The Good Signs

When there is wind in my hair

And God hiding in the humidity of summer air

When the stars kiss my sleeping eyes

And the moon forgets herself in only my skies

When I am Caesar in the palace of my Rome

I have no shame to be without a home.

-Poem inscribed on brick wall next to where body of man was found, midsummer, 2008

Part I

Winter, 2006

He knew before he saw the notice on his door that it was going to be a day of bad signs. He knew it before he even left his flat that morning, because his eggs were fried before they hit the pan, and all the channels on the radio played Styx.

Old Mrs. Greer, who lived across the hall, had smiled at him in the stairwell as he left, and when he saw her three remaining teeth lined up like ill fated soldiers below the whisper of her upper lip, he knew. Although he didn’t have any hard evidence of it, he was certain she was a witch, and for this reason he spit three times on the sidewalk as soon as he got outside, although he knew it was futile.

And then, of course, he was fired.

For nine dollars an hour he washed the dishes at an Italian restaurant on Second Street. Sometimes Annie, the waitress with the blonde hair and impossibly long eyelashes, would split her tips with him, if she had an especially good night. He was aware that she wanted more than the friendly banter they shared when she brought him dirty plates and cups and utensils, but as a rule, he did not date blondes.

His sister had been a blonde, his sister who drowned in the bathtub when she was three because their mother was on crack in the living room and forgot about her. He had pounded on the bathroom door for hours until eventually he had wet his pants, and then finally pounded on his mother’s face until she woke up and broke down the door.

He didn’t blame his mother for the fact that now, nearly two decades from when he was five and saw his baby sister’s blonde hair floating in the water of the tub above her blue face, he was restricted to brunettes and redheads. It was simply the way of things, just like how if he accidentally broke a dish while washing it, he had to break two others in quick succession for good luck.

This, apparently, was part of the reason Antonio, his previously mild-mannered boss, decided to fire him. His other reasons were equally menial. Occasionally, he was late. This was simply because if he saw an abandoned bicycle on the sidewalk, he had to go around it by at least two blocks. Or if he spilled any beans while grinding his morning coffee, he had to ensure they were properly buried somewhere and the ground sprinkled with salt before he could resume his day.

He couldn’t understand why Antonio was bothered by the fact that on several occasions, he quite literally had no choice but to leave in the middle of his shift. He couldn’t control the fact that the radio station the kitchen crew listened to played three songs in a row were in a minor key, or that someone spilled flour in the shape of a cross on the floor.

He tried to explain to Antonio that he wasn’t just looking out for himself, he was looking out for all of them. That if someone saw the signs and didn’t act, the consequences fell squarely on his head.

“When it comes to this, ignorance is bliss, man,” he said, “but if you’re cursed with knowing then you’re tasked with obeying the signs no matter what.”

He had thought that Antonio looked pained, but it was without any semblance of hesitation that he wished his former employee well and walked him to the door.

It started to snow on his walk home, and he counted seven perfect flakes as they fell to the ground. The beauty of it, and the contrast of the icy whiteness on his dark coat, made him feel better. He was nothing if not an optimist, he had never had any other option. After all, he reminded himself there was never a run of bad signs without some luck that would chase out the badness’s unkempt coattails.

The optimism was briefly tested when he saw the red final eviction notice on his door, and for a split second after his vision had blurred and he felt that old familiar rage make his fists into tight balls of fury and his throat swell to twice its usual size. This was the rage that had landed him in juvenile detention twice, once when he was twelve and once again when he was fifteen. That time he had punched his foster father so hard he broke the man’s jaw and two of his own fingers.

In his defense, he was just protecting his blonde foster sister whose hair was curly instead of straight and who showered instead of took baths but who was in just as much danger as his own sister had been all those years ago. His foster father had spiders tattooed on his fingers, and once he’d seen a real spider crawling up her leg when they were sitting on the porch, and just like that he had known. The judge had been compassionless, but he didn’t blame her because even then he knew not everyone could see the signs like him.

