Redhead by the Side of the Road

8

YOU HAVE TO WONDER what goes through the mind of such a man. Such a narrow and limited man; so closed off. He has nothing to look forward to, nothing to daydream about. He wakes on a Monday morning and the light through the slit-eyed window is a bleak, hopeless gray, and the news on the clock radio is all unspeakably sad. There’s been a mass shooting in a synagogue; whole families are dying in Yemen; immigrant children torn from their parents will never, ever be the same, even if by some unlikely chance they are reunited tomorrow. Micah hears all this dully. It doesn’t surprise him.

He tries to slide into sleep again but it’s a fitful, fretful sleep, broken by fragments of dreams. He dreams he dropped his wallet and it landed in Sofia, Bulgaria. He dreams he swallowed a wad of chewing gum, although he hasn’t chewed gum since grade school.

He gives up and struggles out of bed and trudges to the bathroom, and then he gets into his running clothes and switches off his radio and exits through the basement. Climbing the stairs to the foyer, he feels the need to assist himself by pushing down on his thighs with his palms. He feels heavy.

Outside, the air smells like diesel. The ground is still damp from Saturday’s rain. He starts at a slow, bumbling pace; it seems that some blockage in his chest is restricting his breathing. He crosses the street and heads north. His chest begins to loosen and he speeds up a bit. He sees people waiting at the bus stop, but when he turns west and leaves his own neighborhood the sidewalks are almost deserted. Just a couple of other runners pass on the opposite side of the street, and a workman unloads traffic cones from a truck at an intersection. Not till Roland Avenue does the school crowd begin to appear. Little ones dawdling, mothers urging them along, older children tripping each other and jostling and teasing.

Turning south, finally, on the homeward loop of his run, Micah sees an ancient, stooped man clinging to a wrought-iron railing as he inches down his front steps with his briefcase. The man crosses to an out-of-date Buick and opens the door with one crabbed hand and heaves the briefcase onto the front seat; then he shuts the door inconclusively and makes his way around the hood, both hands maintaining constant contact with the car until he reaches the driver’s side and opens that door and disappears within by infinitesimal degrees. Something tells Micah not to offer help, although he does slow to a walk until the man is safely settled.

He’s fully aware that old age will be coming for him too, in time. Health troubles, insurance issues, all with no hope of a pension. Even now, in his forties, he has started to feel slightly less trustful of his own body. He takes more care about how he lifts things, and he gets winded sooner on his runs. A long-ago basketball injury tends to set up a kind of echo in his left ankle during sudden changes in the weather.

Heading east now, he comes across a huge boxwood veiled in fake cobwebs for Halloween. He veers around two women competing to feed a parking meter. Briefly, he mistakes a newspaper box for a child in a bulky jacket. He has noticed that his faulty vision most often reveals itself in attempts to convert inanimate objects into human beings.

He approaches his building from the front, slowing to a walk after he’s passed the lake-trout joint. He sets both hands to his waist, breathing hard, as he climbs the steps to the stoop. He sends a reflexive glance toward the swing, but of course nobody is waiting there.

His shower is hot and invigorating, and he likes the smell of the soap he recently bought at the Giant. But once he is out again and standing at the sink, towel wrapped around his waist, it emerges that he’s not up to shaving. He clears an arc in the condensation on the mirror with the heel of one hand and stares at his own face and just cannot, cannot be bothered. Since he skipped his shave yesterday, his whiskers are already noticeable — a grainy black mask dotted with random glints of white. He looks dirty.

Well, so what.

In the bedroom he gets dressed, and then he goes out to the kitchen to make his breakfast. Toast, he decides, and an orange half that’s been waiting facedown on a saucer in the fridge for the past few days. Its surface has developed a dried-out, beaded-over appearance, but never mind. He cuts it into wedges with a steak knife. He doesn’t bother with coffee. He doesn’t even bother sitting down; just stands at the counter, alternately chomping on his toast and sucking orange wedges. There’s a calendar tacked to the wall above him but it’s still turned to August. He doesn’t really use paper calendars anymore. He studies August’s photo: a woebegone beige puppy with a bandage covering one eye. The calendar came in the mail from an animal-rescue outfit.

Yet another dream floats into his mind from this morning: He was riding in a car with his father. He was telling his father that he absolutely refused to visit Aunt Bertha again. This dream was so vivid, so full of concrete detail, that he can still smell the car’s dusty felt upholstery. However, the father in his dream was not anyone he knows, and he has never had an Aunt Bertha. It appears that he was accidentally dreaming somebody else’s dream. Now that he thinks about it, his other dreams this morning may have been borrowed as well.

He tosses the remains of his toast into the garbage along with the orange peels. He rinses the saucer under the faucet and returns it to the cabinet; he rinses the steak knife and returns it to the drawer. There’s no point in running the stick vacuum around the table because he hasn’t sat at the table. So, straight ahead to floor-mopping day. “Zee dreaded moppink,” he says aloud. But he makes no move to fetch the mop and bucket.

