Something in My Eye: Stories

by Michael Jeffrey Lee

  I’ve been getting steadily drunker, and I’m now going to tell you a story: Once, a man and a woman had a conversation on a stone bridge. The river beneath the bridge was green, polluted, and toxic, but the water had some place to go; it ran swiftly through the city on its way to somewhere else. As for the two people, the lady was sickly and pale, and the man was not so sickly or so pale, but one could not say, upon seeing him on the street, “That man is healthy.” Although they had not met before this afternoon, both had ruined their health looking for things that they were unable to find. The woman, whose speech was often interrupted by a raking cough, had lost her child, a boy, who had fallen off this same bridge when he was young, which was many years before. The man, his loss less severe, had dropped his gold ring into the river as he adjusted his tie, crossing the same bridge several weeks before. “What will you do when you find your child?” said the man. “I’ll teach him not to disappear,” said the woman. “What will you do if he leaves again?” said the man. “I’ll teach myself to disappear,” said the woman. “What will you do when you find your ring?” “I’ll return to my life,” said the man. “I’ll reunite with everyone I’ve pushed aside.” “What will you do if it leaves you again?” said the woman. “I’ll drag them all along with me,” said the man. Both unsatisfied with their answers, the man and woman tried to impress one another with miraculous visions. “Look,” said the woman, “I see seventeen angels skimming over the water.” “Look,” said the man, “I see a bicycle cycling with no rider upon it.” “Look,” said the woman, turning bashfully to the man, “I see a child sleeping in the river with a ring around his finger.” “My ring is not in the river,” said the man angrily. “Neither is my child,” said the woman angrily. So the woman went her way, and the man went his way, and only once did they look back to see how the other was getting along. The water beneath the bridge did not show any sign of having known it was the cause of their sorrow; it kept flowing. The man and woman are still alive even today: mad, wretched, and searching.

  This is not the usual way in which this story is told. It is usually presented as a riddle: A child sleeps soundly with a ring around his finger. He knows every secret, every one. And if he is not in the river, where, then, is he hiding?

  If We Should Ever Meet

  PLEASE READ: I want to tell you before you begin that there are moments in here when I talk more about my family than the strange thing that happened to me, and if you’re in a hurry, you can skip over them without losing very much of the story. I don’t want to waste your time, and it’s too late for me to change anything. Thank you.

  I came in on a bus from the north. In my previous town, I worked in a building that was so tall that people used to jump from the roof when they became so sad that they wanted to end it all. One day I was sitting at my desk next to a window when I felt this shadow fall across my face. It was only there for a second, and I really didn’t think much of it, but then someone I worked with came into my office and told me that somebody had just jumped off my side of the building, and asked if I saw it. I told him I had, even though I had only felt the shadow, and I became so guilt-ridden about saying this that I took a long time off work, just lying around in bed trying to figure out if that dead person was angry with me for making a memory out of him that wasn’t true. When I finally decided that the person was probably furious with me, that I would have to live my life with the lie just eating at my heart as a punishment, my work called to tell me I was fired. So, getting off the bus in my new town, I made a vow to myself that I would try to view each new situation as independent from all the previous ones, and make no snap judgments, because although I had visited once before, I was unfamiliar with the people and customs. When my brother got home from the war, before they sent him out again and he got killed, at dinnertime my father and mother and my brother would all gather around the table, and before we started eating, my brother, who was a lot older than me, would lead us in a song he wrote called “If We Should Ever Meet,” which became a little controversial within the family because the lyrics were vague and kind of ominous, and nobody could ever understand why he was singing about a meeting with strangers when there we were, all of us around the table, a family and not strangers at all. This is what I brought with me in my suitcase when I came to town: a toothbrush and a comb, a notebook and a pen, a dressy shirt for a job interview, casual clothes for hanging around, and all the money I had left, which was around five hundred dollars in cash that I kept in my shoe to confuse anyone that tried to rob me. In my previous city I had often worried about being robbed with a gun in my face, and my plan, should this have happened, was to tell the robber that I had a good bit of money, then take off my shoe and dump the cash onto the ground. While the robber was confused and stooping to pick up my money and poking around in my shoe for more, I would very quietly run away and avoid a gruesome fate. The first couple weeks in my new town I stayed in a motel under the freeway across from a veterans hospital, which wasn’t so glamorous, I admit, but they offered affordable weekly rates for travelers on a budget. In fact, the only ugly thing I found in the motel was a big bloodstain under the bed, which I noticed while looking for a cracker that I had dropped, but before I let this discovery affect me, I decided that if I’d just been a little more careful in lifting the cracker to my mouth, I never would have found the stain. True, it would have lain there, bloody and silent, beneath me as I slept, but who is to say it wouldn’t have worked on me anyway? Even so, I remembered my vow, and left it at that. The motel made a good effort at being a hot destination. Out