by Jim Nisbet
TEN
THE FLAG HAS BEEN THERE FOR SIX DAYS. ONE DAY TO GO. YOU shouldn’t go to work, the smart money said, not for a while, let alone tomorrow or next week. Maybe not even this year. I gotta have a drink, you say, looking at the flag. It’s not a flag, actually, just a bit of rag threaded through a corner at the far end of the chain link fence, right next to the sign that says No Bicycles, No Pedestrians, No Hitchhiking. It almost looks as if the wind could have deposited it there, just like the rest of the trash all around it; but in fact it’s threaded through and around the corner in such a way as to leave human intervention unquestionable. At least take a month off, maybe even a year off. Let’s ride the rails down to Santa Barbara, check out some sun for a change. This perpetual winter they got around here is getting me down. After forty years? Don’t you think it’s about time? You talk like you weren’t around for that dream last night. I was there. But hey, it’s only since we found that refrigerator carton that you’ve been able to dream at all. Snug as a louse in year-old long johns. Who wouldn’t dream? Why is it always ‘we’ when it comes to finding refrigerator cartons, and ‘you’ when it comes to dreaming? The super-ego doesn’t allow dreaming. Dreaming is counterproductive to the interests of the Combine. Dreaming is left up to the id. The superego is in charge of refrigerator cartons. Thanks for the softball question. What’s with the moving legs? We’re going to lose this carton. It could be pouring rain and we’d be snug for a month. Best cardboard in the lower forty-eight. Only those boxes the fishermen use for ice in Alaska are superior. Hey. Speaking of Alaska—. We’ll find another. The Combine breeds refrigerator cartons like year-old long johns breed lice. Like ids breed superegos. Like ids breed psychotics, you mean. Can a person simultaneously contribute to the efficiency of the Combine and not be psychotic? Are you kidding? They have their own newsletter. Chat room. Forum. Chatter forum. Must be loud in there. Mostly it’s about blocking weirdos. Here’s Market Street already. Take Cyril Magnin to O’Farrell and transect the Tenderloin. To see how the other half resuscitates. You got to bear down, pal. Are you sure about this? One’s thirst informs one’s destiny. Walking is good exercise, and exercise is good for thinning the lipids. What did they tell you at the VA? Start thinning your lipids or we’ll take off that leg and use it for an ashtray—which reminds me: no smoking. Straight-up medical advice, maggots to clean the wound, and spagum moss to stanch the bleeding. All the world is uppercase G God’s own dispensary. You got off the troop ship and walked Market to O’Farrell with your seabag on your shoulder and just about here is where your Zippo lighter fell out of the bag’s mouth and she picked it up and returned it to you. That’s how you met. Is it true love, after a tour of duty? Back when you used to kill people for free? No, no. All in the line of duty. You killed one for free just the other day. No, no. In the line of duty. You don’t even remember her name, do you. I never knew her name. No, no. The one who picked up the lighter. I never used to smoke, either. Listen. You can lie to the VA doctor about smoking, but you can’t lie to me. Don’t change the subject: what was her name? If you were in front of my eyes instead of behind them, I’d shift them away from you. Evasive, like. You know I don’t like that word, evasive. Yes, yes, the smart money said tiredly, you like to confront the world head-on. When you look up that term in the dictionary, the smart money pointed out, the usage example is a remark by one Henry A. Kissinger. “I have wondered since whether it would have been wiser to meet the issue head-on.” My uppercase G God, you say, now he wonders about it. Which culture was it, you might explain to me, that Mr. Kissinger failed to smash head hyphen on? He was probably referring to his limited freedom in traveling abroad due to various international arrest warrants issued by various legal entities throughout the developed world. A little fucking late for certain blighted canopies, you adduce bitterly. You still haven’t told me her name, the smart money observes tartly. Okay, okay… I can’t remember it. Surely its somewhere, in your slough, and fecund, in the muck. Lingering like a doubt. You’re convinced this is a matter of destiny. Is that not uppercase D? Only if you over-rate it. Quod the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, “Marriage and hanging go by destiny.” Melancholy indeed. Well, the latter seems to be locked, in a matter of speaking. There’s the Mitchell Brothers Theater, likely the most famous and long-lived palace of porn in the lower forty-eight. Ah, Artie and Jim. Good Irish lads, the one killed the other, I’ve forgotten which. Slain and Able, as the great S. Clay Wilson used fondly and