The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (22 page)

"And say what? That I saw the girl? That I walked by her? That I didn't say anything to her, just left her there to
die?"

Greg stared at her oddly for one long, tremulous moment. In disbelief, it seemed. Stared, until a tear blurred her vision, surprising her as much as it did him. When she turned away guiltily, she saw that the engineer and cameraman were now watching them both, paused in their testing of the equipment. At this, Greg made a motion for the others to continue, and then led Val out of the room by one arm, toward his office.
 

She knew what was coming next, or thought she knew. But of course things never turned out the way one expected. If anyone remembered to chisel that phrase as an epitaph on her own career, it might even be fitting. In the meantime, there were adjustments to be made, if not a shuffling of personnel.
 
John Q. Public, sitting in front of his television set, would decide those. By what he did with his time, or by what he didn't do.

~ * ~

After calling a police detective to tell him what little she knew, Val went to the park that afternoon at Greg's insistence that she "chill out." Sitting on a park bench outside one of the practice baseball fields, where the Colorado Rockies were doing training exercises, she was dressed casually, this time, in a light blue pant suit. She took out a pair of compact binoculars from her purse to scout the various players, looking for Ramon Vasquez. She sighed in wistful abstraction at a few of them, then lowered the binoculars, startled to see that a homeless man was now unexpectedly seated beside her. The man had a beard, long dark hair and dark glasses. He set his rumpled backpack beside him on the ground, along with a long metal probe or cane, like those used by blind people.
  

“Hello,” he said.

“Hi,” Val responded dutifully, her greeting barely audible.

The man nodded toward her binoculars. “Who interests you?”

She glared at him in surprise and disappointment, then started to get up.
 
But he touched her forearm with one hand to stop her. She almost jumped at the intrusive grip.

“Would you tell me. . .” he began.

“What?” she asked, indignantly.

“I. . . don't have a watch.”

Val withdrew her arm to check her watch, and with a slight jerk that she intended for him to notice.

“It's one-thirty,” she said.
 

She rose to leave.

“I'm not really blind, just sensitive to light for a while,” the man announced casually, stopping her retreat. “Staring at the sun too long, doctor says.”

Val paused, glancing half way back in his direction. “Oh.”

He pointed the probe up at the sky. She looked up reluctantly. A jet was passing high up in the pale blue azure, its sound just audible. “I need to be at the airport at six o'clock.”

Surprised by this revelation, she asked, “You have a ticket?”

“No, my dog does. He's been on a trip without me.”

The stranger turned toward the ball players as she studied him, intrigued now. On closer scrutiny, he seemed different, even than she'd first imagined.
 
Peaceful, somehow. Unkempt, but clean. Oddly, she found herself wondering what he would look like without all that hair. He appeared to be about her age, which was something she guessed by his hands, and by what she could see of his unwrinkled face.
     

“Don't worry, I have money,” he told her. “So I can take a cab. The dog is not a seeing eye dog. His name is Picasso.”

Judging him to be relatively harmless, Val finally sat back down. She started to ask more about his dog, then stopped herself, still uncertain if she wanted to engage him in a conversation at all. They were now both simply looking out at the ball players, who were prancing back and forth with short sideways shuffles, as if between bases. It seemed a bit silly, although neither of them said so. Or rather needed to.

Finally the man said, “They hope to be children again, but they can't here.”

“Excuse me?”

She saw him look out at the field exercise, and then smile slightly. “Have you ever wondered why people love sports so much? It's because time stops.
 
The anticipation, it forces you into the present. Life seems real when everything else is forgotten. But here, when they practice, the players are thinking about the future again. The moment is lost.”

Val nodded lamely, trying to imagine where a conversation as inane as this portended to lead. “Are you a fan?” she tried.

“It's the same for fans, too,” he explained. “They hope for the future, for that one moment when they can be free again.”

“So you're not a fan. You're a Buddhist.”

He looked at her, smiling easily again. Sincerely. Then he asked, “Do you think it's possible to feel alive all the time?”

She looked back at the players, still unwilling to hold any stranger's gaze too long. “Like that? All the time, like your team just won? Who could do that?”
  

“I could show you.”

Without another word, the man got up, took his backpack and cane, then started away. She watched him walk across the grass, with no intention to follow. Instead, she looked back at the players, who now sprinted forward in lines to catch rolled balls. When she looked again at this peculiar man she'd mistakenly thought to be blind, he was nearing a distant bench beside a jungle gym, where children played. There he stopped and turned. Beckoning her to that bench.
 

Val paused, and bit at her lip. She remembered her duty: to find Vasquez, set up an on-camera interview. It had been Greg's instruction, or suggestion.
 
She didn't know the difference anymore, and curiously found herself starting not to care. If there was nothing more important than ratings to Claire Robinson, now, she had already wearied of such games. Both those games played by men, and those adopted--or secretly conceived--by women. With a singular sense of rebellion, she finally rose and walked deliberately toward the homeless stranger.
 

“I can't believe I'm doing this,” she told herself aloud, even as she did it.
 
But even this self recrimination did not completely overcome her caution.

~ * ~

When she neared the stranger, he motioned for her to sit first at the new bench.
 
