Reminiscences of a Life in Orthotics

The rain tapers off as I leave work to catch the bus, cautiously rolling through the (possibly bottomless) puddles that darken the street corners. The bus is on time and as we ride across town my attention is laser-focused on everything around me. This may be my last trip over here for a while and I want to remember every moment. A billboard for hypnosis next to the burlesque theater. A young woman repeatedly pushing away the umbrella offered by her companion. Clouds drifting fast over the river.

Tom is sitting in the waiting area when I arrive. I go in and Shelley tells me the room’s not ready yet. “Make it two rooms,” I bellow. “It’s my last visit and I need to be able to stretch out!”

“You think you deserve special treatment?” she asks.

“After all these years? Yes, yes I do.”

I sit next to Tom and he shows me the brace. This is not the clear plastic sleeve he had brought last week, but a severe-looking black device. “You can see I cut a hole in the bottom so you won’t put pressure on that spot,” he says. “It really is strange that you keep having trouble there rather than on the side like most people. If you don’t mind me asking, what caused you to lose your toes?”

I tell him about the infection that cost me my big toe, and the subsequent infection that led to the others getting amputated four years later. 

“Ah; see, losing the big toe, that’s a hard one. When the muscle no longer has anything to attach to, it can really affect your gait.” 

I ask if he thinks a physical therapist could help me learn to walk differently. “There must be walking specialists, no? Doctors of mobility?”

“It might be worth looking into,” he says thoughtfully. “In the meantime, I think the AFO will help. If not, the next step is to try a custom made shoe rather than the off-the-shelf ones. The trouble is they’re ridiculously expensive. Plus they look dreadful. You’d think by now they could make them less ugly.” 

I ask how he got interested in working with orthotics in the first place. He said his grandmother wore shoes with braces because she had polio when she was a child. Once, when he was a teenager, he went with her to the shoe store. He found the experience fascinating, and the man who ran it noticed his interest and asked if he would like to apprentice with him. He did, then went to school and got his bachelors degree and eventually took over the shop. “And that was thirty years ago,” he says. 

“And you guys do prosthetics as well?”

“That’s mostly what we do. People like you who still have the use of your foot are kind of unusual. Well, less usual.”

He tells me about a mental illness called body integrity identity disorder, which causes people to become desperate to have one of their limbs removed, often their left leg. Apparently they don’t think it belongs to them, has somehow been attached to them mistakenly. In extreme cases, they try to cut the imposter appendage off themselves. 

Shelley comes out to apologize about the wait. 

“This place is popular,” Tom says.  

“Everybody wants some of that sweet hyperbaric nectar,” I say. 

“Hey I walk by those chambers every day and it doesn’t do me any good,” says Shelley.

“You need to be loceked inside for the full effect, you know that.” She makes a face and goes back inside.

“It’s weird that you have to be completely encased in them,” says Tom. “You’d think they would have devised something less claustrophobic by now.”

“Actually they make group ones, where you just wear a helmet.” I tell him about the chamber that recently closed at Emmanuel. He gets excited.

“That’s fascinating. I’ve been talking to one of my colleagues about whether it would be possible to develop a portable hyperbaric device that would just act as a vacuum and attach to your ankle, so you wouldn’t have to be inside a tube.”

“Yeah but you need to breathe the oxygen so it can enter your bloodstream and promote capillary repair and growth,” I say, sounding like the hyperbaric training video.

“Ah,” he says. “Maybe it could help with circulation though, or with less serious cases. Have you ever been in one of those things?”

“Couple of years ago,” I say. He seems to hang on every word as I give him the streamlined version of the saga.

Finally Karen emerges. “You coming in?” she asks Tom.

“Nah, call me when the cast is off,” he says.

“Do you want to try your hand at the saw?” I ask him. 

“I’d love to,” he says.

“RRRRRRRRR!” roars Dr. Taggert, imitating the saw.

