Bangladeshi Pillow

              Edison sits still with one elbow on the table and the side of his face mashed into his hand.  The wait staff dances around him like ballerinas with trays held slightly above their shoulders and the scent of Thai food escaping into the air.  He takes notice of their navigation, their balance, their grace.  He takes notice of the Thai aroma homogenizing with the light fragrance of dandelion exuding from the centerpiece.  He takes notice of the exact distance between the flowers and candles on each table as if they were measured for uniformity.  When all he noticed comforts him, he drifts away.  His mind carries him from the refined surrounding where crystal chandeliers hover from the vaulted ceiling, and the linen table coverings blend into matching laced napkins.  The pluck of harp swims underneath the voices sotto voce and is eventually locked from Edison’s thoughts. 

         He thinks of a man he saw on the train earlier that day.  Edison watched him squeeze just inside the closing doors.  The car was full of standing passengers; not a single seat remained.  The other passengers braced themselves, not he.  The train jerked, and most shifted, but he stood frozen and unbothered by the takeoff.  The Scandinavian wore a white sleeveless shirt that was barely long enough to reach the waist of his jeans. 

         “You take my seat, ma’am?” a dark skinned Caribbean woman yelled over Edison’s head, as he continued to watch the man.  “I know there be seats here for the elderly, but don’t know where they go.  They just walk right out of here; they walk right out of here, they did.”  Her eyes had never left Edison. 

         “Thank you.”

         “Welcome,” she screamed once she shifted towards Edison to make room for the elderly woman.  That scream snapped Edison’s attention from the man.

         “Pardon me,” he awakened from his hypnosis.  “Why don’t you take my seat, then?” Edison begged the Caribbean woman once he realized he was sitting in a seat reserved for the elderly.

         “Hmmf!” she breathed and took his seat still annoyed.

         The train stopped at Times Square, and the doors opened.  The man was standing in front of the entrance and was the first to get out.  The entire car had emptied in just a few seconds; simultaneously, the breath from Edison’s lungs fled mightily.  The man reappeared at the front of a short line of boarding passengers.  A strangled Edison inhaled finally when he saw him.  The man sat directly across from Edison, even though many empty seats remained.  Edison took notice of his shoulder length blond hair that behaved and stayed clear of his chiseled unshaven jaw.  Sky blue eyes struck Edison’s stare, but he didn’t break away; he held on like a Rottweiler with resisting flesh trapped in its teeth.  The man smiled and looked away from Edison.  His Scandinavian legs flared out through the aisle, and one of his tan utility boots was flanked by Edison’s black tasseled loafers.  He closed his eyes and leaned his head back into the window indentation, and he reached under his shirt to scratch his chest, exposing his hirsute hardened  abs.  The train stopped a few more times, and only they were left in the car. 



         “Take my bags, sweetie,” Gretchen orders the hostess.  “I’m with the Wost party.  Point me in the right direction, and I’ll show myself the way,” she stammers slightly after locating her fiancé across the dimmed room.  Gretchen giggles at his staring into nothingness.  Harp began to pluck seemingly more quickly as she bangs down the aisles.  The ballerinas gang way to her majesty.  She sits down and searches through her purse for an electronic calendar.  Edison doesn’t notice her. 



         The Scandinavian opened his eyes and raised his head.  The bottom of his white shirt was still raised to the middle of his tanned stomach.  The bell in the train sounded; the doors opened, and he fled out of the doors.  Edison’s eyes followed him out the door.  He began to get up to chase him instinctively like an unleashed dog, but he suppressed the internecine thought and sat himself back down to behave.  The doors began to close, and large fair skinned hands held the doors completely still.  The doors gave in and reopened.  The Scandinavian looked back into the car at Edison blue eye to blue eye.  Edison dashed between the closing doors after him.  They smashed him, relented a few inches and smashed again, knocking his eyeglasses off his face into a gap between the train and the platform.

         “Don’t hold the doors, man.” 

                Edison escaped the train.

         The angry summer rain surprised and greeted him at the top of the stairs.  He cloaked his head with his battered blazer and continued undaunted.  The Scandinavian had already stopped at a corner bodega and was perusing apples.  Edison watched through blurred vision but never got too close.  He stalked him from a distance but was sloppily conspicuous.  The Scandinavian crossed the street, biting the apple he had carefully chosen.  A bus stopped in front of Edison.

         “Are you getting on?”

         “What?”

         “Are you getting on the bus or not?” the rain bludgeoned the bus driver’s voice.

         “No, no I’m not getting on any bus.  I have to go.”  His last few words were just his thinking aloud.  He ran around the bus, dropping his blazer back into place despite the rain.  He violently oscillated his watery eyes, trying to find the Scandinavian, but he had vanished.

         “No.  I’m not crazy about Thai food; bring me an apple martini, no salt.”

         Edison’s mind balances on the precipice of reality and thought. 



         “Are you with me yet?  You’re going to daydream your life away, my darling.  Hopefully you’ll stay grounded at our wedding long enough to say ‘I do’, but somehow I doubt it.”  She paused and looked at him looking at her wickedly.  A server placed Gretchen’s drink in front of her.  “It’s about time.  This restaurant is going to hell in a hand basket.  The service is even worse than these tacky chandeliers.”

