III

Naublus isn't creating his story. No, society is doing him the favor. Society is etching, carving, scraping, scrawling his mess of a story on a grey concrete block. Naublus isn't aware of this. Or maybe he is? "Urban blight" isn't in his vocabulary. He doesn't even know the word "city." He doesn't even know the word "I." 

Everybody in Washington Heights knows the world "I," but they've never heard of "O." O. Peer into it. Dive into it. "O" is Naublus, his imagination, his day-to-day life. O is the tunnel Naublus' alarm clock bullets through. O is the sun whose milky light Naublus can't quite grasp. O is soul. An empty soul? O is Naublus' yawn. O is society's yawn. 

"A, E, I, O, U." String them together and sound them out, and you get a drawn-out, punch-less sneeze. Naublus' life is sort of like this. After gorging himself on the Mongolian beef he picked from the bamboo tree (this is what he thought), he couldn't have felt more unsatisfied, more inadequate. And then this woman came and gave him a sandwich? He said thank you, but he really didn't mean it. "What else am I supposed to say?" he asked himself. He slapped himself mentally for accepting the sandwich. 

"What good is food anyway?"

"Why did I eat that Mongolian beef?" 

"Why can I not think?"

Naublus' thoughts tumbled into an abyss of confusion and melancholy wallowing. He almost drowned, but the rush of commuters pouring out of the SMARTA train brought him back to the surface. As in a rehearsed musical number, they opened up their umbrellas - bright magentas, somber blacks, lively greens, sensual reds. Naublus hadn't feasted on so much color in a long time, and he was sure no one else noticed what a feast it was. Urban blight - of the brain. Back to life he was! He lay on the beer bottle- and cigarette  butt-specked platform, below a "Clean Up, Baltimore!" advertisement. In the super-sized picture, a black woman with dreads and sparkly white teeth held the hand of a freckled, chestnut-haired boy of about ten as they walked through a M&M-green park. It was a little surreal, a little twisted, but it reflected Washington Heights' biggest selling point - diversity! That's right, diversity! Strange wonder why more middle class white liberals didn't move in.

A stubby but strong pink-skinned man lagged behind, holding hands with a Swedish woman twice his height. She donned a patterned bonnet, and Naublus recognized it as Swedish. It looked like they were on a date (or had come back from one). A dance, perhaps? Naublus thought they should've looked happier if they'd come from a dance. 

"Where did y'all come from?" Naublus asked on whim. His Southern accent was also on a whim.

"It's none of your business, granny!" the pink-skinned man forcefully  replied. He wasn't particularly hostile, just angry.

Naublus was above gender insults and meanness in general, so he let the whim slide. Naublus was living again, and he had no time for "fussing and fighting, my friends." He proceeded to carve a picture of a Swedish pastry on his veiny forearm with a beer bottle shard. This is living, he thought. The blood spilled onto the brown and grey platform. The drops shook and whizzed until forming the words, "Hello Naublus!" He knew it was Lady Liberty again.

He talked to her. "What you want, ho?" Naublus couldn't control his offensive slang.

Lady Liberty condensed into being, this time hanging upside down from the "Washington Heights" SMARTA sign.

"I don't appreciate your language, Naublus." Lady Liberty tried to hide the fact that she couldn't speak clearly because of the blood rushing to her head.

"Pardon me, madame," Naublus bowed his head, "sometimes I can't control myself. Lady Liberty sighed and smiled. She was right again.

Naublus then blurted out: "But you know what? You are a ho!"