Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  Omkar stood in the kitchen looking down over the street. He filled up a water glass, failing to turn off the faucet before it began to overflow onto his hands. “Dhi’āna rakhō,” his father said in their native tongue. It was a warning to be careful. Neeraj had taken it upon himself to bring Omkar’s feet onto solid ground. His son’s dreamy nature didn’t make him feel confident about his capacity to work hard enough to carve out a life for himself. The sound of Neeraj’s voice was deep and authoritative. Sometimes his father reminded Omkar of a warrior who had retired into the retail business. After all, the Sikhs had been warriors.

  Omkar stared at the glorified painting of Guru Nanak on the wall. The look on his face and the way he had his hand lifted in the painting always made Omkar feel like he was messing up. Neeraj had aspired to fashion himself after Nanak’s virtue. As a result, Nanak always reminded Omkar less of a guru and more of his own father.

  Though Omkar wore a thin version of the traditional kara bracelet, he had chosen when he was very young to shave, cut his hair and abandon the traditional Sikh costume. Sometimes, this made him feel guilty. Neeraj and Jarminder still felt invalidated in their lives and beliefs by his decision. They wanted Omkar to be proud of his faith and most of all proud of the culture that had forged the marrow in his bones. But they also knew that faith could not be forced upon their son. They knew that the tighter they held him, the more he would rebel, and they were afraid that rebellion might just lead him to reject their culture entirely. And so, there was a tension in the house that was never directly addressed. You could only feel it sometimes in sideways comments and in the emotional distance between them.

  Neeraj sat down on the couch beside Jarminder. The companionship of his wife could only be accessed at times like this by joining her in her fixation on the screen. He asked her for an update on the plot line. Irritated at the possibility of missing something, she caught him up in a fast and exasperated tone before settling into the pleasure of having someone to experience the rollercoaster of intrigue with her.

  Omkar, who had only come upstairs for a drink during his shift watching over the family shop, sidled back down the stairs. The store seemed emptier than ever. He stood behind the checkout counter staring at the products, whose packaging advertised only to the emptiness in the room. It felt like a waste of life doing what every good Indian boy should do with the family business. “How much more of a cliché could I be?” he wondered. But he didn’t want to hurt his parents any more than they had been hurt already. Omkar hadn’t yet carved out his own life because of the fact that he would have to leave his parents’ lives to do it. He couldn’t face the severity of the shame inherent in doing so. He couldn’t choose to betray them by becoming one more thing that they had put all their energy into, only to lose.

  With no customers to serve, he pulled out his laptop computer and went back to his schoolwork until out of the corner of his eye he caught the silhouette of someone about to come through the door. Omkar felt an alarm go off inside himself, the ecstatic shock of seeing her again. It was the girl who had come into the store a week or two ago. Despite his shyness, he stood up and immediately welcomed her back.

  Aria was almost upset to discover that the strange feelings she had felt for the man who stood before her were back. She afforded him a bashful smile and began looking through the aisles. It felt wrong to have come back there, but once again, Aria was desperate. Her period, being predictably unpredictable as usual, had rebounded back into her life. Aria was mad at herself for not having spent some money on provisions when she had it. But since it had not been an immediate need, she had not prioritized preparing for it.

  Having used her socks again and spent most of the morning sitting still, she imagined that the woman at the church, Imani, might have some way to help her out. But she had arrived too late for the meal service and Imani was nowhere to be found. That was when the idea of coming back to the little market had popped into her mind. Aria had hoped that, in keeping with the first day she had visited, the store would be untended long enough for her to steal what she needed. There was a deeper part of her that wanted the man who had been there on the first day to be there again. But necessity trumped the degree that she currently cared for him.

  Omkar desperately searched for the least awkward way to approach her to ask for her number as Aria scanned the aisles until she found what she was looking for. Resorting to her goto technique of looking at an item with one hand and putting another in her pocket with the other, she took a mini-pack of tampons and slid them in her pocket. That jolted Omkar out of the romantic interlude he was planning for them in his mind. Because he liked her, he was paying special attention to the security mirror in the corner of the room, hoping to learn something about her from her purchase choices. And so he had seen her take the item off of the shelf.

  He felt his excitement drop as if hurled from a ten-story building. Maybe he’d been wrong about this girl all along. She didn’t seem like the type to shoplift. He had imagined that the connection he felt between them would certainly mean that she wouldn’t do something like that to his family. He tried to rectify his impression of her by telling himself that she didn’t know the store was owned by his family. Perhaps she just thought he worked there as a clerk. He felt dizzy, not knowing what to do. He could hear his father in his head, yelling at him to call the police. He didn’t want to do that to her. But he didn’t know what to do, so he stood like a statue, in shock, doing nothing.

