Eden by Night

Eden by Night

Along the E5 motorway, missing the night bus means having to wait two hours for the next one. We decided to walk towards the intersection. I had seen a bus stop a little further down the road below the overpass. As it turned out it was quite some walk, far longer than I anticipated. We didn't seem to get any closer, even though we walked towards it for quite some time. Eva looked distinctly unhappy with my sense of direction.

We didn't leave the club in good spirits. The concert was disappointing and we quarreled over some trivial remark I made about our plans for what to do for Christmas. In fact, Eva and I were at that point in a relationship where every little difference in opinion could spark some sort of row. I wanted to leave the city, but Eva insisted that it was our turn to host the family this year. We have a big family and formal dinners seem to last a lifetime. Neither of us looked forward to making the arrangements. But Eva was probably right and we were stuck this year, much to my dismay.

The band had played for a long time. Another source of tension, because Eva had intended to leave earlier. I wanted to stay. The fact that the venue was in a remote part of the city didn't help. By daylight these parts of town do not look very inviting, but at one o'clock at night they look derelict. We ended up wandering through the deserted concrete urban wastelands of pedestrian overpasses, glaring streetlights and rolled down iron fences protecting shop windows. Not many people on the streets. That was about to change.

While walking down the road we passed a beggar. He had a grey beard and he walked strangely bent as if he was looking for something on the ground. The downtrodden man, held a plastic cup in his hand. He had a sign around his neck on which something was scrawled with a black marker: "My children go hungry", it read. Eva wanted to give him something. I didn't, because I didn't want to take out my wallet in this part of town. She gave me a look which obviously wanted to tell me that I was a jerk for being stingy, or that I was a coward for not wanting to slow down, or both.

The beggar noticed our hesitation and started pleading with Eva and me. "Please, I haven't had something warm all day". "What is fifty cents to you?" We walked on but he kept trotting along, talking to us. His voice went from softy complaining to covertly threatening and back to complaining again. "You look like such a happy couple, you'd share a bit of that luck with the homeless", "I'm from the south you know, we from the south are nice people, we don't do anybody harm, you see". "You guys always make yourself believe you do a lot for the poor, but than say 'hey, you can't help everyone'. Bad faith that's called, bad faith". I positioned myself between Eva and the beggar and briskly walked on.

We passed a second figure sitting beneath an overpass. He called out to us and got up. He was dressed in clothes that reminded me of the outfits worn at the turn of the century, or even before that. Beneath a long coat I saw an odd elaborate blouse and what appeared to be a sash. As my gaze travelled down, I noticed he was missing a leg from the knee down. The stump of his leg was wrapped with frayed, dirty, yellowish looking bandages. Inadvertently I looked away from him. He managed to reach us very quickly though. "Been treated in a second-rate hospital, can happen to everybody these days", he confided. "So, do you have something to spare for a one-legged pirate?" He spoke with a gleeful sounding voice, oddly high pitched. I noticed the beggar still walked next to be and he began touching me lightly on my shoulder. I signaled to Eva to walk on, upping the pace a little.

A woman leaning against a streetlight smiled at me. "Hey handsome, wouldn’t you like to enjoy yourself for real once? I promise I won't look at the clock". You could read the signs of faded beauty on her face. She must once have been a pretty girl, but now her face was crisscrossed by wrinkles and scars. "Aw, Martita, if you have him, I guess you won't be putting out for the pirate tonight", the cripple said. He had no trouble keeping up with us at all. "I'll have him you'll see", she said with a salacious grin and a tinkle in her voice. Eva glared at her, but she merely giggled in response.

Just now I noticed we were accompanied by a fourth man. A besodden drunkard, cradling a bottle of gin. "Do you have some change to spare?" "I hate sleeping on the streets you see, even the gin don't keep the cold away". I looked around me and I was surrounded by these four people. I saw Eva's face just behind the first man. She shot me a frightened glance and I tried to look back reassuringly, in which I failed. I tried to signal to her to stay there and that I would reach her, but these figures somehow managed to keep me from seeing her for more than a mere glimpse.

