“Where’s your helmet?” Zoe asked when I rolled up to the back door of Chaos.
“Some gulls stole it.” I tucked my bike behind the dumpster hoping the anarchists didn’t think it was up for grabs and shuffled through my backpack for my keys. “Come on, we’ve got a lot of organic Ethiopian Estate Guatemalan Shade Grown Kona Mocha Java to brew. And you look super cute today, by the way,” I said, swiping her glasses off her face and putting them on my nose. “Can I wear these?”
“No,” she said, swiping them back. Not unless you want me get lost when I have to venture out into the jungle to fill the creamers.”
And that’s how we passed the day after I’d received my mission to save the man on the moon and saved a crazy, homeless-red-haired kid’s life with starlight that had streamed through my hands like the dollar bills we put in and took out of the register all day. I didn’t say a word to Zoe, but I could tell she wanted to ask me why I was in such a good mood, but didn’t want to jinx it in case I was manic instead of my usual depressed.
“You want to come over and watch a movie with Cally and me tonight?
“You mean leave my apartment two nights in a row? I don’t know about that. That seems pretty risky.”
“We’re going to make popcorn with Bragg’s and nutritional yeast.”
“Wow, you’re trying to lure me with the taste of fake cheese.”
“Would you prefer partially hydrogenated oil that stays in your body for the rest of your life?"
“Well, if you put it that way—sure, I’ll come over. But only if you give me any leftovers to feed the seagulls.”
“I thought they stole your helmet. What are you feeding them for?"
“They did me a favor. I should have ditched that thing a long time ago.”
“Hey, check this out,” Zoe said. She had a print-out in her hand someone had left on one of our tables. We had a few particularly zealous ones who casually “forgot” their propaganda in the coffeehouse. People left all sorts of crazy “information”--everything from pamphlets promoting the latest jungle superfood berry drink to articles about aliens who looked like lizards that were actually running the world. Supposedly George Bush was one—an alien. This guy saw his real lizard face one time when he smoked DMT. I would have left it around for someone else to read, but later he started claiming Obama was a lizard, too, and I just wasn’t ready to let go of that little ray of hope for the world he’d brought into my dark existence. Obama was not a lizard. There had to be something sacrosanct.
“It says here there’s a solar eclipse today,” Zoe said, pulling herself away from the article to look at the clock on the back wall that drove us crazy because it ticked off the minutes and neither of us could stand the sound of each second of our lives passing by in Chaos, even if it was just a café. Of course, when it was busy, we couldn’t hear it. We weren’t sure if that was a better or worse way to go through the day, which was a bigger waste.
“And it’s happening right now!” She ran to the door, peering out through the pane. “I’m too scared to go outside,” she whispered. “What if something gets me!”
“I don’t see anything,” I mumbled, pretending I had no idea what she was talking about. I wasn’t ready to decide if I was in denial about the morning’s events or just wanted to keep them as a secret to hold tight.
“That’s because you can only see it in Asia where they’re a lot more superstitious than we are.”
“You’re Asian,” I reminded her.
“No, I’m Chinese. We’re a continent to ourselves.”
“Well you have a rabbit foot key chain and cross yourself when a black cat crosses your path.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t let anyone tell me I had to stay indoors all day so my baby wouldn’t get birth defects like they make women do in India. If I was pregnant, that is.”
“You’re talking about a country that burns brides.”
“Look who’s superstitious now.”
“Or prejudiced.”
“Wow, you really don’t have any pride left.”
“I’m too old to be pc. Let me see that.” I grabbed the paper out of her hands and scanned it, looking for some confirmation that I wasn’t crazy, that it was the eclipse’s fault, that the morning’s fantastical scene could be reduced to a scientific phenomenon and I didn’t have to worry about werewolves on top of the whole Michael Jackson thing.
Everyone knew how the brain responded to light. They’d done all sorts of experiments with rats and there was that sick Werner Herzog film based on a true story about a guy that grew up in a basement and had no memory of anything until one day he found himself stumbling down a street. Supposedly the actor that played him wasn’t acting. Herzog had cast a real lunatic in the part and didn’t even care that people condemned him for taking advantage of the poor guy. I’d just read an article about him in The New York Times “catching up” with where he was today. God, these ironic quotations make me sick. I make myself sick for using them in the first place, but how else can I express my disgust at the human race? He played the accordion on the street in Berlin. People stopped to gawk at him because he’d been in a movie. Nobody told him he played badly. You really just couldn’t trust anyone. Especially the sane.
I wasn’t going crazy. I was just feeling the effects of the eclipse on a biochemical level because I was extremely sensitive to variations in light. Of course this implied I was also sensitive to the dark, but I didn’t want to go there. Not today. Not when I ran the risk of giving birth to a deformed baby if I ventured out on the street.
“Did you get to the part where the astrologers predict a rise in communal and regional violence in the days after and a devastating natural disaster?” Zoe asked me.
“Skipped it. I like this part. ‘There’s no need to get too alarmed about the eclipse,’ I read aloud. ‘They are a natural phenomenon,’ the astrologer told the Associated Foreign Press.”
“Who said that?”
“Siva Prasad Tata from the Astro Jyoti website. He straddles the two worlds, you know. Or at least that’s what this article says. I don’t trust the internet. How do you know it’s a reliable source? It’s not like Deep Throat in Watergate. He had a real voice. He wasn’t some disembodied robot of a machine anyone can program to say anything.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Sometimes you treat me like such a baby! I can’t help it if I wasn’t born in the 60s. By the way, it’s also the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. Were you at that, too?”
“I’m not that old!”
“Not even in utero? Maybe you were conceived there?”
“I told you my parents weren’t hippies. They were in the army and a general caught me when my mother squeezed me out of her. That’s why I’m such a strict boss.”
“Talk about straddling dimensions. How many worlds does that guy in India straddle? I bet you’ve got him beat.”
