Nathan shot upright in bed, wiped the crusty yellow snot from his eyes and paused, listening for the piercing crack that woke him from a dead sleep to repeat. It had been loud and sudden--that he remembered--but the tingling awareness crawling up his sweat soaked spine was fading fast, and the wild leaps his imagination took seemed less plausible with each red minute that passed on the radio alarm clock teetering on the night table.
Stupid, he told himself. Gunshots in his trendy downtown neighborhood were few and far between after all. An abstract reality to be debated late at night on Internet forums and stories to be seen on the nightly news. Stories of someone else’s tear stained mother crumbling outside her ramshackle home in someone else’s part of the city, but not his. Never his.
He flopped backward, slinging an arm over his green eyes to block out the sunlight streaming in through a break in the bedroom blinds. The apartment was quiet. No sirens. No screams. Just a dull murmur from the busy street three stories below.
He fell asleep.
And then he heard it. Not a gunshot, but a shrill shout closely followed by several more, not loud enough to decipher, but just loud enough to grate on his nerves. Nathan waited for the voices to trail off, move down the street and away from his building, but they didn’t. They grew louder.
Grinding his teeth, Nathan glanced at the alarm clock. It was three forty-four in the afternoon. He had drifted off to sleep for less than an hour, and didn’t need to be “up” officially for another three hours, which would have left him thirty minutes to brush his teeth, slap on a semi-clean t-shirt and still make his seven-thirty date. He was not happy.
He sighed, flung the sheets from his bare legs, leapt out of bed and stomped toward the blinds. The window thudded against the top frame as he thrust his head outside.
“What the—” The words died in his throat.
Wide eyes quickly scanned below, to the right and to the left. Everywhere Nathan looked people littered the pavement, packed so tightly the gray street looked like an overstuffed sardine can with its contents still flip-flopping and writhing inside. Homemade banners and signs painted in bright pinks, yellows, red and blue bobbed in the spring breeze. Voices clamored over each other, trying to be heard in the rising cacophony.
Nathan slammed the window shut and paused in front of the glass, captivated by his ghostly reflection outlined in the crowd. After a moment, he spun on his heel, snagged a dingy black shirt dangling from a dresser drawer and strode out his bedroom door.
“George!” he hollered, marching toward his still slumbering roommate sprawled on the living room couch. “Get the hell up.” George groaned, rolled onto his side and buried his face in the cushions. Nathan slapped him across the back of his head.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Hale! What the fuck?”
“You’ve got to see this shit,” he said. “There are thousands, literally thousands of people on the street,” said Nathan, peeking out the living room blinds. George ignored him. “Come on. Get up and take a look at this. They‘re everywhere.”
“Who cares.”
“You’re not even the slightest bit curious to know why the whole fucking city is on our doorstep?”
George reluctantly sat up and scratched his bare stomach. “No, not really,” he grumbled, reaching for a PS3 game controller lying on the floor.
“Not at all?”
“Nope.”
Nathan unlocked the window and held it open. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but in the ten minutes since he woke up and made the discovery downstairs, it seemed as if even more people had filtered into the mob. People were perched on benches and hanging from street lights, cluttering patios and standing atop immobilized cars.
“Will you shut the goddamn window if I look,” George mumbled, coming up behind his roommate. He backed away and George stuck his head outside.
Nathan waited, watching for an astonished look to cross his friend’s face--something that would register this as, if nothing else, an abnormal occurrence, but it never came. After a minute, George dropped the sash and strolled back to the couch, falling back onto the soft cushions and resting his feet on the glass table in front of him. Lighting a cigarette, George exhaled slowly and said, “Freaks, dykes and fairies--that’s what you woke me up for?”
Nathan didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure of his own thoughts so he said nothing, choosing instead to watch George as he flipped the television on and restarted his game, staring blindly at the flickering lights. He could almost hear the crowd amidst the sounds of screeching tires and gunshots booming from the surround sound system.
“I’m gonna go get some coffee,” said Nathan, heading back to his bedroom for a pair of jeans.
“What? Now,” asked George, surprised enough to pause his game. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” he shouted from the living room.
“No. I’m just going to get some coffee and check things out. You want anything?” Nathan slipped on a pair of dirty jeans from the floor and walked back towards the living room.
“The usual. Just don’t get involved, Hale,” said George.
“I’m not.”
“Good. Don’t,” said George, eying his friend through a blue cloud of smoke. “I mean—what the hell do they think they are going to accomplish?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they just want to do something. You know—change the world or something like that.”
“Where is the sanity in that?” he said, snuffing his cigarette in an old Burger King wrapper. “It’s not like anything they do is going to change anything. This is the way things are, and the way things will always be. Except downhill—there’s always that. And come on, who do they think we’re fighting, the man?“ he snorted. “Too much fucking effort and not enough reward.”
