Chapter 8
In the middle of the night, Rai woke from her uneven, itchy sleep among the leaves. A huge raindrop had struck her on the face, and now many others followed. She wished again for the tarp, and tried to huddle deeper under the leaves, but soon they too were soaked. Though the August air was warm, she began to shiver; finally, knowing that sleep would not return and she was not going to warm up, she stood and began to pace. Though soon she felt the blood return to her limbs, the movement did nothing to dry her. She wondered what time it was and how long it would be until The Place opened.
She knew she needed to get dry. Her resistance to illness was always low: she ate poorly, she never had a bed, and whether at The Place or on the street, she was always around people with nasty germs. At least she didn’t have to worry about the sexually transmitted diseases Z and everybody else were always so freaked out about; she felt good about that.
The rain was not Rai’s only problem. She knew many bridges that she could hang out under, but lots of other people knew them, too. Psychotics, homeless old men, winos, thieves… and perhaps worst of all, cops. If getting dry meant that she would get raped or thrown in jail, she would prefer being wet and sick; the nurse at The Place could just give her antibiotics like he always did.
Fortunately, she found no one under the arch just east of the softball fields, so Rai curled herself up in a shadowy corner. Her eyes flashed back and forth from one end of the tunnel to the other, afraid to see a silhouette against the bluer black of the outside. The arch — more of a short tunnel under the park ring road — smelled of mold and urine, and the air was so damp that her clothes could not dry; even her hair had grown long enough to hold moisture. She felt herself begin to shiver, so she stood again and paced back and forth, even jumping up and down in the hope of warming herself. Once the shivers were gone, she sat again.
Rai felt misery in the depths of her bones, and what was worse, she knew that it was a boring sort of misery, the kind that would add nothing to the dramatic, epic story she wanted from her life. Time passed slowly, without marks or meaning. Finally, feeling cold again, Rai stood to pace once more. How long had she been here? How much longer until day, and how much longer until The Place opened? She so desperately needed a shower. And to wash her skirt; she didn’t even want to think of the piss and grime she’d been sitting in.
Suddenly, she heard a voice at one end of the tunnel. Then another responding. Outer Borough accents — Brooklyn, she thought.
“– the worst assignments.”
“How come they can’t transfer me to the fourth precinct? That’s all I fuckin’ asked.”
Cops. Rai didn’t wait to hear any more of the conversation. If they found her, smelling like this, under a bridge at three o’clock in the morning, it didn’t matter how good a lie she told. They would know she was homeless and they would lock her up. Or they would send her to a shelter — either Covenant House (nothing more than a Christian, inquisitorial prison, in Rai’s estimation) or a city women’s shelter (where she was sure to be assaulted, raped, and pricked with dirty heroin needles). Rai sprinted out the end away from the cops.
They seemed to hear her steps, because as Rai waited outside, she heard them slide carefully into the tunnel, whispering to each other. She just wanted to get away, so she ran up onto the ring road, then south toward Midtown. She could see a glint of light in the east; day was coming. It wouldn’t be too long until The Place would open. Maybe she could find someplace out of the rain down there. She walked out of the park and down Sixth Avenue, rain dripping down her face, her skirt soaked, her blouse plastered immodestly to her chest. Several hardy joggers ran past her, headed into the park. Somewhere in the lower fifties, Rai saw a cop, so she began to weave back and forth across the sidewalk, pretending to be a college student going home at the end of a long bender. The cop gazed down with a mix of compassion and pity, then ignored her and walked on.
A skyscraper created a roof for part of what street kids calle “the bat cave”, the strange little park with a Japanese fountain on 46th Street, and half a dozen kids had gathered there. All were silent, trying to warm themselves as best they could with wet blankets, cigarettes, and alcohol. Several of them sullenly passed a joint around. Rai sat against the wall as far from the others as she could and hugged her knees to her chest. She felt so cold. She had forgotten the meaning of life.
Time simply passed, marked only by the flick of a lighter at yet another cigarette. Rain poured off the buildings, but where Rai sat stayed relatively dry; even so, her clothes showed no sign of losing their dampness. Gradually, the streets became lighter, and several people walked by on 46th, carrying umbrellas. They looked at the wet, filthy kids with disdain. Rai didn’t even have the energy to flick them off.
Finally, after an eternity of shivering, one of the kids announced, “It’s nine.” Rai saw that he wore an expensive watch; she wondered if it were stolen or fake. Fake, she imagined. If it were stolen, he would have sold it last night and found himself a hotel room and a hot shower. She stood stiffly and shook blood back into her arms and legs, then walked unsteadily through the downpour along 46th Street to The Place. She signed up for a shower. Fifth in line.
