A Line in the City

Please note, there are some references to sexual harassment, violence, and animal abuse in this story.

Marites cursed as she returned her glasses to rest on the bridge of her nose. She had just wiped away the collected steam from their lenses when she looked up to see the line. Under the pale lights that ran the spine of the building’s foyer stood a motley assembly of her neighbors, their discontent voiced in tapping shoes and murmured conversation. The elevators. Again.

A mechanical hiss and a breath of hot air from the bustling avenue at her back reminded Marites that she was blocking the entrance, so she moved inside to join the serpentine congregation. Within a few steps, she completed the journey. Perspiration conquered deodorant and delicate perfumes to invest the stalled community with the odor of old laundry.

Marites craned her head around the curvature of the mass to garner the situation. A single elevator looked to be in operation, its overhead panel lazily scrolling in a succession of dull red sequences. In the two years that Marites had lived there, never had more than three of the six elevators been in operation at a given time. If that. The numbers indicated this carriage was moving downward from the twenty-fifth floor.

The doors gave another ophidian yawn, and the hot night met the bitter air conditioning that sputtered above her. Her glasses filled with steam once more.

When she had first arrived here, an internal scream would have bitten at her guts and clawed to her throat. But now, she resigned herself. This was life in the city. Her mother had bewailed her moving here. The city, she had claimed, was no place for a nice country girl like you. You’ll get eaten alive out there.

The line moved forward by steps. It snaked along the hallway wall now, where several residents had found refuge on a row of low plastic chairs. One, a young man around her age with sunken eyes and scraggly hair, stood up and offered her his seat. She looked at the cruciform outline of sweat where his butt-cheeks had rested on the vinyl, then at his smiling, over-eager face. She declined.

You couldn’t trust anyone. Nothing was free, not even a seat. She would be indentured to the man’s small talk, and who knows what entitlement that might lead to in his mind. People always took advantage.

A horn wailed outside, drawing her attention to the road outside. Through the condensation that pawed at the sliding glass panels, she could only see obscurities flitting under the cold sodium lights – general outlines of pedestrians and vehicles whose contours surrendered themselves to the hot respiration of the city beyond.

The wafting smell of the building stoop brought made Marites think of the beggar woman. She had been there the day she had moved in. Crouched on a bright blue tarpaulin, her wild matted hair and multicolored clothing a vivid riot against her sun-burnt skin, she had extended a rail-thin hand as she had walked up the steps. The two had locked eyes, and the woman had flashed a bright and hopeful smile. Marites smiled back and stopped. She fished out twenty pesos from her bag and handed them to her. The woman said nothing, but nodded, in gratitude.

It was nice, that moment, and became something of a ritual. The woman was always there in the evenings, and giving her what change she had at the end of a long day lent her new world a tether of human connection.

She had needed it that first year. No matter her protestations to her mother, she did not like the city. The constant miasma of sound gnawed at the backdrop of her mind, and the ubiquitous plumes of exhaust lacquered her throat with the loitering taste of burnt metal.

Whatever her pretensions at independence, she felt like a fraud, and could feel it in the city’s estimation of her. One day, her boss sent her to a copy shop to get handouts for an upcoming meeting. When the man gave her the wrong change, and she pointed it out, his eyes slid over, crawling over her features until they rested on her face. He smiled, and said she must be confused, refusing to admit fault. She had been insistent, but there was no budging. She had been on a deadline and left defeated and hot in the cheeks.

When she had arrived at the apartment that evening, it was still chewing on her mind. She knew what the man had seen – an ignorant provincial girl with silly glasses, easy target for a few extra pesos. She passed the beggar woman on her tarpaulin mat, and absently fished out the change from her pocket.

When she looked down to the outstretched hand, she saw the copier’s gaze in the woman’s dirty, smiling face. Marites looked away, dropping the coins into the weathered palm and hurrying inside.

The line moved forward, bringing her back to the present. They had inched closer, and Marites was able to see through the thicket of sweaty napes that the elevator was still moving downward.

A few paces in front of her, a portly man with a greasy mullet was listening to music on his phone, a miasmic cacophony that nettled through cheap plastic speakers. Someone asked him to turn it down. He looked at them with a vacant, glassy stare. The volume did not change.

Marites craned to say something when someone bumped into her shoulder. Ignoring the limp apology from the old man who had done it, she looked back to see the doors close and a diminutive figure cram against the back of the line. Those in front of her had shuffled forward in an effort to make room and allow the newcomer onto the linoleum gullet of the hall. The asphalt-urine smell of the street wafted in.