Then he joined her, but not too closely. His smile did seem real, unforced. Not a ploy at all. Still, considering recent events, she was beginning to distrust her own reactions.

“It's better if I'm with you,” he said, as though reading her mind.

Stranger danger,
popped into her mind, and she wondered if Sarah Collins' mother had ever used the phrase.
 

She smiled quickly, but nodded nervously as they looked out at the children playing.
 

The kids seemed totally absorbed in swinging and sliding and making little mounds of sand. One boy dribbled some sand on a girl's hair and laughed. The girl attacked him, but the boy escaped to the monkey bars.
 

Val motioned. “I see they're living the moment. With more like it in their future, too.”

“They're not thinking about that, though,” her companion said.

“You sure?” She considered this, then felt a brief tinge of envy. “So you think when they grow up, their lives will be over?”

He nodded. “It's what they will think, and why most people love to watch children.”

“Because we're jealous?”

“Because we think too much, while they just live. For now.”

She looked at him, then back at the children again. She nodded back. “We think for them, don't we?” She shrugged away the thought, self-consciously, then finally asked, “What's your name?”

“That doesn't matter.”

Val held out one hand bravely, anyway. “Well, my name is Valerie. I'm a reporter. TV reporter. Mind if I call you. . . I don't know. . .
David?”

He took her hand lightly, and shook it once before letting go. “Whatever you like. I don't have a TV, though. But I'm not sorry.”

She smiled at her odd new friend, thinking,
You're not a lot of things.
Then she looked at his backpack more closely--at that rumpled green canvas sack with zippers. “Radio?”

David shook his head. “I read the newspaper sometimes at the coffee shop.”

She visualized her wet newspaper, waiting for her at home, on her kitchen table. “You like coffee?”

“Tea. Green tea.”

“Oh. Well, I guess there can't be many serial killers who drink herbal tea, can there?” She paused. “Are you. . . I mean, homeless?”

“Not anymore.”

“What's. . . changed?”

“I have.”
 

“What do you mean?”

“I don't think about the past anymore. Except when I need to.”
 

Val glanced down at her watch impulsively, reminded of her assignment, before wondering what on earth it might be like not to have a job or even a job history. “Must be hard to get a job without a resume.” She covered her watch with her sleeve, then smiled so he'd know she was kidding.

“I don't think about the future, either,” he added.
 

“Really.”

“Have you ever tried it?”

She laughed, despite herself. The idea seemed inaptly comical in the way that the laughter of the homeless seemed incongruous, almost impolite. “That's funny,” she said.

A wary lady guardian walked by them, giving them a look of perplexed disapproval. David ignored her and asked, “Wouldn't you like to be happy too, like a child?”
  

Val noticed that the guardian overheard, so she too frowned at the question. “A child is vulnerable,” she told him.

“And alive,” the man she'd named David said.

She watched the woman move away, but not without one final glance over her shoulder. "Is that why we fingerprint them?"

David nodded. "But we don't own them. We don't own anything."

Unexpectedly, he took both of her hands gently, and clasped them together, lacing her fingers, making a ball.

“What are you doing?” Val asked, tensing.
 

“Imagine that this is your mind. It's about the same size too, by the way." He repositioned her hands, gently. "Now try imagining that your thoughts come out this hole made by the thumbs.”

The wary guardian turned, stopped, and then watched from a safe distance, her disapproval hardening into borderline horror. Val tried smiling, albeit nervously. Yet the woman continued to stare.
 

“Watch the hole for the next thought that escapes," David continued.
 
"Concentrate on it, and nothing else. The very next thought.”

He released her hands slowly, as if a bomb was inside them. Val looked down. She blinked, staring. After a moment she looked up again.

“Well?” asked David.
 

“I don't. . .”
 
She glanced up to see who else might be watching. “What's supposed to happen?”

“Try again. Empty your mind.”
 

She concentrated this time, closing her eyes until her face relaxed and she felt somewhat calmer. Then she reopened her eyes, and finally shrugged.
 

“I'm not sure. I had an idea. Sorry.”

“I'm not judging you.”

“Everyone judges,” she heard herself say, then realized she'd almost sounded like a teenager. With the added word
me
, she would have. “Or prejudges,” she quickly added, instead.

David just looked at her. “Only because they trust their thoughts.”

She opened her hands, looking down at her palms, as though her own fortune might actually be there. Her fate. “For a moment I guess I did blank. For just a moment, I think. I mean. . .”

She smiled, as if tricked, at hearing herself say the word
think
.
 

“But my idea,” she added, “is that I should interview you instead.”

“The Zen Master of Reid Park?” Val suggested.

Her new David only shook his head.

But she persisted. "Here's David and his friend Picasso. . .
 
What breed of dog is he, did you say?”

“It's not important.”
 

“Doesn't have to be important. It's human interest. Is a ball game important? Is the latest movie star matchup or breakup important? I mean, really.”

They watched the children in silence for a while longer. From nearby, a sparrow in a cottonwood tree watched them. Its tiny head angled first one way and then the other as it peered down, like a substitute for the nosy teacher, who now busied herself with the kids.