often to refer to them, the one dead, the other free to porn again. A veritable porn again Christian. Aren’t we the lively guest among the arts-as-practiced-by-entrepreneurs today. If you had a back I’d slap it. So many puns, so much money. Think of it. And there’s the old Ye Rose and Thistle. Another pornographic venue. The first Sam Shepard play I ever saw was upstairs over that bar. They had a little set of bleachers on casters, so they could move the audience around, if the dramaturge were so inclined. Like the bleachers. So inclined? So many puns, so much money. What a gig. Think of it. They sat maybe forty people, maybe four rows high, ten people wide. Could it have been five rows high, eight people wide? Thirty-eight plus two handicap, I believe is the fire code. Any more seats than that, your talking smoke detectors, clearly marked fire exits, panic hardware on the doors, independently circuited emergency lighting… When the show started, the dramaturge had to scamper downstairs and beg the bartender to turn off the jukebox for the duration. Every once in a while there’d be a fight about that, and the audience would have to rush downstairs to restore order. The ones eager to fight for art, that is. Not too many of those. Bit of an intellectual crowd. Pussies, you mean. You ordered a double Jameson rocks and nursed it, waiting at the bar for the rope over the narrow stair to be dropped so the audience could file up and take its seat, if there were just the one person. You still had the Zippo, mainly because of the habit you’d developed right away in the service, to while away the ninety percent of the time you spent waiting there, too, of snapping the lighter just so between the thumb and first two fingers of your left hand, which flipped open the lighter, and snapping the middle finger of your left hand over your thumb and against the serrated wheel, which scratched the flint, whose sparks lit the wick. With a flick of your wrist, the lighter closed and extinguished itself. Over and over again, you’d do this. One night, the bartender came over and offered to buy the drink if you’d stop fucking with your cigarette lighter. Music to my ears, you told him. There was always somebody around this habit would annoy, but usually they would offer to fight instead of bribe you. Do you remember the name of the show? Sure. Killer Head. And you said it wasn’t pornographic? No, I didn’t, but I will now. So many puns, so much—. It was a ten-minute monologue. Lights come up on a cowboy-looking guy strapped into a chair. Can’t remember whether it had casters on it. Can’t remember whether he was blindfolded, or hooded, but he might have been. I think he was. The setup reminded me of Beckett’s Endgame, that’s for sure. Clove, you know, in his black shades on a throne with casters. Anyway, the throne in Killer Head is an electric chair, the guy in the chair, who has no name, is waiting to be electrocuted, he’s all alone in the show, as in death, and he delivers himself of a ten minute monologue, all to do with breaking a horse using a martingale. Which is—? Doesn‘t make any difference. Sure, but—which is…? It’s an adjustable strap that connects a horse’s chin to the girth strap, in order to inhibit its tossing its head or, presumably, its rider. The cowboy delivers himself of this recondite squib about martingales, then—zap, he’s electrocuted, and blackout. That’s it? Show’s over. Huh. Where was this again? Right over there. Now a porn venue. Neighborhood’s full of them. Not a bad bar. Theater was upstairs. When? You have to think about this. I still had the lighter. From the service. So you still smoked. I never smoked. Look, you can lie to the doctor at the VA about your smoking, but I’m your superego, for chrissakes. Some of you is. What’s that? Some of you is my superego. And the rest of me? Pure asshole. That’s what it takes, to ride
herd on the id. Gee, haw, cut up Polk. Van Ness is unneccesarily thrashy. Eight lanes in two directions, buses… But, say, regardless of when you saw it, could you not regard the fact that you saw it at all as portentous? Of what? Of your destiny? Ah! You lick the envelope! In retrospect, you mean? Why, in prospect, even. In the moment, you mean? In that, as well as this. It’s like—it’s like you go to the phone to call someone, pick it up, and as you’re touching the tones a voice on the line asks what’s going on and, and—it’s the very person you were trying to contact! What is? Oh beloved, you say, serendipitous kismet! My lower-case g god, control yourself. You’re getting carried away. But—is it not spring? You look around, paranoid. I always become ill, you say with suspicion, at the change of season. What you perceive as illness, the smart money points out, others perceive as an elevation of the spirits. Lower-case s? you ask. The smart money has to think about this. Possibly, he finally allows. So what do they know, therefore, you