The rage mostly went away after that year in juvie, although it almost sent him to jail when he was nineteen, but thankfully there was that public defender who used words like OCD and possible schizophrenia and the result of children who have gone through the system. That woman was to thank for three years in the whitewashed walls of the mental hospital instead of ten in a concrete prison, and yet he would spend the rest of his life remembering what his hand looked like as it pushed that broken bottle into the stomach of that mean man who had his own angry hands all over his wife in that parking lot, on that hot, unforgiving summer night.

The rage, he had come to accept, was the baddest of all the bad signs, and so he didn’t punch a wall or rip the eviction notice to shreds, he just set it gently on the counter like it was made of fine china, and calmly went to pack his suitcase.

The benefit, he thought grimly as he packed his life into the battered green bag, of seven homes in ten years was that he knew to never own more than he could put in a suitcase, and to only truly care about half of that much.

In fact, there were only two things he really cared about, which he put at the very bottom beneath all the cheap jeans and hoodies and the collapsible cooking pot and propane burner and toothbrush sealed neatly in a plastic baggie. There was the picture of his mother, the only one he had of her, and in it she was holding his baby sister on her hip and he was wrapped around her leg, face turned up to her hand which was brushing the top of his little boy bowl cut. The picture was for him, proof of a happier time that never really existed, and although he knew he had crafted it in his head so he wouldn’t hate his mother for everything she wasn’t, it allowed him to cherish the woman she had maybe been in his earliest memories. That was enough for him.

The second item was the battered, pocket sized edition of Leaves of Grass that he had checked out of the library when he was twelve, and which he had never been given the chance to return after an unexpected transfer to another home. Walt Whitman, he believed, had seen the signs just like him, and managed to sing the body electric anyway. He wasn’t a poet like Walt, but sometimes he had practiced stringing together feelings into words in his head while he washed endless dishes for Antonio, and imagined that someday he might be brave enough to write them down.

When his suitcase was packed he turned off the lights in the flat and put on his coat. He knew he still had a week before he had to leave, but he also knew there wouldn’t magically be more money in a week, nor would there be a new employer who would suddenly decide a man with a rap sheet instead of a high school diploma was the perfect edition for their business.

It was better to leave on his own terms, at least as much as possible, and before there were more bad signs.

Outside, it had become bitterly cold, although the snow had stopped. He had slept outside before, but never in the middle of the winter. He looked up and down the street nervously, searching for a stray black cat, a policeman, a flash of blonde hair. There weren’t any signs, just the icy crystals that glinted on the blacktop in the cast from the streetlights that were starting to come on.

The homeless man was gripping his arm before he could move away or even notice the dark eyes, the cracked lips, the gray hair that fell across his forehead.

“Just a dollar,” the homeless man said, and he smelled like sour apples and desperation, “Just one more dollar and I’ll have enough for dinner.”

He pulled his arm away from the man’s gripping fingers and reached for his wallet. He thought he might have thirty dollars in his bank account, but he had fifteen dollars in cash, left over from the last time Annie the waitress split a tip with him.

He pulled out three of the dollar bills and handed them to the homeless man, because you never could know when Odin might show up in disguise to sort the wheat from the chaff. He turned then and set off down the street that was no longer his, and that was also now all he had. He wanted to find a stoop that had a roof where he might be able to sleep, maybe a bakery where residual warmth might be able to find him.

The snow was starting again.

Part II

Spring, 2007

He watched the cherry blossoms unfurl themselves and the brown haired woman who took pictures of them with a black camera, pressing it to her eye and capturing each blossom the moment they surrendered to their own beauty.

He imagined what it would feel like to be inside her camera, to have his soul immortalized behind her critical eye, to lose himself in the flash.

He knew that cameras stole energy, and that to have your picture taken was a very bad sign, but he didn’t think he would mind so much if it meant a part of him would get to always be with the brown haired woman, who had come to the park three times in the past week. He had observed that she didn’t step on any of the cracks in the sidewalk, that her hair was always parted to the left.

He sat on the bench that he had been sleeping on now for two weeks, since the shelter had kicked him out. You could only stay there as long as you didn’t bring any drugs in, and so now here he was in the park under a dizzingly blue sky on the first truly warm day of the year.

The bench in the park wasn’t bad as long as no birds flew directly overhead, and so long as the police didn’t bother him. If they did, he would have to not only find a new place to sleep, but also never come near this park again. Due to these rules, this park was the last in the city that was still safe for him.

