Things That Are Lost

“You and me, baby.”

“You and me, kid.”

No words to describe the isolation of their relationship. They’d both been living rough when they meet. Him on the dole, turfed by the state, deemed recently cured by The Mental. Fundamentally cured.  Her on the run from somewhere. From a well-fed, drug-fueled home with clean bed sheets. “Crisp,” she describes them. She often tells him that she misses the smell of crisp, just-dried sheets in cheery cotton, Percal blends. Sheets like altar cloths receiving sacraments.

They find each other one night both turned away from the same shelter. “Too late. Too late,” the attendant says, scowling at them. Holding his hands like a traffic cop. There is a mass grumbling and a diaspora as the line of grey people shuffle away, but they are the last to leave. When they make their way to the same underpass, she asks him if he i getting any money from the state. She speaks to him as if she’s known him for a very long time. Her voice is comforting and insinuating, a cheerful worm making its way through his ear into his brain.

She tells him that she can’t get any assistance because her face has changed so radically. She no longer looks like her ID picture. She holds up a dirt-encrusted drivers license and he can see it, the lack of resemblance. In a dull monotone she lets him know it was a sliding sort of change, a thing that happened half the time, then all the time. Banks turned her away first. Gradually even her parents failed to recognize her.He gives  a half nod, acknowledging how such a thing might happen. 

As they begin to share the same spaces, he can see how it is a problem. On any given day she seems to alter more. The planes of her face become sharper, the hair thinner. But her eyes become more present, more seeing. Like the eyes of those crows you see sometimes in the horror movies. The ones who live mostly in hell but come to earth just to cue the really bad things that are going to happen. 

He tells her that he doesn’t get money. It isn’t quite true but there’s something more slippery about her than her face. He’s not quite sure if he can trust her. They huddle together under the bridge one night, becoming shadows together, and in the morning she is gone and he sees that his backpack is unzipped. His few items of clothing are all wadded up and pushed around. She hasn’t taken the most valuable things—his father’s old watch, a key to a safety deposit box. He wonders if it’s because she hasn’t seen them or because she’s decided they don’t matter to her. She’s taken a picture of his though. It’s one where he’s a kid, sitting on his porch steps with his dog, a small white terrier with chocolate brown spots. The act is sneaky and shocking, and he spends a few minutes cursing her. He never wants to see her again.

But he does see her again, because there are only so many shelters in the city. She finds him in the cafeteria of one such place and sits down next to him. He might not have recognized her but for her eyes.

 She pushes her plate back and forth. It’s filled with a grey looking sauce covering a grey slab of meat. She doesn’t speak.

“You stole from me,” he tells her finally, his voice shaking.

“Are you sure that was me?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Then yes.”

He likes that she doesn’t say that what she took was “just a little thing.”  But he doesn’t like that she won’t speak of the theft or why she did it. She won’t even tell him if she still has it, that picture of one of his last happy times. She chews her slab of meat mechanically, her jaw moving from side to side, and she shrouds her face with her hair when she sees him looking at her. The rock that lives inside him tells him to run away from her, but the water tells him to stay close. 

***

He’s sitting beside her one day on the bench by the park across from the law school. They watch the preppy kids smoking outside the white-columned entrance. He’s wearing one of the shirts he got in The Mental. It scratches against his skin but it’s nicer than anything he’s ever owned. It’s striped red and yellow. A cheerful combination.  But it makes his skin feel dirty. He imagines his skin is the bark of a tree and that this girl is sitting beneath his branches. He pretends that he can keep her safe. He hears her talking.

“My mom was always on me to cut my hair,” she says. “She’d tell me, ‘It’ll fix you right up.’ It took her a while to figure it out. That I was unfixable. After that I kept it long just to spite her. Because there’s a kind of grace in being unfixable.”

“You think so?” he says, because sometimes he has to challenge her.

“I know so,” she replies. Flecks of her spit hit him; her jaw is changing now.

