Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

I thought of Miss Rush asleep in my bed. She’d been worn and disarrayed by their two encounters, but she didn’t yet look this way. I wanted to keep her from it.

“Let me give you some advice,” I said, as gruffly as I could manage. “Solve your problems.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Don’t get stuck in a rut.” I was aware of the lameness of my words only as they emerged, too late to stop. “Don’t worry, I never do.”

“Very well then,” I said, somehow unnerved. “This interview is concluded.” If he’d shown any sign of budging I might have leaned back in the booth, crossed my arms authoritatively, and stared him out the door. Since he remained planted in his seat, I stood up, feeling that my last spoken words needed reinforcement.

He laid his head back into the cradle of his arms, first sliding the laminated place mat underneath. “This will protect the table surface,” he said.

“That’s good, practical thinking,” I heard myself say as I left the booth.

It wasn’t the confrontation I’d been seeking.

On the way home I shopped for breakfast, bought orange juice, milk, bagels, fresh coffee beans. I took it upstairs and unpacked it as quietly as I could in the kitchen, then removed my shoes and crept in to have a look at Miss Rush. She was peaceably asleep. I closed the door and prepared my bed on the sofa. I read a few pages of the Penguin softcover edition of Muriel Spark’s The Bachelors before dropping off.

Before dawn, the sky like blued steel, the city silent, I was woken by a sound in the apartment, at the front door. I put on my robe and went into the kitchen. The front door was unlocked, my key in the deadbolt. I went back through the apartment; Miss Rush was gone.

I write this at dawn. I am very frightened.

In an alley which ran behind a lively commercial street there sat a pair of the large trash receptacles commonly known as Dumpsters. In them accumulated the waste produced by the shops whose rear entrances shared the alley; a framer’s, a soup kitchen, an antique clothing store, a donut bakery, and a photocopyist’s establishment, and by the offices above those storefronts. On this street and in this alley, each day had its seasons: Spring, when complaining morning shifts opened the shops, students and workers rushed to destinations, coffee sloshing in paper cups, and in the alley, the sanitation contractors emptied containers, sorted recyclables and waste like bees pollinating garbage truck flowers; Summer, the ripened afternoons, when the workday slackened, shoppers stole long lunches from their employers, the cafes filled with students with highlighter pens, and the indigent beckoned for the change that jingled in incautious pockets, while in the alley new riches piled up; Autumn, the cooling evening, when half the shops closed, and the street was given over to prowlers and pacers, those who lingered in bookstores and dined alone in Chinese restaurants, and the indigent plundered the fatted Dumpsters for half-eaten paper bag lunches, batches of botched donuts, wearable cardboard matting and unmatched socks, and burnable wood scraps; Winter, the selfish night, when even the cafes battened down iron gates through which night-watchmen fluorescents palely flickered, the indigent built their overnight camps in doorways and under sidestreet hedges, or in wrecked cars, and the street itself was an abandoned stage.

On the morning in question the sun shone brightly, yet the air was bitingly cold. Birds twittered resentfully. When the sanitation crew arrived to wheel the two Dumpsters out to be hydraulically lifted into their screeching, whining truck, they were met with cries of protest from within.

The men lifted the metal tops of the Dumpsters and discovered that an indigent person had lodged in each of them, a lady in one, a gentleman in the other.

“Geddoudadare,” snarled the eldest sanitation engineer, a man with features like a spilled plate of stew.

The indigent lady rose from within the heap of refuse and stood blinking in the bright morning sun. She was an astonishing sight, a ruin. The colors of her skin and hair and clothes had all surrendered to gray; an archaeologist might have ventured an opinion as to their previous hue. She could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years old, but speculation was absurd; her age had been taken from her and replaced with a timeless condition, a state. Her eyes were pitiable; horrified and horrifying; witnesses, victims, accusers.

“Where am I?” she said softly.

“Isedgeddoudadare,” barked the garbage operative.

The indigent gentleman then raised himself from the other Dumpster. He was in every sense her match; to describe him would be to tax the reader’s patience for things worn, drab, desolate, crestfallen, unfortunate, etc. He turned his head at the trashman’s exhortation and saw his mate.

“What’s the—” he began, then stopped.

“You,” said the indigent lady, lifting an accusing finger at him from amidst her rags. “You did this to me.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“Yes!” she screamed.

“C’mon,” said the burly sanitateur. He and his second began pushing the nearer container, which bore the lady, towards his truck.

She cursed at them and climbed out, with some difficulty. They only laughed at her and pushed the cart out to the street. The indigent man scrambled out of his Dumpster and brushed at his clothes, as though they could thereby be distinguished from the material in which he’d lain.

The lady flew at him, furious. “Look at us! Look what you did to me!” She whirled her limbs at him, trailing banners of rag.

He backed from her, and bumped into one of the garbagemen, who said, “Hey!”

“It’s not my fault,” said the indigent man.

“Yugoddagedoudahere!” said the stew-faced worker.

“What do you mean it’s not your fault?” she shrieked.

Windows were sliding open in the offices above them. “Quiet down there,” came a voice.

“It wouldn’t happen without you,” he said.

At that moment a policeman rounded the corner. He was a large man named Officer McPupkiss who even in the morning sun conveyed an aspect of night. His policeman’s uniform was impeccably fitted, his brass polished, but his shoetops were exceptionally scuffed and dull. His presence stilled the combatants.

“What’s the trouble?” he said.

They began talking all at once; the pair of indigents, the refuse handlers, and the disgruntled office worker leaning out of his window.

“Please,” said McPupkiss, in a quiet voice which was nonetheless heard by all.

“He ruined my life!” said the indigent lady raggedly.

“Ah, yes. Shall we discuss it elsewhere?” He’d already grasped the situation. He held out his arms, almost as if he wanted to embrace the two tatterdemalions, and nodded at the disposal experts, who silently resumed their labors. The indigents followed McPupkiss out of the alley.

“He ruined my life,” she said again when they were on the sidewalk.

“She ruined mine,” answered the gentleman.

“I wish I could believe it was all so neat,” said McPupkiss. “A life is simply ruined; credit for the destruction goes here or here. In my own experience things are more ambiguous.”

“This is one of the exceptions,” said the lady. “It’s strange but not ambiguous. He fucked me over.”

“She was warned,” he said. “She made it happen.”

“The two of you form a pretty picture,” said McPupkiss. “You ought to be working together to improve your situation; instead you’re obsessed with blame.”

“We can’t work together,” she said. “Anytime we come together we create a disaster.”