What We Are

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

  “Smile for the camera,” I hear. “You’re a hell-bound superstar.”

  In the other back corner of the bus, this cat is writing in his journal. It’s an old-school deal, cased in brown leather with a tie string thin as the lace of a moccasin, the pages yellowed and faded like a scroll from the Middle Ages. One leg’s kicked up so his journal is resting on a naked knee, polyester French-blue shorts with 10 above the hemline rolled back toward his hip, a too-tight T-shirt, black, that says, ZYZZYVA, in white letters. The guy can’t breathe. He’s got a rough edgy look and dark Balkan eyes, an unlit cigarette behind the flap of his ear, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, a goatee gathered and twisted into a point under his chin, and a tattoo on his arm in Apple chancery cursive: Maranatha.

  He lifts his pen and looks out the window at the traffic. The smoke fumes are drifting into a popped vent above us. The lady driving the bus is looking right at him and when he returns her gaze, her eyes dart to the street in front of us. I don’t like mutherfuckers with this kind of sway. Before I can think on why, he says, “You wanna know what this is, don’t you.”

  I’m the only person near the guy, but I don’t care a lick about his deep thoughts. Highly doubt he’s writing the sequel to Notes from Underground, however nuts he is, whatever Slavic state he came from. I doubt he’s even literate. If I wanted to listen to butchered Dr. Seuss rhymes, I’d turn on the radio.

  “I’ll bet you got no clue what I’m writing.”

  “You lost that bet,” I say, looking out my own window.

  “Well, then,” he says. “I’m waiting.”

  “All right, bro. Are you and your big mouth ready?”

  He ties up the journal and caps his pen, the cigarette right on the tip of his lips. I can see it, hear it: he’s got some quixotic blood in his veins. Shit: looks like we’re gonna either chop it up or have a duel.

  “Okay,” I say. “Here’s the answer: Something of absolutely no consequence.”

  He smiles at once and I smile back and he looks out the window and says, “Well. You’re right, of course. How strange that that’s precisely what I’m writing about.”

  I say nothing: we’ll see.

  “But you will listen, of course.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  He unties the journal, flips to a yellowed page, flicks the smoking cigarette stub out the window, pulls the unlit cigarette from his ear, lights it with a match that appears out of nowhere, reads:

  “In the end, the nature of this age, the entrapment of time, and the idiosyncrasy of locale are only variables in the constant formula of my ill-willed temperament, which set in at first polluted breath. In the end, I will have from these hands an account of punishment tantamount to each filthy exhalation of carbon dioxide put forth from the bacterial mouths of the afflicted inhabitants of this temporal planet. In the end, no one alive shall know it. In the end, the only people getting wind of my purpose are dead.”

  He’s literate, all right. But I’m not happy about this at all. It’s like I’m in the ninth circle with the archangel himself. I pop a window, put my mouth out for some air, focus for a second on the sturdiness of a deep-rooted oak, stay cool.

  “Should I get off at the next stop,” I say, “before you blow up the bus?”

  “You can depart if you want. But that would be a waste of your time.” He puts his hands up as if ordered by an invisible cop. “No bomb.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll play this out. You’re an Eastern Euro, maybe Russian.”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Raskolnikov’s disgruntled great-great-great-great-great-nephew?”

  “Pretty funny.”

  “And that’s why I don’t like you. You’re an übermensch. You got too much pride. Deep down, Raskolnikov just wanted attention. To be the topic of conversation.”

  “And will we be talking about you?”

  “No, no,” I say. “I’d like to die with whatever grandiose ideas I have in my head still there. I don’t want to add to the world’s badness. My goal is just to float away.”

  “How sad.”

  “If I can manage it, my contribution to society will be no contribution.”

  “I sense trouble.”

  “Will we be talking about you?”

  “You already have been, my friend. For a long, long time. Though I’m worried that you won’t much longer. Legions come and legions go.”

  “You’re full of shit, bro.”

  “No. I think not. You’re familiar with Sir Shakespeare.”