Instead he goes into his office and checks his email. Ads for political candidates, pleas for political contributions, huge savings on snow tires and malware protection and gutter cleaning. Delete, delete, delete. Kegger wants to know if Wednesday they could meet at the Apple Store. Go ahead and say yes; a glimpse of family sounds like not such a bad idea right now. His subscription to Tech Tattler will expire at the end of next month and he should click here. Delete.

He’s about to log off when he sees he’s received a text from Lorna Bartell Adams. Just wanted to tell you…the top line begins. This is why he should keep his phone with him at all times; he’s forever playing catch-up. He clicks on the icon to read the rest of it. Just wanted to tell you that all is well here. We had a nice long talk on the drive home and Monday we’re setting up an appointment with the dean. Thank you again. XX Lorna

He considers answering this, but in the end he doesn’t. What would he say, anyhow? I’m surprised you even bothered writing since supposedly I am such a—

He pushes back from his desk and rises and goes to the living room. Afghan, phone, three empty beer cans, carryout menu, potato-chip bag. He puts everything in its rightful place. Not for the first time, it occurs to him that he really should take care of all this before he goes to bed every night. But somehow, at the end of an entire day of doing everything he was supposed to he just runs out of enthusiasm.

How come what went wrong with us ended up being MY fault? What on earth do you imagine I—

He gives his head a little shake. Move on, for Christ’s sake. Lorna is over and done with. All of them are — Zara too, and Adele, and finally Cass. He ought to feel liberated. He does feel liberated. Lorna so tediously self-righteous, Zara so obsessed with The Dance (as she called it), Adele with her precious endangered species. (“Are you sitting down?” she would ask before announcing the demise of some rare breed of butterfly. Even though she was right there in the room with him and could see for herself that he was indeed sitting down. “Are you ready for this?” she’d ask. Like someone laughing at her own joke, instructively, before beginning to tell it.) And Cass: Well, there’s a lot about Cass that he could find fault with, starting with the fact that she has been completely dishonest about what she was expecting from him. How was he to know what she expected? He’s not a mind reader!

He frowns down into the wastebasket where he’s just dropped the potato-chip bag. Then his phone rings, and he takes it from his pocket to check the screen. Unfamiliar number.

He answers. “Tech Hermit,” he says.

A woman asks, “Tech Hermit?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yes,” he says.

“So, I have this dilemma?” she says. Her voice is young but not that young. She ought to have given up on the rising inflection by now. “Sometimes something just quits on me? Like this program I’m running? And then I get this note on my screen offering to report it for me?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Well, do I go ahead and say yes or is that just inviting trouble.”

Ironically, her one actual question has no question mark at the end.

“Why would that be inviting trouble?” Micah asks.

“Because they might steal my identity?”

“Excuse me?”

“My identity. It might be a plot to steal it.”

“Nah,” he says.

“No?”

“Not a chance.”

There’s a silence, as if she’s debating whether or not to believe him.

“You should be fine sending a report,” he tells her, “but don’t bother doing it if it’s going to make you uncomfortable.”

Anyhow, he very nearly adds, there are lots worse things than losing your identity. Right now he almost feels that losing his own identity would be a plus.

“Okay, thanks,” she says finally, and she hangs up.

Doesn’t ask if she owes him anything, not that he’d have said yes.

He takes the wastebasket to the kitchen and dumps it into the garbage container underneath the sink. Tomorrow is collection day, but he doesn’t have enough garbage of his own to fill a single bag, even.

His next call comes some time later, while he’s idly flipping through the Sun at the kitchen table. “It’s Arthur James,” a man says. “Do you remember me?”

Micah says, “Um…”

“You set up an external disk for me a couple of months ago.”

“Oh, yes,” Micah says — convincingly, he hopes.

“Well, all at once my printer can’t scan. Yesterday it could scan but today it seems it can’t.”

“Did you try turning it off and then on again?”

“Yes, but nothing happened.”

“Hmm.”

“So I was wondering if you would come and take a look.”

“Remind me what your address is?”

The man tells him, and Micah jots it down on the memo pad next to the toaster. “I’m on my way,” he says. He hangs up and tears the page off the pad, grabs his car topper and his carryall, and heads out the back door.

It’s late morning by now and there’s a call-in talk show on the car radio. Micah thinks call-in shows are the worst idea going. Who cares about some man-on-the-street’s ill-informed opinion? He keeps meaning to switch stations, but he doesn’t have the energy.

The current caller, a gravel-voiced man from Iowa, sounds surprised to find himself on the air. “Hello?” he says. “Am I on?”

“Yes, yes,” the moderator says impatiently.

Then the man of course has to embark on the usual introductory flourishes. “Well, hi!” he says. “Good morning!” Pause.

“Go ahead, please.”

“Well, first off,” the caller says, “I just want to tell you how much I enjoy your show. I always—”

“What’s on your mind?” the moderator asks.

“Huh? And also I’d like to thank you for answering my—”

“You’re welcome! What are you calling about?”

