Reb tosses up popcorn and tries to catch it in his mouth. He connects one time in three. The theater’s mostly empty. Movie theaters are mostly empty these days.
They’re watching a Tom Hanks’ movie, Cast Away. Tom’s plane has splashed down in the Pacific and he lollygags on an island, alone. A beard covers his face, hiding that peculiar slice of mouth. He’s made friends with a volleyball he names Wilson because that’s its brand. He slaps together a ludicrous raft and pushes off from the island with Wilson, his mascot, tied to a hunk of crap. Wilson washes away in a Mighty Storm and Hanks, absurdly fit in a Christ-like loincloth, rolls around on the raft and cries.
And cries.
And cries.
And cries.
Jenny snickers, then belches a restrained hoot that erupts into guffaws. Reb joins in. They keep it up while Hanks cries for five minutes, until a dissolute patron screams, “Shut the fuck up, fuckin shitheads.”
Outside, on First Friday night, they poke through Olde City art galleries thriving in 2nd St. storefronts where wholesale businesses thrived for over a century, then died after World War II. Back then, the area had hustled and bustled during the day, lay dead as Lenin at night. Now the vibe is the opposite.
“I’ve been to Altoona,” Reb says as they laze out from an exhibit of photos of tattoos.
“Nobody goes to Altoona.”
“I wanted to see if there is an Altoona.”
“Is there?”
“More or less.”
“What am I supposed to do?” she asks after blocks of trit-trot silence.
“About what?”
“I need to make a difference. To help make life work right. Or better, anyway.” She kicks a composite ball of trash into the street.
They stroll north through the emptiness of Independence Mall, an emptiness like the city her father had told her of, decades before, the one that died at 5 pm and could not be roused until 9 the next morning.
My father.
Forget it.
But she can’t. Not meaning to, she lets loose on Reb the gray outline of her father – distant to her, distant to anything except math and her own almost unlimited ability to do math.
Where is he, her father?
Reb nods an appreciation as distant as the man she’s describing. Jenny can let her guard down with Reb, but once it’s let, it lands with a blop in the mud. Is this togetherness?
As it’s been after every date (not exactly dates… figs?) they have sex in Reb’s condo loft on Spring Garden St. near 4th. It’s not a trendy loft, not a down-and-dirty loft, just a former factory with immense multi-paned windows, a middle-of-the-road loft with Home Depot lampshades hatted on trash-picked lamps, and framed Old Masters hung on badly deplastered brick walls.
A tufted bedspread. Dynamite sex (of course).
Then they walk again, two miles, three, past the art museum, across the Spring Garden St. bridge, it’s rumpled corrugated siding featuring the painted faces of previous walkers, celebrated by the city’s street-mural agency.
The last edge of the sun, ahead and to the right, sinks into the soup of a late August evening.
Reb’s arm sags on her shoulder, a yoke. He squeezes. “You know, you kind of run off sometimes, just do stuff without thinking about it.”
“I don’t think about all the things most people do, and I don’t think about them the way people want me to think about them. This bridge is creepy, all boxed in. You can’t see what’s under it. It doesn’t stop and it goes around a curve.”
“I’m here to protect you.”
Jenny shakes loose his arm. “Why would I need you to protect me? People don’t mess with me. I sneer them flat.”
“I’ll bet.”
Five steps, ten. “What are we doing anyway?” Jenny asks.
“Walking.”
“Us. What are we doing?”
“Walking.”
“What if I want to run or climb? Huh?”
“I could beat you.”
“The fuck you could. You’re always walking. Even if you ran you’d be walking.”
“And even when you’re walking you’re running. Ever occur to you to slow down?”
“No.”
“Might be it could do you good.”
“Christ on a fucking slice of toast. That’s it? ‘Could do me good.’ Maybe Buddha or Yahweh could do me good?” She plucks a handful of nothing from the air, changes the subject, more or less. “You think religion serves a purpose?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t you have a fucking answer that uses your mind?”
“What’s with you?”
“Nothing’s with me. Being alive… something has to matter. Doesn’t it?”
“My so-called mind isn’t going to mess with that.”
“I need to do something, find a way to change things.”
“I know somethin.” The voice is behind them, thin and raspy, squeezed through sandpaper rollers.
Jenny doesn’t turn. “Where do you keep coming from? Don’t follow me.”
Reb turns. “Who’s that?”
Jenny waves her hand behind her butt. ”Go the fuck away.”
“You should work in a hospital,” rasps the voice.
“Everybody wants me in a hospital! I’ll put you in a hospital, fucker! Get out of my life.”
“Who is he?”
“Filth.”
“Filt,” Filt corrects, “like filter.” The air’s gone too gray to see his lost eyes.
Reb, hands up, moves to block him off.
Jenny turns Reb back the way they were walking. “Leave him alone.”
Reb grabs her arm. “What is this?”
“It’s the voice of doom, OK? Let go.”
Filt rocks on his heels. “Doom’s OK sometimes. Doom don’t have to be bad.”
Jenny wrenches herself from Reb’s half-assed grip. “This shit happens when I’m around. It’s like I’m a jinx.”
“Jinxes don’t exist,” Reb declaims.
“I don’t exist? I don’t fucking exist?” Jenny slams her toe into his ankle in cadence to her anger. Then she runs, a streak dissolving into the evening air turned to silt between the bridge’s corrugated panels.
Reb, inches taller, lights out after her. He can’t get close.
lickhaven 