The Redemption of Marvin Fuster by Patrick Sean Lee (books for 9th graders .txt) 📖

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge-myth is more potent than history-dreams are more powerful than facts-hope always triumphs over experience-laughter is the cure for grief-love is stronger than death.”

Robert Fulghum

Book One


The important thing is…
Marvin


One

Denver, Colorado 1998

Marvin Fuster held a soggy, crumpled bag and a wine bottle in his right hand, and swung his leg over the edge of the dumpster, searching down along the face of the bin for one of the longitudinal depressions stacked like ruled paper lines in the metal. He sat for an instant, afterward, balanced on the two-inch thick top, and glanced up and down the alleyway behind the hundred dollar a plate restaurant.
The evening was quiet except for the occasional purr of tires on the street a hundred feet away. Across from the dumpster a single lightbulb marking the rear entrance to a taxidermy building was fixed inside a half-domed canopy of tin, illuminating the lonesome alley in an anemic glow. Above him the impossibly clear sky smiled down, blinking with a hundred million stars, smothering the dreariness of the alley. For reasons he would never know, but were clear to another set of eyes, he thought back to a little girl he’d known so many years ago, and who had died at his father’s vicious hand. He had forgotten her name, but not the dreadful circumstances surrounding her death.
He didn’t bother to bend his head over to look down as he shook the image of the girl from his mind, leaning outward, putting his weight on the leg with its precarious toehold.
The sole of his shoe slid quickly, and Marvin Fuster’s body followed, headfirst. The trip down—he clung to the bag and bottle he’d just retrieved with a religious fervor—was quick, but Marvin was able to relive several different, important scenes of his long life, say the entire act of contrition, recite the pledge of allegiance (those portions he could remember), and calculate that it was going to hurt like hell in just a second. After all these thoughts were completed there remained a split second of nothing in his mind.
He hit, and true to his expectations it hurt like hell. And then his world went to peaceful black.

*

This was clear as crystal.

He was flying, soaring with his arms spread wide, high above a calm blue sea. Ahead of him the late afternoon sun painted the bank of clouds tangerine, and there was another figure nearing them—a woman with long, dark hair who glanced back at him at intervals. Even across the distance that separated them he could see her sparkling almond eyes each time she turned her head, a look of fear and revulsion written in them. He must catch up to her before she disappeared into the clouds; tell her what he’d done for love of her—but what was it he’d done?
He desperately needed to catch her.

*

Marvin Fuster half-opened his eyes and perceived the dim vision of doors opening. A voice; the sensation of being rolled along on a cart over an unending series of railroad tracks.
“Go! O-R 2!...” he heard a voice call out urgently.
O-R? Wha…?

And then, darkness.
Voices once again…unclear and growing distant as semi-consciousness drifted away.
There was no pain, only white mist as the orderlies rushed Marvin down the long hall to the operating room, his head laid open and bleeding. He drifted off, deeper now, into a strange netherworld, and found himself inside a thick mist of blinding white.
He was falling again.
Down he went, gaining speed it seemed, so much so that his cheeks began to stretch backward because of the G-force.
Down. Down. Down.
When I hit,

Marvin Fuster was thinking in a panic…
How long did he have? It didn’t matter, the ground was coming, and when it arrived he knew his life would then be over. That’s all.
The ground arrived right on schedule, and he hit hard. Painfully hard. Reason told him he should experience no further sensation or thought whatsoever after the impact, but in fact he did. Surprise.
He had landed on his back. Thought one. He wondered next if he had splattered; if his blood had exploded upward and outward like coffee from a shattered cup? Was he in a hundred different pieces, his brain lying somewhere all by itself thinking this? Or was he just a bloody glob in the dirt?
It was dirt. His fingers clenched and unclenched in the fine dust beneath them. This was good. If his brain had bounced away and come to rest in some detached place he probably wouldn’t even have noticed his fingers. He felt the jack-hammering of his heart, and knew that, too, was good. All of this was good. If he was dead, at least he was still thinking-dead.
Marvin opened his eyes.
Gray. Not good.
He tentatively raised a hand to his face and felt first the cheek, and afterward the top of his cheekbone. He blinked. Very good. His eyeball, at least the left one, was still inside the socket where it should be. He let his fingers follow the weather-beaten lines of his face upward to his scalp, and then patted it front to rear. He scanned the length and breadth of his body. Two arms, complete with hands, his beloved, filthy trench coat. Ratty trousers belted with a length of wire at the waist; two legs inside them. His shoes and socks were missing.
Well, hallelujah! I ain’t all busted up…

Secure in the knowledge that he had miraculously survived, he stood and took in his surroundings. The first smoky images he saw were of walls that changed perspective each time he turned his head. A tall, wide archway to his left, and then in the blink of an eye, a solid sheet of more dismal gray. To his right a window suddenly appeared with nothing beyond it on the outside except blackness, and then it too disappeared, to be replaced instantly by another solid wall even as he stared at it. One moment the ceiling vaulted skyward endlessly, only to shrink down on him the next. The chamber was alive in movement, but at the same time strangely dead. And it was hot, unbearably hot.
Above him there was no roof, but neither was there a sky filled with stars or clouds or a moon—only a pall of thick gray and the outline of the dreary walls that rose like monoliths until they lost themselves in the enormity of the height. Goosebumps sprang up his back at the sight of it. High above in one of the walls a small window suddenly materialized, casting a feeble spear of light downward. Dark birds followed quickly, sweeping in circles along the edges of it, cutting across it as though feeding on it, killing its chances to dispel the gloom.
Another doorway stood lit with a burst of kinder, brighter light breaking through—and now a young woman standing all aglow in the midst of it. She raised a hand toward Marvin as if beckoning him to come forward. He pointed a finger questioningly to his chest, then glanced behind him into the shadows to see if someone else was present. Surely she meant…but there was no one, and so with faltering steps he began to move in her direction as the birds spiraled slowly downward in silence far above him. There was no sound; not the padding of his bare feet on the earth, not the rise of his breathing or the beating of his heart that grew more rapid with every step.
He approached her, stopping a foot or two in front of her in deep embarrassment. She was beautiful, more beautiful than the stars in heaven, he could see—this young woman dressed in golden strands of the light reflecting off her deep auburn hair, radiating through the fabric of her white gown.
She turned without saying a word and left him, then, walking with the smoothness of flowing water, down a long flight of worn stone steps, out onto a path that led through soft sand up to the base of a tall dune. There she turned and looked back up to where he stood.
“Well?” she asked in a faraway, melodic voice.
Marvin felt his muscles tighten with a forgotten excitement. He bounded down the steps and ran to her side.