Fiction

When the Air’s Right

Snow falls in slow motion when the air’s right. Successive flakes sizzled and popped as they hit the dim screen and crystalline fractals turned to droplets. The knuckle of his pointer smeared the semispherical orbs into irregular patches while he punched out his note on the surface.

George seemed alright. He lay on his blanket behind the cardboard receptacle. He stretched his legs while he yawned; his tongue lengthened and curled through vicious, feline teeth, and talons extended from his paws. The flakes settled on his coat as it flowed gently with the undulations of his breath.

People walked by—tourists and businesspeople and fashionable women. They walked with hurried steps, vying for position on the sidewalk within generally uniform currents. The hard soles of their glinting shoes clapped across the world behind his phone screen.

The concrete glistened where the salt had melted the snow.

HUNGRY PLEASE HELP?

If they glanced, the passersby glanced absently at the sharpie-scrawled message.

He actually wasn’t hungry; he was cold.

He focused on his note and tried to keep his mind off the heavy weight and peculiar warmth of slow progressing frostbite in his finger pads. The stacked crates on which he sat allowed the frigid blasts to lick at his underside. Moist fabric and flesh grew stiff against the sharp patterned plastic of the crates. He plugged the small of his back into the jutting stones of the wall by which he sat. He hunched across his lap. His lumbar anchored to the stones.

The stones from which he extended burst from the geometrically flat slabs of concrete like a mistake. Their deep red soaked up the light between glass-walled buildings all around. Their existence seemed invasive or unfinished among the square reflections of luxury storefronts and towering office buildings.

In their completeness, the stones formed walls, which framed a church. The rigidity of the ancient stones relaxed as one’s eyes drifted up the walls. Towards the top, the building flowed and twisted with spires and gargoyles. Somber, joyful tolls emanated periodically from the towers.

Within, Old Testament patriarchs looked patiently down on the pews from their glowing, stained-glass worlds. The chapel had the shape of a clamshell. Down toward the hinge, beneath the umbo painted blue from below, the stained wood of the austere pulpit sat defiantly before the organ’s pipes. They played no sound to the empty chapel. The air hung still and warm within.

On the outside of a door nearby to where he sat, a sign hung nailed. “Please do not sleep on these steps. It is dangerous for you and the community. We care about you and will help you find help. Please contact our community ministry office at 212-XXX-YYYY between the hours of 10:00AM and 4:00PM, Tuesday to Friday.”

Last year some vandal had added a postscript: “And call 212-YYY-XXXX for the best blow job of your life.” He’d laughed and laughed. He’d laughed so hard that a police buddy of his had come by to tell him to “shut the fuck up.” He’d been tickled.

He punched at the virtual keys deliberately with his cold knuckle. Big bulging red hearts—twenty, thirty, forty of them—should do the trick! He wanted to express himself.

A gentle, feminine voice drifted down from above his head. “George does not seem to mind the cold.” The voice was muffled by the scarf that wrapped around her little face. The eyes smiled.

He looked up. The phone slipped through his fingers and clattered on the pavement. He hardly noticed. “I’s just texting you,” he said.

“Were you now?” said the woman. The playfulness was muted through the scarf. She pulled it down below her chin. “More smooth talk I presume?”

“Nope, no, nothing smooth.” He began to rub his hands on his thighs to make some warmth.

“How you feeling today Bill?”

“Better now.” He smiled.

“You should keep your gloves on in this weather.”

Bill nodded while he rubbed his thighs.

“Let me see those hands,” she said. She took a knee next to George and grabbed the right hand then the left. She inspected them. The people-stream flowed behind her back. She held the hands side by side for comparison. She traced the scars that ran among the callouses and creases. She inspected a finger. She shook her head. “You need to take care of yourself Bill.” She looked up at his eyes, which stared adoringly downward.

She wiped the blood from the cracks on his knuckles with an alcohol towelette and laid bandages across the wounds. She opened a pair of air-activated hand warmers and placed them in his hands.

“Shake those up, so they get going,” she said.

Bill nodded. He obeyed and shook his hands.

“Have you been taking the medicine I gave you?”

Bill nodded.

“You need more? Can I see the bottle?”

Bill nodded. Something rattled in his pocket. He produced a cylindrical orange bottle. The translucent plastic glowed around the label in the flat wintry light. She took the tube and examined the pills against the sky. She looked displeased.

“How you been Bill?”

Bill shrugged. “Been missin’ you, that’s for sure,” he said.

She giggled. She looked up into his eyes. Bill saw adoration shimmer on her face. She lightly clasped his hands and shook her head. Her nose had grown pink in the cold since she’d exposed it. She was otherwise bundled in a puffed down jacket and knit cap.

