From this municipality of the forgotten, forgotten by mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, forgotten by the state, the city, the nation, the Union of Homeless Citizens was attempting to organize a proper voting bloc, in order that delivery of services might be brought to the needy in Don Hummel Park. Given the size of the homeless population here, there was a genuine possibility, especially in the era of would-be secession by the gated communities, that the Union of Homeless Citizens could field a slate of administrators to seize control of the city itself. The non-homeless organizers, the stationaries, as they were known, had attempted, in trying to program a rally that would appeal to these disparate nomads, to bring entertainment as well as enlightenment to the people. Your mind and your ass were to be moved. Miguel arrived at the park just as a mariachi band, in Mexican uniform, was attempting to sing old Mexican love songs to the audience, especially such old Mexican songs as had a particular relevance to other revolutionary movements, the Zapatistas, the mestizos of Mexico City, the Maya movement of 2020, and so forth. The songs weren’t going over well. Whenever there was a lull in the action, the homeless citizens began attempting to barter, or to criticize, or to make impolite conversation.
Above all, and even in the half-light of urban night, they were all well tanned. It was the way you could tell the homeless citizens from the rest, who were regularly visiting paling stations. They were tan, and they were bearded, and they often had melanomas sprouting somewhere on their faces or their arms. And they had achieved, in their seething, undulating mass of disorder, something close to a perfect habitation of the present moment. In fact, a number of Buddhist ashrams in the region, as well as the omnium gatherum, that shadowy alternative cultural organization, had begun courting the Union of Homeless Citizens. Among the residents of Don Hummel Park, however, few were following the rally closely, nor did they know how they were intended to be organized, although there was a rumor of some burritos and tacos being given away at a certain bandstand. The citizens of Don Hummel Park were casually alert to the possibilities of changing the laws in their favor, but were more excited by the possibility of getting fed.
The political arm of the Union of Homeless Citizens, therefore, the part staffed almost entirely by stationaries, decided that there was one and only one nonnegotiable plank in their movement, and that plank was against ownership. All things in common trust! said the literature that was handed out to the relevant parties, though this was later thought to be too obscure in terms of its locution and was amended to read simply Lend It to Your Neighbor! Lend whatever it was you had. Miguel, who didn’t read English terribly well, wouldn’t have understood the finer points here, even had he taken the time to give them his full attention. He quickly set up underneath a tree in the park. Above him there were men who had climbed these nonnative growths and nailed up structures there. Miguel called to them, as he also asked a couple of men nearby if they wanted some tacos and would they be willing to effect a swap.
Among the activists who were most engaged in this great awakening of the Union of Homeless Citizens were Larry and Faith Roberts. Larry had been fired from URB six or eight years before for extending invitations to audit his classes to undocumented workers he met at the bus station in town. Later, he even attempted to make these new acquaintances his teaching assistants. His wife was mainly known as a writer, if a slightly inconsistent one, of articles about forms of economic oppression. By the time Miguel had arrived in the center of the Don Hummel Park and was busying about trying to secure some barter for the tacos he didn’t need, Faith Roberts was, in fact, talking into the microphone, without getting anywhere much at all. Miguel asked another guy, in his Spanglish, if he wanted some food.
“I got some tacos here. Pretty good. Pretty fresh.”
The blank expression was irritating, but there was no shortage of blank expressions in the present company.
The grandstanding from the bandstand echoed off the falling-down houses of the neighborhood, and in that reverberant and hard-to-hear sonic field, Miguel could only make out a few things: “The way you all make shelters… I’m sure you know… is a powerful suggestion of spiritual presence and rootedness… when faced with the colossal appetites… of a culture that wanted to… rule the world… but lost all that it once had… including its moral standing…”
As if the passage of seconds enabled the Anglo with the blank expression, he of the burned-out eyes, to respond, the man offered Miguel a fistful of pills immediately recognizable as the universal currency of Don Hummel Park, polyamphetamine. It wasn’t the case that everyone there was a user, as indeed Miguel was no longer a user himself, but that didn’t mean that the stuff didn’t have value. The dollar, what with inflation, and because it was trading badly against the peso, was nobody’s idea of a currency. Food stamps, which were scarce because of the fiscal situation of the nation as a whole, were more valuable, but polyamphetamine was the one thing that seemed to accrue value. The city that housed Don Hummel Park may have been full of people who hadn’t gone to college or didn’t speak the language or who were somewhat blunted from the early stages of cirrhosis, but they understood the basics of supply and demand. Miguel, therefore, was happy to offer a taco or two for the polyamphetamine, except that he had a pang of regret. This stuff was probably worth fifty or sixty dollars, and the tacos maybe an eighth of that, and it wasn’t really a fair trade. The sleeping man gets taken in the wager; this was one of the Eastern bits of wisdom that had been circulating among them.
“That’s kind of you, señor, but I’m going to look into this cart and see what else I can offer you, in addition.” The Anglo, slate entirely wiped clean, waited.
Miguel was babbling some sequence of kindly thoughts about the beauty of the evening. A monsoon, if one was possible that night, would take the edge off the heat, and so forth, and as he was lifting up the edge of the army blanket, which was really one of his most precious bits of linen, he found himself in possession of an arm.
Truths are lubricated and personal things, and there is an adherent for every truth under the sun. Some truths, despite veracity, will appear to be downright ludicrous. In addition, there is the category of truths known only to people under severe conditions, such as during the withdrawal of a drug from their system. This category of truths is more slippery, more reflective of a dynamic system than of the simple on-and-off modalities of street-level truth, and in his investigations of this approach, the withdrawal approach to truth, Miguel had found, occasionally, that he saw things that weren’t, according to more empirical methods of investigation, there, just as there were other things that he assumed were there but were not. A lamppost that you could put your hand right through, for example. He had learned, under certain circumstances, to be patient, to allow the different registers of truth to coexist, just as the various dimensions coexisted; it was all good to Miguel, and he didn’t become unduly worried when there was something happening that should not, by most accounts, have been happening at all. He therefore did not gasp when he beheld the severed arm. He didn’t treat the arm as though it were somehow abject, a thing to be feared or driven out of the comforting rabble of civilization. He just wasn’t sure it was there. Nevertheless, after looking at the arm for some time, after looking at the wild, staring eyes of the Anglo who also beheld it, after watching the arm contract and extend its fingers, he had to assume that there was a genuine possibility that the arm existed in the empirical world, resting in his shopping cart and gumming up his magazines.