"Sir", a little girl's voice chirped. "Would you buy a pack of tissues from me?" The child was pulling at my coat. She was 9, 10 years old. I heard music, a street musician was playing violin. The man joined us and asked for some coin so he could keep plying his trade. The bunch was crowding on me. I saw a woman with tangled hair, whom I didn't notice before. "Eva, walk on!" "I'll catch up with you" I shouted. Eva ran while a blind man blocked my way. I had to stop or I would be tripping over his cane. "I can see you, even though I am blind", he whispered. "Want to know how"? "I could tell you, I am a fortune teller", a woman said, "for a small fee". She was a huge woman wearing a head scarf. Her breasts nearly bulged out of the ragged dress she was wearing.

The little girl tied a little improvised bracelet around my wrist. She made it from small colorful thread. "Now you'll buy my tissues, won't you?". "You're handsome", the prostitute tried to kiss my lips. I tried to push them away desperately trying to find a path out of the melee. Faces sprung up and were replaced by others, pathetic looking people, but with expectation in their eyes, mingled with something else, some sort of possessive devotion.

"What is it you want?" I asked frantically, by now ready to give up. "You want my wallet, here you go, my watch, take it!" "You can take my coat too for all I care, just leave me alone", "Take it, take it all". They started murmuring among each other and seemed excited about something. They seemed to have come to an agreement of sorts, and decided that this was their moment of triumph. Reveling in their victory they pulled me up above their heads and I rested on at least ten pair of hands. Like a procession we continued down the road.

As we moved along, I saw the street lamps and their yellow, pinkish glare. Like a limelight, it shined on our procession, blinding me from time to time. I saw the ecstatic face of the prostitute and the contented smile of the violin player. The sounds of the city seemed garbled and berserk, as if it frantically talked to itself in some metallic language. It related its dreams and its fears. With clarity I realized the incalculable number of dead it had cost to build this eternal cty. For a moment I felt like I belonged among these derelicts it had produced.

The group seemed cheerful, happy with their prize. "We have it", "it is ours now", I heard them tell each other. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that we passed by the bus stop we had been looking for. The sign that normally stated the destinations only showed gibberish. The words were not printed, but scrawled on with a black marker. "Bad Faith", was the only thing I could make out among the jumble of signs. A street cat meowed below it.

We proceeded past a bridge, a large one by the look of it. The procession turned towards a door placed within its fundament. It appeared to be some sort of a shelter for these homeless people. Inside, it resembled some kind of hospital. From the look of it, the hospital had been left to decay quite some time ago. The dirty floor had brown spots and looked sticky as if someone had spilled some unsavory liquid. In a corner an old wheelchair was placed under a discarded pile of crutches. It had that hospital smell of disinfectant, but mixed with the odor of milk gone bad. The look of the place reflected the lives of these people, a forgotten lair with ghosts as patients. A social worker was sitting behind a desk. He looked up and I recognized my religion teacher, Mr. Applewhite. I called out to him when they carried me over the threshold. "You are mistaking me for someone else mister", he said calmly. "Welcome anyway, we will make this your home soon". He spoke in an authoritative voice, like a psychiatrist or lawyer.

They carried me into a room where they had set up an old examination table. It had been a modern and adjustable one once, but now it just lay there, flat. They did drape that classic white paper over it though. Carefully they laid me down on the table.

"I want this", the blind man said and with a pencil he encircled my left eye. The one-legged pirate hopped beside me and stuck a pin in my leg. To the pin he attached a little white paper with the word "leg" on it. "So soft", the prostitute was caressing my skin, "for me, for me". I couldn't move. The little girl took one of her tissues and wiped away the sweat from my forehead. "Please don't cry sir", she said. With the look of a priest administering the sacrament, the drunk placed his bottle of gin in my hand. One by one they marked the parts they chose. While they were dividing me, the world seemed to walk away and became grey, as if I was trying to look through a heavy snow storm. It reminded me of an old TV set of which the channels had faded into a formless scramble of white specks. The voices became muffled. I did faintly hear that the musician had picked up his violin.

The snow before my eyes will never entirely subside. 'Cataract', the doctors say. I do manage to find my way out of the shelter every day. I succeed even with my bad leg. I drink too much again, so I am not a pretty sight. When I saw Eva last week, she didn't recognize me and didn't even bother to give me the small change I asked for. I need those few coins. They pay for my stay. Mr. Whitechapel will not let me in otherwise. I will have to lay in the cold, inside a bus stop. A meowing cat will keep me company and I'll see the night bus pass by.