Fossils

New York City

I consider sitting in the park but the good half is still closed and it’s actually pretty cold out and I forgot my jacket in Pennsylvania three weeks ago. I instead sit by myself to eat lunch in a seventh-floor lounge area that is supposed to be some sort of academic meeting room but is primarily an auxiliary cafeteria that is preferable to the actual cafeteria because it has a nice bird’s-eye view of Washington Square Park. I hear the words “I just loved the European countries I saw” come from somewhere behind me; I inconspicuously change seats at my empty table to try to find them.

The girl has strawberry blonde hair draped around an oval face. She is thin and kind of pale and wearing a red faux-leather jacket and a red scarf and strikingly blue jeans, which are covered from her foot to a few inches below her knees by tall brown boots. The boots look worn out and tired.

“Amsterdam was just, like, beautiful…the canals, the architecture…really breathtaking.” She is still impressed.

She’s explaining this to a red-faced boy with brown hair who is wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki cargo pants. He is fairly heavyset and is more interested in her than what she says.

They both have trays of picked-at food sitting in front of them.

“I’m the only one who really got to explore at all, though. My dad was taking care of my grandmother at home, ‘cause she hurt her back a few weeks ago. My mom and my brother came, too, but were really sick for a lot of the time, food poisoning, I think. It was kind of gross.”

I peripherally see him try to touch her hand but hold off because he understands that she’s not paying attention to him.

“Italy was so great, too. I tried to, y’know, get the real experience…avoid touristy places.”

She takes a bite of her sandwich. He takes a bite of his and eats some chips.

“There was this city outside of Rome, it was so amazing. I had a great time and I learned so much…”

She stops talking about Europe. Is that all there was to it?

“But you know, not everyone can do stuff like that, ‘cause it’s my major, y’know?”

I briefly contemplate what it means to be a European countries major while pulling a printout of some chapter from some Machiavelli text from my bag. I’m supposed to read it for class on Wednesday afternoon. Despite having twenty-six hours to complete the task, I do not do so. Machiavelli languishes in a red seventy-nine cent folder with Aristotle and Hobbes.

The guy starts talking but his voice is deeper and harder to distinguish. I pick up a sentence about his family, but he doesn’t seem eager to pursue the topic, so he drops it and moves on: “Jeez, when do ya think the park’s gonna be open again?”

“I think it’ll be open by the time summer classes start,” she tells him, a bit too matter-of-factly for my tastes. She talks about how much she likes the western half of Greenwich Village, but how the eastern half is nice, too. “Oh, and obviously soho is just excellent. I’d love to get in one of those big expensive apartments overlooking Central Park…like, a penthouse or something, someplace to have wild parties.”

“Yeah, that’d be pretty neat…I think I like the west village better. My favorite bar is over there.” He doesn’t mention a name, so I think he’s lying. “The worst part, though, is that you need a job to get a place around here, but it’s really hard to get a job right know, y’know? Total catch-22.”

“Oh, totally, those are seriously the worst.”

They sit in silence for a while. He crunches a pale green dining hall apple a few times. I try to figure out what Machiavelli really has to say about republics and whatnot, but mostly I’m drawing the silhouette of a brontosaur, or other such long-necked dinosaur, on the bottom left corner of the page of notes on which I’ve written down their dialogue. A triumphant stick figure, his arms raised above his head, stands on the tip of its tail. He likely intends to climb the tail, but for what purpose – to ride it while sitting in some kind of makeshift dinosaur saddle or to make his way up to the head – I’m not sure.

I get the feeling that they’re not great friends, that they’re catching up out of some kind of obligation. He’s really paying attention, even though the conversation is fizzling out. “The only meat I really eat is turkey sandwiches. Like, all my friends think I’m a vegetarian, but I’m definitely not.”

He laughs. “That’s crazy.” This strikes me as poor word choice, but I know I don’t matter to them. They don’t even notice me watching them talk as they discuss the view from this floor of the building, how they can so clearly see the Empire State Building situated at the top the perfect line that is 5th Avenue. I’m just another sucker eating lunch alone and trying to catch up on his Machiavelli. They’re not here like I’m not.

They stand up to leave. He takes their trash and scrapes it from the tray into a garbage can. She pulls on a white coat. He wears a grey-blue windbreaker. They were prepared this morning. I realize that I should be heading out, too, or I won’t make it to class by two o’ clock.

They talk about where their next classes are and kiss before parting ways. I am perplexed, and almost make eye contact with him. I’m late. So are they.

