Rain, the young man is thinking. Of course it would be raining. Not a heavy, cleansing rain that leaves the streets steaming and the neatly sculptured yards lush and fragrant. This is a gray drizzling rain. A rain that makes him think of places like England and Scotland as they appear in those disturbing late night films on cable, the ones in black and white that weren’t particularly memorable when they were made and are even less so now.
Still, it rains and the air is cool. All he has to shelter him is a think nylon jacket. The jacket is soaked. It feels both chilly and coarse against his skin. His hair hangs in flat and sodden wings, falling into his eyes. It’s long in the back, almost to his shoulders, and he thinks that the cars that pass him on the street, the occupants of those cars, might look at him and see only that he is wet and not that he is dirty as well. Can they tell that his hair has been unwashed for days? That his clothes are the same ones he’s worn for more than a week? It doesn’t matter. He’s invisible to them as soon as they pass, taking any assumptions they might make with them. They might just mistake him for one of those hoity-toity college kids, one of those clean limbed and beaming have’s who has happened to find himself caught out without his umbrella.
He makes a desultory attempt to straighten his shoulders, to lift his eyes from the buckled sidewalk. To look like he might have a purpose or a destination. It doesn’t help. He has become the day. He has internalized the environment. He did that years ago, in fact.
That’s all I can do.
Not his words, of course, but he understands them. He is intimately acquainted with his limitations.
His entire body is telling him about his limitations right now. His stomach roils on acid and nothing else. He doesn’t remember the last time he ate, but if his guts have their way, he’ll offer what little may be left to the street before long. He walks with his hands crammed deep into the pockets of his blue jeans. If he pulls them out, they’ll only shake like the hands of one of those fucking retard kids Jerry Lewis was always putting on television. There’s more. His aching head. His shoulders and elbows and his goddamned knees that all feel like the joints have been rapped with a hammer.
That commercial: this is your brain on drugs. Fuck. They should talk about your body on drugs. That would have been something like a deterrent.
He shuffles along in his tired clothing, with his greasy hair and his palsied hands and his plugged up ass. Oh, he hadn’t mentioned that one in a while. Not just constipation, the doctors said, but chronic constipation, and for it they gave you these little brown butt nuggets. Suppositories. Shove this up your ass, they tell you. Shove this up your ass and in a couple of days, you’ll be regular again.
How ‘bout you shove it up your ass? That’s what he wanted to say, always wanted to say but somehow never did. Shove it all up your ass, doc. Everything you’ve got to say and offer. It doesn’t help. None of it fucking helped.
I can be angry too, he thinks. Angry and disappointed and disillusioned. Except he isn’t. Anger implies the capacity to feel, and he doesn’t really have that anymore, not in any way he can identify. That’s how it all begins, this life, this desperation. An attempt to feel, or an attempt to stop feeling. He can’t say for certain. He no longer remembers, and the ghosts of his past are at rest. They don’t call out from their graves.
Somehow, he’s managed to reach downtown. This is disorienting. Turn right and fifteen blocks to the hospital. That might have been his plan when he started, for lack of a better plan, anyway. It was all he could do. It wasn’t working out that way.
He can see the courthouse, it’s bronze dome a shadow in the misting rain. Morning, not yet eight, and the sidewalks are barren places. He is alone in a city that would seem devoid of life except for the constant rumble and hum and scudding of cars as they pass. He peers at shop windows. A second hand bookshop on the corner. A high end sporting goods store with a kayak lurched at an unnatural angle behind the glass. A trendy women’s clothing shop blatantly, obscenely targeting the eighteen and nineteen year old somebodies from the campus.
But he keeps coming back to the kayak. A fucking kayak! As if this wasn’t God-fucking Indiana! This feels important to him somehow. And impenetrable. It’s a symbol in a message encrypted beyond his understanding.
I’m hungry. I’m angry. I’m tired. Most of all, I’m tired. I don’t get the kayak.
His shoulders sag and he no longer cares what he may seem to be. He doesn’t know the people who pass, who might pass judgments on him. They don’t get it, either. It’s beyond their understanding.
He steps back from the store’s display. One step, two. He totters with his heels hanging over the sidewalk’s edge. His balance is precarious, not something he could maintain for long if he wanted to. He closes his eyes and he draws into his lungs the odor of a damp city. He swivels his head on the glassy joints of his neck, as though peering back the way he has come.
He opens his eyes. He sees what he wants to see. He doesn’t so much fall back as he steps away.
From the kayak, he thinks. Always from the kayak.
It’s a city bus, large and hulking and green. The windshield is flat and tall, and he can see the driver, a nondescript and burly man. Burly in the way all bus drivers seem to be burly. He is poorly shaven. His skin is sallow. His eyes dark and small beneath a black buttress of Italian eyebrows. His mouth is small as well, probably not always, because a good bus driver needs a good mouth on him. But small now because it’s sucked his lips into a pinhole O of surprise. Something unanticipated.
The bus seems very large now, just as the mouth is very small, becoming smaller by the moment.
Shush, shush, the tires say, unheeded by the wet pavement.
I don’t get the kayak. Not at all.
The bus looms, becomes massive, grows to fill the universe.
And that, he thinks, that is all I can do.