Passenger

by Ronald Malfi

  “You a handsome, handsome white boy.”

  An enormous woman with breasts the size of truck tires has gathered behind a bullhorn. She stands on the curb and begins chanting the T-shirt slogan into the device. Soon, the crowd chimes in. They begin migrating from the yard to the street and, with the large-breasted woman leading the pack, move down the center of the street.

  Clarence is right beside me, grinning like he’s got a coat hanger jammed into his mouth. He’s got two cigarettes tucked behind one ear, too, and as we walk and chant, he plucks one out, sniffs it, then sticks it into his mouth. Somehow, he is still able to smile and chant while smoking.

  “You watch,” Clarence tells me at one point. “The television news be here soon.”

  Clarence is right: vans with television logos appear at one point and film the march. While I have no idea what any of this is about, I am content to be part of something. I am nudged by Clarence, who is now clapping while he chants, so I begin clapping and chanting, too. I have no idea what we’re saying or what any of it means. Still, it feels good to be part of something, to be human.

  “What is seventy-two?” I ask just as they reach the end of the street. The crowd has dispersed and there are a lot of children running about, blocking traffic. Police mill about the intersection, engrossed in idle conversation while leaning against sawhorses. “And why won’t we do it?”

  “The hike,” says Clarence.

  “What hike?”

  “Gas hike. Seventy-two percent.” Yet he pronounces it sem’nee-two. “Started it this past July. Baltimore been sweatin’ all goddamn summer and now Baltimore goan freeze all winter.” He pronounces it Ball-dee-moe. I hang on every word. “But this hike, man, is like killing me. Killing everyone. Like Grandma Evergreen—died of heat exhaustion in her apartment back in August. Couldn’t afford air conditioning. Died like a rat in a tin can left out in the summer sun.”

  “Sorry about your grandmother.”

  “Ain’t my grandmother. Was everyone’s grandmother. All the world. Aw, shit, man—it’s the same all around, yeah? Where they think I got the money for this, huh?” Clarence shakes his wooly head. “You know what I do for a living, Mozart? I haul junk. Got my own company hauling junk. Junk as in crap as in junk. You lookin’ at the president and CEO and every employee down the chain right here. All you do is call me and leave your junk out, I’ll come on by and scoop it up m’self, haul it away. Sometimes if it’s good junk—if it’s salvageable—I’ll sell it. There’s a million places you can sell junk. This city, man, it’s built on junk, selling junk. The whole place revolves around junk being moved from one shitty location to another. Relocation, that’s the game. It’s all the same no matter how you cut it—whether you be moving someone’s junk from the curb to a junk shop, whether you be a taxicab moving junk-head peoples from one part of the city to another, or whether you been taking junk straight from a needle and burying it right in your arm. That’s Baltimore, and that’s what makes the city move—the transporting of junk. We built on it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Junk never disappears, never really goes nowhere. It just gets relocated. You move it from here to there, there to here. But it never leaves. It’s always here.” Clarence’s eyes narrow. “What you do for a living, Mozart?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I was offered a job playing piano at a bar, but I don’t think I can go back there.”

  “No?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Clarence laughs. His molars look like silver ball bearings. “Shit, man,” he says. “I hear you loud.”

  Jostled by the crowd, I find myself at one point face-to-face with an attractive young reporter who jabs a microphone at me. Behind her stares the Cyclops eye of a television camera.

  “What does this hike mean for the people of Northeast Baltimore this winter?” the attractive young reporter wants to know. She is white, pretty, well-groomed, smelling strongly of expensive perfume. She looks at me like someone watching a wild animal through the bars of a cage.

  “Zap,” is all I say before being whisked away by the crowd.

  * * *

  The day moves into evening and concludes in the water damaged basement of an apartment complex on Saratoga Street. It is Clarence’s place, this basement, although it is unclear if he actually lives here or lives in one of the apartments which allow him access to this basement. Or if he has just broken the lock on the door and let himself in. Yet he shows it off proudly, his only complaint being the arguments of the couple in the apartment directly above his. But it is home, he says, grinning his toothy grin.