“No shit. Just two.”
“I think both of us are straddling a few more than that. Wanna name some?”
“I’m having a hard enough time with this one.”
“There’s no cream left,” whined one of the customers.
“Back to work, peon,” I commanded Zoe.
“Yes, boss. Very good, boss,” she said in a bad Indian accent, bowing all the way to the ground to kiss my feet. The cream-deprived customer didn’t think it was funny when she got back up and informed him, “You know in India where cows are sacred you wouldn’t be allowed to put cream in your coffee. You could only have soy milk.”
“I should fire you for that,” I reprimanded her, holding in my laughter for the customer’s benefit for about three seconds. “Sorry, sir,” I choked. “We’re all a little crazy today because of an eclipse on the other side of the world. Your coffee’s on the house. Make that free for everyone!” I announced. The customers clamored toward the counter, tossing dollar bills in our tip jar. If I got fired it would be worth it at least, in other dimensions besides this one.
Zoe beamed at me. “You’ll be a dumpster diver yet.”
“What time is dinner again?”
“Dinner? I thought I invited you over for popcorn and a movie.”
“Since I’m not going to fire you and will probably be the one who gets fired myself, you two better feed me more than popcorn.”
“I’ll go see what’s out back in the dumpster.”
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Moonwalker, Chapter 9
Almost as if to spite me, the morning always showed up when it was supposed to. Sometimes the birds sang, sometimes they didn’t. When they stopped I knew the sun was over the horizon and it was safe to roll my bike downstairs and head off to work. It was downhill from Fox Point to Wickenden, and even though there was hardly ever anyone on the street I’d taken to wearing a helmet since I’d moved to the city, something I’d sworn I’d never do, but I figured if I really wanted to change my life I had to start somewhere, and maybe that somewhere had to involve not looking at all cool. As my mom said, “you’re not getting older. I mean younger.” And as my father had been saying since I left home more than twenty years ago, “You know, you really need to get health insurance.” If I got in an accident I’d be screwed. Now that I was officially middle-aged maybe it was time to be prudent, although Zoe said I looked cute when I pulled up at the shop where she was sometimes waiting for me to unlock the door. She was usually late because she knew I’d never tell on her.
“You’re such a nerd,” were her exact words. “I love nerds. They’re so enthusiastic.” She gave me a “We Are Traffic” sticker for my helmet the Critical Mass bikers wore. “You can ride with us, you know,” she said, as if riding a bike was something radical and not something I’d been doing my whole life because I’d never been able to afford a car.
As I said, usually I was the first to arrive at Chaos, but that morning after The Annunciation I had another odd—I won’t say disturbing just yet—encounter.
Providence didn’t have that many homeless people, at least not obvious ones. There weren’t a lot of panhandlers on the street with their legs stretched out covering half the sidewalk, people huddled in ATM foyers who pushed all their possessions around in shopping carts, or who slept over grates to keep warm when it was well below freezing like they did back in the 80s when Reagan was in charge. There were plenty of poor people, but they all seemed to have a place to sleep at night as far as I could tell, which didn’t mean they actually had a home come to think of it. Come to think of it, one of the things that freaked me out about Providence is how few people there were on the streets. People didn’t walk a whole lot in this city. Everybody drove even the shortest distances in their cars.
Which made the guy camped out on the sidewalk who I passed every morning even more noticeable. Usually he was sitting upright, back against the chain-link fence, legs stretched out, sometimes with his hands behind his head as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He seemed to be going to sleep as the sun came up, which meant he stayed up all night too, unless he just slept all the time like I did first semester of my sophomore year at Yale.
I wanted to stop and ask him how he managed to do it. How did he survive the mocking laughter of the moon and the werewolves howling around every corner, but the one time I did engage him in conversation, he kind of scared me. I told you about him before. He was the guy who’d told me that the Asians wandering the streets of Fox Point at dawn carrying five-gallon buckets with fishing poles on their shoulders were Hmong immigrants. “Do you know about the Hmong?” he asked that one time I slowed in front of him. He had a thick, red-blonde beard, so I wasn’t sure the voice I heard actually came from him, even though there was nobody else around because it was hard to see his lips. Besides, he just didn’t look animated enough to put more than two words together. “They’re fighting a Secret War,” he informed me. “They’re with the CIA. Watch out.” I was grateful I had just reached a hill so my bike could accelerate without it seeming like I was trying to ignore him. Now, I just went ahead and ignored him, but I always glided past with a good excuse playing through my mind, like Zoe didn’t have a key and I didn’t want her to break in and get fired because then our tips would suck in case he spoke again.
He always wore a wool hat, which was crazy since it was well over 80 degrees every day that summer, but then again, maybe he really was crazy and took it off in the winter. I didn’t know because I hadn’t lived through a winter in the city yet.
Supposedly most homeless people were mentally ill, so this wouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes he took his shirt off, which was a startling sight since with his clothes off I could see he wasn’t old and decrepit. In fact, he was totally hot. He had the shoulders of a surfer and defined abs that looked liked he’d spent hours paddling on his stomach.
I used to surf. I wondered if I’d ever caught a wave with him out on Block Island and considered stopping, or even turning around, but the momentum was always downhill. Besides, he probably smelled.
I was in no rush the morning after Michael Jackson’s revelation. In fact, I was going to be early for work since I’d been so restless I left the house well before the ten minutes it took me to bike down the hill to the coffeehouse. I’d actually left my apartment while the moon was still in the sky, waiting at the top of the hill to watch it set in the ocean I could barely see past I-95. Narragansett Bay was beyond that, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean where Block Island waited for the butterflies to anoint it with secrets and lost gold. I missed that place, though I swore I’d never go back there. Not at least until I got a real job.
