S
10 S I’m the only one who works at the shelter who doesn’t wonder why some of the homeless won’t come in, why they prefer the streets—wandering, troops losing strength. Many have in fact fought in wars, and even those who haven’t tell the stories. They’re such accomplished scavengers they can’t help it, I think. They collect stories as they collect everything discarded , cans, clothes, boxes—coins tossed at them out of guilt, not hope. I wonder, though, at the ones who say things I know can’t be true, I wonder where these fictions come from. I think they may be telling stories on behalf of the dead, that there are a handful of stories they preserve among them. Often they die in the streets; we’re called, the corpse described . They tell me about deserts and jungles. You wouldn’t believe it, they tell me. One man will say something specific about the shine of this bug’s wings or how a plant prickled his ankles, and I’ll know this must have been his life. 11 You’re a good person, a few men have said to me. What do you know? I want to say. I give them their retrovirals , I change the gauze over last week’s fight. A good person is someone who helps you, but that’s a narrow definition. I have been many things. I don’t say to anyone that they’re all good. I take temperatures, give out clean needles. I talk to the men about carbohydrates, help them care for the feet’s wasted skin. When the virus finally takes one of them I am in the crowd around the bed, keeping the tubes from bag to blood from kinking. I cry, too, quietly, at their deaths; I cry for the body that remains. The tarn of shadow above the collarbone, the long-fingered hands that played cards, grasped my arm. The teeth. I make them all donate their organs, I make them sign the cards. Don’t waste, I say, and I joke, this is your chance at immortality . But many of them still believe in heaven. And most of their organs can’t be used. I live my life forward. I don’t regret. I won’t haunt the past’s landscapes: A’s house in the woods, I sat on the floor of the living room though everyone always offered me a chair. I sat and rubbed the dog’s head. It is another life. If I try to look back into that room, I can’t see it wholly. This is my place now, here, with these men. Not in that room, the five of us in a home made of smoke and words, the place we returned to even the night Z died. I’m not there anymore. After all, the blood has its own business. Our vessels never meet. The miles of capillaries, breathing in waste and breathing out what they have gathered: they are only ours. This is the fact of our separation. Even in the moments we are closest to union, what we feel is the skin’s friction, the soft nerve-filled walls. ...
OR
