Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

by Z. Z. Packer

  I pass by an old-fashioned movie theater whose marquee looks like one giant erection lit in parti-colored lights. People pass by, wondering how to go about mugging me. A well-dressed man asks if I’m a pitcher or a catcher, and I have no idea what he means. I tell myself that it’s good that Ray Bivens Jr. and I fought. Most people think that you find something that matters, something that’s worth fighting for, and if necessary, you fight. But it must be the fighting, I tell myself, that decides what matters, even if you’re left on the sidewalk to discover that what you thought mattered means nothing after all.

  “WHERE DO you want to go?” the Amtrak ticket officer asks.

  “East,” I say. “Any train that goes east this time of night.”

  “You’re in D.C., sir. Any further east and you’ll be in the Atlantic.”

  Of course I’m not going east anymore. I’d been going east the last day and a half, and it’s just now hitting me that I can finally go west. Go home.

  After the events of the day, I’m not surprised that I get the snottiest ticket officer of the whole damn railway system. I look into the his gray eyes. “West, motherfucker.”

  The ticket officer stares at me and I stare right back.

  The ticket officer sighs. He looks down at his computer, and then at me again. “Where, pray tell, do you want to go? West, I’m afraid, is a direction, not a destination.”

  “Louisville, Kentucky,” I finally say. “Home.”

  He enters something into his computer. Tilts his head. He smiles when he tells me there is no train that goes to Louisville. The closest one is Cincinnati.

  I walk away from the counter and sit down, trying to think of how I’m going to pay to get to Cincinnati, then from Cincinnati to Louisville. The only other white person in the station besides the ticket officer is an old woman in a rainbow knit cap. She’s having quite an intelligent conversation with herself.

  I’ll have to call home, ask my mother to give her credit card number to this prick. I start to try to find a phone when a man approaches the ticket counter, his half-asleep son riding on his back. He probably just came from the March. Probably listened to all the poems and speeches about ants and oxen and African drumming, but still had this kid out in the hot sun for hours, then in the cold night for longer. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning, and all this little boy wants, I can tell, is some goddamned sleep.

  “Hey,” I say to the man. When he doesn’t respond, I tap him on the non-kid shoulder. “It’s pretty late to have a kid out. Don’t you think?”

  He puts his hand up like a traffic cop, but apparently decides I’m harmless and says to me, “Son. I want you to promise me you’ll go clean yourself up. Get something to eat.” He produces a wallet from his back pocket. He hands me a twenty. “Now, don’t go spending it on nothing that’ll make you worse. Promise me.”

  It’s not enough to get me where I’m going, but it’s just what I need. I sit down on a wooden bench. The old white woman next to me carefully pours imaginary liquid into an imaginary cup. The man with the kid goes up to the ticket officer, who stops staring into space long enough to say, “May I help you, sir?”

  “Do y’all still say ‘All aboard’?”

  “Excuse me?” the ticket officer says.

  “My son wants to know if y’all say ‘All aboard.’ Like in the movies.”

  “Yes,” the ticket officer says wearily. “We do say ‘All aboard.’ How else would people know to board the train?”

  Now the boy jiggles up and down on his father’s back, suddenly animated, as if he’s riding a pony. The ticket officer sighs, hands grazing the sides of his face as though checking for stubble. Finally he throws his arms up in a “Sure, what the hell” kind of way, and disappears into the Amtrak offices for what seems like an hour. The father sets the boy down, feet first, onto the ground. An intercom crackles and a voice says:

  “All aboard!”

  The voice is hearty and successful. The boy jumps up and down with delight. He is the happiest I’ve seen anyone, ever. And though the urge to weep comes over me, I wait—holding my head in my hands—and it passes.