  The basement room is a cornucopia of skin magazines, bottled beer, and a scattered assortment of tennis shoes. The walls are barren sheetrock, water damaged and soggy in places, erected without the benefit of insulation directly against cinderblock walls. The randomly placed furniture coughs up clouds of dust when you sit on it. Only the stereo system—an impressive network of wireless, wall-mounted speakers and digital hardware, all blinking, beeping, and gleaming—seems worth anything. Music comes on, heavy and bass-thumping, and Clarence quickly fits my hand with a bottle of Rolling Rock. Throughout the evening, a number of Clarence’s friends filter in and out of the place, each more colorful and boisterous than the last. I sit by myself on a worn couch with birds etched into the fabric, nursing a room temperature Rolling Rock, wondering how the hell I got here, and watch the party unfold. There are high-fives and fists thrust into the air. They clap each other on the back and are proud of the day’s efforts. The large-breasted woman with the bullhorn from the march is in attendance, and she is sucking down beer like it’s her job. I catch her accidentally spill some on Clarence’s CD collection before she slinks away, thinking no one has noticed.

  An attractive black woman sits beside me on the couch at one point during the evening. At least, I believe she is attractive judging by the admiration of her peers, though I have no personal knowledge of what I find attractive. She has a nice figure which is accentuated by her low-cut, tight-fitting, animal-print clothes, and her eyes are large and brown and thickly-lashed. The lobes of her ears are stretched to twice their normal length by the weight of pendulous earrings and her short, styled hair is practically shellacked to her scalp.

  “Hey,” she says. “I’m Tabitha.” She extends a long-fingered hand capped with two-inch nails painted a startling pink. “Hi, baby.”

  I shake her hand. “Hi.”

  “You’re the spy with no name,” says Tabitha, making it sound like the lyric from an America song. She has the dreamy, pouting face of someone on dope. “Clarence, he told me all about you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Said I’m a spy, too. Sent me over to get some information from you. Said I can use all the torture I want.”

  “That’s good of him.”

  “What you doing hanging out with Clarence, anyway? Don’t you know he’s a deadbeat?”

  “Seems okay to me.”

  “Well,” says Tabitha, admonishing me with her acrylic nails, “he’s a deadbeat son of a bitch. Owes my sister like three hundred bills. Me, too, but not as much. We used to go together, too. You know that?”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s true,” she tells me. “Think I’d learn a lesson, huh? Think I’d put this brain to work. No such luck. I been foolish since the day I was born. That’s what my momma says, anyway. What do you do?”

  “I play piano and own an apartment. Apparently.”

  “You rich?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, yeah, you don’t look rich.”

  “If I am, I have no idea where my money is.”

  “Me, too,” Tabitha says. She leans closer to me now, nearly resting her chin on my shoulder. She smells warm and domestic, like a wife. “I used to be rich.”

  “What happened?”

  “Was robbed. By every goddamn man I ever met. Clarence Wilcox included. I t
ell you he’s a son of a bitch?”

  “Yes,” I say. “A deadbeat son of a bitch.”

  Tabitha smiles and looks instantly tired. “You’re funny. What’d you say your name was?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “Yeah,” says Tabitha, “that’s right. You a spy with your memory erased. You don’t remember nothing about all your spy work?”

  “No.”

  “Clarence says you was in the Middle East, fighting the Iraq peoples. You remember any of that?”

  “No.”

  “The Iraq peoples?”

  “Sorry.”

  She runs a hand behind my head and caresses my scalp with those long fingernails. “Did it hurt when they took your memory?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I wonder,” she goes on, “if they had to actually cut out a piece of your brain. Because, you know, there’s a piece of the brain that does all the memory stuff. And then there’s a piece of the brain that handles, like, all your regular functions. Like walking and talking and breathing and all that.” She winks. “And sex. The animal part. You remember how to do all that all right, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  She laughs. Across the room, Clarence raises the bass on his stereo. A flashbulb goes off, nearly blinding me, and I see the large-breasted woman pointing a camera in my direction.

