Equivocality

This is Abby Sher’s winning entry for the 2007 Writer’s Travel Scholarship.

The metal doors slide open. The subway car is mostly empty, except for a man in the center. His frame is thin and stretches at least six and a half feet. His skin is the color of warm caramel and his hair is woven tightly in braids orbiting his narrow skull.

When he speaks, he measures his words meticulously.

Hello and thank you for listening my name is Isaiah and I am here to ask you for help my high school is going to Rome, It-a-lee but we need your help we cannot go to Rome, It-a-lee without you.

Breath.

Today I am selling peanut em-and-ems and life saver gummy candies they are only a dollar each they taste good and please any donation would help a lot thank you.

He ends his speech by shuffling his cardboard boxes side to side so we can hear the candy knock against the sides. The boxes are swollen and dented. They have been taped together with thick, shiny packing tape. Isaiah is careful not to make eye contact with any of us as he walks the length of the train car. He is looking only at our hands. And now, so do I. Mine - dry and ragged and at age 33 already knotted and thick at the knuckles. The couple across from me – her nails are an effusive hot pink and his are wide and cut so close to the skin that they are outlined in raw flesh. A set of hands slices the air into sharp rectangles. Another travels up and down a wool jacket, picking off cat hairs delicately, thoughtfully.

And then there are Isaiah’s hands. Long and sinewy, tapping out a rhythm on his baggy jeans. In the web between thumb and forefinger is the mossy stain of a small tattoo. Isaiah has settled leaning against a pole, letting his back thump as we lurch and sway. His box of treats sits on his feet. I let my eyes climb up to his face now. His lips move delicately, mouthing the words to some unspoken song. His forehead is smooth, his eyes a soft brown, wide and unguarded. And yet there is a definition, an undeniable maturity to his jaw. I can’t help myself.

“So, your whole high school is going?” I ask.

to Rome, It-a-lee but we need your help

he recites before he finds my eyes and then stops. His face hardens slightly. Chews the inside of his cheek, studying me. Maybe I have crossed a line. I am not sure why I challenged him. I know I should be ashamed of my limp sweatshirt, my dusty skin. I want to tell him that I used to be a lot of fun, really. But he does not know me. He cannot be disappointed, I hope.

“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head so we can both forget it. I hand him a dollar.

“Whatever,” he shrugs, unaffected. Throws me a bag of peanut M&Ms.

I am on the Q line. Which stands for quiet, quick, quaint, quinine, quixotic, quaalude. Which means we climb the steel rails slowly and surface up above the Manhattan Bridge. We rumble towards the city with our metal belly exposed as the sky sifts between its grays and blues, trying to decide if it will unleash its storm this afternoon.

I have taken the morning off. Or it has taken me? Pressed my body into the sheets, damp from my night sweats. I have stared at the ceiling for eight hours begging it to fall already. Then put on my jeans, wiped my armpits with a washcloth, and walked to the subway. I could have taken the 2, 3 N, R, or B. I chose the Q.

We stop at Canal Street. Isaiah eyes a young Indian woman pushing a stroller. A large man in a down jacket gets on eating cooked shrimp out of a green styrofoam plate and laughing. The smells of cigarettes, corn chips and herbal shampoos collide as we perform our silent choreography of shifting personal space, each trying to find our own corner. Then newspapers open, eyes lower to a protective half-mast. Isaiah has made his way to the other end of the car.

Hello and thank you for listening my name is Isaiah and I am here to ask you for help my high school is going…

I have to crane my neck to see him now. His gaze is still focused straight ahead, and yet somehow he manages to take in the entire crowd. Shuffles the candies back and forth when he is done. His percussion section.

A woman with an iridescent hairclip lifts up a folded bill.

“Peanut M&Ms please.” She does not look at him.

“Gummy.” Another hand.

“Yes, my brother.” An outstretched fist. Isaiah offers his in return.

14^th Street Union Square.

The colors, the piercings, the patchouli. A man with pink hoop earrings and a bathing cap carries a stretched canvas on which he’s painted, “But what are you gonna DO about it?”

Isaiah picks up his box and swiftly works his way through one of the doors.

I pull my bag into my chest and thrust myself out after him. “Excuse me! Pardon me!” My voice is urgent and startles even myself. I sound injured.

“Let her out!” says a man half my size with a purple lips and cheeks the color of rhubarb.

