I took a stool next to a guy in his sixties with droopy red eyes and thinning white hair. There was a TV mounted among the bottles behind the bar, tuned to MSNBC. They were showing refugees pouring into California from Arizona and New Mexico.
“I just came from there,” the guy said, to no one in particular.
“From California?” I asked.
“Arizona,” he said.
“I’ve heard things aren’t good in Arizona.”
“It’s bad in Arizona,” he said.
A big-eared guy in a business suit turned around. “It’s bad everywhere, man,” he said.
The old guy fixed him with a shaky stare, his face a little blue from the flickering TV screen. “Mister, you got no idea what bad is. You want bad? There’s no water there. None. Everyone with a car left months ago. They drove right over the bodies lying in the—”
“Okay! All right! Shut the fuck up, will you?” The guy turned away. “Christ in heaven.”
“It’s bad in Arizona,” the guy said, shaking his head. We sat quietly for a while, watching the soundless TV, listening to the music.
Most Americans hadn’t known what suffering was until the depression of ’13. In school we used to hear about the so-called “Great Depression,” as if having a lot of unemployed people who were reasonably well-fed was this terrible holocaust. We were wimps. We’re not any more—we’ve learned how to eat bitterness, as the Chinese say.
“I’ve heard things are even worse in China,” I said.
“China?” the guy said. “Let ’em rot in hell. My nephew died over there. Let ’em rot.” He took a drink, shook his head. “This isn’t how things are supposed to be. I had mutual funds for retirement. I had my house and my card games, money for whores.”
I scanned the crowd, looking for my SCAD woman, but instead my attention was drawn toward a black woman on the ice pond dance floor, her hands over her head, her hips gyrating in tight circles.
Sophia.
She was dancing with two other women, gyrating her hips frenetically—whining, they called it on the islands. She looked incredible.
I went back to ground level, heart in my throat, and threaded through the crowd. As I approached, the music changed suddenly, from contemporary to Island Thump, as if I’d walked through an invisible membrane that held in sound. Another New Thing. I stopped a dozen feet from the dance floor and watched.
When she recognized me she stopped dancing, mouthed a silent “Oh my God.” She didn’t seem to know what to do. Finally, she came over.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. “What are the odds?”
“I don’t know, I’m not good at math,” she said, breathless from dancing, her nostrils flaring like a colt’s. “I’m nervous. My legs are shaking.”
“Mine too.”
“How’re you?”
“Much better. Thank you for getting me the job. It changed our lives. Jeannie found a little work too, at a salvage center, stripping parts. Colin gets work on the docks sometimes.”
“That’s wonderful!” Sophia smiled, but there was distress in her eyes. I’d imagined this moment a hundred times. Now I couldn’t think of anything of substance to say.
“I’m sorry things worked out the way they did,” I said.
She shrugged. “Life is. What are you gonna do?”
“I guess.”
A tall, slim black man in a white silk shirt approached us holding two drinks in tall flute glasses. “Do you want another?” he said to Sophia.
“Oh, thanks,” she said, taking it. “Um, Jasper, this is Jean Paul.” Her husband was five inches taller than me, and better looking.
I nodded. He stared back with a smirk. “My mipwi,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, looking to Sophia.
“It means,” she considered for a moment, “his competition.”
How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? Jean Paul smirked down at me. “So, did you follow my wife here?” He didn’t open his mouth wide enough when he talked. It made him seem shifty. You couldn’t trust someone who rarely lets you see his front teeth.
“I’m meeting someone,” I said. “I have a date.” I scanned the bar, praying for a sign of the SCAD woman so I could escape from this nightmare with some dignity. Sophia was managing a smile, but looked uncomfortable as hell. I stared hard at a woman tucked in a nearby booth, with three other women. Her hair was up, but I thought it looked like her. I’d only seen her once for a minute or so. She turned a little and I got a better look: yes, that was her.
“There she is,” I said. I told Sophia it was good to see her, nodded tightly to her husband, and headed for the table, feeling their eyes on me. The music shifted again, to an old Carbon Leaf song. My dad used to love Carbon Leaf.
“Hello,” I said, standing over the table. All four women looked at me.
“Oh, hi,” she said. She was dressed in a long, white peasant dress with ruffles on the sleeves. She looked good.
“Thought I’d check out your hangout,” I said.
“Right. How are you?” she said, not making any attempt to stand.
“Good, great. How are you?”
“Fine. How’d you get out here?”
I shrugged. “Bike.”
“Great. Well, it was good seeing you again.” She turned back toward her friends.
I hovered for a second, then I turned. Sophia’s husband was watching. He said something in Sophia’s ear; she glanced at me, said something back to Jean Paul, frowning, and turned to join her friends at a bar tucked into a snowbank.
I glanced back toward the table where my “date” was sitting, in the feeble hope that I’d misinterpreted her brush-off and she would suddenly be interested in me the way she’d been at the convenience store. She kept her gaze pointed straight across the table, toward her friends. Why had she struck up that conversation with me? What was the wink about, if I wasn’t worth a lousy five-minute conversation? Was she embarrassed to admit she knew me in front of her friends?
I walked back over to her table. Finally, she looked up at me. I cast about for a clever put-down, but my mind had gone blank.
“I can’t help wondering why you invited me here,” I finally said.
“I didn’t invite you. I don’t even know you.” She gave me the lip curl, the one that said I was a pathetic pest.
I puffed out a sarcastic breath. “Yeah.”
The woman across the table from her stood and gestured past me. “Mickey!”
A second later a guy dressed in a black t-shirt was at my elbow.
“He’s harassing us,” the girl said, pointing at me.
“I am not,” I protested.
Without a word the guy grabbed me by the neck and the elbow and yanked me away from the table. I tried to yank free, shouted at him to let go as he propelled me through the bar, toward the red exit sign in the corner. Everyone in the bar was staring. I spotted Jean Paul, laughing. Sophia stood next to him, her head down. The bouncer shoved me through the door, into the sticky-hot air of the street. Two girls hanging out on the sidewalk laughed as I lurched forward before regaining my balance. The door slammed closed behind me.
I unchained my bike from the rack and pushed off into the street, watched the road wind under my front wheel, my face still red. I swerved to avoid the porcelain remnants of a shattered toilet, ran over a fast food paper cup.