are able to conclude. Ah, the Hemlock Bar. Conium & Cicuta, take your choice, my dear Sophocles, they will both short your circuit. No, that would be Socrates, I believe, who was condemned for corrupting the minds of Athenian youth. A worthy end, if you’re asking me, no matter the nationality, but I stand corrected. After all, one has read the Crito. Not a bad name for a law firm. So many declamations, so much money. Would that it were so. Everybody would be rich. Wherein the aforementioned and foredoomed Socrates lamely attempts to enforce the edict of reason over the hogwash of cultural values. That will be the day. A symptom of decadence, would not you think? What, reason? No, no, rather, the predominance of so-called cultural so-called values over so-called reason. You mean like, upper-case D Democracy? Precisely. The opinion of the many, versus the actual truth of the matter—triumphalism, in a word. The more I talk to you, the more I need a drink. Of hemlock? No! Of martini. If you had the choice, between the electric chair and hemlock, which would you chose? I would chose the middle way, the just path, the channel between the Scylla of hemlock and the Charybdis of electrocution—behold the martini. Which costs, now, six-fifty. Plus tip, et voilà hi ho, it’s off to work we go. Which brings us, by way of the far end of Polk Street, a veritable memory lane best left for another time as the mind is cleared for duty, and finally, west on Sacramento Street to the southeastern corner of Lafayette Park. Finally. That’ll be the day. The westerly is up, ruffling the neglected grass at the eastern end of the dog run. Nasturtiums quiver along the chainlink fence at the corner of the lower tennis court, and there’s a dirt path there, somewhat muddy always, despite the dry climate, which heads north along both tennis courts. Today there’s a teacher with a machine that launches green balls over the net in the direction of a young student, who willy-nilly bats them everywhere. A number of balls are to be seen in the long grass that falls abruptly from the path to the backs of various apartment buildings, which block any view of Gough Street but screen the park’s habitués from the noise of its incessant traffic. As you walk along the fence you stoop and toss balls over the top of it, exercise is good for your lipids. The tennis teacher, who is a young man and fit, bored but cheerful with his lot or vice versa, which in either case does not bear much scrutiny as work, though for it he is remunerated nonetheless, thanks you for the first one, dribbles with his racquet into submission such balls as come his way, there’s no rush, the others resume their willy-nillyness, and the court is littered with them. The machine has ceased to cough and now he hits a ball over the net to the little girl, a lob, I think they call it, and, watching this feckless performance, it’s hard to believe that organized sports pave the road to fascism, because, for one thing, this sport they’re disporting is barely organized. Maybe they agreed on a time, but that’s about it. And a price, and now we’re beginning to get organized. So maybe that’s it. That’s the crack in the door. But these thoughts, too, pass. There’s a little knoll to climb and now you’re in a clearing. There’s a woman with each elbow clasped in the hand of the opposite arm, and from one of the hands dangles the loop of a leash. She’s watching a dog as it sniffs its way among the various coyote and monkey flower bushes lining the perimeter of the clearing. A bluff overlooks the west side of this clearing, tall eucalyptuses tower above everything and their leaves clatter in the westerly like the syllables in clafouti. She allows herself a grimace in greeting, then returns her attention to her dog, not entirely, however, taking her eye off you. Hey, you want to say, I’m the guy who was lobbing tennis balls over the fence back there just now, to save that guy with the cabled sweater draped over his shoulders the trouble of having to exit the gate on the opposite side of the tennis court to trudge all the way around to the side of the hill and round up thirty or forty stray balls cause there’s no way that petulant child he’s being paid to keep out of her parent’s apartment for two hours would do it for him or even help him do it, so don’t be looking down your nose at me like I’m a formidably intimidating street person with no credentials, wherewithal or resources other than his feet and an innate ability to supplicate. Resculpt your demeanor, the smart money says, its a normal reaction to the likes of you. You’re right, I forget to recollect myself, you’d think I’d be used to it by now. Cringe onward. At the far end of the clearing there’s a path that rises through the hectoring eucalyptuses, into whispering tall pines, through which there comes into view a magnificent northerly vista of the San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz