Passenger(14)

There is Spanish music playing from an open window somewhere as I step out into the street. The day is tremendous and sunny, the light too powerful for my tired, weary eyes. I walk a short while until I fall beneath the yawning shade of the Mercy Medical Center. The pale brick fa?ade and smoked windows are immediately recognizable. Thinking of the scar on my leg, I wonder if I have ever been treated here.

This is insane. Where the hell is my memory?

I find Calvert Street and maneuver through various neighborhoods. In some vague fashion I am aware I am heading toward the Inner Harbor—can actually summon a visual of the Harbor in my mind—but this passing familiarity does little to comfort me. I wind through a grassy park surrounded by potholed side streets punctuated by gaudily-painted plaster busts of giant crabs, their claws raised above their carapaces as if in victory. At the far end of the park, I spy a tooth-colored square building, columned, and flanked by brass lampposts with a wedge of police cruisers corralled out front: a police station.

They’re going to think I’m insane. They might even lock me up.

These reservations strike me like a hand across the face.

Moreover: what if I am wanted for some heinous crime? What if the police are out looking for me right now? I think of my vacant, echo-chamber apartment and am frightened to admit it could be the den of a serial killer, a sociopath, some psychotic religious zealot. Why is there no fresh food in my refrigerator? Why are there no clothes in the bedroom closet?

Why can’t I remember a goddamn thing?

I formulate a scenario where I am relentlessly interrogated by police, hammering me with a barrage of questions, all of which I cannot answer because I cannot remember any of it. Where were you on the night of the fifth? What’s your alibi? I do not know. And, of course, they do not believe me. You always see it—the bastard being drilled by the cops who never remembers a damn thing. The poor, dumb, hopeless bastard. You always see it.

Maybe that’s true.

Maybe they really don’t remember.

In the end, this paranoia defeats me. If I am a psycho killer, I do not want to know it. I decide the best bet is the simplest bet: call the apartment complex’s main office and ask to see my rental agreement.

I cross the street just as my nostrils become infused with the tempting aromas of the city: the Thai restaurants stacked along the boulevard and the brewing coffee from the Internet cafés. This stretch of Calvert is littered with delis and juice bars, with family-run bookstores that serve pastries and pizza parlors with tables on the sidewalks. Art houses, thrift shops, countless bakeries. There is a drilling pain at the center of my stomach, I am so hungry.

Shaking, head still throbbing, I drop down on another believe bench and wonder how I am going to call the office number without a telephone.

There are still some payphones around the city, if you know where to look for them. I know I have seen them before, but I’m not sure where they are. Still, I would need change…and damn if I didn’t leave my $2.18 at the Samjetta last night, sitting right there on the bar…

There are also a number of homeless people in Baltimore, perhaps more so than most urban locales throughout the country. While they are typically known to be solitary creatures, you can occasionally find them in pacts, in prides, in flocks, in murders, whatever, lighting together on park benches or bundling up in conspiratorial groups to keep warm over heating grates in the winter. Often, they loiter about the steps of churches and creep back and forth in the alleyways with designs on the dumpsters and the treasures within. They congregate outside the bohemian cafés and coffee shops because they know the art students who frequent these haunts are eager to give them handouts and feel good about themselves. The homeless are like hungry squirrels that way.

It doesn’t take me long to target a bearded, puffy-faced derelict talking to himself while hunched over on the stoop of a condemned building. The derelict wears a sawdust-colored trench coat matted with grease, pulled taut about his shoulders like a cape, and there is a backward baseball cap, equally filthy, on his head. Great tufts of pepper-colored clown hair explode at either side of his head from beneath the cap and his multicolored beard is as lush as the mane of a lion.

There is a Styrofoam cup planted squarely between the derelict’s feet. It is this cup that is the target.

Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I make a beeline for the derelict, my head down, moving with a pace quicker than normal. A normal person might have intercepted me before I drew much closer, but the derelict is not paying attention and even seems a bit inebriated. So I am able to get close, to get right in there, and when I strike the Styrofoam cup with the toe of my sneaker, spilling quarters and nickels and dimes to the sidewalk, it takes the derelict a moment or two to realize what is happening.

What follows is an eruption of nonsense, of partially understood curse words and gutter slang, coupled with the furious flailing of very long arms. Surprisingly, however, the derelict does not rise from the stoop; his eyes merely turn to saucers as he watches the spray of change, twinkling like a constellation along the pavement.

“So sorry,” I blurt to the derelict, already down on one knee, refilling the man’s Styrofoam cup.

“Blast,” growls the derelict. “Blast an’ dis’n dat.”

“Here. Here.” I pile the change back into the cup and hand it over to the derelict, who does not accept it. “Here,” I repeat, and finally set the cup back down between the derelict’s feet and walk quickly away.