In the common room, she collapsed onto one of the lightly padded couches along the wall. She was so tired she could not even think, but at least some warmth had returned to her body. She watched the other kids filter in. She could tell the ones who had dared the subway, because they were drier and more cheerful. Those who slept in the park or on the street looked sopping, exhausted, and bedraggled.
Finally, staff called Rai’s name, and she stumbled down to the basement to take a shower. Though kids generally weren’t allowed to do laundry on weekends, Juan allowed Rai to throw her sopping clothes in the washer. She wrapped a towel around herself and walked into the shower, not even feeling the shame of exposing her body. She stood in the hot water for as long as Juan allowed her, then dried herself off, found a sweatsuit she could wear for a while, and collapsed in one of the soft chairs scattered around the basement. She fell instantly, deeply asleep.
She woke with a start. Juan was shaking her shoulder. “Rai. Rai.” She opened her eyes, and he smiled gently at her. “Your clothes are done, and lunch is ready. I let you sleep for a while, ‘cause you looked beat.”
“Thanks.” She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and walked past the television into the laundry room. Television — that’s right. What a strange dream. The only part she remembered was that she had been appointed director of a musical comedy based on the Weather Channel, and she had tried to teach a baritone the voice of a thunderstorm. She wondered if that were a sign of madness. Or just of idiocy. Then she closed the door and changed back into her comfortable, habitual clothes. As she walked back upstairs, she stuck a head into the shower room to thank Juan for letting her sleep; when staff bent the rules to help her, they needed support.
Though hardly at the top of her form, Rai was surprised how good she felt. Just three hours of sleep, and she almost felt content. When she saw that the cook had made oxtail soup, she even felt good. She gobbled down two bowls — keeping warm the night before had used a lot of energy.
After lunch, she walked down the stairs to the common room. She wanted to sleep again, but there were too many kids around to lay down on a couch. Instead, she sat up straight, closed her eyes, and tried not to think of Z. Or of the cops. Or anything else.
The sound of her name yanked Rai back to the room. One of the staff members, sitting at the table with three kids, beckoned her to a Scrabble board. Though Rai firmly believed that she had preserved her anonymity in The Place, in fact quite a few staff members worried about her: she always seemed so lonely, and her only friend seemed to be Z — about whom staff had serious concerns. Several of them had decided to try to integrate her into the communal life of The Place.
“I’m fine, thanks.” Rai leaned back and closed her eyes again.
“C’mon, I need a challenge!” joked a shaven headed white guy with a little goatee. Rai didn’t remember what his job was — some sort of counseling — but she thought his name was Terry. “I’ve been winning so many games that I need somebody who can kick my ass.” He smiled at his previous opponents to emphasize that he was only joking. Rai liked that fact that staff at The Place were allowed to curse. It made them seem so much more human; the staff at Covenant House weren’t even allowed to say the word “condom.” Plus, he had challenged her, so she decided to get up and play. She sat down next to Terry and collected seven tiles.
Though both of the kids and the other staff member who were playing hardly challenged her — they fell into the “cat” and “ha” school of Scrabble, Rai concluded dismissively — Terry was pretty sharp. Not only did he make good words, he managed to put most of them on bonus spaces. By the time the board was half-full, Terry and Rai had pulled far away from the others.
As Terry began to play several tiles, the sound of heavy feet on the stairs broke through the silence in the common room. An emaciated young man, perhaps half-Asian, half-black, burst into the room at a run, then looked up, as if unsure where he was. “Fucking fuck! I need my works! Fucking cunt, get me my fucking works or everybody’s gonna regret it!” His confusion made his shouts into the sound of a cornered animal, terrified, furious, earshattering. He spotted Terry at the other end of the room, jumped over the table, fell, and landed at the counselor’s feet. Grabbing Terry’s bare legs, he now screamed upward. “You gotta help me. Oh, please, please. You don’t even know how I’m fiendin’!” Tears filled his eyes. For the first time, Rai noticed the discoloration on his forehead. Karposi’s sarcoma, she thought.
Terry didn’t try to pull his leg away, even though he could see the signs of AIDS as well as anyone else. He leaned down and clenched the boy’s hand, then pulled him into a kneeling position. A sleeve fell away to reveal a long series of track marks. “It’s bad?” Terry asked with clear compassion.
“Oh, God, you can’t understand. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.” Tears poured down his face.
“Where are your works, Tay?”
“In the basement, man. My locker.” He winced, then screamed. “They won’t let me go down! What’s up with these fuckers! I need my works! Why do you people hate me so much?” As his voice grew louder, he stood, then threw his arms furiously through the air, spinning his body as if possessed by some wind no one else could feel. Tears, spittle, and snot spewed over the room, landing on the table, the board, the Scrabble players. He turned to Terry again, this time demanding instead of imprecating. “Give me the works! You know what I got. You take me down to the basement or…” He looked at the door.
