Away

The platform was empty except a beggar wearing a dead man’s suit. Under his tattooed arm he carried a violin case. All around him were people desperately trying to get where they were sure they needed to be. Each with a timetable, a schedule, and a train number. The city has always been a numbers game. Lives there are measured by salaries and bonuses. People gauge themselves by age and weight, by their credit scores and debts, by dress sizes or the number of shots needed to go home alone again on a Friday night. Failure is measured by the number of unpaid bills stacked up beside a bed. But success is measured in square feet. Dreams, like apartments, are studio-sized small or circus-tent big. They are a pair of shoes that no longer fit or your daddy’s wingtips, too big to wear. For Dabo, the payout was fifty to one. But he had beaten the numbers game even before his feet touched the city’s soil. There were 6 million dead and only a handful of survivors. It was this terrible identity, the digits carved into his arm that had saved him. He was sure, though, longshots are not luck. They are a kind of misunderstood grace. The kind that lies like everything else in between hopelessness and hope. Dabo took that longshot of grace and bought back his heart’s voice. The fiddle might as well have been the pulse in his chest. With what was left he bought new used clothes at the thrift on Fourteenth. Two wool suits, white shirts and ties. Black socks and brown wingtips. All courtesy of a three-pack-a-day smoker and the emphysema that chased him down at 40. His widow tried to sweep away her grief along with the stench of tobacco and death, by leaving the clothes he’d worn for those still able to breathe. That evening, dressed in the dead man’s Sunday best, Dabo returned to the west side. He felt the bills in his pocket, $600, as the rain began. An alley was good enough for him, but not the clothes. So instead, he bought a week at a fleabag on Jane Street. It was cheap, a dollar a night, and dry, but it was a johns’ hotel for the girls that worked the soldiers passing through. The girls of the west side always started pretending it was just part-time, a way to make a little extra. But it was a grind, every bit as hard as breaking your back in some sweatshop. By the time they were consigned to the docks by age and flagging charm, it was only about rent or food or whatever they needed to put into their arms to get by. Loveless love is heavy. It’s the kind of heavy that gets harder to lift each night. Eventually the weight of it crawls out from where it hides it in the heart and up into the eyes. That weight makes lifting even the pretense of romance impossible. The familiar act becomes like a cup of coffee, just barely enough to keep the cold at bay. And Lonely forever stumbles along, blindly bumping into itself. Trying to remember what it used to be.