The Shape of a Miracle : Part 4

Benjamin's Gift
by Michael Golding

(Page 4 of 5)

It was an awful room. The walls were covered with dark printed wallpaper, and the furniture was heavy and ominous looking. And even though it was only ten o'clock in the morning, it was mostly dark: the sunlight that came through the one lonely window seemed to stop a few inches after entering. The only thing that alleviated the gloom - the only thing that kept Benjamin from minding how uncomfortable the chair was and how long Mr. Petersen was taking in the other room - was the large oil painting on the wall across from him. It was a picture of a storm at sea, with a large boat crashing on the waves and a smaller boat carrying a group of survivors to safety. Benjamin had seen the ocean only once, on an ill-fated outing to the Jersey shore that had included a flat tire, a very bad chicken sandwich, and about forty-five minutes to actually look at the water. But he knew from that brief visit how wonderful it was, so the painting helped him take his mind off the interminable wait.

Benjamin was an astonishingly beautiful child. His body was strong and lithe, his face the product of a sculptor's chisel, perfect and radiating light. His only flaw - although a wise eye would not have seen it as such - was a large strawberry birthmark that spread, like the Russian steppes, across his right cheek and throat. When his parents first saw him, the contradiction of it stunned them into silence: the startling beauty, even as a newborn, and this strange, sprawling mark across its surface. Whatever they called it - spot, stain, blotch, smear - it stole away their joy at the birth of a wonderful child.

As Benjamin grew, his beauty grew, too, so that the strawberry birthmark eventually began to seem like a natural balancing mechanism: a silk scarf thrown up against the light of God. The more beautiful he became, however, the more his parents hated the birthmark. His mother, Lavinia, interpreted it as a punishment. It reminded her of the stain on the bedsheet in the morning after she'd made love with Benjamin's father, the dried insignia of her husband's seed that spilled out of her as she slept. At least one of those seeds had managed to find its way up into her womb, and Lavinia was convinced that the mark on the body of the child that it had grown into was intended to chastise her for the pleasure she'd taken in the embarrassing act that had produced him. Benjamin's father, Edward, had a different interpretation. To him the birthmark was a sign not of what had been, but of what was yet to come: Benjamin was the future, and there was a stain upon it.

Had Benjamin looked into the mirror for the first time in a world in which neither his parents nor anyone like them had ever lived, he would have liked what he saw tremendously. The cerulean blue eyes were strong and clear. The nose was straight and the mouth delicately curved. The dark blond hair feathered softly into neat, attractive waves. And the strawberry birthmark was really quite fascinating - a splash of color on a pale canvas, a burst of good cheer like the wine that spilled from the goblet turned over at a wedding. Edward and Lavinia, however, were most decidedly in Benjamin's world. So when he looked into the mirror and saw the strawberry birthmark, the only thing he could feel was his parents' shame.

At first he tried rubbing it off, using terry-cloth toweling, soap detergent, cotton batting, rubbing alcohol, and half a jar of what his mother referred to as, but was obviously mistaken in calling, vanishing cream. When this didn't work he tried covering it over with a paste he concocted of bourbon and baking soda, using the bottle of bootleg his father kept in the broom closet, being careful to top it up with water. When this didn't work he tried spreading strawberry jam across the rest of his fa ce, though by the time he'd emptied the jar he realized that the strawberry birthmark was not really strawberry, but more like stewed cherries or twisted candy whips or the small glass relish dish that his mother brought out whenever company came to dinner.

It was when all these methods failed that Benjamin, tired of being sticky and seedy, stumbled upon his fate. He was sitting on the large, flowered sofa in the sitting room of the small Brooklyn brownstone where he and his parents lived. His mother had told him to wait there while she answered the doorbell, and from the emphasis in her voice he understood that she wished him to remain hidden rather than to accompany her and produce that look of amazement that always appeared on the face of whoever was at the door. As he tucked his legs up under him and listened to the conversation through the wall, he wished that he could curl up tight enough to disappear. And for a moment he did. He closed his eyes and entered a half-world - a blue zone - a limbo. And when he opened them again he found himself on the kitchen floor between the icebox and the stove. He was quite confused and had to concentrate feverishly to return himself to the sitting room before his mother came back. But the next morning, after he had transported himself from his bedroom to the bathroom, and the bathroom to the back garden, he knew that, whatever was happening, it was more than just chance.

For the next few weeks Benjamin refrained from wishing himself to be anywhere other than where he was. It was strange enough to have a strawberry birthmark; what could be the meaning of the ability to transport oneself through space? He tried to convince himself that it had not really happened. As his father always liked to say, people constantly imagined the most ridiculous things. But the vast possibilities that it held finally tempted him to test it again. So he transferred himself from the basement to the attic - from the front porch swing to the second-floor landing - and he saw that, bizarre and vaguely dangerous as it seemed, these powers were actually his.

The one thing Benjamin felt certain about, however, was that he dared not reveal his discovery to his parents; Edward and Lavinia were beleaguered enough without having to process their son's new abilities. Their problems were mostly a product of their insecurities: they had money, but they were convinced that it wasn't enough; they had a satisfying sex life, but they felt horribly guilty about it; they had a beautiful son, but he had a strawberry birthmark on his face. They were therefore poised, like a pair of overripe apples, to fall to the ground with a resounding splat should the appropriate wind blow in.

Copyright © 1999 by Michael Golding

About the Author

Born and raised in Philadelphia and Miami, educated at Duke and Oxford, Michael Golding moved to New York in the eighties to pursue a career in the theatre. After several years of work Off-Broadway (including a season with the Lion Theatre Company on Theatre Row and playing Romeo in the Joseph Papp/Riverside Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet), he decided to move to Paris to begin writing. After a year in Paris, he travelled on to Venice, where both his son Joshua and his first novel, Simple Prayers, were born.