The Simple Man I am at home here, in the dream where the sky and the ground come together, under my skin and run through me like blood. --Elaine Neil Orr The simple man lived in a single room in a mostly abandoned part of the city. He woke early every day and walked, talking to everyone--though few replied-- and collecting interesting junk which he carried a few blocks or miles and put down, to pick up something else--another piece of interesting junk, which he carried awhile and abandoned as well. And so he spent his days walking and collecting things, moving things around. By the time he got home in the evening he was usually empty-handed and content. He had no other work and he had no friends. What money he had--and he didn’t have much--came from a job he’d held many years before, when he wasn’t quite so simple. At night he ate soup from a can, and then he sat in his favorite chair and started counting out loud, as high as he could before he fell asleep, as dusk or night filled the room and sometimes the musician who lived upstairs would hear him counting as he climbed to his apartment, carrying his nightly bag of groceries, happy to be home so he could practice the tunes he’d been thinking all day. The simple man’s door was always half open, even in this run-down funky neighborhood, and the musician could hear the counting, which always made him think of some fundamental rhythm he’d like to try someday, that went on and on like air goes in our lungs and out and in, out and in, on and on. He’d unlock the dozen locks on his door, open the kitchen window for the air and start cooking elaborate one-man dinners, with bebop on the stereo. Then he’d pick up his instrument and start to play, scales for the first half-hour, then chords and melodies, and finally improvisations late into the night which no one else but the simple man heard through his counting, though the musician dreamed women were listening, the women he admired as he walked around carrying dresses and flowers and desserts all day, all over the city, invisible in his work as any man can be. He never took the subway because it hurt his ears, so he walked many miles, watching things and thinking music. And then one day there was this one girl-- he called her a girl though she was really a woman-- who’d heard him play on the street once, at Bryant Park, mid-afternoon one quiet Saturday, who’d stayed a long time watching him, watching his fingers and the way he moved his hands up and down the neck of his instrument, the way he leaned into the melody he played. She’d put a ten-dollar bill into the hat, along with a scrawled phone number which he hadn’t had the nerve to call for a week at least or maybe two--and then when he had called a gruff male voice had barked yeah what--and he hadn’t known her name, so he couldn’t ask for anything, so he only said excuse me and hung up. Saturday he carries his guitar from corner to corner--for money, sure, but mostly to hear how he sounds in the air, to see if he can stop people for a moment. He never talks to anyone, really, not in the way he wishes he could. And he never plays in clubs. He’s never had a band. Sometimes at night he plays along with bebop records--always bebop, though he has a much more mellow style, quiet, a style that charmed her, that woman he often thinks about, who lives somewhere else, who was only visiting the family she feels mostly estranged from, who happened to be walking to the library that morning she saw him, who fell in love with him a little just seeing him play, who sometimes feels the need to suffer for love, who takes the train now across miles of suburbs to Grand Central Station, gets out and walks on 42nd street to where she saw him, then sits in the park and waits. She is so beautiful, man after man can’t walk by without sitting down to look at her. The brave ones ask if they can buy her a drink. But she says no, she’s waiting for someone. Of course. And as she sits there surrounded by pigeons and suitors the simple man walks by carrying a suitcase he found outside Penn Station that morning. He kneels on the bright green grass and opens the suitcase to free a small kitten which runs away from him, toward the pigeons which burst up a moment, then land unafraid. The young woman is indignant when she sees the simple man walk quickly away, leaving that kitten to fend for itself, chased now by a little girl in a pink party dress whose mother says no and no and yes, I guess so. It looks clean enough. The woman follows the simple man home, through winding streets and dark alleys--she doesn’t know quite why. And when she gets to his apartment she follows him upstairs to see where this strange man lives, what he does there. After all, she’s studying to be a journalist or a social worker or a psychologist at her college. As she climbs up the stairs after the simple man, calling hello hello hello behind him the love of her life bounds down the stairs toward her, instrument in hand, whistling bebop, thinking chord progressions and melodies. They pass each other without recognition, like breath and wind. It will be years before they meet again. Down at the Docks You find yourself rolling loaded dice in an old boat, down in the cave where the crewmen sleep. Fish seem to swim in the air around you, attracted, you imagine, to your voice. They dart away at the sharp sound of the dice and hang as shadows, part of the darkness. The men pretend to pay you what they owe you and then they pretend to go to sleep. She was buying a flank of fish when you emerged from belowdecks, black suit and dark glasses slightly steamed, pockets bulging. Her hair was on fire. The fish she was pointing to still flapped on the dock. It had to be fresh, you heard her explain, she was having the man she had decided to love as no other to dinner for the first time, tonight. You whispered to your sleeve, but for the first time in your life, he didn't reply. Sailors were swimming around the boat now, diving down for the coins you threw into the water to impress her, but she never so much as glanced your way. Her fillets squirmed in their wrapping, in her purse, as she walked up the dock and disappeared. Lost in your loneliness, you never noticed as the boat you were standing on started slowly to burn, down in its belly, where you had won the pebbles you now flicked into the harbor, one by one. Smoke started rising through the deck, and when the sailors and fish pushed the boat into the current, fish of fire were leaping from the floor. You have forgotten how to swim. You are reluctant to take off your clothes lest she smell the smoke, turn and see your naked body, such an unimpressive sight. There is something you like about this hopeless situation. You decide finally simply to burn.