dead center, little ferryboats pursing their festive rhumb lines, framed by the proscinium of a pair of the most magnificent apartment buildings in San Francisco, along the north side of Washington Street, the tops of which feature stunning penthouses, no doubt, I’ve always been curious to visit them, and in fact waited in a car in the circular drive of one of them while a companion scored for heroin in one of them, in one or another of the epochs of the Quaternary Period, I think it was, more nostalgia, it must be true that the older one becomes the more the mind fills with the unnecessary detritus to be found uniquely on either side of the wake of time as experienced by the human mind, although one does wonder what any dog finds so interesting on either side of a given path, but stay on task, today is the day you contribute to the efficiency of the Combine if you but stay on task, and thus enable to yawn the Martini Gate to the Ancient City of Oblivia. There’s a bench from which to contemplate all these marvels, Alcatraz, the bay, the ferry boats, Marin County and the villas of Belvedere beyond the white caps tossed up by an ebb falling under the westerly. The bench is halfway along the path, as it meanders the shoulder of the park above Washington Street. And next to this bench is a trash can, incongruously, perhaps, because it usually smells of rotting sandwiches and bagged dog feces, but there it sits. And on the end of the bench closer to the garbage can, you take a seat. Its odor is nothing to you, who reek more forcefully than any but the rankest poubelle, and in fact in this circumstances acts as camouflage. You have the flag with you, unthreaded from the chainlink fence perhaps two hours ago, and now you attach the flag to the handle on the garbage can with a simple overhand knot, as if idly, as if someone had lost it and you’d found it and you’re leaving it conspicuously behind, in case its owner should think to look for it here. After contemplating the view for a while, you raise the lid on the can and have a look. The envelope is there, somewhat crumpled, and beneath two or three layers of bagged dog feces, the remains of bagged lunches—never any bottles or cans, which are retrieved by scavengers within an hour of their deposit. The envelope is addressed to somebody, somewhere. This address is meaningless. The envelope also has a return address, however, and it’s the address of the person whose photograph is to be found inside the envelope. That’s all. The five thousand dollars will be waiting in Union Square, folded into a newspaper, later, after one more step.
ELEVEN
THERE’S A HAWAIIAN BAR WAY OUT GEARY BOULEVARD WHERE oncologists go to relax. I’m not kidding. There’s a roof made out of pseudo-fronds over the bar, tiki chain-saw sculptures, leis draped over the light fixtures, and all the slack key guitar a cust
omer can stomach while downing some rum concoction and eavesdropping arcane persiflage concerning angiogenesis inhibitors etc. In fact it’s a lot like sitting in a café surrounded by people speaking a language you don’t speak. The effect is to permit the mind a great deal of space—in a word, the effect is desirable. It’s a long walk from Lafayette Park, nearly four miles. The way to enjoy it is to walk straight out Sacramento to Arguello, job left to Clement, then way all the way out Clement until you cross 38th Avenue, at which point you duck one block over to Geary and you’re there. Sacramento is boring, but there’s not much traffic. Clement, on the other hand, teems with synecdoches of every country in Asia. China and Japan are represented, of course. But also Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Russia, Korea, Thailand. There’s a bar with belly dancing and seventeen different kinds of raki from Israel, Turkey, Iraq—every country around the Mediterranean that brews booze… The savor is of unknown spices tinged with the reek of booze, of the backwash from yesterday’s eel tanks, of coffees and teas, of newsprint and fried electronics, of unknown vegetables on display in balsa crates or rotting in the gutter, of stores selling live koi and extended clown triggerfish and monkey-face eels. There’s even an excellent used bookstore, the largest in the city. Dim sum, catfish wraps, jicama and papaya salad, duck every which way including loose, Irish beer, Indian beer, Thai beer, Chinese beer, black Japanese beer on draft… That last five thousand dollars had you shitting blood before it was over with, the smart money reminds you as you’re crossing Sixth Avenue. Indeed, you reply, that was fresh. You stop to have a look at the bargain bins on the sidewalk in front of Green Apple Books. It was also three months ago. Cleared up right away. That’s not the way I remember it. If you can remember anything at all, it’s not gone forever. Hey, here’s everything Michael Connelly ever wrote. And Molière. Has it