Sherman Alexie - Blasphemy - New and Selected Stories

Corliss and the homeless white man ate in silence. He was too hungry to talk. She didn’t know what to say.

“Thank you,” he said after he’d finished. “Thank you for the acknowledgment of my humanity. A man like me doesn’t get to be human much.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.

“You can ask me a human question, yes.”

“How’d you end up homeless? You’re obviously a smart man, talking the way you do. I know smart doesn’t guarantee anything, but still, what happened?”

“I just fell out of love with the world.”

“I understand how that goes. I’m not so sure about the world myself, but was there anything in particular?”

“First of all, I am nuts. Diagnosed and prescribed. But there’s all sorts of nutcases making millions and billions of dollars in this country. That Ted Turner, for example, is a crazy rat living in a gold-plated outhouse. But I got this particular kind of nuts, you know? I got a pathological need for respect.”

“I’ve never heard of that condition.”

“Yeah, ain’t no Jerry Lewis running a telethon for my kind of sickness. The thing is, I should have been getting respect. I was an economics professor at St. Jerome the Second University here in Seattle. A fine institution of higher education.”

“That’s why you’re so smart.”

“Knowing economics only means you know numbers. Doesn’t mean you know people. Anyway, I hated my job. I hated the kids. I hated my colleagues. I hated money. And I felt like none of them respected me, you know? I felt their disrespect growing all around me. I felt suffocated by their disrespect. So one day, I just walked out in the campus center, you know, right there on the green, green Roman Catholic grass, and started shouting.”

Corliss could feel the heat from this man’s mania. It was familiar and warm.

“What did you shout?” she asked.

“I kept shouting, ‘I want some respect! I want some respect!’ I shouted it all day and all night. And nobody gave me any respect. I was asking directly for it, and people just kept walking around me. Avoiding me. Not even looking at me. Not even acknowledging me. Hundreds of people walked by me. Thousands. Then finally, twenty-seven hours after I started, one of my students, a young woman by the name of Melissa, a kind person who was terrible with numbers, came up to me, hugged me very close, and whispered, ‘I respect you, Professor Williams, I respect you.’ I started crying. Weeping. Those tears that start from your bowels and roar up through your stomach and heart and lungs and out of your mouth. Do you know the kind of tears of which I’m speaking?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”

“Yes. So I started crying, and I kept crying, and I couldn’t stop crying no matter how hard I tried. They tell me I cried for two weeks straight, but all I remember is that first day. I took a leave of absence from school, sold my house, and spent my money in a year, and now I’m here, relying, as they say, on the kindness of strangers.”

“I am kind because you are kind. Thank you for sharing your story.”

“Thank you for showing me some respect. I need respect.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. She knew this man would talk to her for days. She knew he’d fall in love with her and steal everything she owned if given the chance. And she knew he might be lying to her about everything. He might be an illiterate heroin addict with a gift for gab. But he was also a man who could and would give her directions.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I really have to get moving. Can you tell me where this address is?”

“I’m sorry you have to leave me. But I understand. I was born to be left and bereft. Still, I made a human promise to you, and I will keep it, as a human. This address is on the other side of the Space Needle. Walk directly toward the Space Needle, pass right beneath it, keep walking to the other side of the Seattle Center, and you’ll find this address somewhere close to the McDonald’s over there.”

“You know where all the McDonald’s are?”

“Yes, humans who eat fast food feel very guilty about eating it. And guilty people are more generous with their money and time.”

Corliss bought him a chicken sandwich and another chocolate shake and then left him alone.

She walked toward the Space Needle, beneath it, and beyond it. She wondered if the homeless professor had sent her on a wild-goose chase, or on what her malaproping auntie called a dumb-duck run. But she saw that second McDonald’s and walked along the street until she found the address she was looking for. There, at that address, was a tiny, battered, eighty-year-old house set among recently constructed condominiums and apartment buildings. If Harlan Atwater had kept the same phone number for thirty-three years, Corliss surmised, then he’d probably lived in the same house the whole time, too. She wasn’t searching for a nomad who had disappeared into the wilds. She’d found a man who had stayed in one place and slowly become invisible. If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile? Corliss was afraid of confronting the man in person. What if he was violent? Or worse, what if he was boring? She walked into the second McDonald’s, ordered a Diet Coke, and sat at the window and stared at Harlan Atwater’s house. She studied it.

Love Song

I have loved you during the powwow

And I have loved you during the rodeo.

I have loved you from jail

And I have loved you from Browning, Montana.

I have loved you like a drum and drummer

And I have loved you like a holy man.

I have loved you with my tongue

And I have loved you with my hands.

But I haven’t loved you like a scream.

And I haven’t loved you like a moan.

And I haven’t loved you like a laugh.

And I haven’t loved you like a sigh.

And I haven’t loved you like a cough.

And I haven’t loved you well enough.

After two more Diet Cokes and a baked apple pie, Corliss walked across the street and knocked on the door. A short, fat Indian man answered.

“Who are you?” he asked. He wore thick glasses, and his black hair needed washing. Though he was a dark-skinned Indian, one of the darker Spokanes she’d ever seen, he also managed to look pasty. Dark and pasty, like a chocolate doughnut. Corliss was angry with him for being homely. She’d hoped he would be an indigenous version of Harrison Ford. She’d wanted Indiana Jones and found Seattle Atwater.

“Are you just going to stand there?” he asked. “If you don’t close your mouth, you’re going to catch flies.”

He was fifty or sixty years old, maybe older. Old! Of course he was that age. He’d published his book thirty years ago, but Corliss hadn’t thought much about the passage of time. In her mind, he was young and poetic and beautiful. Now here he was, the Indian sonneteer, the reservation bard, dressed in a Seattle SuperSonics T-shirt and sweatpants.

“Yo, kid,” he said. “I don’t have all day. What do you want?”

“You’re Harlan Atwater,” she said, hoping he wasn’t.

He laughed. “Dang,” he said. “You’re that college kid. You don’t give up, do you?”

“I’m on a vision quest.”

“A vision quest?” he asked and laughed harder. “You flatter me. I’m just a smelly old man.”

“You’re a poet.”

“I used to be a poet.”

“You wrote this book,” she said and held it up for him.

He took it from her and flipped through it. “Man,” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy of this in a long time.”