The caller goes into a rambling discussion of…what is the topic today? Police violence; something about police violence. He is full of verbal tics—“y’know” sprinkling every sentence and so many “um”s and “uh”s that you’d think he would hear them himself. But he’s oblivious, even when the moderator starts giving him hurry-up nudges like “Yes, well—” and “Okay! Well—”

“This is why you should leave radio to the professionals,” Micah chides the caller. Then he tackles the moderator. “And a little common civility from you, please.”

A giant tanker truck is blocking the next intersection. Traffic God must be having fits. All in all it causes quite a delay, and by the time Micah’s on the move again the call has mercifully ended and the news is airing. There are flash floods in Jordan and a catastrophic mudslide in Colombia. An illegal immigrant who’s being deported to his homeland says that when he gets there he’ll just turn around and come back. Try again, try again, and try again after that, he says, because what else can a person do? Micah finally cuts the radio off. He’s stopped for the light at Northern Parkway now and he can hear a neighboring car’s radio playing something hip-hop and feverish, the beat so heavy that it makes his eardrums thud. He waits facing straight ahead, his hands placed on the wheel at precisely ten o’clock and two o’clock. He mentally writes another text to Lorna.

The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.

Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.

Now that his radio is silent, he can hear all the sounds outside his car and inside. The hissing of the tires on the damp pavement, the sewing-machine hum of the engine, some tool in his carryall rattling against another tool with every slight jog in the pavement. He passes Loch Raven Boulevard. He passes Perring Parkway.

He takes a right on Harford Road.

It’s 11:18. He has no idea what the fourth grade would be doing now. Is it lunchtime yet? He’ll wait for lunchtime. He’ll just park in the lot and wait. Except, how will he know that it’s lunchtime? They’ll be indoors, after all, in the cafeteria. Then will they come outdoors once they’ve eaten, or will they stay in till afternoon recess? Well, if he has to wait till afternoon, he will. He’ll just sit in his car till afternoon, because what else can a person do?

He takes a right, a left, another right. He’s traveling through a mostly residential section, small houses with small, leaf-littered yards, many with signs out front for home enterprises like hair weaving and knitting supplies. Then he passes a baseball diamond and he dead-ends at Linchpin Elementary. Tired-looking two-story brick building, crumble-edged concrete steps, garish paintings in most of the windows. Bare clay playground to the left with a swing set, a jungle gym…and yes, children, by the dozens.

At first he’s encouraged. He parks on the asphalt lot and gets out of the car, still wearing his glasses because he needs to see what’s what. But then it strikes him that these children look too young to be fourth-graders. They’re playing a circle game, something on the order of ring-around-the-rosy, and they have the bunchy, squat, bundled appearance of children dressed by grown-ups. Even so, Micah continues walking toward them. He has spotted another group just beyond them, an older group, the boys and girls more separated. The boys are scuffling together without any clear purpose while the girls have organized some sort of jump-rope game. “Down in the valley where the green grass grows,” they’re chanting as the rope twirls, “there sat Allison sweet as a rose.” Allison must be the girl who’s jumping, her braids flying up behind her every time she lands. “Along came Andrew and kissed her on the cheek—”

“Andrew Evans?” Allison shrieks. “Yuck!”

“How many kisses did she get this week? One, two—”

“Fourth grade?” Micah asks the nearest rope turner.

“What?”

“Is this the fourth grade?”

“Well, some of it.”

“Where’s your teacher?”

“Uh…”

The girl looks around vaguely. She allows her end of the rope to slow, and Allison trips and comes to a halt. “No fair!” Allison cries, and she tells the others, “Shawanda let the rope die!”

“Sorry, that was my fault,” Micah says. “I’m trying to find—”

He starts to circle around them, but there seems to be a tossed-off jacket on the ground where he didn’t expect it. It snatches his left shoe and brings him to his knees. “I need to find your teacher,” he finishes as he struggles to rise. He isn’t hurt in the least, already he’s on his feet again, but apparently the mishap has alarmed the little girls, because they’re turning toward the building and calling, “Ms. Slade! Ms. Slade!” (“Mislaid! Mislaid!” it sounds like.) “There’s a man here!” they call.

“I just wanted to have a word with her,” Micah tells them, and then, “A word with you,” because now Cass herself has appeared, stepping out of a side door. She has her head lowered and she’s zipping her parka as she walks; she doesn’t notice him till she’s only a few feet away, and then she looks up and her forehead creases and she says, “Micah?”

“I’ve done everything wrong,” he tells her. “I was trying to make no mistakes at all and look at where it got me.”

“What?”

“Look at where I’ve ended up! My life has come to nothing! I don’t know how I’m going to go on with it!”

“Oh, Micah,” she says, and then she steps closer and gently takes hold of his wrists, because he seems to be wringing his hands. She looks down at his knees, caked with damp clay, and she asks, “What happened to you?”

“He fell over my jacket,” a little girl says. She has picked the jacket up from the ground and is brushing it off efficiently.

But Micah chooses to misunderstand Cass’s question. “I’m a roomful of broken hearts,” he tells her.

She says, “Oh, honey.”

She has never called him “honey” before. He hopes it’s a good sign. He thinks it might be, because next she puts an arm around him and starts guiding him toward the building. They are walking so close together that they’re stumbling over each other’s feet, and he begins to feel happy.