“I thought you were off Mondays?” I ask Karen as I plop down in room two. 

“They were short staffed. Whoa, you were rough on this cast. There’s a chunk taken out of it.”

RRRRRRR and the cast comes off. Once again I feel a moment of panic that once again proves to be unfounded. “Lotta callus,” says Caitlin, and Karen puts Lidocaine on it to soften it up for the doctor. Tom enters and asks if he can have me try the shoe on now that the cast is off. “This part is a little tricky,” he says, helping me guide my foot between the bars and under the tongue. I manage to get it on without too much struggle. He pulls the Velcro over the front and wraps a strap around my calf. 

“I’m getting kind of an S&M vibe here,” I say.

He takes it off and shows me how the brace slips out of the shoe, and how the orthotic slips out of the brace. “You can wear the shoe with just the insert if you have any problems,” he says. “Then call me and I’ll make any adjustments. Do you have an appointment here next week?” I tell him I don’t think so but that he should ask Taggert. 

“Ask Taggert what?” asks Taggert.

“Does he have an appointment next week?”

“Do you think he should have one?” she asks him. 

“Only if you think so. Otherwise I’d like to have him come out to the office. I can actually do more to help him out there than with this bag.”

“Well, since he’s all healed up, I don’t know why not. But you need to call us immediately if you have any issues!” she scolds me. 

“Definitely,” I say. “I’m not fucking around with this thing.”

“Great, so I’ll see you next week,” Tom says, and exits so Taggert can do one last callus trim. 

“I love Tom.” She says as she unwraps one last scalpel.

She cuts very carefully, not wanting to damage the tender new skin. “I’m kind of leaving a lot on. Did you find a podiatrist yet?” I tell her no, that I was hoping she could recommend someone. She gives me the names of two doctors I’ve tried already.

“They don’t look at the whole body,” she complains, as she has so many times before. “And they’re so eager to chop stuff off. I’ve never understood that.” 

When she’s done, Caitlin puts a foam pad over the freshly-scraped area and tells me to change it in seven days. Karen lowers the chair and hands me my new accessory. I squirm into it and stand up. Everyone stares at me. 

“Do you feel unsteady? Are you going to fall over?” asks the doctor, sounding worried.

“Not at all,” I say. “Do I look like I’m going to fall over?”

“Kind of,” she says. 

It’s true that while I feel pretty stable, my left foot seems much higher than my right. I take a wobbly step forward and everyone cheers.

“Will you be able to ride on your scooter with that thing?” asks Taggert.

“Sure. It’s smaller than a damn cast.” 

“You know, I wonder if we really have to wrap them so far up,” she says thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s time to rethink that.” They bring me my scooter and I easily mount it. “I want you to keep using this for two weeks,” she says. “Take it slow. Baby steps. And if the wound opens up again, or even looks like it’s about to…”

“I know the drill,” I say. 

And then everyone is there, chattering and milling around, everyone except Jenny, who I see through the door of the hyperbaric area. I wave to her and she waves back. 

“You can come see us when you visit your endo,” says Taggert. 

“Are you kidding? That’s a whole other elevator,” I say, heading for the door.

“Don’t you want to ring the bell?” she asks. 

“Of course I want to ring the fucking bell,” I cry. Why the hell not? After all, fourth time’s the charm. 

I pick up the silver bell in one hand and the cowbell in the other and ring them as I pound on the desk bell. I try to think of a way that I can ring the bell on might handlebars as well but I can’t manage it without dropping something. I ring and ring and ring until my wrists are sore. Everyone is laughing and talking at the same time. I don’t want this moment to end. I want to live forever in this cacophony of hope and support and love. 

But I also want to get the hell out of here and never come back.

Finally I put the bells down and pick up the Oscar statuette and thrust it triumphantly into the air.

