The streets were spotless. Ironically enough, they were always in their best condition the morning after a riot. No one knew exactly how, but the effects of the riots were nowhere to be found the next morning anymore. It was like nothing happened. I guess people preferred it that way. It even seemed quieter, but that day he couldn't tell the difference; his ears were occupied. It had been years since he listened to music while walking through the streets. His earlier days in the city seemed laughably similar. He was once a young man, looking to distance himself from his past and reinvent himself, with an unreasonable amount of optimism and a look on his face that drew scorn from life-timers. As time passed working at the firm, his self-image changed. The way he presented himself was gradually altered. He tried to project something that he wasn't. Every moment between his apartment and work was spent engrossed in the day's agenda—how to get ahead, how to be more efficient, how to be more prepared for the future. Day after day, he fought to convince himself that these were the most important concerns of life. Meanwhile, music, along with any other aspect of his life that was not a clear driving force towards those ends, became a distraction.
The city made its first appeal to him as a place of observation, a place to examine human behavior, a place to pick up on the little things that no one else seemed to notice about everyday life. These little things were just as soon labeled as distractions and filed away. He had become disconnected not only with the world around him, but what spoke to the innermost part of him. This left him driven by a grayish intermediary layer between the two, which was so compact and busy yet so viciously empty. Even so, as he walked through the streets that day, some fraction of that void was filled with the sounds of the world and the words of the soul. He reluctantly paused his music only to hear the muffled sounds coming from the clerk's mouth.
"You seriously think I'm stupid or some shit?"
“No, no I … not at all. I just figured it would be worth something, being custom made and all,” Waldin articulated, with unanticipated difficulty.
The clerk laughed disingenuously through his nose. “It’s about as custom made as this piece of shit,” the clerk retorted, pinching his dirty, dilapidated white t-shirt. “This handle sure as hell ain’t ivory,” he said as he tapped the handle on the counter, creating a hollow noise, “and I’d bet it couldn’t kill a sewer rat if it was hungry enough.”
His uncle, in all his generosity, was never much of an honest man.
“Look, I’m not trying to cheat anyone. Apparently it’s nothing special but I’m just trying to get rid of it. So if you won’t give me anything for it that’s fine, but it’ll end up on the streets and don’t blame me when you’re staring down the barrel of this when the homeless vet out there gets sick of having the corner of his cardboard sign for dinner.”
The clerk shifted his mouth awkwardly, struggling to conceal a smile. “Maybe you’re not so bad, kid, but business is still business, and just so you know this gun’s gonna find its home on the streets whether you sell it to me or not. Anyone who wanted a gun for self-defense got one a long time ago. I’ll give you a break though, $115 trade in credit, take it or leave it.”
He had always wanted a record player. It was in decent condition and, though it was a bit awkward to carry home, once he found a place for it he was quite pleased. His rationality had its benefits. The night before he had been seized with the urge to throw the gun out of his ninth story window as a final gesture, yet logic quickly overcame and he decided that he would sell it at the pawn shop the next morning. Ironically enough, his rationality had failed him that day as he walked out of the pawn shop with a record player and not a single piece of vinyl. After a few silent moments of staring at his new acquisition, it finally occurred to him that if he ever wanted to hear anything, he would have to head down to one of the old record stores that still somehow littered the city.
He had admittedly stopped in several record stores throughout the years, fully aware that he had no means to listen to or reason to buy any of the records. Regardless, he still sauntered through the sections, eyes darting like sand flies, and experienced an odd, almost euphoric satisfaction out of fingering through records, only occasionally stopping to draw one out. As each record revealed itself he would try to imagine the moment in which it was last listened to. Each one was a portal to a different time, a different place, and, most intriguingly, a different emotional response to the same stimuli. While one might usually jump to the archetypal situation, he searched for the least likely, or better yet, least expected, listener. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” was a Texan soldier on the night before the Fall of Saigon. David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was an addiction counselor from Delaware, preparing for a meeting. Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers LP” was an elementary school teacher from Seattle, losing herself on her lunch break. ABBA’s “Gold” was a young woman, one the verge of overdose, lying next to a man she’s painfully indifferent to, trying to decide if she wants to cry or if she even knows how to anymore.