During class, I scribble some notes in a small box beneath their script, next to the dinosaur and his conqueror.

“we create place over time
through repetition, ritual,
shared fellowship

people associate
we don’t share places, we
share time”

Wind Fish

Chicago, IL

It was the kind of place that was painted bright pastels, the kind of place where the staff was enjoyable rude, the kind of place owned by oily curmudgeons and wide-eyed cranks and savagely reformed dreamers, the kind of place that made a mean turkey sandwich. I went through them pretty quickly, cycling through every sandwich shop in the neighborhood a week at a time. But this place, this was my new favorite because I could get both potato chips and potato salad—because potatoes are too delicious for just one form at a time.

Snow on my shoes, I trudged down the steps to the current week’s favorite basement sandwich shop. I sat down with my order and I dipped the potato chips in the potato salad and wondered at the true goodness of potato magic. The sandwich was too salty, the pastel rainbow on the wall looked more faded than usual, and I wondered if it was time to move on and start dining at the place across the street, Farakan’s Deli Dog.

I pulled out my current book, something about the Spanish Civil War, and tried to disappear. I try to evaporate right there, to slip back to 1938, to feel the sand and the sun, the oil of the rifle sliding between my fingers, to hear the sound of military chants floating on the air of Andalusia, to try to forget that I work beneath florescent lights.

“Yo, I ever tell you bout Johan?”

The voice was not Castilian.

“No, man. You never told me about no Johan.”

I looked up. It was these two guys, a big one and a little one, sitting at a table across from me eating pastrami sandwiches and talking loud enough to fill up the basement room, their vowels hanging from the ceiling, their saliva dripping from the walls, their laughter tunneling through my ears. Didn’t they know the Anarcho-Syndicalists were about to be routed by the Fascists? Can’t they shut up for one minute while the war reaches its inevitable and bloody turning point?

“Let’s go, bro. Who’s Johan? Lay it on me,” the little one said waving his hand.

These two guys. The little one looked like he wanted to be the big one. They were wearing overalls and workman’s boots, both with paint and plaster stains all over their clothes, heavy coats hanging next to them.

“Johan was this one, this guy, that Mindy used to know in college,” the big one says, biting into a potato chip. He’s bald with a beard.

“Oh man, how is Mindy? You really lucked out with her man. She’s really got the uh—” The little one made a squeezing motion to his chest. “You know?” He’s clean-shaven and wears a beanie cap with a hardhat sitting on the table next to him. His overalls fit better and look newer than the bigger guy’s looser, more frayed clothes.

“Hey man, lay off. That’s my live-in girlfriend you’re talking about there.”

“Yeah, well don’t think I ain’t takin’ a turn at her when you’re done.”

“Ay! What’d I just say?” The big guy pounds the table making the hardhat jump.

“I dunno, you were saying something about some dude named Jamal or something.”

“Johan,” the big guy says and glowers at him. “So Mindy used to know this guy. Said he was studying to be a marine biologist.”

“Mindy went to college? Man, brains and beauty, bro.” The little one motions to his head and his chest.

“She was there for like a semester before she dropped out. Then I think she used to just hang out wit her college friends for a year even though she wasn’t in school no more.” The big dude took a sip of his drink. “So anyway, this Johan. The dude liked whales and the college had a whale tank. It was a weird place she went, there was like a whole freakin’ zoo and a seaworld in there. Guy got in the habit of whale watching. He’d roll out of the dorm, ride his bike down to the tanks and just sit there watching them for like hours at a time.”

I was listening now. I was still holding my page open, still staring at the words like I was reading but my eyes were silent and I was listening.

“He didn’t have many friends or nothing. He was friendly with some people in his classes and some of his teachers or whatever, but you know, what she was saying, he didn’t hang out with anybody. Didn’t go to the bar after class or nothing.”

“Maybe that’s why he was staying in school and Mindy had to dropped out,” said the little guy.

“Yeah probably. No friends to drink with, I’d do homework and watch whales too.”

“Or at least watch some Van Damme movies or Skinamax or something.”

“Yeah, really. So eventually this Johan guy started getting in the tank with them,” the big guy took a bite of sandwich and continued with his mouth open. “With the whales. Even though only the caretakers and like the professors were supposed to be in there. This guy would climb into the tank every morning when no one was looking and swim with the whales.”

“Nobody kicked him out?”