  “Of course. I stole from him a few times to secure some cash.”

  He seems excited by the theft. “Yes. Perhaps you’ll recognize the line and hence my problem. See, if there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, I have to remind y’all every now and then to think. That’s my job, I guess. And yours?”

  “My what?”

  “Your purpose.”

  “Shit,” I say. “I can barely take the next breath of air without getting crossed up about it.”

  “I’ve met a friend,” he says, putting his hand out.

  I don’t shake it. “No. It’s gonna take a lot more than that, bro.”

  “We’ll see,” he says.

  “As with anything.”

  “Let’s have a drink,” he says.

  “I’m dry, man.”

  “You’ve stopped drinking?”

  “No. My pocket’s dry. I’ve got a bike stuck to the front of this bus, and forty-six bucks to cover eternity. Just dropped sixteen quarters into that fucking slot.”

  “Oh. But it’s on me, of course.”

  “All right. I’ll get you next time.”

  “If there is a next time.”

  “That’s right, too,” I say. “You remind me of a poem.”

  He waits and then says, “Well, let’s hear it.”

  “May you bite your lip that you cannot meet with God—or beat me to a pub. Amen.”

  “The title, please,” he says.

  “A Curse at the Devil.”

  “The author, please.”

  “Sir Kerouac.”

  He reaches up at once to index-finger the slack cord, the bell in the front of the bus rings accordingly, and we shiver to a tenuous stop. Even as I’m thinking, Who the fuck is this cat? I follow him out the exit nonetheless, yank my bike off the rack as he continues to talk. We walk on with our heads down over broken white concrete laced with blue and brown shards of shattered glass. Right through the waste of the earth, the busted bottles of civilization, among the flashing grid of red and green lights controlled underground by the Morse code of some nameless engineer, right under the pendulant web of telephone wire, the crows looking down on us again with those ravenous eyes of infrared, he goes on and on with his stories.

  For the first time in some time I don’t mind. I listen. To his frustration. A red wheelbarrow of so much overflowing possibility stuck in his raining head, surrounded by glazed chickens upon which nothing and no one depends. Too much mud in his brain, clogging the pipes. He has a reflexive appetite for destruction, his own and anyone else in the way. He calls himself the bastardized result of absolute carpe diem, of forging destiny without limit. Ad infinitum. He flirts with passion. In the land of possibility, everything seems enticing and worthy of a lifetime commitment. All tangents shine like the sun. That’s what he says. This guy at one time was a software designer for Oracle, a Triple-A baseball player, a deep-sea welder, a sociology researcher/documentarist, a porn star named Jude Lawless, and is currently looking to wed. His failed search for a calling has resulted in a network of acquaintances sold on his connection to their given passion. But the truth is, he became bored by each and left them before they could leave him.

  We make our way out to the oxygenated patio of Rock Bottom Brewery: Tiki burners and five dozen yuppies in business suits or Dockers. The waiters of both sexes have spiked hair and pierced brows and wear colorful tattoos and gothic eyeshadow, always black, thickly applied, coat
s of paint on the canvas. Looks like they crawled out of caves. I lean back in my chair and place my line of vision straight above the establishment where finally a beautiful saffron mass of sky rolls west without anyone knowing.

  “What do you think is my problem?” he asks, lighting the cigarette, lipping it.

  I sip on my Hefe-Weizen, ponder the question, offer, “Sounds like you maybe have too much talent.”

  “I am admittedly,” he says, blowing smoke, “a mess.”

  He’s got sweat running down his brow, sweat down his arm. “Are you dying?”

  “I may be.”

  “From what?”

  “Neglect?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one cares that I’m alive anymore.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I may be on my last proud legs.”

  “Well,” I say. “You got a woman?”

  “Been dating someone.”

  “Will y’all marry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love her?”

  He just smiles.

  “You seem like someone who would marry only under the condition of love.”

  “Listen here.”

  “I’ve been listening for the length of a glass of Hefe-Weizen.”

