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Description
You don’t need a high school diploma to run your father’s barbershop, so I dropped out, and when he finally died two years later, I was ready.  I wish his death had been sudden – of course, it would have been harder to digest the truth, but then we wouldn’t have had to go around believing he was dead already when he was still drawing regular breaths – in and out and in.  They said it was caused by a brain cancer, the kind with fingers that creeps around your parietal and occipital lobes, and finally gropes its way – blindly, obscenely - into the cerebellum.  If you try to operate, you never get rid of all the pieces of the fingers, and they reform and grow and grow into a giant web inside the head.  He never wanted to go to a hospital – there was nothing they could have done for him anyway.  He stayed at home, and simply stopped breathing one morning in April.
Every time one of my father’s regulars sat down for a shave and trim and told me my father was a wonderful man, I wanted to hit them.  It was like they were picking away a scab before it had had time to heal.  I didn’t wish them ill precisely – all I really wanted was for them to feel pain like I felt it, although of course every one of them had, lifetimes ago when their own fathers had died.  I would fix my eyes on the back of their heads, and thank them through a clenched jaw.  Eventually they stopped.  Eventually my mother stopped crying too, although she never ceased to wear black, every single day.
I’d always respected my father, but we were never really close.  We were never close in the way that a boy and his mother or lover or friend are.  He taught me things, and I learned them, and that was it.  You know the old joke about hairdressers?  He taught me the same is true (to a lesser extent) about barbers, although I knew this already.  In the years to come, I heard from the old men complaints about their bitching wives, from middle-aged men descriptions of their mistresses, from young men sonnets in praise of their beloved.  I heard about their jobs, their petty triumphs and woes.  I heard about nothing, but still I nodded my head and laughed and groaned at all the appropriate places.
One day, Donatello came into the shop.  I knew every single man in the neighborhood, and I didn’t recognize his strange face, his clothes, his unfamiliar footsteps through the door.  He told me he had just moved in.  Odd place to set up roots, this neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It wasn’t beautiful in any way – it was ugly, and I knew this somehow, even though it was the only place I’d ever seen.  (I have a secret, though.  Someday, I will go to the City of Lights.)  If you weren’t born here, in this slum on the outskirts of an immigrant city, they would always regard you as an outsider, a stranger among them.  I asked him why he’d come here.
“I’m tired.  I’m tired of trying.  I just want to stay in one place and only that place until I die.”
“I understand,” said I, and began lathering him up.  We didn’t speak for the rest of the time, but it was an easy silence, the silence of two people who know each other well enough that they’ve said everything already to be said.
After that he began coming in regularly, and I began to find out some details about his life.  He had married a woman he loved, but she was barren, and they were not able to have children.  His wife had died a decade ago, and he had been alone.  He tried to use this time between her death and his to do things he had always wanted to do – travel to Europe with the money he had put in savings for their phantom sons, write the book about misery with the lonely hours between sun rise and set.  He tried to open his own café, with no success.  He took up with a mistress, thinking perhaps when she looked at him lovingly he might be able to see a glimmering of his wife he had loved, but when she stared at him with her made-up green eyes, the pain of seeing no-one there was worse than seeing her in the doorways of his house, in the rosemary and peonies in the garden; his hand where hers had been – in the mailbox, on the tea-kettle; his head on her pillow.
So he slowly drifted away from everything.  He had gotten rid of the old house, sold all the things in it, sold her memory, and took up residence in a place where everyone had lost something.  Even though his wounds were a decade old and mine had been formed (or re-opened) only two months ago, both were fresh.  The rain poured all night and morning and finally would let up at noon, and we would sit for hours in the barbershop in the lonely nine-to-five era when nobody came for either of us, and we would speak of our own misery and that of others (but like all that has to do with others, it’s only a mirror), and when we finally looked out the window, the rainbow would have already faded away.  I loved those long, sad afternoons.  We were an odd pairing: a nineteen-year-old barber cross-legged on the counter, chin in hand, nodding attentively, and an old, sad man from another place sitting in a red-leather-upholstered chair with the arms worn away, speaking the lonely secrets of his heart…but his black eyes were flat and his heart was dry by then.  He could have been reciting a poem, written by Ozymandias.