“Not at first. Guess they didn’t have the heart. She said this guy was like a dolphin. He looked like he was traveling through the water without moving his hands or feet, he’d just kind of glide. He’d do rings around the whales and only come up for breath as often as they did. Like some kind of merman.”

“Or a mermaid.” The little guy held up his arm and let the wrist go limp.  They both laughed.

“Good one,” the big guy shook his head, put a chip in his mouth. “Every day this guy was swimming with these freakin’ whales. She said crowds started forming not to watch the whales but to watch him slide through the water, grab onto their fins and pet them and everything. She said it went on like that for months until one day he refused to get out of the water when the caretakers came for feeding time. They called in campus security and everything. It was a big deal. The crowd started chanting ‘Attica’ and shit. And the next day, the crowd showed up but he didn’t. He just stopped coming. Dropped out of the marine biology program. Straight up switched his major to genetics.”

They sat there eating for a while. “Was he tryin’ to genetically engineering himself into a whale or something?” said the little guy.

“Actually, and don’t tell Mindy I told you this, cause she said it was all just a rumor, but it’s the opposite.”

“What?” the little guy said around a mouth full of pastrami.

“He decided the whales were too much like human to be animals. He was trying to free them from their bodies, from their whale-shaped prisons.”

“Oh, gimme a break.”

“I swear this is what she said. She was still hanging around the campus now and she said everyone was talking about it, everyone was saying ‘whale-shaped prisons’ and talking about weird genetic manwhales walking around pretending to be college kids. Any time they didn’t like somebody, or wanted to stop hanging out with a kid, they decided it was cause the person actually was a secret manwhale freed from his ‘whale-shaped prison.’”

The little guy rolled his eyes. “This guy turned the whales into people?”

“Said they were better than most of the regular people he met,” the big guy looked at his watch.

“Well you can’t argue that. Look at all these assholes,” he waved his arms around the deli. “I wouldn’t mind having some whales in here if this is the best we got.” He looked over at me and I quickly averted my eyes back down to my book.

“You keep it up you’ll have as few friends as the merman. So,” the guy took a sip of his soda. “Nobody had even seen this kid in a couple months when she says people heard these weird sounds at night, and shadows moving across the moon. The next day there were a bunch of smashed cars and some broken pavement out in the parking lot of the aquarium. Looked like a hurricane had torn through or whatever. And inside, the whales were gone. Poof, just gone.”

“And where was the merman? That Johan?”

“When they finally found him he was naked, wet and shivering, and standing at the top of the campus radio tower staring at the sky.”

I closed my book and went to throw away my garbage.

“What?” the little guy said, eating the last of his chips.

“Said he’d succeeded. Johan said he’d set them free.”

“You telling me those whales flew out of there?”

“I’m only telling you what Mindy told me.”

“So what happened?” the little guy said.

“I dunno. That was around when she stopped even going to the campus. I was thinking about it though. About how nice it sounds.” The big guy touched his beard and looked at the hardhat. “Just watching whales swim around, no home but the water, no worries but when you’re gonna breath next, all the fish you can eat. That’s gotta be good.”

They got up to leave, not bothering to pick up the trash on the table. “Yo, you think Mindy slept with that Johan guy?” the little guy said.

“I dunno. But if she did I’ll fucking kill her,” the big guy said with his hand on the door.

“Then I’ll have the corpse to myself. Lookout world!” said the little guy as the door closed behind him.

I picked up my coat, felt the hole in it and put it on. After wrapping the scarf around my neck, I stepped outside. There was a big puddle of black silted snow that had melted and pooled up at the bottom of the stairs leading back up to street level. The air was cold and blank like a razor blade. I started walking up the steps and thought through the windows in my life: the bedroom that looked out on a brick wall, the lunches that were underground, the office that looked into another high-rise filled with identical cubes.

My breath was a fog that uncurled itself away from my face and hung suspended for the second before it disappeared. The air was mirrored and glacial, a deadly shade that sparkled clear and ancient like blue Antarctic ice. And I stood there shivering and I lingered, staring at the sky, waiting for whales.

Favors

Easton, PA.

“There are a lot of fat people in here,” I make a point of noting to Dave shortly after we sit down. He scans the room and agrees. I wonder if we’re fat, too, or if maybe we’re all only as fat as we think we are. Whether they believe it or not, though, the majority of our fellow diners tonight at the cozy and pseudo-rustic Colonial Pizza House are quite large. I worry for a moment that maybe I’m calloused to other people’s problems and that my rudeness is a defense mechanism of some sort, but I brush the notion off, ultimately content with my faults.

