OUT OF EDEN

I woke curled up in near darkness, disoriented and gagging at the reek of spoiled food, sodden cardboard and…was that carrion? Pillowy masses, damp and slippery, yielded and slid beneath me as I tried to sit up and banged my head painfully on some hard ceiling. Clutching my spinning head in pain with one hand while propping myself up on the other, I peered around until I realized that I was…in a dumpster filled with…restaurant waste? I reached up to shove weakly at the ceiling, which groaned upward on its hinges. It took a couple tries to get myself kneeling atop the shifting bags of garbage stably enough to push the dumpster lid all the way open. As it fell against the dumpster’s outer side with a booming clang, the rush of fresh air was a welcome relief. I squinted up at the back side of some brick building against an overcast sky.

Climbing out took all my feeble strength, and caused both my head and stomach to swirl even more intensely. Having finally clambered to the ground, I was too unsteady to do more than half-crawl across the litter-strewn parking space behind what appeared to be the back entrance of some restaurant. Moving made my stomach lurch so badly that, after just a few feet, I had to stop, leaning miserably against the running board of a black Lexus SUV, and wait for my nausea to subside. What the hell had Rain given me? Sadistic bastard.

“Get away from my car.”

My head spun toward the sound, reigniting my stomach. A tall, overweight man with graying hair scowled at me from just inside the restaurant door.

“You hear me?” The man stepped aggressively out into the overcast morning. “I said, get the hell out of here.”

As he started down the restaurant’s back steps, I lurched to my feet, fearing he meant to attack me. I made it only three or four yards down the alleyway, however, before stumbling to my knees again in a patch of tall, prickly weeds at the pavement’s edge, and hurling the contents of my stomach.

“Goddamn drunken shits,” said the man, standing protectively beside his SUV, “I see you here again, I call the cops. Got that? My place ain’t no B&B for little stoners.”

Remind me to come back and burn your place down when I can walk again, I thought as I climbed back onto my feet and staggered further down the alleyway.

Emptying my stomach had helped, a little. My legs grew steadier as I approached the open street. I still felt weak and cotton-headed, but the nausea was gone. Unfortunately the rotten dumpster smell persisted, coming from me, I soon realized, mixed with the clinging odor of vomit. I looked down to find myself wearing the same thrift store clothes I’d met Piper in, now covered in restaurant filth and a spattering of vomit…

Had that been the point, I wondered, of leaving me piled inside that odiferous dumpster, filled with some drug that would make me feel—and act—like someone coming off a bender? To convince anyone watching that I belonged here—had belonged here since well before that boy Anselm was looking for had ever appeared? Hard and dangerous, Rain had warned. I shook my head in chagrin, recalling my glib certainty about how well my new mix of youth and age would surly equip me for whatever he might have in mind.

What could equip anyone for this?

I emerged from the alleyway to find myself on a wide, not entirely unfamiliar avenue in the University District lined with tall, once-elegant apartment buildings whose mostly blank and darkened windows stared down from above shops and restaurants. Ironically, the movie theater we’d come to on the night my other life had ended wasn’t far from where I stood.

It appeared to be much earlier than I’d realized. Even the breakfast places didn’t look open yet, and there was so little pedestrian or automotive traffic that I suspected it must be a weekend. I had completely lost track of the days by now.

So…what was I to do? Where did a filthy, foul-smelling fourteen-year-old boy with no money and no business being here go before other people were even about? Having spent very little time in this part of town, I flipped a mental coin, and headed north along the nearly deserted thoroughfare.

The avenue’s empty restaurants seemed to compete with one another for ethnic edginess and off-kilter décor running from ultra-hip to ultra-raunchy. Tossing up that morning’s delicious breakfast had certainly not left me hungry to replace it—yet—which was just as well until I had a chance to learn where all these alternatives to dumpster dining that Piper had assured me of might be found.

None of the street’s numerous shops were chain outlets of the familiar sort. The dusty, cobweb-cornered display windows of a used book store were filled with dog-eared paperback classics, obscure scientific and political treatises, and random antiquarian treasures in dubious condition. The still night-lit display windows of clothing stores I passed all catered to the tastes of university students; some decked out in glass, chrome, and track lighting trained on trendy, expensive apparel, while others displayed much stranger custom draped on secondhand manikins tangled in Christmas lights and bathed by overhead spots in lurid colors. Between these were pressed sari boutiques, tattoo parlors, head shops, vintage record stores, palm readers, hemp vendors, art film theaters, European bakeries and gelato shops cheek by jowl with health food stores, junk shops and thrift stores far stranger than the one my current outfit had come from. There was even a blackened cavern of a shop called Nocturnal Lullaby, which advertised tarot readings and ‘Haunted City Walking Tours,’ while seeming to peddle nothing but gargoyles, animal skulls, jeweled daggers, and other goth accoutrements. …

Definitely not your average strip mall.

