Christmas lights glimmer around the windows of stores as I walk past. Wet, dirty slush piles up along the edges of the street. More slush sprays out from the wheels of cars zooming past. A cold breeze stirs the limp ribbons of wreaths hung from streetlights and store windows.
I walk into a hot dog restaurant and push a few crumpled singles across the counter. “One chili cheese dog with everything.”
The cashier hands me a sopping, paper-wrapped hot dog, along with a quarter and a penny, which is now—literally—my last bit of money.
I sit in one of the hard plastic booths, soaking up the heat and brightness of the restaurant, and bite into the chili dog. It tastes incredible. When you’re homeless, it’s amazing how you learn to appreciate the simple pleasures: warmth, a full meal, a clean bathroom.
I’ve been living and sleeping in my car for over a week, now. I’ve worn the same shirt for three days in a row, and my hair is matted and filthy. I look like any other street person—which is exactly what I am. In a way, it’s a relief.
Oh, it’s horrible, of course. I wake up every morning with the knife of hunger in my belly and I go to sleep cold and still hungry. I’m always itchy because I hardly ever have a chance to wash. And I am aware that, statistically, I’m now at a much greater risk for being raped or murdered. Yet beneath the skin-crawling misery of it all, I feel more relaxed and free than I have in a long, long time. This is it—the bottom. There’s nowhere left to fall. I can finally stop trying so damn hard. And if I start muttering to myself or rocking back and forth, no one notices or cares, because street people are expected to be crazy.
I eat the chili dog messily, not bothering to wipe up the meaty juice that dribbles down my chin and onto my shirt. After I finish, I lick my fingers clean and wipe them on the paper place mat. The other customers are frowning at me. A woman shakes her head and mutters something to the man next to her. At another time, their stares might have bothered me, but I find that I no longer care. Distantly I wonder what Stanley would think if he saw me now. I push the thought away.
After a while, a manager walks up to me and quietly asks me to leave. I walk out without saying anything to him.
There’s an old man sitting by the sidewalk, jingling a Styrofoam cup full of change and dollar bills. A pair of sunglasses perch on his long nose, and there’s a small, scruffy brown dog curled up next to him. The man is singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in a deep, resonant voice.
The dog yawns, showing a tiny pink tongue, and licks a small wound on his paw.
I listen for a few minutes, then toss my last twenty-six cents into the cup. The man stops singing and arches an eyebrow. “That really all you can spare?”
I glance at the dog, who looks like some sort of terrier mix. He wags his stubby tail, wriggles, and licks his wound again. “His paw is injured. You should buy some ointment for it.”
The man chuckles. “Pretty bossy for someone who only gave me two coins.”
There’s nothing I can do. So I walk on.
The man’s voice rises behind me, rich and sonorous, in a rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
My head itches, and I scratch it, wondering if I have lice. Does that even happen to people in the winter?
My car is parked in the lot outside a Dunkin’ Donuts. I’ve been driving from place to place so I won’t get ticketed or arrested for loitering. Every once in a while I’ll fill out another job application, but I don’t know why I bother. I don’t have a phone, so there’s no way anyone could contact me, even if they wanted to. I’ve taken to being completely honest; I take a perverse pleasure in writing answers that I know will get my application chucked in the trash. When they ask me why I want the job, I write, Homeless. Need food. When they ask me why I left my last position of employment, I write, Boss tried to kill my friend. When they ask me my greatest flaw, I write, I destroy everything I care about.
I sit in my car for a few minutes, staring into space. All my cash is gone, including the emergency twenty I kept hidden in the glove compartment. Pretty soon I’ll be like that man, asking for change on the sidewalk. I hate the idea of begging, but the knifelike hunger pains in my stomach are getting worse all the time. I could sell my car, but then I’d have nowhere to sleep. I already pawned off my laptop.
A glance at my fuel gauge tells me I have less than a quarter tank left, and after this, I won’t be able to fill it up again unless I somehow, miraculously acquire more money.
I climb into the backseat and unzip the duffel bag. The dried-out carnation still rests atop a rumpled pile of shirts.
It’s the only thing I have left of Stanley’s. Even now, I can’t let go of it.
He won’t be in the park, of course. But I drive there anyway and park in the lot across the street. Snow floats down from the sky as I walk across the expanse of grass, toward the bench where I first saw him. With one gloved hand, I brush snow from the wood and sit.
A heavy exhaustion steals over me. I sink to the bench and curl up, tucking my knees against my chest. The cold seeps into my bones, numbing me, but there’s something comforting about the numbness. I feel like I could float away, and it wouldn’t matter. Is this peace? Is this freedom?