         “Gretchen.”

         “Unfortunately, I cannot stay long.  I have to get back to work on our wedding and the remodeling of your coop.  Speaking of work, it seems I’m the only one who has done any of it today.  I called your office this morning, and your assistant said you hadn’t arrived.”  She looked at Edison to respond.  He did not.  “It was nearly 11am at the time.”

         “Did you say remodeling?” he begins to catch up with her.

         “You are marrying a Vander Veen.”

         “Don’t remind me,” he thinks to himself.

           “I know that the name doesn’t mean anything to you, but you cannot expect me to live in that apartment that looks like it was decorated by some do-it-yourself interior designer from cable TV.  But you’re avoiding my question, lovechild.”

         “What question?”

         “The office, love; why weren’t you there?”

         “I was only there a couple hours.  I took the train to work instead of driving and got caught without my umbrella, so I went back home to change clothes.”

         “You took the subway?  When are you going to stop acting like you’re still poor, doll?”          
                “Well, I drove back.”

         “This drink is horrendous.  You’ll have to go on with me.  I cannot stay.”

                “Gladly,” he thinks to himself.

                “I have an appointment for our invitations.”  She departs.  The harp surrenders to the peace of the restaurant again and plucks softly.

         Lunch doesn’t last long with Gretchen freeing him from the grasp of her nag.  Edison decides not to go back to work after his late lunch.  He does not want to rejoin reality after so much success evading it.  He wanders the busy streets of Manhattan aimlessly after the rainstorm.  The smell of the dissipating humidity reminds him of Ninad.  It has been years since he spoke his name, but he thinks of him almost daily.  His memories of their brief time together console him.  He holds onto his voice, the assuaging way it dismisses sorrow, the closeness the voice creates.  Ninad gave him a sense of inclusiveness he never knew before and still has yet to realize again. 

         Darkness began to loom.  He walks back to the restaurant to get his car from the garage.  “I like my home just the way it is,” he continues to think to himself as he drives home. 



         “Why did you do it?” Ninad questioned his new dormitory mate. 

         “She’s pretty but, but she drives me crazy.  All she talks about is everything she learns in one of her classes.  Yesterday she spent an hour explaining the differences between a bacterium and a virus.  Oh, and the first thing she told me is that bacterium is the singular form of bacteria.  Did you know that?”

         “Actually, I did,” Ninad laughed at Edison.  “I’m in her biology lecture class.”  Ninad climbed down from his top bunk in dishabille and lounged at the foot of Edison’s bunk.  They giggled once more but nothing else was said, so nothing was funny.  They just laughed from happiness.  They laughed from their impassable undefined bond. 

         “It felt like she was spitting in my mouth.”

         “What?” said Ninad.

         “Yeah, this profuse glob of saliva pumped into my mouth when we were kissing.”

         “Going back to my original question then, why’d you do it?”

         “That guy was there watching, and it seemed like the best way to shut him up for good.”
         “You kissed that girl because of that guy?” 

                Edison remained shamefully quiet.

         “Get in bed, man.”  The tenderness of his invitation was stentorian.  Edison was captured by it; he obeyed like a well trained show dog and curled into bed at Ninad’s feet.  “When I first came to this country, my English was poor, and the kids in my class made fun of me.  My teacher asked me to stand in front of the class and tell everyone about my country, Bangladesh.  They laughed even more.  During naptime I lied on my floor mat and cried myself to sleep.”

         “You know how kids are.”

         “When I got home that day, my aunt had a huge smile on her face.  ‘I got a surprise for you, Ninad,’ she sang to me.  She had a package from my mother in Bangladesh.  It was a beautifully embroidered pillow with beads my mother had sewn on for me.  The beads were from the collar of a stuffed poodle I had as a toddler. Then, I told my aunt what happened at school that day.  She reminded me of the courage my mother must have had to send me to the United States without her, and that I had the same courage in me.  I took the pillow to school every day for the rest of the year to remind me of my mother’s strength.”

              After his story there was a long comforting silence.  Edison had closed his eyes to the melody of Ninad’s voice and was nearly asleep but aware.  Ninad climbed up to his bunk and got an embroidered pillow.  “This is the pillow, Edison.”  Ninad handed the pillow to his friend.  “It’s yours now.”



              The officer knocks on Edison’s car window.  He watches Edison’s affect trying to determine if he is drunk.  Edison’s car had been motionless in the middle of New York City traffic while his mind was adrift.  The blocked traffic roared at the car running idle, but it didn’t get his attention.

            “You drunk?” the officer questions looking at him like an alien.

            “Of course not, Officer.”

            “You’re holding up traffic about five blocks back.  Is there a reason you decided to stopped in the middle of a driving lane?”
           
            He scrambles to find anexcuse.  “I was waiting for the light to turn green and didn’t notice that traffic started to move again.”
           
            “Drivers behind you said the light changed at least three times.  Unless you're having a heart attack, get it moving, freak”.

