Cultural exchange

Dark skin; curly, unkempt, thinning hair; tattered, stained off-brand jeans; ripped shoes with one missing heel revealing a bare foot; generic dun-colored jacket half-zipped over a layer or two of smudged undergarments; pungent emanations of body odor and stale wine; unsteady gait + incessant, incoherent mumbling. Messy. The guy wandered, or zigzagged, from the wide concourse outside the café towards our table with a directionlessness that would astound even those used to tracking the physical life of the mentally ill. His unfocused eyes, always looking or seeming to look in different directions, made it difficult to predict his movements through the crowd. Fact it was hard not to feel sorry for the hurried business travelers and well-dressed leisure-mothers, no paragons of social consciousness themselves, forced to dodge about and into one another as he changed orientations every few seconds, always looking furtively to the middle distance like one of those rage-infected zombies from 28 Days Later (he resembled, minus the blood-foam about the mouth, the black army private that sadistic ranking officer had chained, along with his friend, to a wall for “observation”). The cloudiness of his gaze made it difficult to know for sure, but it seemed like somehow he had picked us out of the crowd from a good distance off. We were up against a window, and we did have plates of food and books and backpacks and laughs, conspicuous in a bustling capital city train station on a weekday (even one stacked with upper-caste stores catering to said leisure-mothers), and we were keeping our heads up in clear defiance of local norms. But that was an explanation, not a justification, and it was no stretch to say we were disappointed by the attention. Upset even. Riled.

Nervous. It took him so long to make it, though, that we forgot about it halfway and went back to exchanging laughmakers and eating our pastries. He panted in the corners of our vision at the café’s open mouth and waited for a while, mumbling softly, eyegaze bouncing languidly across the linoleum floor tiles that tied the whole station together, and then a pleasant jokewave that had been building for a minute or two crested and shrunk our little worlds down and down until all in a moment he was standing beside our table, swaying, rasping, spreading inscrutability in discomfiting waves. It might have been the smell that snapped us out of the reverie, actually, and then to look up and find him in our bubble, well, that was rough.

Could have been worse. Comically enough, though he paused in front of us like he was expecting acknowledgement he didn’t alter his behavior in the slightest, just stood and rasped and mumbled and stabbed our levity repeatedly with his ridiculous being. We waited for what we thought would be the inevitable request for change, or food, or anything; but he just stood there like he had in the concourse, except now his unsettling gaze focused or tried to focus on a middle point on the tabletop between us. Pained, bemused looks shot back and forth across that tabletop in the hopes of deflecting the gaze away, maybe to the next table where sat an attractive thirtysomething with a laptop and a pantsuit. We countered the base urge to laugh with manufactured empathy, our untrained souls straining at the effort. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. His gaze and mumbles remained directed at a spot on the tabletop between our plates and bags and rendered our stifled giggles moot.

Our souls soon found respite. Without so much as adjusting the timbre of his mumbles, our visitor slowly, deliberately, unapologetically lowered a trembling right hand toward the closest plate, a cheap unadorned porcelain affair with a forgotten few bite-sized pastry crumbs, mostly devoid of filling, remaining. There was only a moment of hesitation, the last veneer of civility poking up through the weeds, and then before any of us could will ourselves to ask politely if he’d like something to eat he plunged his grabber to the plate and removed the largest crumb to the neighborhood of his face, eyes focusing a bit more than previously to examine the fine buttery layers of the mass-produced goodie, fingers working dexterously, efficiently, to allow all sides equal measure. Not quite equal, actually: the little cavity in which filling would normally congregate (the majority had spilled or been licked out) got a second look, the fluorescent light flattering its appealingly smooth walls. We softened. This was dessert before dinner: how could we not respect a paradox of a man whose bizarre behavior and unsettling appearance allowed him to get away with figurative murder? He knew what he was doing, and he’d be damned if his daily routine was going to include stationary begging at the entrances to places like this, crumpled up and prostrate on the floor like roadkill. Those human lumps existed on a plane far beneath him; he was mobile, in charge of his destiny.

So in charge, in fact, that with the glistening morsel in his sights, not six inches from the maw, and his indecisive mumbling finally coalescing into a circular series of excited guttural utterances—we waited, daring ourselves to breathe, willing the condescending mirth from the corners of our mouths, eyes locked downward for fear of what we’d find if we looked into his—he suddenly and unceremoniously opened his palm flat and like it was suddenly boiling a hole through his hand replaced it with a twitching flourish on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

He might as well have removed his clothes and defecated on the table and then turned around and wandered aimlessly, swaying, mumbling, forcing dodges, out of the café and into the concourse and maybe to the city beyond. Which he did, in due course.

We never saw him again.