Passenger (5 page)

SIX

Daylight.

Patrice removes herself from the bed and washes in the bathroom.  When she does not return after a long while, I listen and think I hear her sobbing on the other side of the bathroom door.  I wonder if she’s thinking of Barry, her husband Barry.  I picture a small apartment with shag carpeting the color of rust, wood-paneled walls with garish paintings in cheap frames, sun-bleached card tables and lots of wicker furniture.  And Barry.  I picture Barry—or, rather, the
essence
of Barry, for he is just a blob, a form, an indistinct distinction in my head—slouched in a tattered recliner staring at the television that is not on, that is black and blank and useless, while he thinks, Patrice, Patrice, Patrice.  By this time, the sun is full in the sky; it forges an assault through the single window.  Leaning over in bed, I pull tight the shade, cutting off the outside world.

Nearly twenty minutes later, when she emerges from the bathroom, Patrice tugs her clothes on over her wide hips.  In the new light, her body looks old and sad.  There is a horizontal crease bisecting her belly where she tries to suck in her gut.  Her breasts are pale, bottom-heavy and pendulous, with faint, wide areolas capped with the mere suggestion of nipples.  Her silver bracelets jangle like a slot machine’s payoff.  It is a sad exercise, watching this married, middle-aged woman dress at the foot of the bed.  I am disgusted with myself.  
I am you, writing this to myself.  
A fresh start, a clean slate, and this is what I do.

“Are you okay?” I say, not moving from the bed.

“Terrific.” She tries hard to sound positive, but the streaks of mascara running from her eyes betray her.  “How about you?  Didn’t you sleep?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Afraid.”

She utters a laugh as she snaps, with some difficulty, the button of her pants.  “Afraid of what?  That I’d suffocate you with your pillow?  That I’d smother you do death?”

“Afraid it would start all over again.  From scratch.”

“What—what are you talking about?”

“The forgetting,” I say.  “The disremembering.”

Her lips tighten, leaving just a colorless slash beneath her nose.  She straps on her bra and pulls her halter down over her head.  The flesh of her forearms jiggles.

“Don’t you remember what I told you?” I say.

“Listen,” she begins, “last night was a lot of fun.  I like the mystery angle and I was goddamn drunk enough or stupid enough to play along.  But it’s a new day out there.  Let’s drop it, all right?”

“I wasn’t playing.  I’m being serious.”

“What’s your name?”

“I told you I don’t—”

“No,” she demands, “I don’t want to hear it.  I want to know your name.  I feel lousy as it is and I’d like to at least know your goddamn name.”

“I can’t tell you my name.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I don’t know it.  I don’t remember it.”

She nearly stumbles climbing into her heels.  When she looks up at me, her auburn hair matted and frizzy, her dark eyes sloppy in their sockets, she looks like she wants to lash out and strike me.  “You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”

“Patrice…”

“Forget it.  This is my fault.  I should have never come here.  Goddamn it, what’s wrong with me?  I should have never come here…”

“Patrice, please…”

“Don’t you come back to the bar,” she barks.  “Don’t you come near that place, you got me?  I’ll have Tony toss you out on your ass if you do.”

I listen to her heels clack down the hallway.  She slams the door on the way out; the sound reverberates forever through the empty apartment.

I do not realize how exhausted I am until I climb out of bed.  My head still throbs, but now my muscles ache, my eyes are sore, my stomach is so empty I can almost feel wind whistling through it, and my throat is raw from the smoke at the Samjetta—an orchestra of agony.

In the shower, I let the water go as hot as I can stand it.  Steam chokes the tiny bathroom.  Examining myself in the mirror, I grow more and more fearful of my appearance.  I am undernourished to the point of emaciation.  My eyes look as if they’ve been blackened by fists.

“Who are you?” the Auschwitz Jew in the mirror wants to know.

I am you.

I dress and feel somewhat nauseous in the half-gloom of the bedroom.  Peeling back the shade of the window, I wince at the over-bright day.  Outside, people cross back and forth in front of the renovated buildings, and a few construction workers in bright yellow helmets and vests stand in a cluster at the corner of the street.

For a time, I consider going door to door, asking any of my neighbors if they know who I am.  This idea seems absurd, but it also seems like it will yield the best results.  So I retain that as a possibility.

Before leaving the apartment, I rewrite the address on my palm.

I descend the stairs to the first floor lobby.  I search for an office in the lobby but do not find one.  In the main lobby, posted to a bulletin board above the row of mailboxes, I locate a phone number for the office.  It is a 410 area code, which means it is local, but there is no address.  Following a cursory glance over my shoulder, I tear the paper from the bulletin board and stuff it in the pocket of my canvas coat.

There is Spanish music playing from an open window somewhere as I step out into the street.  The day is tremendous and sunny, the light too powerful for my tired, weary eyes.  I walk a short while until I fall beneath the yawning shade of the Mercy Medical Center.  The pale brick façade and smoked windows are immediately recognizable.  Thinking of the scar on my leg, I wonder if I have ever been treated here.