A very big black man had had entered the common room and was approaching cautiously, with the calmest smile imaginable in those circumstances. “Tay, let’s step–”
“Don’t fuck with me, Dashel!” He stepped back from Terry. “You people know what I got in these veins!” He pulled a paring knife from his pocket. “Gimme my works or I’m gonna open ‘em up, and there’s blood over all o’ you. Don’t fuck with me!”
“Nobody’s fuckin’ with you, Tay,” Dashel said calmly, continuing forward slowly even as all of the kids in the room sprinted for the door. Rai stood just outside of blood splattering range; she wanted to see what was about to happen. “I just went down to the basement and got these out of your locker.” He held out a hand full of syringes. “I’m breaking the rules, but we both know you need this.”
Tay broke down crying again, almost fell to the floor, then tripped toward Dashel, grabbed the needles, and sprinted out the door as the rest of the kids dived to get out of his way. Rai heard the sound of feet on the stairs again, then the front door slamming. Slowly, with a quiet buzz of gossip, a dozen kids filed back into the room.
Rai sat gingerly back in her seat. Terry still sat where he had the entire time. Now he was scrubbing the table with a baby wipe, and three tears flowed down his left cheek. “Fucking world,” he said under his breath, then wiped away the tears. “You OK, Dashel?”
“Yeah. Dope. I’d likta kill whoever came up with that one.” Dashel walked slowly over to the table. A sort of tired despair had replaced his preternatural calm.
“You want me to do the report?”
“Nah. You gotta cover the room. I’ll write it up. Let’s staff it with Susan later, huh? He’s gonna kill himself soon if we don’t do something.”
“Yeah. Prob’ly even if we do do something.” Terry turned back to the board and Dashel walked slowly from the room.
Gradually, the players returned to the game. When she had first come to The Place, Rai had been stunned by the way everyone recovered from a crisis; within fifteen minutes, it was like nothing had ever happened, except for a vague feeling of tension in the air. Finally she learned that crises were so common that everyone had become numb to the worst the world had to offer.
The board was almost full. Rai was down to her last four tiles — an H, and L, and two Is. The scorecard showed her ahead of Terry by only a couple of points; it was his turn. He stared at the board intently, focusing on an O at the right of the bottom row. Finally, as everyone else grew impatient, he laid down five tiles. P H B I A, plus the O. The final A sat on the triple word score box in the corner. “Phobia! Beat that,” he crowed, then tallied his score. He was now ahead by quite a bit.
As Terry had been thinking, Rai had already prepared her play, so she laid it down without even counting if it would top his score. She used an N on the left side of the board: N I H I L. Everyone looked at her strangely.
“That ain’t a word,” said the boy whose score was lowest.
“Yes it is. Means ‘nothing’ in Latin.”
“What, you think we’re playin’ Scrabble in fuckin’ Latin? If it ain’t a word in English, it ain’t a word in Scrabble.”
“Just ‘cause you fucks are too stupid–”
“Whoa, whoa,” Terry interjected. “You guys let me get away with ‘dissed,’ and that’s hardly in the Scrabble dictionary, so let’s let it go. This has been a tough enough afternoon already.”
A girl had been counting up the points. “Doesn’t matter anyway. You still lose by two. Still think you’re so smart?”
“Fuck your mother. If you had one, that is.” Rai stood, turned her back, and went back to where she’d been sitting. Before she closed her eyes, she looked back and saw that Terry was trying to calm the girl, who seemed eager to fight. “Trying to tell me what’s a word and what’s not,” Rai murmured under her breath. “Like any of those losers are even literate.”
When Rai woke, the room was almost empty. “C’mon,” said a tall black blob that resolved into Z as she rubbed her eyes. “They’re closing down. Everybody’s going to fucking therapy or some shit.”
“Fuck you.” She closed her eyes again.
“Seriously. I wanna go get some books.”
“Abandon me in the rain, and think I’m gonna fucking steal books for you?”
“Whaddaya want? I’ll get you a Tolstoy, or maybe that Google guy you mike so much.”
“Gogol.”
“Whatever. C’mon, lazy ass.”
“If a ho’s got johns, what’s a gigolo got? Jennies? Go steal something with your fucking jenny.” She closed her eyes again.
“Marx’s wife was named Jenny…” Z quickly saw that humor was not going to win her over. He sat down next to her, and she shifted away. He thought a moment. “Or,” he drawled, “we could do some guerrilla philosophy.”
