by Teal Swan
Both of them felt daunted by the newness of this place. The more familiar you are with a place, the easier it is to navigate yourself through it. They were learning the hard way just what parts of familiarity they had taken for granted. Not wanting Aria to be targeted for the curfew violation they had heard applied in LA to any unaccompanied minor, they spent only short times in plain view of the cars passing by.
Eventually, out of options and exhausted, they decided to spend the night under a freeway overpass they had noticed during their walk, which already had a few tents under it. Taylor and Aria both imagined that the permanent-looking nature of the camps were a good indication that the people living there had already established it as a safe place to be. The chances of being singled out and harassed by cops among the other vagrants were smaller. Being careful not to impose on preciously guarded territory, they sat down a short distance from one of the tents. The people there, heavily layered in tattered clothing, seemed to exist in their own little worlds. None of them even acknowledged a change when the two sat down to claim a portion of the territory.
The static hiss of the cars passing by overhead inflicted itself on their attempts to fall asleep. That night, they did not give each other space. Instead, they were braided together, hoping that body warmth would quell their angst. The ground was cold and unforgiving, as was the incline that promised to keep them dry should any rain fall. It was a strange, distorted form of safety. They both slept fitfully, never quite dropping into the dark tranquility of sleep. Instead, they spent the night engaged in the gnarled and fragmented images of the shallow dreams that exist just above it.
When morning came, the sun did not get a chance to wake them; discomfort did. Their bodies throbbed and did not move with their usual quickness. They said nothing to each other, but tried to rouse themselves from the hangover of exhaustion. The sun had not risen yet. Instead the light had converted itself into purple.
It took a few moments for the slowness to be pierced through by panic. Aria had wrapped her backpack around the bottom of her leg, sure she would react should anyone try to take it. But now she reached out to find it gone. “God damnit!” she yelled, causing Taylor to jump too. “Someone stole my fucking backpack. I can’t believe it. Someone stole my fucking backpack.”
She jumped to her feet, her eyes scanning the area around them frantically. She was furious at herself. She was furious at the stupidity of not holding it between them, or at the very least using part of it as a pillow, like Taylor had done. She was uneasy with herself that she hadn’t woken up at the sound of it being taken.
Aria knew the likelihood of finding the backpack again was slim. But against all odds, she saw something vaguely the color of it just over a hundred meters away. She left Taylor to run over to take a look. As she got closer, she could tell it was indeed her backpack. Now all she felt was the fear of what inside it might be missing. The crunch of broken glass broke through her leery focus. It called her attention to the ground. Sparkles had spilled out across the gravel. A short distance away, the globeless base to the snow globe she had brought with her was lying there on its side. She rushed forward and searched desperately through her discarded backpack.
The money was gone, all of it. Whoever had taken it had thrown and scattered whatever contents of the backpack that they didn’t have a use for before abandoning the scene.
Aria gathered her clothes and her journal and the plastic bottles, zipping the body of her backpack around them. She lifted it onto one shoulder and stared down at the base of the snow globe. The bright yellow cartoon-like half moon and the tiny figure of the girl sleeping on top of its bottom curve were now chipped and exposed to the dirt of the floor. She remembered how she used to play in the dirt as a child. Back then the dirt seemed to make this world whole. She remembered how as a child, she used to pretend. Or maybe she didn’t pretend at all and that was what made it all so much more perfect than this. She remembered how many times she had escaped the torture of her world by imagining herself to be cradled inside the safe confines of that snow globe. She had imagined she was the girl that the moon held, come to life. She had imagined the benevolent cradle of that moon underneath her. She imagined the sparkles falling against her face.
That was a game for a child. In just one night, Los Angeles had stripped that innocence and safety from her. Even though it was difficult, Aria left the snow globe behind, an emblem of the life she had walked away from. She left behind not only the comfort it had given her, but also every circumstance that caused her to require that comfort in the first place. It was almost poetic. She walked back toward Taylor before he could reach her. It was a poem that belonged to her alone.
PART TWO
FUGUE CONCERTO
CHAPTER 10
Aria felt the all-too-familiar cinching, the slippery, warm feeling of newly sloughed blood. Having been so preoccupied with surviving day to day, she had forgotten that it had been over a month already since her last period. She looked around for some kind of quick solution, but there wasn’t one.
“I think I just got my period,” she said in an abashed tone. She rushed down an alleyway between buildings and rustled with her shoes, trying to remove them before she bled through the inseam of her camo pants. Being careful not to step on the floor with them, she removed her socks and wadded them into a makeshift pad, and motioned to Taylor who was staring at her, looking concerned. “Can you come stand over here and shield me?” she asked him.
“Do you want me to look away?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Aria replied.
Taylor leaned against the wall of the building, using the bulk of his shape to conceal her, while trying to act like he was just hanging out there in the alleyway. Aria tried to flatten herself against the wall of the building. She unbuttoned and unzipped her pants just far enough to be able to slip the socks between her legs. She felt like a slave to her own body, which had now put more pressure on her, as if everything else was not pressure enough. This was not an aspect of life on the street that she had even considered before today.
