Where is Solomon

Is today Wednesday? The answer he couldn’t recall. For what day it was had no bearing on him anymore. What did it matter: a day of the week, a month, a year a setting sun. The present bore no reasons: the future no possibilities. And the past… oh the past was only time. Time of the essence, time that is no more.
He walked a little further, and why he didn’t know. He couldn’t remember where he was walking to or if he was meeting someone. He just knew he had to get there, to this place on the other side of Rome.
Rome was not as different as he thought it would be. Quite similar to the rush of NYC, where everyone has a destination to get to and cannot reach it quick enough. Traffic, there was plenty, but here there was time. There was time to relax and sip a cup of café’, and there was time to look around at monuments built thousands of years before, and not just traffic lights or buildings of such magnitude that you get dizzy looking up. New York wasn’t a place to wallow in ones misery; it wasn’t a place you wanted to die in.
Tourists invaded this place before him, their cameras snapping photos as if the cost of film was substantial to the sites around them. A picture of a piazza. A picture of a statue of a man who doesn’t exist even in the history books. A picture of a palm tree. A picture of the sky, just to say to the world back home that they were under a Roman sky. As if the sky is any different in NY as it is in Rome? It was sad to think that those pictures would last longer than he would. That they would survive while he would fade away, not to be remembered in the cold of marble, and be only dust swept away from the streets he traveled on.
He passed a woman with ebony hair sweltering down her backside, and flowing gently from side to side. He paused to observe her, to watch her, and she reminded him of Vanessa, with her exotic beauty and mane of a stallion. But she, unlike himself, only had the virus. He was stuck with the disease. It was only a year before when they were together. When everything was fine and love was flowing endlessly through their veins and into the core of their being. This was what he had sought all his life; to be with someone and to not just experience an orgasm, but to experience what it’s like to be a man. That feeling made even his dull life meaningful, but as all things do, when one good thing happens it is met with an equal and opposite effect.
He had come home from work on an ordinary day. The packages were delivered, and the files were in order for the day to come. He even called to double check the night order, as if anticipating any chance of error and getting it fixed before he proceeded home. And he never double checked the night order. Usually said, fuck it, and let someone else worry about it. He got home to his one bedroom apartment and found Vanessa sprawled over the couch with tears flooding the floor and staining her silk blouse.
He ran to her, thinking someone had died. “What’s the matter?” He repeated over and over again. “Did someone die? Who died?”
“We have!” she finally bursted out, wailing at the top of her lungs and flinging her arms around his neck.
He hadn’t understood, just knew he had to comfort her to find out whether she was just going through one of her fits or going ballistic over something unnecessary, as she normally did. She proceeded to tell him she had donated blood a month before, and that they had just called her. Said they couldn’t use her blood and that it was infected with HIV. And that’s when the story unraveled and the mystery of her life came out in a blink of an eye. As if the person he had been dating for a year was finally unveiling her mask.
Drugs! As if he could have foretold the response, as if it was all a story from some Lifetime original movie. That she had been addicted as a teen to heroin and the needles were unsterile, having been shared between her and her friends. It was all a predictable story, and he could even have written the sequel. That he may also be infected. That he may also have HIV.
One simple blood test revealed the results, and it was the longest day of his life. Sitting at home, and just waiting for the phone call. He had tried to watch TV, read a book, but both couldn’t deter his mind from the truth. That he had it. He knew what the doctor would say. That he was sorry and that there are things that could be done. He knew there was no cure. Everyone knew that. Things that could be done. He found out the hard way what things could be done for those who had the money to pay for it.
As he stood there in the center of the Piazza di Spagna, he knew there was nothing to be done for him. The insurance plan dropped him, claiming him not eligible for their assistance. His job kept him on, but how their eyes would look at him, as if he was some disease. That he was the disease. He began to feel it wherever he walked in NY. That people stared at him from behind their Gucci sunglasses, speaking in their different tongues that he was disgusting, and not worthy to walk their streets. That he would contaminate and continue spreading the disease.
“You must be gay!” one co-worker had expressed one day at work. “I always knew people like you would try to kill us all.”
Were people so ignorant, in a city where so many are dying of the same thing? Are people so ignorant? Where are the Solomon’s of today? Do they even exist? Where are the wise and the strong to stand up for those who cannot find the will to stand? They are faded names in biblical texts, on ancient marbles crumbled to the ground and beneath the earth. Those names are the ones who are never remembered, those are the names we choose to forget. Instead, the names of Caesars and Kings; they are the ones we remember. They never did the fighting, they never suffered. But yet we remember those names. We celebrate their lives.
A gypsy woman sat cross legged, straggling her two-year old child across her lap. She rocked him back and forth, looking to passerby’s to offer a euro, to give something. Those eyes were pleading for her son and not for her own indulgence. Yet could he trust her? Couldn’t the millionaires spare a gram from their pockets, even though a gram is a gram to them as much as it is to himself? However, they must balance their equations and die with their mansions and yachts and hearts of gold. Only the best tombstones to glace the ground mounted upon them. The man cursed himself for dropping a coin, as if he could make a deal: a coin for a life. His life. NO miraculous light rained down from the heavens. All he got was a simple grazie from the mouth of a mother whose eyes weren’t accustomed to the hand of God.
Villa Borghese loomed into vision, a drastic change in the landscape, as if he just reached 60th and 5th avenue at the brink of Central Park. What was he searching for? The trees dabbed with a green mesh of leaves lay sleeping atop the branches. A serenity was present within those confines as if all were trespassers in this natural environment. And the parasite stood still, frozen and wishing it was all over. That he’d die right there. Not wait for his T-Cell count to reduce to nothing. Not wait for an innocent cold to end his life.