front, it had a pool in the shape of a heart which overlooked the expressway, and I would have liked to dip a toe in had it not been November. The Jacuzzi was initially inviting, but I never got a chance to use it because it had been cordoned off by police tape ever since I had arrived. I managed to live pretty frugally: cheese and crackers for breakfast and dinner, and oranges for the Vitamin C. Finding a job was the only thing I thought about; I studied the classifieds like they were sacred scriptures, and even did fake interviews with myself in front of the mirror for practice. In the mornings I would shower and shave with a disposable razor and soap, which was sometimes tricky because I tend to grow hair inconsistently, at inordinate speeds along different parts of my face. The motel had complimentary toilet paper, so I was able to staunch any of my cuts with little folded scraps before I left my room. One day though, I was in such a hurry that I cut myself under my nose, bad enough that I had to ask the manager nicely for a Band-Aid. People gave me nasty looks on the bus that morning, and I only figured out why, when, after I had filled out an application at a coffee shop and was using the bathroom in the back, I noticed that I had a pretty sizable amount of blood in my teeth, which I wasn’t able to taste because of the cinnamon gum I was chewing. My brother’s song went something like: If we should ever meet, I will kindly take your hand. If we should ever meet, I will cudgel every lamb. If we should ever meet, I will wear my cleanest gown. If we should ever meet, I will set fire to this town. If we should ever meet, I will deny those close to me. If we should ever meet, I will feign to disagree. My first couple of weeks in town, I applied to about eighty percent of the town’s businesses. I submitted applications at restaurants, toy stores, electronic stores, video stores, supermarkets, office buildings, bars, shoe and watch repair shops, cell phone stores, music stores, banks, home furnishings stores, department stores, and money lending stores. During this time, when I was still really new to the town, no matter where I was at noon, I would try and find a family restaurant to have some lunch. I would sit at a table for an hour, studying a map of the town, highlighting any streets I had not yet seen. I’d eat as much as I could. Most places didn’t allow you to take food out, so I chose things from the buffet table that would stay in my stomach the longest. Cheese sticks, or a rare chicken fried steak seemed to work the best. My brother used to tell me that eating was one of the saddest things to take pleasure in because it is impossible to keep filling yourself
once your stomach is full. I never saw many actual families in the restaurants, but there was never any shortage of seniors. Most of them didn’t speak to one another; they just ate and puffed on their cigarettes and sometimes coughed for long stretches. Before I began any meal at those restaurants I would say a prayer in which I thanked God that I was still youthful, and still had some traces of ambition and the pleasant good looks my parents gave me. My mother didn’t often speak to me when I was young, but one day I remember her giving me a pretty mild smile and telling me that some people were naturally transient, and she was pretty sure I would be one of them. She said she was basing her assumption on the fact that my father gave me half his blood, and he couldn’t stand to stay in the same room for longer than a few minutes. My father used to come home once or twice a year, usually out of money and needing a shave pretty bad. He used to draw me up in his lap, even when I was a teenager, and whisper stories about boxcars and what he called ladies of the night. In town, the places I applied at were always willing to give me an application, even if there were no actual customers milling about. I had a fancy pen that I kept from my old job, and I used it to carefully fill out my applications. I would always, always write my name but leave the address box blank, because I didn’t really feel comfortable telling anyone that I was living in the motel. I did, however, list the hotel’s phone number, and next to it, in parentheses, I wrote to ask for me. I always made up my references, because although I’m sure some of my previous employers in my previous cities and towns would have gladly recommended me, I never did keep track of their phone numbers, so I figured it was better to list an imaginary person with a plausible number than a real person with no number at all. The owner of a laundromat told me that I seemed like a smart person, but he said that not only were they not hiring, he had reason to believe that there might not be any available jobs in the town, due to the economy and because everyone was living longer these days. I did wonder why he didn’t tell me that until after I had taken the time to fill out my application, but I did appreciate his honesty. My mother worked all her life in a bank and she died in her bed. My father lived on the road and died on a railroad trestle. That’s what the letter said, so who knows. The only thing left to do, after I applied to all those places, was to relax in my motel and wait for the calls to come in. I took a lot of showers at night, which was pretty good for my complexion as long as I didn’t make the water too hot. There was a soda machine just outside my door, and it took a lot of willpower not to spend my money on a Coke or something refreshing. The tap water wasn’t bad, though it was cloudy and smelled a little like sulfur. I didn’t watch much television, because when I do I forget time exists at all, and I’ve never liked the feeling, once I turn it off, that not only has time passed, but that it has done so without me being really present for it. One day, during my job search, I found this little paperback braced under a dumpster where a wheel was missing. The book was a remainder, so it had no cover or back—even the title page was missing. The book was a collection of stories about dogs, which was, I thought, a