Read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears for Free Online Page A

calling me at least once a week since April. He calls me at home early in the morning, or at the store in the middle of the day to see if I’m performing my shopkeeper duties, first and foremost of which is to be open. Now that it’s May, he seems determined to let me know that I can expect more of the same from him. In the background I can hear other phones ringing and a low rumble of indistinguishable voices. I’ve never been to Kenneth’s office, but I imagine a busy row of men in identical suits picking and hanging up their phones in unison.
    “I was on my way there,” I tell him.
    “It’s almost nine,” he says. I look at the clock hanging on the wall across from me. I hadn’t considered the time yet. There are already too many hours in the day; to worry about any one in particular is pointless.
    “I know what time it is.”
    “Joseph and I were planning on coming back to the store tonight,” he tells me.
    “You don’t have to.”
    “I know.”
    He hangs up abruptly then. This is what he believes men in power can do. They can dismiss with a wave of the hand and never think twice about it. There are those who wake each morning ready to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake only because we have to. We live in the shadows of every neighborhood. We own corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day. We spend our afternoons gazing lazily out of windows. Somnambulists, all of us. Someone else said it better: we wake to sleep and sleep to wake.
    I leave for the store half an hour later, hoping, however foolishly, to catch what’s left of the morning rush-hour crowd. The sidewalks and street are practically deserted; everyone but me and a few morning joggers has already reached their destination. The emptiness is nice, though. As I walk through the circle I decide to stop and take a seat on one of the new benches across from General Logan to listen to the birds chattering away loudly in the trees. There’s an arc of benches on either side of the statue. The benches have new black lacquer paint, and behind the benches are thick layers of startlingly fresh green sod where only dust and scattered clumps of crabgrass and weeds used to grow. When I opened my store ten years ago, Logan Circle was still predominately poor, black, cheap, and sunk in a depression that had struck the city twenty years earlier and never left. Most of the streetlights that surrounded the circle were burned out, leaving the neighborhood perpetually pitched into a strange half-darkness more frightening than pure black. Before the newly formed General Logan Circle Statue Association restored the statue last month it was chipped, defaced, and smeared with human, dog, and bird shit. Drunk old men, their foreheads wrinkled, their pants barely buckled around their waists, rambled around the statue’s benches in the afternoon and evening muttering to themselves and one another. The benches smelled of urine, and even the pigeons that strolled around the grass in search of thrown-away chicken bones and bread had a sad, desolate look to them, as if they knew by instinct that this was where their breed belonged. The old men have mostly shuffled on. A few, on occasion, still stumble around the circle, and even though I’ve never looked at any of their faces up close, I imagine there’s something approaching shock and wonder as they look up at General Logan, whose bronze exterior is now clear enough for me to see my reflection in, and who looks down on all of us with the glimmering sheen of a privately funded cleaning job. I think if he were alive now he would have to say this is progress; that a society that fails to properly remember its dead and fallen heroes is a society not worth remembering at all.
    The birds cackle away in their treetops, and after watching them hop idly from branch to branch for another half hour, I finally decide it’s time for me to rise and