On one tattoo parlor’s display window, stenciled five feet high in red enamel, was the shop’s official emblem—top-heavy crown, trunk, and spreading root ball, almost exactly as it had appeared on all those doors I had been marched through since the previous morning. Coincidence? Possibly. But as I continued down the street, I saw a very similar image at the top of a vegan menu posted under glass beside a restaurant’s entrance. And again, in plaster relief above the doorway of a particularly dark and musty-looking bookstore.

Three blocks later, I passed a large, fairly elegant granite-faced apartment complex called Lothlorien, of all things. Its bronze architectural embellishments were rendered in a style reminiscent of the streamlined, not-quite-Art Nouveau fixtures I’d seen inside The Lady’s seat; and there, once again, in gold leaf on its glass double doors, was what sure looked to me like yet another version of the Tree.

The image just kept turning up, stenciled onto a lamppost, rendered in blown glass inside the display window of a head shop, and spray-painted on several occasions among the tangled graffiti in alleyways and architectural recesses, which I peered into, scouting for possible places to sleep—or hide…or for evidence of lurking trolls.

Could they be this numerous? Despite everything I’d seen and been told during the past few days, that seemed highly unlikely—especially if they were as few and infertile as I’d been led to believe. But, if they were just especially numerous here for some reason, then why had Rain chosen this place to ‘hide’ me?

A place where Anselm would not think of looking, they had said… And where Mikayl’s sons could stumble into me without arousing curiosity… Had I been dumped into a place where they gathered every day to mingle with others of their kind? Hidden in plain sight under the very noses of us Andinalloi? A chill spread up my back as I wondered who or what might be watching me right now from some upper floor window. Recalling Rain’s stern warnings, I continued up the street, silently rehearsing ‘my story’ as the shops and restaurants around me began opening their doors, and people of who knew what stripes started trickling into sight.

Before long the morning overcast burned off, and the avenue went from ghost town to teeming circus. A newspaper machine had informed me by then that it was Saturday. Spring was settling in at last, and it seemed that everyone was coming out to enjoy the sun.

Frat boys in their baggy, rayon jerseys and gym shorts, space-aged tennis shoes and expensive shades passed in herds between breakfast and the barbershop, or ambled in and out of coffee joints with sorority arm-trophies in their tiny skirts and tube tops. Drawn and sober grad students in rumpled jeans and tattered sweaters sipped chai at sidewalk café tables, or wandered in and out of book shops. Old couples ambled at a snail’s pace, turning now and then to stare at some store window as if mystified or aghast at what they saw there. Brisker men and women wearing polished shoes, pressed slacks, dress shirts or pantsuits dodged urgently around the leisured class toward whatever business owned them even on a weekend. Married couples were dragged in and out of vans and SUVs by gaggles of T-shirt-clad children, while policemen in fluorescent yellow vests strolled stoically through all of this, or pedaled up the street on bikes.

I saw more than one nose wrinkle in distaste as I passed by, and quickly learned to meet no one’s gaze, though real street-kids were in no short supply that morning either. They stood in clumps around the bus stops, or against the concrete walls of drug and hardware stores, pinching cigarettes to their chapped lips, staring at the passersby so pointedly not looking back at them; or laughed amongst themselves, sprawled in twos or threes, often with their dogs, around cardboard signs and change bowls/cans/hats or boxes. Their long-suffering clothes, colorful or faded, were more weathered, though often cleaner, than mine. Many of them seemed too warmly dressed for such weather. Over ripped jeans or ragged shorts, they wore tattered denim jackets, hooded sweatshirts, scuffed and cracked old leather vests, or military surplus coats, zipped and buttoned closed, often in layers under which I thought they must be broiling. Were they somehow colder than the rest of us, I wondered, or just trying to hide themselves for some reason? I recalled all those wrinkled noses I had passed, and wondered if I should try to find a few more layers too.

Some of their faces were pierced with hoops and crescents, crosses, studs and spikes; their ear lobes enlarged by disks of polished metal, bone or wood. Their tangled hair was hennaed black or copper red, bleached white, dyed pink or green or blue; tousled mops or bread rolls, dreadlocks, corn braided, cropped off under stocking caps and soiled bandanas, or shaved off in patches, if not altogether absent. As a group, they looked more fey than any of the ‘fairies’ I had recently met.

These were supposed to be my tribe now; the people from whom I must learn the workings of this life. They’re people too, Piper had told me. Approach them that way. But I could not see how, or, more honestly, could not climb over my fear to try. I spent the morning heeding easier parts of her advice. Keeping my eyes and ears open, I leaned casually in doorways near their gatherings, or slowed as I passed, listening for scraps of what they said and how they said it. Beyond a handful of familiar expletives, I found little of their slang decipherable. Neither ‘dude’ nor ‘whatever’ appeared anywhere at all in their patois.

