Tracks

Because there was nothing left of me, I went with him. The world accumulated history as each second passed, but I sloughed it off as though my body were coated in wax. I wanted to remember nothing, foresee nothing, there was nothing I wanted to know about myself. But him: a scar ringed his left eye, a white circle with red edges, and a drop of blood floated in his blue iris. “My father,” he said wearily. “A broken Coke bottle.” That was enough for me—almost too much—and I followed him from Port Authority to a taxi without further questions.

I had run away, arrived here only hours before; in a month I’d be sixteen. I’d abandoned my past, poured it from my life like liquid from a bottle. I ignored what I already knew—that a bottle is never as important as what fills it—and I also tried to ignore the details that began to pile up in me like separate ingredients waiting to be mixed together. Outside the car, grime covered everything, blurring edges like a soporific; X’s flashed on marquees, announcing something that I knew to be at the center of my situation. Inside, the boy from Port Authority shivered, sweated, crossed his arms over his stomach. “God, I need a fix,” he said. Though I didn’t know what he meant, I didn’t ask. I just said, “Me too.” He looked at me then, and I returned his stare. His eyes mocked me, told me I’d messed up, forced me to look down. That’s when I saw his hands. Red lumps deformed every knuckle, and at the center of each lump was a tiny brown scab; a few oozed pus. History was revealed there, a process of decay that had happened one bump at a time. Revolted and fascinated, I stared until he lifted his shirt and folded his hands into the concave shell of his stomach. Looking up, I saw he’d turned to the window. His eye was hidden, but I could see part of the scar that ringed it. It didn’t seem so horrific compared to his hands. Even under cloth, they made me want to shudder. And then I realized he’d hidden them under his shirt: he was ashamed of these wounds, and I suddenly knew that, unlike his eye, they were self-inflicted. It was something I’d never thought before: that people might hurt themselves on purpose.

The taxi lurched forward like a time machine, momentum claimed my attention. We gathered speed recklessly until the car overflowed with it, and because it’s easy for me, I forgot everything except the street, which slapped at us like a swung belt. Then the car slammed into a hole and bucked out of it at an angle, and when the squeal of the tires had left my ears and we were again under control, I found myself clasping the boy’s arm. But as soon as I felt him between my fingers, so thin, so weak, my grip softened, and then I was merely holding him, not holding on to him. A thought seized me: I wanted to protect him. I wanted to protect him because, though it’s easy to forget things, it’s also hard not to remember. I was remembering my mother: her thinness, her fragility, her weak­ness, and death. I would have remembered more, but he grabbed me, my hand: my right hand. He pulled it off his arm and held it, flipped it like a pancake. “What’s up?” he said, “what’s with your hand?” More memories flooded my brain, and they escaped through my mouth: “My father,” I said. “The sole of his boot.” The only answer I could give, as free of history as possible, it still contained a force that stunned me, propelled by the weight of everything I’d lost, and hinting, somehow, at things I had yet to gain.

He looked at me for a long time, and then he looked at my hand again, and then he looked at his own hand, which now held mine. It was pretty ruined. His, I mean. He leaned forward then, told the driver to stop. As soon as we had, he pulled me out. “Run,” he yelled, already backing away. The driver hopped out of the cab. “Hey, somebody got to pay for the ride,” he called, but the boy drowned him out. “Beat it, John!” he yelled. “Make tracks! Get lost!” At this, he took off. The taxi driver came around the car. I could see he wasn’t going to help me, that no one would help me. That’s when I started running. I tried to follow the boy’s directions: I tried to get lost. But though I easily lost my way in that long-ago city, the boy from Port Authority had stirred up something I would never escape: memory and emotion, and thoughts of people I could never possess. History.

 

I know now that the boy from Port Authority was the first man I ever loved, and the last person I ever trusted. I know now that it’s always been that way with me: I will love a man at the slightest sign of weakness, but I will never trust anyone, because trust makes you weak. For years I searched for him, around the Square, in Port Authority, and I always double-glanced at any thin sandy-haired boy I passed on the street, seeking, but never seeing, the scarred left eye. I thought I might see his picture in the paper, in a notice announcing his death. You could tell with him, not just from his hands, not just from his face or from the drop of blood that was melted into the blue of his eye, but from the way he held himself, just as my mother had. With people like that, it’s not a question of when they’ll die, but a question of how, and how soon. And though his eye haunts my stories—it most resembles a bull’s-eye, a target waiting for an arrow—and though I’ve seen hands on many people destroyed even more than his by track marks, still, what I feel most when I think about him are arms, so thin that the bones seem pliant. The arms encircle a stomach, trying to contain a destructive urge that will not be held back. What that was, for him, is easy to say: heroin. What it is for me—as it was for my mother—is harder to say, not because the answer is any less obvious, but because, after everything that’s happened, it makes no sense: love. And trust.