Bill spoke. “You look adorable. You know that?”

“There’s that smooth talk,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me about your week? What’s been going on since we last spoke?”

Someone flicked a nickel to his box. “Thank you sir,” shouted Bill with a wave. He dropped his warmer. “God bless you sir,” said Bill.

“Still raking in cash, I see,” she said.

Bill smiled and started talking. He recounted each day carefully, as if he had prepared summaries in advance. On the evening after their last conversation, he had missed the shelter cutoff. It had been a cold day, colder than today, and he’d been scared that he might die in the cold. He bought a bottle for warmth and courage and settled down for the night on a sidewalk grate that gave off a little heat.

He woke up early, shivering and sweating in the night. It was dark, moonless, and morning had not hinted on the sky. There was no snow. He closed his eyes and prayed for the sun to rise. And it did! So he survived another day, collected money on his corner, and made sure to make the shelter early. He slept warm till morning, though they took his booze.

He found himself disoriented in the sober morning. His head lolled inverted off the side of his mattress, and the fluorescent lights shined harsh. It took time to piece things together, to distill distinct objects from the overwhelming world. But he did! He found things sharp and clear. He did not want to dull his senses with the pills, so he settled for a cup of coffee and tried to read the paper. As he stared at the sheet, the words disintegrated into their letters, which floated and vibrated against each other on the paper. So he put the paper down and folded, and he walked out into the day, which whirred by without definition.

He spent that third day in the park among the trees. The biting air embraced his body as it embraced the bare branches, stones, and ponds. He bought a hotdog from his buddy Abdul and settled down at a hilltop gazebo. Foliated white pines blocked the wind, and the worn wood felt good beneath his seat. He stared with smiling eyes at scratched hearts and initials, graffitied into the wood, while he swallowed his well-dressed hotdog down. He slept well, warm in the shelter and sufficiently stoned to last the night.

When he awoke, he walked to the East River and sat transfixed by the rising sun. He hardly felt the cold. Little steeples and water towers of old Brooklyn, vivid and silhouetted against the fiery sky, poked out among the mess. The warm clouds billowed; they seemed triumphant, celebratory. He could not look away. When the horizon turned gray and the dome turned blue, he continued to sit and stare, overwhelmed with the vivid beauty of the world.

And then it was night. And he had not moved. And the shelters were closed. So he kicked in the door of a public restroom and settled down for a night on the tile floor. He slept poorly, buoyed in and out of horrifying dreams. Eventually the morning came again. He walked out into the lambent orange of the sunrise and felt tortuously thin warmth reach his skin through the air. An old Chinese man dropped lines into the water. When he’d see flexing in a rod he’d test the tension with a twang. Periodically, he reeled one in, and every now and then, he’d drop a flapping fish onto the pavement. Muscular flexion glinted silver in the morning. Seagulls called with envy from the air.

The world shimmered on his walk back up to the park. The structure of the sky dissolved inverted in the water. Grids of elderly Chinese danced in synchronized slow motion beneath a bridge. He walked along the water while he could and then through quiet neighborhoods where austere castles appeared suddenly among the trees. Beautiful women with large dogs walked across the street with purpose. He found a grassy hill on which to lie between cakes of solid snow drift. He watched birds, which must have missed the memo to fly south, circle in the sky. The sky lay thick and low but obviously infinite upon the world.

He felt light pressure on his cheek. He cracked a lid. A little head was cast against the sky. He blinked and forced the other lid apart. The head cocked slightly to the right in curiosity. He blinked again. The child’s finger poked his cheek again. He flexed his ciliary muscles to give sharpness to the shape that floated on the sky. The girl spoke to him: “Why are you lying here?” He did not answer. “Aren’t you lonely?” He gestured down to George, sleeping and content upon his lap. The girl continued to look down. He blinked again.

A frantic mother’s voice called her back: “Sophie, come back here now.” Sophie poked him again. He picked up George by the scruff and gestured downward. Again came maternal commands. Sophie’s head whipped away, and she ran.

Bill tried to cry but could not. Eventually he raised himself and meandered slowly to his corner, where he slept another night, and here he was, resting on his seventh day like the good Christian man his father tried to raise.

“You sure can spin a yarn Bill,” she said.

Bill smiled.

“Maybe you should keep a journal. It might be helpful to you.”

Bill nodded. He thought of floating letters.

“It looks like you’re doing alright for now.”

Bill nodded.

“That right?”

Bill nodded.

“Okay, well I’ll have to get going, but you know how to call if you need help, right?”

“Oh I’m perfect sweetheart. How are you doing, though?”