I was in no rush. I didn’t want to get to work too early. The morning, when the sky was shared by sun and moon, if I could stop from shaking, was actually beautiful. Only melodic birds were singing—no crows or cackling blue jays. I decided to get off my bike and walk a little instead of riding as fast as I could to the safety of Chaos.
First I saw what looked like a rattlesnake’s tail. Then a few stars starting small and growing larger as I followed them down the sidewalk. A weed growing up through the cracks was outlined with a big heart, another with a multicolored rose that looked like a cathedral window; yet another with a smiley face that made me smile as well, which rarely happened before my first latte.
The stars seemed to form some sort of wondrous pattern, but I couldn’t figure it out, and they weren’t white, but every blazing color you could imagine, including the ones on the spectrum we can’t see like infrared and ultraviolet.
Did you know black is the combination of every color and white is no color at all? A moth shot toward my face like someone had thrown it, white wings fluttering toward my nose. I batted it away, but could feel it caught in my hair. Its wings beating against my skull sounded like the whirr of a helicopter’s blades coming in for a landing to rescue wounded in a war zone.
The light exploded. I dropped to my knees and shielded my eyes from the shrapnel I knew must be flying around, but nothing hit me but the air from the blades, whirring quietly now, like wings resting on flowers. I opened my eyes to blackness and there they were in every color, a flock of butterflies sprayed across the sidewalk singing look down, look down.
Embarrassment usually would have kicked in at this point. I’ll admit it wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a compromising position on a sidewalk. It happened more than once back in the days I was a drunk. I’d probably been mistaken for a homeless person myself. I even had some actual physical scars to prove it as well as the stories I’d told at AA before I’d dropped out, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t have time to be, because there on the concrete in front of me, outlined in fuchsia chalk, was a human body, except it had wings, which I supposed made it some kind of hybrid, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if there wasn’t an actual body inside the chalk outline, hands folded over its chest like broken wings, the way they do for people in coffins.
It was the hot homeless guy, laid out like a corpse, body taking up the whole sidewalk, feet dangling in the gutter. The water beneath us rushed by without a sound.
One shoe was off. When I got close I could see it was hanging from the laces on the sewer grate. I picked it up before it could fall and put it on the pavement next to him, hoping he’d notice when he woke up.
No such luck. He was either drunk or dead, and from the angle of his neck I would guess dead. No one could sleep like that, although I had seen some drunks pass out in some pretty crazy positions over the years that you’d swear weren’t humanly possible. Damn, I was going to have to do something, I thought, just when I was almost starting to enjoy being apathetic.
Maybe he just passed out because it was really hot. Maybe if I took his hat off he’d snap out of it, which is what I did, grimacing as I touched the greasy wool, plucking it off his head and tossing it over my shoulder where it landed on the grate with his shoe. A couple of seagulls swooped over toward us from the direction of the Bay as if they thought there might be something worth scavenging besides the usual pizza boxes and bottles of malt liquor that nobody cared enough to recycle, even though it wasn’t a trash day and the bins weren’t out on the street. They perched on the chain-link fence and looked down at us.
“What should I do?” I asked them, glad it was so early and there was nobody around. People were going to think I was crazy too if I didn’t watch out. I half expected them to answer, but they didn’t, so I did the most obvious thing and looked down at the poor dead kid (I could see he was really young up close) who looked so vulnerable with his hat off I started to cry. How was I going to tell his mother? Maybe the police would, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The police showing up at your door with that look on their faces you know from TV but can’t believe because it couldn’t really be happening to you because things like this don’t happen in real life, they only happen on television. I was going to have to tell her. I couldn’t do that to her, even though I didn’t know her yet and didn’t want to.
I took another look just to make sure I’d be able to positively identify him in the morgue. I had to be absolutely sure it was him before I told his mother the heartbreaking news. Maybe he was from Florida and I’d have to go back there after all.
He had strawberry blonde hair like Willie Nelson. Strawberry stubble on his cheeks, which was strange because it meant he shaved and I didn’t see when a guy who spent all day and night laying on the sidewalk would shave. Come to think of it, how did he eat? There weren’t any restaurants or stores on this block. People must bring him food, I guessed, and as far as going to the bathroom maybe he jumped over the chain-link fence and went in the abandoned lot. Probably thought he was fertilizing the weeds like a responsible anarchist.
I was aware that all these thoughts were rampaging through my head so I wouldn’t have to touch him. The closer I got, the less it looked like he was still breathing. Maybe he had the ability to hibernate like a bear or a frog at the bottom of a pond, or maybe he was waiting inside an invisible egg like a turtle, or a chrysalis like one of the butterflies he’d sketched in chalk on the sidewalk. I assumed it was him since the trail of stars and butterflies ended with the outline chalked around his body. I didn’t stop to ask how he could have drawn it around himself. When I got really close I saw how it glowed as if etched in stardust or something as precious and rare as the luminescent filaments on butterfly wings. Supposedly if you brushed them even the slightest the butterfly couldn’t fly anymore and died of grief and broken flowers.
I was afraid to cross over it, afraid to even reach over with my hand to put my hand up to his mouth to see if he was still breathing, but what if he was just bound by some magic spell that would break if I did?
After awhile you can only make so many excuses. At some point you’re going to get in trouble for not calling 911, even when it looks like there’s nobody else witnessing the scene. That’s why they always catch so many hit-and-runs. There’s always somebody watching from behind a drawn shade or hunched down in a parked car. I was pretty sure he was dead. I was going to have to be the one who declared an end to this poor kid’s fate. I reached my hand over the glowing line around his body and cupped my palm to his mouth.
Neither warmth or cold came from his lips, which were slack like a dead person’s, or like someone really relaxed like we did in corpse pose at the end of yoga class, though that had never really happened to me, but I knew about it because I was so not relaxed I never lost myself in the bliss of prana and heard every word the instructor said, judging myself of course for not being relaxed enough to get lost in it.