I would say to myself, “Carmine, you are not alone; this man understands.  He is sitting not three feet away, and talking to only you.” And another part of me would argue, “But you are alone, Carmine, and you always will be alone, because those who tell themselves they are not alone fool themselves.  He is talking to himself, just as you, when you talk to him, speak only to Carmine Alighieri.”  We are lone audiences in a matinee showing of our own psyches, playing endlessly at half past two in the afternoon in a huge, empty auditorium that once was beautiful.  Our dramas could not be truer to Stanislavski technique; our births are too painful, our tears too real, our deaths too jagged and anticlimactic for any opera: yet only one person applauds at the end.  Even he does not have the nerve to call bravo! bravissimo! encore!
Nonetheless, those grey siestas with Donatello lasted for weeks and months.  The more I talked to him, the more I realized my wounds and his would never heal; they would at best turn gangrenous.  Finally, one evening when I hadn’t seen him for days and was beginning to worry, he called the barbershop unexpectedly and told me to come to his small apartment on Strada Regina.
When I got there, I knocked on the door of what I thought was his apartment.  I knew what was wrong; we always know, deep inside, but we tell ourselves otherwise.  To alleviate responsibility?  To lighten our load?  I heard nothing when I knocked, but the door was slightly ajar, so I pushed it open.
Donatello was sitting in a chair in the dusty corner.  The light was dim through unwashed windows, and I almost missed him.  I implored him if he was all right, and when he waved a hand and mumbled something unintelligible (Why does it matter?  What do you think?  I died years ago.)  With the gloom coming in at all sides in sepia-tinted light, an crumpled old man in a corner, and motes of dust floating in front of my face, I felt like I’d just kicked down the door of a tomb.  I did what made the most sense: I looked around for a kettle and set about making coffee.
At 6:09 on a September evening, in a small immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a nineteen-year-old man (stronger than I was two years ago, though only slightly less thin) with eyes that everyone who met him felt were too large and searching for comfort, was fumbling in the kitchen of a corpse, trying to conjure up holy water, the elixir of life – anything to fend off himself for one more minute.  I noticed the kitchen cloths were embroidered by hand with his dead wife’s initials, but when I asked about it – “I thought you threw all that away?” – I was met with only silence.  When the coffee was done, I brought some to Donatello, sat down opposite him, and tried to discover what the matter was.
“I want to die, Carmine,” he said, devoid of any emotion.  “I want to die.  It’s the last thing I will ever want.  It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of anybody.”
I didn’t understand.  “I want to die too,” I told him, truthfully, “but we can’t just keel over whenever we want to.  God will decide when to give and when to take away.”
“Give!  Take away!” Here he laughed, a slow graveyard chuckle that breathed of what lies underground.  I turned away at that, as quickly as if I had been slapped.  “No, no, Carmine, there is no God.  No.  No giving, no taking away.  There are only beginnings, and ends, and I want my end.  It’s my due.  I never wanted a beginning.”
I desperately wished something would happen.  The sky was a funny tan color outside, like before a hurricane, except there are no hurricanes in Brooklyn.  The old man was staring at me intently.  If he had been younger, I would have called that look obscene, I might have been frightened, but as it was, I tried not to notice.  I told myself he was an old man; he was slipping away.  But still, he looked less as if he was undressing me than as if he had stripped all the flesh off my bones, looked at me, and discovered he could see straight through.
“Well, what do you want from me?” I asked at last.  “Why are you acting like this?”
“I can’t sleep,” said Donatello.
“I’m sorry.”
“I haven’t slept since my wife died.  I haven’t slept in ten years.”  He stopped talking for while, and looked up at the ceiling.  I didn’t believe him.  He had probably not slept before that.  He had always been unhappy – I could see it now – his wife had nothing to do with it.  He thought he needed a reason for his sorrow – a reason outside himself.
“I want to sleep.”  He stopped looking at the ceiling, and once again looked straight at me, but this time he met my eyes.  “I want to die.”
I backed away.  He was asking me to kill him.  I wanted to scream.  It struck, I realize now, too close to home.  I wanted to escape, to run away, to jump off the fire escape.  He propped himself up with a cane, and slowly came toward me.  “Please.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He took a knife out of a kitchen drawer.  “I can’t do it myself.  It’s the in between that scares me.”  So it is with us all.  He held out the knife, handle first.  “I’m frightened.  Look, I can admit it.  I’m frightened.  Kill me quickly.”  What a coward he was.
“No.”  I didn’t realize it, but tears were streaming down my face.  “I can’t.”