really been three months? No wonder I’m thirsty. When’s the last time you read a book. I’ve been reading ever since my computer died. You never had a computer. That’s right. How was it, exactly, that this binge mentality came about? If it hasn’t to do with erratic funding, I’m sure I don’t know. That fish tank store used to be an open-air newsstand. Had every periodical published in English, I think. Those were the days. How much money did you ever spend in there? I bought Time magazine there, once, just to read for myself the article about how taking LSD made people stare at the sun until they went blind. Oho, that was a good one. Makes the internet look like the Nether Pole of Probity. And you haven’t had a good laugh since. Three months circling the Culde-sac of Thirst would make Santa Claus humorless. Such a distant memory hardly qualifies as a binge, does it. Not if you can’t remember it. Three months! It’s not simple deprivation, it’s strict parole. It’s the difference between mere inconvenience and total derailment. And yet, with the latter you do flirt. And just exactly how far do you ever get, flirting? We’ve gotten as far as this Levantine grocery, here, which reeks of olives and fennel. It never ceases to amaze us that we can smell anything at all. One thing about the people on the sidewalk in this neighborhood, they don’t bat an eye at the odd blunderbuss of aroma. They probably think I’m comestible, in one way or another. Momentarily, at least. Long enough for you to slip past forever. Olfactory cloaking device. To wash or not to wash—that is to say, to put the olfactory cloaking device at risk—isn’t even a question. But to drink… That’s not a question either. Lookit that row of ducks. How do they get them to look like that? How do they get people to buy them when they look like that? You are not, I believe, the target audience. This entire street, as a matter fact, will continue merrily into the future without the like of you. Or even the dislike of you. You are invisible to them, a non-entity, precisely the definition of cipher. A zero. Zeroness. Zeroicity. All the easier to get by with. Not so much as a personal photograph on the internet. Almost impossible to affect. We could jog over to the park. I’m not jogging anywhere. Thinning your lipids today, that’s for sure. Look at the nice big picture window on the front of that supermarket across the street. Looks like they clean it every day. Indeed it does. So: are we being followed, or not? If we are, they’re more insipid than we. Probably wore their asses out with this four-mile route. We’re only three miles into it, the pussies. Unless… Unless what? Unless they already know where we’re going? What, so they can just wait for us there? Look, look, look, insists the smart money. I’m looking. How many people in this town do you think have heard about this Hawaiian bar where oncologists go to unwind? You have to shake your head. Damn few, if it’s an inside thing. But, you say, that’s precisely the kind of obscure detail a cop would pride himself on knowing. Just like you do, supposed the smart money. You have to nod your head. Damn, says the smart money. What? you say. You look and act just like you’re on the phone. Well I’m not on the phone, you say, as the blood rushes to your face, I’m just trying to be a perfectly normal paranoid schizophrenic whose mesolimbic flow of dopamine presents him with no prospect more diminutive than the odd if resplendent alcoholic stupor. Alcoholic stupor is not a co-morbid condition, the smart money observes calmly, like depression or anxiety or paranoia. No, you say, quite aloud, it’s a palliative! A perfectly normal-looking woman abruptly pulls a U-turn right in front of you, and power walks in the opposite direction. Seeing that the light is red at the intersection of 8th, she takes an unhesitant hard left and crosses Clement. The other two or three hundred people within earshot merely glower. Now look what you’ve done, the smart money says. The lifetime occurrence of substance abuse among your sort of fuckup is about forty percent. You have a better chance of committing suicide than the average cellist, who censuses the highest suicide risk of any desk in the string section, which in turn censuses the highest of any section in the orchestra, and your nervous system should have collapsed completely some ten or twelve years ago. You’re afraid of people, the open-air markets, any medicine you haven’t prescribed yourself, women, girls, boys, dogs, yogurt and steam-powered automobiles. There is a reflection in that window who seems inordinately interested in you, you say. Where? The smart money is immediately alert. It’s a Chinese-looking guy. He’s looking out the door of that medicine shop. So he is. But, all in all, everybody on the street has become aware of you, now that you’re shouting questions and answers at yourself. I want a drink. Did we drink that