PART ONE
When Things Went Bad
Mom kicked Dad out when I was ten. We saw him under the 27 overpass every time we drove by, and Mom always told me I was “definitely not allowed to see him.” It took years to work up the courage to see him myself, and when Mom went out of town one weekend, I went to the overpass. But he wasn’t there. Gone.
In high school, I was a passionate kid. I knew every kitchen and shelter in New Brunswick and maybe half of the ones in Newark. Whenever I wasn’t in school, I was volunteering. I never told anyone, but I had a fantasy of my dad coming in to one of those shelters, seeing me from a distance but recognizing me immediately even after all those years. He’d shout my name, “Gunman,” and run over to me. We’d talk. It never went much further than that.
I was seventeen when Obama was running for president, and I lit up seeing that poster of him with the word ‘CHANGE’ right under it. I pestered Mom into voting for him even though she had, “no time for all that nonsense.” I was one year away from having a voice that mattered, and all that was on my mind was being the change I wanted to see in the world.
But if I was the apple of my father’s eye, I guess I fell right to his feet. Because just a few years into college, that fire in my belly turned to smoke in my lungs. Wake and bake. Hoke and toke. Rail and wail.
I became a person unrecognizable to my old self. I laughed at the kids who marched through campus with signs and megaphones. Idiots.
And on our walk back from bars just off campus, I ignored the people sitting on the sidewalk that asked me for change. I didn’t have any change left to give; I’d used it all on myself.
“You can’t get addicted to weed, Gunner,” my buddy Jonjon would said, and I called him my buddy to avoid saying we shared a bed, because we’d ripped holes in his mattress when we were faded.
Me and Jonjon would sip on vodka we diluted with water. “Makes it taste better,” he’d say, “still get hydrated.”
“It’s that dopamine release in the prefrontal cortex,” one of us would say, back when knowing the terms meant not doing the damage.
We’d laugh and laugh. “C’s get degrees.” Our version of cheers as we sipped and smoked.
When my buddy dropped out, I was alone in the apartment. Without an echo, I was the only one I saw in the mirror.
Solution: I dropped out too and moved to a farm.
PART TWO
When Things Got Worse
“Avocados are hot money right now,” said Marsha. She raised the cows and ran the avocado farm, barking orders at us “no good millennials.”
By then, Obama was out and Trump was in. I didn’t use my voice on the day it mattered. The line was too long.
After Trump, there was someone else. I forget the name. I was high on whatever I could get my hands on. Started with meow, molly’s cheaper cousin. Then, lady K, gentleman Jack, and the twins: hop and horse. Once I got a hold of the twins, I never went back.
I knew I had to work. Who doesn’t work? But when it came down to it, and I got to choose pure bliss run through my veins or the cold on my skin from having nothing inside me, gosh, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. There was a turning point, when not having my fix would make me worse at work than being clean. And since work is life, I had to use. Who’d argue with that? Not me. Until I got canned.
I still slept on the farm most nights, when I could sneak around the back. Even though Marsha told me to “git and stay got,” she turned her third-eye blind to my body in the barn.
Other nights, I was on a friend’s coach. Or a friend of a friends. Or someone’s. On the nights I passed out in the fields, I’d joke in the morning with anyone who’d listen, that I was just a drunk. I’d admit to a lot of things, being a lush and a loaf. But I wasn’t homeless, like Dad.
Home is where the heart is, I thought, until I got sick.
The shelter woman knew a doc who had a free clinic. “Free,” they said.
But when I got to the clinic, the girl at the counter gave me an eye roll. “You need an address to get an appointment, sir. You’ll have to register at the shelter.”
So, I went to the shelter a few streets down. But I got huffs and puffs there too, this time from the guys in line.
“You a fool? They ain’t going to let you in without a stub. Get your stub.”
But how does a sick man get a pay stub?
So, I went back to that clinic and told the girl at the counter the whole story, enduring every eye roll she’d had saved up. “I’m close enough to death to smell it sneaking up on me!” I must’ve said it too loud, because a beefed-up security guard tossed me outside. Wished his mother had seen him do it. His face had nothing on it but a smirk, all lip.