Without thinking about it, I moved my hand down to his heart. I didn’t touch it. I just let my hand hover in the air, drawing the glow of the stars and butterflies and smiley faces and hearts surrounding us into my own heart that I could hear now beating inside my own exhausted body.
I know it’s hard to believe, but the street started to drum.
Inside all of the shuttered houses there were drummers calling and answering each other back and forth across the pavement with ancient rhythms from Africa that told the story of how the world was born and how it would die.
It was a story about the emptiness in the center of the earth, a story of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. It was the story of the black hole inside each one of us, the vacuum where no sound exists that we dance toward, summoned by our beating hearts and the stamp of our feet on the red earth.
My hand was a calabash, a hollowed gourd. I turned it over and it was filled with water whose phosphorescent glow called me to look through its surface to discover what happened on the other side of the black hole. The drums gripped the back of my neck and pushed me facedown until my nose was beneath the surface. I closed my eyes until I heard a voice say open, and when I did I saw the lines on the palm of my hand were some kind of map I could follow if I wanted to really know the earth, but I also saw that if I followed them I would have to leave it too, or at least the safety of the earth I knew where it was only possible to live with death because we ignored it.
The drums wanted me to dance with death. The street was shaking and the rattle of the chain link fences dividing the paved yards shot through my legs like a jolt from an electric chair.
I had to get to work. Zoe had to be there by now and she’d be really dismayed if I did something as stupid as drowning in my own palm. With that thought I actually did inhale a nose-full. My head jerked up, spraying water all over the kid’s red beard. I noticed the seagulls were still perched on the fence above us, looking down with their yellow eyes and red-tipped beaks. They were silent as owls, unusual for such talkative birds.
“Give that back!” A ghost yelled.
His eyes exploded open. He leaped to his feet and slipped around me, running down the street after one of the gulls who was flying away with his hat I’d thrown over my shoulder.
“Ladrón! Get back here! You know that doesn’t belong to you!”
To my amazement, the gull turned around and dropped the hat in the middle of the street, the way they dropped clams on the blacktop on Block Island to crack them open. He picked it up and put it back on his head, reached into his pocket and threw the gull a packet of unopened oyster crackers which it caught and flew away with toward the Bay, the other gulls taking off after it to see if they could steal its score.
“Phew,” he said, “this is my hat from Peru,” jamming it back down on his head until it nearly covered his eyebrows. “They can digest plastic, you know.” He said to me without turning around to face me.
“I know.” I knew a lot about seagulls. I hadn’t lived on Block Island all those years and not learned a trick or two.
“You really should take off that helmet. It doesn’t suit you.” I wanted to say “turn around,” but decided to play it cool--if that’s what he wanted. The “Aren’t you hot with that thing on?” I managed to drop seemed blasé enough to convince him I hadn’t been scared to death when I thought he was dead on the street.
“Do I look hot?” he said, turning around, and because he turned I knew he was aware of the double entendre. A lesser boy would have ruined it by pushing the hat out of his eyes with a line like that, but he didn’t. Did he know I’d checked him out those times I’d passed by on my bike and he’d had his shirt off?
“I have to go to work now.”
“That’s all you can say after you just saved my life?”
“Uh-huh.” It appeared my eloquence and rapier wit had deserted me.
“Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” Disarmed by a seagull. “Just what were you doing passed out like that?” I asked.
“Did I scare you? I’m sorry. I had a rough night keeping the werewolves out of the neighborhood. For some reason they want to get in Fox Point more than anywhere else. I finally got rid of them by telling them there was a big frat party at Providence College, but some didn’t believe me and snuck back. Took a bite out of my leg—look.”
He rolled up his pants and sure enough there were teeth marks on his calf.
“Werewolves? You expect me to believe that?”
“No. I expect you to believe I’m a junky who shot up and passed out on the sidewalk.”
“Did you draw all this?” I pointed to the flowers and stars beginning to glow pink as the sun rose around us.
“That depends on who’s asking.”
“Like the cops?”
“Like girls who have wings but don’t know it.”
He looked at me and for a couple of seconds I swear I saw myself reflected on his black pupils. I was a white star in the center. I didn’t look like the self I knew. I can’t say what I looked like, only that I was present at the birth of something beautiful. Something unequivocally true--something that could never be taken away from me if I could only remember to remember it.
“The werewolves love this block. It’s where Fox Point ends and Wickenden starts. It’s always easier to cross over on the borders.”
“Border of what? It doesn’t look any different to me.”
“That’s because you haven’t learned how to be invisible yet. You could though. You noticed me when nobody else did.”
“That’s because everybody was asleep! This is a weird city, anyway. Nobody’s ever on the street it freaks me out."
“Wow. You really can’t see them, can you? Just me. Incredible.”
“Whatever. I gotta go now.” I turned to mount my bike. “What do you eat?” I couldn’t help asking. He pulled a goldfish net out of his pants and waved it in the air around his head. “Moths. Moonlight. Want some?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“No. You just don’t want to remember.”
“How I lost my soul?” I joked.
“No, how to find it.”
Of course I forgot all of this as soon as the first door opened on the street and a woman wearing gold earrings so big her Chihuahua could have jumped through them hollered out at us. “Hey, I thought I told you to beat it, kid! Go find some other block to stink up!”He laughed and waved at her. “Good morning! I could tell he really meant it. “You think those are real gold?” He asked me. “I hope so.”
“Me too.” The Chihuahua barked as if to say “me three,” but its owner must not have understood we were rooting for her to show us the way to lift us out of this leaden city where the sky was so heavy it was going to collapse soon.
“I mean you!” She barked. The little dog jumped out of her arms and cowered under her robe. “Beat it or I’m calling the police!”
