Читать книгу In the Blind - Eugene Marten - Страница 9

SO the first night was bad.

The air conditioner was loud and too cold. If you turned it to low it still came out high, so I got up and turned it off, opened the window. I lay back down and warmed up fast. Sweat crawled and then I realized it wasn’t just sweat and jumped up wiping and slapping. Turned on the light and watched them scatter. I left the light on and washed my face.

The closet door wouldn’t close.

My back, my stomach, my side. Sleep would come without warning, a dirty trick you kept falling for. I woke up hard like running into a wall. Someone driving a stereo past the building, driving it right through you. Couldn’t tell if I’d shouted or dreamt I had, then a silence so strange it hurt. Once I’d used wads of cotton, candle wax, bits of sponge to keep out the noise. Now I got up and turned the air conditioner back on. Shut the window. Washed my face again.

Coming back to bed, a small red stain in the middle of the mattress. Might happen from time to time, they said. Nothing they could do. Avoid stress, they said, and recommended a feminine hygiene product.

I flipped my pillow. My stomach clenched. The closet door wouldn’t close all the way but at least outside it wasn’t as dark anymore.

When it had been light for a while I got dressed and went downstairs. The maintenance man told me about a diner where you could eat a full breakfast for under three dollars. Coffee included, juice extra. It was the kind of place where people smoked while they ate. Over easy and white toast. I ate it all, saving the home fries for last, then soaked up the yellow puddle with a piece of toast somebody hadn’t finished. They’d left a paper, too, and I sat there in the booth drinking my coffee and looking over the help wanted pages. I had a rough idea of what kind of help I wanted to give: entry level. Will train. Wages commensurate—maybe the less you asked for, the less they’d need to know. Something you could just walk up to and disappear in.

Something on a bus line.

The waitress came and asked me how everything was. I said everything was fine, I just needed something to write with. To make circles.

Foundry, flagger, material handler. Wear a clean cap in a clean room, impregnate engine blocks. They wanted you to work with limestone. Wanted you to be a self-starter in a friendly, fast-paced environment.

“Take your average person,” someone said in the booth behind me.

“Vitamin B and as hot a bath as you can stand,” the waitress was saying.

She filled my cup. I kept losing my place. I tried to go in order, to read them one at a time, but then my eyes would wander. I’d see them all at once and have to start over.

“Ask your average person to take your average person.” They wanted you to join their team.

I made a circle. Laborers, immediate openings. Within walking distance. After that transportation was provided and you got paid every day. I left nothing and grabbed a toothpick on the way out. My shirt smelled like coffee and secondhand smoke.

On the way to the agency I passed a building that had once been a high-rise condo and was now something called the Workforce Development Center. The people camped out front did not look like they were being developed. Maybe they were on the waiting list, or maybe they weren’t on any list and were beyond waiting. They sat or lay across the whole sidewalk with their blankets and makeshift backpacks, their shopping carts and cardboard, their duct-taped shoes. A man with no arms or legs lay on a furniture dolly and played a portable keyboard with his tongue. Christmas songs. I didn’t look in anyone’s face I didn’t have to, but you could smell cheap wine and everybody’s ass, their terrible freedom. It was as warm as the day before but in the middle of them all a trash can smoldered.

And then someone finds the heart you tried to lose and shakes it bleeding in your face. Take your average person.

At the agency a sign in the window sent you around back. The guys hanging out there weren’t in much better shape than the ones on the sidewalk, but most were on their feet. Two of them threw a foam rubber football at each other. They stopped long enough to let me by.

Inside you couldn’t smoke but you could make all the noise you wanted. Imitation wood paneling and a dirty tile floor. Plastic chairs, all of them taken. A TV set on a stand playing a company video everybody ignored. A young woman was drywalled into a corner and everyone else was gathered at her window, getting paid, complaining, both. Or maybe they just talked that way. I tried to filter in. A big round-faced man stood behind the woman. She kept asking, “Who’s next?” and everyone thought they were.

Sheets of paper tacked to the fake wood displayed work requirements, the Minimum Wage Act, the Equal Opportunity Act. NO SMOKING. WIMPS NEED NOT APPLY.

“Arrive fifteen minutes early and be ready to start work,” the video said. “Dress professionally and use proper hygiene.”

