“I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. I had to swerve out of the way.”
“Of course she was dead. Who lays in the middle of an off-ramp?” the woman with red hair said.
“Has anyone seen a man with an eye patch?” Michael asked.
They ignored him. All of his concerns of being noticed in the city faded. He had always wanted to blend in, and the time he needed to stand out to get somebody’s attention and assistance, he was no match for a dead mermaid. He looked around, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t simply dreaming. With his one functioning hand, he touched his face and stroked his ears, and for a while he waited in vain to wake up.
Soon, several ambulances arrived. The men inside were volunteer paramedics who set up zebra-striped barriers around the body and covered it with a black tarp. Littered around everyone were their blue entry forms, flopping on the pavement like gasping fish. Then a fire truck arrived and passengers began arguing over who would get a ride to the hospital.
The sky was turning past evening—a brilliant expanse of pinks and blues, like nothing he had ever seen inland. In a way, the accident had served a purpose: he was now free from his past by losing all of his belongings. As the paramedics struggled to write with dull pencils what passengers were saying, he longed for his own ledger book. They never glanced over at him, and so he decided they didn’t need him—there was no one here to ask for his entry form—and he walked away.
The exit off-ramp led to a road that connected to a main street that stretched as far across the peninsula as he could see. Buses and taxis sped beside cars and bicyclists. The street was lined with tall buildings, many starting to turn on their lights as the sky darkened. Michael stuffed his detached arm in his jacket sleeve and used his good hand to hold it in place by clasping the elbow. At a stoplight, he stood beside a flyer that said:
SAVE THE CITY: SAY NO TO ANNEXATION!
He joined a loose crowd of restless pedestrians and strolled as if he had always lived here. He had told no one at home he was leaving. At this time, his brothers, Leo and Ralph, had probably returned to the house after all of their deliveries of their coffee beans in town, and their father was leaving the high school where he taught. They probably thought he was still in his room. His younger brothers had turned their backyard into a coffee farm and sold their coffee to local coffee shops and grocery stores. Michael was their bookkeeper, and the day before, after counting the bags they had taken away, he updated their accounting books, went into his bedroom, and then packed his cardboard valise with a few belongings, including two socks stuffed with money and some clothing. He wore his one suit and walked their long driveway, past the apiaries and sycamore trees, to the town’s single bus stop.
The big secret was this: his brothers knew nothing about bookkeeping, and for the past several months, Michael had used an account he had created, called Offsets, where he had placed small amounts for himself. Life inland had become intolerable. Ever since the accident, his life had become stagnant, never leaving the house, watching the same trees lose their leaves and then burst into green again, never knowing any other smells than those carried by the wind; before he knew it, ten years had passed. His younger brothers grew bigger, hairier, and fatter, and although Michael technically was an adult, he was treated like a cloistered child because he was the same size he had been at fifteen. He listened like a child by placing a glass on the wall to hear the sounds from their rooms, and he hid whenever his brothers’ girlfriends stayed overnight and ate breakfast in the living room. His family was constantly worrying he would be swept away by the strong inland winds. They never let him go outside unless he had a heavy metallic belt with him, like a paperweight, to hold him in place. The few outsiders who saw him were always so startled and overly sympathetic, as if he was in constant pain. They never understood. No one understood. But after ten years as a kind of pet, he was on his own, and there was no way to stop him. They would never know he had come to the city. Did the wind take him away? they’d ask, searching the fields and inspecting the scarecrows for evidence of Michael’s body. But they would find nothing. He didn’t even leave a note. He didn’t want to waste the paper.
He could be anyone now. The one thing that acknowledged him was a crow that yelled at him from a tree. He wandered the streets of the city and thought about the new life he would start. He imagined living in an apartment that overlooked the ocean, painting the images on large canvases, much larger than any work by his father. And in the corner would be paintings of his memories back home, with a dark streak beside the collapsing barn to represent his father’s shadow. From this apartment, he would study the ships entering the harbor and how the pedestrians moved like ants on the sidewalk.
Here he was, one of the ants, someone unknown in the buildings above studying him. He looked up, searching for that window with a light, the hope that he could one day be up there.
Instead, he was hit in the eye.
It began to rain.
3
THE OTHER PEDESTRIANS HAD BEEN PREPARED. THEY POPPED open their parasols, which had been conveniently stowed inside their bags, strapped to their belt buckles, or in their hands. Everyone had the same style: a short, wooden handle with black fabric for the canopy. A few men loosely tented newspapers over their heads and dashed for cover. A stocky woman lowered the hood of her stroller and tightened the blankets around a baby. The only parts of the baby that could be seen were its hands, in motion like little pincers. Small nomadic groups of hooded people were headed in all directions—he had no sense which way led to the best place for shelter. Some hid indoors; some huddled beside a bus stop with a small overhang only large enough to cover a bench that could seat three. He stepped into the crosswalk and tried to duck under other people’s umbrellas. Underneath them, the stiff faces of the umbrella owners glared at him, recoiled, and hurried on.
It was summer time. Weren’t the rains over after spring? But then he realized he was assuming the rest of the world was like the inland. The inland: known for hot, dry summers and wet winters and springs. The city had its own climate, and he couldn’t believe that he had not thought of this before.
Every minute the rain seemed to transform. It started as fat sporadic drops of water, splashing dark dots on the sidewalk and pavement. Then a wind blew in from the sea and shifted the drops to assault people and buildings horizontally. And then the drops turned into drizzle, finally settling on a steady shower. The rain felt warmer than the surrounding air, the clash of temperatures making the streets muggy. Wind picked up and set flight to loose leaves of newspaper across the street. Wheels of cars mirrored the wind, spraying beads of liquid from their tires, like moving sprinkler heads. Taxis honked and bus brakes squeaked. In the distance he saw a small traffic jam at an intersection. A man, his mustache dripping with rain, was yelling at a driver. He stood waving his deflated umbrella and spoke in a language that Michael did not recognize.
The gray cloud cover muted the colors of everything—except the blue trash cans on street corners, which seemed like columns of topaz; gray glass and gray walls; gray pavement, tinged with the swirling rainbow and starbursts of oil slicks; and the rolling water that stretched down the gutters like gray tentacles.
Michael grabbed a newspaper from the bus stop and tented it over his head. A new learned behavior. He was briefly excited for this innovation he had acquired. His jacket and shirt were damp. His detached arm snug in its sleeve. Water was something he had learned to avoid over the years. Whenever it rained inland, there always was a clear sign. The clouds would collect and darken in one spot of the sky, or they could be seen migrating from a distance, rolling forward like sheep. Here, it was as if the sky had suddenly given in to the weight of the water. Like nature’s accounting: the credit of water in the air had transferred to the debit column of raindrops.
Up ahead, he could just make out through low-lying
