In the dim light of the city side-street, he was cautiously approaching.
"Are you there?"
But I hunkered beneath my shelter of cardboard boxes and matted sacking. Not for me the mindless chat of those who live on the outside.
Scuffle. Scamper. It wasn't just me who shunned the light.
"You. You there. I want to help you."
But I don't want your help.
"I have food, clothing, books and papers for you to read. Please."
I have all that. All that I need.
Moving relentlessly forward, ignoring my silent resistance, a tower of a man flickered his flashlight above and about me, but always returned to me. Did he know me?
"I know you. I want to help you. Please," he pleaded again.
And yet there was something in his voice, in the plaintive sigh of sadness and exasperation that rang that proverbial bell somewhere in the dark recesses of my past.
Would he speak again?
"You helped me once. Now I've found you. It's my turn."
And then I was transported back into the past. Same city, different part of the city. The city was a new-born thing then, fresh with the promise of economic enterprise; today's polluted, aged result bore no comparison. He was a teenager, a whippet of a thing with skinny legs. Eyes afraid, neck strained, body ready for flight.
"What's wrong?" I'd asked him, but I could see all the wrong that had been visited on him. The hunger was almost tangible. How could this happen? I'd asked myself at the time, because I was then an optimistic but unworldly trader, buying and selling on stock-market in the city. I wondered from where this young man had sprung, quietly, furtive as the dark, and needy. Needy.
He'd taken some time to trust me enough to relax into companionship. Years before, he'd run away from home that hadn't given him the sustenance, shelter and love that surely seem to be the natural right of the child. Not asking for a place in the world, he resented being given one. One could understand. Throwing back huge mouthfuls of the food I'd had to do little to make him take, he spoke between swallows.
"I hated them. I had to go."
"But how do you live now?"
"I live. I can find food. I don't need anyone."
And as soon as he said it I knew he was lying. Not about procuring food, but about needing someone. No one wants to feel alone. I was reminded of a poem I'd studied at school years before: "No Man is an Island". So I sat, and chatted. He was intelligent, curious and interested in what I did for a living. He wanted to know how and why people bought shares in companies that were really only pieces of paper, not even that, just a digital portfolio with a dollar sign summary at the end. So I told him, first in the simple, easy language of the layperson, then later as we met regularly, in the more specific jargon of the trading world. He lapped it up, as one who's been without mental simulation and then finds it. He wanted me to explain the newspaper business section I began to bring to show him, then later books, and eventually my laptop. He learned with the rapidity of a fast-flowing river: with unstoppable forward movement.
The time came when I knew he needed, not only needed but wanted, craved, to be able to be a part of this world that had been introduced to him. I gave him the chance and he flew with it. He flew so far he was out of my city and country within a year. I was happy for him.
And me. What had happened to me meanwhile? Well, that's the second part of my story. A course of events completely opposite of his rise to success. It wasn't totally my fault, but I began to forget that the world I worked and lived in was a paper world. The sheets of paper began to fall around me as the market crashed and I became one on the streets, the homeless, the occasionally hungry. But not friendless. There were others like me, for different reasons, and we shared a bond. I felt amongst my fellow homeless a companionship I'd never felt in the rich world from which I'd been ousted. I had enough to sustain me, and found some sense of togetherness of "being a part of a whole" as that poem from high school said, in the men around me. It was a real world. They were real people. I knew I didn't want to return to the superficiality of my precious sheltered existence.
**************
"I understand." He thought he was soothing me with his words. He wasn't really. There was no soothing necessary.
I returned to my sacks and cupboard, and settled in for the warmth of the June night. Or was it the warmth of the unexpected touch of reciprocal human kindness that had reached out to me from the other world?
