Touching the Pole

Alex MacLennan

Darren steps onto the grooved plastic floor of the Muni train’s third car and dances awkwardly backwards to avoid a fat woman with an oversized purple sweater and frizzing, snapping hair. He plants his feet widely, feeling for his own weight. His feet are encased in modern, moisture-whicking socks and shoes that are made of thick, black rubber. I will not touch the pole, he tells himself, holding himself doggedly upright. He looks to the grooves on the floor and mouths: I will not react to her hair. Darren is going to the library today.

Darren sways with the first lurching movement of the train, the late-morning light striking his eyes, the dread mounting. In moments, the train will carry him underground. He manages his balance, carefully. He watches the big woman, warily. Darren tries to pin down each yellow-gray curl of her discolored, smokers-teeth hair as if to ensure that no small strand will escape his notice and float toward him like some gossamer emissary of doom.

He hasn’t ridden the Muni in years, but is determined to survive this first, terrifying voyage through the public underground. He is going to the library, the new library at Civic Center. It will be brilliant–sleek and shimmering, a magical land of order rising out of San Francisco’s dirtiest, most dangerous streets. It will be clean.

Years ago, when Darren still worked as a librarian in West Portal, he had read, wide eyed, over the plans for sweeping metal stairs and railings, private offices for the librarians, a soaring, airy atrium, modern ventilation, and a full-time custodial staff. Civic Center is almost unbearably dirty, Darren knows, but the library with its perfect rows of books and blue-faced computers will be very, very clean. And now he is invited, (they have invited all the current and former librarians) for a private tour. Despite everything, despite the impossible terror of this trip, he knows he has to try. Dr. Rowe has told him so.

Darren surveys the other passengers, assessing them for danger, but since he has waited well past rush hour the train is almost empty and people are very still. Do not make eye contact with strangers. I will not make others feel uncomfortable today. Darren notices a younger couple, maybe in their twenties, sitting close together in a cramped, backwards-facing double seat. Her knit green hat belts her head and squeezes a confusion of dark curly hair into her eyes. The man’s hand, as he reaches to brush the hair from her eyes, is small and hairy like a subterranean rat, and intermittently covered to the knuckles with a scuffed orange leather coat. His coat matches the seats of the Muni. I will not tell him not to touch her, Darren promises himself. I will not tell him about the germs.

Darren has been in trouble in the past for telling people about germs, for approaching them, goggle-eyed and insistent, with urgent warnings about their doom. He stands perfectly rigid with the motion of the train and imagines himself to be a surfer in a movie, closing his eyes in order to breathe, trying to ride the nauseating swells. He can’t keep his eyes closed too long for fear someone might approach. He can only shut out the world, expelling his breath harshly through his nose, for seconds at a time. He has to breathe in the world and its germs. He has to look it in the face.

At least that’s what Dr. Rowe had said, and he wants to believe it is true. I will not be afraid of the world, Dr. Rowe had made him repeat. Sitting in the therapist’s office, cheap pillows and wan plants struggling against the free clinic’s blue linoleum swell, Darren had heard Dr. Rowe’s admonition, and chanted his new mantra over and over, and over again. His shoes arranged on six squares of toilet paper, the toilet paper arranged in two neat strips of three next to three, protecting his feet from the wan, stubbled rug. I will not be afraid of this world. I am of it and can breathe it in. I will not be afraid of this world. I am of it and can breathe it in. I am not afraid of this world, he repeats to himself conspicuously, realizing suddenly that he is speaking out loud.

Holding his lips very still he repeats, I am of it, and can breathe it in.

A sudden stop forces his hand, yanking him by the back of his neck like his mother used to, and throws him into that purple swathed woman, that fleshy monster with too many bags and spittle in her pink-drawn lips. He swells against her briefly, her rough baggage and potato-sack flesh, and then rights himself and steps away. He leans back away from her as she tromps down the two steps to the street, smiling. Darren does not quite manage to smile back, though he comforts himself that the corners of his mouth, spittle-free, turned upwards when she said "goodbye." I will not judge her without reason. This is a new one, he realizes, as two more people exit the train. He even came up with it himself.

The couple is still in their seat, one of her legs is up over his lap, and they are both wearing leather pants that Darren doesn’t think people really wear anymore. He’d certainly never had a pair – and hers, which are bloody red, have shining, faded stretches where her legs fill and rub against them. I will not think about her skin. One very large man gets on at the sliding doors nearest him. Another, small and blonde, boards farther down.

The man stands in his black suit in the center of the aisle, right next to Darren, and breathes huge breaths through a mouth that pants like a dog. Darren imagines the man’s muggy breath, and it is almost as if he can actually see the tiny bits of hot dog and bun, the tiny bits of white onion and green relish trapped between his teeth. He imagines the fat pink tongue and saliva bulging behind the thin lips and black mustache of this huge man named....I will not make assumptions about people I do not know. I will not imagine germs where I cannot see them. I will not be afraid of this world. I am of this world and... The man coughs. A thick, wet cough that fills all the air in the car with noise and horrible droplets that catch the yellow light. The man chuckles and wipes his hand on his arm, leaving a slick of something on his black sleeve. Darren puts his head down, fumbles into his pocket for the chalky surgical glove he had promised himself he wouldn’t use, struggles it onto his left hand and snaps it at his wrist. It is like ants are crawling over his skin, their sharp toes leaving tiny spikes in his cheeks, the edges of his eyes. His eyes are watering. He is sweating. He grabs the pole so that he can close his eyes and disappear.

