Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

He walked down Market Street, the early stretch of it still dominated by strip clubs and SROs and the woven dens of the homeless, constructed of scraps of cotton and cardboard as though designed by earthbound birds. Thomas dodged a handful of requests for change that varied in tone and volume, stepped over a half-dozen sleeping bags, and then he saw her. Her outstretched hands, her skin that appeared to have experienced flood and drought in an unending cycle, her eyes unchanged.

HARDLY FEELING THE DIP between curb and street, he glided towards her. He was sure, or nearly, that this was the child Edith and Declan had lost. She was standing with a foot on the concrete ledge of an angular fountain, working a denim pant leg up with one hand and holding the plastic handle of an overflowing shopping cart with the other.

He approached and stepped into the fetid scent, understanding too late he was interrupting her bath.

“Jenny?”

The woman wrinkled her forehead to regard him, and the dirt on her face realigned. She was worn in the way of broken things left out in brown yards, stretched and sun-bleached and sagging.

“Who are you to ask,” she spat. “You a cop?”

“No, I—”

She pulled on his sweater and tilted her head to the side. “No, you’re not a cop.”

“I came to talk to you—”

“I’m hungry,” she barked. “You gonna get me some fuckin’ food or what?”

Before he could answer she was shuffling off, pushing her cart against the light through protesting honks. He tried to keep up, weaving through traffic and raising his hand in thanks to the drivers who let him. In front of a McDonald’s she acknowledged two hunched and gaunt men pinching cigarettes between diminished lips and leaning against the intricately scratched window, and parked her rolling pile of possessions there.

Inside, she told Thomas what to order, grabbed a booth while he waited in line. She’d brought in four bulging plastic bags, which she examined and sniffed. Thomas looked up at the backlit photos of hamburgers, unsure if this was how he had wanted to feel when he found her. It had happened too quickly: he had not been prepared: but how, he wondered, could he have readied himself for this?

She didn’t comment on the way he crouched to slide the tray, one armed, onto the table. While she inhaled a double cheeseburger and gnawed the ice from the soda, splintering it in her open mouth, Thomas looked for words, aware he’d spent much of life like this, stammering and searching. Wasn’t this outcome more likely than any other he’d considered — couldn’t he have guessed that the lost child, damaged by an era that chewed up so many, would be somewhere between life and death, growling, pushing her rotting blankets and talismans through depressed intersections?

“I guess I’ll get right to it. Your mother? Edith? Is sick. Your brother is trying to take the property from her against her will.”

She said nothing, kept eating, opening ketchup packets with her sawed-down teeth and picking at her gray gums with a pinky nail.

“I know it’s been practically a lifetime, but—”

“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but you must be a lunatic or somethin’,” she said, finally. “Don’t know why you want to tell me this shit. Like I don’t have plenty to deal with. Everything I can do just to survive. City making new laws to illegalize me every day.” Her frustration soon became unintelligible, and she was speaking in schizophrenic apostrophe. “Little bitches,” she said. “Flying around, not even my own age.”

Her cool anger seemed to flash, vanishing from her face before it appeared in her body. Their circumferences like those of dinner plates, her enormous hands spread and hovered over the table, then slammed down. “Fucker. Mother fucker .”

“Jenny?” He said it again, though he knew now how wrong he was, and longed at once for all the clean, quiet moments of his life, as though summoning them might give him some power in the barbed present.

“I’m leaving, and I don’t want to see you again.” She removed a butter knife from one of the plastic bags that swayed from her arm and stood before him, swiping it through the air vertically. Thomas found himself laughing, everything suddenly a well-earned punch line: the carving on the bench that read SUK OR FUK MY DIK, the irate homeless person he’d tried to offer free real estate, the filthy woman’s eyes protruding as she gripped the dull, bent knife.

“Lunatic is right!” Thomas said, as she backed away. Freed in some way, he closed his eyes and sank into the vinyl backrest.

He folded his arms on the table, buried his sight in the scratchy wool once Declan’s, and found the memories of his past life there: himself at an art gallery, shaking hands with suited men, later sharing their cabs, waiting for the girls in belted linen dresses to come to him, packaging his pieces for shipment once they’d sold, taking a nap in the afternoon, knowing the world would be ready to receive him when he awoke. He sighed and rose and pushed the door open.

Before he felt the force of hands around him, he noticed the scent of old sweat. Then the voice of the woman who wasn’t Jenny, skirted by two others, and the coughs as they slammed his head against a wall, searching his body as though it were a cluttered drawer. The greedy push of their fingers was several seconds gone before he opened his eyes, saw them running and the man in the blue uniform approaching.

PAULIE HAD SWUM towards a quiet place within the limits of his condition. He had come to understand that the affection he shared with Claudia was as sacred as any — but still sometimes an alarm went off, all parts of him knocked together. When at the zoo he saw a father hoisting a child to see the wild goats canter, or on the street he watched a pair of sweethearts speaking to the stroller between them, he felt angry at the simple shape of his life: at the meals Claudia helped him prepare and the way she watched him complete the tasks she nervously assigned, at the days he sometimes spent playing music for just himself, at the brightly colored blankets and playful lamps that smeared his apartment as reminders of a permanent childhood. Once in a while he would still plead with Claudia, But what if I adopted, but what if you helped me take care of the baby , and always ended up red-faced and tear-streaked.

The conversation had happened again. Paulie had shut himself in his bedroom, turned on the light shaped like the moon and insisted, uncharacteristically, on wallowing in his poor temper. He had fallen asleep in his clothes, slept through Claudia leaving for work in the morning, and woken up with a mood that moved like an injured bee, frantically, from wall to wall.

Paulie thought he might go see Edward, either lie on his couch and ask him questions about what he was writing or convince him to go somewhere with plenty of color and sound, a loud movie or fast train, but when he knocked, no one answered. He sat down on the landing, not yet ready to return to his apartment, and tried to think up a story he liked about staircases. When he heard Edith’s door open, he brightened. He called her name too loud and stood waving like a traffic guard, trying to direct her eyes to his voice.

She turned and blinked steadily for most of a minute.

“How is today looking?” he asked. Running her fingers over the peach costume jewels that ringed her neck, Edith squinted up at him. Her face reacted as though to some improbability, a lynx strolling through a bank or a waterfall tumbling out a third-story window.