The Seer

by Lloyd B. Abrams

She is known, simply, as Mama.

When her door is open, I’d see her sitting on a worn stuffed chair, usually with her head lolling back. Her large black and brown ancient dog is curled up on the floor beside her. Whenever I’ve walked by, at whatever hour, her door has been wide open.

When I was a kid, there was something spooky about the way she sat, with her milky white blind eyes, gazing out at the street. We were all scared of her back then, but now I no longer cross to the other side of the street to get to my building.

Sometimes, when I pass by, I can hear little kids laughing or crying or shrieking inside her apartment. A bunch of young mothers leave their children with her when they do their errands – tiny Tyrones or Shemiqas or Franciscos or Angelas. sometimes even a Korean or a Jewish kid. The playpen in her apartment is a United Nations melting pot – a demographic reflection of our rundown, dilapidated neighborhood – twelve square blocks missed by Jimmy Carter when he visited the city decades ago, overlooked by politicians running for office, forgotten by city planners with gentrification on their minds.

And me? Like so many others, I’ve stayed. I can’t beat what I pay for my parent’s old two-bedroom, fifth-floor, rent-controlled walk-up, now a big place for just one person. I had lived with my parents until my father died fourteen years ago, shortly after I graduated from City College. He complained about everything, including his zhlub of a know-nothing son, his dead-end job and his uncaring, frigid wife. He was always angry that his heart “wasn’t no good,” but he never went to see a doctor. I could never understand why he refused to get medical help even when heart pains stopped him in his tracks.

After his death, Mom lingered on, grieving, bereft, for eight more months, until she, too, followed him up into gan eden – heaven, or so she hoped and prayed, when she sat at the edge of the worn kitchen chair, wringing out a crumpled-up tissue in her prematurely gnarled hands. She withered away, faded away, melted away to nothingness. It was like watching her receding through the opposite end of a telescope. Despite his mistreatment, she never could bear being away from him.

I’ve been teaching math in one of the city’s shittiest – in the parlance, “lowest performing” – junior highs for fourteen years. I’ve heard that burnout comes after seven years, and I’ve managed to last almost twice that, a personal claim to fame or a survival adaptation or sheer laziness to make a change. But now I’m only a lukewarm cinder, perhaps a dying ember. I haven’t yet turned to ash, for I can still feel some fire burning inside. I hope it’s not just heartburn or a heart attack coming on.

Like my colleagues, who lumber up the stairs, ignoring the taunts from the same testosterone-flooded little bastards with whom I have to deal, I feel besieged and unappreciated, and I sometimes liken myself to a holocaust survivor suffering the indignities of a concentration camp. Yet I go on, despite the ever-constant changes of curriculum, the new approaches to education that attempt, and inevitably fail, to meet the challenge of reaching the modern urban youth – another euphemism for stupid, uncaring, fucked-up ghetto kids, who befoul me with their pent-up anger like the indelible tags they leave behind with their markers and their spray paint and their filthy mouths. This, despite the micro-management, the poor leadership, the ever-present administrative idiocy. I persevere. I really do persevere. But, unlike my colleagues, I know I’m burning out. Most of them don’t have a clue; they seem so oblivious. Sometimes I wish I were like them – happy and ignorant and clueless.

On my way home from the el, before autumn shadows completely eclipse the sidewalk, I pass Mama’s open doorway, and look in. Mama’s there, as always, sitting like a Buddha. A table lamp in the corner ekes out a pitifully dim light. A yahrzeit candle flickering in the window adds atmosphere. “Hey, Mama,” I call out.