This is insane.  Where the hell is my memory?

I find Calvert Street and maneuver through various neighborhoods.  In some vague fashion I am aware I am heading toward the Inner Harbor—can actually summon a visual of the Harbor in my mind—but this passing familiarity does little to comfort me.  I wind through a grassy park surrounded by potholed side streets punctuated by gaudily-painted plaster busts of giant crabs, their claws raised above their carapaces as if in victory.  At the far end of the park, I spy a tooth-colored square building, columned, and flanked by brass lampposts with a wedge of police cruisers corralled out front: a police station.

They’re going to think I’m insane.  They might even lock me up.

These reservations strike me like a hand across the face.

Moreover: what if I am wanted for some heinous crime?  What if the police are out looking for me right now?  I think of my vacant, echo-chamber apartment and am frightened to admit it could be the den of a serial killer, a sociopath, some psychotic religious zealot.  Why is there no fresh food in my refrigerator?  Why are there no clothes in the bedroom closet?

Why can’t I remember a goddamn thing?

I formulate a scenario where I am relentlessly interrogated by police, hammering me with a barrage of questions, all of which I cannot answer because I cannot remember any of it.  
Where were you on the night of the fifth?  What’s your alibi?  
I do not know.  And, of course, they do not believe me.  You always see it—the bastard being drilled by the cops who never remembers a damn thing.  The poor, dumb, hopeless bastard.  You always see it.

Maybe that’s true.

Maybe they really don’t remember.

In the end, this paranoia defeats me.  If I am a psycho killer, I do not want to know it.  I decide the best bet is the simplest bet: call the apartment complex’s main office and ask to see my rental agreement.

I cross the street just as my nostrils become infused with the tempting aromas of the city: the Thai restaurants stacked along the boulevard and the brewing coffee from the Internet cafés.  This stretch of Calvert is littered with delis and juice bars, with family-run bookstores that serve pastries and pizza parlors with tables on the sidewalks.  Art houses, thrift shops, countless bakeries.  There is a drilling pain at the center of my stomach, I am so hungry.

Shaking, head still throbbing, I drop down on another
believe bench and wonder how I am going to call the office number without a telephone.

There are still some payphones around the city, if you know where to look for them.  I know I have seen them before, but I’m not sure where they are.  Still, I would need change…and damn if I didn’t leave my $2.18 at the Samjetta last night, sitting right there on the bar…

There are also a number of homeless people in Baltimore, perhaps more so than most urban locales throughout the country.  While they are typically known to be solitary creatures, you can occasionally find them in pacts, in prides, in flocks, in murders, whatever, lighting together on park benches or bundling up in conspiratorial groups to keep warm over heating grates in the winter.  Often, they loiter about the steps of churches and creep back and forth in the alleyways with designs on the dumpsters and the treasures within.  They congregate outside the bohemian cafés and coffee shops because they know the art students who frequent these haunts are eager to give them handouts and feel good about themselves.  The homeless are like hungry squirrels that way.

It doesn’t take me long to target a bearded, puffy-faced derelict talking to himself while hunched over on the stoop of a condemned building.  The derelict wears a sawdust-colored trench coat matted with grease, pulled taut about his shoulders like a cape, and there is a backward baseball cap, equally filthy, on his head.  Great tufts of pepper-colored clown hair explode at either side of his head from beneath the cap and his multicolored beard is as lush as the mane of a lion.

There is a Styrofoam cup planted squarely between the derelict’s feet.  It is this cup that is the target.

Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I make a beeline for the derelict, my head down, moving with a pace quicker than normal.  A normal person might have intercepted me before I drew much closer, but the derelict is not paying attention and even seems a bit inebriated.  So I am able to get close, to get right in there, and when I strike the Styrofoam cup with the toe of my sneaker, spilling quarters and nickels and dimes to the sidewalk, it takes the derelict a moment or two to realize what is happening.

What follows is an eruption of nonsense, of partially understood curse words and gutter slang, coupled with the furious flailing of very long arms.  Surprisingly, however, the derelict does not rise from the stoop; his eyes merely turn to saucers as he watches the spray of change, twinkling like a constellation along the pavement.

“So sorry,” I blurt to the derelict, already down on one knee, refilling the man’s Styrofoam cup.

“Blast,” growls the derelict.  “Blast an’ dis’n dat.”

“Here.  Here.”  I pile the change back into the cup and hand it over to the derelict, who does not accept it.  “Here,” I repeat, and finally set the cup back down between the derelict’s feet and walk quickly away.

What I make off with is nearly two dollars in change—seven quarters and a dime, to be exact.

SEVEN

There is a payphone inside Franelli Brothers’ Pizzeria; I stand with the receiver against my ear, one hand curled around it, while huddled in one corner.  I try to make myself nonexistent.  I’ve got the sheet of paper with the phone number of the apartment complex’s main office in one hand, and my eyes volley between the number and the phone as I punch the digits.