“I’d like to thank my mother, and God, and of course all the kind people at wound care. I couldn’t have won this best patient award without your help!” Everyone claps and whistles. I think of slipping the Oscar into my bag, but instead I place it back on the counter and mash the blue button. The door swings open, and for the latest in a seemingly endless series of last times, I roll out of the clinic. I look back and see CK staring at me. I blow her a kiss, and then the door slowly swings shut and latches behind me.

Banana

 I take a long weekend off and head to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland with the Widder, Robyn, and Robyn’s boyfriend. Ashland is a charming town nestled in the mountains, and despite the sloping sidewalks I don’t have any trouble getting around with my scooter. 

We get back Monday afternoon and I take the light rail from the airport directly to my wound care appointment, luggage weighing down my handlebars. Tim, the free-agent nurse the departments are always fighting over, saws off my cast and says the wound is looking good. 

When she’s through debriding, I ask Dr. Taggert about her trip with he son to Panama. They went there through an organization called Floating Doctors, and slept in hammocks and ate nothing but plantains. She shows me photos taken on the tiny island where she had treated patients for various ailments, most of them related to parasites. “This is our waiting room,” she says, pointing to a row of pregnant women sitting on folding chairs beneath the trees.  “And here is our OR.” She points to a thatched roof on stilts. “No one has diabetes there because if they get it they just die,” she says. “They die of all kinds of preventable stuff. I like being able to help out a little but to be honest it’s pretty grim.”

A few days later I get a call from Tom at Evergreen Prosthetics and Orthotics and we arrange for him to come to my next appointment, which will be on Tuesday instead of Monday, due to Memorial Day. He says he has made the brace and wants to see how it fits.

I run into him in front of the hospital as I’m heading in to my appointment. He’s heading out to his car and says he’ll be up in a few minutes. 

The two guards at the entrance have me put my bag through the x-ray machine but don’t bother to wand me after I roll through the metal detector. I could be hiding a gun in every pocket. 

Upstairs, Karen immediately says they’re ready for me and I glide right in. She says she hasn’t done a cast in a while, then cuts through the fiberglass as if it’s butter, which it is also the color of. The saw’s exhaust fan makes the curtain ripple wildly.

Karen rips off the batting and plucks off the square of padding. I can see that it is completely dry. 

She looks puzzled, and gently prods the wound.

“I’m not sure but it looks like you’re completely closed up,” she says. “I mean, there’s no drainage. Nope, I am just not seeing a wound here.” I twist my leg to get a look. There is still an indentation, inside of which is a layer of smooth, pink skin. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” I say.

Old Karen comes in and says, “I haven’t seen you in a while. What’s new?”

I start to tell her about Ashland but I can tell she’s not really interested. “What’s new with you?” I ask. 

“Nothing. Oh, that’s not true, we got a dog,” she says, and shows me pictures of her adorably morose-looking puggle. “She’s thirteen. Her name was Bea but we started calling her Nana, because she’s an old lady, then it became Bea Nana and now it’s just Banana.” 

When Dr. Taggert comes in, she is pleased to see me healed up, and as she slices at the callus she sings, “It’s the final countdown! Da-da DA duh, da-da DA da duhhh...”

Just then Tom shows up, and Taggert steps aside to watch, grilling him as he opens his bag and takes out my new brace. It’s made of clear molded plastic rather than metal like I had pictured. He examines my wound then slips the brace onto my foot and makes some marks on it with a silver Sharpie.

“It’s weird, I just don’t know why it keeps opening up in that spot,” he says. “Usually people have problems on the side here.” I ask if he thinks the bone might have gotten calcified again, like it has in the past, and he says he doesn’t think so, though I don't know how he can tell without an x-ray. He asks if I brought my other shoe, and I ask one of the Karens to get it from my bag. “It’s a shame we couldn’t fix this with the orthotic,” he says.

“I didn’t really get a chance to use it,” I say. “It opened up before I even broke it in.”

