Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

After I pay him, I have no money left for a cab or a bus. The bridge over the Potomac isn’t meant for pedestrians, and it takes me half an hour to walk across it. For a long time I’m on New Hampshire Avenue, then for a long time I’m on Georgia. I ask for directions to the train station and someone finally gives them to me.

I wonder if he’s right about Lupita. When she sat on the porch and held her head, it seemed she felt more sorry for him than she did for herself; not pity, but sympathy.

I pass by an old-fashioned movie theater whose marquee looks like one giant erection lit in parti-colored lights. People pass by, wondering how to go about mugging me. A well-dressed man asks if I’m a pitcher or a catcher, and I have no idea what he means. I tell myself that it’s good that Ray Bivens Jr. and I fought. Most people think that you find something that matters, something that’s worth fighting for, and if necessary, you fight. But it must be the fighting, I tell myself, that decides what matters, even if you’re left on the sidewalk to discover that what you thought mattered means nothing after all.

“WHERE DO you want to go?” the Amtrak ticket officer asks.

“East,” I say. “Any train that goes east this time of night.”

“You’re in D.C., sir. Any further east and you’ll be in the Atlantic.”

Of course I’m not going east anymore. I’d been going east the last day and a half, and it’s just now hitting me that I can finally go west. Go home.

After the events of the day, I’m not surprised that I get the snottiest ticket officer of the whole damn railway system. I look into the his gray eyes. “West, motherfucker.”

The ticket officer stares at me and I stare right back.

The ticket officer sighs. He looks down at his computer, and then at me again. “Where, pray tell, do you want to go? West, I’m afraid, is a direction, not a destination.”

“Louisville, Kentucky,” I finally say. “Home.”

He enters something into his computer. Tilts his head. He smiles when he tells me there is no train that goes to Louisville. The closest one is Cincinnati.

I walk away from the counter and sit down, trying to think of how I’m going to pay to get to Cincinnati, then from Cincinnati to Louisville. The only other white person in the station besides the ticket officer is an old woman in a rainbow knit cap. She’s having quite an intelligent conversation with herself.

I’ll have to call home, ask my mother to give her credit card number to this prick. I start to try to find a phone when a man approaches the ticket counter, his half-asleep son riding on his back. He probably just came from the March. Probably listened to all the poems and speeches about ants and oxen and African drumming, but still had this kid out in the hot sun for hours, then in the cold night for longer. It’s almost five o’clock in the morning, and all this little boy wants, I can tell, is some goddamned sleep.

“Hey,” I say to the man. When he doesn’t respond, I tap him on the non-kid shoulder. “It’s pretty late to have a kid out. Don’t you think?”

He puts his hand up like a traffic cop, but apparently decides I’m harmless and says to me, “Son. I want you to promise me you’ll go clean yourself up. Get something to eat.” He produces a wallet from his back pocket. He hands me a twenty. “Now, don’t go spending it on nothing that’ll make you worse . Promise me.”

It’s not enough to get me where I’m going, but it’s just what I need. I sit down on a wooden bench. The old white woman next to me carefully pours imaginary liquid into an imaginary cup. The man with the kid goes up to the ticket officer, who stops staring into space long enough to say, “May I help you, sir?”

“Do y’all still say ‘All aboard’?”

“Excuse me?” the ticket officer says.

“My son wants to know if y’all say ‘All aboard.’ Like in the movies.”

“Yes,” the ticket officer says wearily. “We do say ‘All aboard.’ How else would people know to board the train?”

Now the boy jiggles up and down on his father’s back, suddenly animated, as if he’s riding a pony. The ticket officer sighs, hands grazing the sides of his face as though checking for stubble. Finally he throws his arms up in a “Sure, what the hell” kind of way, and disappears into the Amtrak offices for what seems like an hour. The father sets the boy down, feet first, onto the ground. An intercom crackles and a voice says:

“All aboard!”

The voice is hearty and successful. The boy jumps up and down with delight. He is the happiest I’ve seen anyone, ever. And though the urge to weep comes over me, I wait — holding my head in my hands — and it passes.

ORIENTATION GAMES BEGAN the day I arrived at Yale from Baltimore. In my group we played heady, frustrating games for smart people. One game appeared to be charades reinterpreted by existentialists; another involved listening to rocks. Then a freshman counselor made everyone play Trust. The idea was that if you had the faith to fall backward and wait for four scrawny former high school geniuses to catch you, just before your head cracked on the slate sidewalk, then you might learn to trust your fellow students. Russian roulette sounded like a better way to go.

“No way,” I said. The white boys were waiting for me to fall, holding their arms out for me, sincerely, gallantly. “No fucking way.”

“It’s all cool, it’s all cool,” the counselor said. Her hair was a shade of blond I’d seen only on Playboy covers, and she raised her hands as though backing away from a growling dog. “Sister,” she said, in an I’m-down-with-the-struggle voice, “you don’t have to play this game. As a person of color, you shouldn’t have to fit into any white, patriarchal system.”

I said, “It’s a bit too late for that.”

In the next game, all I had to do was wait in a circle until it was my turn to say what inanimate object I wanted to be. One guy said he’d like to be a gadfly, like Socrates. “Stop me if I wax Platonic,” he said. I didn’t bother mentioning that gadflies weren’t inanimate — it didn’t seem to make a difference. The girl next to him was eating a rice cake. She wanted to be the Earth, she said. Earth with a capital E.

There was one other black person in the circle. He wore an Exeter T-shirt and his overly elastic expressions resembled a series of facial exercises. At the end of each person’s turn, he smiled and bobbed his head with unfettered enthusiasm. “Oh, that was good,” he said, as if the game were an experiment he’d set up and the results were turning out better than he’d expected. “Good, good, good!”

When it was my turn I said, “My name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I’d be a revolver.” The sunlight dulled as if on cue. Clouds passed rapidly overhead, presaging rain. I don’t know why I said it. Until that moment I’d been good in all the ways that were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student — though I’d learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with Mace.

“A revolver,” a counselor said, stroking his chin, as if it had grown a rabbinical beard. “Could you please elaborate?”

The black guy cocked his head and frowned, as if the beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks of his experiment had grown legs and scurried off.

“YOU WERE just kidding,” the dean said, “about wiping out all of mankind. That, I suppose, was a joke.” She squinted at me. One of her hands curved atop the other to form a pink, freckled molehill on her desk.