All of our other plans for the day didn’t work out, so we decided to get dinner. Being that this was my first visit to this establishment, long a hometown favorite of his, Dave tells me, “Meg and I used to come here so often that they would place our order as soon as they saw us, before we were even seated.”

“Oh? What happened to that?” I ask.

“Oh, well, you know, we all moved away, went to college, never really made time to come back just to eat here, then she and I broke up, and then, you know, I made a few million dollars, legally changed my name to Rich Uncle Moneybags, and bought the place. Now everyone just resents me…”

“You just can’t win, can you?”

“Life is pain, my friend.”

“That it is.”

We chuckle, and swap stories about the last few months we’ve spent away at separate schools. This isn’t our first year away at college, but every year goes about the same: we don’t talk for a while after leaving, then we do talk, pretty often, and then we don’t talk again for a while, and then suddenly we’re both home and sixteen years old again.

I order an eggplant parmesan sandwich. I’m nervous about it, because eggplant can be disgusting if it’s not well made. My friend’s confidence in this place assures me that it probably will be fine, although he has never ordered, nor considered ordering, the eggplant parmesan sandwich. He orders a plain pizza. The waitress asks him, “Now have you ever had pizza here before?”

“Um, yeah, sure – a lot of times, actually,” he tells her.

“Alright, good, I just wanted to check. You know we put the sauce above the cheese, and that just freaks people out sometimes! I’ll be back in a minute with some drink refills for ya!”

“Thanks,” we reply in unison. “Freaks people out…?” he says to me. She goes back into the kitchen, past the steps where people are lined up, waiting for a table. It’s an odd system: there are two dining rooms, one on the first floor and one on the second, and you need to go upstairs in order to be seated. Shortly after we walked in, stopped behind of family of five, a group of seven started piling in. The door opens right on to the stairs, and we were running out of room on there; Grandpa got left out in the cold.

“That family of eight in the corner?” I point. “The youngest girl, by the window, she’s just listening to her ipod, and no one cares. They’re all just carrying on without her. None of them are even talking to her. Why’s she allowed to do that?” The old lady across from her, a grandmother maybe, looks lonely, too. The youngest and the oldest members of the family were separated by some funny food and chair placement and this bothered no one. The rest of them seemed to be having a great time. This makes me uncomfortable.

A waitress, but not the same one who took the order, comes out with Dave’s pizza and sets it on an elevated tray. “Anything else boys?” Dave and I exchange glances.

“I’m, uh…still waiting for a sandwich,” I tell her, not sure if it matters because she’s not our waitress.

“Oh? I’ll see if it’s ready.” She walks away.

“Maybe they figure that if everyone is at least at the same table, it’s been a successful dinner, so it doesn’t matter if she’s not really there?” Dave suggests.

“Maybe,” I agree. “Kind of a bummer.”

The other waitress comes out thirty seconds later with the wrong dish. “That’s not mine,” I tell her, with only a vague sense of politeness.

“Oh my,” she says, dramatically. She consults the original waitress, who has appeared to serve a newly populated table behind ours. “This isn’t his sandwich?” she whispers before heading back to the kitchen. She returns with my eggplant parmesan in one of those plastic baskets that you might get if you ordered food at a crummy bar. I’m a little dumbfounded by this, but overlook it and inquire about the potato chips that I thought would accompany the sandwich. She says she’ll check for me. I thank her. This fake waitress has been far more helpful than the real one.

She comes back a minute later, sets down a tiny bag of Ruffles and explains, quietly, that they’re usually just for the cold sandwich meals, “but I grabbed you one anyway.” I thank her again and wonder if there are places in the world where that’s considered a favor. Then I wonder if my standards for what does and does not count as a favor are too high.

We start eating. With my mouth full I ask Dave, “What do you think she’s listening to?”

“Hm? Who?”

“The ipod dinner girl.” I nod my head in her direction and we both look again. “What do kids listen to now? The Beach Boys? Philip Glass?”

“Never understand what’s going on there,” he snorts. “Damn kids.” Then I wonder if we’ll have kids of our own. We finish eating. My sandwich was good. A particularly fat family seated next to us has been replaced by two handsome looking parents and a son dressed in black Adidas track pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt that says “MICHIGAN” in gold and blue letters. The mother looks a little disappointed, but I suspect that there may be more than just this one item to blame. The check is placed on our table. We deliberate over the tip. I say I wish we could tip the non-waitress instead.