“Who’s next?” the young woman said. Nobody moved and so I was. You spoke through a hole in the window. She passed me a pen and an application, a half-sheet of paper printed on one side. There wasn’t much to it but I had my hands full. Someone squeezed in next to me, a shoulder hard against mine. She was the only other woman there and I didn’t move.

She slid her pay stub under the window, kept a finger on it. “What’s this for?”

“Lunch,” the red-faced man said.

“Somebody gave me a baloney sandwich I ain’t ask for,” she said.

“Three dollars.”

“Wasn’t even no mustard on it.” She sounded and smelled drunk. My hand shook. You could barely make out my name and social security number. At the bottom of the application they asked you what kind of experience you had—you were supposed to check a box. I checked Other and put the pen down.

“Talk to me like I’m a human being,” the drunken woman said.

“This is how we talk to human beings,” the woman behind the window said. The red-faced man returned the pay stub.

The video moved on to safety in the workplace. A man lay under a forklift.

“I’m goin back to Buffalo,” the drunken woman said, like this was the only possible response. “Fuck some tired baloney.”

“We love you, too,” the woman behind the window said. “Who’s next?”

I told her I didn’t have a phone. She took the application and said it didn’t matter. She asked me what shift I wanted to work and I said it didn’t matter.

“Report back here at four-thirty for first shift,” she said, “one o’clock for the second, seven for the third. You get paid at the end of your shift.” I asked her what kind of work I’d be doing.

“You get paid every day,” the round-faced man said.

I asked if they could give me some idea.

“Racking parts,” someone behind me said.

“We haven’t even taken any orders yet,” the young woman said. They took them at five-thirty for first shift, two o’clock for second, eight for third.

“You have to show up an hour early,” the man said.

“Using I language,” the video said, “tell the offender how you feel.” The subject was sexual harassment. Then violence in the workplace, a black guy and a white guy squaring off in a warehouse. This got an audience, and some of them looked and sounded like men I’d known but hadn’t wanted to.

Out front a battered rusty van pulled up and people were spilling noisily out before it had fully stopped. If they’d been racking parts, they were bent and dusty from it. Some went into the agency, some went into the bar next door, picking up speed. A sign said they cashed checks in there.

There was another agency across the street. The lights were out and the door was locked. I saw a couple of chairs inside, then just myself. A sheet of paper in the glass told you when the door would open. In Magic Marker it asked that you not wait around outside. There’d been complaints.

Across the street a bottle broke and let out laughter. I blinked and ground sand against my eyeballs. Tasted my mouth. If I was going to come back an hour before any shift I’d need some real sleep. The Magic Marker said two kinds of ID.

On the way back I passed a Burger King. I stopped, kept going, stopped, turned and went inside. Everyone was having it their way. All you had to do was push the little pictures on the register, but the only buttons on the customers were the wrong ones. Someone wanted the seeds scraped off his bun.

“I didn’t order any hair with my burger,” a woman was saying at the counter. I got an application and left.

I thought about going to the library—I’d developed the habit of reading while I was away—but I remembered where it was and today it was still too far.

Back at the Avenue a heavyset man was complaining at the lobby desk. Someone was in his parking space.

“There are no assigned spaces,” Mrs. Ivy said in monotone. “First come first serve, this is a recording.” I turned my back and faced the elevators.

“Are you in my space?” the man said loudly.

“He doesn’t have a car.”

I rode up to my floor and went down the hall. My hand was still shaking when I slid the key into the lock. Maybe it was the coffee. If I couldn’t sleep there was always fast food, or the library—or tomorrow, just not a lot of it. I turned the key the wrong way and it broke off in the lock. Suddenly it had been a long day and that felt like the end of it.

I felt sweat beading on my scalp, leaned my forehead against the door. I could lie on the floor and close my eyes. It would turn into a sidewalk beneath me. A trash can appeared, smoke rose out of it. I took some deep breaths and when I felt steadier I went back down to the lobby. Mrs. Ivy waited without looking at me. A sign on the front of the desk said TEN DOLLARS FOR NEW KEYS. NO EXCEPTIONS. She looked up.

I told her I hadn’t gotten any phone books. She said she’d take care of it and let me use hers. I looked through it, found something, went back up to my door.

I knelt down. You could see it stuck there in the keyhole, protruding slightly but not enough for me to grab. I reached in my pocket and felt the broken half still on its chain, then the chain, then the imitation Swiss Army knife from the kid at the Greyhound station.

