Instead of immediately falling asleep, she looked out the window at the broken-down RV that Darren had turned into his garrison. Whatever light source he was using cast just enough glow for her to see the chaos of clutter among which he lived his life: piles upon piles of items he had found and brought back here. For Darren, these things had become a safety signal, a way to buffer himself against the soreness of his own vulnerability. It was a life’s worth of people who were so inconsistent, unreliable and impermanent that they could only be counted on to use and take things from him that had made him this way. It was safer for him now to attach to things rather than people. It was the only way to predict and control his life. It was the only way to feel good.
Darren could look at anything and imagine a potential time when he might need it. The piles were the closest he could get to closeness. They felt cozy to him. The physical distance between objects, which is created when people organize things, felt cold and isolated to him. He didn’t want that separation. That organized separation between objects reopened the wound of emptiness and isolation. Besides that, Darren hated space. For Darren, space meant exposure, where attack could come from anywhere at any moment. Having clutter around him offered him enclosure and padding from potential threat.
When Darren had returned from war, he began to identify with trash. There was a day before he ended up out on the streets where he was about to throw away a milk carton and suddenly he saw himself in that milk carton. It was suddenly something that he had used and was about to throw away the same way that the army had used him up and thrown him away. He couldn’t stand it. So he washed it out and filled it with soil to use it as a pot for a dandelion he dug up from the lawn outside the house. Seeing the value in anything and everything was the best way he could find to resolve the wound of being treated as if he no longer had any value and of being used and discarded himself.
Though the seemingly careless and unsanitary way that he kept his possessions suggested a lack of caring, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Darren was terrified of losing his things or having someone take them away. The very idea of it threatened to reopen the scab covering his wounds. He could not face the idea of needing something and not having it, or even worse, not being able to get it. He could not face that emptiness of the emotional neglect that he had filled up with things. He could not face the idea of himself being discarded. He could not face the panic of exposure. To lose his things was to lose the only relationships in his life that he felt like he really did have.
Aria felt sorry for Darren. Her own wounds allowed her to clearly see his. Like her, he was just doing the best he could with what the world had refused to give him. Like them all, he drained the soul from the cigarette between his lips, as if begging for mercy from a God that had cursed him. The indifference with which people passed by his noiseless cry was a sin in and of itself. He had built his life on the shoal of their insults and spare pocket change. Aria knew that this was probably how he would live out what was left of his life and that this was most likely the way he would die. And despite the bramble of his character, it nearly broke her heart. She distracted herself from the strain of watching him anymore by lying down and thinking about the man from the store. He had told her his name on the first day they had met and she tried to remember it, but couldn’t.
Aria imagined what it would be like if she had met the man under different circumstances – if they had been classmates together, or had met at a party somewhere. Almost any other circumstance seemed to guarantee her more dignity in their meeting. Aria fantasized about the certainty of love exchanged in a moment, finding each other face to face in some revolving door. She imagined herself to be more glamorous than she was now, a woman of class and fortunate circumstance. That certainty felt more beautiful to Aria than the uncertainty of the sudden passion that she felt for him and the inevitable lack of passion she was convinced that he would feel in return if he knew anything about her.
CHAPTER 20
The three of them sat beneath a noisy underpass. It was the best place they could find to avoid the rain, which by noon was so heavy that it looked to drown everything in sight. Aria had found a giant blue rain slicker at a pre-Christmas clothing donation drive at one of the homeless shelters on the outskirts of the city nearly a month ago. She was gladder of it now than ever.
Aria, Wolf and Taylor had visited a food pantry on their way from the public library back to the car lot. Wolf slid the hooked end of the can-opener blade on his Swiss Army knife across the lid of a jar of baked beans, breaking the metal tediously as he went. His long hair, not tamed into a ponytail like usual, blew in the wind as if it were caught in a water current. Aria stared at the veins that were woven like tree roots just under the surface of his hands. When he managed to open the can enough, he