She laughed. “I’m doing fine Bill.” She pulled her scarf back up across her face.

Bill’s happy eyes squinted, and he smiled.

“Will you take that medicine like I know that you know that you should?”

Bill nodded. He shook the warmers in his hands.

“I want more than anything to help you, but I can’t help you if you don’t start helping yourself first,” she said.

She turned and walked across the street. Bill watched her head drop behind green fencing. She vanished into the subway.

The atmosphere had substance in the cave. Warm, underground air churned through the labyrinth. The periodic rattle and rush of the passing trains gave rhythm to the din. People shouldered themselves in and out as their journeys required.

She removed hat and scarf. She shoved them in the pocket of her coat. She squeezed onto her train. It whipped her downtown. As she ascended from the station, a man pulled aching, mournful music from his cello; it bounced around the tunnels.

The surface air froze the subway stink off her body, and she checked the notes on her next client:

- Fred, white, male, Wisconsin, late 30s

- Loves literature, scared of dogs

- 1 daughter (estranged)

- Paranoid schizophrenic (controlled?)

- Opiate user

- Heterosexual (tricks?)

- HIV-positive (controlled?)

- UH for ~ten years

Okay, she thought. Let’s do it. She walked quickly to Fred’s corner.

She completed her Thursday rounds at three o’clock in the afternoon. The clients lived as they usually did in their states of complacent pain.

Once back in her room on the fifth floor of some red brick tenement, she typed her notes quickly. She showered, did her hair, donned a black dress, applied makeup carefully with open mouth and open eyes, and picked out shoes and jewelry for the evening.

She took a cab up Madison Avenue and arrived perfectly on time.

“Here to see Dave,” she told the doorman.

“Yes miss,” he replied. “Fourth floor.”

She hurried over the tiles and stepped into the mirrored box. The doors shut slowly. She hit the button. Her stomach sank. The box rose. Eventually the bell rang, and the doors slid mechanically apart on their tracks. Light jazz diffused through the air. She heard quiet laughter.

They feasted like extravagant aristocrats on steaks and baked potatoes and autumnal salads with roots and fall vegetables. They drank and commented on fine California wine. They laughed lightly and discussed the issues of today. She sat across from Dave.

“I just don’t think she seems presidential,” said one of the men.

“What the hell does that mean, Mark?” asked a woman.

Mark backed off. Someone changed the topic.

There were ten of them, seated around a circular table in the uptown apartment. Caterers or maids brought new dishes and refilled glasses. Their discussions were mostly orderly, maybe somewhat forced. People spoke in turn, speaking one by one to the entire group, on whatever topic they’d taken under discussion. They spoke of politics, business, economics, movies, music, television, and culture. Opinions were met with nods and emphatic affirmation. There was much exasperation with an unnamed, backwards mainstream, which had not yet developed to the level of high consciousness that shared the enlightened views.

When the conversation sank, Dave always picked it up with a new observation. She loved that about him.

During one such lull, her phone buzzed.

“Whoa, who’s that?” asked Dave with a smile.

She blushed and shook her head. “Just work.”

Dave eyed her while he tilted his head forward. “Are love letters and hearts part of the normal correspondence of social work?”

She tried to shift the topic, but the table was quiet, and there were eighteen pupils pointed at her.

“Someone wrote you a novel,” said Dave. He laughed.

“Yeah we sometimes work with clients who become a little over-affectionate in their gratitude for our help.”

“That’s a client?” asked Dave.

She nodded.

Exclamations of interest erupted at the table. “Fascinating,” said one. “Who’s the client?”

“This old man, Bill,” she said.

The eyeballs watched her expectantly.

“This old man from Alabama,” she said.

“Looks to me, like Alabama Bill might have a little crush on you,” said Dave.

She giggled.

“Hey I don’t blame him,” said Dave. “What’s Alabama Bill like?”

She felt flutters in her stomach. She laughed. “You should hear this guy talk. Sounds like that cartoon chicken, Foghorn Leghorn, or whatever.”

The group laughed.

“He’s obsessed with this ratty little alley cat he calls George.”

More laughter and sounds of endearment bubbled from the table.

“He’s a nice man,” she said. “Just made some mistakes and had some bad luck.”

The group nodded.

Coincidentally, Bill was only three or four blocks from Dave’s building at the time. He lay on a cold sidewalk grate, warm with the rumbling hearth that he’d drunk into his stomach. George lay curled between his master’s chin and neck, soothed by the fading heat of Bill’s body and rocked by its rasping suspirations. George was fast asleep when the heat began to plummet and the suspirations ceased. He did not notice any change.

The air was cold. The snow had kept falling in slow motion, as it does when the air’s right.