Passenger (3 page)

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.

The men at the tables cast glances at me only briefly, and with disinterest, before turning back to their boisterous conversations, their heavily callused hands gripping beer bottles in a headlock.  There is a woman among them, I notice; she acts as a transient, rotating between two tables to deliver messages, this broad-smiling, painted-lipped carrier pigeon.  She is middle-aged, with coiffed wine-colored hair and a sturdy figure, except for the too-wide hips.  She wears a low-cut halter that displays ample cleavage, and, in watching the woman, I am profoundly assured of my heterosexuality.

I go directly to the bar.  From my pocket, I withdraw the $2.18 I took from the table by the apartment door, and set the money in front of me on the bar.  I do this, I realize, because I hope I have counted wrong—that there will somehow magically appear to be more money than I originally thought.  But it is just the $2.18; so when the well-groomed male bartender materializes in front of me, I only tap the bills with my middle finger.

“It’s all I have,” I tell him.  My tone is nearly apologetic.

The bartender is friendly enough.  “No problem.”  He reaches for the nearest draft spigot with one hand while simultaneously producing a pint glass from beneath the bar with the other.  He fills the glass, cuts off the thick head, and fills it again.

When the beer is set in front of me, I do not immediately touch the glass.  I am looking around the place, taking it all in—the low, dark ceiling festooned with looping strings of Christmas lights, the dormant jukebox, the excavated Mayan piano.  The people.  All of them.  Again, I watch the woman weave between the tables.  I am reminded of the black cat in the alley, winding in and out of the trashcans.  The woman’s breasts pull taut the fabric of her low-cut halter.  And maybe her hips aren’t that big after all…

I sip the beer and feel it go all the way down.  There is almost an audible splash as it spills into my empty stomach.  When was the last time I ate?  Maybe that’s what the throbbing at the back of my head is: a hunger headache.

There are bowls of complementary peanuts and pretzels staggered at intervals down the length of the bar.  They look like traps, the way they are placed.  I reach for the nearest bowl and, hooking my index finger around its edge, drag it toward me.  Moments later, the bowl contains nothing but a fine white powder punctuated by granules of salt, reminding me of beach sand.

Reminding me…

Do I frequent the beach?  Do I have a house there?  Maybe I am rich.  Or poor.  Am I a vagrant, a beach bum?  A lifeguard?  A champion swimmer?

And it occurs to me that I can be whatever the hell I want.  Because I am starting over.  Because I am brand new.

“Today is my birthday,” I say.  The words are out of my mouth before I realize I have spoken them.  And while the bartender only smirks and nods and does not look up from his bartender work, the busty woman with the wide hips that aren’t too wide suddenly appears beside me.  She is smiling with very red lips and startlingly bright teeth.  Up close, she is a bit older than I originally thought, but there is something alluring about her.  Or, rather, the ghost of her allure is still visible just below the surface.

“Well,” she says, “happy birthday, hon.”

“Thank you.”

“What’s your name?”  She proffers a slender hand with manicured fingernails the color of a hemorrhage.  Silver bracelets clatter and slide up her arm.  “I’m Patrice.”

“Hi, Patrice.”  I shake her hand.  “I don’t know my name.”

“That’s sad.  Someone should name you.”

“Maybe someone should.”

“You live around here?”  Her eyes narrow, but her voice remains playful.  “Because you don’t look familiar.”

“I’ve got a place on St. Paul.”

“Because I know most everyone around here, hon.”

I shrug.  “I might be brand new.”

“Are you in the military?”

“No,” I say.  “Why?”

She reaches out and runs one palm along the top of my head.  There is nothing sensual about it.  It is abrupt and awkward.  “Your hair,” she says.  “Short.”

“No,” I say.  “I’m not in the military.  At least, I don’t think so.”

“So, birthday boy, how old are you today?”

“One day old,” I say.  And, after a moment, we both laugh.

“Pitcher up,” the bartender says, setting down a pitcher of light-colored beer and still not looking up.  “You always fall for the mysterious ones, huh, Patty?”

“Bite your tongue,” Patrice says, and quickly scoops up the pitcher.  It occurs to me that Patrice works here.  She winks at me as she carries the pitcher to one of the tables, and calls after me, “I’ll have to find you a name before you leave, birthday boy.”

I stalk a second bowl of peanuts and pretzels from farther down the bar.  They are free, sure, but I desire to maintain some discretion.

