Fall, 2017
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He saw him enter the street mid block, before Helen’s warning, so had plenty of time to stop and wait for him to cross. The man doesn’t cross, however, but walks an uneven path up to their car, in front, where he stands straight, touching the bumper with his legs. He stares through the windshield without facial expression, with a look that is intense yet hard to unpack, and while his eyes are directly on him Robert doesn’t sense the man actually sees him.
The man is large, well over six feet, white, pale white, but has dirt etched in his face. His hair is partly matted, somewhat combed. His clothes are worn and somewhat soiled. He looks powerful yet passive, as if contained within an understanding only he knows, or as if restrained by another that is beyond him, over which he has no control.
Or he is is building energy for release.
They are coming back from seeing friends in San Jose, a desultory afternoon of disjointed, dispirited talk eased by wine, and have exited 880 into the neighborhoods of Oakland, where Robert can finally start to relax after the tension from the push of traffic, bad even on Saturday—the mass of cars driving too fast, too close, where sudden shifts in the flow can make drivers slam on brakes. This is the fabric of life now, normal day-to-day. You can’t let such distractions get to you else they overwhelm. They won’t get better. They will only only get worse. Before them, down the receding parallel lanes of the highway, and above, on the horizon, the gray haze.
That look—
The man doesn’t change it as he pulls from his jacket pocket a straight razor with a bright, silver handle, unfolds it slowly, as if by method, and holds the blade up in the air, tensely poised by his face. His face, however, now is calm, composed, almost comforting. Robert can only keep looking back. He can deal with conflict. He knows he can deal with conflict. He also knows when to walk away. Backing up wouldn’t be right and might be dangerous. If he takes his eyes off he won’t be prepared for whatever happens next. But he isn’t thinking about what to do next. He isn’t thinking about Helen. He isn’t thinking about himself. He isn’t thinking about anything. He can’t. He is frozen in the man’s gaze.
That look—
Without taking his eyes off Robert or changing the look, the man touches the top of his left cheek with the blade and delicately, slowly, carefully, still as if by the same method, draws it to the bottom with a slight, curving motion. Only a split second of nothing, then the red crescent, then the generous flow, bright against the dirt and pallor of his face. It is beautiful.
What this is is familiar yet Robert has no idea what it is. There is nothing he can do. All instincts collide into indecision and paralysis.
Then the man moves the blade to the other cheek and draws once more, tracing a curve that approximates the other in length and shape, but this time Robert does not see the results. He only sees the man’s eyes, or doesn’t them, rather is lost in the intensity of the gaze.
Then the man’s eyes rise and ease to an expression that resembles resolution, even satisfaction.
Then the man folds the blade into brightness with precise gesture, as if by another method, and puts the razor back in his pocket.
Then he moves to the sidewalk and walks off. Before long he is out of sight.
“Call 911,” Helen says, but he has already begun to pull to the curb to get his phone out. Waiting with the ring tones, he turns to her, whose stunned face must match his, yet it startles him.
The woman at 911 asks a litany of questions. Is he in danger? The man is gone. Is the man a threat? No, he doesn’t think so, he doesn’t know. Tall, black hair, jeans, brown jacket—he realizes he can’t remember much else to describe him, even the color of his eyes or if he is shaven. But obviously the man won’t be hard to spot. He doesn’t know where he went and isn’t even sure exactly where they are themselves and has to lean out and look at street signs.
“I need a minute,” he says, then draws a breath. It is if all time rushed to this moment, has suddenly stopped, and he has to wait for it to start again. They sit in silence, impossible to think how long, not finding words, exchanging glances that in reciprocation diminish them both. Finally he realizes he has regained sufficient composure and that there is nothing else to do but drive home.
A dozen blocks up and over he sees a police car pulled to the curb, its lights flashing, and further off, on the sidewalk, the man. One officer stands before him at some distance, hands on hips. Another is talking to people on a lawn, Black and Asian, who wave their hands wildly. They must have called him in as well. The man’s face is horribly bloody. Robert can’t tell if he has cut himself further.
“Should we stop?” Helen asks.
“And tell them what? What can we say that the others won’t tell them? That they can’t see for themselves? The police understand this.”
Robert debates his argument, but Helen doesn’t disagree, perhaps looks relieved. So he drives on carrying a memory he waits to dissolve, past the modest craftsman houses and sterile apartment blocks whose faces are closed and quiet, where all sees are the bars on windows and the steel mesh covering front doors, the bars and mesh diminishing as he approaches the Oakland hills but not the closed faces, their silence.
That look—
In memory the man’s eyes pierce through the blood, or from it draw their strength. It is a look of possession and abandon at the same time, of wonder but not revelation but the whatever the opposite of that might be. Everything comes together in their sight, nothing is illumined, yet in them them Robert feels he is known and touched to the core.
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“What will happen to him?”
They’re having a late, light supper, scarcely eating. Robert does not look up to see if Helen looks at him when she asks, though senses she does not. He is not ready himself.
“They’ll probably take him to the emergency room and patch him up and turn him loose. There are rules.”
“Where will he go?”