I’d do random work where I could get it for some extra cash, but I wouldn’t beg. Not unless it got cold enough. Then, I’d beg, just not tell anyone after. Not that I had anyone to tell, except that girl under the highway that’d hold me for a dollar.
She had customers all night. There were enough of us out there for that. She’d just hold me, honest. No funny stuff. Though what she did with her other customers, that was her business.
The name she used with me was Kat.
I kept seeing Kat, even when the cops came by and told us we had to go. We got booted from every new neighborhood we tried to settle in. I could have gone anywhere, but I followed Kat.
And hey, she stuck with me even though she knew I was no good. I got caught stealing my meds from a pharmacy, and though the judge let me off, I still spent a night in jail and got half my things stolen on the way out. I traded anything I had, anything I could get my hands on, for another taste. I’d even swallow methadone if I had too. When I was sure I’d lost everything worth having, Kat took me in like a pet dog. “I’m taking you for a walk,” she said.
And so we walked, until I discovered it with my own two eyes. A community, full, of people like us. The smell of grilled meat, pungent human odors—signs of being alive, and the sounds of makeshift music and hollering just to holler.
It was breathtaking.
PART THREE
When There Was Hope
They call it, “Living on the margin.”
Someone high up decided that there were too many of us. So we all got booted by the cops. We were an eyesore. So ugly, we became illegal. To be fair, I was a hapless criminal. But Kat, she was like the sun.
We couldn’t live in the cities anymore, in the suburbs, or in the farmlands. Nowhere near any roads, factories or power plants. We ended up in little corners of the world most normal people didn’t know existed. Our community, 55th and Center, was a shanty-town on the surface, one block long at the far edge of Jersey City, but most people lived in the tunnels hidden below. The place really started feeling like home when my old roommate showed up one day. He was calling himself, “Rat,” but the name didn’t matter to me. I was just glad he was there.
I had my own place, a four-walled place too. It was made of rusted tin, and I cut the windows out myself with a chainsaw borrowed from my dealer—but hey, windows are windows. Kat came by often enough that I joked she was my wife, but she’d always tell me, “If that’s true, then I got five husbands better than you.”
My place was just outside the tunnel entrance, the one that fed into the sewers beneath part of the city that had been abandoned years ago. When I needed to buy or trade, I’d slip into the tunnels, but never more than three or four turns, or I’d get lost and have to find a rat to follow, hoping that it was looking for light. Sometimes I’d run into Rat, which was lucky. He knew every nook and cranny, every hustler and vendor, and where to get torches or glass. He could even get you kids, but I hated hearing about that stuff.
I was somewhere around the third turn, searching for something to play music with, when Rat ambled up to me with a sly grin.
“There’s news!” he said, grabbing me by the shoulders. “They’re saying it’s a new Eden. Everyone’s talking about it.
“You listening to that?” I said. “We’re so used to trash it’s coming out our mouths.”
“No, man,” he said. “I’ve been hearing it everywhere. It’s got to be real!”
“How many times,” I said, looking down my nose at him, “have the cops told you to ‘git’ and you got. I’ll believe in a paradise when I see it with my own two eyes.”
“But Edna’s saying it.”
“You’re lying.”
“I ain’t.”
So, the two of us went looking for Edna. But as it turned out, so was everyone else.
We found her at night, by the tunnel’s first turn, addressing a whole crowd at once. Edna was our fortuneteller, and she was right so many times—about little Jane getting pregnant and dying during the birthing, about No-gums and Joel pulling a three-dick trick, about the city fencing us out—that when she talked, we all listened.
“It ain’t like last time,” said Edna, over the sounds of us shushing each other to hear better. “Not like a California governor buying us plane tickets, or a shelter taking up a thousand of us. This time, it’s real.”
I was getting squeezed into the crowd, all of us swelling up at her words, edging closer to hear.
“There’s a city in the west that’s gone and made it official, a place for us to live, safe and easy.”
“Where?” people shouted back at her.
Edna’s voice boomed over the crowd. “Portland.”