“I guess protecting people from werewolves doesn’t mean anything anymore?” The kid sighed. “What’s a Dragonfly to do, but fly away?” He spread his arms out like wings and rolled his eyes in circles. The pupils fractured like a kaleidoscope into every color of the rainbow and then some. When he stopped they were blue once more and I could breathe again.
“Dragonfly?” I managed to say, dumbstruck by his multifaceted eyes.
“That’s my name. And by the way, you’ve got to change your name as well as get rid of that helmet.”
“’I’ve been told that before. Hey, you don’t think nerds are cool because they’re so enthusiastic do you?”
“Sure. I love nerds.”
“But you’re a surfer!”
“So are you. I’ve seen you out there.” So we had met before. “You really should get going,” he said. “Nerds are never late cuz they’re so enthusiastic to get to work.” I swung my leg over my bike seat and straddled the bar. “Flexible,” he commented. He put his hand on my seat. “Where did we surf together? Narragansett Beach?”
“No.”
“Watch Hill?”
“Definitely not. Too many rich people. I get arrested every time I roll into that town.”
“Black Rock?"
“Never heard of it.” But somehow I knew that that’s where I’d seen him. Offshore
the far side of Block Island, looking back at the faces of the old men etched in the bluffs by wind and rain, wondering if we’d ever go back to land, waiting for the first butterfly to float on the current of air sweeping down from Canada aromatic with the resin of pine trees high in the mountains of Mexico where the fractured light could be made whole again. He waved his net in the air in front of my face. “That wasn’t me. That was my brother.”
“He surfs too?”
“Yeah, but only when it’s sunny.”
“I gave my board away.”
“We can go back there and get it. It’s only a 45 minute drive to the ferry.”
“Not until I get a real job. I promised myself.”
“Well, then you best be on your way. Don’t want to get fired from the one you already have. Won’t look good on your resume.” I slid up on to the seat. He slowly took his hand away. “Careful,” he said, “You don’t want your pant leg to get stuck in your chain and make you crash.” He stooped down and rolled it up. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“We do?” I leaned over as he began to stand back up. He didn’t smell bad at all. In fact he smelled like Sex-Wax, the coconut-scented balm I rubbed on my surfboard so I didn’t slip off. Or used to. I had given my board away when I left the island.
“You don’t think you didn’t save my life for a reason now, do you? Somebody else might have just left me for dead.”
“It could have been anybody.”
“But it wasn’t. It was you, whatever your name is going to be….It’ll come to me soon. Next time I see you.”
“When will that be?” I asked, even though all my danger signs were flashing. I had a feeling he could make me forget the man in the mirror who’d cursed me when he saw the broken glass all over his bar. “What the fuck!” he’d yelled. “Fucking crazy bitch!” Of course I’d just thrown a bottle at his face, covering us both with broken glass.
“Don’t worry, it’s almost over,” he said, his voice smooth as river water streaming over moss-covered stones.
“I’m not so sure about that," I answered, wondering how he knew, because he did know. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t erase those memories.
“The eclipse that’s about to start in a couple of hours. It’s one of the biggest in years. The moon’s going to block the sun for over six minutes.”
“It’s going to be dark in the day?” That was the last thing I needed.
“Only in Asia. Here we’re just going to act crazy without knowing why.”
“Isn’t that how it usually is around here?”
“Whadda you know. I think I’ve figured it out,” he laughed, waving his net around my head like a magic wand.
“What’s that?”
“Your name.”
“Tell me.”
“Can’t. You’ve got to give me something first.” He dropped the net over my head, leaned in close. There was only a thin veil of mesh between our lips that fluttered as our breath drew it back and forth between us. I wanted to kiss him but I knew if I did there’d be no saving me from the werewolves.
“Don’t worry. I’ll still protect you,” he said before pulling away. His eyes sparked and shot across the dawn to join the seagulls gathering to greet the sun at the edge of the Bay. “Catch you later!” he cried, releasing me with a push on my seat that sent me rolling down the street.
“My name!” I yelled over my shoulder.
“What are you going to give me!”
I unstrapped my helmet and threw it over my shoulder. He must have caught it, because I didn’t hear anything crash on the ground.
“You’re such a nerd,” were her exact words. “I love nerds. They’re so enthusiastic.” She gave me a “We Are Traffic” sticker for my helmet the Critical Mass bikers wore. “You can ride with us, you know,” she said, as if riding a bike was something radical and not something I’d been doing my whole life because I’d never been able to afford a car.
As I said, usually I was the first to arrive at Chaos, but that morning after The Annunciation I had another odd—I won’t say disturbing just yet—encounter.
Providence didn’t have that many homeless people, at least not obvious ones. There weren’t a lot of panhandlers on the street with their legs stretched out covering half the sidewalk, people huddled in ATM foyers who pushed all their possessions around in shopping carts, or who slept over grates to keep warm when it was well below freezing like they did back in the 80s when Reagan was in charge. There were plenty of poor people, but they all seemed to have a place to sleep at night as far as I could tell, which didn’t mean they actually had a home come to think of it. Come to think of it, one of the things that freaked me out about Providence is how few people there were on the streets. People didn’t walk a whole lot in this city. Everybody drove even the shortest distances in their cars.
Which made the guy camped out on the sidewalk who I passed every morning even more noticeable. Usually he was sitting upright, back against the chain-link fence, legs stretched out, sometimes with his hands behind his head as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He seemed to be going to sleep as the sun came up, which meant he stayed up all night too, unless he just slept all the time like I did first semester of my sophomore year at Yale.