whole fifty bucks, the other… Was that yesterday? It was this morning. No, it was two weeks ago. But your theoretical Social Security check arrived just after, and you have not managed to drink it all up. So much for a fixed address. A little soup might do you a world of—. Potato chips at the bar will be sufficient, thank you. Hawaiian potato chips? Maybe two bags. Don’t you worry about how they increase your heart rate? I worry about how everything else doesn’t increase my heart rate. Life stimulates only the amygdallae. That guy’s Chinese, he probably runs that medicinal herb place, he might even be the doctor himself. He might have something that will help you. And before you know it, you are seated before a counter heaped with prepackaged herbal sachets, a pan scale, a cash register of course. The lower part of the counter is glass, and within it are all manner of medicaments satisfying to contemplate, chief among them a big flask of snake wine sealed with wax. The guy behind the counter asks you a number of questions designed to make you comfortable, designed to make you think this guy is really interested in your condition, concerned about you as an individual, and your chi energy. As he’s questioning you he’s got your left wrist in his right hand and three fingers of his left hand on the inside of your wrist, one on each pulse, two of which are unknown to Western medicine. There’s a very young girl on a stool behind the counter next to the guy, and she’s writing Chinese characters down one side of a page and back up the other side in a huge ledger of the sort you’d normally associate with double-entry bookkeeping, and she’s writing as fast as the questions come and your answers go. Age? Sixty-something. Smoke? Never got the habit. Must you continue to lie about that? the smart money says, just as the Chinese guy says, I think not. He says it in Chinese, however, and th
e girl writes it down. They think you’re not grokking the gist of these characters which, upside down, look like road-kill scorpions. But you’re so paranoid you’re speaking perfect Chinese. So the guy behind the counter, you realize, can tell that you used to smoke by the metabolic telegraphy available to his expertise via his fingertips. His fingertips gently knead the inside of your wrist until he periodically readjusts the relation of the three fingers to your three pulses, it’s like there are not a few figurative patterns he must assess. He adjusts them again, closes his eyes, and waits. The girl lifts her pen from the ledger. There comes a whine from your jejunum. Liver? he asks. No problem. I think otherwise, he replies, and she quickly writes it down. Blood in the urine? Only after a beating. How about in your stool? Did I ever piss blood in my stool? He does not dignify this with a response. Instead he waits. The pen hovers above the page. How did you know about the blood in the stool, you finally ask. He says something and the girl writes it down. Sleep? Not much. Through the glass on the countertop you can see the eyes of a snake, coiled amongst a number of his pickled ilk in the jar of liquor. While his brethren attend to other things, this one snake is watching you. What proof is that stuff? you ask aloud. The guy behind the counter ignores this. Gallstones, no, bladder infection, no, painful urination, no, shortness of breath, yes, a little. Medications? None. Unless you count alcohol. He nods. He counts alcohol, the smart money concludes. So do I, you say aloud. He releases your wrist and makes a little speech to the girl, who writes it all down. Strange they didn’t ask me my name, you realize, watching the figures reel down and up the page. It’s a very fat book and she’s more or less in the middle of it. A large rubber band corrals the previously filled pages. The girl looks up and says Three dollars. You’re startled. You blink. I beg her pardon, you say to nobody in particular. Three dollars, she repeats, closing the book. The Chinese guy leans down under the counter and produces a package covered in calligraphy, with a picture of Kuan Yin, maybe, and some gilded filigrees that look like brush-stroke bamboo leaves. He waits. The girl waits. Three dollars, they want, the smart money says, for whatever it is in that package. If it fixes the least little thing that is wrong with you, the smart money points out, that’s pretty cheap. If it even makes a dent, you agree, and you fork over three of the five singles in your singles stash, to be discovered when the coroner goes through your clothes. She takes the money and gives it to the guy and the guy hands her the package. She wraps the package up in two pages of a Chinese language newspaper, using a clever and very quick manipulation of folds to seal the package without tape or string, and hands it to you. Once a day, she says in English, same time every day. You take the package and stand up from the wooden stool and