On Lower Wacker I’d seen transients scattered along the catwalk, many asleep between scraps of newspaper and cardboard in the early morning. Otherwise there were only those few commuters who parked their cars in the designated spaces between the catwalk and the street itself. Occasionally a car would slow and the driver—hoping to claim a parking space—would ask if I was going to my car. I would cast the driver an accusing, condescending glare and simply say, “I don’t drive.”
I would look up at the concrete ceiling and listen for the sounds of heavier traffic flowing above, but I never heard it. Sometimes that ceiling seemed to be a mile or more thick, and the blackest, sootiest patches on it the entrances to vast, inaccessible caves.
On the morning I first encountered them I was going down the steps when I saw a haggard old man with worried eyes waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Before I even made it to the bottom he was talking to me. I averted my eyes and attempted to pass him by, but he held out a shaking hand to block my path.
It was then that he said the word, not as part of a sentence, but just as a single, exhausted exclamation: “Shabbie.”
As I attempted to sidestep him, I lost my balance and nearly fell onto the dusty, glass and ratshit-laden sidewalk. I cursed the old man and continued on my way.
I knew what he’d been talking about as soon as I saw them. There were about twenty on that first day: men and women—none of them standing any closer than ten feet from each other—on the catwalk, among the parked cars at the foot of the catwalk, even along the edges of the road. They didn’t look at anything except each other, with vacant, expressionless faces, hands deep in their pockets, hugging shapeless garments around themselves. There were a few more street people hovering along the edge of this strange, scattered group. They whispered to each other, laughed, complained, but refused to pass beyond a certain point into that arena where the brown-ragged strangers stood so silently, so oblivious to anything but each other.
Another old man called to me as I walked past the huddled transients and onto that stretch of blacktop where the strangers stood. Almost immediately I could hear a ringing, feel the pressure of an invisible fluid closing around me. I looked into their incredible eyes. If they knew I was even walking among them, they made no sign; and when I finally passed the last of them I felt a tremendous release in pressure, as though I’d just surfaced from a deep swimming pool.
All the rest of that day I felt as though there was a wet gloss clinging to me, but whenever I ran fingers over my skin, they came away dry and clean.
I didn’t see them again for several days, but in the meantime I saw a piece of graffiti on one of the cement pillars that lined Lower Wacker:
It was an unseasonably cold evening in early October. For some reason I can no longer remember and probably couldn’t have pinpointed at the time, my usual depression had been boiling into an uncharacteristically vicious rage against everyone around me, against inanimate objects that got in my way, against my pathetic little room and, of course, against myself and everything about me: my thick, hopeless face, my job, my loneliness. I pushed my way through the Wabash Avenue crowds and made for the nearest stairway down to Lower Wacker Drive.
A rat, obese from eating the garbage that filled the dumpsters and piled along the base of the catwalk, waddled quickly across my path. I had to stop in my tracks to keep from kicking the beast. I suddenly focused all my rage on this foul-smelling creature that had the audacity to block my way for even a split second. My fists clenched and I searched the shadows, wishing I had kicked it, wishing I…
When I first heard her voice, I could swear she was laughing. It was only when I heard the telltale impact of flesh smacking against flesh that I was sure she was crying—no, screaming. Then I heard the man’s voice: loud, cruel, wet with lustful anger, and I realized what was going on.
They were on the catwalk, near a stairway that led to street level. I jumped onto the walk and grabbed the man before I had any idea who or what they were. With a downward straightarm, I loosened his grip on her clothes as I grabbed his collar and swung him around to face me.
He was a Shabbie. They were both Shabbies. He was about my height, very thin, but there was an animal hunger across that emaciated face that would have scared me off had I not already been so wound up in my own furies. He screamed, a high-pitched flurry of incomprehensible sounds, and his face seemed to stretch forward, forming a threatening, toothy snout.
I was standing too close to take a swing at him, so I brought up my elbow and struck his nose. The glancing blow stunned him long enough to allow me to step back and punch him as hard as I could with my good arm. He stumbled off the edge of the catwalk, bounced onto the hood of a car and melted into the deep shadows, moaning and whimpering.
When I turned to her she was looking at me with horrified eyes, as though I had been the sole aggressor. I opened my mouth to say something in my own defense, but she ran up the nearest set of stairs. I took one last look at the Shabbie man lying between two cars and then followed her.
She was on the top step, looking out at the city lights as though she had never seen anything like them in her life.
“Are you all right? Miss? Did he hurt you?”
The sound of my voice sent a brief tremor across her face. She reluctantly took her eyes from the skyline and looked me in the eyes.
“I didn’t mean to scare you like that. Down there, I mean.”
Once her eyes locked into mine, she would not let go. She looked at me as though I was something disgusting she had just been ordered to eat. She nodded toward the buildings, trying to draw my attention to them.
“It’s a pretty skyline, isn’t it? When they turn on all the lights…”
But she wasn’t listening. I looked at her closely then, because she seemed to have lost all interest in me. Her hair was thin and medium brown, laced with silver streaks and hanging limp and careless to her shoulders. From this vantage point, only a couple of feet away, it was almost impossible to resist trying to make out the skull beneath that clear skin and those delicate blue veins just beneath the surface. But her face was too wide—or her head was too narrow; at any rate, the effect was to jut her nose and the center of her lips forward and pull her eyes and the edges of her mouth around to the side.
I could make out her delicate slenderness even beneath the shapeless brown rags she wore. Her feet were big and her breasts were small, like a young girl’s, but she was clearly more than a girl. There were traces of age and pain in her face. In spite of her plainness, her strange face and her ragged clothes, I found her unusually attractive and appealing. The fact that she was one of the Shabbie People who had been haunting stretches of Lower Wacker Drive only made the attraction stronger.
“Miss, could I… buy you something to eat? A cup of coffee or something?”
She made no response, so I turned away, humiliated, and headed for the train. I did not bother going back down to Lower Wacker; I was only two blocks from the train now and the crowds were beginning to thin. As I walked I tried not to think of the latest, capstone humiliation of this wretched day; I had saved a pretty girl from an attacker only to have my respectful advances ignored afterward. The incident seemed to have neutralized me. I no longer felt any anger, only that creeping numbness that was my biggest enemy but probably also the one thing that had kept me from taking my own useless life years before.