Blind Man had seen more than most because he spent his days and nights outside. He saw two strangers in wheelchairs roll by each other without the slightest acknowledgement that the other existed, although he could no longer see the stars in the night-time sky. Blind Man saw a taxi roll over the foot of a purple-haired old woman as she stepped onto the street and hesitated over whether the theater district was up — or downtown, although it would require a somewhat intense self-examination to figure out exactly how dirty the underneath of his fingernails were. Blind Man saw Melvin yell for three hours at a lamppost after his one-liter bottle of Coke cut with Boone tipped and gurgled into the sewer. He saw shades descending, mists rising, colors quieted.
When it rained the rainbows no longer formed in the street's puddles. Blind Man knew the city's secret: the city is nature's inertia, more so than any forest ever could be. Recognition of the smallest injustices requires consciousness and nature rails against consciousness in any form. Nothing surprised him. (Everything surprised Melvin.) Blind Man might never scream out, although whether he will or not, the inexorable darkness would soon completely blanket his home.
Blind Man sat propped up against the stone building, was part of it, and out of habit flipped through the newspaper that he'd picked from the top of a respectable, dry-looking trashcan. He wasn't hungry; he swallowed his daily sluggishness. Since everyone needed a purpose, he rationed that his distance from the ATM machine couldn't possibly threaten or make uncomfortable those involved in private transactions. When people did give him money, he thanked them in the best possible way: simply, but also with a tone that said, "If you didn't give me this money, that'd be alright too." He was never distraught with a feeling of victimization even on those days he couldn't scrape up enough change to get himself some generic sugar cookies and orange juice from the supermarket.
Blind Man remained visible.
He'd seen his share of guys obey the demands the world made on their identity. They slipped into oblivion, became imperceptible; without seeing their reflections in the eyes of others they disappeared. And some of them, after picking up TB in a homeless shelter or having AIDS blow up all over their face and hands, forgot how to seek help, and crawled into an abandoned building to die. Like everybody else, they slept in the most comfortable place they found.
****
The culinary triumvirate of olive oil, garlic, and onion prevailed at the Brogan homestead, four days a week accounting for the base of entrees made with pastas like angel hair, fusilli, gnocchi, and spätzle. Their pasta bowls were mauve and Angie preferred to eat with dimmed lights, not necessarily for romantic motives but because the bright lights of the windowless office she worked at left her drained and wide-eyed by the end of the day, with a slight headache and a twittering right eye-lid. She worked as a social worker in the public domain, and had fallen into the job after partying with a group comprised mostly of kindergarten teachers. She had something of an epiphany one night when one of her girlfriends, the assistant principal of Sunny Time Day School, had remembered there was a little coke in her ex-boyfriend's jacket, somewhere way back in the closet. The girls were nervous, yet filled with enough berry-berry wine coolers and the anticipated excitement of the forthcoming spring break to be in an experimental mood. A lengthy back and forth match of "You get it/No, you get it" ensued. The coke ended up sprinkled on the rug inside the closet. The gym teacher held back the temptation to ask if she could have the ex-boyfriend's jacket. The General Science teacher kept saying, "When's it gonna work." Angie sniffed pocket lint, the dried up edge of a dead moth's wing, and enough coke to decide that she wanted to help people, to do something in this world that was bigger than the little mauve-colored niche she occupied. Paul Simon's Graceland played in the background.
Keith had not worked in over a year and since then the center of their relationship had somehow become the couch. They ate their dinners there and even though both he and Angie — separately and privately — felt the urge to watch TV while eating, neither voiced this urge, yet it hung there somehow, and became psychically exaggerated in indefinable ways demonstrated by their awareness that they positioned themselves on the couch so they faced each other while eating; meaning, said position acknowledged what they were not doing: watching TV. Angie preferred angel hair; Keith, gnocchi; although more than once they argued about whether gnocchi was actually pasta. The unset table and its four chairs were a mere three steps away. If two people sit on a couch long enough, one is bound to get up before the other.
Angie told her clients' stories. They both preferred freshly grated parmesan to the artificial tasting Kraft stuff. Angie's clients were technically criminals: first time domestic abusers, public drunkards, vagrants, and the like. They used the remote control to keep their napkins from slipping off the coffee table. Her position was created in order to place these people in community service programs, AA meetings, or psychological counseling. The stories interested Keith on levels that he didn't know existed within him. Usually Keith would brush bread crumbs off the couch and sweep the floor after dinner. Sometimes they made love on the kitchen floor.
Angie told him about a man who beat up his wife in the elevator while their child was watching. And another man named Melvin, a new client who would punch at and argue with invisible demons that hovered in the air around him. Melvin had been "taken away" when the pastor of the 120th Street Methodist Church got fed up with him digging up the bushes and flowers, making barren the area that wound along the vaguely awe-inspiring slash fear-inducing, pointy-arrowed, black iron-fence that surrounded the church and its patch of grass. Nobody understood why Melvin did this; or why he'd tie colorful pieces of bags and paper to the fence. But Angie's co-worker, who wore two sweaters and whose hands never popped out from underneath her sleeves (unless file digging), developed a theory that Melvin's lifestyle had offered him the chance to separate himself from present reality and dig deep within his primal consciousness, resulting in the physical manifestation of deep-down-habits that maybe he — Melvin — was unaware of but were anyway perfected by his African ancestors. The perpetually cold woman had her Master's in Third World Dilemmas and read Margaret Mead on weekends. "Everything has perfect sense," she announced to the office. "The stripping of the land took away any camouflage or hiding places that snakes or other small animals used; and the tying of stuff onto the fence, well, that's just decorative, but more in a religious sense than anything else, you know what I mean. Melvin is protecting the village, whether he knows it or not." A collective sigh of "Gotchya smarty-pants, now please go back to work," hung over the room silently.
