Being Henry David

by Cal Armistead

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I take a huge gulp of soda to wash down the lump in my throat.

  “Yeah, you do. You’re scared shitless, but you still figure being on the streets is better than being at home.”

  Jack stuffs another bite of cheeseburger into his mouth and pokes a finger at my chest. “You can’t bullshit me, ’cause I’m the same as you,” he says with his mouth full. I’m nothing like you, I want to tell him, taking in his filthy clothes and the dark smudges under his eyes from dirt or lack of sleep. But what if I am a runaway, and things were so terrible where I came from, I blocked them from my memory? My fingers seek out that sore spot on my head under my hair, with its dried blood and goose-egg lump. What happened to me?

  “I’ve heard all the stories. Let me guess yours.” He looks me up and down. “Don’t tell me. You’re a foster kid who aged out of the system.”

  I shrug, not sure what else to do.

  “Wait, wait, I got it,” Jack says. “You did something, didn’t you?”

  The lump on my head begins to throb.

  “Ah, we’re getting close,” Jack crows. “What’d you do, break into a house? Steal a car?”

  Sweat breaks out on my upper lip.

  “Oh, I know. Maybe you killed somebody.”

  He laughs after he says maybe you killed somebody, loving his own crazy joke, and I try to join in, but my face is frozen. My pulse hammers in my ears and something dark lurches in my chest like a beast waking from a deep sleep. A wave of dizziness breaks over me and I grip the edge of the table so I won’t fall off the chair.

  “Dude, you okay?” Jack’s thin face drifts in and out of focus.

  A trickle of sweat trails between my shoulder blades. I wipe my upper lip with the back of a shaky hand. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “You looked like you were about to have a seizure or something,” Jacks says. “You one of those epileptics?”

  I take deep breaths, needing hits of oxygen. “Just dizzy, that’s all.” My mouth is desert-dry, so I grab my soda and gulp it down. Slowly, I feel my heart and breathing return to normal, and I sense the black thing in my chest (what the hell was that?) hunker down and go quiet.

  Jack squints at me, but then jerks to attention like a deer smelling a predator, turning toward the entrance of the restaurant. The two transit cops I met earlier are standing there. Their glances sweep the room and lock in on us. They start toward us, and Jack freezes. Red hitches up his pants over his belly.

  “You back again, Jack?” asks the cop with the mustache. He smiles, but the grin looks more menacing than friendly.

  Jack slouches down in his chair. “Just enjoying a delicious meal, officer, like any other paying customer. No law against that, is there?”

  “No, but if you overstay your welcome, we’ll have another conversation. Understand?”

  Jack nods, his eyes sleepy. “I most certainly do, officer.”

  Mustache Cop’s gaze trails over to me. “You enjoying that book, kid? You seizing the day?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, I can see that. Just watch yourself with Jack here. You look like a good kid, and I don’t want his influence rubbing off on you.” His eyes drill into mine, like he’s trying to extract something.

  “Yes, sir.” I say again. Lame.

  Finally, without another word to us, the cops finish surveying the restaurant, then seeming satisfied, they leave, radios crackling in their wake.

  “I hate those guys,” Jack murmurs to me. “They seem to like you, though. Must be the preppy kid look you’ve got going on. And those running shoes. Bet they cost you like two hundred bucks.”

  I examine my innocent gray sneakers as if they hold some story they can tell me about myself. Jack looks too.

  “Is that why you talked to me?” I ask him. “You think I’m some rich kid?”

  “Not at all,” Jack says, his blues eyes all wide. “I talked to you because I could see you were lost and needed a friend.” He stands up and tucks the second cheeseburger in the pocket of his green army jacket. “Let’s go. I got a place where we can crash for a couple hours.”

  Jack starts walking toward an exit and I stay frozen in my seat, not knowing what to do. When he notices I’m not following, he turns and stares at me, annoyed.

  “Look, it’s past midnight in New York City, Hank. You really want to be here at Penn Station all alone with the crazies?”