The military.  Sure.  I’m AWOL, my ship having docked at the Port of Baltimore.  I’m stumbling around the streets with a head injury, my body wracked with fever, my memory shut down on the atrocities I witnessed overseas.  A coping technique.  So I take a bus into the city and wake up brand new.

Absent without leave.

Sure.

“On the house,” says the bartender, setting down a fresh pint.  “Happy birthday, mystery man.”

Halfway through the second beer, and with my near empty stomach, I am beginning to feel lightheaded from the alcohol.  Patrice continues to saddle up beside me with each return trip to the bar.  I can smell the flowery scent of her perfume dulled by the stronger, acrid stink of cigarettes on her clothes and breath.  She tries hard to look bored, as if she wants to impress upon me that she is overqualified for this job, and she drums her lacquered red nails on the mahogany every once in a while.  For the rest of her shift, our communication is relegated to cursory smiles and sidelong glances.

At one point, I rise and locate the bathroom.  The men’s room is the door to the right of the dormant jukebox.  It is a tight squeeze, a claustrophobic little room, with just enough space for the toilet and the sink.  There is no mirror over the sink—just a fist-sized hole in the plaster above the sink where the mirror should be—and I become mesmerized while washing my hands at the sink.

Because something has occurred to me.

Because, while washing my hands, I smear the address off my palm, and in staring at the smear, I realize what it must mean to wake up on a bus with your home address written on the palm of your hand.

It means that I had anticipated the forgetting.  It means I knew I would not remember…

I am quick to leave the bathroom, running my wet hands down the length of my jeans.  This sudden realization excites me, but worries me, too.  I stand, uncertain of what to do next, just outside the men’s room, my eyes roving over the tiny tavern and wincing at the constellation of Christmas lights above my head.

Okay—but now what?

The constricting sense of helplessness grows stronger.  Again, I want to collapse in a heap to the floor, as I did on the stairwell of my apartment—and is it even my apartment?—and not move, not think, not breathe.  It takes all my strength to fight off that urge.  I remain standing, feeling the eyes of everyone slowly turn on me, feeling their pervading stares, and it takes everything in me just to fend off my desire to disappear.

Suddenly, I am standing out.  I am noticed.  I am called out.  I want to collapse, to disappear, to vanish like a ghost.

But I cannot.

So, instead, I play the piano.

The overpowering urge comes from turning my head and actually looking down at the dusty black and white keys.  This is not a fancy piano—the keys are muted, lackluster plastic instead of ivory—and some of the high keys, like gaps in a smile, are missing, exposing the green felt beneath.  I look at these keys and am suddenly sure of myself.  There is a four-legged bench wedged beneath the keyboard.  Retrieving it, pulling it out and thudding it along the tavern floor, I sit and stare momentarily down at the keyboard.  At my back, I can still feel the eyes of the tavern on me.  For one split second, I pray for a brain embolism or for an airplane to come crashing through the roof, annihilating them all.  Then, without another thought, I begin to play.

I do not know how I know the way.  My mind is absent of memories concerning lessons or concerts or having ever played a piano before in my life.  Yet I play, and for whatever reason, my hands know how to position themselves, my fingers know where to fall.

I begin with the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 14, in C-sharp minor—the haunting
Moonlight Sonata.
  As I play, I rock gently back and forth, back and forth, and at one point—just as I transition from the dark, moody C-sharp familiarity of the piece to the scherzo in D-flat major—I close my eyes.  I know this tune—it is personal to me, familiar—yet, at the same time, I have absolutely no memory of it.  I may have composed it straight from thought or straight from the air, if not for my knowledge of all things beyond myself—of Beethoven’s compositions and the rest of the tangible world.

Many keys do not play well.  Also, the piano is out of tune, creating an overall sour tonality to the composition.  Twice, I attempt to strike a key that does not exist, the ring finger of my right hand grazing the smooth bit of exposed green felt.

But I play.

It is wonderful.

When I finish, my eyes still closed, I am aware of a simmering silence.  For all I know, the Samjetta’s patrons have all evacuated to the street.  There exists not the clinking of beer bottles, the rough, labored breathing, the creaking of wooden chairs.  There exists only silence.  And the throbbing at the back of my head.

Then they applaud, and I open my eyes.  Turn my head.  Find them there in the gloom, ridiculous beneath a sky of Christmas lights, these burly lumberjack men and grimy, burlap-faced dockworkers.  They clap and some whistle and Patrice the waitress stands beaming while propped against the lip of the bar.  Even the bartender looks mildly surprised.

“Oh, hon!” Patrice croons, suddenly clapping along with the patrons, her silver bracelets jangling.  “That was brilliant!”