it’s only then that you notice that two women and an ancient old man have been patiently waiting while seated on a row of chairs immediately, claustrophobically against the wall behind you. You’re hardly past the first one when she takes her place on the stool, rolls up her sleeve, and places her wrist on the mousepad atop the countertop. The young girl turns a page in the big book and resumes her seat. A fourth person, an old man, turns sideways as he enters the narrow shop, so as to slip past you as you’re blocking the door. No visible reaction to your reek clouds his features. He puts each hand in its opposite sleeve and bows to the room in general before taking a seat. The round of perfunctory questions and murmured answers begins. You’re on the sidewalk. The sun is out and it’s uncustomarily warm for the Lake District. You’re in a daze, you realize, but it’s nothing to do with the weather. That guy, the smart money knows, that guy back there? That’s the first time you’ve been touched by another human being in… Maybe a year? you respond absently. I’ll bet it’s more like five, the smart money says. I can’t remember. It could be ten for all I know, you say. Or care. Oh? Then why do you feel so strange? the smart money says. Because it’s the first time anybody’s touched me in howsoever long, you’re the one who brought it up, you say, and it’s that simple. Did you see that snake? I saw snakes, plural. He flicked his tongue. Listen, the smart money suddenly shouts, don’t invent problems. Okay? You hold up the package. What are we supposed to do with this? Once a day, she said, whatever it is. What if I have to cook it, you say, what then? Guess you wasted three bucks, the smart money supposes. Maybe it’s something you’re just supposed to eat. You find yourself at Clement and 17th. There’s a municipal trash can on the corner, of the type that has a top and a door, so only the city can access the trash within. That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s a flawed theory. You put the package on the top of the trash can. You unwrap the outer layer. It smells sweet. Cloyingly sweet. You unwrap the inner layer. It’s a bar of soap, the smart money realizes. So it is, you say, not touching it. Rose-scented soap, the smart money guesses. I’ll be a son of a bitch, you say. You look back down Clement Street. The commercial strip has faded, it’s mostly residential now, with the odd grocery, yoga studio, and dry cleaner. The apothecary is ten or twelve blocks east. It isn’t worth it, that walk, just to get our money back. It’s ten blocks back, maybe twelve, a big fight maybe, maybe not, and then ten or twelve blocks back to where we started from. A total of twenty to twenty-two blocks of walking, plus the fight. A deal of energy. You touch your breast, where the envelope is stashed on top of the breast of your long johns and underneath both of your shirts, as well as the overcoat. There’s five grand, the smart money says, just waiting to be earned. A bar of soap, you say. Somebody, at long last, said what had to be said. I guess, the smart money sighs, that’s one way of looking at it. You’d have thought, you say, that at least he’d have prescribed some nettle tea. To cleanse the liver. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to give you, to cleanse the liver? Maybe he thinks your liver is hopeless, the smart money suggests, like you do. You consider this. He could tell I used to smoke, you remember. Not even the VA has figured that out, the smart money points out—although they’re waiting, I suspect, for some mutant cells to betray your mendacity. The VA has all the time in the world, you agree. They got a cancer for mighty nigh everything, the smart money says, but sixty percent of all cancer is directly attributable to smoking. Doesn’t that mean, you ask shrewdly, I still got a forty per cent chance of fooling them? I guess so, allows the smart money. You still got the cancer, though, I remind us. You still got the cancer, the smart money says. Not me. You. If any doubt lingers as to whether or not I’m a figment of your imagination, or even of your brain chemistry, the smart money reminds me, wait till you get the cancer. A bank of fog has risen high over the Richmond, maybe a quarter of a mile to the west. It represents an absence of sunlight and a ten or even a fifteen degree drop in temperature. The tea-rose colored bar of scented soap is able to hold down the printed tissue and the two pages of Chinese-language newspaper that it came wrapped in, for the moment; but the loose edges have begun to waver in the chill moving inland in advance of the fog. Soon the sheets of paper will turn into sails. They will take flight, and the bar of soap will tumble to the sidewalk. To be overcome by filth. You get the cancer, the smart money assures you, you’re going to be all by yourself. All alone. I can’t wait to savor the difference, you say aloud.
