BrooksI have been in transit for a long time, yet at each stop I find I keep arriving at myself. My life has been a series of escapes from Cimas - lately to this place that strikes me as less solid than anywhere else I've been, and as garishly arrayed as bright yellow on jet black skin.
It is here that I meet him.
Easily the terror of the sane, and the bane of the mass of people that move in and out from this great sham-front, he approaches me after fruitlessly rummaging in a nearby bin. He asks me for bread and corned beef and a tall glass of something that must not be water, the original request seamlessly expanding into something like an order off a menu.
I realise how generosity can be a trap for the giver. I chart down my brownie points, giving him time of night until 1:00 a.m. as he fills my ears with his life story and philosophy. Then I leave him and walk back to my house of shadows, opening my eyes beyond sleep to introspection.
Like all new acquaintances, he subsequently alights in a crowd existing not only in the world but in my world. As though one could ignore him! He has no fear. With a forehead of adamant he pushes harder against those who dare wonder aloud about his means of making bread, goading goodly church folk into raw declarations of their prejudices.
The only madness he shows is in his eyes - eyes that seem lit with a strange fire, bespeaking the single-mindedness that makes people like him unpredictable and dangerous.
I, too, am not exempt from being exposed by him. Around him I am left all edges, my convictions and my idealism dashed to pieces, again and again.
In the many 1:00 a.m.s since then he has tried to plumb my real thoughts (as though getting at that could be easy for anyone, even him). He persists, nonetheless, leaving destruction to the planks I guard jealously in my eyes, like the dents in the sides of buses that have felt his anger.
He walks about unfettered because he has no fear: none for the church folk that sentence him to damnation seven times over; not after a million rejections to go up to another car window and demand some loose change; not for the blazing afternoon sun under which he begs if he is to eat; not of the cutting wind sweeping down the dark hills, against which he must make his nightly bed.
And it is into those winds, on this moonlit night, that we talk, with me trying to show him some flaw in the processes of his brutally lucid mind. The wind cuts into my flesh, leaving, as it were, weals - always for me a bittersweet sensation. The wind cuts past my flesh, into my soul, and I realise that I don't regret knowing this man, that, rather, I regret knowing myself too clearly because of him.
- Ryan Brooks
