Crooked Little Vein

Chapter 2

I sat there for at least half an hour, just thinking. Trying to think, anyway. Sort of a fugue state, where lots of words were flying around my head without assembling into sentences. The walls started closing in. Shifting in my chair, I found that my joints were locking up and my muscles were bunching into hard knots of stress. I fought my way into my jacket, feeling like a stick insect trying to put on a life vest, and went out for a walk.

There was a girl with blue hair sitting cross-legged on the corner of the street. Her hair fell down her back in thick, fuzzy dreadlocks, like someone had nailed a dozen baby aliens to her head. She was dressed in what I assumed to be an artful arrangement of fabric swatches intended to resemble rags, rather than actual shambling homeless/nutcase out-and-out rags. Tartan, paisley, plaid, things that looked like they belonged as wallpaper in a kid’s room, things that looked like they’d been ripped off clowns at knifepoint. She had her back to me, and, as I approached, I expected to see a hat in front of her, or a little cardboard sign with the hand-scrawled message NEED MONEY FOR FOOD/DRUGS/CLOWN-STABBING. As I walked around her, I saw that she was just sitting there, eyes closed, hands on her knees, perfectly still and calm.

She had… well, I thought it was Sharpie or makeup around her eye, at first. A wobbly circle, with stitch marks crossing it, drawn like the sort of roundish patch you’d see sewn into teddy bears or old denim jeans. She sort of came to as I walked around her, smiled as if she’d just woken up, and rubbed her face. The marking didn’t smear. It was tattooed on.

She rubbed her eyes, and then looked up at me, giving me the gentlest smile. “Hello,” she said softly.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re sitting asleep on the corner of the street.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I was listening.”

“To what?”

She nodded at the street, still with that serene smile. “The traffic. Sit with me.” She patted the sidewalk next to her. Calculating that, after this, the day just couldn’t get any weirder, I said the hell with it and sat down next to her.

She nodded toward the street. “The traffic. I’m listening to the traffic.”

“What’s so interesting about the sound of cars? Is this one of those art things I never get?”

She laughed, and it was a soft low laugh, like the flow of water in a brook. There was no tension in the girl at all. I couldn’t imagine anything affecting that pool of relaxation around her. Just sitting there, I felt the knots in my back slowly sliding apart.

“No. Well, not really. I’m listening for the future.”

“The future.”

“Do you know anything about the Native Americans?”

“Only the usual stuff about poisoning them with infected blankets. I always wondered why we don’t give little blankets to each other at Thanksgiving.”

There was almost a frown there. “That’s just nasty.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out of me without really thinking. I suddenly didn’t want to spoil her and her zone of no-tension.

“The Native American shamans,” she said, “listened for the future in the sound of horses. They divined it, from the patterns of hoofbeats. They would sit like this, and just listen. In those days, horses were the sound of their world, the true sound of motion, and they believed that their movement through time let in leakages of the future. Presentiments of what will be.”

“I don’t see any horses.”

“Then you’re not looking.” She smiled, indulgent. “This is the sound of our world in motion, right here. Cars. The strike of hooves became the point where the rubber meets the road. Now, I’m a new American. My family came over on the boat from Spain only a hundred years ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from the people who were here before. In fact, I think it means I ‘must’ learn from them, if I’m going to stay here and look after this land properly. If only to make up for your smallpox-infected blankets, right? So here I sit. A New American shaman, divining the future from the sound of cars.”

As the strangeness of my days go, this was really kind of benign in its insanity. And I was enjoying the peace of her. So I drew my knees up and around until I was cross-legged like her, and we sat together like Zen hoboes on the corner of the street.

“What do you hear?” I asked.

She inclined her head slightly, toward the constant blur of metal accelerating past us. Just listening. It took a minute before she gave a little laugh.

“What?” I said.

“I hate the way this sounds. It makes me sound like a carny fortune-teller.”

“Go on.”

“You’re going on a long journey, Mike.”

“Oh, God. Tell me there’s no tall dark stranger.”

She giggled. “I think you’re the tall dark stranger. But, no, you’re going on a long journey. Sounds like you’re going to cross the country before you’re done. And yourself. It’s going to be strange for you. But that’s not a bad thing. Traveling is good.”

“You travel a lot?”

“I do nothing but travel,” she said, glancing at me. “Look at my face. I don’t fit in anywhere. I can’t get a job, buy a house, any of the things we’re supposed to want to do. When I got the tattoo, I knew I was drawing a crooked line between myself and society. But that’s okay. It stops me from giving up on myself. It stops me from settling for something ordinary. You shouldn’t want ordinary things, either. You’re unusual. I know you can’t hear the future, but it comes to you, anyway, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it the future.”

“That’s because you can’t hear it.”

“Back up a second,” I said, feeling like I’d missed a step. “I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“No.” She smiled. “You didn’t.”

“I should really get moving,” I said, standing up, suddenly very cold.

She beamed up at me. “Yes, you should. You just came into quite a lot of money. You should spend a little on yourself before you have to spend it on necessities. You don’t need to start your journey just yet. Enjoy yourself a little bit.”

“I just thought of an old song,” I said.

“Which one?”

“‘Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.’”

“That’s right,” she said, eyes drawn back to the traffic. “It’s always later than you think. I won’t be here tomorrow. And neither will you. Go have a drink.”