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Description
Most people can hold their breath long enough to pass out from lack of oxygen.  After they lose consciousness, the limbic system kicks in and they begin to breathe regularly again.  This, like the sensation of pain, is just one of the body’s many strategies to perpetuate itself as long as possible.
If there is a God, maybe He didn’t mean for me to live past the age of five.  That was when I found out about it.  I wanted to try holding my breath for as long as I could, and I tried to time myself.  I was going for a minute.  Back then, in my childhood, I was the sort of child who would toy with the idea of not speaking for three days and then do it religiously.  I’d restrict myself to eat only five peanuts a day and see how long I could keep it up until it was hard for me to walk.  I’m not like that anymore.  Anyway, I was more successful than most at my little experiment.  I remembered counting seconds, and as they slipped by slower and slower my lungs began to hurt.  I didn’t think I could do it anymore, but I’m always second-guessing myself.  I did it.  And the funny thing is, I didn’t start breathing again after I passed out.  I would have died if my mother hadn’t come into the kitchen to start lunch and found me blue and unconscious.  She knew nothing about resuscitation, but she breathed air into my lungs and brought me to life for the second time.  Maybe it was then I decided neither she nor anyone else would ever have to do it again.  Maybe everything happens for a reason.  I’m not glad now I didn’t die, but if I had to choose, I would have to choose to live.
Usually when children hit fifteen or so, they undergo a sort of transformation, from the chrysalis of a perfect imaginary childhood to the angry, lonely little pupa that sees reality for what it is.  I was that isolated little planet, rotating in space, but nobody knew.  My parents’ friends always wanted me to take their daughters out.  I had the reputation of being a nice, well-brought-up boy.  I didn’t have to go off by myself to escape; I’d just escape into my own mind.  It never works trying to think of nothing at all; I’ve tried.  Thinking about air, a balloon will pop up when you wish it would go away.  Think about things that mean nothing.  Things that conspire to make people the way they are.  Somebody lost in outer space.  Imagine being completely alone in a world of the dead.  Remember yesterday when my little sister ran to the butcher to get some prosciutto.  Remember the time I was conceived in my mother’s womb (yes, I can remember that too.  It was warm, and I could feel her heartbeat, and I was too unformed to want, but if I could have I would have wanted to never leave.)  All nothing, nothing.  When I tried to stand up the emptiness in my head seemed to implode and I’d have to lie down.  You get the same feeling if you don’t eat for three days.
I could always do that to myself, but it took until I was about seventeen years old to realize I could have an affect on things outside my own mind.  My little sister Lucy was playing on the street outside our apartment building with a friend.  I myself was in my father’s barbershop, sweeping up pieces of hair, and keeping an eye on her through the glass window at the front.  There was no yelling, but all of a sudden everything was too quiet, as if people had all simultaneously abandoned their business and gone back inside.  My father and I went outside to see my sister and her friend flattened against the brick wall, too frightened to utter a sound, staring at a dog that was coming down the street.  It had apparently escaped from its master, who was watching it from a distance, not daring to come after it.  I knew at first glance it was in the last stage of rabies; it tottered swiftly and unsteadily down the steet, foaming at the mouth as if it had something to say.  I remember what I felt that moment, looking down the street at the approaching disease, and I felt nothing but pity.  In my mind, I saw it stop moving.  Then I was inside its head, and everything was speeded up and silent and black.  The dog’s quickened heartbeat thudded loud in my ears.  It began to beat less often, until it was synchronized with mine, and now the thuds were a second apart and slowing.  A feeling of drowsiness washed over me, and then it ended.  In front of all the neighbors watching from windows and doorways, the dog sank to the ground and died.
Nobody cheered the dog’s death then, and nobody seemed to remember that it had been alive.  People went about their business; the little girls retired inside to play marbles, the former owner called the man from the pound to collect the corpse and went inside.  I knew the dog’s death had something to do with me but didn’t dare mention it.  I couldn’t.  At first I had the childish, crazy notion that this was something everybody could do, but politely refrained from, something that wasn’t supposed to be done or talked about.  Taboo.  Or, conversely, it was a coincidence, and I was crazy, in which case I could never mention it to anyone.  Perhaps it was magic.  Divine intervention.  Maybe God was working through me.  Or maybe – and at the time it seemed somehow the most likely explanation – I was possessed.
On every Sunday evening at around eight o’ clock, I could be found kneeling inside a confession booth in Saint Leonard’s.  I always confessed everything bad I’d done or thought or felt that week to Father Francis, and Father Francis was benevolent and kind so he listened to me, even though I usually really didn’t have anything to confess.