  Somebody else might have said, you go ahead, I’ll stay here. Somebody else might have trusted his gut, which was telling me Jack could only lead me to trouble. But I’m not somebody else, and I don’t have a better plan. Jack has decided to be my friend, and that’s all I’ve got. So I go with him.

  Out on the street, the sounds, smells, and lights of the city at night crash over me like a wave. Stale car exhaust. Glaring artificial light. Horns honk, people shout, and from far away a car alarm drones. The city itself is like some kind of huge, restless, living organism.

  Jack leads me through the charged air, turning left down one street, then another. The place is alive with people and noise, even though it’s past midnight. Taxicabs clatter by and honk for no apparent reason. A guy in a dirty black jacket sits on a milk crate playing an acoustic guitar, and I stop to watch his fingers fly across the frets, his right hand picking and strumming. A woman drops a dollar bill into his open guitar case. Jack comes back and grabs my arm just as I empty out the coins in my pocket.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “He was really good.”

  In spite of the bombardment of noises and smells, I memorize every turn, including two more lefts onto smaller streets, just in case I need to find my way back to the train station.

  “Where you taking me?” I say at last.

  “Relax, already. We’re almost there,” Jack says.

  One more turn, and we walk down a narrow alley littered with scraps of wood and rusty pipes. A light shines down onto a big green Dumpster at its end.

  “Home sweet home,” says Jack.

  “What, you live in a Dumpster?”

  “Behind it, prep boy. They’re doing renovations on the second floor, so it’s full of construction stuff. You wouldn’t believe what they throw away.”

  Behind the Dumpster, I see a lean-to shack made of broken slabs of wood and sheets of plastic, propped up against the brick wall like a crooked little fairy tale house.

  Jack goes over to the shack and pounds on a slab of cracked drywall that makes the roof. Colored beads hang from the front of the shack. Apparently somebody tried to decorate. “Hey, Nessa, you home?”

  There’s a rustling inside the shack, and a girl emerges from behind a ragged patchwork quilt serving as a door. Her hair is long and black, and she has heavy makeup smeared around her pale eyes.

  “Hey, Jack,” Nessa slurs, either sleepy or wasted.

  “How’d it go tonight?”

  Nessa shakes her head and tugs at her huge gray sweatshirt. “Not so good.” Her legs are skinny, bird legs in thick black tights. She’s probably fourteen or fifteen years old, but even with all that makeup, she looks like a little girl. She catches a glimpse of me, hovering there behind Jack.

  “Who are you?” she asks, looking me over with huskydog blue eyes.

  “I’m Hank.”

  “Cool. You’re cute,” she says and gives me this sweet smile.

  Jack ducks into the shack, leaving Nessa and me standing there. I wish I knew how to turn the volume down on the sadness in this girl’s eyes. I wish I could take her out of this dark, smelly alley and tuck her away someplace safe.

  “Uh, thanks,” is all I can think of to say. “So are you.”

  Brilliant.

  Jack comes out carrying two blankets and a pack of cigarettes. He offers me a thin wool blanket. It’s gray, full of holes and smells like mothballs and piss, but the night is chilly, so I take it, hoping it’s not crawling with bugs or something. Wrapped up
in the blankets, we lean back against the Dumpster. Nessa nestles between us, and Jack hands her the cheeseburger he saved from our snack at the terminal.

  “Aww, thanks, sweetie,” she says. “I’m starving.”

  “Hank bought it.”

  “Then thank you, sweetie,” she says to me, and I nod as if it were my idea, wishing it was. She chews the first bite with her eyes closed like it’s a gourmet meal instead of a cold, greasy burger.

  I take the cigarette Jack offers, poke its tip in the flame of his lighter, and puff. Smoke in my lungs feels familiar. I must be a smoker, then. We sit there for a while just smoking together, and something inside me relaxes for the first time.

  “Check out the moon,” Nessa says.

  It takes a moment to see it past the glaring lights of the city, but then, there it is, big and full, glowing orange like an omen. Good or bad? I wish I knew.

  I look at Nessa’s pretty profile as she tilts her head to look at the sky. “Makes me think of this book I really liked when I was a little kid,” she says, her voice quiet. “I think it was called Goodnight Moon.”

