I cleaned up as best I could and hid the soiled towels in the back of the closet. The maid wouldn’t make up the room until midday tomorrow, many hours after I had fled the halfway house that was the hotel and faded into the lower depths of the city. Aside from some brown towels that would probably never be able to be used again, there would be no trace of a man who had once existed on credit reports and payroll records.
It was almost noon. Since I hadn’t eaten breakfast, my stomach was starting to demand recognition. I looked around the hotel room to make sure everything was all right. Then I left the room and closed the door quietly behind me.
I walked through the lobby with tentative steps. The morning clerk was not there. I exhaled when I realized I had been holding my breath. No one looked at me. No one noticed the radical transformation that had taken place in the appearance of one of the hotel guests. No one commented on the fact that a graying, hairy, bearded man with a heavy step had checked in this morning and was now nowhere to be seen. In his stead, there appeared to be a much younger clean-shaven man with vigor in his gait and a more wholesome aspect in his demeanor. He looked much more like a freshly-minted member of the Christian Right than a superannuated hippie with vaguely leftist overtones.
The drizzle had stopped but the sky was still overcast. The August air hung hot and humid. I walked over to Seventh Avenue and headed north. There was a coffee shop on the east side of the avenue between Thirtieth and Thirty-first Streets. I entered and took a seat on a stool at the counter. It was as typical as a Greek coffee shop could be, with murals of the Parthenon on the walls and a drawing of Athena in all her glory on the menu cover. The place was almost empty because the midday crowd hadn’t started drifting in. The waitress put a laminated menu on the counter in front of me and said “Coffee, Mister?” at the same time.
I turned my gaze up and looked deep into her eyes. “Yes, thank you very much. I would really love a cup of coffee.”
It wasn’t the words. It was the sound the words made. Everything seemed so new, even though I’d been through this transaction maybe a million times and so have you. Ordering a cup of coffee in a luncheonette. It was the unexpected gesture. Looking into a stranger’s eyes when you weren’t invited to do so. The shock of intimacy when it wasn’t anticipated. One doesn’t look into the eyes of strangers. It isn’t polite. It is intrusive.
Our eyes locked. There was that flash that happens when a man’s and a woman’s eyes meet. She moved her head back imperceptibly. Then she dropped her gaze. The moment of electricity was gone. She was once more just a tired, middle-aged woman in a thankless job.
But I felt as if I was in the throes of a drug-induced high. Perhaps it was my clean smooth face absorbing unfiltered air for the first time in an oxygen overdose. Every color seemed brighter, every sensation enhanced, every smell more pungent. I was like an actor in a psychedelic play where every action was a little bit off.
She had experienced it too. I was not simply a nameless, faceless customer to be served. I was a flesh and blood person who had recognized that she was the descendent of an amphibian who had crawled out of the primordial muck just as my ancestors had. I knew she was a real person and not an automaton who served tables.
She nodded at me and poured a cup of coffee very slowly. “Would you like milk or cream for that?” she said in a way that indicated she really cared whether I wanted milk or cream.
My first impulse was to say cream, but I knew those days were gone. There was also the matter of my immediate and inordinate craving for a plate of crisp bacon and eggs. These were vestiges of my former identity. My diet from now on would consist of a third-world subsistence regimen of casaba and soy and yam. My diet had to be changed to conform to my new surroundings.
“Do you have skim milk?” I asked her.
She shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry. We have only regular milk or cream.”
She had a dusky look about her. Dark hair and dark eyes. She was Mediterranean but she wasn’t Mediterranean. She wasn’t Spanish or Italian or Greek. There was some vague hint of the Orient about her.
“Where are you from?” I said.
She gave me a little smile. It wasn’t a welcoming smile. It was simply a smile because I had asked. “I am from Morocco.”
“How long have you been here?”
She was surprised by the question. “Here? In the restaurant?”
I shook my head. “No. Here, in this country.”
She nodded in acknowledgement. No matter how long a foreigner has been here, there are always small misapprehensions in tone or meaning. “Almost ten years,” she said. “Next year I will go back to my country.”
“I see. That’s very good for you.” Why had she imparted this little piece of information to me? Was it just to make conversation, or did it have a deeper significance? I let the matter drop.
“OK, then. I’ll have regular milk,” I said. I picked up the menu and scrutinized it. “What do you recommend for a healthy meal?”
“There are many healthy things on the menu. What kind of food do you want? Italian? Greek?”
The suggestion of a Greek dish sounded appealing. I had never eaten a Greek meal because no one had ever offered it to me before. If I was going to be from Troy, I would have to learn more about Greece since Troy had fought Greece in the Trojan War. There was a great deal I had to learn.
“What kind of Greek dishes are healthy?” I asked her.
She leaned forward and put her finger on top of the menu I was holding and pulled it down toward her. She let her finger slide over to the right side of the menu and pointed at a box that was headed GREEK SPECIALTIES. The box had a pillar on each side. I wasn’t sure if the pillars were Doric, Ionic or Corinthian, but I was pretty sure they were Greek. They would have to be Greek, wouldn’t they? Otherwise, what was the point?