I will not touch the... he wants to begin.

Instead, I will not be afraid of the world.

He stands there, head down, holding the pole through the waves and currents of the Muni’s movements, looking up only to gauge the movements of the other riders on the train. The huge man disembarks and, at first glance, the train seems emptier. Darren quickly realizes, however, that the train is no emptier, that its passengers have simply parted in two ellipses around him where he stands with his chalky glove and mutterings, and around the small blonde man who had boarded one stop before.

This new man is wearing a brown corduroy jacket with sleeves that don’t cover his narrow, knobby wrists. His hands are curled inward on himself. His chin is tucked into his chest, soft downy hair resting on his head or floating with the static of the dry air around him, and his eyes are small and puffy like a newborn gerbil in a cage. Head down, he is shuffling up to and into different passengers, attempting some kind of a coddled hug, and causing person after person to back away with soft, uncomfortable looks in their eyes. He might be twenty-three.

Darren can’t help watching him, this opposite entity who needs and craves touch as strongly as Darren shuns it. I will not run away, he tells himself sternly, from this little man with his scruffy yellow whiskers who looks like a child or cherub in dirty jeans. He is wearing soft looking green sneakers with yellow stripes. Darren watches with mounting anxiety as the man moves his way through the train, the savvier passengers having already moved out of his range and into full seats, taking refuge in the company of less disturbing strangers whom minutes before they had purposefully ignored. No one appears to be malicious. This person is clearly an innocent and almost filled with light, but no one wants him to touch them, no one wants to be asked to connect. Darren has begun to sweat – something he hates to do – and can feel the warm damp of his armpits, his underwear, the arches of his feet. He will have to shower at least three times when he gets home.

This ride isn’t working. It isn’t getting better, he thinks as the shuffling, childlike man comes closer. He wants to back away but can’t bear to remove his gloved hand from the pole, his tenuous, prophylactic hold on safety. The library feels impossible, and, impossibly far away. The small man never looks up, just steps sideways into each person’s radius, trying to fold himself into their chest and rest his head on their shoulders. Each person steps away. Darren watches it all with a detached fear, the man’s soft ricochet toward him. He has totally left himself behind, is watching the unacceptable, inconceivable insertion of another human being into his immediate proximity, watching through his own reflection in the blackened windows of the train.

Suddenly, the man is in front of him, and the train, the whole glittering, fractured world is pulled off its track. Suddenly, the man is there.

Darren feels his arms lift as if he had been pushing them against a door, or as if they are being pulled open by an invisible puppeteer’s strings. He tries to resist, denies the enfolding movement of his arms. Feels this thin blonde bird of a man curl himself into his own barren chest. Feels his heart speed to a place where he thinks it might explode. Feels the man’s soft hair brush his chin like feathers and imagines he can see a golden shimmering of light. He has lost all connection to the pole.

Darren wants to shout or to push the man away: Don’t touch me! His mind screams but it does not reach his mouth. His eyes, he is sure, are screaming uselessly for help. The leather man and his girlfriend, an older Chinese man with paper blotting a cut on his chin, two dark-skinned children with a shopping bag as tall as they are – all studiously ignore his silent plea.

Then, an utterly new voice inside him speaks. I will not be afraid. It is a softer voice, and he can hear the echo in his young man’s head. He is as afraid as I am, Darren thinks, and realizes that his arms have curled around the young man’s back, this young man’s back that feels like a starving dog’s. He is shocked to find his own chin dipping and sweeping across the cool, thin hair. The pale corduroy feels right under his fingers, and realizing this, he lets himself gently stroke the man’s ribbed back. He realizes that the corduroy is just a fabric that looks dirty, that he can’t actually feel any germs. He settles his back against the pole.

Darren leans into the boy’s head and breathes in one deep, fresh-washed-blonde-hair breath. The hair smells like being a child. The young man just smells so good.

They ride like that, hugging, through four more stops, passing Darren’s stop at Civic Center, riding until every other passenger leaves the train and new, outbound passengers begin to board. Darren feels frozen in a transparent crystal, safe and entirely removed from time. He can’t look at himself too closely, or he knows the illusion will pass. The new passengers make wary circles around them when the man shifts for the first time since Darren began to hold him, turns in his space, and walks off the train.

Slowly, Darren follows, stepping at the last possible moment through the quiet shushing of the doors. He enters the pale light of the underground platform like a blind man testing a new cane, and finally, tenderly, pulls off the glove. He doesn’t know what has just happened, or who the man was. With great care, he tosses the spent glove into a battered green trashcan, from what he hopes is a distance of precisely three feet away.