There was an uproar that night, with people drinking, smoking, cooking, saying goodbyes. The market at the third turn was packed until half-night, everyone last-minute trading. Water bottles were going for the highest prices, and after that, socks.
We packed up everything we could, whatever we could carry. I’d even cut out a square of tin from my wall to keep in my pocket. A makeshift knife, I’d said to Kat as an excuse for keeping it.
“How we going to get there?” asked Kat.
“Ain’t we going with your five husbands?” I said.
“What husbands?” she said. And that was the end of that.
I wouldn’t say I loved her. Maybe I can’t, because I ended up losing her on the way. And people won’t believe true love that didn’t last. But it sure did feel like it then.
We all traveled together in packs. We took anything we could get from old busses to pick-up trucks. We shouted out, “Cinco! Cinco! Centrar!”, after the name of our community, 55th and Center. But it got difficult to wait for people to show up. We waited days at a stop sometimes, looking round the bend of the horizon for a truck that might never come. And when it came down to it, what were we going to choose? Us, whose hands we could see if we lifted them up to our faces. Or them, who might’ve gone ahead anyways, or at least, that’s what we told ourselves when we decided to push on.
We walked half of Kentucky. That’s when I lost Kat. We’d went by backroad for a day and a half, stopped by a rough-town too far from a city to have any sense of order. It wasn’t like 55th and Center. These people had cars. They lived in them. They had guns too and they knew how to use ‘em. Kat trusted them. I didn’t. There’s nothing left to tell, except that I nearly knocked her seventh husband right where he deserved it. But I was the man without a gun, so I walked.
Took four days to get through Montana, and I nearly lost a foot, frozen.
When I reached Oregon, I had to run past wild dogs through some tall grass. Broke into and right out of a small-town house. There was a family eating breakfast, and I snatched the loaf of bread right off their table. I ate the whole thing while running, never looking back. I lost my square of tin then.
But I made it. To Portland, alone.
Except I wasn’t alone. There were so many of us, people with knapsacks even bigger than mine. Hairier beards, baggier eyes, foot fungus you could smell just by looking at it. From all around the country we’d come. No cops telling us to get gone.
It was the first time in years I’d been out of the margin, and boy were things different now. Everything was shiny, metallic. Doors talked, people glimmered, and there were cameras everywhere (or so they said).
I waited in this big line to get into the city, and a bunch of official looking people were coming by to ask us all sorts of questions. After that, they assigned us numbers.
“1” was a number you’d never see. Because they had guards to deal with anyone stupid enough to have killed people and shown face. You could always tell who got “1,” because they’d come walking by in cuffs, a black bag over their head.
“2” meant you’d go to the asylum. They didn’t call it that. They said it had rehab clinics and so much more. But none of us wanted “2”.
“3” meant you’d get a free plot of land in a “reforming community.” But you’d still be living somewhere in the margin.
“4” meant you’d be sharing a house in the city, one of the neighborhoods most normal folk wouldn’t live. People would give you looks, knowing what you were. But you’d be normal enough to live through it.
“5” was the real deal. The reason we all came out here. We kept chanting down that line, “Five or dive.” The rest of that chant that no one said too loud, was “with a six-barrel trick.” We’d been saying—half of us sober, and the others, still dreaming—that we wanted “5” more than we wanted to be alive. Those of us from 55th and Center had our own version of the chant: “Cinco, cinco, o seis.”
I waited three days in the line. Pissed in some old water bottles. Shat in a newspaper. There was an attendant for that, a young girl with a bucket coming around, (literally) picking shit up from people.
My feet hurt like I’d left them too long drying on a can-fire. I’d passed out too many times to know what was real, or if I had really made it to the end.
A woman with a smile too wide for her bony face handed me a packet. Right at the top, it had the number I’d been begging for: “5.”
PART FOUR
When Everything Changed
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” said Melinda, my manager, the one assigned by the city.
It was hardly a house, more like a box. So small, it fit a single cot. Not quite high enough to stand up straight, so I was hunched over with my forehead hitting the doorframe.
“Roomy,” I said.
She scowled. “Roomy is better than nothing, ain’t it?”