I wanted to stop and ask him how he managed to do it. How did he survive the mocking laughter of the moon and the werewolves howling around every corner, but the one time I did engage him in conversation, he kind of scared me. I told you about him before. He was the guy who’d told me that the Asians wandering the streets of Fox Point at dawn carrying five-gallon buckets with fishing poles on their shoulders were Hmong immigrants. “Do you know about the Hmong?” he asked that one time I slowed in front of him. He had a thick, red-blonde beard, so I wasn’t sure the voice I heard actually came from him, even though there was nobody else around because it was hard to see his lips. Besides, he just didn’t look animated enough to put more than two words together. “They’re fighting a Secret War,” he informed me. “They’re with the CIA. Watch out.” I was grateful I had just reached a hill so my bike could accelerate without it seeming like I was trying to ignore him. Now, I just went ahead and ignored him, but I always glided past with a good excuse playing through my mind, like Zoe didn’t have a key and I didn’t want her to break in and get fired because then our tips would suck in case he spoke again.
He always wore a wool hat, which was crazy since it was well over 80 degrees every day that summer, but then again, maybe he really was crazy and took it off in the winter. I didn’t know because I hadn’t lived through a winter in the city yet.
Supposedly most homeless people were mentally ill, so this wouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes he took his shirt off, which was a startling sight since with his clothes off I could see he wasn’t old and decrepit. In fact, he was totally hot. He had the shoulders of a surfer and defined abs that looked liked he’d spent hours paddling on his stomach.
I used to surf. I wondered if I’d ever caught a wave with him out on Block Island and considered stopping, or even turning around, but the momentum was always downhill. Besides, he probably smelled.
I was in no rush the morning after Michael Jackson’s revelation. In fact, I was going to be early for work since I’d been so restless I left the house well before the ten minutes it took me to bike down the hill to the coffeehouse. I’d actually left my apartment while the moon was still in the sky, waiting at the top of the hill to watch it set in the ocean I could barely see past I-95. Narragansett Bay was beyond that, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean where Block Island waited for the butterflies to anoint it with secrets and lost gold. I missed that place, though I swore I’d never go back there. Not at least until I got a real job.
I was in no rush. I didn’t want to get to work too early. The morning, when the sky was shared by sun and moon, if I could stop from shaking, was actually beautiful. Only melodic birds were singing—no crows or cackling blue jays. I decided to get off my bike and walk a little instead of riding as fast as I could to the safety of Chaos.
First I saw what looked like a rattlesnake’s tail. Then a few stars starting small and growing larger as I followed them down the sidewalk. A weed growing up through the cracks was outlined with a big heart, another with a multicolored rose that looked like a cathedral window; yet another with a smiley face that made me smile as well, which rarely happened before my first latte.
The stars seemed to form some sort of wondrous pattern, but I couldn’t figure it out, and they weren’t white, but every blazing color you could imagine, including the ones on the spectrum we can’t see like infrared and ultraviolet.
Did you know black is the combination of every color and white is no color at all? A moth shot toward my face like someone had thrown it, white wings fluttering toward my nose. I batted it away, but could feel it caught in my hair. Its wings beating against my skull sounded like the whirr of a helicopter’s blades coming in for a landing to rescue wounded in a war zone.
The light exploded. I dropped to my knees and shielded my eyes from the shrapnel I knew must be flying around, but nothing hit me but the air from the blades, whirring quietly now, like wings resting on flowers. I opened my eyes to blackness and there they were in every color, a flock of butterflies sprayed across the sidewalk singing look down, look down.
Embarrassment usually would have kicked in at this point. I’ll admit it wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a compromising position on a sidewalk. It happened more than once back in the days I was a drunk. I’d probably been mistaken for a homeless person myself. I even had some actual physical scars to prove it as well as the stories I’d told at AA before I’d dropped out, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t have time to be, because there on the concrete in front of me, outlined in fuchsia chalk, was a human body, except it had wings, which I supposed made it some kind of hybrid, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if there wasn’t an actual body inside the chalk outline, hands folded over its chest like broken wings, the way they do for people in coffins.
It was the hot homeless guy, laid out like a corpse, body taking up the whole sidewalk, feet dangling in the gutter. The water beneath us rushed by without a sound.
One shoe was off. When I got close I could see it was hanging from the laces on the sewer grate. I picked it up before it could fall and put it on the pavement next to him, hoping he’d notice when he woke up.
No such luck. He was either drunk or dead, and from the angle of his neck I would guess dead. No one could sleep like that, although I had seen some drunks pass out in some pretty crazy positions over the years that you’d swear weren’t humanly possible. Damn, I was going to have to do something, I thought, just when I was almost starting to enjoy being apathetic.
Maybe he just passed out because it was really hot. Maybe if I took his hat off he’d snap out of it, which is what I did, grimacing as I touched the greasy wool, plucking it off his head and tossing it over my shoulder where it landed on the grate with his shoe. A couple of seagulls swooped over toward us from the direction of the Bay as if they thought there might be something worth scavenging besides the usual pizza boxes and bottles of malt liquor that nobody cared enough to recycle, even though it wasn’t a trash day and the bins weren’t out on the street. They perched on the chain-link fence and looked down at us.
“What should I do?” I asked them, glad it was so early and there was nobody around. People were going to think I was crazy too if I didn’t watch out. I half expected them to answer, but they didn’t, so I did the most obvious thing and looked down at the poor dead kid (I could see he was really young up close) who looked so vulnerable with his hat off I started to cry. How was I going to tell his mother? Maybe the police would, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The police showing up at your door with that look on their faces you know from TV but can’t believe because it couldn’t really be happening to you because things like this don’t happen in real life, they only happen on television. I was going to have to tell her. I couldn’t do that to her, even though I didn’t know her yet and didn’t want to.
I took another look just to make sure I’d be able to positively identify him in the morgue. I had to be absolutely sure it was him before I told his mother the heartbreaking news. Maybe he was from Florida and I’d have to go back there after all.
He had strawberry blonde hair like Willie Nelson. Strawberry stubble on his cheeks, which was strange because it meant he shaved and I didn’t see when a guy who spent all day and night laying on the sidewalk would shave. Come to think of it, how did he eat? There weren’t any restaurants or stores on this block. People must bring him food, I guessed, and as far as going to the bathroom maybe he jumped over the chain-link fence and went in the abandoned lot. Probably thought he was fertilizing the weeds like a responsible anarchist.