By midday, my hunger had grown fierce again. I needed more than ever to ask someone where a broke, homeless boy could find some food, but I still shuddered to imagine what those feral kids might do to a soft, domesticated pup like me if I approached them. As I sat against the sandstone face of a bank building, with my arms around my knees, watching a group across the street that I’d been spying on for half an hour, I remembered sitting just like this back in junior high school, every day at lunchtime, watching kids I was afraid to talk to chatter and laugh with one another, until, finally, I’d just taken to eating hidden underneath a set of bleachers way out by the football field. Though supposedly decades wiser now, it seemed nothing scared me any less than it had back then. The Lady had been right from the start. I wasn’t going to rule the world this time either—for all the very same reasons.

I suddenly realized that one of the group across the street, a thinly bearded youth with long, dirty light brown hair tumbling from under his knitted cap, was looking at me with the soulful eyes of a wolf. There was a row of tiny bands and hoops along the edge of his left ear, a nickel barbell piercing his right eyebrow, and a silver crescent moon bigger than a quarter hanging between his nostrils. I dropped my gaze, but, to my alarm, he cocked his head, stood up, and came across the street.

I’m sure my eyes went wide. I’m sure he saw my fear, as I considered getting up to run. But I was too scared to move before he stopped in front of me and thrust his fist down toward my face. I had no idea then that I was just supposed to bump it with my own. The ghost of a smile crossed his lips as he recognized my confusion and let his hand fall.

“S’up?” he said.

“Hey,” I replied noncommittally, having heard at least a few of those I’d passed here greet each other this way.

“C’n I sit?” he asked, already bending down to settle against the wall beside me. “I’m Catcher. Who’re you?”

“Matthew,” I said quietly, wondering whether I should just leap up and run away.

“So, how’s it goin’, Matt?” he asked, gazing at nothing out in the street.

“Okay, I guess.”

That edge of a smile crossed his face again. “You got a smoke?” he asked, still not looking at me.

I shook my head.

“Want a hit of mine?” he asked casually, pulling a slightly bent, partially smoked cigarette and a paper matchbook from the pocket of his long oiled cotton jacket.

“I don’t smoke,” I said. “Thanks though.”

“Mm.” He nodded as he tucked the cigarette between his lips and relit it. He sucked a first long drag, then asked, “Whatcha lookin’ for?”

I glanced across the street where his former companions had stopped looking back at us and resumed their conversation. “Sorry I was watching you,” I said. “I just…”

“Hey, no problem. We seen ya walkin’ up and down all morning. We’re just wonderin’ what you want.”

“I…was wondering if you know where there’s a…a soup kitchen or something where I could get a meal,” I said, deeply relieved to have the question asked at last.

Catcher turned to give me a long, appraising look. “You know how to get to 17th and Harrison?” he asked.

I nodded, dismayed to think that this might be the closest place. 17th and Harrison was at least several miles away.

“You from around here?” Catcher asked.

I nodded again.

He nodded too this time. “Then you should go home,” he said quietly. “You won’t last here. It’s in your face. Anyone could see that. Go home.” It was said gently. There was no judgment in it, only solemn concern.

“I can’t,” I said, wishing desperately that I could. “I…can’t even tell you why.”

He studied me again with those penetrating, canine eyes, then turned back to gaze out at the street and drag another cloud of smoke into his lungs. He nodded to himself, apparently convinced. “Then go talk to Stacy.” He gestured past me down the street. “Down there at Nocturnal Lullaby—that black shop on the corner. She helps strays sometimes.” He stood up, pinched out his cigarette, putting what was left back in his pocket, then turned to look back down at me. “Like this,” he said, bumping his fists together, then extending one of them to me again.

I reached up and bumped it with my own this time. “Thank you, Catcher.”

He shrugged, unsmiling. “If you stick around, just come hang with us sometime. Don’t lurk around like some kinda snitch. But stay away from Janus and his crew. They’re as scary as you think.” He turned to cross the street again, then looked back. “And there’s a place eight blocks from here. North Star Drop In; 56th and Staddler; food, showers, medical help, no big hassles. Ask Stacy.”

“But… Then why did you tell me Harrison and 17th?”

He shrugged again, smiling this time. “Just wanted to see how clueless you really were.”

As he walked back across the street, I rose too and started toward the black shop full of gargoyles I’d seen that morning. I glanced back once to see Catcher’s friends look up inquisitively as he rejoined them. When some of them gazed after me, I barely stopped myself from waving, sure that this would not make me seem cool. I just turned away and picked up my pace, feeling stupid to have wasted so much of the day struggling with imaginary fear. Catcher had seemed anything but scary—once we’d started talking. Piper had been right—about everything, it seemed. Someday I hoped I’d have a chance to thank Catcher more tangibly for his kindness, or barring that, at least to help some other frightened person as he’d taken it upon himself to help me.