My eyelids slip shut as I drift into the murky space between sleep and waking.
After Mama’s death, I spent some time in an institution. I don’t recall much of it. For a while, I just drifted, surrounded by a gray haze. Words like catatonic and unresponsive floated at the periphery of my awareness.
Little by little, I realize that I’m in a room with pale lime-green tiles on the floor. I start to notice things like the pattern on my sheets, the grain of the fake wood paneling on my wall, the taste of the stringy green beans the white-coated woman pushes into my mouth with a spoon, and the number of pills in the little paper cup they give me every morning and every night. There are nine.
One evening, the white-coated woman comes into my room wheeling the tray of green beans and chicken, with the paper cup full of pills next to it. She picks up the cup. “Time for dinner and medication, Alvie. Can you say ‘ahhh?’”
Slowly I sit up and run a dry tongue over drier lips. In my head, it makes a sound like sandpaper. With a sweep of my arm, I knock the cup and plate of mushy food off the tray, and it scatters across the floor. The nurse lets out a little shriek.
Later, I learn that this is the first time I’ve moved on my own in four weeks.
Over the next few months, I improve, which is to say I start to walk around, go to the bathroom without help, and eat on my own. But I’m hard and empty inside, like a nutshell. I can’t even cry. Every morning I stare into the mirror and wait for the tears to come, but it never happens. I don’t say a word to the nurses or doctors. They think that I’ve “regressed,” that I’ve lost whatever verbal abilities I possessed due to trauma. But it’s not that I can’t speak; I just don’t particularly want to.
Because there’s not much else to do in the institution, I read a lot, mostly books about science and animal behavior. The doctors don’t seem to realize that I can understand the books; they think I’m just looking at the pictures, or counting the words. I don’t care, as long as they don’t try to stop me.
One day, I find a big book of European folklore on the shelf of the rec room. It has a thick leather cover with a border of shiny, raised gold leaves and detailed pictures of dragons and knights and forests. I’m not usually interested in fairy tales or history, but there’s something hypnotic about the images.
Inside, there’s a chapter called “The Changeling,” with an illustration of a horned troll—its wrinkly face creased in a smile—lifting a baby out of its crib.
Hundreds of years ago (the book says), some people believed that trolls and elves were real, that they lived in the forest, and that once in a while, these supernatural beings would sneak into a village to steal a human baby and replace it with one of their own offspring—a creature that looks human but isn’t. This child is called a changeling.
If a child started acting strangely, parents would get scared and think he was a changeling. The legend held that tormenting the imposter—by beating it or putting it in a hot oven—would make the kidnappers return the real child to its human parents.
I wonder how many children were burned in ovens or beaten to death by their parents because of this quaint little myth.
I go to the window and crack it open. The windows in the rec room only open a little, because they don’t want us jumping out, but there’s enough of a gap that I can slide the book through. I push it out and watch it turn over and over as it falls and lands on the pavement with a distant, muffled thud.
When I turn around, there’s a nurse standing in the room. “Oh, honey,” she says, “did the pictures in that book scare you? I can bring you some nicer books, if you like.”
I tilt my head. She doesn’t really expect a response. I haven’t spoken to anyone since I first came to the institution, almost six months ago. “Can you bring me some books on quantum mechanics,” I say. “I’ve been wanting to learn more about that.”
Her jaw drops.
She tells everyone, of course, and the doctors start bombarding me with questions, which makes me wish I’d never opened my mouth.
But I realize that, for the first time in months, I do feel something: restlessness. I want to get out of this place. I don’t know what I’ll do once I get out. I don’t care. I’m just sick of it—sick of the smell, the pea-colored tiles, the mushy green beans with every meal. I want to see animals again. Real ones, not the stupid cartoon cutouts pinned to the bulletin board.
So I keep talking. I answer the doctors’ questions. I read more and more; the nurses start to call me Little Einstein, and bring me books as presents. One of them gives me a copy of Watership Down.
After a while, a doctor says, “Good news, Alvie. You’ve improved so much, you’re going to be released into the foster care system. You’ll have a family. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I wait to feel something. Anything, even a flicker of relief. But there’s no response from inside me.
What they called improvement was simply a slow process of locking everything away, deep in the recesses of my mind, until I was numb enough to function. Over the past few months I have been building the Vault, stone by stone. Now I walk and talk, but a part of me is still far away, and I don’t know how to reach it.
Mama is dead because of me. I should be with her, rotting at the bottom of the lake.
Maybe I am, and that’s why I can’t feel anything. Maybe I’m like Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time.