Free My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) by Clarence Major Page B

United States Code Section fifteen-forty-four.” This followed by blank pages for entries and departures, for visas. At the end of its last two there was more—the highlights: “This passport is the property of the United States Government. It must be surrendered upon demand made by an authorized representative of the Department of State. The passport is not valid unless signed by the bearer on page two.” Mason stopped at the corner of Prince and placed his heavy left boot on the top of a fire hydrant, balanced the booklet on his knee, and with his trusty Bic signed the thing. Happy day: signature du titulaire. The gods smiled. Znotchy was in high gear. Mason stepped briskly: he was making it in America. Hotdog! Yet he was no penance payer: any judgment would be secular since he wasn't a 1940s James Cagney of the Lower East Side caught excruciatingly between Church and State. If repentance must be then make it a civic sacramental ordinance: his forgiving priest was his own knowledge that he'd done his so-called best, that the Forces had been so powerful, so overwhelming, and poverty and misuse so pervasive, that he could not have done better otherwise . Lie? The Department of Justice would not agree. So: absolution wouldn't be forthcoming? How about confession? Had the system nailed him so profoundly to the cross? He insisted that the angels of The System had lice under their wings. He too? You bet. Was there guaranteed another sea up ahead? No, but he had no trouble at all getting a driver's license in the ctesired name. He went downtown to the Municipal Building and stood in line like everybody else. That was the hardest part. The passport did the rest. Applying for a Visa Credit Card wasn't quite so copesettic. The computer said The Impostor already had one. “Uh, excuse me, I forgot.” A day later, elsewhere, Mason applied—with fingers crossed—for a Master Charge card. Luck would be with him.
    Mason Ellis sang “Diddie Wa Diddie” like Blind Blake, crossed the street at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second like the Beatles on the cover of Abbey Road and reaching the curb leaped into the air and coming down did a couple of steps of the Flat Foot Floogie. (Earlier, in his room at the Gramercy Park Hotel—just north of the park, he'd kissed himself in the mirror! Yes, yes he'd moved: did ya think he wuz gonna stay in that fleabag . . . ?) He climbed the grand stairway. Inside he found Reference. Selected the volumes to update “his” activities. A photocopy machine added technological sparkle to a dreary corner by a drinking fountain. He took the books there and xeroxed the pages he needed. It was like discovering a map of the unknown world: The Grand Lake the Shadow Mountain the Rainbow Curve. Then: feeling paralyzed as in a dream unable to move he stood trim, halfway between sturdy shelves where he'd returned heavy volumes and a reading table, holding the copies at chest level. His cards exposed—? the dealer dealing from the bottom . . . ? was his opponent putting the squeeze on him? Was there some recent history of “himself’ he had missed out on? What madness was responsible? Was he a man who'd missed a train because of a threat-of-loss . . . ? What'd The Impostor done since seventy-nine? Spare us. He longed for wish-fulfillment, it alone —and none of the above. Mason took the stairway down. Dazed—he started walking rather than taking any of the buses headed for Washington Square, or Cooper Square. As he threw himself against the Hudson winds sweeping up Fifth, choked on the gas fumes of the taxis racing down, he closed his eyes against Reagan posters pushing for president in November, against Carter posters too, everywhere—on the backs of buses, on billboards. Too much. Then bong: he bumped into— what? —a person? a light pole? a bus? Mason opened to see the big man stepping around him, cussing. But, uh, wasn't he Reverend Jack Mackins, the preacher of those wonderful reformatory