Passenger (4 page)

“Do another,” a man at one table shouts.

“Do Hank Williams,” suggests another.

I roll through an up-tempo version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and the crowd sings along, getting most of the words wrong.  I do not know how I know the song, but I do.  They coax me into playing “Crazy Arms” and a surprisingly passable rendition of “Great Balls of Fire,” where I even manage a glissando with my foot, and it leaves the place howling.  The men have relocated to the piano; they stand with their beer bellies and barrel chests up against the piano, gripping their beers by the neck in enormous hands, their severe faces softened by their drunken elation.

They buy me beer, too.  Lots of beer.  A tray of tequila shots makes its way around, too, but I concern myself with a choppy version of “Free Bird,” by unanimous request, which brings down the house.

Once I finish—once my back is sore from the patting and clapping and friendly punches and my fingers are swelling with blisters—I am sweating within my canvas coat.  I shrug the coat off and happen to glance at the palm of my left hand.  A number of black, smeary streaks intersect at the center of my palm.

“That was fantastic, hon,” Patrice says, pulling up a stool beside the piano bench.  She sits higher than me and has to look down to meet my eyes.  “Where’d you learn to play like that?”

I say I do not know.

“Because you’re wonderful.”

“Thanks.”

“Your hands—your fingers—move so fast.”  She winks at me.  It makes her look younger.  “You’re full of secrets, aren’t you, Mozart?”

“I guess you’ve found me a name.”

“I guess I have.”  She smiles prettily.  “But come on,” she continues, the tone of her voice dropping.  We are conspirators now.  “What’s your
real
name?”

I roll my shoulders.  “I don’t know.  Honestly.”

Her eyes linger on me, examining me.  There are faint creases around their corners and her lashes are long and thick, crusted black with mascara.  But she has pretty eyes and I am content to stare at them for as long as she will let me.

Then she says, “Tease.”  She says, “You sneaky tease.”  Says, “Mozart the mystery man.  What a tease.”

Eventually the place clears out.  I have lost all track of time and I haven’t moved from the piano bench, though I no longer play.  With the last of the customers out the door, Patrice shuts and bolts the door and saunters over to the staggered assortment of tables.  She wipes the spilled beer and dried gunk from the tabletops and carries on a brief conversation with the bartender, who is closing out the cash register.

The house lights come on, revealing the true ugliness of the place.  I wince.

“Hey,” the bartender says, ambling over to me while pulling on a leather jacket.  “You wanna come back on Monday, man?  Like, for a gig?”

“A gig?”

“Yeah.  Like, I’ll pay you to play for a few hours.  You know?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t wanna bend your arm or nothing, man…”

“No,” I say, “I’ll come back.”  Because I don’t even know if I have a job.  “What time?”

“Be here for five,” says the bartender.  “Happy hour.”

“All right.  Thanks.”

“Yeah.  Sounded good, man.  Right on.”

And he slips out a door that seems to spontaneously appear behind the bar.

“Impressive,” Patrice says from across the empty room.  She is still wiping down the tables, but her pace has slowed and she has lost all interest in working.  “I’ve been bugging Tony to hire another waitress for over a year now and he says we can’t afford one.  Then you come along, play some boogie-woogie and whatnot, and he practically gives you tenure.  Nice.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, I’m just busting your balls.  You want another drink?”

I am already drunk.  “No, thanks.”

“Mind if I have one?”

“Not at all.  Go ahead.”

She disappears behind the bar and, when she returns, she is nursing from a bottle of Heineken.  She pauses against the bar, examining me from over the bottle, her coiffed auburn hair curling down her forehead.  Her eyes shift around the room and I can tell she is thinking of something.

An impulse overtakes me and I turn and begin playing the low, resonant keys.  I run a scale in A-minor.  Unlike all the other songs, I do not recognize this one.  Yet I play it with inexplicable confidence, with the genetic instinct of a migratory bird.  It is a possessing, melancholic melody, furiously simple yet, at the same time, breathtaking in its complexity.  It is nothing like the barroom, barrelhouse piano I played earlier.

“That’s so sad,” Patrice says from across the room once I’ve finished playing.  The final note still resonates, underscoring her voice.

“I think it’s supposed to be a love song.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I admit.  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”

“I can’t get you anything?” she asks after too much silence passes between us.  She is still holding her beer, still halfway across the barroom floor.  “Anything at all?”

“A pen,” I say, glancing down at the inky smears on my palm.  

Patrice seems confused.  “A—pen, did you say?”

“Please…”

She scrounges around behind the bar and manages, after a time, to locate one in the vicinity of the cash register.  Tapping it against the air, she stalks across the bar toward me like a predatory creature.  Along the warped tavern floor, her shadow is multiplied by the countless Christmas lights above her head.  She is playful when handing me the pen—extends it, jerks it away, prods me gently in the center of the forehead.

