The Book of Ten

In America

 in america n Late afternoon, late february in San diego, the sky a gauze bandage of blue light, the air mild, springlike, and the young black man and i wait for the train at Seaport village, just the two of us, no seaport, no village in sight, just a place for tourists on their way to other tourist stops, gas Lamp Quarter or old town, other faux streets of restaurants and galleries, of t-shirt shops and ye olde lampposts contrived for our distraction in the year of our Lord . he looks harmless enough in his clean, faded shirt and baggy jeans, his body soft, doughy, as though if i touched him my thumbprint would stay visible on his flesh forever. i have friends who know what it is to have a woman cross to the other side of the street, to be pulled over by cops for no reason— dWb, they call it, driving While black— but i can’t help it, when he asks for a dollar for the train, something deep in my body turns over, flops like a hooked fish on a line. he’s all dimples and baby fat, but still, when he opens the brown paper sack, i imagine a gun in there, a gun black and thick as his arm, but then i see what he has wrapped up in a shiny red box. he’s on his way to the mall in el Cajon where his girlfriend works nights at Smoothie King, and tonight he’s going to ask her to marry him, he’s finally going to do it.  he points to the band-aid on his arm and tells me he sold his blood to pay for the ring even though he’s terrified of needles. first thing next week he’s going to enlist in the army if he can pass the test this time. he’ll have to lose weight, he says, but he can do it, and if they get married now, she can have his benefits. you can see the stars in his eyes, gold flecks in the deep brown that shine in the night sky of his face. in two minutes, i’ve gone from fear for my life to fear for his life, and i’m relieved when the train arrives at last because i don’t know what to say about his dreams, which i believe will come to nothing, because this is america, where the poor stay poor and hope is not, as emily dickinson said, a thing with feathers, but is, as someone once said of the comb-over, an acceptable convention that doesn’t really fool anybody. two stops later i’m off with a quick “good luck”—it’s a pleasantry that seems too little and not right. he smiles and waves, holds up the ring box for me to see one last time, and is gone down the tracks. for months afterward i can’t stop wondering what happened to him, if he got married, joined the army. Maybe he got sent to iraq. Maybe he died there. i watch the news every night, thinking i might see him somewhere among the soldiers in the burning streets. of course, i’ve forgotten exactly what he looked like, though i keep trying to recall his face, his face like the dark side of the moon pressed against the window of the swiftly moving train. ...