“Try Spanakopita,” she said. “It is spinach pie. It is very good, very tasty. You will like it.”
“Do you like it?”
She nodded for emphasis. “Yes, very much. I always take it.”
“Good,” I said. “Then I will take it too.” This wasn’t the way I would ordinarily have phrased it, but I had to start becoming familiar with the speech patterns of the immigrants. It was necessary to become comfortable with the customs and transactions that these newcomers had brought to the shores of this fortunate land.
I’d once seen a man from Africa and a man from China on a street corner in midtown Manhattan. They were gesticulating wildly as they tried to communicate in pidgin English. But the hand motions weren’t needed because they understood each other perfectly, even though neither one spoke English as I knew it. They were involved in some sort of intricate business negotiation and the process was as stylized as a Noh play and as dramatic. It didn’t matter whether you spoke Swahili or Mandarin. The lingua franca of our age was expressed in those old guttural Anglo-Saxon syllables of Western Europe which demonstrated that the barbarians had, in the long run, defeated the Romans. World domination had finally been achieved through insidious cultural indoctrination.
The spinach pie was unusual, but very tasty, as the waitress had promised. It had some sort of flaky dough covering. The spinach had a strange consistency, which I attributed to a kind of cheese that had been mixed in and with which I wasn’t familiar. I rolled it around on my tongue and savored the taste and the consistency. So this would be my introduction to the cuisine of the third world. Did the ancient Greek hoplites consume large portions of spinach pie and thus gain the strength necessary to defeat their Trojan adversaries on the field of battle? And what did the Trojans eat that caused them to lose?
The portion was more than I could finish. I put down my knife and fork and pushed the plate away. I took a final sip of coffee.
The waitress looked at my plate and frowned. “You did not like it?”
“Oh, no. It was very good. I liked it.”
“Would you like something more?” she asked.
“That
was enough for me. Please give me the check.”
She nodded and put the check on the counter, her hand still holding it. I reached over and let my fingertips rest on the back of her hand for a moment. Her skin was cool. The very coolness sent a shock up my spine that culminated at the base of my skull. It was a fitting end to our relationship and our contract for food and service.
How many small unwritten contracts were transacted each day? Every time you ate in a restaurant, every time you got into a taxi, every time you sat in a barber’s chair for a haircut, there was an implicit unspoken agreement that you would pay a certain amount upon the completion of the transaction. In a small percentage of the agreements, there was a dispute. The food was not good, the haircut was unflattering. And, in one way or another, these disagreements were worked out. But this was a very small fraction. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the contracts were honored. This was the glue that held a society together. The social contract that said we will pay at the conclusion of a transaction. Imagine the friction to the economy if we had to have a written contract, no matter how short, at the initiation of a meeting of the minds. People had to trust one another. People had to believe the other party to the unspoken and unwritten agreement would carry out his part in good faith.
I left her a generous tip and paid the bill at the cashier. I now felt thoroughly Hellenized by the food and the surroundings of the coffee shop. With renewed energy, I continued my walk up Seventh Avenue until I reached Thirty-fourth Street and then turned west, past Macy’s and the crowds of midday shoppers, sweaty but unbowed in their quest for the perfect unnecessary purchase.
The smells that assaulted my nose from the sidewalk pushcart vendors were almost unbearable in the midday heat, especially since I had eaten more than I should have. There was the odor of frying onions and greasy sausages mixing with the nauseatingly sweet scent of sugar-coated nuts and roasted lamb gyros. I navigated my way through the wet mass of humanity that clogged the streets, trying to stay as far as possible from the food carts as I walked up Eighth Avenue.
Ashok’s store was even more packed with cartons of merchandise than the last time I was there. It was almost impossible for a westerner of ordinary girth moving sideways to wedge his way between the boxes. I tried to move toward the back of the store, slowly advancing and sucking up my gut as I went. When I got to where the little old man stood, he turned to stare at me. There were two other Indian men with him. They looked at me also. The sitar music, timeless as usual, played in the background. The air conditioning was feeble, but it was better than being in the bowels of Bombay.
The old man’s words were cold. “How may I be of service to you?”
“I came to do my photo ID card,” I said breathlessly.
He looked at me skeptically. “I do not understand you.”
“You know.” I winked at him.
That didn’t seem to have any meaning for him. He turned to the other men and said something in Hindi that sounded like arregan and which caused them to laugh. I was starting to get an unpleasant feeling in my stomach. It may have been from the excess of spinach pie or it may have been because I wasn’t getting the response I expected. So far, everything had gone well. Was there an immutable law that said every plan must have a snag?
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t you remember me? “
He shook his head. It was a slow side to side motion that didn’t stop. Like one of those little dolls you see on the dashboard of a car. It was an eternal negative, serene but unyielding.
I put my hand on his frail stooped shoulder. He moved away from me.
“You have to remember me. Don’t you remember our agreement?” My tone bordered on desperation. This wasn’t going very well, at all. I felt as if I was in one of those nightmares where you can’t make other people understand you and your life depends upon it. You try to speak, but the words come out in an incomprehensible babble or they don’t come out at all.
