A Nobody in the Day and Night

Whether distance, physical distance, from his family, was a worthy criterion of success for a child to embrace, Gideon Garatdjian had, since he could remember, seen removal from the apartment and the building where he had been raised as necessary to his survival. He longed for separation, not closeness, his life mission being to prove that he was not like the floundering older siblings ensnared on the very premises where they and he had lived since infancy. Oh, he loved his mother to a degree as great as any child could love his mother, seeing her as warmth and softness and love itself, and he loved his brother and his four sisters in varying degrees, but he did not love failure. He did not love weakness and dependency and the excuses that accompanied them, and such deficiencies seemed in strong evidence in his immediate environment.

Like his family, the building, which towered thirteen stories over Broadway, was showing signs of deterioration. Periodically bits and pieces of masonry would break off from the cornices and crash to the sidewalk below, scaring the pedestrians witless and prompting the police to temporarily section off a portion of the block. Over the years the façade had grown grimy from the exhaust of the cars and trucks and buses down on Broadway and cried out for sand-blasting, and the window sashes were rotting and in need of replacement. If the building’s neglected features called attention to themselves, so too did the verse of scripture from the Gospels:

For For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
John 3:16

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