Vision

I can’t decide whether or not this is finished. It started out as a tale I told a friend that stretched over a half hour in telling, but here its is a bit more refined.

As of now, it is done, with revisions included.

The old man sat on the cracked sidewalk, blind eyes watching the passerby. On his threadbare, plaid horse blanket, he sold assorted whistles and pipes, which no one ever bought. Occasionally, the neighborhood kids would casually pick up one of the cheap plastic toys, then speed off towards his comrades, holding aloft the stolen treasure to the cheers of his peers. Although this was good fun the first few times, after awhile it became boring, as the man never stirred or yelled at the boys; plus, somewhere in their street-hardened consciences, they felt pity for him, and eventually they left him alone, though sometimes the kids would sit and talk with him a bit, just to brighten his weary and defeated features with a small smile.

He told them about himself. He was once a young man on top of the world, in love with his beautiful wife, proud of his angelic daughter, a hard worker and this close to a promotion at work. Life was swell, and the times couldn’t be better. He ate well, slept better, and made love every night with an overwhelming passion that hadn’t died in the seven years he and his wife had been married. And then…

Then things had taken a turn. He had walked into work bright and confident, remembering the pot roast he had the night before and the silly little smile on his daughter’s face as he fed her tiny bites of meat, and walked out dejected, shoulders slumped and inching along in an old man’s shuffle, the small pink slip clutched in his left hand. But when he reached the door of his home, he straightened his shoulders and pasted a broad, invincible grin under his nose, boomed through the door, grabbed his wife, reminded her how much he loved her with a kiss like an emotional earthquake, and then gave his daughter a kiss on the cheek, which she returned with a loving spot of saliva on his ear.

“You must have had a good day at work,” his wife said, her eyes still a bit glassy.

He smiled again, being brave. Not quite, he told her, pulling the pink slip from his hand, torn a little as his fist wouldn’t relax. Not to worry, though, he assured her. He was a strong man, in his prime, smart and successful, and we’ve got plenty saved up, work would come to him and everything would be fine. She remained unconvinced, but went back to snapping the ends off the green beans for dinner.

Work didn’t come–in fact, it hid. He and his family moved from their cozy apartment to the relative slums. Husband and wife began to resent each other, she because he was unemployed, he because she complained constantly. Their savings dwindled to next to nothing, and the couple were forced to swallow their pride and line up at St. Mary’s Thursday night Soup Kitchen where they got a warm meal and the companionship of the pigeon lady who roamed the park at night and Mr. Whispers, self-named and hard to miss in his antique top hat and ragged, fingerless gloves of scarred leather.

She started to nag, he started to yell. Their daughter, now three and a half, watched with wide, innocent, uncomprehending eyes. They made love less often.

Two years after the loss of his job, she left him, taking their daughter. He was a dead-end, good-for-nothing, just like her father had said, and she regretted the day the veil lifted from her face.

He settled below the fire escape on the blanket he had found lying in the gutter; he wondered why, it was practically new and didn’t smell too bad. The whistles he had bought for three cents each at a Chinatown shop that sold everything from intricate maps of the city to cages for crickets (made in China) to jars of aged blueberry preservatives. He resold them for seven cents apiece. He thought four cents profit was plenty to live on.

His blindness was a result of too many nights seeking the moon through the smog belched into the sky during the day, the raw rain splashing into his eyes, the filth of his surroundings, the cold of the winter, the heat of the summer, fleas, sweat and his own urine that stewed about him. He never closed his eyes once, though, through all of it; they filmed over with a milky blue mantle reminiscent of pale spring skies, back when the city was clean and fresh. His age came about for many of the same reasons. When he turned forty-five, he looked sixty; when he turned fifty, he looked eighty. Well, that was to be expected.

His hat lay next to his leg, always accepting the few spare cents that the generous dropped. Usually at the end of the day, there was about two or three dollars in quarters and pennies in his cap, enough to buy a drink and some cheap food; it wasn’t much, but he survived. He feared nothing, really, and even began to enjoy his life sitting beneath the fire escape, the dark reigning, but memories always in vivid color. He lived and relived the times he spent with his family as a young boy, his life before his wife, dark days filled with brothels and late night drinking with his friends, and then her advent into his life, a beacon of what could be. Their wedding, the honeymoon, the birth of Eliza, but then he stopped thinking. He didn’t want to remember what had brought him here.

Every morning and evening, a certain man walked past our emaciated, shriveled hero, silently simmering. His own life was near perfect, truth be told; he had a lovely woman at home, though the exact state of their relationship, whether married or not was never made quite clear, a daughter whom he adored (again, the status of this little girl was uncertain: a daughter, or the woman’s daughter, or an adoption–either way, he loved her very much) and a son from a previous marriage who made him proud to bursting every day, a rather boring job, to be completely honest, but it paid well and required minimal effort.

Homeless people bothered him. Why couldn’t they get off their lazy asses and find a job, just like he did when he was very young? Life hadn’t been kind to him; he’d had to work for everything he’d ever had. This one in particular annoyed him. Everything about him screamed lazy: his unkempt beard, long enough to serve as a blanket, his smell, his cheap little whistles that no one ever bought, but most of all, that hat.

That hat drove him insane. Why should some pathetic old man be able to sit there all day, doing nothing, getting paid for it, while he, he who had worked his whole life had to get up every morning at six, shower and shave, dress and have to skip breakfast, and then work all day–all fucking day–while this bum just sat, doing nothing, staring into whatever he could see. It infuriated him. It began to eat at him. Every time he passed the old man, he clenched his fists and ground his teeth, frustrated and angry. It seeped into his life: he shouted at his girlfriend/wife/lover, was too harsh with the little girl, ignored his son.

