leave it here,” and set the lunch box just outside the perimeter of a circle of pigeon waste. “It has enough calories to keep you going for twenty-four hours.” He continued to squat. “It’s cold out here, you know,” he said. “You’re going to need more than just that sweatshirt.”
“Fuck him,” he replied.
The young man looked around, but there was no one else there. Finally he stood and walked away.
“Hey!”
The young man turned. The Client was holding the lunch box. “You have me confused with someone interested. Come back here and get this.”
The young man returned. If the Client refuses to accept the offered meal, gently encourage him to reconsider, while maintaining the appropriate distance. Do not insist if he continues to refuse. Always remain courteous.
“Are you sure you don’t want it?”
“The makers of our Constitution,” he replied, “undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, conferring, as against the Government, the right to be left alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.”
The young man looked at him. “I’m not with the government,” he said. “I’m with Food Bank America.”
The lunch box remained suspended in the air between them. The young man took it and walked away.
Then the other started to howl with a kind of primal senescence. The pitch rose above Tim’s pride and forced him to call the young man back a second time. He took the lunch box and, in exchange, offered him a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet. The money was a condition for taking the food, which the confused young man, more than surprised by the amount in the Client’s possession, finally agreed to accept, after much protest, as a donation to the cause.
On the state highway, drivers came around the bend erratic and unmindful. These were roads no one expected a pedestrian to walk down. The electricity poles all had a lean to them. A carload of teenagers passed by honking as if he were a night at the prom.
Clouds of broken granite covered the sky. He passed the Village Dodge and the Wonderland Farms Storage. He walked past rain-bleached boxes of cigarettes and what might have been the carapace of a sea turtle. He didn’t believe he was anywhere near the ocean.
He stood at the customer-service desk of a Barnes and Noble waiting for the woman at the computer to free up. In the meantime he bent to a knee and gingerly untied his shoestring, which had been double-knotted and made tight by water. The blisters of frostbite on his fingertips and the lost sensation in his hands made the action crude and slow. He pulled off the wet sock and saw that his remaining toes were also blistered and his foot was as white as the pallor of his hands. Removing the shoe momentarily eased the pulsating swelling caused by so much walking. His feet were like two engorged and squishy hearts.
He rolled up the cuff of his chinos to inspect the cut on his leg. There was weeping from the abscess. A halo of soft pink tissue surrounded it. The calf had ballooned. He had been confusing its stench for the MasterCard T-shirt. He removed dirt with his fingernail—not dirt, it turned out, but a trapped bug.
“Can I help you?” asked the woman.
He sprung up. “I’m looking for a book on birds.”
“Any particular title?”
“Something I can use to identify them in the wild.”
Name a bird and master the world. Reveal nature’s mystery and momentarily triumph over it. The fleeting containment within the mind of spotted flight, which has no name until you give it one. That was something the other could never do. He should buy a book on butterflies and trees, too. Trees would include flowers and shrubbery.
The woman stepped away from the help desk and quickly started on her way to Nature. He walked behind her with his cuff still rolled, holding his sock and shoe. It was only when she arrived at the section and turned to look at him that she saw his exposed leg, swollen like a goiter in the middle of the calf.
“Oh my God,” she said.
He read books on birding in the café. He warmed himself with cups of coffee and replenished on the baked goods under the display case. Then he was forced to move as quickly as possible through the store to the men’s room, where he remained a long time. A manager came in and said generally, “Is everyone okay in here?”
Eventually