“I don’t know. Where he always goes. Anywhere. Everywhere. He’s a loner. I doubt he lives in a camp.”
“Can no one help him? We have clinics.”
“I’m sure they are filled. But what do you think they could do? Do you think he’d even go there?”
“The man needs help.”
“The man is on drugs.”
“How do you know that?”
“Didn’t you see his face?”
“He can be treated.”
“The man is crazy.”
“He can be treated.”
“The man is gone.”
“You know nothing about this man.”
“What is there to know? He’s in his thirties. Think about how decades of isolation, neglect, and self-abuse have wired and undone him. Think about what he has decided. Think about all that he has let go. Think about what he has left. He has nothing.”
“He’s in his twenties, and his jacket was blue not brown.”
“He’s in his thirties. But fine, get him clean. Ease his mind. Then what? What does he have waiting for him when he returns to the world? Do you think anyone will give him a job? Doing what?”
“He can learn a trade.”
“Do you think he’ll get training? Do you think anyone will pay? Fine, give him a scholarship. Sign him up for training. Do you think he can cope with that? Do you think he’ll stay and finish?”
“Fine, he graduates, he completes the training. Do you think anyone will still give him a job?”
“Fine. Give him a job. Doing what? Do you think he’ll keep it? If he does, do you think he’ll be able to afford to live on what he gets paid? Do you think he’ll keep his spirit? Keep his mind? He’ll just be back where he is now.”
All this he tells the sandwich on his plate.
“The man is hurting.”
“The pain is all he has.”
“How can you have no feelings for him?”
“How can I? And I can tell you the man neither needs nor wants our sympathy.”
Then he looks at her and sees Helen staring at him with horror. The long, narrow face he has always found attractive now looks emaciated, her auburn hair thinner, paler. There are lines he hasn’t noticed before or else has put aside that can’t be accounted for by her wrenched expression. Her eyes flee from her face, as if they don’t belong. For the second time today he is looked at but not seen.
“Jesus, he was big. I wonder where he gets the food,” Robert says.
Helen stands abruptly, knocking the table and rattling plates, and without excusing herself turns and leaves.
Robert is shaken. This isn’t like her, he thinks. She is not fragile. She is upset. Naturally. Understandably. Only now does he realize he raised his voice.
But the marriage is OK. He doesn’t take her for granted and they seldom fight. Life at home has been quiet, but all couples go through that. At some point you run out of things to say and have to stay on an even keel.
They’re OK. Work is work. It’s OK. It’s fine. There have been shakeups at the office, but he has survived and is in good shape with his position. Helen was moved to part-time, but they decided that made this a good time to have a child. Still, he is already dreading the cost of college for an unborn, that and all else that will follow. Their mortgage payments are steep for a house they couldn’t afford if they tried to buy it now. But he’s always worked things out before, and there’s no reason to think he can’t continue doing so now. That their lives could be better, however, is not a luxury he can afford.
He’s OK. He’s sitting on other stuff, but who isn’t? There’s no point in dredging up what can’t be dealt with or changed, what no one cares about, what gets exacerbated with the dredging.
Many are far worse off. There’s no solace in that recognition, but it should should temper any move to self-pity. The homeless camps have cropped up in the news, and he’s seen the one by the Fruitvale Home Depot, a mass of dingy tents, dented campers, and flimsy plywood constructions cemented by junk and trash. Here and there faces, furtive, defiant, listless. There are layers of existence above and layers below. What lies at the bottom?
Then there is the world. The country is having a rough patch as well. Mood is bad, and nothing feels good, stable, certain, or sane. People are divided and angry, or remote. No one can believe what anyone says. Like wildfires they have spread, the rallies from the man in the White House, his incoherent, rambling words feeding the single passion in the crowds.
Ride it out. Stay sharp, keep calm. Concern yourself only with what you can manage. And he has done that. At any rate he’s done all he can with what he hopes is good faith.
Then there is the thing no one talks about. There is always the thing no one talks about. He wonders what that might be. How can you think about a thing when no one talks about it, when they might not know what it is?
He picks up his sandwich, stares at it, then puts it down. He looks up to see Helen passing by in the hall, carrying a small bag on her shoulder.
“Don’t call,” she says. He only sees her back. The front door closes soundlessly.
Don’t call, he knows, means don’t call. She’s being irrational. He’ll need to give this a few days.
.
The flames don’t dance but leap wildly, sending jagged sprites into the sky, following an erratic choreography scattered across the terrain. Fire embraces and consumes whole structures of houses; blackened trees stand in silhouette against lurid shimmer. From above, dense smoke, massive and soft like storm clouds, spreads across the land through which appear a constellation of spot fires and red tears in the hills, open wounds. It is late, and, sunk in an armchair, Robert is watching news footage of the Sonoma conflagration.
The newscaster strains for the right emotion, tempering small certainties against large unknowns, not finding a note of reassurance. She shows and explains an animation that plays the growth of the fire since Wednesday, which, in its size and speed, approaches vast inevitability, uncontained and uncontainable. Then the screen returns to footage on the ground and from the air, repetition with variations searching for a theme, or tearing away from any.