“I killed a dog on Friday evening, Father,” I told him.  My eyes were shut.  Even though I was facing ahead, I wanted not to imagine his disappointment.  He was the man I told everything to, things I’d hidden from everyone else.  I wanted to act good not mostly out of piety, as I told myself back then.  I’ve realized it was mostly out of a wish to please Father Francis.  I’ve begun to suspect this is the true purpose of confession.  If God hears nothing else; not the tears of orphans or the moans of those in terminal pain – why would he hear this?
Father Francis was surprised, I know.  Carmine Alighieri, straight laced son of Vincent Alighieri the barber, had never done anything remotely like this.  Usually I came in to confess suicidal thoughts, thoughts that strayed from God.  Lustful thoughts about Michael Antonioni’s twenty-three year old daughter, Perpetua.  How I’d almost stolen a necklace to give this girl but put it back.  Things I would never, in my wildest dreams, actually do.
“What happened, Son?”
“The dog had rabies,” I said.  I was remembering the moment it had died.  I was trying to remember.  “It was very sick.  It was foaming at the mouth, and running down the street.  It would have died soon anyway.  It could have bitten Lucy.”
Now he understood.  “If you killed the dog to save your little sister, Carmine, it is perfectly all right.  You performed an act of heroism.  I was worried you had killed it out of spite,” said Father Francis.  “How did you kill it?”
I fell silent.  This I couldn’t explain, even though I wanted him to understand.  Father Francis assumed this was because I had done something terrible to the dog; made it suffer unduly, and so I said ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, all alone in the back pew.  I left after saying the prayers, disappointed, still in silence.
I knew Father Francis was disappointed in me.  I’d always thought I knew myself well, more or less, or rather that there wasn’t that much to know.  I was only beginning to realize how wrong that was.
It was the dead of winter in Brooklyn.  The snow began to fall softly from the darkening sky, and the air had a taste of iron.  But I buried myself in my thoughts and strode on, indifferent to the cold and to my own hunger.  A long black car drove past, splattering me with sludge.  I had the odd feeling I deserved that, and made no effort to wipe it off.  I passed my father’s barbershop without looking inside, even though I was supposed to be working there, cleaning up and putting things away.  I knew I would someday own the shop, when I was older.  I knew that day would be the day my father died, and even as I thought of his eventual end I felt an old pain, benumbed and buried deep.  I was struck by something I’d forgotten for years.  I remembered the sleepless nights when I was five years old, when I used to think of when my parents would die.  I imagined the Devil coming in on a black horse and carrying him away.  I’d heard a story where that happened, and I naturally concluded that was how things ended.  Nobody was good enough to escape, nobody was faultless.  I cried until my mother and father came in with a candle and shut the window and pulled the covers back over me.  I told them I didn’t want them to die, ever, and they would say they weren’t planning on dying anytime soon.  Then I made them promise never to die – I begged until I wept again - and they promised and went out, leaving the candle near my bed.  And then I half-slept an apprehensive slumber.  At five years old I still believed my parents could choose to die or not; but I didn’t always trust what they said.  I imagined them lying in bed, old and sick, telling me they couldn’t choose, but they could.  They would choose to leave me alone.
I stumbled as I trudged through the snow.  I couldn’t think of anything good at the moment, even though I tried to remind myself.  I knew God would want me to, but as I lay there, while cars passed by and the snowfall thickened, until the glare of headlights was only barely visible through the drifts of white, something happened inside me – like a piece of ice in my eyes – and I somehow saw my life in an instant.  It was cold, unimaginably cold, and dark.  I felt far away from everything, even though I needed to be near to a warm fire - anything.  I was so cold; cold to the bone.  After a while warmth began to creep around me, like the slow embrace of l’angelo della morte, and I got up and walked unsteadily on, because I knew I couldn’t die, not now, although I didn’t know why.
I came to the street where my family lived, the street where I had killed the dog, and I saw for a brief moment the furry corpse among the flakes, although the man from the pound had already taken it away.  Then it was gone.  The lights were on in my apartment window, and I knew my mother would be cooking minestrone and wondering where I was.  I wanted to see her then, but I had to turn away.  I took a side street, and another, and the second left after that, until I was in a strange alleyway I didn’t know.  I walked along, counting the regular black doors that lined up on either side.  It was impossible to see five feet in front of me, but apparently I was near the bay because a fog horn, slow and mournful, pierced the muffled air.