pretty original idea for a book. My favorite story was about a dog who was beloved by many people until it got some sort of illness and died. The story didn’t bother to explain the disease, or the grisly details of its death, but it did go on to talk at length about how the dog managed, during its short time on earth, to have a positive effect on many people in the community, so the line to view the little casket streamed all the way around the block. I stayed in the motel during business hours all that week, waiting for the calls for interviews. I sat on the edge of the bed with my posture as professional as I could manage, reading that paperback and listening for the phone, which I kept within arm’s reach. I ate my cheese and crackers and my oranges in this position and even urinated in the ice bucket to be on the safe side. On Friday I called the manager to ask if he’d forgotten to give me any messages concerning possible interviews. He told me he hadn’t, and that I was behind on rent by a week. I was pretty tired of sitting in the motel, and frustrated at not getting an interview, so I put on my dressy shirt and some newer jeans and started walking toward downtown. The motel was along an empty expressway, which was surrounded on both sides by chain-link fences and no sidewalk, so I did my best to kind of stroll quickly along the shoulder of the road. To make sure the passing cars would see me I waved both arms above my head like the insane and desperate do, and the vehicles gave me a wide berth. I reached downtown after about an hour, and walked into a pretty fancy bar that named their drinks after celebrities, which made them kind of fun to order. As I said, I was a little frustrated by the fact that I hadn’t received any calls for interviews yet, so I had about eleven drinks myself, mixing and matching types of alcohol just for variety’s sake. Then I got to feeling that someone was holding a blowtorch to my head, so I excused myself and went to the bathroom and ran my head under the faucet and dried off on the sanitary towel. Then I started introducing myself to strangers, asking my fellow patrons if they knew anyone who was hiring. I was being really friendly, buying them drinks when they asked me to, but the only lead I could come up with was at the dog pound, and the guy who told me was laughing pretty hard and putting his hand up a woman’s shirt when he recommended it. Then I remembered that I had already applied there, and I thanked him anyway. Once on the road, my brother took me to a burlesque show and he cupped the dancer’s breasts in his hands and pushed them up and down, like he was a scale. I don’t remember him smiling. I walked back to my hotel on the same side of the expressway, putting my arms up high, but not in a needy way. A convertible pulled onto the shoulder, and a man in an Eskimo jacket asked if I wanted to make a hundred dollars. I told him to wait a second, and I took off my shoe, and I admit I wasn’t too surprised when nothing, not even a few coins came jingling out. So I said that I did, and he told me to get in. We got going up to about ninety, which was definitely breaking the law, and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind putting the top up, because I had only my dressy shirt, and he had his fur lining. He didn’t do that, so I slunk down really low in my seat and tried to avoid the wind. I evidently fell asleep, because when I woke we were still screaming down the expressway, and the man had his finger pinching the sensitive part of my neck, directing my head toward his jeans, where he was kind of lazily wagging his penis at me. He dropped me off in a dark part of town and directed me toward the mission. I tried to explain about my motel under the freeway but he told me to get out of his car in a not-so-nice way. I was familiar with the dangers of shelters, having stayed in them in other towns, so I smartly tucked the hundred-dollar bill back in my shoe. The walk was cold, though, and I kept stepping on broken glass, which is pleasant-sounding at first but then kind of painful if your soles are bad. Nobody was in the streets, and as far as I could tell nobody was watching me from the burnt-out buildings. The mission was on a corner under another freeway, and I was surprised to find that it, like so many other places, was completely cordoned off by police tape. The front door was open, so I did a kind of limbo under the tape and walked inside. There was a young woman about my age behind the desk, who was crying, and behind her there were the bodies of about fifteen or so homeless people, all dead and very bloody and lying in pretty unnatural positions on the floor. She told me that the mission was closed, and that a group of seventeen or so people had come in earlier that night and killed every homeless person who happened to be staying in the mission, and later set fire to the unemployment office. My brother was shot by people in his own squadron, who thought he was the enemy. Apparently he died too quickly to have any last words. I asked her where the police were, and she said that the police only showed up in that town to put tape around crime scenes, because funding was low. She was pretty attractive even with the dead bodies behind her, so I asked her if she’d like to come back with me to my motel, where I only had an orange or two left, but said she was more than welcome to them. She said she would love an orange or two, and so we called a cab and rode in the back together until we got ba
