Tin Foil Woes
The Tale of August Beecher, part 2.
She find herself white-knuckling the steel pole in the middle of the subway car just three days later. Her hand keeps slipping because of the sweat pooling in her palm.
Never having rode the Subway before, she takes cues from those around her. She feasts her eyes on the young woman with fingernails so long and so sharp she can’t scroll through her phone screen without extending her hand so that her fingertip is flat against the screen. Her mouth seems permanently downturned, her long brown hair burnt to a crisp. She can glean nothing from this young woman, whose feigned comfort seems only secondary to breathing. Next, August looks at the petite woman sitting with her slender wheeler bag between her legs. She is so tiny that even with her legs on either side of her bag, she doesn’t take up the full width of the seat. She wears a disposable blue mask and darkened glasses, no expression visible for August to mime. Then she finds the impossibly tall suited man—likely named Scott or Mark—the only other person standing on this side of the Subway car. It isn’t that there aren’t seats open, there are, but it is as if his tush is too rich and well-groomed to touch the faded-orange Subway seat. August makes up stories about her fellow passengers both to entertain her as one dark tunnel gives way to another as well as to distract herself from the horrific odor coming from her right, where a man is sprawled across three Subway seats. His stench wafts up and braids its way around every of August’s nostril hairs. He bends under the seat where he adjusts several crinkled, ripped pieces of tin foil. He adjusts the pieces with such reverence, such delicacy, that August can not figure how such a pungent and abrasive smell emits from the same person. As soon as he is satisfied with the position of the tin foil below him—August cannot make out any difference from its original position—he draws upward and shifts under the blanket on his lap, feet bare for but one sock, crossed below him.
Everyone else in the car gives him a wide berth, as if he owns the space, though August doubts he even owns the tin foil he so carefully adjusts. She keeps trying to make eye contact with her neighbors—establish some common ground with a knowing look or a shared sigh—though no one dares look up. Not the teenager glued to her phone. Not the old lady with the mask whose eyes haven’t moved from the one stained spot on the floor. Not the business executive who drums his fingers along his briefcase strap, oblivious to the scene across from him. No shared confusion, curiosity, nor bewilderment. August is alone in these feelings.
That is, of course, until she accidentally steps on the homeless man’s tinfoil.
The homeless man looks up with the eyes of a godless lunatic. She didn’t think it possible to describe staring as excruciating but his stare is. It is as if he’s staring right into the abyss of her soul though only he knows it is an abyss and he decides his tinfoil is the perfect weapon to fashion into a sharp object where he repeatedly impales her drawing not blood, but deep, deep shame.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
He returns to adjusting his tinfoil, huffing his disgust with the likes of her, a middle-aged first-time Subway rider whose feet are decidedly frozen beneath her.
The doors open. The masked lady and business executive get off the train. The man pushes past her, giving August the dirtiest look she’s ever seen on another human’s face. It is ugly, wretched, the kind of face that elicits your own dirty face in return. It is as if he is disgusted with her for stepping on the tinfoil—as if that homeless man, of different race and age and socioeconomic status, was his brother, his son, his beloved cousin who he couldn’t believe she’d disturbed.
The city responds with the quickly accelerating Subway that threatens her neutral, immoveable stance and people pushing pash her, throwing her into the steel pool she considers her only friend.
The train skirts to another stop, her prayers answered. She shuffles out, weaving through the incoming passengers just outside. She wants to warn them about Tin Foil Man, but she doesn’t know what she’d say or how. Plus, the way their nostrils crinkle and shrink closer to their eyes, she realizes they already know. His stench precedes him.
It takes her awhile to find her way out from underground. Her phone keeps shorting out—the SOS symbol in the top right corner like the final nail in her city-stained coffin.
It is only now—after the 50-minute train ride into the city, the eight dollar parking fee she swallowed begrudgingly, and the slow shutting of her front door against Chester’s pleading-yet-cataract-cloudy eyes—that she wishes she’d never come. She’d weathered the storms thus far for Harry, the “Boy Who Lived,” who encouraged her to keep living through her fear, but it was the directionlessness she feels turning in circles more than six feet underground that collapses all that’s left of her courage.
She feels claustrophobic, like she can’t fill her lungs as deeply as she needs to and the air that does fill them is only the remnants of the Tin Foil Man and his filth.
Someone bumps her shoulder which she takes as her sign to immediately move. It is a young woman with a tote slung over her shoulder, headphones in, heading towards the closest exit. August follows her.
She looks like she knows where she is going, both in life and in this abyss of train screeching and exhaust fumes.
August’s quads ache on the three flights of stairs out from underground, but the air tastes fresher the higher she climbs so she wills her legs to quiet as she ascends. This is when the SOS signal on her phone disappears and the theatre reappears as a red blinking dot one block away.
She sees the shining lights first. HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD. It seems even the street buzzes with excitement, the concrete somewhat softer on her heavy soles. She fishes her ticket out of her zipped pocket. She clutches it tightly in her fist. She finally takes a deep breath, exhaling all that she had carried on her journey to this place. It is only when she lets go of every last drop of breath held tightly by her lungs does she hear his voice.
It pulls on the deep recesses of her mind like a strange chord echoing in an empty hall, the reverberations tugging her neck to turn—turn—stretch—tilt to look behind her where the noise originates. He repeats himself, the sound making contact with her ear drums in the buzz of familiarity yet with the surprise of something new, aged, different.
“August,” he says, “I can’t believe it’s you.”
TO BE CONTINUED…