  “Or maybe,” Tabitha continues, “they just have some transmitter device or something inside your head. Like a little electronic thingamajig. Somethin’ that goes ‘beep-beep-beep.’ Some white fool in D.C. don’t need you no more, presses a button, and zap—”

  “Zap,” I say.

  “Zap,” Tabitha parrots. “Zap. Just like that. Your memory’s all gone.”

  “Could be.”

  Tabitha says, “You think I don’t like white boys? Because I like white boys just fine. I dated white boys before.” Her hand is still caressing the back of my head. Suddenly, my eyelids weigh a hundred pounds each.

  “Okay,” I hear myself say.

  “You wanna smoke some opium?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ever smoke any?”

  “I don’t know.” We could go on like this all night…

  “Got regular weed, too, if that’s your thing.”

  “I don’t know if I have a thing.”

  She laughs; my statement sounds funny to her. “Listen, spy,” she says. “You ever hook up with a sister?”

  Because I can’t stand to repeat myself, to tell her I can’t remember, I lie and say, “Yes. Of course. All I do is date black women.”

  “Yeah?”

  “All I do is hook up with sisters.”

  “Well!” Another laugh. She must think I’m the funniest guy around. “Well, now! You ain’t married, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Got any kids?”

  “None that I’m aware of.”

  “I don’t got no kids. You like kids?”

  “I don’t have time for kids,” I say, leaning into her. “Not enough time, what with being a government spy and all. I’m on the road too much.”

  “You’re very cute. And clever. But maybe you ain’t no spy. Maybe Clarence just pulling one over on me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Hey.” Her smile is instantly warm and inviting. If it has been this way all this time, I am only now just noticing it. When she touches my hand, I feel something go woozy inside my stomach. “Hey,” she says. “Come with me.”

  We are in a small room off the basement—a storage room, cluttered with old hot water heaters and the snakelike spirals of garden hoses, hardened with dry rot. Tabitha produces a joint from a small purse and lights it, the flame reflecting in her curling, manicured fingernails. She wraps her lips around the joint and smokes. The smell makes my mouth water. Her eyes are wide, are brilliant, over the glowing cherry.

  “Here.” She hands the joint to me.

  I suck the life from it. My head goes swimmy. Then I cough, and Tabitha’s eyes, just slightly glassy now, never leave mine.

  “Yes,” I say. “Oh, yes.”

  “Yes,” Tabitha says, suddenly very close to me. Soon, her breath intermingles with my own, and both our scents join the smell of the smoking marijuana. Kissing her, I taste the pot on her breath and the gum she’d been chewing earlier in the evening. An erection immediately voices its opinion, and in no time I am rubbing myself against Tabitha. I grope her, feel her breasts through the form-fitting, leopard-skin top she wears. Some fumbling, some more sharing of the joint, and I manage to work my hands up under her shirt. She doesn’t wear a bra and her breasts are heavy and full with generous nipples. Together we finish the joint. I tell her I want to have sex with her. I think she laughs—I can’t be certain—and she says something in my ear, low-voiced and seductive, that could be nonsense, could be Swahili. Either way, my pants never make it off and sex does not seem to be in the cards.

  She runs a hand along the back of my head, the base of my skull. Pressing too hard, a sharp, searing pain launches from the base of my skull straight along the upper circumference of my head, zapping me between the eyes. Stars go off beneath my lids. Zap.

  Tabitha is breathing heavy. We are both breathing heavy. The whole room smells of marijuana and breath.

  “I think I love you,” I whisper.

  “Is that so?” she whispers back. Her voice comes from everywhere.

  “Why not?” I say. “Why the hell not?”