I hand the waitress the check and cash and we say thank you and goodnight. We have to slink past a line of people on the steps. They seem unhappy, and hungry. We make it out the door and head back to the car. The air is bitter cold. It snowed for about twenty minutes this morning.

I’m Broke, Anyway

New York City.

There’s something unnaturally pleasurable about buying food and drinks from people in or next to carts on street corners, more pleasurable than it ought to be, as what you’re really doing is trading your money and your time for mediocrity. What you purchase from the attendant manning that cart will never be completely satisfying because if they really had anything good to sell you, the cart would actually be a shop, or at least a mobile limb of said shop, rather just a man in a cart on the corner of Broadway. I bought a small cup of coffee this afternoon, while taking a break from wishing I was more productive, and when the man in the cart asked if I wanted cream and sugar I said, “Yes, please,” because that’s the only way I really like my coffee, and when he asked if that would be all I placed three quarters in front of him and said, “Yes, thanks,” because I’m polite. Before I picked up the boiling hot cardboard cup, a woman bumped into me, as if she was rushing to the cart to catch the man before he closed up for the day, which in reality would not be for a few more hours, at least. She was small and unattractive and looked like a cartoon character, over made-up with teased blonde hair, red lipstick and a leopard print jacket. Under her arm the head of a fluffy white dog was poking out from a black patent-leather bag that looked too small for the dog, assuming that the rest of the dog’s body was in proportion with its head. I stared intently into the dog’s small black eyes, trying to figure out if it could really be happy in there, while its owner asked for something that the man in the cart did not have. She didn’t apologize as she turned around and bumped my arm with the dog, but I didn’t care and went for a walk with my coffee.

Humidity

New York City

It was about one-thirty in the afternoon and I was eating lunch in midtown manhattan along with every other asshole stuck working in midtown manhattan. After I’d finished eating, I had planned on reading a book until I decided it was time to go back to work, but instead I watched a small Asian man rolling a large suitcase down the sidewalk try to sell a Black man eating lunch in the backseat of a car some mysterious pale green rectangular box that he pulled out of a tote bag.

“No thanks,” the Black man tells him, looking around suspiciously, as if this is part of some kind of set-up and there are dozens of cops just standing silently around the corner. The Asian man puts the box away, stares at him for less than one second, and then pulls it back out. He is smiling. I wonder about what. The Black man laughs, tries to explain that the Asian man has misunderstood. The Asian man nods, puts that box away and pulls out a smaller, tan box. Oddly, the Black man is interested in this item, but still looking around as if something very serious could happen any second. The Asian man puts it away, and pulls out the green box again. “No, no, no, man, the other one, the other one!” the Black man says.

He looked at it as if it was something he hadn’t seen in a long time, as if seeing it brought forth some long buried memory of something that he had once seen in passing.

The Black man asks about the price of the small tan box, still looking at it with a sense of wonderment. The Asian man names him a price he likes, the Black man stands up, pulls cash out of his pocket, and trades the cash for the box. The Asian man rolls away, out my view, the satisfaction of a good sale beaming from his face.

The Black man stares at the box as he finishes the sandwich he was eating. He opens it up, and pulls out a small glass bottle, filled with a golden liquid. Ambrosia? I think, unhumorously. He drinks most of the bottle’s contents in one long chug, and when he puts his hand down, it looks as if he’s chewing something, but he’s actually just swishing some of the liquid around in his mouth. He spits it out into the gutter. “Eww…” I accidentally say aloud, quietly. He finishes the rest of the bottle, drinks it down. No swishing this time. He gets out of the car and throws away the box and bottle in the trashcan on the corner. He comes back to the car, pulls out a plastic bottle of apple juice, finishes that, too, rests the bottle on the armrest in the backseat, closes the door, and walks away.

Peculiar indeed, I thought. I considered calling someone to tell them how weird I thought this situation was, but instead I went back to work. Some Jewish holiday was coming up, so a lot of people didn’t come that day, or were leaving early, so I was allowed to leave early, too. Being a non-practicing Protestant sure has its advantages, I thought, irreverently.

It had been raining all day, but I decided to walk home to my apartment in Chinatown anyway while it was stopped. The air was thick with humidity and fog made the tops of buildings disappear and for a little while every building in new york city was the same size and we had nothing to be cocky about. The empire state building only looks good in profile, anyway. From the ground, at the very bottom, it looks like shit.