“You’re a numb little boy,” he said.  “Look at my pain.  Do you want it to go on?  I’ve been trying to get away from this all my life, every minute of every day of all my sixty-nine years.  Now I’ve finally decided it has to end.  It has to end.  You were my only friend.  I need you right now.”
No matter how we try, they say, we can never fully understand another person, yet suddenly I knew where I was at this moment.  I heard those words, I was inside him; I heard his fluid heartbeat: swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh.
“I’m in need, Carmine.  You know me; I’ve spent these hours telling you who I am.  You know, deep within yourself, what I need.”
I did.  And when I opened my mouth at the same time as him, we spoke together in a tandem voice: “Let me die.”

I looked out the window.  The empty sky and endless rooftops stretching on towards infinity seemed suddenly like a burden, almost ridiculously easy to throw away.  I told Donatello to go lie down in his bed and try to go to sleep.
“What’s going to happen?” he asked, out of what seemed like mild curiosity.
“You’ll be able to sleep,” I told him.  “Finally.  It will be long and refreshing.”
“Will I wake up?” he asked me, like a child.
“Only when you want to.”
I pulled up a chair next to his bed and watched as he lay down for the last time.  I looked at him, and then I lost myself.  I saw myself from the bed through half-closed eyes, and the room around Donatello and myself was cold and bleak and grey.  I had wanted so long and so desperately for it to end, that I had almost given up hope.  This, ironically, was what had finally alerted me to the fact that it was time.  It was long past time.  Donatello’s breathing slowed.  The sounds of the blood moving through his veins became fainter.  The swishes of his heartbeat became farther in between.  Finally, he drew his last breath in this world, and slowly exhaled; slowly as my father, slowly as a feather floating down a well shaft.  Then I was Carmine once again, and as I sat by his bed with my hands folded, by his stillness I knew sleep had come to Donatello at last.  His face, so worn and hopeless fifteen minutes ago, looked almost beautiful.  I could see what he had looked like as a young man.  He was at peace.
As I walked slowly out of his apartment into the fading remains of the day, I knew finally what I was, as the angel’s words came floating back to me on the lonely evening wind… a sky of cool air to those in torment…a sea of water to those in thirst…

Description
You don’t need a high school diploma to run your father’s barbershop, so I dropped out, and when he finally died two years later, I was ready.  I wish his death had been sudden – of course, it would have been harder to digest the truth, but then we wouldn’t have had to go around believing he was dead already when he was still drawing regular breaths – in and out and in.  They said it was caused by a brain cancer, the kind with fingers that creeps around your parietal and occipital lobes, and finally gropes its way – blindly, obscenely - into the cerebellum.  If you try to operate, you never get rid of all the pieces of the fingers, and they reform and grow and grow into a giant web inside the head.  He never wanted to go to a hospital – there was nothing they could have done for him anyway.  He stayed at home, and simply stopped breathing one morning in April.
Every time one of my father’s regulars sat down for a shave and trim and told me my father was a wonderful man, I wanted to hit them.  It was like they were picking away a scab before it had had time to heal.  I didn’t wish them ill precisely – all I really wanted was for them to feel pain like I felt it, although of course every one of them had, lifetimes ago when their own fathers had died.  I would fix my eyes on the back of their heads, and thank them through a clenched jaw.  Eventually they stopped.  Eventually my mother stopped crying too, although she never ceased to wear black, every single day.
I’d always respected my father, but we were never really close.  We were never close in the way that a boy and his mother or lover or friend are.  He taught me things, and I learned them, and that was it.  You know the old joke about hairdressers?  He taught me the same is true (to a lesser extent) about barbers, although I knew this already.  In the years to come, I heard from the old men complaints about their bitching wives, from middle-aged men descriptions of their mistresses, from young men sonnets in praise of their beloved.  I heard about their jobs, their petty triumphs and woes.  I heard about nothing, but still I nodded my head and laughed and groaned at all the appropriate places.
One day, Donatello came into the shop.  I knew every single man in the neighborhood, and I didn’t recognize his strange face, his clothes, his unfamiliar footsteps through the door.  He told me he had just moved in.  Odd place to set up roots, this neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It wasn’t beautiful in any way – it was ugly, and I knew this somehow, even though it was the only place I’d ever seen.  (I have a secret, though.  Someday, I will go to the City of Lights.)  If you weren’t born here, in this slum on the outskirts of an immigrant city, they would always regard you as an outsider, a stranger among them.  I asked him why he’d come here.