  When she speaks again, her voice sounds very far away. “You need to find out who you are. You need to get your memory back.”

  NINE

  It is a dreamless sleep. And when my eyes open, there is a sense of displacement that lasts for the extent of a single heartbeat. Sitting up, my head pounding so hard I wince, I realize I am still on Clarence’s couch in the basement of his apartment building. The whole room is dark, empty, and silent. Cigarette smoke haunts my nostrils. Through the barred windows at street-level, I can see the silver orb of the moon behind a veil of clouds.

  I have fallen asleep.

  Panic rises in me. But as the events of the past two days swim back to me, I begin to relax. I recall everything that has happened since waking up on the bus. Sleep, it turns out, does not erase my memory.

  Not tonight, anyway.

  The urge to urinate propels me from the couch and sends me stumbling down a darkened, alien hallway in search of a bathroom. The air stinks of weed and incense and the deeper, headier stench of body odor. I find the bathroom and unleash a burning, foul-smelling stream that seems to take forever to fully evacuate from my system. It is a small bathroom with ceramic blue tiles (missing in places) and a plastic shower curtain adorned with goldfish. Beard stubble is sprinkled like confectioner’s sugar in the sink. A woman’s purse sits open on the sink and a pair of white briefs is draped conspicuously over the doorknob. Briefly, I examine my reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink. My skin jaundiced, my eyes sunken into dark pits, I look like death, a death camp. Hello, Auschwitz Jew. Hello, skull-face. When I grimace at my reflection, displaying my teeth, the image is so much like a cadaver’s that I quickly press my eyes shut to chase the image away. Behind closed lids, the world seems to spin. My head continues to throb and I wonder how much longer I can put up with the pain.

  When I open my eyes, I find myself staring into the woman’s purse. It is open like a mouth and, inside, I can see toiletries and a tube of lipstick and a compact and an angry-looking hairbrush with bristles like porcupine quills. I remove the compact and flip it open, wiping pink powder from the little circular mirror with my thumb. Then I turn around and hold the mirror directly in front of my face with the back of my head reflected in the mirror above the sink. My hair is short enough for me to see the nasty scar I feel when I trace it with my fingers. I can’t see it perfectly, but it’s there all right. So I open the medicine cabinet and locate an electric razor. I click the switch and it hums to life. The sound is al
most soothing. After a moment, the electric burning of the razor is all I can smell. I use the razor—Clarence’s razor—to carve a narrow path from the base of my hairline up over the scar, midway to the top of my head. A dusting of hair wafts into the sink. Repositioning the mirror, I can clearly see the scar now—an angry, crooked, puckered train track of flesh coursing along the protrusion of my skull. The damn thing must be five inches long. I touch it…and while it does not hurt to touch it, the unnatural shape of the skull beneath causes a shiver to course through me.

  That stranger.

  This stranger.

  So I won’t look like a complete psychopath, I take time to shave the rest of my head then clean the hair up from the sink with a damp piece of toilet paper.

  Back in the basement area, I stagger like a drunkard for a moment in the dark, pausing briefly to watch the veil of clouds pass over the moon through the barred windows. I recall talking with Tabitha on the couch, but I cannot remember much after that. I wonder if my lack of memory is a result of my mysterious condition or simply from exhaustion. From drinking and marijuana smoke and exhaustion. And on top of that, I realize I cannot continue doubting and questioning and wondering everything about me. I cannot continue being a stranger to myself. Either way, Tabitha is no longer here. The whole place has been evacuated.

  Someone has taken my shoes off while I slept. They are placed side by side near the couch. I climb into them and lace them up, listening to nothing but the traffic outside and my own respiration.

  Outside, the night is bitter, cold. A soupy mist sinks down to the tops of the buildings. The sodium street lamps are dull, faded smears through the fog.

  Clarence is sitting on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette. “Hey, Mozart. You sneaking out on me, bro?”

  “Thought you might be sleeping. Didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “Nice hairdo. Clean to the bone.”