Edmund Sandoval
From where he lay, he was nearly unseen. His scant body covered with a blanket of leaves, his only bedding beyond the clothes he wore, his jacket folded to a pillow.. The morning was silent, the insects dormant in sleep, the city. He coughed but did not rise. Though his body ached from the ground, he’d come to prefer it over the thin cots and stagnant air and hopeless men of the itinerant house he’d once frequented. Lately, he’d been using the arboretum. If not as home, as shelter. As it was removed from the city but not far enough away to be remote. Wind carried the smell of the city, the lake it butted against. The air thick with gasoline fumes, a sodium bracken. The park was unmanned, and by nightfall, he was alone to do as he wished. Mainly to sleep, to plan the next day’s action, to eat if he could. To eat, a thing he’d done rarely of late. His last meal composed of wild mushrooms bolted cold, like eating jellied mucus. Splayed on the ground, awake but tired, his gut rumbled and pained him, as though clamped with a number of vises, then twisted. It angered him. Why ought man not to eat, was it not his right. He massaged the thin board that was his belly. The hair that ran across his torso was thin and sere as the leaves he lay on.
***
The arboretum was all sprawling green acreage, a space that rolled and pitched. Grounds that he’d learned to navigate, that he’d come to know as one knows a limb or digit. In his learning, he’d noted the names of plants and trees and other vegetation. Their arboreal nature, the peculiar curl of certain leaves, the Latin genus of each one printed on metal signage posted close to the ground. In his weathered clothes and unkempt features of hair and soiled skin, he looked spectral, some relic simply wandering, as monks did. In a muddy swale where mosquitoes fogged the air, he kept his belongings. A cracked cooler on wheels that held some little clothing, those he’d need for winter. An ancient parka shiny with grease, the fabric the semblance of oilcloth. Long underwear was colored yellow by sweat, piss, other. He owned a dullish knife blade absent a handle, the bare haft wrapped and tied with cloth. There was a guidebook on urban foraging dog eared and pored over with warnings of toxicity and ill-making plants and fungi underlined by pencil line or dirt smudge. Lately he’d managed little beyond sorghum root and bulbs of wild onion dug from the soil with bare hands. He worried he would soon move on to tulip bulbs, to the soft pulp that resided in cattail. His little muscle and fat flensed away like the days passing; the composition of his days was a sluggish idle. Often he composed fantasies. Whom he would lash out at, those he’d identified as responsible for his condition. Faceless, mute, random, these bodies like ghosts, who were not bodies, not people at all. How he would take and harm them, how he’d be justified, how they’d apologize for his hurt, and how he would pardon them, saying, you didn’t know. Just the same, he considered climbing an oak tree and jumping. He thought of the whirl and contortion his body would go through as it hit branches and rasped through leaves, as it finally hit the ground and ceased. He felt his entirety was a fester that would soon burst.
***
On the ground he was still. As though conserving energy, or consuming one that existed only in the dawn. Ease, he thought, and rose slowly. Leaves scattered and clung to his frame, his hair. Standing, he inhaled deeply of the wet, dew-laden air, implored it for an energy he could not muster. He felt of his face, the unsmooth skin and cover of whisker like hemp twine come apart. Patchy and knotted. Here and there a burr, karats of dirt, the dried ooze of a picked scab. He scratched at his scalp and came away with a white mastic of dead skin that gathered under his fingernails. It had a vegetal aroma like the floor of a forest undisturbed for centuries that he wiped on his pant leg. Soiled khaki sizes too large at the waist and in the leg. In a thicket of fescue and shrub he heeled a small hole in the ground, then squatted. A rabbit contributed more. With fistfuls of grass and soft duff, he cleaned himself, then pulled up his rank drawers, cinched a woven belt around his waist, and kicked grass and dirt over his leaving. At the cooler he produced a limp bag of pink soap collected from a gas station bathroom dispenser, a stained rag of rough cloth, a shallow bowl. After a quick glance round, he stripped down. In his modesty, he crouched to hide his privates. Night-cooled water from a canteen went into the bowl. He worked up a filmy lather and began scrubbing. Kept at it until he was clean and pink from the effort. Done, he doused himself with the sudsy water. Goose pimples lined his ski. Naked and shivering, he waded through the cooler, in search of clothes that were not dirt and filth stained, and he settled upon a gray sweatshirt that he turned inside out, a pair of jeans with a warren of faded patchwork. He had no mirror to view himself. but he was transformed; he looked a college student who’d not yet learned to manipulate a washer and dryer. Finished, he made his way to the unpaved road that led to and from the arboretum. He walked fast and in his walking his pants and shoes became shellacked with the dew that clung to grass and low branches.