“Before I give you this,” she says, shifting her weight from foot to foot, “I want you to answer one question.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Why?”

“I don’t remember much.”

“Much of what?”

“Of anything.”

“You’re an odd duck.”

“Well,” I say, “go ahead.  Ask it.  We’ll see what happens.”

She says, “How would you feel if I told you I’m married?”

While the question stuns me, I also feel a sense of relief.  My mouth is dry; beads of sweat roll down my ribs.

“I don’t mind,” I say.  “Why would I mind?”

She drops the pen in my lap and watches as I rewrite the address on my left palm.  I mutter, more to myself than her, “I’m right handed.”

“I see that.  What are you writing?”

“My address.”

“Shouldn’t you be writing that on
my
hand?”

“It’s a long story.  And I’m afraid I don’t know any of it yet.”

“You
are
a mystery man.”  Again she touches the top of my head.  This time more sensual, slower.  “You wanna get out of here, hon?”

FIVE

Time, like my memory, is lost.

We arrive at the St. Paul Street apartment in the early hours of morning before the sun has time to rise.  An eerie radiance burns up along the horizon from the east and, in the foreground, the formidable brownstones and tenements rise like the smokestacks of sunken battleships.  As we walk, Patrice runs her fingers along the fencing that serves as a barrier to the construction site along the street, and briefly, pauses over a grate in the sidewalk.  Shoes hollow and scuffing on the pavement.  She leans against the placard that reads
hanely construction. Cars slide soundlessly through the intersection.  The green bulbs in the traffic lights appear blue.  It is the time of morning when you think all time has paused and everything is standing still.  Mounting the steps to the apartment building, Patrice nearly stumbles and requires assistance—an arm at the small of her back—to climb to the top.

“You live here?” she says.  “These are nice apartments.  What do you do?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her, and she laughs.

The stairs moan as we campaign to the third floor.  Immediately, I spot a newspaper outside one of my neighbor’s doors.  I gather it up and fold it under one arm while producing the key to my own door.

“You’re a thief,” Patrice whispers, very close to my face.  I can still smell the perfume and the cigarette smoke on her, but those smells are overshadowed by the stronger scent of alcohol.

In the apartment, Patrice walks in slow revolutions about the main room, in awe over the lack of things to be in awe about.

She says, “You have nothing, Mozart.  No pictures on the walls, no furniture, no little yapping dog at the door.  Did you just move in?”

“Yes.”

“Recently?”

“Today, in fact,” I say.  And for all I know, this is the complete truth.

“No books, no stereo, no clocks tick-tick-ticking on the walls.”  She sounds almost sad in her recital.  “Where is all your stuff?”

Because I am tired of saying I do not know, I lie and tell her all my belongings are still in storage.

“So you’re new to Baltimore?”

“Sure.”

“I knew it!  Because I knew you didn’t look familiar.”  Something about this makes her laugh.  She seems glad.  “I knew you were a stranger.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Do you have anything to drink?”

“Sorry.  No.”

“Not even a bottle of wine?”

“No.”

“Not scotch?  Not whiskey?”

“I’m sorry.”

“So sad.”  She staggers through the room and leans against the wall of the hallway.  An exhaustive release of heavy breath rushes up her throat.  Suddenly, in the half-light, she looks ancient. A strong gust of wind would reduce her to rubble. “This whole city burns. It’s lava, molten lava.  Did you know?”  She’s drunk and doesn’t know what she’s saying.  “Towering inferno.  Be kind, be kind.”

I set my key down on the table beside the front door.  I set the newspaper down, too, and flatten out the front page, smoothing it with my hands.  December 2.  There will be a local section, a metro section.  Faintly, I wonder if I will come across my face in any articles—local man mugged and left for dead in the street.  But, no—that would have involved the police.  And the police wouldn’t have shoved me onto a bus with no memory of who I am or what had happened to me.  Unless, of course, I still had my memory at the time…

The police.  
It is like an audible bolt sliding into a lock in my brain.  
The police can take my fingerprints.  They will know my identification.

If, of course, I have been fingerprinted in the past.

The police.

I nearly laugh, I am suddenly so relieved.  
You can’t stay lost forever,
I realize.  
No one can be a stranger for very long.

“Come here,” Patrice growls, still propped against the wall.  She looks sloppy and dark.  What the hell is she even doing here?  I feel myself waiting to shout at her, scream at the top of my lungs for her to get the hell out.  But I don’t.  I am thinking about the police, fingerprinting and the police, and something is swimming around in the back of my skull.  Headfish.