Isaiah has crossed the platform and is heading onto an uptown R train. I scoot in before the doors close and clutch a pole behind a peach tank top. She shimmies her shoulders. Her synthetic ponytail whips me in the face.

Hello and thank you for listening my name is…

Shuffle shuffle.

“Peanut.”

“Gummy.”

Herald Square. We switch trains again. Get swallowed by a crush of pinstripes, suede and aftershave.

My high school is going to Rome, It-a-lee…

“Is there room in that suitcase for me?” quips one of the briefcases. He finds himself hilarious.

The open-toed pumps next to him snarls, “Rome’s overrated.”

“Yeah, actually. You’re right, you’re right,” Briefcase drools. “Hey, you wouldn’t wanna get a drink, would you?”

Pumps shrugs and Briefcase tries not to ejaculate in his pleated pants.

Times Square. The mass of bodies is thick and tight. Isaiah is alert but unhurried, maneuvering past dancers, drummers, an Asian man playing “Ave Maria” on a wooden flute. We are on the 7 now. There are only a handful of people on this car. I sink down into a spot behind a man with a worn bible and I fold a magazine over my face. Master of disguise. But I also am not sure why I am hiding.

for listening my name is Isaiah and…

We get off again two stops later. I have never been in this station before. The walls are a bleeding red, soured with stains and puddles of piss. The map says YOU ARE HERE with a thick circle and arrow. I do not have time to read where HERE is. Isaiah is taking the stairs two at a time. We come out onto the sidewalk. The air is loud and dissonant compared with the intimacy of below. The scarves and steaming kebobs frenzied like an amusement park. I watch Isaiah from behind a newspaper box as he opens a package of peanut M&Ms and pours the bright pellets into his mouth. His jaw muscles tighten and then release, his Adam’s apple raising as he tips his head up at the sky. Maybe he is smelling the rain too.

He takes me off guard and steps into the street just before the light changes. The orange hand has already stopped flashing and he snorts at the cars coming towards him, throwing his birdie finger up above his head as he saunters across. Swivels his hips around the metal railing and then descends below another subway sign that says Vernon Boulevard, and beneath it, Smurff rulz det pussy.

The traffic light is lingering now, a sickly mottled green. The cars going past are moving offensively slowly. I do not have a plan if Isaiah and I are separated. Probably because we are not even together. And this should not make it difficult to breathe, but it does. When the light shifts to yellow I pounce, arms outstretched, snaking past gyms bags and strollers, flattening myself between a loving couple. They can hold hands later.

There are four subway lines that stop here. Isaiah could be on any one of them, going up or downtown. I pause. Try to listen. There is no gut instinct. My gut is constantly twisted and sore, pushing against my bottom ribs. When I confuse it for hunger at night I feed it cheap wine and burritos. Now, as I hold it, it is empty and bitter and refuses to speak with me.

Isaiah is standing under the stairs. His cardboard luggage resting on his feet. I am already inches away from him by the time I realize how close we are. Back away a few steps on tiptoe, trying to control my panting. He remains undisturbed, nodding his head with eyes closed as a train tumbles towards us.

Metal doors yawn. A smallish gathering. I settle down a row behind him. Until he turns around to face the other way.

Hello and thank you for listening my name is Ramon and I am here to ask you for help my high school his-tor-y class is going to Peru South Am-air-eeca but we need your help we cannot go to Peru South Am-air-eeca without you.

My head snaps up in time to catch the left side of his mouth curling into an impish half-smile before he walks to the far end. My heart quickens. It is not wrong what I am doing, I tell myself. It is not anything.

An elderly couple both shaped like humpty dumpty sits down on top of me. His belt buckle is bright and brassy and pokes up between his sagging breasts.

“My whole arm is getting numb-uh. And it hurts up here-uh. I shouldn’t have had all that soda at lunch-uh. It’s not good for my heart-uh.”

“Sssh, just close your eyes. You’re making yourself anxious.”

“Don’t tell me to go to sleep-uh. You always want me to go to sleep-uh. I could be dying-uh.”

“Think pleasant thoughts.”

“I’m thinking of divorcing you-uh. That’s pleasant-uh.”

A girl by the door laughs. Pink sweatpants pulled tight across her rump. Terry cloth letters spread across her chest. The man next to me now leans over towards her.

“Are you a modder?”

“Wha?”

“Are you a modder?”

“No,” she rolls her eyes and blinks her pink-dusted eyelids slowly.

“Joo could be.”