“I’m tired.  I’m tired of trying.  I just want to stay in one place and only that place until I die.”
“I understand,” said I, and began lathering him up.  We didn’t speak for the rest of the time, but it was an easy silence, the silence of two people who know each other well enough that they’ve said everything already to be said.
After that he began coming in regularly, and I began to find out some details about his life.  He had married a woman he loved, but she was barren, and they were not able to have children.  His wife had died a decade ago, and he had been alone.  He tried to use this time between her death and his to do things he had always wanted to do – travel to Europe with the money he had put in savings for their phantom sons, write the book about misery with the lonely hours between sun rise and set.  He tried to open his own café, with no success.  He took up with a mistress, thinking perhaps when she looked at him lovingly he might be able to see a glimmering of his wife he had loved, but when she stared at him with her made-up green eyes, the pain of seeing no-one there was worse than seeing her in the doorways of his house, in the rosemary and peonies in the garden; his hand where hers had been – in the mailbox, on the tea-kettle; his head on her pillow.
So he slowly drifted away from everything.  He had gotten rid of the old house, sold all the things in it, sold her memory, and took up residence in a place where everyone had lost something.  Even though his wounds were a decade old and mine had been formed (or re-opened) only two months ago, both were fresh.  The rain poured all night and morning and finally would let up at noon, and we would sit for hours in the barbershop in the lonely nine-to-five era when nobody came for either of us, and we would speak of our own misery and that of others (but like all that has to do with others, it’s only a mirror), and when we finally looked out the window, the rainbow would have already faded away.  I loved those long, sad afternoons.  We were an odd pairing: a nineteen-year-old barber cross-legged on the counter, chin in hand, nodding attentively, and an old, sad man from another place sitting in a red-leather-upholstered chair with the arms worn away, speaking the lonely secrets of his heart…but his black eyes were flat and his heart was dry by then.  He could have been reciting a poem, written by Ozymandias.
I would say to myself, “Carmine, you are not alone; this man understands.  He is sitting not three feet away, and talking to only you.” And another part of me would argue, “But you are alone, Carmine, and you always will be alone, because those who tell themselves they are not alone fool themselves.  He is talking to himself, just as you, when you talk to him, speak only to Carmine Alighieri.”  We are lone audiences in a matinee showing of our own psyches, playing endlessly at half past two in the afternoon in a huge, empty auditorium that once was beautiful.  Our dramas could not be truer to Stanislavski technique; our births are too painful, our tears too real, our deaths too jagged and anticlimactic for any opera: yet only one person applauds at the end.  Even he does not have the nerve to call bravo! bravissimo! encore!
Nonetheless, those grey siestas with Donatello lasted for weeks and months.  The more I talked to him, the more I realized my wounds and his would never heal; they would at best turn gangrenous.  Finally, one evening when I hadn’t seen him for days and was beginning to worry, he called the barbershop unexpectedly and told me to come to his small apartment on Strada Regina.
When I got there, I knocked on the door of what I thought was his apartment.  I knew what was wrong; we always know, deep inside, but we tell ourselves otherwise.  To alleviate responsibility?  To lighten our load?  I heard nothing when I knocked, but the door was slightly ajar, so I pushed it open.
Donatello was sitting in a chair in the dusty corner.  The light was dim through unwashed windows, and I almost missed him.  I implored him if he was all right, and when he waved a hand and mumbled something unintelligible (Why does it matter?  What do you think?  I died years ago.)  With the gloom coming in at all sides in sepia-tinted light, an crumpled old man in a corner, and motes of dust floating in front of my face, I felt like I’d just kicked down the door of a tomb.  I did what made the most sense: I looked around for a kettle and set about making coffee.
At 6:09 on a September evening, in a small immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a nineteen-year-old man (stronger than I was two years ago, though only slightly less thin) with eyes that everyone who met him felt were too large and searching for comfort, was fumbling in the kitchen of a corpse, trying to conjure up holy water, the elixir of life – anything to fend off himself for one more minute.  I noticed the kitchen cloths were embroidered by hand with his dead wife’s initials, but when I asked about it – “I thought you threw all that away?” – I was met with only silence.  When the coffee was done, I brought some to Donatello, sat down opposite him, and tried to discover what the matter was.