  “I know,” he says. “Thank you. And you’re welcome. Here’s the scaled-down bio of yours truly.”

  “Another one?”

  “I’ve been saved my whole life by poles: tied to the post of family, girlfriend, job, or sport, whatever. Any time I got too wild in my meanderings I’d be yanked back to sanity like a dog on the fence, choking in his collar. But things changed. I don’t know how, but I broke the chain, chewed through the rope. I don’t know what to do now with my freedom. I haven’t had a sport since baseball, been jobless for half a year, and my family—father, mother, and sister—have fled five hundred miles east of San Jo to Lincoln, Nebraska. My ex, Deidre, split after catching me inside a double-jointed gymnast at her sister’s wedding in Saratoga Hills. Nobody’s left to keep me moderately clean, see? I am alone on the infinite plane of desire.”

  “I’m missing something,” I say. “I don’t get why you’d marry then, bro.”

  “Well. This new one’d kill me if she caught me in the coatroom with a bridesmaid. She’d drop a pill of arsenic in my brew. I met her in Kabul. My Muslim princess of Aryana.”

  “Uh-huh. What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “It is. I have to believe it is. I can’t talk about it any further or I’ll start to break it down.”

  “Yeah. Well. Good luck.”

  He’s looking toward the parking lot. “Let’s change topics. Break something else down.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that,” he says, pointing directly behind me.

  A kid the height of a fire hydrant jumps out of an army-green Hummer and is led onto the patio. He has a collar around his neck, and there’s a five-foot leash attached to the wrist of a man with gray wolfish eyes and finely detailed eyebrows. A woman in a diamond cross necklace flashing like a Fourth of July sparkler trails the man as if she were, despite the necklace, a dutiful Muslim. When they take their table, the man tugs lightly on the leash like he’s testing the status of a fishing line, and the kid, fiddling with the gauge of the faux-bamboo heating lamp, turns his head and skips to his seat. He’s no older than four, probably three, perfect age for experimentation. The man and the woman look like they’ve both been pollinated, the tanned skin of beeswax. The patio is now full of Silicon Valley techies dropping in for the Thursday evening happy hour, yet no one but us has the nerve to even gaze.

  My newfound friend shakes his head, splashes some Hefe-Weizen into my mug and then his own, and slams the pitcher on the table-top, his eyes on the new arrivals. His dilated nostrils look like the smoky twin entrances to infinitesimal black holes. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t care how many abductors are out there. How the fuck do they get away with that?”

  I sip my beer, leaving his thought afloat in the air, a kind of silent affirmation. I don’t care how many abductors are out there either; just keep an eye on your child, like billions of other parents have been doing for the last four thousand years. At the table, the kid’s sitting on the woman’s lap and she’s stroking his head like a kitten. He still wears the collar with the five-foot leash, rolled into a coil on the table like a garden hose, a rattlesnake fixing to strike. The man, already, is pinkie-crinkling a glass of merlot.

  My newfound friend slaps my arm. It leaves a trail of warm sweat. “They taking the dog around the block for a walk?”

  I take a sip. “Maybe he has Tourette’s or something.”

  His eyes narrow into slits of cynicism. “Are they gonna throw a muzzle on him next?”

  “Hey, I’m with you. Let him bite someone.”

  “Yeah. The kid ain’t got Tourette’s or anything else. He’s just got bad luck. Look at him.”

  The kid’s docile as a neutered dog.

  “Lazy aristocrats. The kid’s constricted neck is the price for his burger and fries.”

  I say, “Topic shift?”

  “Yes, sir. I just got back from Afghanistan.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve had no one to talk to for a long time and so I’m a bit diar-rheic. All I got was lean and brown from a yogurt diet and the lingering smog of war.”

  I sip my pint, ask, “What were you doing there?”

  “Taking pictures.”

  “What part of Afghanistan?”

  “Outskirts of Kabul. I’d stop at a tenement stuck to a hillside, sip tea on the dusty dirt floor. No running water, the blown-out walls in piles everywhere. Looked like ant mounds.”

