She lived here because she had to live somewhere. She could not manage alone. She is staying with an older sister and her family. They are the only white family left on the block. She is the strange one, the one who never says where she is going, who rarely takes meals with the others, the one who will never marry.
Maybe there was no technical term or medical name for what she did or what she was. She just wandered on past, free of all that.
He felt the heat, Bangladeshi heat, West Indian heat. He read the names on the windows of local enterprises. This is what she sees every day, Tattoo Mayhem, Metropolitan Brace and Limb. He decided to wait within sight of the stairway to the elevated tracks. If there was a movie to come, she would show up eventually to get on the train. He ate something in Kabir’s Bakery and waited, then went to Dunkin’ Donuts and ate something else and waited, looking out the window. Was this the first food he’d eaten all day? Was she eating while he was eating? Did the Starveling eat?
He stood in the shadows on the corner, under the el, trains arriving and leaving, people everywhere, and he watched them, he so seldom did this, evening slowly unfolding. There was nothing here that was not ordinary but he felt compelled to examine the scene, searching for something he could not identify. Then he saw her, across the street. She was born to be unseen, he thought, except by him. She willed it, she carried it with her, the wary look and taut body, the inwardness, the void of touch. Who touched her, ever?
She wore a dark sweater now, V-neck, and there was an umbrella handle jutting from the shoulder bag.
Take the umbrella, her sister had said. Just in case.
He followed her up the stairs to the platform, same track as before, uptown, and this was another reality to absorb, that they were not headed back to Manhattan. They rode five stops to the end of the line and she went to street level and boarded a waiting bus. He felt lost and dumb, wandering blind, a passive victim of some shadowy manipulation. He also felt close to the point of breaking off contact. The bus sat there, marked Bx29. People kept boarding and after a while he followed, taking a seat near the front. Nothing happened but time seemed to be rushing past. He could see it out the window, sky darkening, things in motion. A man and woman behind him were speaking Greek. He thought the Greeks were in Queens.
Then they were moving past a landscape of parkways, thruways, loops and interchanges, and the bus entered an enormous shopping complex, several malls, more or less contiguous, national names everywhere, franchises and megastores, a hundred soaring logos, and out there, beyond, he saw the lights and regimented shapes of a great sweep of high-rise buildings.
She nearly brushed his shoulder when she got off the bus. It wasn’t until he stepped out onto the sidewalk that he was realized he was standing in front of a movie theater. He stared into the transparent facade. He was ready to believe all over again. There she was inside the lobby, her sketchy body moving along the winding ticket line. He was ready to trust the moment, be himself, like a man bracingly awake after a panic dream.
He checked the display of features and starting times and bought a ticket to the film about to screen. He rode the escalator to the second level and entered theater 3. There she was at the end of a row near the front. He took a seat where he could in a crowded house and tried to think along with her, to feel what she was feeling.
Always the sense of anticipation. To look forward to, invariably, whatever the title, the story, the director, and to be able to elude the specter of disappointment. There were no disappointments, ever, not for him, not for her. They were here to be enveloped, to be transcended. Something would fly past them, reaching back to take them with it.
That was the innocent surface, on loan from childhood. There was more but what was it? It was something he’d never tried to penetrate until now, the crux of being who he was and understanding why he needed this. He sensed it in her, knew it was there, the same half life. They had no other self. They had no fake self, no veneer. They could only be the one embedded thing they were, stripped of the faces that come naturally to others. They were bare-faced, bare-souled, and maybe this is why they were here, to be safe. The world was up there, framed, on the screen, edited and corrected and bound tight, and they were here, where they belonged, in the isolated dark, being what they were, being safe.
Movies take place in the dark. This seemed an obscure truth, just now stumbled upon.
It took him a moment to realize that this was the same movie he’d seen the day before, way downtown, in Battery Park. He didn’t know how to feel about this. He decided not to feel stupid. What would happen when the movie ended? This is what he ought to be thinking about.
He watched it end the same way it had ended twenty-four hours ago. She remained in her seat with people shuffling past. He did the same, waiting for her to move, a full fifteen minutes. He recognized the meaning. Movie over, no wish to leave, nothing out there but heat rising from the pavement. This is where they belonged, in a tier of empty seats, no false choices. Did he want to own her, or just touch her once, hear her speak a few words? One touch might ease the need. The place smelled of seat cushions, the dust of warm bodies.
The restrooms were at the end of a corridor. The area was clearing out when she went in that direction. He stood at the head of the corridor, thinking, trying to think. There was nothing to trust but the blank mind. Maybe he felt that he was standing watch, waiting for the other women, if there were any, to come out of the restroom. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next and then he walked down the hall and pushed open the door. She was at the washbasin farthest from the door, splashing water in her face. The shoulder bag was at her feet. She looked up and saw him. Nothing happened, neither person moved. He drifted toward a state of neutral observation. Neither person moved, he thought. Then he glanced at the row of stalls, all apparently empty, doors unlatched. This was a motivated act, stark and telling, and she moved away, toward the far wall.
There were gaps in the silence, a feeling of stop and go. She was looking past him. She had the face and eyes of someone distant in time, a woman in a painting, curtains hanging in loose folds. He wanted one of them to say something.
He said, “The faucets in the men’s toilet aren’t working.”
This seemed incomplete.
“I came in here,” he said, “to wash my hands.”
He didn’t know what would happen next. The white glare of the toilet was deathly. He felt sweat working along his shoulders and down his back. Even if she wasn’t facing him directly, he was in her sightline. What would happen if she looked at him straight on, eye to eye? Is this the contact she feared, the look that triggers the action?
Neither person moved, he thought.
He nodded to her, absurdly. Her face and hands were still wet. She stood with one arm bent in front of her but it didn’t seem defensive to him. She was not fending, staving off. She was just caught in midmotion, the other arm at her side, palm of hand flat against the wall.
He tried to imagine what he looked like to her, man of some size, some years, but what did he look like to anyone? He had no idea.
He felt a kind of tremor in his right arm. He thought it might begin shaking. He clenched his fist, just to see if he could do it. The thing to do was to make himself known, tell her who he was, for both of them to hear.
He said, “I keep thinking of a Japanese movie I saw about ten years ago. It was sepia tone, like grayish brown, three and a half hours plus, an afternoon screening in Times Square, theater gone now, and I can’t remember the title of the movie. This should drive me crazy but it doesn’t. Something happened to my memory somewhere along the way. It’s because I don’t sleep well. Sleep and memory are intertwined. There’s a bus being hijacked, people dead, I was the only person in the theater. The theater was located down under a monster store selling CDs, DVDs, headsets, videocassettes, all kinds of audio equipment, and you go into the store and down some stairs and there’s a movie theater and you buy a ticket and go in. I used to know everything about every movie I ever saw but it’s all fading away. It embarrasses me to say three and a half hours. I should be talking about minutes, the exact number of minutes that make up the running time.”