“I want to die, Carmine,” he said, devoid of any emotion.  “I want to die.  It’s the last thing I will ever want.  It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of anybody.”
I didn’t understand.  “I want to die too,” I told him, truthfully, “but we can’t just keel over whenever we want to.  God will decide when to give and when to take away.”
“Give!  Take away!” Here he laughed, a slow graveyard chuckle that breathed of what lies underground.  I turned away at that, as quickly as if I had been slapped.  “No, no, Carmine, there is no God.  No.  No giving, no taking away.  There are only beginnings, and ends, and I want my end.  It’s my due.  I never wanted a beginning.”
I desperately wished something would happen.  The sky was a funny tan color outside, like before a hurricane, except there are no hurricanes in Brooklyn.  The old man was staring at me intently.  If he had been younger, I would have called that look obscene, I might have been frightened, but as it was, I tried not to notice.  I told myself he was an old man; he was slipping away.  But still, he looked less as if he was undressing me than as if he had stripped all the flesh off my bones, looked at me, and discovered he could see straight through.
“Well, what do you want from me?” I asked at last.  “Why are you acting like this?”
“I can’t sleep,” said Donatello.
“I’m sorry.”
“I haven’t slept since my wife died.  I haven’t slept in ten years.”  He stopped talking for while, and looked up at the ceiling.  I didn’t believe him.  He had probably not slept before that.  He had always been unhappy – I could see it now – his wife had nothing to do with it.  He thought he needed a reason for his sorrow – a reason outside himself.
“I want to sleep.”  He stopped looking at the ceiling, and once again looked straight at me, but this time he met my eyes.  “I want to die.”
I backed away.  He was asking me to kill him.  I wanted to scream.  It struck, I realize now, too close to home.  I wanted to escape, to run away, to jump off the fire escape.  He propped himself up with a cane, and slowly came toward me.  “Please.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He took a knife out of a kitchen drawer.  “I can’t do it myself.  It’s the in between that scares me.”  So it is with us all.  He held out the knife, handle first.  “I’m frightened.  Look, I can admit it.  I’m frightened.  Kill me quickly.”  What a coward he was.
“No.”  I didn’t realize it, but tears were streaming down my face.  “I can’t.”
“You’re a numb little boy,” he said.  “Look at my pain.  Do you want it to go on?  I’ve been trying to get away from this all my life, every minute of every day of all my sixty-nine years.  Now I’ve finally decided it has to end.  It has to end.  You were my only friend.  I need you right now.”
No matter how we try, they say, we can never fully understand another person, yet suddenly I knew where I was at this moment.  I heard those words, I was inside him; I heard his fluid heartbeat: swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh.
“I’m in need, Carmine.  You know me; I’ve spent these hours telling you who I am.  You know, deep within yourself, what I need.”
I did.  And when I opened my mouth at the same time as him, we spoke together in a tandem voice: “Let me die.”

I looked out the window.  The empty sky and endless rooftops stretching on towards infinity seemed suddenly like a burden, almost ridiculously easy to throw away.  I told Donatello to go lie down in his bed and try to go to sleep.
“What’s going to happen?” he asked, out of what seemed like mild curiosity.
“You’ll be able to sleep,” I told him.  “Finally.  It will be long and refreshing.”
“Will I wake up?” he asked me, like a child.
“Only when you want to.”
I pulled up a chair next to his bed and watched as he lay down for the last time.  I looked at him, and then I lost myself.  I saw myself from the bed through half-closed eyes, and the room around Donatello and myself was cold and bleak and grey.  I had wanted so long and so desperately for it to end, that I had almost given up hope.  This, ironically, was what had finally alerted me to the fact that it was time.  It was long past time.  Donatello’s breathing slowed.  The sounds of the blood moving through his veins became fainter.  The swishes of his heartbeat became farther in between.  Finally, he drew his last breath in this world, and slowly exhaled; slowly as my father, slowly as a feather floating down a well shaft.  Then I was Carmine once again, and as I sat by his bed with my hands folded, by his stillness I knew sleep had come to Donatello at last.  His face, so worn and hopeless fifteen minutes ago, looked almost beautiful.  I could see what he had looked like as a young man.  He was at peace.
As I walked slowly out of his apartment into the fading remains of the day, I knew finally what I was, as the angel’s words came floating back to me on the lonely evening wind… a sky of cool air to those in torment…a sea of water to those in thirst…