We are both too drunk to make sense of anything.  I go to her and she is quick to pull my face to hers.  We kiss, and it is a messy affair.  Her mouth tastes like an ashtray and her tongue is overly forceful in accessing my mouth.  I feel warm breath from her nose on my upper lip.

When I pull away, the look on Patrice’s face is one of content slumber. Childlike in its simplicity.  In fact, I believe she has fallen asleep slouched against the wall.  Then, lethargically, her eyes peel open and a smile widens her face.

“Damn you,” she says, not angrily.  “I try to be so good.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Of course.  Everyone is sorry.  It’s a world of regret and apology.  A lava-filled world.”

“This is something you’ll regret?”

“Your questions are nearly childlike.  You know that?”

“I’m a child,” I say.  “I’m starting fresh.  Right here and right now.  I’m a newborn.”

“Call me a whore.”

“Why would I do that?”

She turns her head away from me, looking instantly miserable.  “Never mind.”

“Why would I do that?” I repeat.

“Bathroom,” she says, sidetracked.  Dreamily.

When she vanishes, I use the Bic pen to scribble the following on the back of an advertisement that slides out of the folds of newspaper:

If you wake up with no memory, know this—

You are in an apartment in Baltimore, Maryland.

It might be your apartment.

You woke up yesterday on a bus and could not remember who you are.

The address of this apartment was written on your hand.

You do not know your name.

Go to the police station and get fingerprinted.

I am you, writing this to myself.

I leave the overturned advertisement on the table by the door.  And stare at it for quite some time.  As if burning it into memory.  The last sentence sounds awkward, confusing…but how else would you say it?

I am you, writing this to myself.

We make clumsy love in my empty bedroom and it is over very quickly.  We are too drunk and too trembling to make it account for anything.  In the dark, we lay talking in hushed tones.  Patrice talks about her husband, who is out of town at the moment.  Barry.  His name is Barry and he sells ceramic floor tiles.  She talks about him with the nostalgia and melancholy of someone recounting their childhood friends.  It is the perfect name for a ceramic tile salesman.  Barry-Barry-Barry.  For a time, breathing beside this woman, I wonder if Barry exists at all.

Or maybe I don’t.

Maybe no one truly exists, anyway.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I think relationships are not relationships at all, but a series of indiscretions we suffer until we finally get tired and settle for who we’re with when we happen to become tired.”

“Sounds like a sad way to look at things.”

“Oh,” she agrees, “it is.”  I feel her head turn on the pillow.  “But nothing about it has to be beautiful.  Or even happy.  Who says relationships have to be happy?  Who says life has to be free and clear?  It’s not.  Anyone tells you otherwise, they’re a fucking liar.  We all owe something.  All of us.”  She does not wait for me to respond; anyway, what could I say?  So she clears her throat and goes on: “I lost my virginity at age thirteen.  Nothing happy about it.  He was twenty-six.  Thirteen and twenty-six.  I bled the way sap can ooze from a tree.”  She sighs.  “Just one of a million indiscretions.  Not, of course, that I’ve been with a million different men.  But thirteen and twenty-six—I mean, that’s something.”  Another sigh.  “What about you, hon?”

 “What about me?”

“I know nothing about you, Mozart.”

“Me, either.”

“Stop it.”

I say, “I woke up this evening on a bus with no memory of who I am.  I don’t even know my name.  I only found this apartment because of this.”  I hold up my hand and show her the inked address.  My palm floats blue and ghostlike in the gloom of night.  “It was written there when I woke up on the bus.”

“But not when you got on the bus?”

“I don’t know,” I say.  “I don’t remember getting on the bus.”

“That’s strange.”  She sounds sleepy and unimpressed.

“I must have written it,” I tell her.  “Which means I must have anticipated losing my memory.  Wouldn’t you think?”

“So you can’t remember anything?  Any memory at all?”

“No.”  Then I consider.  “Well, I guess—maybe one.  I remember a stretch of roadway winding through pine trees.  A long, vacant stretch of roadway.  Far from here.”

“Where does the road go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t recognize it?”

“No.  The image just appeared in my head.”

“When?”

“Earlier tonight.  When I first came to the apartment.”

“What apartment?”

“This one.”

“Oh,” she says.  I can sense she is smiling in the darkness.  I think I can, anyway.  “Oh.  I’m drunk.  Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“So you weren’t kidding,” she says, her voice seemingly far off.  “About not knowing your name, I mean.”

“I’m going to go to the police station tomorrow.  Today, I mean.  As soon as I get up.  See if they’ll take my fingerprints, maybe find a match.”

“I would think,” Patrice says, “you would have had to sign some sort of lease to get this apartment.”

Then she rolls over and falls immediately to sleep.