“Well hopefully if you use this for a while and it doesn’t open up, we can go back and try again.” 

“Isn't that plastic kind of hard?” Taggert asks. “His skin is very delicate.”

“It’ll have a soft insert,” he says, working the brace into the shoe and fiddling with the laces. “I’ll have it ready by the time I see you next week.” He puts the shoe with the brace into his bag and slips away. 

New Karen smears lotion on my pasty leg, which feels heavenly. Agnes comes in and plops into the chair. 

“I almost got murdered,” she says. 

“Oh my god, what happened?” I ask. “Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I went on a date with this guy and he almost murdered me. He didn’t like when I told him I didn't want to see him again. Then I went home and when I woke up the next day there was graffiti on my car.”

“Wow. What did the graffiti say?”

“I couldn’t tell,” she says. “And I’m not a hundred percent certain it was him. But Karen’s got a boyfriend.”

“Congratulations,” I say, a little confused that Agnes’s story about almost getting murdered didn’t seem to involve anything resembling her almost getting murdered. “What does Dolly think of him?”

“She likes him more than she likes me,” Karen grumbles. “I’m a little peeved about it. She totally ignores me when he’s in the room.”

Agnes mutters something about becoming a spinster, then slouches away. Karen wraps my leg then admires her handiwork. It looks perfect, as does the cast Taggert proceeds to wrap over it. It’s gratifying to see your body subjected to such high levels of craftsmanship. 

“Evergreen guy sure left in a hurry,” Taggert says. “Think I scared him off with my questions? I can’t help it, I just like to know things!” I imagine her beneath the palm trees, in a tropical paradise rife with suffering, screeching at an interpreter as she tries to explain to the poor islanders how antibiotics work. I assume she doesn’t tell them that even though there is in fact medicine to treat diabetes, they can’t have any. 

If I had been born on that island, I would have died nearly forty years ago. 

Don't Chase

 I spend July 4th in the apartment, alternating between cleaning and sleeping. I didn’t have too much to drink at the barbecue but I still feel sluggish and worn out. I have a pretty pleasant day regardless, and by evening feel perky enough to head down to the Goose for supper. 

There are Lost Dog posters plastered all over the neighborhood, showing a moppy little mutt with the typical admonition “Dont chase will run.” The Goose is busier than I thought but most of the crowd is settling their bills and heading out to watch the fireworks, leaving only a few of us. 

As usual, nearly everyone on the deck is coupled up, but when I walk over to the water cooler I see an attractive woman sitting by herself. I smile and she gives me a big, warm smile back. Well that’s nice, I think, but she’s probably waiting for someone. But when I go to sit down with my drink, I see her start to talk to a guy sitting by himself a few tables away from her. He has a full beard and a baseball cap. He also has a dog. 

By the time my food comes they are laughing and chatting like old friends. His dog barks wildly at every other dog that approaches the deck. “She’s just saying hello,” the man says every time. I can’t make out much of their conversation but I hear him say that he’s in real estate. She’s new to the neighborhood, and fairly new to Portland. I hear them talk about paddle boarding. They look like a good match. Even if I had a dog, I can’t compete with real estate and paddle boarding, not to mention that beard, which is full and lustrous. I can only hope that the cap is hiding a case of male pattern baldness, though I know that wouldn’t make a difference at this point. 

I take my trusty sketchbook out for company but my heart’s not in it. I tell myself this is a good opportunity to practice not spiraling down into self-hatred and misery about how alone I am, how long I’ve been alone, how the older I get the chances of this changing grow ever slimmer. It’s so easy to chastise myself for my cowardice. I should have gone right up to her when I got my drink, talk to her before that irresistible canine spell could take hold. But I couldn’t do it. I am convinced that no woman wants anything to do with me. While this might not be true, it has been many years since I’ve seen any evidence to the contrary.

“I need to get a dog,” the server says to me.

“Same here,” I say. “But I like cats better.”

