Passenger(44)

“True as true,” Maxwell practically sings from atop his heap of beer kegs. He’s gotten his cigar to light and he stares now at the glowing red ember, hypnotized. “Thelonious Monk.” Only he pronounces it The Loneliest Monk.

“That’s me,” I say. “Loneliest as they come.”

“Shoot,” says Dougie, and hands me another ten dollars.





*





I wear out my feet again hiking the Green Line. I am becoming familiar not only with the Line itself, but with the people that populate the Line: the strippers and prostitutes along The Block; the men making out with other men in the park of the cultural district; the savage little children in basketball and football jerseys that ebb and flow like the tide from one end of the city to the other. It is one week before Christmas and the sky is terminally gray. As dusk falls, the frosted colored bulbs—the big, chunky ones from the 1970s—come on in many windows. Like a poke of bone through skin, I feel overly exposed. My body shakes, my body trembles. My shirt and jacket have grown way too big for me; the stalk of my thin neck—the neck of this concentration camp survivor—protrudes from the gaping hole in my clothes, the skin hardened and broken and splitting in places from the cold.

There are thrift shops in every nook of this city. I sprinkle my crinkled dollar bills onto a glass counter and purchase a red scarf. The clerk who rings me up seems more than happy to pluck the bills from the counter so he doesn’t have to remove them from my hand and risk touching my reptilian skin.

“It’s the cold,” I tell him. As if I owe him anything. “Wind-chapped.”

Like a sandcastle, I am crumbling apart.

Night rises like seawater behind the black buildings. And like the homeless that populate this city, I crouch against a brick alley wall, pulling my shapeless knees up to a chest that heaves and prickles with cold, and settle my chin in the divot that my knees and chest have come together to create. Azure lights flicker behind sheer-curtained windowpanes. The remaining snow seems to simmer and glow on the pavement. Freezing, I wrap my bald head with one end of my new red scarf and wrap my neck with the other. This reminds me of the man whose Styrofoam cup I kicked over, whose change I stole. I wonder if this is how it started for him, too. If he is this stranger, if he is that stranger. There was one time when he had a family, or at least parents, and he knew them and they knew him. He had memories of similar azure lights and sheer-curtained windows, of green lawns glimpsed through the slats of whitewashed fences. Bronze, sun-kissed leaves of dogwoods under a summer sun.

How did you get here?

What have you done?

Because you have done something to deserve this. You have committed some crime against man, against nature, against God. There is a reason you can only glimpse the festivities through shaded windows, left out in the cold to inhale like scent the sounds of laughter within these homes. And here you are trapped outside your own mind, too, banging palms-up on glass panes to be let in, but no one will let you in. You have forgotten about yourself because the world has forgotten about you. It is unusual and amazing because it is so simple and typical. Your odyssey spans a thousand lifetimes; it has been written about, sung about, painted about, performed—all of it—for centuries.

There is nothing special about you.

Not a goddamn thing.

A laugh simmers just below the surface of my throat. It sends tremors through my cold, wracked body. I think, Eres mi amor, mi amor, and it occurs to me that if I don’t get up now, right now, that I will resign myself to remain here, to die here. And when you die here, you do not fade away or disperse into granules of bone-dust but, rather, you become part of the dirty city itself, part of Charm City, where the benches preach belief while the homeless are hopeless and sleep upon them; where the city that reads is the city that bleeds—bleeds out like an arterial gash—only to drown you not in blood but in nothingness, nothingness, nothingness. Charm City is Harm City, is Alarm City. And the most frightening part of that is how it is not frightening at all. There is a comfort and peacefulness I would welcome. Yet to my astonishment, there is still some fight left in me. Almost a full month on this planet and it has not yet beaten me down.

I push up off the alley wall and stagger like a leper into the street. I am—where? My eyes target a street sign. The irony of it all, I am on Pleasant Street. Just a few blocks from my apartment, hugging my coat tight about my diminishing frame, I urge myself forward.

As I reach the intersection of Franklin and St. Paul, some blessed intuition causes me to slow my pace. I pause and linger behind a shroud of cars parked along the street. Across the intersection on the opposite side of the street, a police car sits outside my apartment complex, the blue and red swirl of its lights reflected in the many windows of the building. Two officers stand talking on the front stoop. In the dark and in their black uniforms, only their matching white faces are clearly visible.

I crouch down behind the cars and watch them through the window of a Pontiac. They have come for me. It was only a matter of time. For whatever reason, they have come for me.

It’s not very late and the streets are still awake. Two women hustle down Franklin Street, the metronome clack-clack-clack of their heels audible even as they turn the corner. At my back, light from apartment windows spills across my shoulders. Then and there I make up my mind to outlast the officers—that I will stay out here all night if they are willing to. And on the heels of such self-discipline, I wonder if this has been my mindset all along—that I am a criminal by nature, adept at waiting out the cops and avoiding capture.