By then, I’d gone through the treatments, staying at a dorm in an old college. Classes with slides where they yelled if I didn’t take notes. Videos while I was strapped to a chair that shocked me if I closed my eyes. They took my blood every so often, checking for drugs that I wouldn’t know where to get, not in this city. The shaking and sweating at night was the worst part. “It’s just the chemicals leaving your body,” the doctor said, and all I wanted to do was sack him in the face. I ached with the want for something sweeter, a calm, a release, but the best I could get from the guy was a pack of Tylenol. At the end of every treatment, Melinda would show up and check off another box on her clipboard list.
“Time to find you work,” said Melinda.
“What work?” I asked.
“We’ll try everything,” she said, her eyes sparkling.
I couldn’t do desk-work. People gave me funny looks in the kitchen when I tried to wash my head in the sink.
Couldn’t do construction. Messed up too many toes on my left foot back in Montana, slamming them into a tree trunk, trying to get the frost out.
I settled for a cash register gig. They’d have someone count the money every few hours. They weren’t subtle about it, eyeing my pockets and groin liked I stuffed bills down there.
Not like I needed the extra cash. There were vending machines with free food, but I stopped going to those. People always taking pictures of me. Back then, I was still sensitive about it. I stopped going to the shelters too, because I was still shaking sometimes thinking of getting my fix, and the stares didn’t help. Most nights, I went hungry because I hated leaving the house. I ached so bad, it made me see things, hear things. It was easy to be out of my mind in that city, where everything was chrome, with people zooming by, no eye contact, no empty ‘hello’s.’ Things moved too quick, shined too bright.
Every day was agony, and every ching of the cash register was like a needle to the brain. It felt like years, but really, it had only been weeks when Melinda showed up at the store, tapping her pen on the end of her clipboard. God, I wanted to snap that thing in half.
“We’ve got something better for you,” said Melinda with her red-lipped smile.
She took me to some homeless kitchen and said, “You think you can help them?”
There were rows of people just in from the margin, sitting at long tables or else standing in long lines. Half of them were shivering even though it was plenty warm.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Well, you’re something of a success.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“You haven’t run off, at least. Not like the others.”
“What number are they?” I asked.
“Mostly fives, a few fours. A lucky three here and there. You were lucky, you know, to come in when you did. Even some of the fives here won’t get full treatment.”
I scowled. “They should all be fives.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, flicking her hair behind her shoulder. “But there’s only so much funding to go around.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice rising, “it really does go all round.”
I pointed to the federal building, visible from out the window, standing at least a hundred stories tall. Pristine, overly decadent, filled with suits sipping on bourbon, even at 3pm.
“You can be angry about it,” she said, “or you can help. The higher ups gave the order. You’re to help them however you see fit.”
“Fine then.”
“How do you think you’ll go about helping them?”
“Isn’t it obvious,” I said. “I’ll ask.”
I met the kitchen’s manager, Diane, a woman who got called “chin and grin,” because her jaw jutted out but it didn’t stop her from smiling nearly all the time. Together, we prepped food, handed it out, and got people seated. Every now and then, I caught a whiff of the good stuff, just in passing.
“They call all of us mental,” said a man with yellow-stained teeth and a chattering jaw. “They say, ‘oh golly, it’s so sad,’ like they feel bad for us. But really, they say it so they don’t have to feel bad. Because if we’re all sick, then there’s something wrong with us. We’re different.”
The man slaps his belly with both hands and he laughs. “They don’t see that any one of them could become anyone one of us.”
Then, there was the woman who fondled the top button of her shirt to no end. “I mean, think about it,” she said, “it’s not like they could take in all of us. See how big this line is. See how many of us waited for a number. They were waiting to see how many of us could survive in the first place and even make it out here. We’re the survivors. Now that they know who to focus on, they can find us out one by one.”
She grabbed my face and I didn’t resist. “We’re fives, you and me. Something special.”
“Cinco,” I said, and her face warped with confusion.
After that, there was a slew of people with all kinds of ideas. I heard them one by one until we ran out of food and the line came to a halt. But even then, the line didn’t disperse.