I was aware that all these thoughts were rampaging through my head so I wouldn’t have to touch him. The closer I got, the less it looked like he was still breathing. Maybe he had the ability to hibernate like a bear or a frog at the bottom of a pond, or maybe he was waiting inside an invisible egg like a turtle, or a chrysalis like one of the butterflies he’d sketched in chalk on the sidewalk. I assumed it was him since the trail of stars and butterflies ended with the outline chalked around his body. I didn’t stop to ask how he could have drawn it around himself. When I got really close I saw how it glowed as if etched in stardust or something as precious and rare as the luminescent filaments on butterfly wings. Supposedly if you brushed them even the slightest the butterfly couldn’t fly anymore and died of grief and broken flowers.
I was afraid to cross over it, afraid to even reach over with my hand to put my hand up to his mouth to see if he was still breathing, but what if he was just bound by some magic spell that would break if I did?
After awhile you can only make so many excuses. At some point you’re going to get in trouble for not calling 911, even when it looks like there’s nobody else witnessing the scene. That’s why they always catch so many hit-and-runs. There’s always somebody watching from behind a drawn shade or hunched down in a parked car. I was pretty sure he was dead. I was going to have to be the one who declared an end to this poor kid’s fate. I reached my hand over the glowing line around his body and cupped my palm to his mouth.
Neither warmth or cold came from his lips, which were slack like a dead person’s, or like someone really relaxed like we did in corpse pose at the end of yoga class, though that had never really happened to me, but I knew about it because I was so not relaxed I never lost myself in the bliss of prana and heard every word the instructor said, judging myself of course for not being relaxed enough to get lost in it.
Without thinking about it, I moved my hand down to his heart. I didn’t touch it. I just let my hand hover in the air, drawing the glow of the stars and butterflies and smiley faces and hearts surrounding us into my own heart that I could hear now beating inside my own exhausted body.
I know it’s hard to believe, but the street started to drum.
Inside all of the shuttered houses there were drummers calling and answering each other back and forth across the pavement with ancient rhythms from Africa that told the story of how the world was born and how it would die.
It was a story about the emptiness in the center of the earth, a story of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. It was the story of the black hole inside each one of us, the vacuum where no sound exists that we dance toward, summoned by our beating hearts and the stamp of our feet on the red earth.
My hand was a calabash, a hollowed gourd. I turned it over and it was filled with water whose phosphorescent glow called me to look through its surface to discover what happened on the other side of the black hole. The drums gripped the back of my neck and pushed me facedown until my nose was beneath the surface. I closed my eyes until I heard a voice say open, and when I did I saw the lines on the palm of my hand were some kind of map I could follow if I wanted to really know the earth, but I also saw that if I followed them I would have to leave it too, or at least the safety of the earth I knew where it was only possible to live with death because we ignored it.
The drums wanted me to dance with death. The street was shaking and the rattle of the chain link fences dividing the paved yards shot through my legs like a jolt from an electric chair.
I had to get to work. Zoe had to be there by now and she’d be really dismayed if I did something as stupid as drowning in my own palm. With that thought I actually did inhale a nose-full. My head jerked up, spraying water all over the kid’s red beard. I noticed the seagulls were still perched on the fence above us, looking down with their yellow eyes and red-tipped beaks. They were silent as owls, unusual for such talkative birds.
“Give that back!” A ghost yelled.
His eyes exploded open. He leaped to his feet and slipped around me, running down the street after one of the gulls who was flying away with his hat I’d thrown over my shoulder.
“Ladrón! Get back here! You know that doesn’t belong to you!”
To my amazement, the gull turned around and dropped the hat in the middle of the street, the way they dropped clams on the blacktop on Block Island to crack them open. He picked it up and put it back on his head, reached into his pocket and threw the gull a packet of unopened oyster crackers which it caught and flew away with toward the Bay, the other gulls taking off after it to see if they could steal its score.
“Phew,” he said, “this is my hat from Peru,” jamming it back down on his head until it nearly covered his eyebrows. “They can digest plastic, you know.” He said to me without turning around to face me.
“I know.” I knew a lot about seagulls. I hadn’t lived on Block Island all those years and not learned a trick or two.
“You really should take off that helmet. It doesn’t suit you.” I wanted to say “turn around,” but decided to play it cool--if that’s what he wanted. The “Aren’t you hot with that thing on?” I managed to drop seemed blasé enough to convince him I hadn’t been scared to death when I thought he was dead on the street.
“Do I look hot?” he said, turning around, and because he turned I knew he was aware of the double entendre. A lesser boy would have ruined it by pushing the hat out of his eyes with a line like that, but he didn’t. Did he know I’d checked him out those times I’d passed by on my bike and he’d had his shirt off?
“I have to go to work now.”
“That’s all you can say after you just saved my life?”
“Uh-huh.” It appeared my eloquence and rapier wit had deserted me.
“Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” Disarmed by a seagull. “Just what were you doing passed out like that?” I asked.
“Did I scare you? I’m sorry. I had a rough night keeping the werewolves out of the neighborhood. For some reason they want to get in Fox Point more than anywhere else. I finally got rid of them by telling them there was a big frat party at Providence College, but some didn’t believe me and snuck back. Took a bite out of my leg—look.”
He rolled up his pants and sure enough there were teeth marks on his calf.
“Werewolves? You expect me to believe that?”
“No. I expect you to believe I’m a junky who shot up and passed out on the sidewalk.”
“Did you draw all this?” I pointed to the flowers and stars beginning to glow pink as the sun rose around us.
“That depends on who’s asking.”
“Like the cops?”
“Like girls who have wings but don’t know it.”