The dog raises his head, yawns and slowly places his head back on his paws. “Hi, boy,” she answers. She’s always called me “boy,” the same way I call my kids, “man” or “hon” because I can’t remember their names. Fact is, I don’t even try anymore; their faces race by, from term to term, like a blur. Getting through the semi-annual parent conferences is a real bitch. The kids and I are complicit in “getting over” on their parents. They clue me in as to who they are, what class they’re in, and where they sit, so I can check the Delaney book and my grade book, and then I do my best to lie to their parents, most of the time in their favor. These are the rare times when I switch from jeans to dress pants and put on a tie, “Yo, teach, you look ‘phat.’” With their parents, I try to fake it, and say all the right things so maybe they’ll think I really give a damn, so maybe they’ll check their kids’ homework assignment for a day or two until they forget about it and don’t bother anymore. I do my song and dance, they laugh and applaud, and we all know on some level that it’s all a crock of shit.

“Why ’n’ cha come in,” Mama says.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon and I’m already exhausted. I wish it were due to some heavy partying or drinking and drugging over the weekend, but I’m not into that scene, or any scene, for that matter. I’m worn out because it’s the fourth five-day week in a row. I’ve decided to call in sick this Thursday. After all, what are sick days for? Thursday is my mental and physical rehabilitation day. Fuck those perfect-attendance assholes who are acknowledged at the final faculty meeting of the year with a coffee mug or a water bottle. Fuck ‘em all. My plan is to spend an entire Thursday morning in bed, take in an afternoon movie and then pick up some chinx to take back to my place. On Friday, I can make my token appearance, and then have the weekend off. And it’ll be another week shot to shit.

Since I’ve got nothing else to do, nothing penciled in my heavy social calendar, I step over the threshold and into her anteroom. “Sit down over there,” she says, waving in the general direction of another overstuffed armchair. I carefully step around the dog, who doesn’t even react, and wearily sit down.

Before I go on, there’s something else about Mama that you ought to know. I don’t know exactly how to put this, but it’s like she can see into the future. It’s not like, “Hey, Mama, who’s gonna win the third at Saratoga?” or anything like that. Or, “Is Microsoft gonna go up or down?” as if anyone had money to put into the market. It’s more like people coming into her room talk to her – mostly about their dreams – and then her telling them what’s going to happen next, how things are going to turn out. So they can plan accordingly, or make amends, or skip town, as the case may be.

I can hear you saying, “That’s bullshit,” and you’d have every right to have your doubts. But as far back as I can remember, we all heard the stories about Mama, and we all knew she had some kind of power – not to directly change your destiny – that was up to you – but to let people see with more clarity where their lives were heading.

Let me give you a fr’instance. There was this Puerto Rican guy who lived on the next block who was cheating on his wife. Nothing unusual about that. The Rican’s wife went over to Mama’s and talked about it. And then the guy swaggered over the next day, probably threatened by his wife. Nobody was around to hear what went on – what Mama said to him – but, for a while, he stopped stepping out on his wife. A couple of months later, he was at it again. I guess he just couldn’t keep it in his pants.

I heard that one night, on the way home from his newest squeeze, he tried to sneak into his apartment building through the back entrance, because he knew his wife would be watching out for him from their window overlooking the courtyard. As he neared the chainlink fence behind the building, a couple of pit bulls in the rear yard woke up yelping and barking, and started running after him. The guy never made it cleanly over the fence, because he panicked when one of the dogs jumped up at him. When the guy fell over to the other side, the razor wire atop the fence ripped open his pants, and severed his testicles and his penis, which was probably still glistening with the fluids of his assignation. The dogs were rewarded for their efforts with a late night snack. And never again did the guy cheat on his wife.

I can hear you snickering, thinking that it all could’ve been a coincidence. But how many of these coincidences would make you believe that what I’m telling you about Mama is true? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? If I told you a couple hundred, would you believe me then?