  Drinking Coffee

  Elsewhere

  ORIENTATION GAMES BEGAN the day I arrived at Yale from Baltimore. In my group we played heady, frustrating games for smart people. One game appeared to be charades reinterpreted by existentialists; another involved listening to rocks. Then a freshman counselor made everyone play Trust. The idea was that if you had the faith to fall backward and wait for four scrawny former high school geniuses to catch you, just before your head cracked on the slate sidewalk, then you might learn to trust your fellow students. Russian roulette sounded like a better way to go.

  “No way,” I said. The white boys were waiting for me to fall, holding their arms out for me, sincerely, gallantly. “No fucking way.”

  “It’s all cool, it’s all cool,” the counselor said. Her hair was a shade of blond I’d seen only on Playboy covers, and she raised her hands as though backing away from a growling dog. “Sister,” she said, in an I’m-down-with-the-struggle voice, “you don’t have to play this game. As a person of color, you shouldn’t have to fit into any white, patriarchal system.”

  I said, “It’s a bit too late for that.”

  In the next game, all I had to do was wait in a circle until it was my turn to say what inanimate object I wanted to be. One guy said he’d like to be a gadfly, like Socrates. “Stop me if I wax Platonic,” he said. I didn’t bother mentioning that gadflies weren’t inanimate—it didn’t seem to make a difference. The girl next to him was eating a rice cake. She wanted to be the Earth, she said. Earth with a capital E.

  There was one other black person in the circle. He wore an Exeter T-shirt and his overly elastic expressions resembled a series of facial exercises. At the end of each person’s turn, he smiled and bobbed his head with unfettered enthusiasm. “Oh, that was good,” he said, as if the game were an experiment he’d set up and the results were turning out better than he’d expected. “Good, good, good!”

  When it was my turn I said, “My name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I’d be a revolver.” The sunlight dulled as if on cue. Clouds passed rapidly overhead, presaging rain. I don’t know why I said it. Until that moment I’d been good in all the ways that were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student—though I’d learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with Mace.

  “A revolver,” a counselor said, stroking his chin, as if it had grown a rabbinical beard. “Could you please elaborate?”

  The black guy cocked his head and frowned, as if the beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks of his experiment had grown legs and scurried off.

  “YOU WERE just kidding,” the dean said, “about wiping out all of mankind. That, I suppose, was a joke.” She squinted at me. One of her hands curved atop the other to form a pink, freckled molehill on her desk.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I meant it at the time.” I quickly saw that this was not the answer she wanted. “I don’t know. I think it’s the architecture.”

  Through the dimming light of the dean’s office window, I could see the fortress of the old campus. On my ride from the bus station to the campus, I’d barely glimpsed New Haven—a flash of crumpled building here, a trio of straggly kids there. A lot like Baltimore. But everything had changed when we reached those streets hooded by gothic buildings. I imagined how the college must have looked when it was founded, when most of the students owned slaves. I pictured men wearing tights and knickers, smoking pipes.

  “The architecture,” the dean repeated. She bit her lip and seemed to be making a calculation of some sort. I noticed that she blinked less often than most people. I sat there, intrigued, waiting to see how long it would be before she blinked again.

  MY REVOLVER comment won me a year�
�s worth of psychiatric counseling, weekly meetings with Dean Guest, and—since the parents of the roommate I’d never met weren’t too hip on the idea of their Amy sharing a bunk bed with a budding homicidal loony—my very own room.

  Shortly after getting my first C ever, I also received the first knock on my door. The female counselors never knocked. The dean had spoken to them; I was a priority. Every other day, right before dinnertime, they’d look in on me, unannounced. “Just checking up,” a counselor would say. It was the voice of a suburban mother in training. By the second week, I had made a point of sitting in a chair in front of the door, just when I expected a counselor to pop her head around. This was intended to startle them. I also made a point of being naked. The unannounced visits ended.

  The knocking persisted. Through the peephole I saw a white face, distorted and balloonish.

  “Let me in.” The person looked like a boy but it sounded like a girl. “Let me in,” the voice repeated.

