Passenger(34)

Must make you feel free.

And the world shakes me loose.





FOURTEEN





A bit of black pavement carved through a sun-speckled, wooded landscape. It is less a dream and more like a single bit of film stock played on a loop, the same sequence over and over again, played and replayed, dulling as it goes. Bright colors dirty to sepia bronze. Such a nondescript, forested passageway could be anyplace in the world—Borneo, Mesa Verde, the Isles of Quios…



*





When I awake, I am splayed out in the darkened hallway outside my apartment, my head grinding like a jackhammer. I open my eyes and my vision threatens to shatter like glass. The pain in my head is tremendous. I touch my scalp with a set of fingers; they come away sticky with blood. When I sit up, the pain worsens. My stomach wants to cramp and fold in on itself.

Yet despite all this, I am still alive.

Barry the traveling ceramic tile salesman has spared my life.

I spend the next twenty-four hours licking my wounds and refusing to leave the sanctity of my apartment. In the streets, the snow melts to slush, black and gritty. The sky adopts a Creamsicle hue and there are many well-defined clouds of blended pastels hovering above the city.

There is a bloody gash at my left temple and a swollen bruise in the center of my forehead. I clean the wound as best I can and sit up in bed all afternoon, listening to the traffic outside while skimming The Odyssey. Out in the hallway, every creaking floorboard rouses in me a fear that Barry the ceramic tile salesman has returned, this time determined to drive a bullet through my shaven head.

Because the drug store around the corner delivers, I cultivate a stockpile of aspirin. The headache fights the good fight, though, and by midnight I wave the white flag.

This cannot go on much longer.

And yet, the following day, I keep going. It takes me a good twenty minutes to walk to the next bus stop. And close to a half hour to walk to the one after that. I have drawn a rough sketch of the Green Line and have practically memorized the route. However, as I approach each stop, my anxiety grows more palpable. None of this refreshes my memory. The goddamn teenage fortune-teller is a fraud. I meander around Mount Vernon, watching as contract workers drape the Washington Monument in Christmas lights.

The next day I nearly complete the circuit—all but the last two stops. Or, I suppose, the first two, depending on which direction you are headed. It is still daylight by the time I decide to quit, but I am already worried that I will arrive at these final two stops and nothing will change. That I will still be ignorant to my own life, blind to my past.

Clarence Wilcox makes a surprise visit to my apartment one afternoon. He’s flashing his toothy smile and tugging on the scruff of beard when I answer the door. Wordlessly, he jabs something small and plastic at my chest.

“Hey,” I say. It is my picture on a Maryland driver’s license. My address is 1400 St. Paul Street and my name is Moe Zart.

“I used the picture Lady Madonna took of you at the party,” he says. “Dig it—you’re a real person again, man.”

“You made this?”

“Shit,” says Clarence, still grinning. “I’m a talented mother, didn’t you know?”

“Moe Zart,” I say. “I sound Jewish.”

“Maybe you are.” He frowns. “The hell happened to your head?”

“Forget it.”

Clarence says, “Let’s go for a ride.”

He whisks me away in his red pickup truck with the terrible rust spots and the unsmiling front grille. We trek across the city to Fell’s Point as the sky turns a sickly yellow color. Out over the water, the distant clouds look like smeared blotches of iodine. The air smells of rain.

The pickup strikes a cobblestone street and we trundle along as if in a mining cart miles beneath the earth. The steel-shined harbor rises up to one side, oil-spotted against the bulwark, and I can see water taxis sliding in and out of port. Flapping Irish flags align the street, all the way down to the water’s edge where construction barges seem to huddle together as if for warmth.

Clarence parks the pickup along Thames Street and we empty out onto the cobblestones. Across the street runs a wall of black wood bars and restaurants. This section of the city does not rely on neon-heavy lights in the windows; they are more subtle, with nylon flags and candelabras outside the doors, above which hang hand-carved signs and epigrams of welcome.

I follow Clarence into a seedy little pub called The Neighborhood. Its walls look about ready to surrender and the floor is warped and bulges in places. The acoustic ceiling tiles are gangrenous with the brown Alaska-shaped splotches of water damage and there is a raised bandstand that looks out on a smattering of circular tables; it seems to sag beneath the weight of a moldy upright piano and a drum kit whose cymbals give off no shine.

Clarence introduces me to the proprietor. His name is Timmy Donlon, a tall Irish fellow with a ruddy complexion and squinty, oil-spot eyes. He pumps my hand vigorously but seems bored with the introduction. At the bar, he serves Clarence and me a couple pints of Guinness and smokes cigarette after cigarette like he’s getting paid to do so. “Look here, mate,” Timmy Donlon says as he slams a stack of Polaroid pictures on the bar top. “This was just last week,” he informs me as I pick up the stack of photographs. “Just so you know what you’re getting into.”