The other men stared at me through narrowed eyes. To them, I must have seemed the embodiment of the British raj, white man’s burden, and all that. Here was a tall occidental male demanding recognition, thrusting his need into the face of an ancient civilization which stared back with untroubled equanimity.
The little old man lifted his face so I could see those blackened sockets. “I am sorry, my friend, but I do not know you. I have never seen you before this moment.”
“Wait, Ashok,” I said. “I used to have long gray hair and a beard. Don’t you recognize me?”
His response was a little less negative. “No, I do not believe I know you.”
“Wait,” I begged. “My name is going to be Tony Mendes. You made me ten years younger."
The two Indian men next to me looked on in amazement at this torrent of nonsense that flowed from the white man’s mouth. What must they have thought of the state of western education and mental health?
But this time Ashok’s eyes widened a little. His head swayed from side to side. He said something to the two men and they responded with a word like acha that sounded like a small sneeze and then they took their leave of him and disappeared between the corrugated cartons.
The sitar music stopped. The store was suddenly very quiet.
“I did not know you,” the little old man said. “You look quite different from the last time we were speaking.”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. I’m a new man. Reborn.”
Ashok smiled and his face wrinkled up. “That is excellent. You do not look melancholy the way you did last time. It pleases me to see you happy.”
The sitar music started again. Chords and twangs, but this time the music was accompanied by a high-pitched female voice.
The little old man’s head swayed from side to side. “Come with me to the back,” he said.
I followed his slight hunched body between the large brown boxes. The dimly-lit back room was pungent with the aromas of Indian food. There were aluminum take-out packages of chick peas and spinach and flat bread spread out on the small desk. I stepped carefully between the porno videos and electronic toys on the floor. Ashok turned and motioned for me to stand in front of a blank spot on the wall.
“Please,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I will take a photograph of you. You should look serious, but not worried."
I laughed. “That’s a very fine line to distinguish between the two.”
He struggled to move a tripod with a Polaroid camera into position. The tripod was almost as tall as he was. It took him ages to get the tripod where he wanted it. Then he jiggled it back and forth until it stood on top of an X mark on the filthy floor. He adjusted the camera and peered into it several times. Then he made a motion with his hand to indicate that I should move slightly to my right and back toward the wall. His delicate hand shook with the tremors of old age.
I did as I was instructed. I glared into the all-seeing eye of the Polaroid and tried to will myself into the persona of Tony Mendes, the new incarnation of Bartleby, the scrivener who preferred not to. Not to be a part, not to participate, not to partake. Who preferred to be apart.
The flash startled me. My eyes closed.
Ashok saw it. “This is not good. You must keep your eyes open. You are wasting film.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting the flash.”
He shook his head at me. “When you stand in front of a camera, you must always expect the flash.”
The words sounded like a saying from A Book of Five Rings. The wisdom of the ages. I almost laughed.
The old man pulled the photo from the camera and studied the picture with an expression of disapproval. He held it close to his face. His eyes blinked slowly in the dim light. Then he came up to me and handed me the photo. “This photograph is no good. You should be more careful, so as not to waste money. I cannot use this photograph for your card.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I won’t blink next time.”
“Very well. I will take another picture. You
can see I do not like to waste money.”
“That’s pretty obvious,” I said.
The old man looked into the Polaroid again. His hand fluttered in my direction. “I will count to three. When I say “three” I will push the button and the flash will go off. Please do not blink this time.”
“OK,” I said. “I’m ready. I won’t blink.”
I blinked rapidly a few times while I waited for his count.
“One…two…three.”
The flash went off.
My eyes were open.
Perfect.
I was frozen in the bright light and preserved in amber forever as a specimen of a species of risk-takers. Because what I was doing was as risky as bungee-jumping without a cord tied to my body. I was going over a cliff with no idea of what lay below me. I was aware of the risks and afraid of what might happen but I just didn’t care any more.
Ashok pulled the photo from the camera. He scrutinized the picture carefully and then smiled in evident satisfaction. “This time it is much better. Your eyes are open and you look serious but not worried. You are no longer melancholy. You look younger and healthier.”
I wanted to kiss him. But I knew, in certain societies, that was frowned upon. So I restrained myself. I took a step forward and said, “How long will it take you to make the license?”
He glanced down at the picture in his hand. “It will not take long. Please be so kind as to go to the front of the store and wait for me there. I will be with you presently.”
I was surprised by the fact that the old man would let me stay unattended in his shop, but I didn’t have to worry. When I reentered the store, a young man appeared as if by magic and nodded in greeting to me. His skin was darker than Ashok’s, but his features bore a family resemblance. He was obviously the watcher. Even I knew that. You see, when you go into a Korean or Indian store, there is a man whose only function is to stand with his arms crossed, scrutinizing the patrons so they don’t succumb to the temptation to expropriate items of merchandise that don’t belong to them. This springs from the mindset that has long been conditioned to believe that wages are cheap but property is expensive.
Left No Forwarding Address Page 7