I couldn’t pry the rest of the key out with the blade. There was a tiny pair of tweezers I tried then and it came out easily. I put the two pieces of key together in their own pocket. They clinked together like coins.

The shop wasn’t far, a block up and a block over in what had been designated a Historic District. A large black-brick building loomed next door with crenelated towers and a banner that said NOW RENTING. SECTION 8 WELCOME. On the other side a blood bank. The building across the street looked like it should have been condemned and maybe it was, but there were people in the windows and maybe they were, too. A deli store. Salvation Army. Brownstones. Some kind of urban development association with a big sign out front on a crew-cut lawn. A ragged woman came out of nowhere, hiked up her skirt and squatted behind the sign. She looked at a newspaper, then tore off a piece.

There was a safe in the window. Locks installed in cut-out door sections.

I went in and the door chimed. There was no one at the counter, no one else in the store. Someone called out from the back, a girl’s voice. She would be right with me. I looked around, at what hung above the counter, what was on the walls, but I wasn’t seeing it yet. The windows were dirty. I smelled dust.

“Can I help you?” She stood behind the counter, looking pressed. It wasn’t easy. I had to put it together . . . if she could copy one. Broken.

“Sure,” she said. “If it’s not all . . .” She made a face, held out her hand. She had a warm scratchy voice, almost a kid’s voice, the kind that called people sweetheart and honey, but she was pressed. I gave her the pieces and she held them together. “No problem.”

The walls that formed the corner behind her bristled with tiny hooks and on the hooks were hundreds of them, thousands, maybe, and I was close enough to see that they were all blanks, possibles, the edges straight and uncut. But the one she took came from a box on the counter.

“Kwikset,” she said. “Very common type.” She slipped on a pair of goggles, turned her back to me and put the pieces into a machine. There were a couple of stools in front of the counter but I kept standing. I couldn’t tell what she was doing but I watched her arms move. I watched all of her.

A high-pitched grinding you felt in your teeth. You could smell it. The door opened and a man walked in holding a newspaper. He sat down on one of the stools, unfolded the paper and covered his face with it. The dusty light crept toward him.

The girl switched the machine off. She blew on the key and inspected it briefly. The goggles sat on top of her head. She and the man with the paper ignored each other.

“A dollar forty-nine,” she said. When she gave me my change I asked her if she was a locksmith. The man made a sound.

“I keep the books,” she said. “I just help out up front as needed.” She hooked her fingers around the last two words. The newspaper rattled.

“You guys looking for help?” I asked. She didn’t answer, she was doing something with the register. I said it again, louder. Asked if they were looking for someone.

She looked at me. “Help?” she said. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe . . . I think he might have mentioned something.”

The man behind the newspaper said, “He did say something.” She went on like he hadn’t spoken. “He’s just so disorganized—especially lately. I mean you wouldn’t believe.” Just no time to take out an ad or anything.

“Could I fill out an app—” It got tricky again, a bubble of spit sealed everything in. I slowed down: or were they looking for . . . ex-per-i-ence? Someone with?

I had history but no experience.

“I’m not sure.” She held her chin. “I know we need somebody. I think he’s just looking for help right now.” Raised a finger. “One second.”

She went back in the back. The man on the stool read his paper. Locks hung from the walls in plastic packages, by themselves or in doorknobs or levers. Outside a man walking by the storefront, spooning lunch into his mouth from a tray under his chin. The light pushing harder through the dirty glass, the blanks behind the counter glowing silver-white and brass-yellow.

“One minute,” she yelled. Papers shuffling, drawers opening and closing. The man on the stool yawned. I looked at the headlines between us. “I’m sorry,” she said, coming back, “I don’t know where he keeps them. But you know what?” She took a breath. “The best thing to do would be to talk to him in person. He’ll be in later. That way you can find out exactly from him.”

So when did she expect him back?

“Ibrahim’s time is all messed up,” the man behind the paper said. “Best time to catch Ibrahim is first thing, before it starts.”

“Read your paper,” she said but she nodded. “Do you want to do that?” She smiled. “Come back first thing in person? Before it hits the fan?”

She said I should leave my name and number, in case Ibrahim wanted to contact me. I told her all I had for now was a name, and she took that.