They’d decided to abandon their attempts to call Taylor’s friend who had promised to help him if he ever came to LA. She had not picked up a single one of his phone calls. Instead, they took three hours to reach a public park and Aria went straight into the public bathroom. She washed her socks out at one of the sinks as fast as she could, to cover up what she was doing. Her blood blushed deep crimson against the steel shine of the sink.
Aria filled up one of her empty water bottles and squirted a stream of orange hand soap from the dispenser into her hand. Using her elbow to try to latch the door of the bathroom stall closed, she straddled the toilet and used the soap and water from her bottle to wash herself off. Knowing she would bleed through toilet paper, she used it temporarily while trying to dry off her socks under the hand drier. It soon became obvious that she wasn’t going to be able to get them any drier without it taking too much time, seeing as how she had to stop for the other women who needed to dry their hands. So she folded her socks together and put them back in place. She would have to stay there near the bathroom for the rest of the day. Perhaps for the next five days.
While she was cleaning herself up, Taylor resolved to make them some money so Aria could get a packet of sanitary pads. He told her he had a soft spot for women because he’d had a lot of sisters over the years and he’d seen what they had to go through every month. So she spent the majority of the day moving from place to place in the park, watching Taylor passively panhandle next to a crosswalk just outside the park fence with a sign that said “Hungry, Anything Helps.” Aria didn’t know what to do with the kindness. She felt dissected by it. One part of her wanted to soak up the solace of that care and trust it. Another part of her wanted to stop him from doing it. She feared that this would simply put her in emotional debt to him and flip the axis of power in his favor. She didn’t trust people to do good things to her if they had the upper hand. She had no way t
o get ibuprofen, like she usually took for cramps, so during the three times that she had to revisit the bathroom to wash the socks and dry them again to the best of her ability, she tried to relieve the pain. She splashed cold water on her face and on the back of her neck to thwart the sweating. She contorted herself into different positions, hoping that one of them would take the edge off of the sharpness of the ache.
The pain had created a deleterious state of mind and she saw Taylor through it. She watched the people walking by him. She watched people pretend that he didn’t exist. She watched people scream at him to get a job. And she watched him shoulder the dehumanizing treatment in the same determined way as he maintained his affability even when everyone seemed perturbed by it and pushed him away. She felt a fondness growing for him. Because his sexual inclination was toward other men, there was something pure about the link between them. People had deceived her before and people had disappointed her even more times than that. But with Taylor, it seemed the only ulterior motive he had was to feel like he had someone in the world to exist with. It occurred to her while she was watching him that she might actually have a friend.
By the time it got dark, Taylor’s efforts had resulted in a few coins over $7. They decided to walk to the closest store they could find. Having spotted the giant blue letters and yellow spark logo of a Walmart, they cut through the crowd of other shoppers dallying in the aisles until they reached the pharmacy section. They examined the shelves for the cheapest solution to Aria’s predicament. Aria soon realized that she would have to choose between them eating that night and buying pads. She evaluated whether she wanted to be clean, or whether she wanted to be full.
“Let’s get something to eat instead,” she said dejectedly.
“Well, what are you gonna do?” Taylor chided, as if suddenly broken from the rhythm of his mission. “I don’t want you to have to be bleeding everywhere.”
Aria mustered up a look of enthusiasm to mask her true feelings and responded, “Nah, I’ll figure something out. It’s not like I can just come in here every time I have a problem. Besides I’m starving, aren’t you?”
Taylor looked at her suspiciously, but soon agreed to walking to the other end of the store. After some deliberation about what to buy, they decided in favor of practicality. They eventually walked to the checkout stand with bananas, the cheapest protein bar they could find and a can of tuna on special.
After setting out on foot again, Aria and Taylor sat on a strip of lawn outside the Walmart, watching the cars come and go. Taylor struggled with his pocketknife to open the lid of the tuna can. When it finally opened, he offered some to Aria but she declined and peeled back one of the bananas instead. She was determined not to give up her principles for the sake of her own survival. She could not find it in herself to choose her own wellbeing over the death of another being. She was already thin, but, looking down at her forearms, she could see that her hunger had stripped away all unnecessary flesh. It had worn her down to the sinew, and, having seen her face in the bathroom mirror so frequently that day, she knew her face was gaunt.
Not wanting to take the risk of ending up somewhere worse than where they were already, Taylor and Aria spent the night behind the Walmart, hidden between a collection of blue crates, topped with compacted cardboard boxes. Aria left Taylor sleeping and made trips to the bathroom to wash out her socks that were serving as a substitute menstrual pad.
Later that week, Aria got more creative. When they passed a Starbucks on the way to the library, she worked up the courage to pop inside and ask one of the men behind the counter for a few packets of plastic utensils. He handed them over with quizzical slowness. Aria pulled a pile of napkins free from its dispenser and went to the bathroom with them. She unwrapped the plastic package from the utensils and placed the napkins on top of it, so that if she bled through the napkins, it would collect in the plastic.