  Aria picked out the cheapest packet of gum she could find and walked toward the checkout counter. For a second, Omkar hoped that she would take the item out of her pocket and pay for it as well, so he could go back to seeing her in the way that he did before tonight. But she didn’t. Instead, she took a handful of spare change out of her pocket for the gum, hoping that the purchase would serve as further disguise for what she had taken. The noise from the cash register took up the space where their words did not. Aria was disappointed by his suddenly withdrawn demeanor; he had been so friendly before. But all she could think of was getting out of the place quick enough to avoid being found out. So when he handed her back a dime and some pennies, she pivoted and walked back out the door.

  Omkar stood at the counter in shock for 30 seconds before the idea of following her shot into his head. The rush of the decision had already taken hold of him. “Papa, Papa, watch over the store for me!” he yelled upstairs, throwing his jacket over his shoulders and struggling to get his arms through the sleeves fast enough.

  Neeraj came downstairs with a worried look on his face. “What is this?” he said, equally concerned and perturbed at his son’s request.

  “It’s something I forgot at school. It’s very important.” Omkar’s apology was inherent in the way that he said it. Neeraj was visibly frustrated by his son’s immaturity in having forgotten something so important, but he nodded consent and Omkar sprang out the door.

  He looked frantically both ways down the street as far as he could, searching for her. As fortune would have it, he could just make out the patched design of her camo pants and the edges of her hair being played with by the wind as she walked away from him. He began to follow.

  It was one of the most exciting things he’d ever done in his life. Keeping the perfect distance to survey her every movement, but also making sure never to be noticed, made him feel like a character in one of the action movies he loved so much.

  After 30 minutes had passed, the feeling of excitement began to crumble at the edges. It was confusing to him that she was still walking. They had walked so far, Omkar was afraid of not being able to find his way back to the store. He felt more worried now than intrigued. But he continued to follow her down the dismal, crowded streets and through alleyways, stoplight after stoplight impeding the flow of her progress toward wherever she was going.

  After two hours had passed, Omkar knew he would have to call a cab to get back home. It had also started to rain. He was following Aria with a knot in his sto
mach. At first he had imagined the spy mission to be fun. But it wasn’t fun anymore. He had assumed that, because she strolled into the store on foot, she must live in the neighborhood, especially given that she’d showed up twice. He was now plagued by confusion about why she would ever walk so far. He was bothered by the idea that a girl shouldn’t be walking alone on the streets of any city, much less for so long. Omkar was now committed to the mission of finding out where the hell she was going, more out of concern than a sense of curious adventure.

  The distance between the houses and buildings began to grow larger. The sun had given up on their journey, casting an indigo hue over everything in sight. Omkar watched Aria take a side road. Following her down it, through the haze of the rain, he watched her duck under a broken stretch of chain-link fencing. He saw her walk over to a car in a broken-down car lot and get inside it. Careful to go unnoticed, Omkar waited before exploring further from a distance. He walked a full circle around the car lot. By the time he was done observing the tarps and tents and clutter, he was soaking wet. But Omkar had ascertained enough to understand what was truly happening. He watched Aria and a few of the other people at the encampment until his view was too severely obscured by night.

  Omkar dueled with the branches of the trees and bushes in order to get back to a main road without being seen. Instead of immediately calling a cab, he sat down on a curb, letting the hum of the cars pass by him. He had assumed that Aria had stolen the pack of tampons because of some habitual pattern of defiant rule-breaking. He had expected to follow her to some suburban home which belonged to two parents, much like his own, whose rules were strung too tight for her to breathe. So tight that she had to break rules somehow, even if they never knew that she had broken them. But that was not what was happening at all. It was clear to him that she had stolen the tampons because she literally had to.

  Omkar didn’t know what to do. He loved her even more now. He was conscious of loving her when the thought of loving her more now crossed his mind. He was in love with this girl, who he knew almost nothing about, a girl he had never officially met. He wanted to go back and rescue her, but take her where? And what if she didn’t like him? What if the way she looked at him was just a strategy to be able to steal what she needed to live?

  When Omkar finally did call a cab to go home, he did his best to memorize the route between the car lot and his family’s store. It felt so wrong to leave her there that as he was driving away, every cell in his body revolted. One day the minutes of his boring life had been ticking away and now, he could not fall back in line with those minutes. His mind was possessed with the image of her and all the unanswered questions he had about her.

  Totally unaware of her new admirer, Aria smoked a cigarette, hoping that it would alleviate the pain of her cramps. She cracked the door open so as to not submerge them both in smoke and leaned against it.

  “You shouldn’t be doin’ that,” Taylor said from the front passenger seat.

  At first Aria thought he was referring to the cigarette she was smoking. “Dude, I’m fucked right now, could you just get off my back?” she said.

  “No. Fuck it!” Taylor yelled, turning around with tears in his eyes. “She’s not good company and you don’t need her fucking up your life too. You don’t need to go doin’ things with her like that.”

  It took Aria a second to realize that he was referring to Ciarra and her one-time attempt at hooking.

  Taylor had arrived early and had rifled through her backpack, looking for the pocketknife that Luke had recently given her. Despite the protests of his conscience, he had read her journal, including the entry she had made about having prostituted. It had plagued him for the last few hours. Coming back to the car lot to find her gone had made him assume that it was not a one-time thing and that she was at it again that night.