ck to my motel under the freeway. The cabbie told me that the total fare for two passengers was one hundred dollars, and I got the bill from my shoe and kind of dejectedly handed it to him 1.) because it was the last of my money and 2.) because I didn’t have enough for a tip. The woman wouldn’t tell me her name, and she sat eating both my oranges in front of the television without taking their peels off. When I came back from brushing my teeth, she was gone, but luckily hadn’t taken any of my things. I lay down and slept about thirty-seven hours until late Sunday evening, and then I went out and walked north to the convenience store, away from downtown, holding my arms in the air. The clerk was out front smoking, and I had just enough time to stuff a few candy bars in my jeans before he came inside. I browsed in the dirty magazines for a while, just to throw him off, and then I walked out. When I got to the expressway, I started to run. At the motel I found my suitcase sitting on the curb, all packed, and my room locked tight. I rang the night bell for the manager, but no one came to the window. I ate the remainder of the candy bars in frustration, and then laughed a little at how rash I was acting. When my brother and I drove across country trying to not to think about our dead parents or get in a car accident, I would sometimes break a long silence by asking him a question, usually about gas mileage or where we were going to stay that night. He would always get a little angry with me, tightening his knuckles around the steering wheel as he told me that words are infernal things that should never, under any circumstance he said, be used loosely. Then I would start to laugh, because my brother was always so serious and because I knew that laughter didn’t constitute language, and then he would tell me to stop even that, because laughter is derisive and there is always a target of your laughter, even if it’s only yourself, and that is terrible. I started walking toward downtown with my suitcase in my hand, and I felt so terrible that I didn’t even bother to put up my free hand. After about an hour I came to a park, which was not locked, and although it was pretty cold, I thought it might be a decent place to spend the night. Before I could even select a bench a group of about seventeen men dressed in rags and some old tattered flags came out from behind the trees and surrounded me and told me they had a proposition for me. They said: “You see, one of our boys is losing his will and is growing demented in his old age. No one has suffered more than this man, and so we, being his friends, wish to help ease his pain. Several weeks ago, when you arrived in town, our boy saw you walking near the hospital with your arms up in hopefulness, and he smiled at you for a while, but in that smile lurked a terrible knowledge because he recognized your face from a picture your brother used to carry in his wallet when they were deployed together in the same squadron. This was before our boy shot him by accident, and although many years in the past, the memory is deforming him, and he’d now like nothing better than to have a duel with you. Don’t ask us the reason, it’s just what he wants.” I did try and make a run for it at this point, but they circled in closer around me and kicked me with their boots. They told me that if I managed to get away, they would hunt me until the day I died, no matter the town I decided to settle in. “Just as we have made it impossible for you in this town in terms of employment,” they said, “so it will be in any future town if you do not comply.” Then they lifted the man from behind the bushes, who smiled at me, but not in a sweet way. The bandanna he wore was all sooty and crusted with old blood. He handed me a silver pistol and told me to stow it away in my pants and he showed me that he had already done the same. Then we squared away at thirty paces, and one of the seventeen shouted, “Draw.” It seemed like he didn’t even try to unholster his pistol before I got him in the shoulder and he kind of crumpled to the ground. I felt bad about this, so I ran over to where he was and tried to staunch his wound with a piece of my dress shirt that I’d torn off. The seventeen all gathered around me, whispering to one another. Then they closed in and wrapped their fingers around my hand that held the pistol and helped me level it at his head. I pulled the trigger and it was done. They all thanked me individually, each shaking my hand and bowing, and told me I was in no danger and free to leave. Once their man stopped twitching on the ground, they pulled him away, his heels dragging along the concrete. I looked around for some warm things to cover myself, and found a couple newspapers and some cardboard. I lay down in the middle of the park, feeling not so good. I awoke as the sun rose, my feet numb from where the cardboard hadn’t been long enough to cover, and I stretched and did a little jog around the park to warm up. I saw a man walking a tiny dog, and I approached them and acted like I was going to pet the dog, but instead I picked it up and draped it across my shoulders like a mink and I sang my brother’s song to him in the voice of my brother, and then I lied and told him that the song was mine. He took off one of his walking shoes and shook out several hundred dollars, and I went directly to the bus station and took the first bus here, to this town. I have a lot of applications out, and the people at the mission are pretty good about delivering messages, so who knows. The public library has been kind about letting me use their computers. I have a long list of e-mail addresses that I’ve found just poking around on the web, which I’m going to send my story to, and tell them to pass it along to whoever might be interested. My father, when he was home and I was sitting on his knee in the kitchen, once asked me to fill him in on an adventure I had had while he was away. I started to tell him about something important from my life but he stopped me in the middle of the story and told me that I was a bad teller, and that I should probably just go ahead and join the military so I could be useful, which I didn’t want to do because I didn’t want to die. He said I hobbled around in the silly parts and didn’t get around to telling the real stuff, which he thought was in the violence. His death was not peaceful, so I do hope it was at least interesting for him. One last thing: if we should ever meet, maybe you might take me in for a short while, help me get established in your town. I promise to be a gentleman and not try anything funny. I can keep myself entertained—you won’t even know I’m there.