“Where my wallet?”
George waved his hand. “On the counter, my man.”
“I’ll be back in a bit,” Nathan said.
“Lock the door on your way out. I don’t want any of those dipshits to come wandering in here when the pigs start ramming their big fat pork sausages up their protesting do-gooder asses.”
Nathan paused, hand on the door. “Don’t feel like you need to do anything.”
“Trust me, I won’t,” George snorted. “Did you see that sign? Tax the rich. Feed the poor. Till there are no rich no more. Yeah, OK. I say lay off the burritos and get a job fat fuck and…” The words trailed off, replaced by the blaring sirens erupting from the restarted game as Nathan clicked the door behind him.
Downstairs, the crowd was even more chaotic than it had appeared from above. Nathan paused at the glass foyer doorway; hand poised on the latch and contemplated going back.
Up above, there was safety and security, frozen hot pockets and the comfort of knowing what the day would bring. Outside bodies churned and writhed against each other like waves in a rocky sea cascading toward land. It didn’t look violent though, he rationalized. Adamant, but not violent. Nathan pushed the door open.
He kept to the sides at first, away from the chanting throng pushing its way down the street, and inched his way along the building walls. As he made his way down the block, he came across people like him, people he knew who had come from the stores lining the street or the apartments above, standing on the sidelines or peeking behind curtains, watching the crowd before them with perplexed gazes. Their eyes would meet his, these fellow bystanders, and together for the briefest instant, he’d share a nodding agreement and keep walking, tripping over the crowd that sometimes spilled over.
Nathan didn’t see the guy with the megaphone until he knocked him over and nearly took his head off, jumping up and latching onto the streetlight beside him like a monkey in an urban forest. People pushed him aside, not even glancing down at him as they continued moving down the street, hands raised and screaming. Someone stepped on his hand and Nathan groaned, struggling to his feet and trying to pull his weight up by grasping onto the monkey man’s big black boot.
Swinging around with one arm, the monkey man blasted crackling broken rants from the megaphone into Nathan’s upturned face. “Population…breeding!” Unyielding black eyes glared at him over the megaphone’s vibrating red center and continued without pause. “Nation…bleeding…economy!” Nathan pushed away from the streetlight, leaving the monkey man to his diatribe, and rubbed his tingling ears.
Life is funny, he thought to himself, pressing against a niche in a nearby building. The street was complete chaos and yet, the sky above was sunny and brimming with fat white clouds against a pristine blue spring backdrop. Not the tableau he would have imagined, he thought, swatting a buzzing bee from his sweaty forehead as a pretty young redhead smiled in his direction and passed by, waving a sign above her emblazoned with something about money and monopoly.
He sniffed, pulling the air into his lungs and smelled pungent coffee. Nathan turned around, saw the big emerald letters above the doorway and realized that he was already at the end of the block.
Someone pushed him and Nathan’s head smashed into the glass, bouncing off the sharp edge of the frame. Blood poured across his face as he stumbled into the entryway, touching his wet eyebrow. He slumped to the ground and stared at his bright red fingertips, listening to the shouts from the street in a daze. World pollution…institution…electrocution—it all blurred in his head.
“Are you OK?” someone asked beside him, reaching out to touch his head.
Nathan turned to the voice. “I think so,” he said.
The homeless man examined his head, gently touching the laceration streaming blood across Nathan’s eyes and pursed his wrinkled lips. “I might have something for it,” he said, digging into a tattered gray satchel slung across his slumped shoulders. Nathan watched as the man took out and discarded several scraps, before pulling the dull, torn orange beanie off his head and offering it to bleeding young man.
Nathan protested, pushing the man’s cracked and brown hand away. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can,” the man said, stuffing the hat into his hand.
“Can I give you something for it,” said Nathan, reaching for the wallet in his back pocket. The man grasped his arm, and held it for several long moments, staring at him in earnestness. Finally, Nathan nodded, understanding and put his wallet back into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said quietly, pulling the cap over his blonde hair and forehead.
The man slumped back into position, and the two men sat together watching as fists began to swing in the crowd. A bottle careened against a wall, exploding into a million shards. Sirens could be heard wailing in the distance, coming closer.
“Black and white, rich or poor, it’s just them and us,” the man whispered.
“Yeah, stop the war!” Nathan shouted, surprised. The old man turned sharply, and eyed Nathan, who grimaced in embarrassment.
“I bet this isn’t what you came outside for,” the old man said. “Should have stayed inside.”
“Maybe,” said Nathan. “But I needed coffee.”
The man snorted. “Coffee?”
“Yep. I needed to wake up.”
“Well then,” said the man, chuckling. “It’s a fine time for coffee.”
Review item
Add to faves
Ratings & Rankings