As for myself, I have very vivid dreams. It’s partly due to the Zoloft that’s been prescribed for my agitated depression, since Zoloft affects how you sleep. Thank God for the city health plan which covers psychotropic medications, but that’s another story entirely. On top of that, I’ve always been a light sleeper. Every August, I can rely on being trashed by my annual plague of school dreams. Like the one about the file cabinet containing my math lessons catching on fire and I’d have to walk into a class unprepared; or the one about seeing one of my students falling down a stairwell to his death, and it was my fault because I didn’t get to class on time; or the one about walking into an English class and not knowing what the hell I was doing; or the one about being in front of a class and students started walking out, only to be replaced by rowdy students who didn’t belong. And on and fucking on.

And I’ve had other wonderfully graphic, ever-so-realistic dreams in which an up elevator I’m on starts moving sideways; where subway trains and locomotives ride off the tracks and onto the ground; where school basements open up onto rooms and then other rooms until I become impossibly lost; where I’m trying to make an emergency phone call and I can’t get a dial tone; where I have to get someplace and my feet are anchored in mud or concrete.

The closet dream-analysts among you are itching to take a shot at interpreting those dreams, aren’t you? You want to tell me how I express my anxiety in my dreams, how I don’t know where I’m going, how I don’t have any life goals. You may as well tell me to call you at the Psychic Hotline for $3.99 a minute so you can tell me what numbers to play in the lottery for all the good your dream analyses will do. Go right ahead. But I’d much rather listen to Mama’s take on my troubling dreams. So I finally decided to hit her with the really big one, the one I would never dare to share, even with my ever-understanding, all-accepting, pill-dispensing, health-plan-accepting psychiatrist.

“What’s troublin’ you boy?” Mama asks.

She still calls me ”boy,” even though I’m 38 years old. “How d’ya know there’s anything bothering me?” I answer.

“Why else would ya come in and sit a while?” she asks. Jeez – stupid me. “Nobody ever comes around just to visit. They always want something from Mama.”

“Well, Mama,” I begin. “I’ve had this dream...” I heard my voice tailing off.

“Yeah, yeah. Everyone has they dreams,” Mama says. “You no different.”

“I don’t know if everyone’s had dreams like the one I want to tell you about,” I said. And then it occurs to me, at that moment, like an epiphany, that Mama wasn’t really altruistic. Yeah, she mystically and magically doles out tidbits and advice about the future, but she actually gets more out of it all than she gives back in return. As the unofficial mayor of and mother-confessor to our passed-by and passed-over neighborhood, she was able to listen to our most intimate thoughts and fears, our innermost cravings and needs. With her psychic tendrils reaching out, probing, she was the welcome recipient of our internal experiences, the repository of our twelve-square-block collective unconscious.

Mama shrugs, as if to say in the teen-age language of dismissal, “Whatever.” Or, less indirectly, “Fuck you. Why should I care?”

So I decide to propose a trade. “Mama, I’ll tell you about my dream – it’s a really good one – if and only if you tell me about some of yours.” I think that was a fair proposition.

It is hard to make it out in the dim light, but I see her huge figure lurch momentarily. A tear might have rolled down Mama’s cheek. She sits facing me with her head bobbing up and down ever so slightly. It looks like she might even have been davening sitting down. It is hard to watch, so I sit back and wait.

Finally, “Okay.” That’s all she says.

So I begin to tell her about the dream I remember having at least three or four times. It was bad enough the first time, but its repetition gave it made it even more believability. The whole dream was actually a dream within a dream.

“Here goes,” I say. And then continue: In the inner dream, I am a collector of sadomasochistic pornography and write stories for these publications in which I torture and horribly mutilate someone or someones. When what I’ve done is discovered, I make a mostly futile effort to destroy the evidence, and then run from the police, and also run for my life. In the dream, I know absolutely that these first-person stories come from personal experience, things I’ve actually done. When, my terror reaches a certain level, I force myself to wake up from the inner dream and segue to the outer dream. The outer dream convinces me that the inner dream had really been true.

I explain to Mama that I usually have the ability to wake up from a dream when it becomes too threatening, too ridiculous or too far out. It’s like I tell myself, “Oops. That’s enough already.” So I wake up.