She shakes her head and pushes her breasts out further.

A graying father with his two children. They have quaint English accents.

“Max’s turn now.”

“Yes, my turn! I’m going to make it a haad one.”

“Not too haad, Max.”

“All right.”

“Is it an object or an animal?”

“We’re all animals, silly.”

“So it’s an object?”

“Yes.”

“Is it heavy?”

“Very.”

“Is it in America?”

“No.”

“Europe?”

“No.”

“Asia?”

“No.”

“Is it the rings of Saturn?”

“No. No more hints.”

“Is it on this train?”

“Yes.”

“Can it fly? Is it heavy?”

“I told you already yes!”

“Is it a boat?”

“What?”

“I mean, a bird?”

“No.”

“Is it Daddy’s shoes?”

“Yes!”

We transfer again. I don’t even look at the map now.

Hello and thank you for listening my name is Aaron and I am here to ask you for help my high school band is going to the Philippines but we need your help…

Hello and thank you for listening my name is Marcos and I am going to Ecuador.

My name is Don and I am going to Orlando, Florida.

We get off at Ditmars. Isaiah crosses the street and walks into DOLLAR DREAMS. Jugs of purple drink and thin paper plates. Isaiah goes straight to the counter.

“Chris!” his voice is much sharper in here.

Chris gives him a new box of M&Ms and a kitchen garbage bag full of Starbursts.

“You got a new box? This one’s shot,” says Isaiah.

“I gotta ask Mook.”

“Forget it.” He dumps the new candies into his cardboard luggage and counts out twenty singles.

“Who’s she?” asks Chris. I have been looking at Mary Magdalene candles, but close enough that I can still feel Isaiah shrug off the question.

“C’mon,” he says, brushing my arm with the side of the box and taking off.

There is a new brightness to our wares now. Maybe a full box is more enticing, the waxy yellow paper luring hungry eyes. One car is made up entirely of moustaches. Dark and spiky, pushing through stubbornly. Soft and nascent, tickling the upper lip. Curling in pubic-like spirals. Isaiah sells at least a dozen to the moustaches. Weaves his way from pole to pole.

“Good luck,” says a girl with a mustache and a bag full of seltzer.

“Thanks,” says Isaiah gently.

The next car only holds one man. His hair is an explosion and there are feathers all over his grey shirt. He holds a cardboard sign. A ransom note for the life that he deserves to live. I can see through the door windows that there are plenty of people in the other cars. But Isaiah does not move. He does not make his speech either. We both sit in the rancid cloud of unwashed flesh and excrement that hovers in the car. The man does not seem to notice us, but stares out the windows, approaching the end so resolutely, so gracefully.

We pass from train to train. We are going to LondonIng-land, ParisFrance, Mad-reedSpain, SacramentoCalifornia, Toronto, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Australia, Germany, Morocco, Mozambique, Alaska, Taiwan, and Mini-sota.

We are always part of a high school.

One boy says, “What high school, man, Central?” He is dressed entirely in camouflage and his shorts drip down into his dirty socks.

“King,” says Isaiah.

“Yeah,” says the boy, nodding and hands him a dollar. “Keep it.”

We stop to see how much candy we have left.

“I’ll pay you fifty cents for just the red ones,” says a man. His beard is the color of rust and he has wooden spikes in his wrist and eyebrows. “You know they each correlate to your energies. Totally say so much about you. I used to only eat yellow, you know, fire. But when I came back from India, I couldn’t even smell the yellow ones without getting sick.”

Isaiah swallows the sugary paste in his mouth. “Dollar,” he says soberly.

“No, man. All I got is fifty cents. I swear. I don’t even want anything but the reds. I just need to be grounded, you know? Touch the earth. Can you just take out the reds and I’ll pay you. Look, this is it. I’m not lying.” His palm holds a thousand intersecting creases of pink skin and two dull quarters.

Isaiah pulls out a package from the box and tosses it to the man.

“Okay man, I mean thank you. I’ll give these to someone who needs them. But seriously, I’m not gonna touch any of them except for the red ones. I can’t. It’s like, physically impossible.” As he walks away I see a Bush-Cheney ’04 bumper sticker holding together the crotch of his cut-off pants.

Isaiah doesn’t speak during the evening rush. The chaos of armpits, elbows, laptops. The faces have lost many of their contours, their vigorous applications of mascara, lipstick, cologne. New shadows have blossomed, and a sunken weariness that gives everyone deep jowls. There are new smells too – ripe halitosis and dampened baby powder.

