Read Online The Interloper by Antoine Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

a tad too close together. He wore a military helmet from time to time and his cardboard sign usually read “please help $1 anything,” though he seemed too able-bodied to be living on the streets and begging. He looked like a cartoon soldier, thus his sobriquet: the Cartoon GI. He spent most of his time—in residence at the coffee shop—drawing multicolored diagrams (with a four-color click-pen) of various worldwide conspiracies, with arrows joining a Union Jack to a (well-drawn) rat to the Stars and Stripes, with the words FLOW OF CAPITAL written over one of the arrows and U.N. GLOBAL P.O.W. CAMP writtenover another. He posted these diagrams on telephone poles in the area. I used to collect them.
    One evening I was dozing in the quiet cocoon of my home office when I heard yelling outside. Yelling was rare, a thing of the city. I went to the front door and poked my head out to see what was going on, and there he was, the Cartoon GI, making his way down the sidewalk with his helmet, his tightly rolled sleeping bag, his olive-drab pack. He screamed at random intervals, at the sidewalk ahead, although no one was there: “Niggers!” and “Mother fuck your nigger ass!” and so on, each phrase punctuated by the same racial epithet. Now I am sure there are white people in the world for whom the sound of that epithet means the safety and comfort of a redneck home, but for me it had the opposite effect—I understood, upon hearing the Cartoon GI screaming these words, that he was not as harmless as I thought he was. Ever since then, I had made a point of avoiding him, no longer peering over his shoulder to see what his latest diagram contained.
    We locked eyes for a moment, he recognizing that I was standing in a pair of women’s underwear, me recognizing him. He turned and walked out, cursing under his breath. I slipped out of the painful thong as quickly as possible and pulled on my pants, careful not to streak the insides with whatever was on the bottom of my shoes. The secret was to roll each pant leg into a donut and get the shoe through all at once. As for the panties, I didn’t want to risk keeping them in my pocket. And I couldn’t throw them away—I couldn’t bear to imagine my wife’s panties sitting atop a landfill somewhere. (Birds pecking at them.) There was a ledge at the top of the concrete wall, just under the roof.By straddling the stall—standing on the too-low stall walls—I was able to reach up and tuck the panties there, under the eaves (but indoors) for safekeeping. I would get them in the morning. Mission accomplished, I hopped down and walked briskly—how free my parts felt!—out the door, almost bumping into the Cartoon GI, who’d been waiting outside for me to finish so he could go in.
    There stood Patty, Frisbee in hand, eyes on me. I wanted to collapse at her feet. I have stolen something from you, sweetheart. I have deceived you. Sometimes I feel that nothing human is foreign to me, but at other times, I can be unsettled by the pettiest deception. Look at her. She stood before me and, relieved of the torture in my crotch, I could see her again. Why had I deceived her like this? I had to remind myself that all deception would fall away soon enough.
    But what I really want to say is that the sight of her bony shoulders outlined in her black sweatshirt brought me back to something, which I wouldn’t exactly call reality because I was already in reality, but which I might call context. Her unsmiling gaze made me feel like I had access to some former version of myself, one not tormented by those things currently tormenting me. She was a vision. Now she smiled. She handed me the Frisbee.
    “That guy was scared of you for once,” she said.
    Ahh—that was the face she’d been wearing: the stored-up joke.
    “What was going on in there?”
    “Why? Did he say something?”
    “Grumble, grumble, grumble.” She imitated him, shaking her head.
    “I guess he expected the place to himself.”
    I