“Do you like Lord Byron?”
He whirled around to face the voice which had called out from behind. A girl sat on a stone facing him, a book open and a pen in her palms. She had to be a college student, dressed in jeans and a sweater which didn’t accentuate her body structure.
“What?” he exclaimed.
She pointed to the statue before his eyes. “You’ve been staring at it for like 10 minutes that I figured you must be a fan.”
Startled he looked up, to behold a statue of Lord Byron, the famous poet. In a grand position as if he was looking at what lies beyond.
He bent down to read the epitaph: “’But I have lived and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, and my frame perish even in conquering pain; But there is that within me which shall not tire. Torture and time and breathe when I expire’.”
“Pretty profound,” he finally said. “I wonder if he actually believed it.”
“Probably not,” she laughed. “But it’s nice to think that maybe he realized it before he died.”
The wind whispered into his ear, as if the voice of Byron was trying to interact somehow with the living. He shivered as he thought that a spirit was present along his shoulder. “She could afford to stay alive,” it seemed to say. “You can only afford to die.”
“The leaves don’t change here, or die,” he finally found himself conversing with the stranger. “Not like they do in NY.”
She was busy sketching away at her book, but ended up replying, “Makes you miss the autumn months, doesn’t it.”
He gazed into the trees and he remembered the times he would stroll with Vanessa through Central Park and just pause for a moment by the water to gaze upon the leaves; the red’s and yellow’s and orange’s hanging on to their branches as if at any moment they would start their final plight to the ground, their destiny out of their control. And yet amongst all that change and death, there was tranquility in that park, as he held the frigid hand of his love, and thought nothing would ever change that feeling. It had rained then, but they still stood overlooking the water, their reflections forever imprinted in that timeline of their lives.
He looked over at the drawing the woman was sketching and it was of the statue yet it resembled something quite different.
“You a beginner?” he asked
She laughed, “No, I am an artist, well I guess you wouldn’t think so. I just see things that you may not. Like you see a statue, but I see a man of struggle, who found his voice in his literature, and no one else would have said the same thing.”
“How do you know that? Someone else eventually would have said something similar.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He couldn’t understand this girl. She continued sketching her erroneous drawing and he continued to wonder what he was doing there? He should be doing something, going somewhere, but where was he going to go? He found his way here, but now what? What was there still to do?
“What are you running from?” She finally asked, as if the question had been bombarding her mind since he stepped into her peripheral vision.
“Are you trying to read my mind?” he asked unsure of how to proceed on answering. “Because I’m not running, I’m just trying to find something here that I couldn’t find in NY.”
“Maybe the answers are in NY but you just don’t want to admit it to yourself. Like when you said the leaves don’t die here. They are leaves. Leaves do die, no matter where you are. Just here, people don’t notice. People prefer to watch life, and not death.”
“But the leaves don’t die here. They can’t.”
She put her pen down and fixed the scarf around her neck. “Why can’t they?”
He began boiling with anger, this girl with her smart-ass remarks and her sketches that don’t make any sense. He wanted to knock her off her rock and make her land in his world of reality. Instead he only cried out, “Because if they don’t die here, maybe I won’t.”
“You speak of dying like it’s a curse. Didn’t you read…”
“It’s easy for you who can sit and waste time in front of a statue like you have all the time in the world. Well I can’t.”
“We’re all dying. Perhaps this is my way of living. You keep searching for your way of dying because you’ll never find it. It’ll creep up on you no matter how much you try to fool yourself that it won’t happen.”
He wanted to scream so loud that every soul on earth heard his suffering. Life shouldn’t be like this. Questions, questions and nobody with an answer. What kind of existence is this? One’s body being weathered away, piece by piece like a stone trapped within the ever flowing tide. But what is the enemy? Time, Vanessa, the virus, God? Who do you blame? Is there even someone to blame?
The girl’s voice broke out in a gentle hum, which began to transform into a song he knew, a song he had heard many times in his life. Her voice caused the world to stop spinning before his eyes and the anger was lifted to reveal the sky. It had transformed into two distinctive parts, with one half celestial, and the other a grayish mist of clouds. He found himself listening to the John Lennon song, as she began to sing the words… “We all shine on. Like the moon and the stars and the sun. We all shine on.”
He lay against a stone and listened. The skies released their burden and the water dripped down upon his body, the wet substance revitalizing his tortured soul. Picking up his head, he watched the rain pour itself down upon his face, dripping into his mouth, its taste sweet and bitter.
“This is what I’ll miss.” He slowly said.
And with that he closed his eyes. He won’t open them again as his body lies in a hospital bed in NYC Hospital. The elongated beep echoes in that solitary room and the Doctors write down the time of death. One doctor stares hard at the life he tried to save, at the man whose body is now skin and bones, tubes still sticking out of his veins. His face has lost most of its youth, though the man is only in his late 20’s. Vanessa is present, her tears the only other audible noise in that room of silence. “A cure?” a doctor hears her say. “Where is the cure?” He pulls the sheet over the body but can detect a glimpse of a smile on the man’s face, as if he had a final beautiful memory before he died.
He walks out of the room and closes the door behind him. Another doctor approaches and observes his look of horror.
“What is it,” the other doctor asks?”
The doctor looks up and says slowly, “His name was Henry. Now he’s just another number. Another number to add to the massacre.”
“I don’t understand,” the other says.
“Nobody does.”
And outside NYC is bustling during rush hour, with people rushing through their crowded streets. The lonely, the wealthy, the sick, the poor, the mother, the beggar, the druggie, the whore. All interconnected on this street called life.
Where are the Solomon’s of today? We are everywhere. We are the ones who suffer. It is through our suffering that we see the face of God.