Vulnerable Strangers

The cave of the train station swallowed streams of pedestrians. I liked being one of many and enjoyed the delicious feeling of obscurity; it felt like taking solace in the peace and still of nighttime.

I determined myself to a path, dodging people and puddles to grab something to eat. As I checked out, the beautiful people on magazine covers sneered at my existence.

You, the pathetic passerby.

I chose a spot to eat what I’d foraged, a bench with one other person sitting at the other end. The stranger tapped her feet in double-time, running in place while I ate. A rotten smell came from her direction.

“Sorry for the smell.” I startled to see that the stranger was talking to me. “I’ve just come from the tunnels.”

She referred to the network of tunnels webbing the underbelly of the city. They were a place for meandering, discarded people; travelers, refugees, and runaways; homeless and jobless people; addicts and the mentally ill; ex-prisoners, criminals, and anyone else with nowhere to go. I wondered what she had been doing in the cavities of the city.

Remembering the tunnels always made me shudder, like turning over a rock to find that its underside is crawling with bugs. It’s easy to forget that they’re there.

A black rat skid past us in an instant. He had that hunchback look from a round belly. Good fellow. City rats are more resourceful and street-wiser than I. The cannibalistic laws of their world are the same as ours; governed by hunger, may the best rat win.

I thought of something I'd read once. When mice are punished in unpredictable and unavoidable ways, they give up on escaping even when given a way out. Why try? Sometimes the constraints you cannot see are the most binding.

Trying to be friendly, I asked the woman if she’d heard of the mouse studies, but she recoiled.

“I hate thinking about animal experiments. How can people be so cruel?”

She hates what you said. No one likes you and you should never say anything ever again.

The stranger unzipped her jacket. “Do you have paper and pen? I need to write down departure times.”

I reached in my purse to give her a pen and the small black notebook that I carry everywhere, but never write in. “You can keep them,” I said, relieved to pass by the moment.

She thanked me and opened the notebook to find the first page covered in loopy, furious scrawl.

Could've sworn it was empty.

I didn’t need — or want — to look at what I’d written to know what it read: some variation of the usual diatribe peddling around my brain, insulting me with infinite source material.

You idiot! You are so embarrassing! You worthless sack of...

Something to that tune.

I felt naked. I hadn’t talked to my friends in months and now a stranger knew the walls of my private torture.

“You shouldn’t talk to yourself that way.” She frowned at me.

How did she know it wasn’t something I’d written to someone else, an enemy?

Rather, how did she know that the enemy was me?

She ripped out the page and crumpled it, leaving a jagged edge in my notebook, and darted to trash the ball of vitriol.

When she sat back down, something small and grey popped out of her bag.

“Do you want to hold her?” The stranger offered.

I took the kitten into my lap and let her lick yogurt from my open parfait cup. She could eat the whole thing if she wanted.

Next to me, the stranger tore open an envelope, the only item left in her bag.

I peered over her shoulder as she pulled out a loose pile of money. It took me a moment to recognize the hundred dollar bills that looked like foreign currency. Until now I’d assumed the woman was homeless. Her eyes were wide as she counted through the money, then split the deck in half.

“For the notebook and for being so nice to me. It’s twenty thousand.” She put a bundle of cash in my hand. “Thank you.”

I gestured to dismiss the gift out reflexive decorum, but also because you are undeserving.

I felt her hand on my back and was embarrassed to feel comforted by it.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said, and pressed the money into my hand. Had I said something?

When I turned to say thank you, she was gone. I scanned both directions for the stranger, but she and the kitten had fled under the ghastly uproar of engines.

I felt new, somehow; unanchored. My eyes stung and I noticed, for the first time, that I sat facing a window which beamed in afternoon sunlight, making me sticky with the beginnings of sweat.

I thought through our exchange and smiled.

Maybe she was right about the mice.