Inside, she told Thomas what to order, grabbed a booth while he waited in line. She’d brought in four bulging plastic bags, which she examined and sniffed. Thomas looked up at the backlit photos of hamburgers, unsure if this was how he had wanted to feel when he found her. It had happened too quickly: he had not been prepared: but how, he wondered, could he have readied himself for this?
She didn’t comment on the way he crouched to slide the tray, one armed, onto the table. While she inhaled a double cheeseburger and gnawed the ice from the soda, splintering it in her open mouth, Thomas looked for words, aware he’d spent much of life like this, stammering and searching. Wasn’t this outcome more likely than any other he’d considered—couldn’t he have guessed that the lost child, damaged by an era that chewed up so many, would be somewhere between life and death, growling, pushing her rotting blankets and talismans through depressed intersections?
“I guess I’ll get right to it. Your mother? Edith? Is sick. Your brother is trying to take the property from her against her will.”
She said nothing, kept eating, opening ketchup packets with her sawed-down teeth and picking at her gray gums with a pinky nail.
“I know it’s been practically a lifetime, but—”
“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but you must be a lunatic or somethin’,” she said, finally. “Don’t know why you want to tell me this shit. Like I don’t have plenty to deal with. Everything I can do just to survive. City making new laws to illegalize me every day.” Her frustration soon became unintelligible, and she was speaking in schizophrenic apostrophe. “Little bitches,” she said. “Flying around, not even my own age.”
Her cool anger seemed to flash, vanishing from her face before it appeared in her body. Their circumferences like those of dinner plates, her enormous hands spread and hovered over the table, then slammed down. “Fucker. Motherfucker.”
“Jenny?” He said it again, though he knew now how wrong he was, and longed at once for all the clean, quiet moments of his life, as though summoning them might give him some power in the barbed present.
“I’m leaving, and I don’t want to see you again.” She removed a butter knife from one of the plastic bags that swayed from her arm and stood before him, swiping it through the air vertically. Thomas found himself laughing, everything suddenly a well-earned punch line: the carving on the bench that read SUK OR FUK MY DIK, the irate homeless person he’d tried to offer free real estate, the filthy woman’s eyes protruding as she gripped the dull, bent knife.
“Lunatic is right!” Thomas said, as she backed away. Freed in some way, he closed his eyes and sank into the vinyl backrest.
He folded his arms on the table, buried his sight in the scratchy wool once Declan’s, and found the memories of his past life there: himself at an art gallery, shaking hands with suited men, later sharing their cabs, waiting for the girls in belted linen dresses to come to him, packaging his pieces for shipment once they’d sold, taking a nap in the afternoon, knowing the world would be ready to receive him when he awoke. He sighed and rose and pushed the door open.
Before he felt the force of hands around him, he noticed the scent of old sweat. Then the voice of the woman who wasn’t Jenny, skirted by two others, and the coughs as they slammed his head against a wall, searching his body as though it were a cluttered drawer. The greedy push of their fingers was several seconds gone before he opened his eyes, saw them running and the man in the blue uniform approaching.
PAULIE HAD SWUM towards a quiet place within the limits of his condition. He had come to understand that the affection he shared with Claudia was as sacred as any—but still sometimes an alarm went off, all parts of him knocked together. When at the zoo he saw a father hoisting a child to see the wild goats canter, or on the street he watched a pair of sweethearts speaking to the stroller between them, he felt angry at the simple shape of his life: at the meals Claudia helped him prepare and the way she watched him complete the tasks she nervously assigned, at the days he sometimes spent playing music for just himself, at the brightly colored blankets and playful lamps that smeared his apartment as reminders of a permanent childhood. Once in a while he would still plead with Claudia, But what if I adopted, but what if you helped me take care of the baby, and always ended up red-faced and tear-streaked.