He nods. He wonders if she’s on medication. He wonders if medication would make things better or worse for her. He is out of his own medication; he’s been out for some time and all his internal elements now guide his actions.

“I dream all the time now,” he tells her. “That can be fixed. But then I sleep all the time. I don’t like that.” He tries to fish for answers through his own admissions.

She nods. She aims her crow eyes at those students across the street. Near the clock tower, a policeman rides a horse that is coming, clop, clopping towards the park. Towards them.

“When I had a face that people recognized,” she tells him, “I got a lot of attention. I never wanted it, the attention. It turned me into a thing. I didn’t like that.”

He doesn’t know if he believes her. He can tell that she does not like the invisibility of their current situation. It makes her do reckless things. Like now. He can tell she wants to do something that will attract the policeman’s attention. He can feel her own internal itch and Rock rumbles. He gets up. He is with her but he will not be with her to go to jail.

He starts walking away from the bench and in a minute he can hear her running after him. 

“Wait,” she says. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”

He nods.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I have to keep safe.”

“Well, safety’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“You talk too much,” he tells her, but really it’s Water that’s talking inside him and making him itch. It’s turning him into a tree and if he gives in, he’ll stop and grow roots that reach down into the cement, down into the subway tunnels he knows are beneath them. He needs to choose where and when that happens and he doesn’t choose here. Her silence makes him look at her and he can see he has hurt her. Her face has changed yet again. The corners of her mouth twist down and she is rubbing her arms as if she’s cold. 

“You can’t care about that,” Rock tells him.

“I know, I know,” he replies. He reaches for one of her hands to still its flight.

“What do you know?” she asks him, a furious edge to her voice. It is another part of her that does not change. 

“What it’s like to be a wrong thing.”

She accepts this. His meaning has somehow connected with hers, though not quite intersected. It’s the best they can do for now.

***

They don’t sleep in shelters anymore though they try to get food there. They’d be separated, men to the men’s cots, women to the women’s and neither side is safe. They are better together, outside while the weather is still bearable. 

“Why did you take that picture?” he asks her one night. The air is sharp and soon it will be much harder to sleep outside. She reaches into the back pocket of her jeans and pulls it out. It’s crumpled and it feels damp when he takes it. He sees that she’s drawn an outline of something, somebody. A girl-like shape beside his own boy shape.

“Is that supposed to be you?” he asks.

She shrugs and will not meet his eyes. 

“I went back there once,” he tells her. “I thought that going back might be like time travel, so I retraced my path through all the places I’d been since I’d lived in that house. When I got back to it— to that old first neighborhood, to that first house— I even knocked on the door. The place belonged to a different family of course. There wasn’t a little boy and a dog. And I looked…I was clean, but they could see it…”

“That you were a wrong thing,” she murmurs.

“Yes,” he says. “I could see it in the way their mouths twisted around their words. The look of disgust in their eyes." The memory of it is still sharp as a blade that slices through his heart. A new presence inside him rises up to meet it. He can feel it just as he can feel the dwindling life of the city around them as the day creeps away from the night. When he drags himself back from remembering, she is speaking again.

“Everything that’s happened to me is ordinary,” she whispers. “It’s nothing that hasn’t happened to millions of other girls. I don’t know why I’m the one who had to go all Humpty Dumpty about it.”

He considers this. Water tries a platitude but the new presence, which he decides to call Snake, because it’s all coiled inside him, shoves the words away. 

“There’s a universe of broken things. We balance all the unbroken things,” he says instead. 

She nods and leans her head against the brick wall that’s risen up against their backs. The sky is purple from all the city lights and the river a few blocks away smells like sulfur. In the morning, she’ll be different again and perhaps he won’t recognize her, because he’ll be different as well. He brushes against her hand with his knuckles and can feel the blood thrumming beneath her skin. When her voice stops making sense to him, it will be the sound he recognizes her by.

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