“Me too,” he says. “But, you know.”

The new friends order another drink and I finish mine and head back up the hill. In an empty parking lot, a gorgeous young woman and a man who looks like her father are fiddling with an automatic ball-throwing machine that their dog is nosing warily. The girl is twitchy and holding her limbs at odd angles, like she’s on something. Dog toys and balls and various bits of throwing apparatus lie scattered across the parking lot. 

At the top of the hill, the lost dog signs grow more desperate, hanging from every telephone pole. The sky is nearly dark. Soon the fireworks will start and all the dogs I saw tonight will be whimpering under their owners’ beds. I wonder where the lost dog will hide, who will comfort him as the world around him explodes.

Clean Towels

        It’s the day before Independence Day and the second Revolutionary War has been won. After decades of fighting, the noble rich have finally thrown off the shackles placed on them by the filthy poor. For us huddled masses, it’s all pretty disheartening, but I have the day off tomorrow and am on my way to a backyard barbecue. As I sit on the bench at the bus stop, I look at the arrival time on my phone. It keeps leaping around, getting longer and shorter as some unseen force impedes the vehicle’s progress. A man on the corner shows a cardboard sign to the traffic. I don’t bother to read it. I used to be interested in these signs, in all the different ways people ask for help, the various kinds of lettering they use, but I can’t look anymore. 

        A teenage girl sits next to me, thumbs skipping across the screen of her phone. There is suddenly an explosion behind us, followed by another, and another. It seems early for fireworks –the sun is still high in the sky. I turn around to look and see puffs of smoke in the air above the bridge. The booms go on for a few minutes. 

        “What was that?” the girl asks uncertainly. She doesn’t have an accent I would guess she’s Pakistani.

        “Oh, somebody getting ready for the fourth,” I say.

        “But that’s not until tomorrow,” she says, sounding confused.

        Just then there is a crash right in front of us. An old hatchback truck crammed with junk has spilled a pile of metal shelves out of its open hatch. The truck speeds through the intersection then pulls over. Fortunately, the car behind it brakes before it hits the shelves, and I walk out in front of it, holding up my hand up. The girl runs out after me and we both gather up  the shelves. The words CLEAN TOWELS are written on a piece of masking tape on one of them. We carry them to the sidewalk and the driver of the truck comes and grabs them without a word. 

        

        The girl and I sit back on the bench. 

        “Lucky that didn’t go through somebody’s windshield,” I say. 

        “Yeah. Pretty scary,” she says. The bus comes and I gesture for her to get on first then she does the same to me and I insist and she says no then we both try to step on at the same time and laugh. As we drive off I look at the guy on the corner and finally decide to read his sign. He’s crayoned an American flag next to the words WAR VETERAN ANYTHING HELPS. I wonder if he knows that the real war is just beginning. 

The Lew Welch Memorial Expressway

I wake up beside the highway. Above it, rather. Over the past year I’ve learned the rhythms of its traffic the way someone living beside the sea learns the patterns of the tide. The traffic never stops on the 405 and its many arteries, though it does slow down at night. The poet Lew Welch ranted about the insidiousness of highways in a letter he mailed from a house one block from here that a few years later was razed to build this very road. If it was still there, I would be able to see the roof from my bedroom window. Despite all the changes to the city, I like knowing that many of the buildings he would have walked by are still standing, including this one. 

The sun has not yet crept around the corner of the building so I’m a little chilly as I sit on the balcony with my coffee. The sparrows vanished last week; I miss their frantic chirping, though I never caught more than glimpses of their beaks. I do my puzzles and read the news, even though I know I shouldn’t. I should be protecting myself from the constant barrage of horrifying updates to the story of our country’s plummet into madness. It’s  rush hour and the traffic light on the ramp is helping to stagger the traffic speeding toward the tunnel that cuts through the hills. 