“That’s a new one on me,” Mama replies as she shakes her head. So I go on.

After waking from the inner dream out into the outer dream, I am the faced with the stone-cold reality that I am a criminal – a serial murderer. While the intense inner dream lasts only a short time and covers a small amount of happenstance, the outer dream lasts much longer and gives further credence to the crimes of the inner dream. Since I’m supposedly awake in the outer dream, I really fear that I am living a double life. Finally, I wake up into the real world, shuddering and panting. I sit up in bed, and feel the sweat rolling down my face. I try to focus. Until rationality – such as it is – eventually breaks through, I wonder if what I had dreamed had actually happened.

When I finish telling Mama about the dream, I have the same visceral reaction as I had after waking up from the dreams. I feel sick to my stomach; my head is throbbing; I feel flushed. Her reaction to it all: “That’s rich. That’s a good one. Best I heard in a long time.”

I wait for more but none was forthcoming. “That’s all you have to say?” I ask.

“For now, yeah,” she answers. “I got nuthin more to say about yo dream.”

“Thanks for nothing,” I say. “You’re the only one I’ve ever told about this dream and you’ve got nothing to say? No reaction? No nothing?”

“Not right now, boy. But we made an agreement. Are ya ready for me to keep my side of the bargain?”

At that point, I didn’t want to play games anymore.

“Yeah, sure I do.”

Mama says, enunciating each word separately, “Well I do not dream.” And she starts chortling, her huge body writhing in gelatinous glee.

“Fuck you, bitch,” I say under my breath, and I start to get up.

She must’ve heard me pulling myself out of the chair, for she suddenly stops laughing and shouts out, “Hey, wait. Where ya goin’?”

“You don’t dream. You got nothing to say. So why should I wait around?”

“Don’tcha wanna hear about my very own nightmare?” she asks in a childish, teasing tone. “You sure you can take it?”

“Yeah,” I reply.

And so she begins to tell me.

Mama says she had always been fat, so much so that her father continually called her a shticke dreck, which I know meant a “big piece of shit.” I’m surprised. I never realized that she was Jewish; I just assumed that she was a Puerto Rican or a mulatto because her nondescript features were overshadowed by her obesity and her overall unkempt appearance, and because of her unmistakable ghetto dialect.

She went on: Her mother died during her childbirth and her father never stopped blaming her. Because of her, he traded a pliant, loving wife for a squalling, demanding infant. While the post-World War II boom was going on around him, he managed to be a failure in several promising businesses. For this, too, she was blamed. And for his chronic health problems, and for his inability to find someone else go out with, let alone marry, and for being forced to remain with her in their tenement apartment, and so on. For everything.

As soon as she could remember, she was made to wash and clean and cook, and lick and suck and fuck. To tidy up their apartment and to worship his circumcised cock. To light candles on Friday night and then to blow him after dinner. To keep his shirts ironed so he could make an appearance at shul the next morning, but never, ever, taking her with him to sit on the other side of the mechitza, the wall separating men from women. And when he returned home after the kiddish of bony whitefish, stale challah and a glass of schnapps, he had her convinced that opening her legs for him was a shabbat mitzvah. He threatened to kill her if she ever said anything to anyone. And all of this, while taunting her about her weight and her stupidity and her worthlessness.

He kept her out of school, but it was a time when truant officers never bothered to venture into the neighborhood. After all, why should she go to school? What was the purpose, since she was, and was always going to be, a no-good piece of shit?

So she continued to gain even more weight, but there was no Weight Watchers for her, no diets, no medical care, no care of any sort. When she got her first period at the age of fourteen, she thought it was due to her father’s repeated penetrations and his savage use of a broken broomstick as punishment for imagined slights and wrongs.