It got worse as each day passed. He began to dread getting up and hated when he glanced up from his paperwork to see that ten hours had passed, it was time to leave and pass the old man again. He tried walking an alternate route, but it took him through dodgy neighborhoods and trash-strewn streets; no, he preferred the torture of passing the man to risking his life, thank you.

The Friday afternoon he passed the man, he was thinking of those annoying reports he had to complete over the weekend in order to meet his deadline the following Tuesday. He’d have to work all day Saturday, into the night, and then maybe a bit on Sunday too. What a pain in the ass. It’d take him forever; and he would be off the clock, no overtime for this. He groaned. What a weekend. His son would put on that hideous heavy rock, too, just to piss him off. He really needed to spend some time with that boy, but he never seemed to have the time; work was just too busy, what with the merger and all. He’d find time soon, just as things cleared up.

Still, though, it was infuriating that he should have to deal with this. The anger was coursing though his veins, fists clenched and straining against the confines of his cotton button-down.

He passed our ragged hero without noticing him for a change. But today, unluckiest of days, the old man decided to speak to him.

“Rough day, huh?”

The man stopped. He did not think. He did not hesitate. He just acted.

When he was done, the old man lay in the gutter, broken, bloody; the man towered over him gasping for breath like a winded bull, amazed at his own anger, ashamed of the action. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this, he’d just go, just leave, just leave and eat his dinner and sleep in his bed and spend the weekend working–good, honest work.

He did exactly that, but his mind was on the old man the entire time. He could see every swing, watched the man fall again and again into the gutter.

And then one night, weary of reliving the horrors of his actions over and again, he resolved the next day to apologize, to stitch up the oozing wound in his soul. He did not think of the old man’s pain and his the burden of humiliation that lay thick upon his brow.

Without much warning or introduction, the next day the man walked right up to the poor street beggar and offered his apologies. “I’d like you to come over for dinner tonight,” he said. The blind beggar dipped his head obligingly and replied through cracked teeth in a cracked voice: “Sure, sure, sir, if you please,” whistling pathetically over the s’s and nodding like a demented parrot.

“Good.” The man seemed to cave in a little, and his tight white collared shirt grew bigger on his frame. “I’ll return for you after work and we can go back to my place.”

The beggar man, for the first time in centuries, felt an excitement stir the butterflies that had lain dormant in his stomach. He eased himself off his blanket, a process which, due to his recent injuries, took the good part of an hour, and began to walk, gathering up his hat and leaving his Chinese whistles on the urine-drenched blanket. He began to meander around the city, picking up odds and ends wherever he could find them: a tattered top hat, grey with age, in a dumpster in the theater district, a bunch of wilted baby’s breath in the rich side of town, undoubtedly originally from a bouquet of roses, and to his supreme delight, an uneaten cheeseburger nestled atop a twenty dollar bill in a birds nest in the park.

Returning to his blanket, he eagerly awaited six o’clock, two hours away, clutching his baby’s breath bouquet, wearing his ridiculous top hat, and staring with glee at his cheeseburger and the grease-stained twenty dollars that lay jumbled in his many layers. He sat so still for the two hours that several birds perched on the brim of his hat and his shoulders, adding to his bizarre appearance. He got more money in his old hat that day than ever before, the strangers staring over their shoulders with sad, sad looks on their faces.

When the man came around at six twelve, the clown that awaited him seemed so different from the broken beggar he had left nine hours before.

“Ready?” he asked abruptly. The shirt had grown tight again.

The clown stood, not disturbing the birds, gripping the now dead flowers, and put the cheeseburger in his pocket along with the twenty dollar bill: he didn’t want them to feel lonely. They made their way down the boulevard, past the town homes filled to the brim with children and disappointment, past the fake Irish pub, still decked out in green from St. Patrick’s day three months ago, and over the river to the man’s neighborhood, a dull but peaceful area, one of the few quiet places in the screeching city.

The beggar’s heart was racing. The excitement was almost too much to bear; he wet himself slightly in anticipation. All of a sudden his birds deserted him, winging off to some other statue that didn’t move as much. He barely noticed. The smells of home-cooked food that reminded him of his past life tickled his nose, making his mouth water.

Up the stairs: six flights. No easy task for the broken beggar, but the smell beckoned, wrapped around him and pulled him like a lifeline, pumping air into the spirit of a dying man. Each step brought him closer to the warmth of food and the collapse of his knees–closer, closer, closer, step, step, step. A landing: a hallway: more steps, steps, steps, carpet gentle on his jelly knees. The shirt grew tighter. The flowers trembled in his fist. His pants grew wetter.

“Mike! And your guest,” said the woman when the door flew open. “Miiiiiike!” the girl shouted, throwing herself at his legs, wrapping herself around his knees, trapping him in his place. His son sat at the table, slouched, and turned around when the woman said the word “guest”. At the sight of the beggar, his eyes and smile grew wide, shiny with wonder at such a marvel. The little girl, though, shied away and hugged her mother’s knees instead.

The blow hit him ferociously and without warning; a tidal wave of memories crashed over him and he fell over, fell to the ground, where his wife ran to see what was the matter, and his daughter screamed.

~ by Reluctant on January 5, 2008.