  “Sad.”

  “It is what it is. The Afghans play house almost as if nothing has happened, no bombs dropped, no drone flybys. The family right there, fifteen people in a circle under the black speckled sky, no roof. We’d munch on salted chickpeas, smiling at one another. Toward the end, a week ago, I attended a luncheon with these Western media intermediaries. Bent on sustained U.S. funding. Contracts, extensions, that kind of thing. It was like being at the New York Stock Exchange. Oh! And I followed a herd of gypsy rug sellers called Kuchis. For two days. Here are the pictures.”

  The Kuchis are robed in flowing chestnut gowns, hair knotted like Rastafarians, leading camels heaped with salable goods, sheep-dog trotting between the front and hind legs to shade in the camel’s shadows.

  I say, “They look like gypsies.”

  “That’s what they are, nomads. Sell goods on the border of Pakistan.” He pushes another photo toward me, sipping his beer, and there he is with a bearded Afghan, flanked by two men with RPGs over their shoulders.

  “This guy a tribal king or something?”

  “Close. Actually, yes. It’s just we call ’em warlords over here. That’s Ishmael Khan. He’s the tribal king of Herat.”

  “Think I read something about this cat.”

  “You read evil stuff about him. He’s refused to concede his region to Karzai. He had bodyguards everywhere. The only way I got in was by telling them I was a Canadian novelist writing about a warlord named Khan who’s fighting off an imperial juggernaut. They asked me to prove it and I said, ‘Fuck the Soviet Union.’ They shook their heads like I was way behind the times or something, and I said, ‘Okay. Fuck the USA, too.’ I made a thumbs-down sign and they nodded and let me in. Khan told me I looked like an Afghan warrior in another life. That was a compliment.”

  “So is he a crook or what?”

  “Sure he’s a crook. All the warlords over there are crooks. It’s a tributary system. He was so flagrant about his power that he gave me the lowdown on a laundering operation. Hinted at an upcoming coup against a rival warlord. It’s a way of life that extends far beyond our little jiffy in time there. Whether we’re dropping bombs or Wal-Marts in their cities, we better be s
ure about it.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  He slams down his beer glass, squints, refills the both of us, says, “Once this old sage with half his face creviced by flesh-eating sand flies told me that the Afghan political picture is like the nine-hole Kabul golf course. He said the course was built in ’73 by the Afghan king. Closed by the pro-proletariat Soviets for ten years. Reopened for several years after the Soviets fell. Closed again by the Taliban. Reopened in 2002 by an NGO. There is no grass, only sand and oil. The greens are called the blacks. No American will set foot on such a lowly course, for fear of irreparable damage to their skills. Very few Afghans have ever learned how to play the game in thirty years. Probably never will. But they liken the view to a peaceful plain, so sunbright with promise you can’t even follow the ball.”

  “Well,” I say, “if you don’t remember that the sun also rises, you’re gonna die internally.”

  It’s the most I’ve talked to anyone but my uncle in a long time. I realize I may have made a mistake. Don’t know why it happened, except it feels right to reciprocate the sharing spirit.

  “That was a picture of you,” he says, “in the Mercury News.”

  I’d forgotten about the bruises on my lip, the black eye. I resist the temptation to massage one or the other, sip my beer. “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Hate Crime.”

  “That’s right,” I say, and then, “but that ain’t right.”

  “You look Mexican to me.”

  “Shit.” The urge to clear my name to this guy seems heightened by the beer. I want a smidgen of truth to get into the discourse, so I say, “I might as well be Mexican. Those cops and that blond snitch haven’t spent even a tenth of the time I’ve spent south of the border. Right here in San Jo: I grew up with eses. My best friend growing up was Mexican, my first lay was a girl named Dora Candelaria for chrissake. Those fools know nada. We used to cook carne asada in the summertime, pumping Vicente Fernandez’s ranchero gigs on hot stereos.”