A woman gets off and says, “Bye,” even though we never said hello.

And I realize, we are alone.

Isaiah throws a loose M&M at me. I throw it back to him.

“You’ve got to save this….for France.”

“Yeah,” he muses. He slowly lets out air between his crooked teeth. “Huh.” Then he catches a thought with his chin. Smiles.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

I could say so many things. I pick at the zipper on my bag, then open it, as if to find an important paper, a ticket, a map leading to the pot of gold. All I have in there is my wallet and a nail that I almost stepped on outside my apartment security door. I have no destination. Which stands for aimlessness, unattainable, excavation into a hollow rock. Which meant danger or at least daring when I started out. And yet, I am surprisingly calm as I shrug my shoulders in response.

We share a package of M&Ms and a small carton of orange juice that Isaiah takes out of his box. And we go. We go through Queens, the Bronx, up the east side and down to the river. Over bridges, under tunnels, past the moment before and into sun’s descent.

“This is you, right?”

Isaiah’s foot is in the corner of the metal doorframe. I look at his tapping fingers, then at the platform. It is empty and vague and poorly lit.

“Right?” he asks again. The tiles of the station are white and green, blood, vomit, coffee, beer, petrified bubblegum spelling out DeKalb Avenue. I cock my head as if I don’t understand. But Isaiah’s face is solemn. We both know this is where I began.

Stand clear the closing doors! shouts the conductor. Her voice pops and curdles in the p.a. system. I stand up and lift my bag onto my shoulder. Step towards the door.

“But where are you going?” I demand quietly, carefully.

“I don’t know yet,” he says. It is honest. Slightly flirtatious.

I said, stand clear!

There are faces peering angrily. Earrings bobbing. New musks and fresh stockings. Make a decision. Are you coming or going?

Isaiah watches me.

“I’ll take one more please,” I say. Fish out a dollar and look him in the eye.

“Which one?”

“Those.” I take a package of Starbursts, warm and slippery. He takes his foot away and the doors bite shut behind me as I go up the stairs.

DeKalb Avenue is celebrating. The re-opening of a bakery that I never knew closed. The internet café got an atm machine. Happy hour all night. A man tips out of Ray’s Pizza and chomps on first one slice, then another, without stopping to swallow. “Ha ha!” he calls to the drunken moon.

I ran away I tell him.

Did you notice? I ask the owner of the Greek video store.

I’m not sure what day it is, what year it is who’s the president? I bait the card table on the corner where they sell incense and soap.

It is still Tuesday. A little after nine.

I leave my sneakers by the line of mud-caked shoes outside my door. This is my home. Where I live alone. Where I have nursed my solitude and torpor until it has grown mossy, covering everything in a fine, earthy coat.

I turn on the lamp in the living room. Pour a glass of water, and sit down in front of the coffee table.

“Okay,” I announce to anyone and everything who can hear me. My lurking demons, my dead people, disappearing lovers and talk show hosts who admonish with hook-nosed opinion late into the night. My stale grief and outdated promises. My library books.

“You’re invited too,” I say graciously to the mouse scratching by the basket of softened onions.

I do not light candles or play music. This is not a séance and I assure them I am not exorcising anyone tonight. I wait for them to assemble. Cautious at first, and then lightly stepping forward. Eyeing me. I don’t blame them for their wariness. I have treated them cruelly. Manipulated them. Blamed them for my lack of everything. Cursed and spit. Pretended – and almost convinced myself – that I had beaten them down with the weight of my inertia. But tonight I know I need to acknowledge them. Some sort of truce.

“I went out. And I brought you back something.”

I put each color out on the coffee table. Yellow for what’s gone and red for what’s stuck pink for thick-fanged fear and orange for self-loathing. I unwrap one square at a time. Misshapen and sweaty, like us.

And we dine. Chewing slowly. Deliberately. The slick flavored syrups flooding our mouths, numbing our teeth, tongue, lips. The artificial colors rising through our skin until our eyes are violet and our hair is pea green. I recount where I went and who I saw and what I heard and how I was

Impetuous.

Nimble.

Endless.

My demons grin generously. My dead people applaud.

I then I finish my water, turn out the light, pull off my clothes and get into bed. Only for a short time though. I do not set an alarm, but I don’t need to. I already cannot wait for the morning.

When I will get on the B.