  Jack snorts. “Yeah, except out here, it would go something like, ‘goodnight junkies, goodnight rats, goodnight Dumpster, goodnight trash.’”

  Nessa smiles at him, but her voice is still dreamy. “Remember that book, Hank?”

  “Nope,” I say.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Jack says. “Every kid knows that book.”

  I shake my head and take another drag of the cigarette. “I don’t remember.”

  We smoke in silence for a bit, so quiet I can hear faraway sirens and the crackle of our cigarette paper burning down.

  “Mom used to read it out loud,” Jack says, still looking up at the moon. “That was before she died and Dad stopped caring whether I went to school or not or whether I was alive or dead. Until the day he came after me with a shovel. Then I was pretty sure he wanted me dead.” Jack gives me a sidelong look and this weird smirk. “Whatever. Everybody out here has a story.” Jack swipes at his face with the wool blanket. “So what’s yours?”

  Nessa stands up and stretches. “Leave him alone. Can’t you see he doesn’t want to talk about it?” She rubs her eyes with fists like a sleepy child, further smearing her makeup. “I gotta sleep. Are you going to stay with us a while, Hank?”

  “Maybe a little while,” I say, though I have no idea. A part of me wants to stick around, like I have this crazy idea I can protect her. Nessa says good night and disappears into the shack.

  “Everybody has a story,” Jack says, as if there’d been no interruption in our conversation. “No matter how bad it is, I guarantee I’ve heard it before.”

  “I doubt it.” I stare up at the moon for a long time. Jack and Nessa have taken me in, the only friends I have on this planet. The night is gentle, holding its breath, and at least for this moment in time I feel safe. So I decide to tell him. “My story is that I can’t remember my story.”

  “Say what?”

  “I don’t remember anything.” I lower my voice. “Not my name, not where I came from. I woke up at the train station a couple hours ago, just before I met you, and that’s the first thing I can remember.”

  “Seriously?” The glow of Jack’s cigarette hovers motionless. “You mean, like you’ve got amnesia?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess so.”

  “Wow.”

  “I mean, I know stuff. Like, before I ate it, I knew cheeseburgers tasted good. I know about money and train stations, that I live in the United States of America and speak English. I know general stuff about the world. But I don’t remember anything, you know, about myself.”

  “Hmmm.” Jack purses his lips as he contemplates this news. “That is so messed up, dude.” Then his face twitches into a smile.

  “I know.” Recognizing the weirdness of my situation, I smile back. When Jack starts laughing, at first I’m a little pissed, but then his laugh is so damn contagious, I’m laughing too. Something in my chest feels lighter with the laughing. Sharing my secret makes it less scary somehow.

  “So Henry David isn’t your name.”

  “Nope.” I pull Walden out of my waistband and hold it up to show Jack. “I just found this book next to me when I woke up, so I used the name of the guy who wrote it. Other than the clothes I’m wearing, it’s the only thing I own. I think it must be a clue.”

  Jack shrugs and takes a deep drag of his cigarette.

  “Either that or some random person left it at the train station and you just happened to find it.”

  My jaw clenches. “No way,” I say. “It’s a clue.”

  “Take it easy,” he says. “Okay, it’s a clue.” He stubs out his cigarette on the bottom of his sneaker. “So what are you gonna do? Go on national TV and be Amnesia Boy? The media loves that shit. You’ll be famous by dinnertime tomorrow.” From far away, we hear a police siren. “Just don’t say anything about me,” Jack says. “I like to keep a low profile. Way low.”

  “Yeah, I think I need to do the same.”

  Maybe you killed somebody.

  Keeping a low profile is about the only thing I’m sure of. That, and the fact that I woke up with this book next to me. Therefore, it has to mean something. I touch the cover picture of pine trees at the edge of a lake. That’s where I want to be.

  “Okay, Hank, or whatever your name is, I need to check in on Nessa and crash for a couple hours. Grab some drywall and make yourself a little shelter. Cool?”

  “Cool. I’ll be fine.”

  Jack salutes, then disappears into the shack. He andNessa whisper for a while, then there are soft sounds that could be laughing or crying. After that, silence.