“They’ll stay until dinner,” Diane said. “At least I’ll make sure the ones at the front get extra, for having missed lunch.”
“But,” I said, “doesn’t that mean people in the back get less?”
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” she said. “Let’s take a walk.”
Diane led me out of the building, where I saw that the line stretched all the way down the block. I imagined it, that horrible clenching of the stomach when hunger takes over every part of your body. I imagined it a thousand times, for every person in that line.
“There’s too many,” I said.
“You’re looking too far,” Diane said. “I only see one person.”
She pointed to the person to the front of the line. “We help every person as much as we can, and then we do it again, over and over.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I said, my eyes glazed. “At a clinic, I think.”
“If we gave every person a slice of bread and nothing more, they’d all die.”
“So better to just save a few?”
“When you come up with a better idea, come see me.” She walked off.
I started working at Diane’s kitchen every day, and at the end of the week, when I got my paycheck, I got confronted by two impulses. One, to buy a sack of bread and start handing out loaves to people. Two, to find someone—anyone—who could get me my fix.
If you had asked me then, whether I thought I would make it, I would’ve told you there was a better chance of a peacock becoming governor. But I made it as far as finally having an idea for how to tackle the lines around the building.
Diane took me across the street to the federal building, where I met important people with last names, white smiles, and firm handshakes. They sat me down in some conference room and scribbled notes as I talked at them. “You can’t define homelessness with a checklist. It might’ve worked for me. I mean, at least I made it all the way through the program. I’m here, now. But there are hundreds of people it didn’t work for.”
“Talk slower,” Mr. Netter said.
“You can give someone a house but you can’t guarantee they’ll live in it. You can give a person medicine, but they might not take it. We need to stop using those checklists and numbers to define homelessness. They aren’t working.”
“So, how do we go about defining homelessness,” Mrs. Albertan said.
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said. “But the point is that every person needs a full set of services. If we give people anything less than a five…well, it’s not much better than doing nothing.”
“What do we do then?” Mr. Lindsay said.
“Make everyone a five, or die trying.”
They all chuckled, adjusting their suit jackets. “Impossible! You’re a madman!”
I had a list of maybe a dozen ways to rake up the dough, and by the end of it, they almost looked convinced. After we parted, I had no way of knowing if my words had any effect. I was a nobody, and honestly, I couldn’t even tell you who they were.
But a few days later, when I was serving mashed potatoes in the kitchen, I heard the announcement on the news. “Governor Lindsay’s mandate has just passed, instituting a new tax on companies with high CEO-to-worker salary ratios. These funds will be used to support the programs developed by the 2033 Act to End the Margin.”
There was nearly a riot in the kitchen. Shouts of joy, people jumping on tables, everyone clapping me on the back. It was the start of a new era. Tax the rich and feed the poor. Let’s end homeless together, as a city.
But the riot in the kitchen was a precursor for what happened in the streets a few nights later. People marched through the city carrying signs that read ‘Take Back Portland,’ and confronting anyone who looked ‘homeless’ enough. Diane was convinced it was started by the CEO’s who got taxed, that they funded the Take Back campaign to prove the tax mandate wasn’t working. She felt guilty, I think, for putting me up to it. But even if that was the lit match, the fuel that fed the fire was undeniable. The city had changed since we got there. The streets were packed with marginers, and even families in residential neighborhoods couldn’t look out their windows without seeing whole hordes of people. Marginers pitched tents anywhere they could, begged anyone they could, did what they had to do to survive. There was ‘us’ and there was ‘them.’ But when taxes went up, I guess that was the last straw.
There a mass exodus. We weren’t wanted. Why would we stay? And it was about then when I realized clearly, which side I was on. Every day, the lines around Diane’s kitchen got shorter and shorter, until people stopped coming out in public at all. It was too dangerous now that people were carrying cans of pepper spray and wooden signs with sharpened ends. They’d mess up your face, and say it was self-defense, an accident, that we already had red eyes or bleeding cuts before they ever got to us. Anyone with half a brain took to the underground, until that time of night when things were quiet enough to slip out of the city. The talk of the town was there was a new Eden, but this time, I didn’t have a whole community telling me every chance they got. I overhead it, once, from someone passing through the kitchen. “Everyone’s going to San Francisco.”