Last week my mother and I drove through that tunnel on the way to the zoo. She was in town to visit and she said the two things she wanted to see were my new (to her) apartment and the baby elephant. Tula-Tu is four months old; I’d never seen an elephant so young, and while it’s always depressing to see animals in cages, my mother and I were both captivated. It’s a strange experience to stand next to the woman who gave birth to you and watch a baby elephant tuck her trunk into her own mother’s armpit to suckle. 

We had a nice week together. Growing old has not made her bitter and crabby like it did to her own mother, who never was all that nurturing to begin with. I didn’t plan a lot but we managed to pack in a lot. I dragged her along to a program dedicated to the work of a local video artist, which wasn’t great, and a production of Assassins, which was. Assassins is a Stephen Sondheim musical about the people who killed or tried to kill the president. It’s hard to believe there has only been a single botched attempt at eliminating our current president, but the show repeatedly urges us to follow our dreams.

The production was put on by a small local troupe of self-proclaimed marginalized  individuals, all of whom were terrific. They performed in the black box theater at Reed College. Lew Welch went to Reed, along with his friends and fellow Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. I wonder what they would have thought of the play, its usual carnival barker narrator replaced by an imposing drag queen Lady Liberty. 

We spent a few days at the coast, staying in a motel in the sleepy town of Rockaway Beach. It was shabby, but it was clean, and it was right on the beach. We had lunch in Manzanita, which is a bustling metropolis by comparison, then went to my favorite spot on the entire coast, Short Sand. I don’t get there often because you need a car. From the parking lot you follow a creek for a mile through old growth forest, where trees sprout from other trees, their roots forming twisted structures that look like portals to the faerie kingdom. It all looks otherworldly. The path ends at a gorgeous cove rimmed with pines and beloved by surfers. 

Welch famously disappeared into the California wilderness with a rifle when he was 44, leaving behind a note.

 

I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it – never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone.

 As I sat next to my aging mother, looking out over the Pacific, I felt grateful that she was still in good enough shape to visit me, to drive to the beach, to walk through the woods to get to this beautiful spot. It has been a hard year, as was last year, as was the year before, as was... The losses keep building up and the planet seems to be spinning faster and faster toward apocalypse. My foot is still fucked up, and as usual I’m aching with loneliness. To cope with it all I’m drinking too much, which, oddly, does not seem to be helping. I’m not ready to give up on this world yet, but if I was, this would be a good place to do so. To let go of this world with the protective arms of the cove encircling us. Juncos twittering in the branches. The sun sparkling on the water. The waves crashing against the sand like the sound of rushing traffic on the freeway. 

For the Cause

It has to be done, I know that,

but God is it boring. Unsavory, of course,

but it’s the boredom that eats away at me.

I stare out at the flies crazing

beneath the ceiling fan, feel like my eyes 

are going to start circling and looping like them 

if he doesn’t finish soon. I’m jerking as hard as I dare;

too fast or too slow and he’ll gripe.

It’s small and flaccid, but I do my best  with the material

as I wait for that final spasm so I can finally 

get some work done. In the meantime, 

I stare at the flies and think about the diagrams,

the lists, the maps, all the scraps of folded paper 

outlining the plan to bring down this gang of rejects

from Monster Island. Some of the information 

is vital –lists of potential allies,

the heights of buildings along various routes,

seating arrangements in the chambers and halls. 

Some of it is more esoteric. Secret sauce recipes

for various fast food items. Sources for exploding

seat cushions. Theories on how to keep a head alive 

once it’s been separated from the body 

so it can still watch and feel as a razor-sharp, 

many-pronged dildo is rammed repeatedly 

into the rectum. Is that really a necessary part 

of the overall scheme? 

There are various schools of thought on this. 

Some fear we will lose focus, as I am right now, 

letting my weary mind daydream about a day 

when a never-ending series of handjobs 

and blowjobs won’t be necessary 

to appease and distract these slobs. 