He would continue on in this manner for hours sometimes, yet today he finally selected an armful of his favorite albums and headed for the register. It became one of those subtly awkward exchanges where there's a certain irony to a situation that only one person is aware of. The cashier looked at him with a suspicious curiosity as he inexplicably fought off a smile, while drawing his card from his wallet. For a moment, he somehow forgot that the cashier had no idea how unexpected and aberrant a moment this was for him. Slightly embarrassed, he quickly grabbed the stack of vinyl and briskly walked out, trailed by a precocious, “Uhh ok, have a nice day,” from inside the store.
It had been quite some time since he had walked through the streets on a Monday morning with nothing to do. What was there to do? What he had he been missing out on? What a laden question that was, yet he had the rest of his life to answer it and in that moment he once again seemed unsure of everything—the only exception being that he sure was hungry, or at least felt that way.
There was a small cafe on 4th Street that he often stopped by on the weekends to read or just take in the scene, when he managed to pry himself away from work. Late Monday morning provided a much different atmosphere. The nine-to-fivers were replaced with the unemployed, the unpublished authors, the struggling street artists and comics, the troubled, creative minds living cigarette to cigarette, fix to fix, gig to gig, spark to spark, fuck to fuck. The junkies get all the shame, since their self-destruction is so apparent, but everyone has their own fix, something that makes them feel alive. Before finding it, most just feel lost or dissatisfied, but after that something is attained, existence without it seems insufferable. Maybe more frightening, yet at the same time more beautiful, than anything else in this life is the suggestion that what that something is could be a matter that we as individuals have no say in. Inevitably self-destructive and depressive, maybe, but at least they lived day to day, moment to moment, emotion to emotion, and that’s more than he could say thus far.
Everyone’s aura seemed depressing but in a comforting, bona fide way, until, of course, his scan reached her. The cliché frustrated him but he let it take its course.
Her face seemed so oddly yet so alluringly familiar. He nearly swore she had caught his eye, at least once before, in a park in his hometown, or while crossing paths on the busy streets, or even at the very coffee house he then sat in. By the same token, he was equally certain he had never seen her before, or anything even remotely close to her. She was beautiful, yet not in an objective, anatomical way that turned heads on the streets and brought out the most shameful desires of men. She was beautiful in a way that made him question the mere definition of the word beauty and if it could even possibly do her justice. There was something so unique about her face, about her eyes, her being, that screamed, almost violently, at his dormant soul. He was immediately reminded of when, as a child, he first overlooked the foothills from a local peak, and felt a longing for something higher, a desire to capture the profound moment forever,
yet, though he was young, he knew a photo could never encompass or recreate the experience. So there she sat, in her last moments of indifference to his existence. The world saw a girl, a woman maybe, simply reading alone in a cafe, yet he saw an oyster, wanting nothing more than for someone to give enough effort to open her shell and bear witness to what lay inside. Unbeknownst to him, she saw herself not as an oyster but as a bubble, who, upon allowing anyone to breach her outer layer, would cease to exist.
It abruptly occurred to him that, amidst his foolish, romantic thoughts, he had been standing alone at the counter for several seconds. Embarrassed, he quickly ordered his usual black, decaf coffee and whole grain bagel, left a five at the register, and sat down discreetly in her view. Always pressed for time, he was usually a quick finish at the table, but that day he ate and drank deliberately slowly. She had barely touched her tea and was all but submerged in a book he couldn’t quite make out the title of. This told him that, logically, she would likely be there for a while longer, yet beyond logic it told him something of more significant value. Though they did not yet share desire for each other, in his mind they shared more than a simple enjoyment of reading. They shared the desire to learn, the desire to be challenged by the questions that all books present, the desire to see a glimpse inside the minds of others, and, most considerably, an insatiable desire for something higher. Not in a literal or even moral sense, higher as in something more, something more than the material, more than the superficial, more than the physical, and, ironically enough, more than even words. That very desire is what kept him alive, once again, not in a literal sense, or upon further thought, maybe in a literal sense as well.