A part of me wanted to go too. But I had a duty to Diane. She had lost her famous grin, and she was having daily meltdowns. When she could keep it together, she’d ask me over and over, “What can we do?”
Her kitchen was empty. Not a soul in sight. I took a week off to think of a solution. We’d shut down the kitchen. At least, make it look shut down. We’d stock up supplies for people heading South, like the first stop on the underground Railroad. But when I showed up at the kitchen with my idea a week later, the whole place was up in flames. Diane was screaming at a group of cops who were all shaking their heads at her. I went home.
It took me too long to realize that two people were following me. Their faces were covered, and I could hear the clink of something metal, a weapon maybe. I was stupid to think I wouldn’t be targeted. After the treatments, I didn’t look much like other marginers. But I guess if you’re trying to rid your garden of weeds, you’ve got to rip out the roots. I was feeding the problem.
When my apartment was in sight, I burst into a run, slamming the front door and pushing a dresser against it. I packed a single bag in less than a minute. They were still beating at the front door when I climbed out the bathroom window. There was no other option. I’d go to San Francisco right then and there. I hoped, begged, and even prayed, that Diane would make it out alive, soon, before they got to her.
PART FIVE
When I Fought for More
When I got to San Francisco, I went straight to MSC-South, the biggest shelter in the city. There was an enormous line, but the volunteers working there seemed to think I was one of them. It must’ve been that I looked cleaner, or something, but they had me cut the line. When I got inside, I met the woman that ran the shelter, Suzanne. She was in the middle of handing me a t-shirt that said ‘volunteer’ right on the front, when I told her I was homeless and looking for a place to crash. She nearly burst out laughing. “You look like you belong in a suit,” she said.
It was like fate that I met Suzanne right then. She’d been a finance manager on Wall Street for a decade, rich as can be. But she wasn’t happy with just money, so she started running MSC-South. When I told her my story, how I’d helped push the governor’s mandate in Portland, she said, “So you’re the reason we’ve got people pouring into the city. You better do something about it. Maybe, I can help.”
A few days later, she leased an empty warehouse and bought enough bunkbeds to fill it up. “It’s yours now,” she said. “I don’t have time to look after you, so you better do some good.”
I turned the place into a wet house, one of the only shelters in the Tenderloin that won’t kick you out for drinking. The first day we opened, the place was packed with people. I slept there most nights, too, to keep an eye out, or so I told Suzanne. But really, I slept there because I hated being alone. When there was no one around my mind would race with all the different ways I might go about finding a dealer. I figured out soon enough, though, that sleeping alongside other marginers didn’t make me one. Conversation died whenever I approached. People looked at me with colder eyes. I still felt alone.
Only a month or two in, the numbers started to drop. Nearly half the beds went unused, then the week after, only a dozen people came in. I was afraid it was me, like they could sniff me out, like they didn’t trust me. I wanted to know what was going on, but I was running out of people to ask.
One night, when only three people came in, I made a point to eavesdrop. I slinked along a wall to get closer to their beds, and I overhead one of them, whispering.
“They city is on it already,” said the man. “I thought they were joking! Declared a public health emergency. We’re getting rounded up! They’re calling it detox but I hear it’s more like prison. Even this place might not be safe—”
They spotted me and went quiet.
I tried to walk away casually, but it didn’t matter. A few minutes later, and they were gone. I was alone, and all I could think about was getting my fix.
It was nearly midnight when I left the wet house, going under bridges, through alleys, anywhere I thought there might be someone, anyone. I tried outside bars and nightclubs, in public parks. But everything was dead silent. No one, nowhere. I was sweating through my clothes even though the air was freezing, my heart racing. It was about 4am when I gave up. I ended up at a 7-11 in the top ramen isle. I was about ready to off myself, when I met Cheryl.
“You must really be fiending for some ramen,” she said, giggling.
Then, I had the impression that she saw right through me. I was still pouring sweat and she knew why. But I found out quickly that she was a nice girl, no dope, no nonsense.
