Part Seventeen

Picture this: somewhere there is a city in the dawn’s light, bathed in that heart-rending golden yellow that has inspired so many to sit, to take up a pen and paper, to say something descriptive. I remember the city. The city bathed in the awe-inspiring glow of dawn and reflecting back to the giving horizon the city’s own golden light, generated by a trillion yellow postits, dimmed only a little by the black marks of a trillion fonts on each postit. This is sublime.
Picture this: a body tattooed from the scalp to the heels in nothing but blue-tinted letters that, depending on which way you turn the body, spell chaos or order, poetry or gibberish. Every letter is a font unique unto itself, a few dingbats thrown in for good measure, some letters as large as an organ, some as small as the head of a pen.
Picture this: a world with no written language. All memory, all knowledge, all sharing is oral. Everyone would be silent most of the time. Sharing information would be a sanctified event preceded and followed by prayers and incantations. Orators would be shaman. And I would lumber through the world with a scowl on my face.
Picture this: a man waking, for the second morning in a row, to the flatulent cacophony of a Harley passing near the man’s head as he lays face down in the gutter. He lifts his head from the ground, his face lined by the texture of the pavement and damp with the morning dew. With a grimace in his demeanor, he lifts himself from where he lays half on the sidewalk and half in the street and begins to feel his ribs and his neck and his knee. He appears puzzled. He looks around. He goes to the storefront glass behind him and reaches out to the image of himself he sees reflected there. He feels distant, apart from the body before him, and his hand lingers on the image where the hand and the image of the hand meet at the glass.
This was me. These were my dreams and my waking reality. At that point I was starved and half-crazed with thirst, but found that I had to stand confounded before the storefront glass because, upon waking, I could no longer believe that I was the same person that I was when I was put so aggressively to sleep by the large, bitter man. The skin around the left side of my jaw was purpled and tender, but, as far as I could tell, the joint was intact and the bone unbroken. However, this was not what confounded me. My first thought after recalling how I had ended up on the curb again, was that my neck would be immobile and my knee and ribs redoubling in their pain and throbbing. But, when I rose from the pavement, I felt nothing save the tenderness in my jaw. My knee felt fine, my ribs normal, my neck as loose as the day I’d left work (before I stepped off of the curb). I had to look at my reflection somewhere – I simply couldn’t believe that my body could feel so well again. Somehow, the large and bitter man had the power to concuss and to heal packed into the same wallop. It was a miracle.
As I reached out to the image in the glass, that was when a new pain pinged sharply into focus – the pain of hunger and thirst. My lips were dry and the saliva on my tongue thick and difficult. I spun around on the walk, the miracle all but forgotten now, and went to find the nearest café, stopping only once to place a postit over my image in another storefront window – a postit that read, “not me” in an erratic and shaky eighteen point font.
After an exceptional breakfast at a pleasant, out-of-the-way greasy spoon (four glasses of water, an OJ, four breakfast burritos, and a slice of lemon meringue pie – I labeled the flatware, plates, glass, napkins, table, seat etc. while I waited), I walked out onto the sidewalk into the full light of morning filled with renewed vigor. I strode up the street, decisive and sure-of-step, making certain my postits and sharpie were still in my coat pocket and glancing about for my first opportunity.
A lump of clothes caught my attention down in the back of an alley I passed. Normally I wouldn’t have concerned myself much with a pile of clothes in an alley, but this pile moved and it stirred my curiosity.
It turns out it was a bum – I should have guessed. Coming up the alleyway, I was actually fearful of what sort of creature I might find there. I slowed my pace upon approach, and hesitated as I reached out to remove the pile of clothing. I took a deep breath and went for it, convincing myself that there was little to fear. And there he was – a full-dollar bum complete with an empty flask of Mad Dog gripped in his brittle fingers. When I moved the pile of clothes he looked up at me without surprise or irritation. He gazed up at me, over his shoulder from where he lay on his chest, as if I were an expected friend arriving at his front door. By virtue of his welcoming gaze, I liked him immediately, and I sat down with him to learn more about him before I labeled him.
I asked the bum several questions – where was he from and the like – to which he responded with a mere grunt and a shake of the few drops left in his flask. I prodded him with a few inflammatory remarks just to get him to say something, and again was met with no more than a grunt for each answer. What could I do? I whipped out my sharpie, grabbed his emaciated and brittle hand, the one with the empty flask, and scribbled “meaningless” across the back of it before his inebriated reflexes could react to the move. I left him in the alley and went back out onto the street.