Unexpectedly, his often hindering distaste for rejection began to creep up his spine and nearly convinced him to forget her altogether. He began the internal argument that always arose in his head whenever he was faced with an even slightly challenging decision. The latter nearly prevailed, until he figured that the familiarity in her face could only mean that he had, in fact, crossed paths with her before. He had been too much of a coward to approach her before and she had been placed before him today simply as an opportunity to redeem himself, an opportunity to prove right the decision he made the night before. And with that thought, he threw away his trash, stood up, and, nonchalantly as he could, walked over to her.
His proximity drew her eyes to his for the first time and almost caused him to forget his previous thoughts completely. He was a perennial planner, yet nothing could prepare him for his soul’s jerk reaction to the presence of its beckoner. She smiled warmly yet cautiously at his unexplained, yet somehow not awkward, silence.
He gathered himself and managed to get his lips moving enough to say, “Hey, sorry. Okay, um... I know this may seem a bit weird and I’m not even sure exactly what I’m doing here but if you’d just give me a few moments of your time, it would do a lot for me and it might just do something for you too.”
“Well consider yourself lucky. This book hasn’t been doing much for me. Jane Austen makes me remember why dropped out of grad school.”
He let a genuine laugh slip out for the first time in who knew how long. “The lesser of two evils, huh? Nineteenth century British literature or the awkward guy trying to hit on you in a coffee shop. I get it I —”
“Oh no, no. I’d much rather read Wuthering Heights than talk to you. I just somehow got talked into giving Pride and Prejudice another chance.” She was quite sharper than he imagined.
“Well I swear I never thought that book would come in handy.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself just yet.”
“Fair enough. I’m Waldin.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Waldin.”
“And you are…?”
“I’m … not quite sure I want to give you my name yet.”
“Okay, I can respect that.”
He slowly felt the stubble he didn’t care enough to shave that morning. “Well here it goes. I experienced something yesterday that I’m not sure I can really wrap my head around yet. I won’t get into it but things are different and let’s just say I don’t want to go back to the way things were. In order to do that, there’s something I think I need to do. I need to make a promise. I’ll never make another promise to you, but there’s one I have to make. I promise that I will never lie to you.
“I know that may not mean much coming from someone you don’t know at all, or anyone for that matter, but I’m only asking for the opportunity to keep that promise. I might offend you, annoy you, or even horrify you, but I also might provide some value to your life that you never could have imagined. I don’t expect anything else from you besides the chance to get to know you and tell you the truth. I don’t expect you to be completely honest with me, because I know how much it would be to ask of anyone, but if you did, I think we could at least experience something rare.”
He paused to take a breath. Her eyes and expression hadn’t wavered since he began speaking and he started to question everything he had just said. “I know that was a lot and I don’t know if you’re follow—”
“Okay. I’m in! Let’s see what happens.”
“Really? Okay great… Uhhh, I don’t have my phone actually, but I can take your number down.”
Without responding, she pulled out a pen, flipped to the last page of her book, quickly wrote something down, and tore the page out. On the table lay the final paragraph and below it read an address.
“So you won’t trust a stranger with your phone number, but you’ll give out your address!”
“Maybe you’re not as bright as I thought. It’s a P.O. Box. Write me a letter, about anything. If what I read interests me, you’ll see me again.”
Before he could figure out how to respond, she stood up and walked out of the cafe, leaving her book and unfinished tea on the table. An incoming meteor wouldn’t have drawn his eyes from her as she made her exit, and after she was out of sight he looked around, marveled by the fact that no one else had done the same. He shook his head and laughed to himself, as he downed the rest of the tea and headed home.
Chapter 4