If someone had been walking down that street at half past eight that night, they would have seen me as I was then, a tall, thin boy with a teenage beard, standing stock still in the middle of the lonely street, snowflakes drifting along the air and slowly turning his dark hair white.  His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, but his face was turned up to the air.  One might have thought he’d seen an angel among the flurries.
And maybe I did.  I definitely saw something up there that night, beyond the fire escapes and naked clothing lines, but I couldn’t tell what it was.  It was there one minute and gone the next, and I was sure I’d caught a glimpse of it, although I couldn’t tell anything else.  I was still standing there when a bearded nobody spoke through the wind.
He was huddled among the garbage cans, presumably for shelter against the storm, and he was almost invisible from where I stood.  His voice was mostly lost against the weather, but I knew he was talking to me.  I went closer and knelt down, and was surprised to see that he was still very much alive – his blue eyes glinted when he saw me and he shuffled and sat up further.
“I know your secret,” was the first thing he said.  His voice was clear and strong now, surprisingly.  I was too shocked to say anything.
“I know your secret,” he intoned again, “because it was my secret too.  I know the life you will lead, because it was the life I led.”  I found myself asking him if it was worth living.
“Maybe you will think it is, maybe not,” he replied, “but you do not get to choose.  Have you read Dante?”
“Some,” I whispered.
“Paradiso comes at the very end,” he said, and his voice cracked.  “It’s coming for me now.  I’m going to say goodbye.  Remember, even if you think it is Inferno, all it is in reality is Purgatorio.  Purgatorio ends when it is time for it to end.  You are a saint of the streets.  You are a sky of cool air to those in torment.  You are a sea of water to those in thirst.”
I couldn’t say anything.  All the time I had spent never telling a soul, and now came this complete stranger who seemed to know my deepest, most secret thoughts.  I knew he was dying.
“Give me your arm, sir,” I told him.  “I will take you home and warm you up and you’ll be a-ok in no time.”
“Arrivederci, figlio,” he said, in a voice that was still as strong as it ever was.  He seemed to be making an effort to speak now, though.  “Non sarà facile.”
And he died.  Just like that.  I shook him and tried to get him to speak.  I shouted at him and wept.  No use.  The odd thing is, when I touched his face, it was still warm, even though he had been in a winter snowstorm for God knows how long.  It was all so sudden, I thought it was my fault.  I had somehow caused a second death that week, but nobody would ever punish me.  Nobody would see.

Description
Most people can hold their breath long enough to pass out from lack of oxygen.  After they lose consciousness, the limbic system kicks in and they begin to breathe regularly again.  This, like the sensation of pain, is just one of the body’s many strategies to perpetuate itself as long as possible.
If there is a God, maybe He didn’t mean for me to live past the age of five.  That was when I found out about it.  I wanted to try holding my breath for as long as I could, and I tried to time myself.  I was going for a minute.  Back then, in my childhood, I was the sort of child who would toy with the idea of not speaking for three days and then do it religiously.  I’d restrict myself to eat only five peanuts a day and see how long I could keep it up until it was hard for me to walk.  I’m not like that anymore.  Anyway, I was more successful than most at my little experiment.  I remembered counting seconds, and as they slipped by slower and slower my lungs began to hurt.  I didn’t think I could do it anymore, but I’m always second-guessing myself.  I did it.  And the funny thing is, I didn’t start breathing again after I passed out.  I would have died if my mother hadn’t come into the kitchen to start lunch and found me blue and unconscious.  She knew nothing about resuscitation, but she breathed air into my lungs and brought me to life for the second time.  Maybe it was then I decided neither she nor anyone else would ever have to do it again.  Maybe everything happens for a reason.  I’m not glad now I didn’t die, but if I had to choose, I would have to choose to live.
Usually when children hit fifteen or so, they undergo a sort of transformation, from the chrysalis of a perfect imaginary childhood to the angry, lonely little pupa that sees reality for what it is.  I was that isolated little planet, rotating in space, but nobody knew.  My parents’ friends always wanted me to take their daughters out.  I had the reputation of being a nice, well-brought-up boy.  I didn’t have to go off by myself to escape; I’d just escape into my own mind.  It never works trying to think of nothing at all; I’ve tried.  Thinking about air, a balloon will pop up when you wish it would go away.  Think about things that mean nothing.  Things that conspire to make people the way they are.  Somebody lost in outer space.  Imagine being completely alone in a world of the dead.  Remember yesterday when my little sister ran to the butcher to get some prosciutto.  Remember the time I was conceived in my mother’s womb (yes, I can remember that too.  It was warm, and I could feel her heartbeat, and I was too unformed to want, but if I could have I would have wanted to never leave.)  All nothing, nothing.  When I tried to stand up the emptiness in my head seemed to implode and I’d have to lie down.  You get the same feeling if you don’t eat for three days.