  Staring up at the moon, I try to feel sleepy, but now that I’m alone, my mind is racing and I’m wide awake with my heart hammering against my ribs. There are skittering sounds on the other side of the Dumpster, probably rats. The wind shifts, and even though the Dumpster is mostly full of construction trash, I get a strong whiff of rotting food and random nastiness. I pull a huge plank of particle board out of a pile next to the Dumpster, lean it against the back wall of the alley, and huddle underneath like it can keep me safe. I try to stop my hands from shaking.

  To calm my twitchy brain, I take a little internal inventory, try to piece together what I know about myself so far. Okay, so I’m a teenage guy, probably somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old. Hair, black; eyes gray. Not bad-looking either. There was only that quick glance in the men’s room mirror, but I know that much. I like burgers and soda, and I might be a smoker, although that cigarette left a weird taste in my mouth that kind of makes me want to gag. I have a bump and a cut above my forehead that stings if I touch it. I get real fidgety around the cops.

  And there’s a black beast inside me that doesn’t want me to know stuff. It guards my memory, clawing at my insides and going for my throat if I get too close. So why did the beast wake up when Jack said, maybe you killed somebody? Is that what it won’t let me remember?

  The black thing in me surges again, and I feel a pounding headache coming on. “Stop,” I whisper. “Go away.” But it crouches there, waiting to creep closer so it can attack, now while I’m alone and vulnerable. No. There’s a light shining down from the side of the building, bright enough to read by. So I open my book, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and that’s what I do.

  This Thoreau guy wrote it in the mid-1800s, so the writing is a little weird for me at first. I have to read some paragraphs over a few times to figure out what he’s trying to say. But then I start to get into it.

  Walden, as it turns out, is named after some pond in the woods in a town called Concord, Massachusetts. Henry David Thoreau was in his late twenties when he went there to get away from the world and live alone in a little cabin for a couple years. He listened to the birds, walked around the pond, and just thought about stuff. Living off the grid, whatever grid there was in 1845.

  Instead of the stink of the alley and the echo o
f sirens and honking taxicabs, while I’m reading the book it’s actually like there’s fresh air rustling leaves in a tree over my head. I hear the water and birds singing. Somehow, I know this place in Henry’s book. I can remember being outside like that, in the woods, near a lake. It’s familiar in a way I feel to my bones. It’s the closest feeling so far to home.

  3

  “Jack, you son of a bitch. Get out here!”

  I lurch awake, and for a long blank moment I have no idea where I am or what woke me up. Walden lies next to me on the ground, where it fell when I went to sleep. There’s a good dream lingering behind my eyes and I grasp at it, but it vanishes before I can remember. My heart sinks when I realize where I am. The alley looks even dirtier and more depressing in the first white light of morning.

  Then I realize what woke me up. Some guy is shouting in the alley.

  “Jack!”

  There’s a confused rustle inside Nessa’s shack, and then Jack emerges, squinting in the morning light, hair sticking up all over his head. He looks past me at someone on the other side of the Dumpster where I can’t see.

  “What are you doing here?” Jack calls out.

  “I want my money back.”

  I untangle myself from my blanket and peer around the edge of the Dumpster, watching Jack approach some skinny, bent-over guy standing in the alley, hands fisted at his sides. He wears a filthy flannel shirt and his face is like an old man’s, all sunken in against his skull. The guy from the train station men’s room.

  He reaches into the pocket of his shirt, pulls out a plastic baggie, and waves it in Jack’s face.

  “I don’t know what you cut this with, Jack, but it’s not right. I want my cash back.”

  “I don’t have the money, Simon. I already gave it to Magpie.”

  “So get it back from Magpie.”

  A pause. “I can’t do that.”

  Simon shoves Jack against the Dumpster. Jack’s skull slams against the metal, clangs like a muffled bell.

  “This is bullshit, Jack.”

  Jack sits crumpled on the ground, holding the back of his head. I help him to his feet, then turn to face Simon. “Leave him alone,” I say. My voice is steady but my heart slams against my ribs like a manic bird in a cage.