EVERYONE OUT OF THE POOL
THE CLOSEST THING TO TUMBLEWEED IN NEW YORK CITY ARE THE PEOPLE.
I say this out loud to the woman next to me because I think she is from Arizona.
Whenever it starts to rain I think end of the world. Whenever the telephone rings or someone calls me by name I think Leonidas at Thermopylae or Custer at Little Big Horn.
What this speaks to I try not to think about.
Don’t try to trick me into being happy, is what the woman says back.
We are in a museum when we say this to each other. This particular room in the museum has windows for walls and you can see the weather from anywhere inside it.
This is not just me talking, I say. I pause a moment and then keep talking about the weather until I hear myself say, One bolt of lightning and it’s everyone out of the pool time.
I think I’ve known this woman for years. I think we met in college and have tried since then to get away from each other. The problem is one or the other of us has nothing better to do at any given time. Then I think we came to New York two months ago to help the poor or feed the poor, something with the poor.
The trouble with me is I think too much and don’t know anything.
I don’t know why this is, though I suspect it’s my own fault.
Outside the rain is coming down like it’s angry with someone. Like someone had made fun of the rain’s mother.
We are sitting on a bench surrounded by twenty giant speakers arranged in an oval. From the speakers a children’s choir sings in a foreign language that might be Latin. When you walk from speaker to speaker you hear a different voice, which is why it’s in the museum, I think. When you are outside the oval you can’t distinguish one voice from the next. To me, the voices all sound the same, even the different ones.
The woman next to me is looking out the window, watching the passersby tramp through gaping puddles, watching the rain like she’s never seen it fall down before.
This is when I say something about the homeless, something that sounds like at least they’ll have a bath today. Why I say this is because I don’t know how she’ll react and I’m curious.
Between the choirboys and rainfall the woman can’t hear me, though, and from the look on her face I can tell she’s making her mind up about something, something that might include leaving me here on this bench to go play in the rain, eventually finding her way west to feed the poor of Tempe or Phoenix or wherever it is she’s from and that maybe if I’m lucky she’ll call when she gets there.
SCAR
THIS DEBORAH TALKS OUT OF THE LEFT SIDE OF HER MOUTH, as if she’s trying to keep what she says secret from her own right ear. She wears three or four earrings in each one. Two hoops of equal size and little silver balls that trail up her lobes like tracks.
I see the tracheotomy scar immediately. She leaves the top two buttons of her blouse undone like she’s saying, Here I am, beaten and scarred, take it or leave it.
I’ve decided not to say anything, pretending either not to notice or care. Whichever she decides.
She talks a lot out of the left side of her mouth, which is good. The little I say I’m tired of hearing myself say it. And this Deborah doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, which is even better.
Just as we are pulling up to a red light she says like she is accusing me of something, You’re not wearing the seat belt. I answer, I only put it on when it rains. Out of the left side of her mouth comes, You’ve never gone through the windshield.
There are only a few cars on this road to wherever it is we’re going. Some exotic barbeque place well off the beaten nowhere. She spends most of the ride going through her purse like she is looking for something. She pretends to be preoccupied most of the time, I think. Otherwise she is preoccupied most of the time and I’m making her out to be clever in a way she isn’t. I turn the radio on and scan the stations, pretending that finding a good song is important to me. She stops going through her purse without having pulled anything out of it.
I don’t know whether or not she is expecting me to defend myself, my position on car safety. I keep going up and down the dial, pausing to hear the end of a Willie Nelson song and most of It’s All Right by the Impressions.
Because I don’t have a lot to say people tell me I’m a good listener. But I don’t think that’s right, either.
I haven’t gone through a windshield, never even come close. I’ve never been injured or seen anyone seriously injured. I was at a party once as a teenager where someone was killed in a backyard brawl but it happened after I had left. He got his shoulder or his neck slashed with a beer bottle and bled to death.
All during dinner I try to imagine this Deborah going through the windshield, the mechanics of it. I try to see her head making contact with the glass and shattering it. I try to see her body careening off the hood and landing on the concrete.
The thing is she doesn’t look like someone who’d gone through a windshield. If anything she looks like someone who’d been robbed at gun-point, maybe assaulted. (One of those that takes a self-defense class and carries a gun afterwards.) Nothing where she was hanging onto a thread, hooked up to machines with one foot in the morgue. I’m guessing about that part, but it stands to reason.
She wears a lot of make-up but not enough to cover up any facial scars. She flaunts the one on her neck like it’s a piece of jewelry.