A woman with a rasping voice answers.  I try to sound as cheerful as possible when I ask about their location.  When she gives me the address, which I jot down on the sheet of paper below the phone number, I thank her and quickly hang up.

The office is located on Lombard Street.  No money for cab fare, I spend the afternoon walking.

I walk past the office twice before realizing it is the narrow sliver of a building wedged between a bank and what looks like a defunct nightclub.  Inside, there is just a waiting room and a small wooden desk where no one sits.  The place is disguised as a travel agency, what with the various framed photographs of the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and the Bahamas on the walls.  There is faded, cruddy wallpaper peeling everywhere I look, tinged yellow by ancient cigarette smoke.  A space heater shudders in one corner of the lobby.

Before I have a chance to sit in one of the waiting room chairs, a silver-haired woman with a pinched face and narrow reading glasses hobbles out of a door behind the desk.  Upon seeing me, her pointy face becomes pointier.  She holds her head up to examine me through her glasses.  In the poor lighting and against the nicotine walls, her skin looks the pallor of cookie dough, the texture of a sun-swept desert landscape.

“He’p you?” the woman utters.  It is the same rasping voice from the telephone.

“Yeah, hi, I’m a tenant in the St. Paul complex, apartment Three-B.  I was hoping to get a copy of my lease for my files.  I guess I must have lost it.”

The woman is already busy clacking away on computer.  “Name?”

“Well, I’m not sure…”

The woman’s heavy-lidded eyes linger on me.  “Excuse me?”

“I mean, I’m not sure whose name is on the lease.  I can’t remember who signed the, uh, the paperwork—”

Exasperated, the woman says, “The apartment number again?”

“Three-B.”

The woman hunches close to her computer screen.  I can see the reflection of the monitor in the lenses of her glasses.  Then she rises with a grunt, requiring both hands to push off the armrests of her chair, and, rather shakily, shuffles to an immense filing cabinet that leans in a precarious fashion away from the wall.  The woman pulls out one drawer, digs through a ream of paperwork and multicolored folders, and finally produces a manila folder.  Opening it, scanning it, her pinched birdlike face nearly crumbles to dust.

Still scrutinizing the paperwork, she says, “You said Three-B?”

“Yes.”

“St. Paul complex?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” she says, and snaps the folder shut.  “We don’t have your paperwork.”

Something like a lead weight crashes down through my stomach.  “What do you mean?”

“Building went co-op last year.  Three-B was sold.  Don’t have no rental agreement.”

I swallow a lump of spit that feels like a hunk of granite.  “Sold to whom?”

“If you’re living there,” says the woman, “then to you.”

“But there’s no paperwork, nothing with my name on it?  Any information at all?”

“Not our job to maintain your personal records, sir.”

“But there must be something with some sort of documentation, some…I don’t know…some sort of…”

The woman’s eyebrows cock as she sets the folder down on her desk.  With her brittle, yellowed fingernails, she peels a sheet of paper from the stack in the folder and hands it over to me.

“Have a look at it,” she says.  “No name, no personal information.  Three-B was sold in July.  Paid in full.”

“Then maybe you’d have a copy of the check on record—”

“Cashier’s check.”

“Excuse me?”

“Paid in full by cashier’s check.”  She snatches the sheet of paper back from me and buries it in the folder.  “Three-B ain’t our responsibility.”

I take a step back from the counter, running my hands through the stubble of my hair.

“Can I get your name, sir?”

“I don’t…”

“There might be some paperwork in the back,” she says.

My eyes fall on the framed picture of St. Thomas, so that is the first thing that comes to me.  I say, “Thomas.  Last name’s Thomas.”

The woman’s suspicion is evident.  She moves slowly to her computer terminal again, but her eyes linger on me.  Her lips are pressed tightly together, a mere slit beneath her nose, and I can tell she is rolling her tongue over her teeth.  She hammers out a few keys on the keyboard then stares hard at me.

“Thomas, eh?”

I rub at my face.  “Yeah…”

“Let me see some I.D.”

My mouth dry, my hands shaking, I surprise myself by uttering a strangled laugh. “Please,” I say. “I’m sorry.  Please.  I have no I.D.  I just need you to help me.  Please help me.”

The woman’s gray eyes narrow.  “You,” she says.  There is sudden accusation in her voice.  “You’re the guy who came in here last month, gave Suzie a hard time, ain’t you?”  She is jabbing a talon-like finger at me now.  “She called the cops on you, didn’t she?  Giving Suzie a hard time about the same thing.”  The birdlike hand snatches up the telephone on her desk and brings the receiver to her ear.  “I don’t know what game you’re playing, mister, but I’m calling the cops.  You can sit here and wait for ’em, or you can get the hell out and don’t come back.”

I am out the door before she is finished dialing.