  “Not a chance,” I said. I had a suicide single, and I wanted to keep it that way. No roommates, no visitors.

  Then the person began to sob, and I heard a back slump against the door. If I hadn’t known the person was white from the peephole, I’d have known it from a display like this. Black people didn’t knock on strangers’ doors, crying. Not that I understood the black people at Yale. Most of them were from New York and tried hard to pretend that they hadn’t gone to prep schools. And there was something pitiful in how cool they were. Occasionally one would reach out to me with missionary zeal, but I’d rebuff the person with haughty silence.

  “I don’t have anyone to talk to!” the person on the other side of the door cried.

  “That is correct.”

  “When I was a child,” the person said, “I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out ‘I am an orphan—’”

  I opened the door. It was a she.

  “Plagiarist!” I yelled. She had just recited a Frank O’Hara poem as though she’d thought it up herself. I knew the poem because it was one of the few things I’d been forced to read that I wished I’d written myself.

  The girl turned to face me, smiling weakly, as though her triumph was not in getting me to open the door but in the fact that she was able to smile at all when she was so accustomed to crying. She was large but not obese, and crying had turned her face the color of raw chicken. She blew her nose into the waist end of her T-shirt, revealing a pale belly.

  “How do you know that poem?”

  She sniffed. “I’m in your Contemporary Poetry class.”

  She said she was Canadian and her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. “That’s a guy’s name,” I said. “What do you want? A sex change?”

  She looked at me with so little surprise that I suspected she hadn’t discounted this as an option. Then her story came out in teary, hiccup-like bursts. She had sucked some “cute guy’s dick” and he’d told everybody and now people thought she was “a slut.”

  “Why’d you suck his dick? Aren’t you a lesbian?”

  She fit the bill. Short hair, hard, roach-stomping shoes. Dressed like an aspiring plumber. And then there was the name Henrik. The lesbians I’d seen on TV were wiry, thin strips of muscle, but Heidi was round and soft and had a moonlike face. Drab henna-colored hair. And lesbians had cats. “Do you have a cat?” I asked.

  Her eyes turned glossy with new tears. “No,” she said, her voice quavering, “and I’m not a lesbian. Are you?”

  “Do I look like one?” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “O.K.,” I said. “I could suck a guy’s dick, too, if I wanted. But I don’t. The human penis is one of the most germ-ridden objects there is.” Heidi looked at me, unconvinced. “What I meant to say,” I began again, “is that I don’t like anybody. Period. Guys or girls. I’m a misanthrope.”

  “I am, too.”

  “No,” I said, guiding her back through my door and out into the hallway. “You’re not.”

  “Have you had dinner?” she asked. “Let’s go to Commons.”

  I pointed to a pyramid of ramen noodle packages on my windowsill. “See that? That means I never have to go to Commons. Aside from class, I have contact with no one.”

  “I hate it here, too,” she said. “I should have gone to McGill, eh.”

  “The way to feel better,” I said, “is to get some ramen and lock yourself in your room. Everyone will forget about you and that guy’s dick and you won’t have to see anyone ever again. If anyone looks for you—”

  “I’ll hide behind a tree.”

  “A REVOLVER?” Dr. Raeburn said, flipping through a manila folder. He looked up at me as if to ask another question, but he didn’t.

  Dr. Raeburn was the psychiatrist. He had the gray hair and whiskers of a Civil War general. He was also a chain smoker with beige teeth and a navy wool jacket smeared with ash. He asked about the revolver at the beginning of my first visit. When I was unable to explain myself, he smiled, as if this were perfectly reasonable.

  “Tell me about your parents.”

  I wondered what he already had on file. The folder was thick, though I hadn’t said a thing of significance since Day One.

  “My father was a dick and my mother seemed to like him.”

  He patted his pockets for his cigarettes. “That’s some heavy stuff,” he said. “How do you feel about Dad?” The man couldn’t say the word “father.” “Is Dad someone you see often?”