  Unaware that he had read her journal, Aria imagined that Ciarra had said something to him about it.

  “Dude, I only went with her one time and it didn’t work out … Why the fuck do you even care?” Aria yelled back, taken completely by surprise by his outrage, especially given that he didn’t bother to consult her about the trajectory of his own life.

  “Because you’re better than that. You’re better than her. You don’t need to go doin’ that shit.”

  Taylor turned back to face the windshield, his arms crossed to protect his vulnerability. He was quietly crying.

  Aria felt judged, but beneath that judgment she could clearly see from his reaction the attachment that he had to her. Feeling loved to that degree made it impossible to defend herself with an attack.

  “I only did it once and it didn’t work out. I swear to God I haven’t gone back, it’s too fucked up,” Aria countered.

  “You swear to God you aren’t lying to me?” Taylor said, turning around to face her again, scanning her face to determine her sincerity.

  Aria said nothing further. She looked him straight in the face. Taylor started to cry again, pulling her head toward him with the crook of his elbow so as to hug her as best as he could, given the awkward position of their bodies relative to one another.

  Taylor considered her to be like a little sister and the idea of her falling prey to predators behind his back was more than he could bear. “OK, just promise me,” he said, wiping the tears away from his cheeks.

  “I swear to God,” Aria said, trying to wiggle out from under the pressure of his request.

  “OK, ’cause I love you,” Taylor said, waiting for her to reassure him in return.

  “I do too,” she said. It was not an impressive response, but it was enough for him to turn back around and position himself to go to sleep.

  Aria was as uncomfortable with the pressure Taylor put on her to live up to his expectations as she was with the sudden realization that he cared so much about her. That pressure, though uncomfortable, made her feel warm inside her chest.

  Instead of immediately falling asleep, she looked out the window at the broken-down RV that Darren had turned into his garrison. Whatever light source he was using cast just enough glow for her to see the chaos of clutter among which he lived his life: piles upon piles of items he had found and brought back here. For Darren, these things had become a safety signal, a way to buffer himself against the soreness of his own vulnerability. It was a life’s worth of people who were so inconsistent, unreliable and impermanent that they could only be counted on to use and take things from him that had made him this way. It was safer for him now to attach to things rather than people. It was the only way to predict and control his life. It was the only way to feel good.

  Darren could look at anything and imagine a potential time when he might need it. The piles were the closest he could get to closeness. They felt cozy to him. The physical distance between objects, which is created when people organize things, felt cold and isolated to him. He didn’t want that separation. That organized separation between objects reopened the wound of emptiness and isolation. Besides that, Darren hated space. For Darren, space meant exposure, where attack could come from anywhere at any moment. Having clutter around him offered him enclosure and padding from potential threat.

  When Darren had returned from war, he began to identify with trash. There was a day before he ended up out on the streets where he was about to throw away a milk carton and suddenly he saw himself in that milk carton. It was suddenly something that he had used and was about to throw away the same way that the army had used him up and thrown him away. He couldn’t stand it. So he washed it out and filled it with soil to use it as a pot for a dandelion he dug up from the lawn outside the house. Seeing the value in anything and everything was the best way he could find to resolve the wound of being treated as if he no longer had any value and of being used and discarded himself.

  Though the seemingly careless and unsanitary way that he kept his possessions suggested a lack of caring, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Darren was terrified of losing his things or having someone take them
away. The very idea of it threatened to reopen the scab covering his wounds. He could not face the idea of needing something and not having it, or even worse, not being able to get it. He could not face that emptiness of the emotional neglect that he had filled up with things. He could not face the idea of himself being discarded. He could not face the panic of exposure. To lose his things was to lose the only relationships in his life that he felt like he really did have.

  Aria felt sorry for Darren. Her own wounds allowed her to clearly see his. Like her, he was just doing the best he could with what the world had refused to give him. Like them all, he drained the soul from the cigarette between his lips, as if begging for mercy from a God that had cursed him. The indifference with which people passed by his noiseless cry was a sin in and of itself. He had built his life on the shoal of their insults and spare pocket change. Aria knew that this was probably how he would live out what was left of his life and that this was most likely the way he would die. And despite the bramble of his character, it nearly broke her heart. She distracted herself from the strain of watching him anymore by lying down and thinking about the man from the store. He had told her his name on the first day they had met and she tried to remember it, but couldn’t.

  Aria imagined what it would be like if she had met the man under different circumstances – if they had been classmates together, or had met at a party somewhere. Almost any other circumstance seemed to guarantee her more dignity in their meeting. Aria fantasized about the certainty of love exchanged in a moment, finding each other face to face in some revolving door. She imagined herself to be more glamorous than she was now, a woman of class and fortunate circumstance. That certainty felt more beautiful to Aria than the uncertainty of the sudden passion that she felt for him and the inevitable lack of passion she was convinced that he would feel in return if he knew anything about her.