Passenger(2)

I have no name.

I could be any of a million people in the country. In the world, even. The universe.

There is a moment when fear grabs at my throat. The fear-fingers threaten to cut me down and shake me loose. I struggle to overpower them. It takes some heavy breathing before I force the feeling into submission. Because that is what it’s like when you’re a stranger to yourself. When you don’t know who you are.

Because you can be anyone.

Anyone at all.

I recall my reflection in the bus mirror and estimate that I am in my early thirties, although I think I feel older than that, what with my sunken face and deep, soulless eyes. It is a reaching, grasping estimation, influenced by the rundown, worn-out, fatigued look of my face in the bus mirror. Also, I feel underweight for my height.

Across the street, a young couple emerges from one of the row homes and empties onto the sidewalk, talking inaudibly and smiling with their heads pressed close together. Beyond the young couple, a line of streetlamps flickers then dies. I can see traffic up ahead at the nearest intersection—the wash and swirl of intermingling taillights and headlights, the shhh-shhh peel of car tires through sodden streets, the distinct bleating of occasional irritated horns—and I begin moving in that direction.

Here, the brick-fronted shops and row homes are packed tightly together. They are like teeth crowded into a too-small mouth. The vehicles at the intersection are caught in a clog. I pause on the curb and watch the blinking orange palm on the other side of the street.

“Don’t walk,” I say, surprising myself by the sound of my own voice. And for all I know, they are the first words I have ever spoken. I know what the sign across the street means. I know, too, that if I disobey the sign I will be run over. And beyond all that, I am aware I require air to breathe and food to sustain myself—I know, in other words, all the basic things one needs to know to survive.

Yet I know nothing about myself.

Nothing that defines me and designates a place for me in the universe.

The persistent throbbing at the back of my head will not relent. This, coupled with the absence of a wallet, prompts me to wonder if I have been mugged and beaten. Robbed and left for dead in some alley somewhere. Lead pipe to the scalp and they gut my wallet like an eel on a fishing pier. It is easy to imagine such a thing. In fact, my imagination is so vivid I wonder if it is imagination at all.

Gently, I touch the back of my head. It causes me to wince.

Cars slide through the intersection as I watch. I squint and see the white license plates flit by in a blur. As one vehicle slows, I see it is a Maryland plate. Another and another. They all appear to be Maryland plates. Maryland after Maryland after Maryland. And beyond all that, I know what Maryland is, am able to define it—that Annapolis is the capital, that I am on the east coast flanking the Atlantic Ocean, that the Baltimore Orioles are the local baseball team and the Baltimore Ravens are the football franchise, and that I will most likely need a key to get into my home, if I even have a home, because people in Baltimore and in cities all across the U.S. lock their doors when they go out and, for all I know, I do not have a key…

I know all this, but I do not know who I am.

Or how I got here.

The traffic lights change and I hurry across the street. A drizzling rain starts to fall and I pull the collar up on my canvas coat. There stands a grimy-looking sandwich shop on the corner, its front window reinforced with a retractable iron gate behind which neon lights welcome me. Iron bars and welcome signs seem an oxymoron. Two black teenagers in matching gray pullovers mull around the shop’s front door. Although they act like they do not see me, they quickly disperse as I approach and go through the front door.

It is a small, cramped little sandwich shop with a few makeshift shelves of canned goods, sodas, soups, and breads at its center, and a glass counter at the far end of the shop behind which an ancient-looking Middle Eastern woman mutters while stapling receipts together. It is the type of shop willed from generation to generation, never changing. Directly above the front door a wall-mounted heater hums and breathes hot breath on the nape of my neck. The tinny, discordant plucks of recorded sitar music seem to emanate, ghostlike, straight through the walls.

I move to the first shelf and touch a bag of Wonder Bread. Overtop the aisle, I examine the bronze-skinned old woman behind the sandwich counter, then peer over my right shoulder. The neon lights in the front window sizzle and pop. Beside the window, a wire-mesh newspaper stand groans under the weight of a stack of papers. To my left, just beside the noisy wall-mounted heater, is a tortoise-shell mirror…and once again I find myself staring at myself. The skeletal appearance of my face—the way my thin skin seems too taut around the bones of my skull—is exaggerated by the convexity of the mirror, and I suddenly have no idea how old I am, or if I am dying of some terminal illness.

That stranger.

This stranger.

I negotiate around the aisle of groceries, forcing my eyes off my hideous reflection. A wall of magazines greets me as I round the last aisle, moving alongside the sandwich counter. I can read all the magazine names and know the ones wrapped in the black cellophane are pornography—I know the workings of the world, in other words—and even, to my own surprise, find I am able to understand some of the Spanish titles among the queue. Do I speak fluent Spanish? Yo hablo espa?ol. Did I grow up in a Spanish home or study it in school? Did I even attended school—undergraduate, graduate, medical school? Am I a brain surgeon or a derelict? I know the cellophane-wrapped magazines are pornography, are Playboy and Penthouse, but I do not know if I am a college graduate.