sacred & profane

I am ambivalent with regard to the notion of fate. That said, I believe that Wednesday morning, when the temperature had again dropped below freezing, our encounter was as predestined as the fall of any sparrow.

Just before sunrise, well wrapped in layers against the coming of the cold, I opened my front door and with a deep breath stepped outside. My eyes immediately began to water in the bitter air. Parked cars, rooftops, lawns—even dead leaves—were white with frost. My tears flowed slowly.

I had hoped I wouldn’t see it, but I never really doubted. I didn’t know who it would be, only that I dreaded the encounter. It was so cold. I even took a different way to work this particular morning, trying to avoid the meeting. But my altered path led me inextricably to what was determined to happen, regardless.

Before having passed beyond the shadow of my apartment building, there it was. Like a sacred object—ancient, wise, terrible—he sat immovable amid the scutter and scurry of morning traffic. Untouched by the world around him, he instead drew the world to himself.

Poised on the bus stop bench, a child’s pink blanket draped over his head and concealing his body, he filled me with foreboding. A jacket stiff with snow lay at his side, along with the other articles that might have kept him warm: pants, gloves, sweaters, shoes, a sleeping bag—all bristling like cacti with spines of white frost. The clothing formed an unbroken trail into the gutter. A brittle shell of ice encased his swollen feet, his socks stuck and stinging on his useless toes like the carapace of a mottled crab.

I stood for a moment, unsure of what was supposed to happen next. It seemed he had found me. How many times had this encounter taken place throughout the course of the world?

I moved very close.

“Hello?” I whispered.

He slowly drew back the blanket, eyes rolling in his head, and as he did, the sweet aroma of vegetable matter filled the space around us. And with the lowering of the blanket I could see that besides his sweatshirt, he was wearing only a pair of ratted underwear. His thighs were blotchy, and all his skin seemed tea-stained and scaly. It was 31 degrees, and he was perfectly still. I wondered if he was dying. 

“Are you okay?” 

His eyes, cloudy and congealed, wandered past me as mucus bubbled from his nostrils in a way I had only before observed in infants. His mildewed beard of brown and gray was chunked with globs of glistening ice, and coiled across his baldhead was a deep, undulating scar. Something had long ago reached in and touched his brain.

For a moment more I stood in awe of what was before me. I felt small, my words like throwing apples at a god.