He looked at me and for a couple of seconds I swear I saw myself reflected on his black pupils. I was a white star in the center. I didn’t look like the self I knew. I can’t say what I looked like, only that I was present at the birth of something beautiful. Something unequivocally true--something that could never be taken away from me if I could only remember to remember it.
“The werewolves love this block. It’s where Fox Point ends and Wickenden starts. It’s always easier to cross over on the borders.”
“Border of what? It doesn’t look any different to me.”
“That’s because you haven’t learned how to be invisible yet. You could though. You noticed me when nobody else did.”
“That’s because everybody was asleep! This is a weird city, anyway. Nobody’s ever on the street it freaks me out."
“Wow. You really can’t see them, can you? Just me. Incredible.”
“Whatever. I gotta go now.” I turned to mount my bike. “What do you eat?” I couldn’t help asking. He pulled a goldfish net out of his pants and waved it in the air around his head. “Moths. Moonlight. Want some?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“No. You just don’t want to remember.”
“How I lost my soul?” I joked.
“No, how to find it.”
Of course I forgot all of this as soon as the first door opened on the street and a woman wearing gold earrings so big her Chihuahua could have jumped through them hollered out at us. “Hey, I thought I told you to beat it, kid! Go find some other block to stink up!”He laughed and waved at her. “Good morning! I could tell he really meant it. “You think those are real gold?” He asked me. “I hope so.”
“Me too.” The Chihuahua barked as if to say “me three,” but its owner must not have understood we were rooting for her to show us the way to lift us out of this leaden city where the sky was so heavy it was going to collapse soon.
“I mean you!” She barked. The little dog jumped out of her arms and cowered under her robe. “Beat it or I’m calling the police!”
“I guess protecting people from werewolves doesn’t mean anything anymore?” The kid sighed. “What’s a Dragonfly to do, but fly away?” He spread his arms out like wings and rolled his eyes in circles. The pupils fractured like a kaleidoscope into every color of the rainbow and then some. When he stopped they were blue once more and I could breathe again.
“Dragonfly?” I managed to say, dumbstruck by his multifaceted eyes.
“That’s my name. And by the way, you’ve got to change your name as well as get rid of that helmet.”
“’I’ve been told that before. Hey, you don’t think nerds are cool because they’re so enthusiastic do you?”
“Sure. I love nerds.”
“But you’re a surfer!”
“So are you. I’ve seen you out there.” So we had met before. “You really should get going,” he said. “Nerds are never late cuz they’re so enthusiastic to get to work.” I swung my leg over my bike seat and straddled the bar. “Flexible,” he commented. He put his hand on my seat. “Where did we surf together? Narragansett Beach?”
“No.”
“Watch Hill?”
“Definitely not. Too many rich people. I get arrested every time I roll into that town.”
“Black Rock?"
“Never heard of it.” But somehow I knew that that’s where I’d seen him. Offshore
the far side of Block Island, looking back at the faces of the old men etched in the bluffs by wind and rain, wondering if we’d ever go back to land, waiting for the first butterfly to float on the current of air sweeping down from Canada aromatic with the resin of pine trees high in the mountains of Mexico where the fractured light could be made whole again. He waved his net in the air in front of my face. “That wasn’t me. That was my brother.”
“He surfs too?”
“Yeah, but only when it’s sunny.”
“I gave my board away.”
“We can go back there and get it. It’s only a 45 minute drive to the ferry.”
“Not until I get a real job. I promised myself.”
“Well, then you best be on your way. Don’t want to get fired from the one you already have. Won’t look good on your resume.” I slid up on to the seat. He slowly took his hand away. “Careful,” he said, “You don’t want your pant leg to get stuck in your chain and make you crash.” He stooped down and rolled it up. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“We do?” I leaned over as he began to stand back up. He didn’t smell bad at all. In fact he smelled like Sex-Wax, the coconut-scented balm I rubbed on my surfboard so I didn’t slip off. Or used to. I had given my board away when I left the island.
“You don’t think you didn’t save my life for a reason now, do you? Somebody else might have just left me for dead.”
“It could have been anybody.”
“But it wasn’t. It was you, whatever your name is going to be….It’ll come to me soon. Next time I see you.”
“When will that be?” I asked, even though all my danger signs were flashing. I had a feeling he could make me forget the man in the mirror who’d cursed me when he saw the broken glass all over his bar. “What the fuck!” he’d yelled. “Fucking crazy bitch!” Of course I’d just thrown a bottle at his face, covering us both with broken glass.
“Don’t worry, it’s almost over,” he said, his voice smooth as river water streaming over moss-covered stones.
“I’m not so sure about that," I answered, wondering how he knew, because he did know. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t erase those memories.
“The eclipse that’s about to start in a couple of hours. It’s one of the biggest in years. The moon’s going to block the sun for over six minutes.”
“It’s going to be dark in the day?” That was the last thing I needed.
“Only in Asia. Here we’re just going to act crazy without knowing why.”
“Isn’t that how it usually is around here?”
“Whadda you know. I think I’ve figured it out,” he laughed, waving his net around my head like a magic wand.
“What’s that?”
“Your name.”
“Tell me.”
“Can’t. You’ve got to give me something first.” He dropped the net over my head, leaned in close. There was only a thin veil of mesh between our lips that fluttered as our breath drew it back and forth between us. I wanted to kiss him but I knew if I did there’d be no saving me from the werewolves.
“Don’t worry. I’ll still protect you,” he said before pulling away. His eyes sparked and shot across the dawn to join the seagulls gathering to greet the sun at the edge of the Bay. “Catch you later!” he cried, releasing me with a push on my seat that sent me rolling down the street.
“My name!” I yelled over my shoulder.
“What are you going to give me!”
I unstrapped my helmet and threw it over my shoulder. He must have caught it, because I didn’t hear anything crash on the ground.
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