That day seems so distant, 

but at least this current state of semi-hardship 

is close to coming an end, his cheeks having gone 

from orange to cherry to grape 

as he puffs and groans, sweat matting 

linty cobwebs of hair against his brow. 

Finally, with a little squeak 

his whole body shudders 

and a greasy comet of spunk 

streaks across the room

to splat against the portrait of his daughter 

eying us from the end table. 

Milky tears run down her face 

as he struggles to extract his ass 

from the deep plush. 

It won’t be long now, I want to tell her.

He totters and tugs on his trousers 

and flicks a few bills at me.  

As they flutter to the carpet, 

I go to the bathroom and wash my hands. 

One of the flies follows

and I snatch it from the air with a soapy fist 

and drop it into the sink

where it swirls and swirls before 

being sucked down into the darkness.

I Thought We Were Talking

Sunday morning I wake up and look out the window. On the street below, a figure in s black coat is standing nearly doubled over, frozen in place. This is a common sight these days; dealers have taken to cutting fentanyl with an animal tranquilizer called Xylazine, or tranq, which extends the length of the high and paralyzed the recipient. 

I spend the afternoon riding the bus around. I am sickened by the nastiness of the anti-homeless rhetoric, but today is one of these days when everyone I come across seems fucked up on something or other, and it’s pretty depressing. The ones who aren’t huddled in doorways pace back and forth, muttering and twitching. The city’s once clean streets are now always filled with garbage and food wrappers. Tents are everywhere, but they don’t stay in the same place long. The cops keep doing sweeps so people are always on the move.

As I’m waiting for one of my buses, a man paces back and forth in front of the shelter. It’s a large shelter, with four seats, only one of which is not covered with globs of various liquids. He finally asks me if I saw twenty dollars under my seat. I tell him no but do a cursory check. He walks away, screams something at the sky, then returns and quietly asks if Ive seen twenty dollars. 

I get on the bus and sit down across the aisle from a young man who is talking as if engaged in a conversation, though he doesn’t have a phone or earbuds and no one was responding to him. He is clean cut in a tshirt and pair of shorts. His legs are very smooth, like they have just been shaven, or maybe he just doesn’t have any hair is his legs. From time to time he chuckles to himself, and keeps glancing over at me. I dont make eye contact and don’t pay attention to what he’s saying though I hear him say “The thing you got to understand is he really does love me.” 

I get off at the closest stop to my apartment. It’s a three block walk. At the last minute the young man leaps off the bus and walks beside me as I cross the street, talking the entire time. “You know what I’m sayin?” He asks, and looks at me as if expecting a response. 

“I didn’t know you were talking to me,” I say. 

He laughs and continues to walk alongside me. “I remember you from that place we lived in Milwaukie,” he says. (Milwaukie is a suburb of Portland.) 

“I never lived in Milwaukie.” I say. He seems confused then continues chattering about some upstairs neighbor. His speech is very difficult to follow; the sentences themselves make sense but they don’t seem to connect to form a narrative. 

Instead of continuing on straight ahead, he turns right when I do and crosses the bridge with me. I am starting to feel apprehensive; his demeanor is friendly and he seems harmless, but he obviously has some sort of brain damage, probably caused or exacerbated by whatever controlled substances he is on.

At the other end of the bridge I turn left and cross the street and finally stop. My building is just ahead and I don’t want him to know where I live. He takes a few steps then stops and turns to me, still talking. “Are you following me?” I ask, annoyed. 

“I thought we were talking,” he says, sounding confused and slightly wounded.

“I need to go home,” I say. He immediately turns and starts walking back the way he came. I watch him for a bit, then walk past my building and around the corner to go in the back way. It’s only then that I sheepishly notice how hard my heart is pounding. 

The next morning I look out the window and see a figure in almost the same spot as the one yesterday, standing hunched over with his head bowed, standing completely still as if time as stopped. As if he has turned to stone.