***
The air was brisk, the morning still in its infancy, weak and nebulous. He walked alongside the road in the scree and gravel and weeds that banked it. The road terminated in a neighborhood erected the previous mid-century. Track houses and tri-level ranches. Stop signs and street signs, streets with names like Ash, Taylor, Hawthorne. Cars and vans and trucks sat dormant in driveways. Here and there a kitchen light flickered on and doors were cracked open to receive a newspaper, to feel of the weather. He sought transport and in short time, found it. In a yard was a small bicycle with stout wheels, one used for doing tricks off ramps and curbs. The frame was neon green. It was cast aside like discarded refuse – the carelessness of children. He went to it cautiously, as though he needed to sneak up on it, as though it would suddenly up and scamper away. The bike was wet, the metal of its frame cold. He wiped down the saddle and swung a leg over. His legs were long, the bike like a toy underneath him. He sat and pushed forward until the bike began to roll. The wheels hushed through the thick grass of the yard.
***
Though he was not certain, he did not think he had harmed her. He would not be going back to check. He could only hope. His mouth hung open and a free hand kept hold of his pant waist, the other a canvas bag. How quickly fortunes change, the capriciousness of it, like wind over a field, east, west, up, down. She was there, just turning into a side street, an alleyway lined with roll-off dumpsters, with the buckled, crumpled mouths of garage doors. Her shoes made a light clatter off the pavement. And then he was behind her, then upon her, then yelling, then grabbing all, abusing, cursing, a sudden violence. She had clutched herself in an attempt to shrink into nothing. He’d knelt down to her and in her eyes was a fear whose magnitude he could not measure. I’m sorry, he’d said, and wanted to cry, to join her in tears. He’d reached out to her. His dirty hand, nails black with dirt, fingers newly swollen and red, the cuff of his sweater stained with grease, the wet from his nose. The hand seemed an impure thing, a sin made real, and he withdrew it and rested it on the bag. She did not move. Her hands were scraped and grit stung in the wounds. She did not speak. She did not know what would happen and thought of shouting out but his eyes were wild and unsure. She continued to cry. An oily sweat broke out on her forehead. He looked at her and bit his lip, bashful as a teenager though he was a man, and strong despite his desperation, because of it. He rose, mumbled some rude apology, turned and made his exit. He told himself he would beg forgiveness but to whom he would beg he did not know. In his haste of leaving, several items fell from the bag. A head of leaf lettuce, a tin of candies, a crumpled receipt. His shoes were in tatters, grass and dirt stained, wrapped with layers of fraying duct tape to keep the shape, and they padded quiet over sidewalk and road. He was careful not to run.
***
He walked quickly, as though late for an appointment, the heavy cloth grocery bag bumping against his thigh. Through the busy street he walked. Everyone on their way to work, to school, the café, the dentist. Excuse me, pardon me, ah, I’m sorry, twisting and contorting, stumbling once, and he brought the bag up to his chest, clutched like a small child protected from falling debris. He was worried. His face a broken geometry that careened into a frown, a grimace. The armpits were wet, the small of his back. A tannic sweat seeped through his clothing in a darkening stain. Yet, if anyone noticed him, he simply looked like a man in a rush, and so he was one of many. His mouth was dry, his throat, and he swallowed, then spit thick foam in the curb. He stopped, unsure of where he was, for he had taken random turns, was carried by a surge of adrenaline, of power rarely known. He peeled off into alleys and stray roads that ended abruptly in cul-de-sacs rimed with four-room homes of peeling asbestos shingles and blistered tar roofs, whose yards were the size of area rugs, where the abandoned toys of children rested pell-mell in the road,. He spun round. In search of landmarks, street corners he might recognize. All was a swirl. The many storefronts and walkups. Empty lots and parks overgrown. Canvassed with trash that clung to sagging chain link fences, the midnight camping grounds of the homeless. He wished only to be home, knowing well that he had done wrong. He began again, his arms clutching the satchel, and washed haphazard into the thrum of people, their heads and shoulders bobbing quickly, women and men, the occasional child, an infant lashed to a mother’s chest, a father’s, a leashed dog straining to sniff and piss. Overhead, the wobbly bulb of the sun was reflected countless times in the curve of high-rise windows, its arced rays unable to reach out in full, hemmed in by sill and lintel, unnoticed above the gray walkways painted in shadow. An intersection. The cars nosing down the avenue, the smell of exhaust, the sound of car radios filtering through closed windows, engines idling, a cyclist gliding down the smooth tarmac of road, careless and free, the briefest of smiles on her face. He stopped, and when the traffic thinned, he trotted across, kept the trot as he met the adjoining sidewalk.
***
Aimless, his wandering. The recurring theme of his life. That he would never escape. The single aspect of a pointless existence. What had he accomplished? The food in the bag would sustain him for two days more, three. Would his body retain any of it? Could he eat it without tasting his own wretchedness, the abhorrence that churned now through his body? A turn and then another, then down a street, an alleyway to hunker down in, only to leave abruptly because of a passing shadow, a rustle of paper. He felt persecuted, scared, timid and small. He felt disgust. For himself, the life that had prodded him thus. It was a thing that welled inside of him, the pit of his stomach, like a ball of thorny vine that tore and snagged on his delicate insides. Hours had passed. But hadn’t it been but a moment’s time? For him, all had changed; he had crossed the river to foreign shores and the language was one he could not recognize. He could not go back, though he longed to, and tried to look to the other side, but it had disappeared. He walked.
