“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you where that is. You don’t have to buy me no lunch.”
“You give me directions out of the goodness of your heart. And I’ll buy you lunch out of the goodness of my heart.”
“That sounds like a safe and sane human interaction.”
Inside, they both ordered Quarter Pounders, french fries, and chocolate shakes, and shared a small table at the front window. A homeless old man and a romantic young woman! A strange couple, but only if you looked at the surface, if you used five senses. Because she was Indian, displaced by colonial rule, Corliss had always been approximately homeless. Like the homeless, she lived a dangerous and random life. Unlike landed white men, she didn’t need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm clock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class. College was an extreme sport for an Indian woman. Maybe ESPN2 should send a camera crew to cover her academic career. Maybe she should be awarded gold medals for taking American history and not shooting everybody during the hour and a half in which they covered five hundred years of Indian history. If pushed, Corliss knew she could go crazy. She was a paranoid schizophrenic in waiting. Maybe all the crazy homeless Indians were former college students who’d heard about manifest destiny one too many times.
Corliss and the homeless white man ate in silence. He was too hungry to talk. She didn’t know what to say.
“Thank you,” he said after he’d finished. “Thank you for the acknowledgment of my humanity. A man like me doesn’t get to be human much.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.
“You can ask me a human question, yes.”
“How’d you end up homeless? You’re obviously a smart man, talking the way you do. I know smart doesn’t guarantee anything, but still, what happened?”
“I just fell out of love with the world.”
“I understand how that goes. I’m not so sure about the world myself, but was there anything in particular?”
“First of all, I am nuts. Diagnosed and prescribed. But there’s all sorts of nutcases making millions and billions of dollars in this country. That Ted Turner, for example, is a crazy rat living in a gold-plated outhouse. But I got this particular kind of nuts, you know? I got a pathological need for respect.”
“I’ve never heard of that condition.”
“Yeah, ain’t no Jerry Lewis running a telethon for my kind of sickness. The thing is, I should have been getting respect. I was an economics professor at St. Jerome the Second University here in Seattle. A fine institution of higher education.”
“That’s why you’re so smart.”
“Knowing economics only means you know numbers. Doesn’t mean you know people. Anyway, I hated my job. I hated the kids. I hated my colleagues. I hated money. And I felt like none of them respected me, you know? I felt their disrespect growing all around me. I felt suffocated by their disrespect. So one day, I just walked out in the campus center, you know, right there on the green, green Roman Catholic grass, and started shouting.”
Corliss could feel the heat from this man’s mania. It was familiar and warm.
“What did you shout?” she asked.
“I kept shouting, ‘I want some respect! I want some respect!’ I shouted it all day and all night. And nobody gave me any respect. I was asking directly for it, and people just kept walking around me. Avoiding me. Not even looking at me. Not even acknowledging me. Hundreds of people walked by me. Thousands. Then finally, twenty-seven hours after I started, one of my students, a young woman by the name of Melissa, a kind person who was terrible with numbers, came up to me, hugged me very close, and whispered, ‘I respect you, Professor Williams, I respect you.’ I started crying. Weeping. Those tears that start from your bowels and roar up through your stomach and heart and lungs and out of your mouth. Do you know the kind of tears of which I’m speaking?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”
“Yes. So I started crying, and I kept crying, and I couldn’t stop crying no matter how hard I tried. They tell me I cried for two weeks straight, but all I remember is that first day. I took a leave of absence from school, sold my house, and spent my money in a year, and now I’m here, relying, as they say, on the kindness of strangers.”
“I am kind because you are kind. Thank you for sharing your story.”
“Thank you for showing me some respect. I need respect.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. She knew this man would talk to her for days. She knew he’d fall in love with her and steal everything she owned if given the chance. And she knew he might be lying to her about everything. He might be an illiterate heroin addict with a gift for gab. But he was also a man who could and would give her directions.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I really have to get moving. Can you tell me where this address is?”
“I’m sorry you have to leave me. But I understand. I was born to be left and bereft. Still, I made a human promise to you, and I will keep it, as a human. This address is on the other side of the Space Needle. Walk directly toward the Space Needle, pass right beneath it, keep walking to the other side of the Seattle Center, and you’ll find this address somewhere close to the McDonald’s over there.”
“You know where all the McDonald’s are?”
“Yes, humans who eat fast food feel very guilty about eating it. And guilty people are more generous with their money and time.”
Corliss bought him a chicken sandwich and another chocolate shake and then left him alone.
She walked toward the Space Needle, beneath it, and beyond it. She wondered if the homeless professor had sent her on a wild-goose chase, or on what her malaproping auntie called a dumb-duck run. But she saw that second McDonald’s and walked along the street until she found the address she was looking for. There, at that address, was a tiny, battered, eighty-year-old house set among recently constructed condominiums and apartment buildings. If Harlan Atwater had kept the same phone number for thirty-three years, Corliss surmised, then he’d probably lived in the same house the whole time, too. She wasn’t searching for a nomad who had disappeared into the wilds. She’d found a man who had stayed in one place and slowly become invisible. If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile? Corliss was afraid of confronting the man in person. What if he was violent? Or worse, what if he was boring? She walked into the second McDonald’s, ordered a Diet Coke, and sat at the window and stared at Harlan Atwater’s house. She studied it.
Love Song
I have loved you during the powwow
And I have loved you during the rodeo.
I have loved you from jail
And I have loved you from Browning, Montana.
I have loved you like a drum and drummer
And I have loved you like a holy man.
I have loved you with my tongue
And I have loved you with my hands.
But I haven’t loved you like a scream.
And I haven’t loved you like a moan.
And I haven’t loved you like a laugh.
And I haven’t loved you like a sigh.
And I haven’t loved you like a cough.
And I haven’t loved you well enough.
After two more Diet Cokes and a baked apple pie, Corliss walked across the street and knocked on the door. A short, fat Indian man answered.
“Who are you?” he asked. He wore thick glasses, and his black hair needed washing. Though he was a dark-skinned Indian, one of the darker Spokanes she’d ever seen, he also managed to look pasty. Dark and pasty, like a chocolate doughnut. Corliss was angry with him for being homely. She’d hoped he would be an indigenous version of Harrison Ford. She’d wanted Indiana Jones and found Seattle Atwater.