Passenger(7)

I have things broken in my head.

I am hitting foul ball after foul ball.

Still, I shower. My body is too thin—washing my stomach is like running my hands along a picket fence—and my hips look painfully narrow. My penis has retreated into the sodden nest of black pubic hair. Thighs the color of herringbone bow toward two clunky red knees. Strangely, I am more naked than naked, crablike in a subhuman carapace, molted and flayed. Yet the water stays warm and feels good on my flesh. There is a comfort under the spray, and while it is a homelike comfort, there is nothing familiar in this. I cannot remember this shower. I cannot remember the bowing white thighs and clunky red knees.

There is a scar. I discover it along the apex of my left shin, perhaps six inches long, maybe longer, and very faint. But undeniably visible. The skin is puckered, pinched, and somewhat shiny. Mineralized. What does that mean? What does any of it mean? I run two fingers down its length, feeling the smoothness of the skin…and feeling the soreness beneath. It is impossible to tell if this is an old injury or a new one.

Yes—at least six inches. How did this happen?

Climbing out of the shower, I towel off in slow motion before the fogged-up mirror over the porcelain sink. I dry my left leg off and prop my left foot on the closed toilet lid. Again, I examine the six-inch scar. Old or new? There is something fruitlike about the pink, dimpled flesh. No leg hair grows on the ruined flesh. It is like looking at colorless rubber stretched too tight.

Dry and naked, maintaining my crustacean status, I search the apartment for a pen, a marker—anything with which I can write. I shuttle sideways, feet arched, this crab. Finally, after several minutes of hunting around, I locate a Bic ballpoint in one of the kitchen drawers. With concentration, I trace over the address on my palm, all but faded to nonexistence after the shower.

Because I might wake up tomorrow not knowing where I am.

Because I might wake up tomorrow on a bus.

In bed, I try to sleep. I keep my arms down at my sides and stare at the ceiling, corpselike, while listening to the light traffic on St. Paul. My exhaustion is palpable but my mind, being empty, fights to remain active, struggles to suck everything in.

And think, Do I call a doctor?

And think, Do I have a job?

I cannot sleep. I know sleep will not come. After what I think is about an hour, I rise and tug my clothes back on.

Funny thing. You cannot dream when you have no memories.





FOUR





The city has grown cold in the night. Yet even at this hour, and in the cold, there are parts of the city that are still alive. There are cars sliding through the misty dark and people shuffling in and out of bars farther down the avenue. The clang of a trolley bell. Black avenues lie unrealized, like dreams long since surrendered by a march of once-strong men. Because this is Baltimore, there are the homeless, obscured in darkness like rats in hiding. They snicker and cough their phlegm-filled coughs, the sound of spilling change like a splash falling from up high. There are the eccentrics, too, and they all seem to materialize after the daylight hours: the roaming packs of thugs, switchbladed and steely-eyed; the solitary drunkard with the stare that lingers uncomfortably long, one eye milk-soured and astray; the hollering schizophrenic dressed in a suit of bubble-wrap and electrical tape. Neon sings, popping and sizzling, reflected in puddles of runoff and sewage and urine and oil.

Hands in pockets, head forward and facing down, I walk down St. Paul, my brain still throbbing. I am seeing the tub of aspirin in my mind’s eye—the way the Middle Eastern woman quickly snatched it from the countertop and stowed it away before chasing me out of the sandwich shop. With some discontent, I wonder if I should have shoplifted the aspirin. When I close my eyes, I see nothing but the memory of my reflection in the tortoise-shaped mirror mounted beside the sandwich shop’s heater. Unburdened by a full catalogue of memories, the ones I have, these recent ones, are bright sparks, lighted flashes in a theater. Nothing in this world is clearer; everything is bigger. Larger than life. Fingers like Fallopian tubes and feet like the slides of wet tide. There is a gloomy, melancholic saturation in the memory of the most recent things, of waking up on a bus a complete stranger to myself, and then everything beyond that: a black painted wall. There could be no trespassing signs, could be yellow police tape. It doesn’t matter. Nor would it have mattered if I’d taken the aspirin. Perhaps shoplifting is not foreign to me. Perhaps I have carved a niche for myself as a thief, a criminal. This could be my lifestyle. I could have been this man all my life.

Wandering a few blocks farther, I hear raucous music and deep-bellied laughter rising up out of the night. There is a neon sign clinging to a whitewashed tavern at the corner of an otherwise ghostly intersection. The place is called The Samjetta. Outside it looks gritty, a blemish on the street corner, something dirty and derelict resolutely discarded. There are trashcans along one wall of the squat little building, blocking an alley, and the surreptitious shape of a black cat weaves between them. I approach. The Samjetta’s front door stands wide open. The interior is dark and smoky. Shapes shift phantomlike beyond the yawning archway.

I could be a phantom among phantoms.

The Samjetta is dimly lit, slouching, tired looking. The place has little appeal, like a phlegm-filled cough made tangible. It all but begs to be set on fire and razed to rubble. The air is a caustic sheath of cigarette smoke, blue-tinged in the twinkle of white Christmas lights that droop from exposed rafters. The walls are wood-paneled and adorned with large framed movie posters from the 1960s. Movies about giant leeches and vampire lesbians from outer space and the like. There are a few circular tables scattered about the warped, sawdust-laden floor, around which hunker the broad-shouldered silhouettes of swarthy men with dark eyes and severe, protruding features. Behind the men and running the length of the far wall is a lacquered mahogany bar. A well-groomed male bartender, nicely dressed and perfect-featured, shuffles back and forth before a wall of spotlighted liquor bottles that seem to rise up on glowing pedestals like gold medal winners. At the end of the bar, pressed up against the wall between two unmarked doors, a dark, lifeless jukebox crouches like something injured and hiding. In one corner, I spy an upright piano covered in a film of dust so thick, it may have been recently excavated from a Mayan temple.