            Edison walks into his apartment still embarrassed of what happened on his way home.  He pours a glass of cheap white wine, loosens his tie, and settles on a brown leather chair next to a clashing gray velvet couch.  He picks up the remote to the Egyptian patterned curtains and exposes the dark room to the panoramic view of Manhattan’s Upper East Side that his high rise owned.  He takes notice of the incipient night then looks into a cavalcade of strip mirrors oddly spaced on the wall.  A man with thinning blond hair stares back at him.  Edison stretches his legs onto the mismatched ottoman and admires their length, and remembers the tone they used to have.  Next to the ottoman sits an old pair of tan utility boots withered from age, not wear.  He picks up the pillow Ninad gave him many years ago and smiles. 



         “It’s yours now,” he recalls the words Ninad used when he handed him the pillow the first time.  “Man, I love the smell of rain in the city.  The only things I can remember from home are my mother and all the rain.” 

                The phone interrupts. 

         “Edison, are you there, love?  You probably are daydreaming.  Anyhow, I’m starting on your place sooner than I anticipated, so if you come home and things look different, you know… tasteful, you will know what happened. 

         “You’re cocaine white paint that powders my walls.  I want to handle you, but I’m afraid to smudge you, smear blemish on you, ruin my perfect ivory beaut.  So, I lie prostrate in lieu a cornea’s distance from you with my eyelids buckled down vigilantly not peeking through.  And I imagine your snowflake view and pretend that two can bask in your hue, and that I could plaster my bare walls, too.”

         The phone rings again.  He does not answer; it goes to his answering machine.

         “Gretchen again.  Have to cancel for tonight, sweet pea; I’m exhausted.”  She manages to break his concentration this time.  He gets up and replays his fiancée’s cold messages a few times, clinching the pillow with a shivering hand, and he finally decides to erase her, not to be interrupted again. 

         He looks into the strips of mirrors, and the Scandinavian smiles back at him.  He was able to truly face himself for the first time since Ninad disappeared.

         He slept well that night; he dreamed insignificantly, non-symbolically.  He dressed for work the next day and decided to catch the train downtown instead of driving.  He made some money on the market that day; that wasn’t unusual.  In fact, everything was peculiarly usual.  Gretchen didn’t call him that day, and he hadn’t noticed.  He hadn’t noticed, not because he was disengaged but because he was engaged with himself for the first time in a long time. He didn’t need to divorce reality to cope with himself and his surroundings, which had grown like voracious weeds, strangling his life as a result of not embracing himself.

         “Mr. Wost, your 2pm appointment is here,” his secretary storms into his office.

          “Why don’t you call me by my first name, Stella?  I call you Stella, and you call me Mr. Wost.” 

                She pauses at the awkwardness of how seriously he spoke of the topic. 

         “Do you even know my first name?”

         “Of course, Edison, I do”

         “Perfect.  I like the sound of that much better.  Cancel my 2pm.  Tell him I fell ill, and I’m dropping him as a client; he’s totally unscrupulous.  I’m going to go have a drink, and I may not be in tomorrow, so cancel everything for tomorrow, too.  Reschedule them all except Doris Klein.  Inform her that this office will no longer service her either.”  He grabs his blazer and hat and hurries past Stella, who was still in shock.  Then he saunters by his 2pm appointment without acknowledging him.

         The short train ride to the West Village was, too, uneventful.  He didn’t notice anything that others could not see.  He saw what others saw:  commuters, panhandlers, teenagers.  None was salient.

         “White wine please,” Edison orders at the bar.

         “Now there’s a man who’s not afraid of what others think.”

                Edison looks down at the inebriated man but said nothing. 

                “What makes you say that?” Edison acknowledges without looking his way.

         “Since college I must have drunk hundreds of beers that I didn’t even want, but I was too afraid to order a glass of wine.  I can’t even stand the taste of beer.  They say you’ll acquire a taste for it. I haven’t yet.  It tastes like cow piss.”

         “You have firsthand knowledge of the taste of cow piss?” Edison breaks.  The music in the bar turned from radio pop to techno that played a loud relentless thump that repeated in computer generated repetition.  The delirious sounds sped up faster, and the bodies in the bar, including the ones sitting, began to rock at its relentless pace.  Then, the voice of Madonna parted the sounds like a celestial knife.  Her voice created a roar in the small Manhattan bar and arms swam wildly in the air.  Edison inhaled the atmosphere and was possessed by something that others around him could feel, too.

         “You like this song?”

         “I’ve never heard it before, but yeah, it’s nice.”

         “You’ve never heard this song before?” he laughs at Edison. 

         “I don’t get out much,”

         “Bartender, take this beer away and bring me a white wine, too.”

         “Now there’s a man who’s not afraid of what others think,” Edison encourages.

          Edison caught a cab back to his high rise on the Upper East Side.  When he enters, he stumbles on table placed just inside the door, which he had never seen.  He looks around the room at all the stuff he had never seen.  The mirrors on the walls were removed, and a pastiche painting he had made in high school was missing.  Finally, he notices the Bangladeshi pillow, too, was gone and that Gretchen manages a final word.