She had her own apartment, and I spent every other night there or so at first. Usually, we’d watch Netflix and drink wine. Cheryl would only ever have half a glass, because she didn’t like turning red.
When I handed the wet house back over to Suzanne, I started spending every night at Cheryl’s. When Cheryl got off her shift, we’d fold laundry and hum along to the Beatles. I watered her plants when she went out of town. She gave me a reason to smile, to laugh, to feel good again. But there were things she didn’t get. Like doing and not saying, or keeping some things held close to your heart. Or when things got hard, I just wanted to tell it like it was, and not get sympathy for it. But she liked to talk about feelings.
I got around to telling Cheryl that I loved her, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t yearning for something more. Because when I wasn’t with Cheryl, I was visiting the shelters and the kitchens, looking for—something. My Dad. Dope. Or answers, maybe.
I finally got an answer when I found Rat loitering around a food bank.
“Rat!” I yelled when I saw him, clapping him on the back. I nearly called him Jonjon.
Rat jumped at the sound of my voice, turning around with a beaming smile. But when he saw me, his face fell. “That you, Gunner? What happened?”
“I got turned,” I said with a smile. “In Portland. They’re doing it here, too, now.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I didn’t get five, so I went full on six. But it didn’t pan out, the drugs, they didn’t kill me. Should have went with the six-barrel.”
He laughed and I felt like I was back at 55th and Center.
I launched into a retelling of old memories, to keep him thinking about the old me, not the person standing before him. I got him laughing enough times for him to let his guard down. I followed him onto a bus that dropped us by an alley, and we snaked between buildings for what felt like miles until we reached a tunnel entrance.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, makes sense,” he said, looking me up and down.
Even before we hit the first turn, we hit a crowd of people. There were little cubicle-houses made of tin, some made of cardboard, others just had pitched tents. People were laying on blankets, all sorts of trinkets and goods strewn out around them. There were tables too, a few carts with hot food, and the sounds of bartering, laughing, and storytelling. When I passed, people turned to look at me with shocked expressions. My hair, skin, clothes, maybe even the way I stood and walked—all of it, reeked of surface dweller.
“The market here is a bit bigger than at 55th, try to keep up,” said Rat.
I had to push past, or else slip between, the people and shops to make it past the first turn. Beyond the market, there were rows of tents along each wall.
“It’s like this for twelve turns or so,” said Rat, “but it gets quiet down further.”
I tried to memorize the turns as we did them, so I could make it out later. Left, left, right, left, right. But Rat was telling a story, making me laugh, and I forgot everything about why I was there after turn nine when we ran into Kat.
I saw her and I felt like my skin was going to melt off. She had scars on her face, a story in each one I was craving to hear. When she realized it was me, her instinct was to pull down her shirt.
“You that excited to see me?” I said, too loudly. They both ignored my surface joke.
“You see here,” said Kat, pointing to a bullet-hole scar in her shoulder. “I got this from husband number nine. He had a knack for ruining lives, and he ruined mine real good, too.”
“Can’t trust a man with a gun,” said Rat, “no matter what he says to you.”
“Can’t trust no man,” said Kat with a laugh, swatting my arm, and that’s when I saw the track marks on her elbow she wasn’t bothering to hide anymore. The sight alone made my mind race, my veins ache.
The three of us went walking deeper into the tunnel, telling stories up until we reached Kat’s place—a tin-walled place, just like mine had been.
“About time I head back to the market,” said Rat, giggling as he looked from me to Kat.
“How long you here for?” Kat asked me.
“Dunno,” I said.
“Well, stay at my place then,” she said. “Stay as long as you want.”
Rat made a ‘ooh’ noise. “Careful. City folk don’t too well down here.”
Kat rolled her eyes. “You might look like city folk, but I know you better. You got a house up there, a job, or what? Something pretty keeping you up there?”
Rat went into a giggling frenzy.
My voice got caught in my throat. The pause was long enough for them both to look up at me, one curious, the other expectant.
“No,” I said, as firm as I could. “I got nothing worth staying up there.”
Nothing like you.
