Passenger(22)

I also read up on the CIA and government spies. Because I could very well be a spy.

I could very well be anyone on the planet.

Because I do not have any identification, I cannot get a library card. So instead I smuggle a number of textbooks out under my coat, and no one is the wiser. These are textbooks I feel may enlighten me on my condition. They have enigmatic titles like Sleep the Mind and I Dream Awake and The Overactive Inactive. I steal a paperback copy of Homer’s The Odyssey as well. Because, in a way, I am on my own odyssey.

Despite the cold, I am sweating through my clothes by the time I walk halfway across the city back to Clarence’s apartment. I have no real desire to help Clarence work today but feel some nexus to real life in my commitment to do so. In the face of manual labor, I may find some self-worth, some personal substance. Ripened fruit to be picked. So I wait on the front stoop until an old pickup truck, leprous with rust and belching black plumes of exhaust, chugs around the side of the building and shudders to a standstill out front. Two bleats on the horn summon me to my feet. Without expression, I climb into the cab and am immediately overwhelmed by the aroma of marijuana and Slim Jims. Clarence, grinning behind the wheel, punches the pickup into gear and pushes the shuddering vehicle through the intersection.

“You look sick,” says Clarence.

“Maybe I am,” I say. “Maybe I’ve got some terminal disease. Maybe I’m dying right now.”

“Man, that’s a downer. You think? No, dog. Have a smoke.”

Clarence passes me a joint. I examine the smoldering twist of white paper and smell the sweet scent of the burning weed before bringing it to my lips. I inhale and erupt in a series of coughs that causes Clarence to chuckle and retrieve the joint from my pinched fingers.

“Maybe you never been high,” says Clarence. “Maybe you even a cop. That’d be something, huh? Old Clarence chillin’ with the police.”

“I’m not the police.”

“How you know?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“Or maybe you the meanest mother around. Maybe you done shit make me turn white. Maybe you the worst kind of white boy. You know what I’m saying? Like, black dudes, they bad, they f*ck you up. But white dudes—I mean, you ever see a black dude choppin’ people up and sticking ’em in the freezer, eating they skin and shit? That Jeffrey Dahmer psycho shit, I’m talking ’bout.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t have it in me.”

“Maybe not now,” says Clarence, “but maybe you did before. Maybe right now you just can’t remember all the horrible f*cking things in your life that made you a people-eating psycho.”

“Jesus, Clarence…”

“Well,” he says, burning through a red light, “it don’t matter now. You can be whoever you want now. You gets to start over. You lucky.”

“I don’t feel lucky.”

“Sure,” says Clarence. “See, I had some opportunities to make something of myself. You know what I’m sayin’? Maybe I’d have a better job now. Maybe I wouldn’t have to move junk from one part of the city to the other. But now that’s what I do. But, see, you get to do it all over, start fresh. Man, that’s something!” He laughs. “Hey,” he says, “you think I can forget all my shit, too? How’d you do it, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seriously,” Clarence says, “you think you’re really a governmental spy?”

“Sure,” I say, watching the row homes shuttle past the window, “why not?”

“Then we best be careful. You dig? Keep a lookout.”

“A lookout for what?”

“For the peoples who might be out there looking to kill you, dog.”

We spend the afternoon loading junk from different porches into the bed of Clarence’s pickup. The porches are all residential and they are scattered throughout the city. Often, there are people outside while we load the truck, and they offer us some coffee and, once, a plastic bag of potatoes. They all seem to know Clarence. Clarence works hard, whistling while he loads the truck, and we are both sweating and sore by the time we arrive at the Charles Street Salvation Depot and Auction Center. It is an eclectic little shop with headless mannequins dressed in sequined harem garb and an old-fashioned bicycle with an oversized front tire in the front window. Clarence winks and pulls the pickup down a brick alley that runs alongside the shop. Someone has sprayed the phrase nigel sweeny lives along the brick in bright orange letters. The pickup truck bucks and sputters and dies. We climb out and begin the arduous task of relocating the junk from the bed of the truck into the store.

Inside, the place is like a schizophrenic’s nightmare—a narrow corridor cluttered with relics of times forgotten, with papier-maché parrots lazily twirling by lengths of catgut tacked to the ceiling tiles, with ceramic cats placed strategically about the floor like landmines, their eye sockets aglitter with emerald jewels. Crossing through the corridor, I pass into the store itself, and I am immediately overcome by the mustiness of the place. I get the feeling I’m breathing in the dust from an Egyptian tomb. An enormous rainbow-colored parachute covers the ceiling, bowing slightly at its center. Bric-a-brac gnomes patrol various shelves. The hide of an alligator or crocodile—I cannot tell which—is splayed and pinned to one wall, directly below the mounted head of a rabbit with antlers. A desk crowded with papers, books, a skateboard, a gold-leaf lamp in the shape of a nude woman, and a coonskin cap is shoved against one wall. Behind it stirs a parchment-faced man in his seventies with great tufts of white hair sprouting like kudzu over his ears and large, roaming blue eyes. A pair of suspenders is draped over his shoulders, but they hang loose, flapping against his ample belly and not affixed to his pants. Much like everything else in the place, those suspenders serve no purpose. Clarence sets down a bookcase he has carried from the bed of the pickup truck and introduces the proprietor to me as Wiley Jum.