She looked up as he approached her, and he registered that her eyes were the color of sand, and she clutched her camera close to her chest as soon as she saw him coming. She wasn’t as pretty as Annie the waitress from his old life at Antonio’s kitchen, but he liked her dark, dark hair and the downward turn of her mouth.

“Hi,” he said, and she stepped away from him, alarm flashing across her face.

“I don’t have any money,” she said quickly, “I don’t even have my wallet on me.”

“Oh,” he said, and grinned at her, “Neither do I.”

He found their similar lack of possessions charming, but even he could tell that she didn’t, and for the first time in more months than he could remember he considered how he might appear.

His hesitation, this momentary slip in confidence, was enough time for the woman to have turned away, and by the time he regained himself she was striding away quickly, looking over her shoulder at him occasionally with a worried expression on her face.

He watched her go, and then turned to look at the cherry blossoms, the ones whose souls were forever caught in the brown haired woman’s camera, unlike him. Up close, you could tell what had been taken from them. Every single one, although beautiful from afar, was damaged- petals torn or darkened or gone completely.

He reached out and gently pulled one from the tree, held it in his palm. He could see lines of dirt criss-crossing his hand like railroad tracks, knew that he was further ruining the flower. Some things, he thought, were not meant to be studied too closely, since beauty can never truly hold up under scrutiny.

There were no policemen and no birds, but he left that park, and for the next year he took pains to avoid even passing it. Sometimes he wondered if the woman with the camera ever went back, or if she, like him, recognized it as a bad sign.

He did keep the blossom, though. He pressed it between the pages of his Walt Whitman poetry book between To Garden the World and From Pent-Up Aching Rivers. He kept it not in memory of his brief encounter with the woman, but instead so he would never forget the way he felt sitting on the bench, looking at her and the blossoms and warmth of the day. He kept it so he would always remember the exact last moment he felt hope, because perhaps she didn’t steal his soul with the eye of her camera, but she took something else from him that day all the same.

Part III

Summer, 2008

He slept in alleyways and in the sheltered stoops of businesses tucked in for the night. He slept in the doorways of churches, and atop the vents on the sidewalk where blessedly warm air rose up. He did not dream, although sometimes it felt like when he was awake it was all just a dream. It didn’t feel real to stand in line at the soup kitchen, or ask people with kind eyes who walked past him if they had anything to spare. The heroin certainly didn’t feel real, although it was the best part of this waking dream he found himself in every day.

One day he found a child’s backpack abandoned on the sidewalk and from it he took pencils and a notebook. He wrote when the shadows started to gather between the buildings, and businessmen poured out of their offices like salmon rushing upstream. He wrote when he was coming down, in those brief moments when reality was sharp as a knife and he worried he might be delusional.

He imagined someone finding the notebook one day and opening it up, being amazed at what they saw there. He imagined that one day, people would carry copies of it around with them, that someone packing up their life into a suitcase would save room for his words.

He didn’t realize he was dying until it was too late, although really, it had been too late since that long ago day when it was too late for his sister and he saw her hair floating in the blue, blue water.

It might have been one of the dirty needles that he slipped into his arms, or the hunger, or most likely, he thought, somewhere along the way he missed a really, really bad sign.

He tried to go to the hospital, thinking maybe they might help him, or at least let him die somewhere clean and air conditioned where a cool hand would press against his cheek and someone might tell him he wasn’t alone.

He thought he almost made it, although he was disoriented and the sky kept flipping inside out so he could see the strange wiring of the clouds, and the heavy thread the sun hung on.

Eventually, he gave up and lay down in the coolness of an alley, surrender coming with surprising ease. A poem came to him, and he thought he might write it down, although he didn’t have any paper, just bricks and the penknife in his pocket.

When he closed his eyes, he was surprised that the voices in his head, the ones that told him what bad signs to look out for, were gone. It was blissfully quiet, and for the first time, all that was left was himself, and he was pleased to find out that he was whole after all.

And maybe, in the end, it would be the good signs that helped him on his way, that pointed a big arrow right to where he was supposed to go.