Aria had to deliberately plan her week around whatever restrooms were available to the public. A couple of times, other women who visited the restroom at the same time looked at her as if they had guessed that she was homeless. Aria hated that. She abhorred being looked down on. There were times on the street when she watched everyone else rushing around the world like they were caught in one big hamster wheel. At times like this, she felt better than them, possessing a self-government that they severely lacked. But, at other times, she felt subhuman and humiliated to be looked at like a pest or pitied.
Beaten by the trials of the week, Taylor’s optimism had diminished to a sanguine commitment to do the best he could with whatever he had. Aria had figured out by the second day what it took Taylor the week to accept. She could tell that he was deluded: sure that the person he considered a friend was in fact a friend, when the truth was she wasn’t. Sure that he would have support and opportunities once he made it here, but he didn’t.
After a close call with police, who were placing notices to vacate on camps in one of the places they tried to stay for the night, they trailed a couple of the men when they packed up to leave. Taylor had the idea that perhaps the men would lead them somewhere where the chances of getting hassled by police was lower. And if not, the worst that could happen was that they would discover other potentially useful places in the city. Instead, they ended up on a street that made them both all too aware of their inexperience.
When the Union Rescue Mission in LA opened its doors in the 1800s, people without jobs, hobos and transient workers congregated there because it was the last train stop in the country. Naturally, the infrastructure that built up around it catered specifically to both transience and poverty. In the late 1900s, the city adopted a “policy of containment” whereby the services for the homeless and needy were moved directly to the places where they had already naturally collected. The area was called Skid Row.
The scene that greeted Taylor and Aria was one they’d have expected to see on the television after a national disaster in a third world country – not on an ordinary night of the year in the United States. The street was lined with disheveled tents and makeshift plastic tarps, propped up over piles of clutter. Hundreds – maybe even thousands – of men, woman and children, rotting under the iron hand of poverty. Shopping carts full of every possession that their owners had. A paralyzing smell. Urine and feces stained the sidewalks, but people didn’t seem to care, or couldn’t care because there was nothing they could do about it. Drunk and high, or having succumbed to the decay of hunger, people sprawled out against the pavement and chain-link fences. Luxury lofts rose above the blighted lane, like specters cruelly reminding the people below of the luxuries that they would never have. Aria could feel the precarious overcast of crime lurking just underneath the patrolling eye of the cop cars that seemed to be making supervising rounds throughout the area. Concerned with criminal justice instead of human rights, they felt more like sharks ready to attack at any moment.
An internal warning of danger screamed at her through her nerves. She couldn’t stay there. “I can’t do this,” she said, expecting to be met with resistance. But there was none.
“Yeah, fuck this, let’s just go back to Walmart tonight, this is disgusting,” Taylor said. They did an about-face and walked back the way they had come, hoping to go unnoticed. During the walk back to Walmart, the initial shock of the experience compelled them to exchange remarks back and forth, in search of mutual validation about how bad the place had been. And then both Taylor and Aria fell into a self-preoccupied silence.
Now that her period had started, Aria was regretting running away more than ever. Suddenly the problems that had caused her to run away seemed minimal in comparison to what she was facing now. The details of her former life seemed sweeter than she had originally believed. So many things she had taken for granted. The memory of them moved in slow motion, like a scene from a movie deliberately trying to be nostalgic.
She was in torment. Before finding a hiding place to lie down for the night with Taylor, Aria sat in a stall in the Walmart
bathroom and cried.
CHAPTER 11
Bravery had a way of finding Aria, where mercy would not. They say a woman can’t be until a girl dies, and the girl inside Aria was dying. Either that or she was retreating into the dark recesses beyond her reach. Her innocence was not welcome in this new life. Like all women on the streets, she had been forced to accept that there were people who found beauty only in broken things, people who hid their secrets behind the voiceless. But these people did not admire what was already broken; instead, they broke things to create that pleasure for themselves. They did not confide in people who would keep the shame of their demons safe because of vulnerability. They placed the stains on their conscience inside those who could not speak for themselves, instead of cleansing them.
Aria was learning the hard way that life for anyone on the streets was not as free as she had once imagined because life on the streets was not safe. It was even less safe if you were a woman. Hypothermia, heatstroke, rape, violence, infection, sunburn, arrest, insanity, injuries with nowhere to go to treat them, hunger and malnutrition seemed to follow you when you lived out on the street, like an invisible vulture, simply waiting for you to take a fall. And choosing a companion who was as out of place and flamboyant a target as Taylor made it even less safe.
They decided to spend their day at the closest library they could find to seek a safe refuge. Upon arriving, they went their separate ways inside the building. Taylor went to look for jobs online at the computer lab and Aria found a corner with a collection of chairs. She picked up a large cookbook with which she intended to conceal the fact that she was napping. She weighed her exhaustion against the chances that doing so would get her in trouble and decided that she still looked more like a student who was not preoccupied with her appearance than someone who had come in off the street. She hoped that anyone who saw her there would find the fact that she had fallen asleep more endearing than offensive. She drifted off into a dreamless sleep that was far deeper than she had intended.