  “I hate my father almost as much as I hate the word ‘Dad.’”

  He started tapping his cigarette.

  “You can’t smoke in here.”

  “That’s right,” he said, and slipped the cigarette back into the packet. He smiled, widening his eyes brightly. “Don’t ever start.”

  I THOUGHT that that first encounter would be the last of Heidi or Henrik, or whatever, but then her head appeared in a window of Linsly-Chit during my Chaucer class. A few days later, she swooped down a flight of stairs in Harkness, following me. She hailed me from across Elm Street and found me in the Sterling Library stacks. After one of my meetings with Dr. Raeburn, she was waiting for me outside Health Services, legs crossed, cleaning her fingernails.

  “You know,” she said, as we walked through Old Campus, “you’ve got to stop eating ramen. Not only does it lack a single nutrient but it’s full of MSG.”

  I wondered why she even bothered, and was vaguely flattered she cared, but I said, “I like eating chemicals. It keeps the skin radiant.”

  “There’s also hepatitis.” She knew how to get my attention—mention a disease.

  “You get hepatitis from unwashed lettuce,” I said. “If there’s anything safe from the perils of the food chain, it’s ramen.”

  “But do you refrigerate what you don’t eat? Each time you reheat it, you’re killing good bacteria, which then can’t keep the bad bacteria in check. A guy got sick from reheating Chinese noodles, and his son died from it. I read it in the Times.” With this, she put a jovial arm around my neck. I continued walking, a little stunned. Then, just as quickly, she dropped her arm and stopped walking. I stopped, too.

  “Did you notice that I put my arm around you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Next time, I’ll have to chop it off.”

  “I don’t want you to get sick,” she said. “Let’s eat at Commons.”

  In the cold air, her arm had felt good.

  THE PROBLEM with Commons was that it was too big; its ceiling was as high as a cathedral’s, but below it there were no awestruck worshippers, only eighteen-year-olds at heavy wooden tables, chatting over veal patties and Jell-O.

  We got our food, tacos stuffed with meat substitute, and made our way through the maze of tables. The Koreans had a table. Each singing group had a table. The crew team sat at a long table of its own. We passed the black
table. Heidi was so plump and moonfaced that the sheer quantity of her flesh accentuated just how white she was. The black students gave me a long, hard stare.

  “How you doing, sista?” a guy asked, his voice full of accusation, eyeballing me as though I were clad in a Klansman’s sheet and hood. “I guess we won’t see you till graduation.”

  “If,” I said, “you graduate.”

  The remark was not well received. As I walked past, I heard protests, angry and loud as if they’d discovered a cheat at their poker game. Heidi and I found an unoccupied table along the periphery, which was isolated and dark. We sat down. Heidi prayed over her tacos.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said.

  “Not in the God depicted in the Judeo-Christian Bible, but I do believe that nature’s essence is a spirit that—”

  “All right,” I said. I had begun to eat, and cubes of diced tomato fell from my mouth when I spoke. “Stop right there. Tacos and spirits don’t mix.”

  “You’ve always got to be so flip,” she said. “I’m going to apply for another friend.”

  “There’s always Mr. Dick,” I said. “Slurp, slurp.”

  “You are so lame. So unbelievably lame. I’m going out with Mr. Dick. Thursday night at Atticus. His name is Keith.”

  Heidi hadn’t mentioned Mr. Dick since the day I’d met her. That was more than a month ago and we’d spent a lot of that time together. I checked for signs that she was lying; her habit of smiling too much, her eyes bright and cheeks full so that she looked like a chipmunk. But she looked normal. Pleased, even, to see me so flustered.

  “You’re insane! What are you going to do this time?” I asked. “Sleep with him? Then when he makes fun of you, what? Come pound your head on my door reciting the collected poems of Sylvia Plath?”

  “He’s going to apologize for before. And don’t call me insane. You’re the one going to the psychiatrist.”