Her father could never get his head above water and he eventually realized he would never get anywhere. Menial jobs followed weeks and then months of unemployment. He sold Christmas trees in the dead of winter and came home with frozen fingers and an even icier disposition. Sometimes, out of desperation, he took on potentially hazardous jobs, breathing in noxious fumes and abrasive particulates. To him, these were jobs that “even the schvartzes wouldn’t do.” And when he’d come home wheezing and coughing up blood she knew that she’d soon be shedding some of her own.

Still, he became even more cruel. When she closed her eyes to blot out the suffering, he demanded that she keep them open, to look at him. He was particularly vicious on her birthdays, which he helped her to celebrate not by buying her a card of a gift, but by raping her vaginally, orally and anally. On the day she turned fifteen, when she was already well over 300 pounds, he tied her down to the bed and forced her to watch what he was going to do. He went back to the kitchen and brought back an icepick. He teased her with it, lightly brushing its sharp point over her cheeks, her nose, and her lips. He slowly raised the icepick and dug it into her left eye. Then, while she was screaming into the panties that he had thoughtfully ripped off her and stuffed into her mouth, he jammed it once into her right eye. All she remembered hearing him say was “fuck you, bitch” before she passed out.

After that, he lost interest in using her for sexual release. But she was still required to keep the place clean and to cook his meals. He spent increasingly longer amounts of time away from the apartment, sometimes days and weeks. She still feared for her life and often wondered if death was a better alternative. Maybe her father was right. Maybe she had nothing to live for.

Mama was forced to fend for herself. She learned to feel her way around the apartment and she soon memorized where everything was. She continued to eat and relentlessly gorged herself. On her eighteenth birthday, her father staggered home, drunk, and fell onto the couch in a heap as he passed out. Mama felt her way to the kitchen, got the icepick out of the tool drawer, came back to the living room, and, with one hand on his neck, furiously stuck the icepick into his heart, again and again and again, until, exhausted, she passed out next to him on the floor.

The police came when she woke up screaming, for the upstairs neighbors had finally heard something, after all those years. In the morgue, the medical examiner counted fifty-nine individual stab wounds. Mama was arrested, quickly arraigned, and then let out on her own recognizance. After a cursory investigation and for humanitarian reasons, the district attorney withdrew all charges against her. She was finally free of her father, but not free from the demons who howled at her from inside and who tyrannized her through the night. Fiends who sometimes whispered so she’d have to listen carefully and who sometimes abruptly screamed things at her that she didn’t want to hear. Filthy things, awful things, but things she knew, knew down to her core, that had to be true.

She would have been certifiably crazy if she told anyone all this, but she rarely moved from her overstuffed chair. The very people who brought their children over to stay with her when they went shopping brought back food and groceries for her. The people who sat down and told her about their dreams opened her mail and helped her pay her bills. For the dreamers, all she had to do was to report back what her phantoms told her. She was like a talking head on TV who repeats back what the production staff says in her earpiece. For them, it was magical, mystical, wondrous. For her, it was no big deal.

When it seems that she was done telling about the nightmare that was her life, I wait for her to continue. Then I prodded her by asking, “No big deal?”

“No biggie. Ya gotta ‘member,” she explains, “that it wasn’t me talkin’. It was dem damn demons.” She starts cackling, a laugh which turns into a wheezing cough.

Her body stops heaving from the coughing, and she starts to sob. After a minute or two, she gathers herself, looks at me with those eerie glassy eyes, and says, “Got more than you bargained for, huh, boy?”

I’m speechless. How could I possibly respond? What could I possibly say?

Mama must sensed what I’m feeling. “I told ya enough,” she says. You better go on home, now, boy.”

That night, I slept fitfully. Once again, I dreamt a dream within a dream. This time, though, I wasn’t the sadistic murderer, but, rather, the avenging angel who settled Mama’s score.

Over and over and over again.

Rev 4 / November 13, 2003 .. Rev 6 / July 3, 2019

Up to the beginning of the story

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 51, August 2019

November 2003 & July 2019…Copyright © 2019, Lloyd B. Abrams