I could always do that to myself, but it took until I was about seventeen years old to realize I could have an affect on things outside my own mind.  My little sister Lucy was playing on the street outside our apartment building with a friend.  I myself was in my father’s barbershop, sweeping up pieces of hair, and keeping an eye on her through the glass window at the front.  There was no yelling, but all of a sudden everything was too quiet, as if people had all simultaneously abandoned their business and gone back inside.  My father and I went outside to see my sister and her friend flattened against the brick wall, too frightened to utter a sound, staring at a dog that was coming down the street.  It had apparently escaped from its master, who was watching it from a distance, not daring to come after it.  I knew at first glance it was in the last stage of rabies; it tottered swiftly and unsteadily down the steet, foaming at the mouth as if it had something to say.  I remember what I felt that moment, looking down the street at the approaching disease, and I felt nothing but pity.  In my mind, I saw it stop moving.  Then I was inside its head, and everything was speeded up and silent and black.  The dog’s quickened heartbeat thudded loud in my ears.  It began to beat less often, until it was synchronized with mine, and now the thuds were a second apart and slowing.  A feeling of drowsiness washed over me, and then it ended.  In front of all the neighbors watching from windows and doorways, the dog sank to the ground and died.
Nobody cheered the dog’s death then, and nobody seemed to remember that it had been alive.  People went about their business; the little girls retired inside to play marbles, the former owner called the man from the pound to collect the corpse and went inside.  I knew the dog’s death had something to do with me but didn’t dare mention it.  I couldn’t.  At first I had the childish, crazy notion that this was something everybody could do, but politely refrained from, something that wasn’t supposed to be done or talked about.  Taboo.  Or, conversely, it was a coincidence, and I was crazy, in which case I could never mention it to anyone.  Perhaps it was magic.  Divine intervention.  Maybe God was working through me.  Or maybe – and at the time it seemed somehow the most likely explanation – I was possessed.
On every Sunday evening at around eight o’ clock, I could be found kneeling inside a confession booth in Saint Leonard’s.  I always confessed everything bad I’d done or thought or felt that week to Father Francis, and Father Francis was benevolent and kind so he listened to me, even though I usually really didn’t have anything to confess.
“I killed a dog on Friday evening, Father,” I told him.  My eyes were shut.  Even though I was facing ahead, I wanted not to imagine his disappointment.  He was the man I told everything to, things I’d hidden from everyone else.  I wanted to act good not mostly out of piety, as I told myself back then.  I’ve realized it was mostly out of a wish to please Father Francis.  I’ve begun to suspect this is the true purpose of confession.  If God hears nothing else; not the tears of orphans or the moans of those in terminal pain – why would he hear this?
Father Francis was surprised, I know.  Carmine Alighieri, straight laced son of Vincent Alighieri the barber, had never done anything remotely like this.  Usually I came in to confess suicidal thoughts, thoughts that strayed from God.  Lustful thoughts about Michael Antonioni’s twenty-three year old daughter, Perpetua.  How I’d almost stolen a necklace to give this girl but put it back.  Things I would never, in my wildest dreams, actually do.
“What happened, Son?”
“The dog had rabies,” I said.  I was remembering the moment it had died.  I was trying to remember.  “It was very sick.  It was foaming at the mouth, and running down the street.  It would have died soon anyway.  It could have bitten Lucy.”
Now he understood.  “If you killed the dog to save your little sister, Carmine, it is perfectly all right.  You performed an act of heroism.  I was worried you had killed it out of spite,” said Father Francis.  “How did you kill it?”
I fell silent.  This I couldn’t explain, even though I wanted him to understand.  Father Francis assumed this was because I had done something terrible to the dog; made it suffer unduly, and so I said ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, all alone in the back pew.  I left after saying the prayers, disappointed, still in silence.
I knew Father Francis was disappointed in me.  I’d always thought I knew myself well, more or less, or rather that there wasn’t that much to know.  I was only beginning to realize how wrong that was.
