Isaac

"Isaac was a strange man,"  was the consensus of his neighbors, or at least those of his neighbors who had the opportunity to see Isaac poke his head, shiny bald on top and wildly hairy with white hairs in and around his ears, outside of the apartment door of the New York apartment building. Outside of being born in a hospital somewhere close by the thirty story building, he had never really been outside of the apartment, a space he inherited from his wealthy, agoraphobic mother, who instilled in Isaac a healthy fear of the outside.  

It wasn’t that Isaac hadn’t ever wanted to leave the apartment.  There were times when he would beg his mother to take him outside to the park or to eat somewhere other than the kitchen table.  “Let’s compromise,” she would say, as if anything with his mother was a compromise.  “I’ll permit you to stand on the balcony for a few minutes so you can see what a dirty mess the outside world is with all its noise and ugliness.  And when you come inside, I’ll order delivery for Pagnili’s.” 

Initially, he would accept the compromise because a prisoner generally accepts the merest of freedoms when offered merely because it permits them greater space than what they then exist.  He would open the the door to the balcony, stepping on to the concrete patio bare and small.  It a had an iron gate that hugged the concrete formed into the most intricate and decorative design, a antique pattern of grape leaves and grapes twisted in an organic pattern with spaces so small one could only barely fit one’s tiny eight-year old legs through and let one’s feet dangle over the busy street down below. 

Those times he had sat on the balcony, he would watch the pigeons in the darkness of the shadows of other buildings and the traffic of cars and people streaming through the street down below.  It was like his own little ant farm, masses of insects scrambling every which way, the color of street vendors.  There were sounds of honking which bounced along the city walls until they reached his ears.  The air was crisp but also a little stale.  But only a few minutes would have been sitting on the balcony when his mother, cigarette in hand, dressed in her house coat, would knock on the balcony door, half begging him to come back in the apartment, half commanding him.

Once, he had tried to swat her begging command away, turned away from her knock.  He expected that she would come out onto the balcony herself and yank him inside; she was not above inflicting upon him the strict yank of the ear or the arm, to make him follow her commands.  But she did not open the door.  Her knocking, which had been a gentle reminder that his time outside had come to a close became a forceful banging on the glass pane of the door and he heard her soft voice raise to a more angry fevered pitch, a dull, distant reprimand.  “Isaac, young man, come inside immediately.” 

Suddenly, Isaac recognized that he obtained a certain power over her, that her agoraphobia placed him slightly out of her reach and that if he chose to remain outside, there was nothing that she could do to prevent him from doing so.  And despite the angry turned fury reflected in her voice, he ignored her allowing the city sounds and smells wash over him.  The beating on the window grew more frantic and ugly and he could hear her voice turn to a sort of pleading, a frightened pleading, as if he were at risk of dying. 

“Please, Isaac,” she cried.  “Come in,” she begged.  His blood in his veins turned to ice, a chill had overcome him.  Isaac had heard his mother use the same tone of voice once before, when his Auntie Maisie died, when his mother stayed in her room for days on end, and would cry out in the middle of the night, commanding Auntie Maisie to come back, to return to her.  It was a harrowing noise which reverberated in the walls of the apartment, and, more than once, the building superintendent would come to the apartment door and ask to see his mother to see if she were alright.  Eventually, the doctor would come and give his mother some medicine which make his mother forget about everything.

The noise of the beating on the pane glass grew louder and louder and more desperate, and Isaac knew he had to give up the game sooner rather than later for fear that the superintendent would again come and that he would be the cause of the visit.  But just before he stood up, he heard the cracking of glass and then a shattering as the pane fell to the concrete which he sat.  And now his mother’s voice came clearly, the shrieking of a woman who has lost her child to grip of death.  “Isaac, Isaac, Isaac,” she kept repeating….