When first I sat at the table I took all the cards at face value. It was bad enough when they gave me directions according to where the old post office used to be. Worse when I arrived there with a package to mail. “And where should I take this, the hospital?”
“Only if it's for a patient, dear.” She took a drag, stamped out her cigarette on the curb, and walked back into the bookstore.
In the town square stood a statue of a man in a military coat and cap, striding forward with anger in his face. “A civic or national hero?”
“Why, no. He led a revolution for a country that no longer exists in a land that, though it's a lot like ours, still seems a world away.”
“Then, what, he was an exponent of our ideals?”
“Well, I can't speak for everyone, but not mine. His professed ideology ridiculed political and personal freedoms from the first. When he held power he indeed suppressed these and others besides, and used racist oppression as a tool to consolidate political support. This came to be a hallmark of his country and its successors, though of course this is hardly unique in the world.”
“Then why should we keep his statue here?” The plaque below mentioned something about its artistic significance. It had been pulled from a scrap heap after the war.
A bar off the square had its own statue outside. A person holding a glass, with a motorized arm lifting the glass to drink and lowering it back down, over and over again, forever. A sticker on the door read, “Register to vote here.” Inside a drinker slapped his arm around me. He was, it turned out, in this strange city, from my home town, and that's one of our local pastimes: getting black-out drunk and hugging eachother. That's one of the reasons I left. He raised his glass and toasted a candidate for local office whose speeches were false fiction (fiction is no different from fact or prophecy, it can be false but it isn't always). I wasn't going to change his mind.
He had a landscaping practice. His best customer was always traveling for business but kept a house in a post-bohemian neighborhood up the hill from the square. He was taking classes for an Associate's Degree but was struggling with math requirements. I met an accountant once that said she never liked math, and was never good at it. Then she wondered aloud why she'd gone into accountancy! Anyway, eventually he asked me what I did for work and I didn't have a quick deflecting lie ready and it was like he knew. I have lots of quick lies ready for when my colleagues ask me about my personal life, but not for that, because they all know what I do for work! He said he'd never been so close to someone he wanted to punch in the face.
He lived a couple dozen miles south of town. Past the shipping port and the huge railyard that spreads out from a massive freight beltway, hidden to highway maps but imposing on the ground, in a glacial valley among factories and warehouses. He'd parked blocks away on a side street to avoid the specter of crime on the main drag. He was frighteningly drunk. Before my work came up and before punching-in-the-face came up he'd been laughing at my expense, or at the expense of the act I put on. Many of my lies and embellishments are self-deprecating, and I was dressed ridiculously; punch up or punch in, that's comedy. Now his sarcastic disgust was getting angrier. “I bet you take public transportation!” he sputtered. I didn't mention my bike locked up outside. I guessed at the sort of route he might take out to the freeway and made a mental note of streets to avoid on my way home.
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