It was the dead of winter in Brooklyn.  The snow began to fall softly from the darkening sky, and the air had a taste of iron.  But I buried myself in my thoughts and strode on, indifferent to the cold and to my own hunger.  A long black car drove past, splattering me with sludge.  I had the odd feeling I deserved that, and made no effort to wipe it off.  I passed my father’s barbershop without looking inside, even though I was supposed to be working there, cleaning up and putting things away.  I knew I would someday own the shop, when I was older.  I knew that day would be the day my father died, and even as I thought of his eventual end I felt an old pain, benumbed and buried deep.  I was struck by something I’d forgotten for years.  I remembered the sleepless nights when I was five years old, when I used to think of when my parents would die.  I imagined the Devil coming in on a black horse and carrying him away.  I’d heard a story where that happened, and I naturally concluded that was how things ended.  Nobody was good enough to escape, nobody was faultless.  I cried until my mother and father came in with a candle and shut the window and pulled the covers back over me.  I told them I didn’t want them to die, ever, and they would say they weren’t planning on dying anytime soon.  Then I made them promise never to die – I begged until I wept again - and they promised and went out, leaving the candle near my bed.  And then I half-slept an apprehensive slumber.  At five years old I still believed my parents could choose to die or not; but I didn’t always trust what they said.  I imagined them lying in bed, old and sick, telling me they couldn’t choose, but they could.  They would choose to leave me alone.
I stumbled as I trudged through the snow.  I couldn’t think of anything good at the moment, even though I tried to remind myself.  I knew God would want me to, but as I lay there, while cars passed by and the snowfall thickened, until the glare of headlights was only barely visible through the drifts of white, something happened inside me – like a piece of ice in my eyes – and I somehow saw my life in an instant.  It was cold, unimaginably cold, and dark.  I felt far away from everything, even though I needed to be near to a warm fire - anything.  I was so cold; cold to the bone.  After a while warmth began to creep around me, like the slow embrace of l’angelo della morte, and I got up and walked unsteadily on, because I knew I couldn’t die, not now, although I didn’t know why.
I came to the street where my family lived, the street where I had killed the dog, and I saw for a brief moment the furry corpse among the flakes, although the man from the pound had already taken it away.  Then it was gone.  The lights were on in my apartment window, and I knew my mother would be cooking minestrone and wondering where I was.  I wanted to see her then, but I had to turn away.  I took a side street, and another, and the second left after that, until I was in a strange alleyway I didn’t know.  I walked along, counting the regular black doors that lined up on either side.  It was impossible to see five feet in front of me, but apparently I was near the bay because a fog horn, slow and mournful, pierced the muffled air.
If someone had been walking down that street at half past eight that night, they would have seen me as I was then, a tall, thin boy with a teenage beard, standing stock still in the middle of the lonely street, snowflakes drifting along the air and slowly turning his dark hair white.  His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, but his face was turned up to the air.  One might have thought he’d seen an angel among the flurries.
And maybe I did.  I definitely saw something up there that night, beyond the fire escapes and naked clothing lines, but I couldn’t tell what it was.  It was there one minute and gone the next, and I was sure I’d caught a glimpse of it, although I couldn’t tell anything else.  I was still standing there when a bearded nobody spoke through the wind.
He was huddled among the garbage cans, presumably for shelter against the storm, and he was almost invisible from where I stood.  His voice was mostly lost against the weather, but I knew he was talking to me.  I went closer and knelt down, and was surprised to see that he was still very much alive – his blue eyes glinted when he saw me and he shuffled and sat up further.
“I know your secret,” was the first thing he said.  His voice was clear and strong now, surprisingly.  I was too shocked to say anything.
“I know your secret,” he intoned again, “because it was my secret too.  I know the life you will lead, because it was the life I led.”  I found myself asking him if it was worth living.
“Maybe you will think it is, maybe not,” he replied, “but you do not get to choose.  Have you read Dante?”
“Some,” I whispered.
“Paradiso comes at the very end,” he said, and his voice cracked.  “It’s coming for me now.  I’m going to say goodbye.  Remember, even if you think it is Inferno, all it is in reality is Purgatorio.  Purgatorio ends when it is time for it to end.  You are a saint of the streets.  You are a sky of cool air to those in torment.  You are a sea of water to those in thirst.”
I couldn’t say anything.  All the time I had spent never telling a soul, and now came this complete stranger who seemed to know my deepest, most secret thoughts.  I knew he was dying.
“Give me your arm, sir,” I told him.  “I will take you home and warm you up and you’ll be a-ok in no time.”
“Arrivederci, figlio,” he said, in a voice that was still as strong as it ever was.  He seemed to be making an effort to speak now, though.  “Non sarà facile.”
And he died.  Just like that.  I shook him and tried to get him to speak.  I shouted at him and wept.  No use.  The odd thing is, when I touched his face, it was still warm, even though he had been in a winter snowstorm for God knows how long.  It was all so sudden, I thought it was my fault.  I had somehow caused a second death that week, but nobody would ever punish me.  Nobody would see.