He tunes out the voiceover and in quiet contemplation surrenders to the images. Whatever gloss they might provide for the day’s events dissipates in the insistence of the flames, their resolute, bright colors, orange and red, whose inner pulse soothes him, slips him towards a trance. He is tired.
The winds will shift Sunday, the newscaster says before he turns off the set, and they will be strong.
At the door to their bedroom he pauses, surveying the layout, studying the vacancy on one side of the bed. The room rearranges itself to make the subtraction, then returns to exactly what it was before but now has become a cubic void. A welter of emotions stir inside while reason deflects from the absence. That will have to wait, he thinks. Everything will have to wait. It is time to let go and give himself to restoring sleep. Already his body is heavy, and he fumbles with undressing, keeping his shorts, then slides into bed.
But when he turns out the lights, pulls the covers, and closes his eyes, suddenly he is struck wide awake, as if the alarm of eternal vigilance has gone off inside his head. He doesn’t know how to turn it off, so he lies in bed waiting for it to quiet and sleep to come.
He checks the clock to see only a few minutes have passed.
When he checks again a half hour has disappeared.
His eyes have adjusted to a darkness, where he can see outlines, the dimness seemingly pooling within their edges yet not moving. The darkness looks dirty. The darkness is dirty. He can feel it on his skin.
Get up, do something, he thinks. He can’t lie awake this way all night. He goes to the bathroom, flips the switch, flinches in the sudden blare of light, then adjusts. At the mirror he stands to see his naked chest and above, on his face, the day’s stubble. It looks dirty. He feels dirty.
Then let’s shave.
He picks up the razor from the counter and holds it before him a moment, as always impressed by its heft and balance, its thick, sure chrome plating. It’s a double edge—safety—razor. His father used one, one of few traditions Robert has left, but only a remnant of a memory. His is made in Germany and cost a few bucks, a small luxury he decided was justified. Something in our lives has to be well made. He remembers the blade was dulling this morning, so twists the handle. The mechanism is a marvel of precision and firmness, and the wings unfold slowly, smoothly, without the least stutter, to reveal the blade. The blade looks dirty. He rinses thoroughly, every time, but the blade still looks dirty. He removes it and sets it down.
Then he gets the pack from a drawer and slides the used blade in the bottom and carefully—always carefully, with finger tips only, it’s part of the ritual—pulls a fresh blade. It is clean. Instead of inserting it, however, he holds it up before him. Twin, gleaming ridges line the gray rectangle, pure and sharp. There is writing, a cryptic name and the place of origin—Japan. The blade inspires confidence as well. Down the middle, where the blade goes in and is held, a straight, toothy grin. But instead of inserting he moves it next to his left cheek, close, without touching.
Why would anyone do this?
It’s not a question he can answer. He’s still wide awake, the alarm is still going off, sounding more questions he cannot answer, including the one as to why he is standing there, questions raised by the day, questions that have always been there, questions yet to come, questions that multiply into still more questions, questions without end. He’s been here before. Who hasn’t? Ride it out. Stay sharp, keep calm. Concern yourself only with what you can manage.
Instead he traces a curve down his cheek, barely touching skin. But it’s too much, it is enough—blood has begun to flow, red and clean. The sting from the cut is bracing, and he stares at the arc, at the blood, wonder chasing horror. His head ratchets up another level of alertness.
Too much, not enough. He feels incomplete, lopsided, that sideways smile against a blank. How to solve the discrepancy? He only gives that question a second’s thought before he takes the blade to his other cheek and draws down again. The blood flows graciously, like a benediction. The pain on the right matches the pain on the left, joining it in resonance. His mind races to a charged peak, illuminating in its intensity, burning clean.
Stop.
What next?
Possibilities, the vectors of possibilities fan out rapidly and turn against themselves and contort and turn into signs and symbols that break apart into beads and blots that coalesce, faster, and straighten into more lines that radiate once more in his mind, from his face, from the blood, and transform again, still faster, do not rest. What next? Streaks and bolts and zigzags? Camouflage? To hide himself from what? Another face to go against his own? Which one? A face that reveals his inner self? Or hides it? What if he doesn’t have an inner self? Tribal markings? Which tribe? A fierce mask that strikes fear in foes and fends off plagues and devils and hunger? A graceful array that pictures serenity? An intricate configuration of contrasts that boosts presence? An exotic design that ensures fertility and restores the land? Geometric patterns that bring order but mean nothing? Special markings only he will comprehend? That he will spend the rest of his days trying to grasp? A spastic scatter that makes no sense to anyone? Twining lines of flora, the ferocious scowl of an attacking beast, twisting strands of DNA, a chart of distant stars?
Scarcely, only on the periphery of his vision, does he notice the blood rivulets down his chest or the red streaks against the white porcelain bowl gathering at the bottom. Nor, in the mirror, does he see directly his sheeted cheeks. What he sees are his eyes, looking back, only sees a look. It is that look, the look of the man with the straight razor, and it is his look, and it isn’t anyone’s look at all.
He understands everything now.
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