***
I am changed, he said. I am changed? Was it a question, a statement. Maybe I’m the same. I failed but then I didn’t. I didn’t like doing what I done. It was bad. I should kill myself. Hand myself over. Say, look, I done it. Robbed her and roughed her up bad. In the road he stopped. Half-lit, a lamppost a ways down the road. Tell them that I tried stealing from innocent folks. Scuffed their doors, violated their thresholds. He desired punishment and atonement both. He stood there and thought of what to do. There were no high structures. He had no implement of destruction. Neither blade, neither gun. Just his hands. His hands. He put the bag down. He looked at them in the dim light. They were gray, as though constructed from stone, cement. They were blemished. He turned his hands. The palms faced upward. A plaintive gesture. As though about to receive bread, a blanket, a child. The palms were deeply lined, ridged with callus. He closed his hands. His nails glinted in the dark. It was easy, and he would not miss.
***
The air was crisp, and it soothed the new bruises that canvassed his face. A light mist dragged through the air. His walk was slow. A limp had appeared. All of him sagged, the physical, the spirit. He was wasted by his own hands. What began as a tentative slap, a single stinging rebuke to his crime, morphed into an assault that split his lip, which closed an eye, which set free a tooth already loose and rotted. As always, no one stopped to intervene, to care, not a one, though some cars did slow, only to accelerate fast upon seeing the insanity of his efforts. Now, as he limped along, a noxious aroma rose from his body and mixed with the rain—the many exertions of the day, the strain of it, lifted off him like smoke from a fire—and was lit by the headlights of cars that splashed down the lane, the side of which he walked. He could not smell it, but if he did, he would wonder if it was the dissipation of his self, a final evisceration, that he was dissolving into something less than rain. It was some time prior to his realizing that the culmination of his endeavors was tipped over and soaking in the rain. The bag of groceries had spilled its contents, and food and drink lay scattered as orphans on the walk. A pained grin wisped from his grizzled face, and he continued his slow return to home.
***
The forest of the arboretum at night, its darkness, was a primordial thing. Seemingly complete but not. Transformed by the wet shellac of water that cleaved to all surfaces, each blade of grass, the arthritic channels of tree trunks. He was tired, the vaporous fumes that had propelled him burned away. He was nearly gasping, ripping breaths into his lungs as though oxygen was some spritely thing that playfully evaded capture. He was disoriented and thought the forest itself changed, as though it had gone through some wayward metamorphosis, and was now deeper, more full, an organism without knowledge of its limits or depth. In the early a.m. hours he found his place. Finally a definitive plan. On his knees, the saturated ground, the rain increased, the flutter sound of the droplets on innumerable surfaces. He wiped water from his eyes and opened the cooler; it like a safe that housed his pathetic fortune. There was no light to speak of. Everything muted by the cloud drape, the rain. He was reduced to groping through his belongings. He unraveled clothing, cast aside booklets of matches, a can of soda he’d been saving, this and that. The cooler emptied out. His vision was off. An eye was closing, filling with bruise and swell. He moved to the ground and felt of the grass, things he’d tossed aside in his haste. He slowed. Was methodical, almost contemplative in his search.
***
He didn’t know prayer or psalm or gentle words. He was seated cross-legged under an elm. Water trickled from above, coursed down over him, pooled in his lap, the hollows of his collar bones. He was beyond cold. The facsimile of warmth swam through him. He was not lucid; he was lucid. In his hand his small blade. Unsharp, he considered how to finish. Did he have the force. It was barely good enough to cut bread. No matter. He would succeed. Though his lips were wet, he licked them, and said, sorry lady, it was a accident. My mistake. My name is Kyle if you want to make some report on me. I’d write it down but my paper stuff is wet. And with that, he plunged down.
***
There was not blood. Only a vague pain, distant. Of course he had failed. It was his destiny. Maybe he did not want to die. Already he was seeking justifications. A TV show he’d seen at the itinerant home. A man saying, second I jumped, I knew it was the most dumbest- assed thing I’ve ever done. I’m lucky. Life is good. He remembered how the man on the TV had rubbed his forearms the whole time he spoke. In turn, he did the same, probed gingerly the hurt he’d newly made. Life is good, he wondered. It was a ponderous thing. The thinnest of adages. He’d flung the knife from him. It was far from him. Near his forage book. The book was open. A section on herbs: Wild sorrel has a delightful tang reminiscent of the citrus fruits. Leaf, stem, and flower are edible. He brought his knees up. Leaned into the tree. The tree was statue still and unjudging. Its silence reassured him, was a quiet balm. He did nothing. Simply sat. The cold returned. His resolve was spent. He put his head down on his knees. He did not sleep, though he soon would.
#
Edmund Sandoval resides in Madison, Wisconsin. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Waccamaw, Nat.Brut, Necessary Fiction, Writing Tomorrow, Hobart, the minnesota review, and The Common, among others.