Someone barked a ruddy admonishment to the noisemaker. The music was turned down. Marites nodded internally.

It had taken her time to learn you couldn’t let people get away with crap. In the first few months, she put up a brave front, though her new life had beaten her around. On phone calls home she still bubbled gossip with her mother and siblings. Her mother would fret, Don’t get eaten alive out there.

To this, Marites always effused confidence – but every day she left the apartment, she bristled at the city about her. The throngs of people with dead eyes, the stalled traffic polluting the roads like clogged arteries, the gaggles of discalced and starving children that filled her with fear and shame – all of it repelled her.

The city seemed to sense this, and - like a predator on the trail of a sick animal - stalk her. Bringing groceries home, a feral dog snapped at her, seeking the bloody meat dripping in its cellophane package and leaving a gash in her hand.

In the mall, she caught a young girl trying to lift her phone from her purse. She called for security, but the girl turned heel and ran off.

Riding the metro, a passing teenager brushed his hand against her breast. As she snapped her head to yell at him, he exited the train doors, a grin splitting his face.

And every day she returned home, the beggar woman would be outside, waiting, her hand raised and smiling. Over time, the way Marites saw her changed. The more her misery, the more pronounced her humiliation, the clearer it became. The grin was predatory; the hand a thief’s tool; the smile an uninvited intimacy.

There was another bump at her shoulder, and Marites turned angrily to find the old man replaced by a tall woman, who offered no apology but chewed gum loudly. Looking past the woman’s shoulder, she could see the line had shortened in the back. Perhaps some residents had gotten sick of the wait. Peeking out from the wall of shoulders a reflective blue tarpaulin shivered under the cold hallway lights.

Blue tarpaulin. Marites came to despise the sight of it. It was like a throne on which the beggar outside sat, judging her failures. She stopped giving her money, began ignoring her, but her vigil remained. She was still there every day, silent and waiting with a smile on her face. To Marites, it seemed for all the world she was waiting just for her. So she could see, and judge, and gloat.

The line moved forward, and she could see the elevator doors more closely now. Their reflective steel mirrored the dull congruity of bodies before it. A long string, a noodle of meat. It parted to allow another group of people inside. Marites noticed that the people kept staring ahead as they entered, neglecting to turn around and make room for others. They stood there as a group, staring into the emptiness of the elevator walls as the doors closed behind them in a glottal bite. No one had pressed a button. The elevator went down into the garage.

Ahead of her an argument had erupted. The man with the mullet had turned his music back up, and the other who’d yelled was confronting at the man again. Although they were hidden before Marites, she could hear the beginning of a scuffle. A scream let out, and Marites felt something warm soak her feet through her shoes. She did not look down. No one did.

One year ago, everything had changed. She came home to find police on her street. A jeep, its long reflective back glistening like a beetle in the dying sun, was askew on the road. As she reached the sliding glass doors she saw, splayed across the narrow pavement of the street, the beggar woman. She had been struck by the large vehicle; her body twisted to an incongruous bent at the waist. Her color-print skirt draped over her face, exposing the naked flesh of her thighs. Blood seeped from the broken shell and swiped a broad path across the filth of the road.

Something bloomed in Marites, looking at the dead woman. Revolt and sadness curdled into a fomenting placidity, and a hideous feeling bubbled within her.

Joy.

Joy and relief and the coppery taste of revenge. It was irrational, but it was there all the same. Marites realized she had come to see the woman as an extension of the city and its cruelties. The poverty and grime and duplicity that surrounded Marites had extended its limb out to her doorstep, where it now lay crumpled and broke.

And here was proof that nothing was exempt. There was no protection, no secret to life here. It was just an animal world of chance. The city was an beast, and they were just cells within it, moving and coursing and consuming and dying within the greater body of this expansive, stone creature. They were all just meat, meat and shit.

Marites slept well that night, and thereafter. When she left the apartment in the morning, she walked with more confidence.

Someone bumped into her again, and she looked to see yet another person behind her, this time a child with sunken eyes and shoeless dirty feet, looking up at her plaintively. She returned his gaze with apathy.

A movement from the back caught her eye, and she could see the line had shortened once again. The tarpaulin-surface had come closer now. There were only a few people behind her, and she could see over preceding shoulders the riotous hair of an unkempt scalp peeking over them.

The line moved closer still. It seemed it was moving faster now. Again, a group entered the doors, only to disappear before them in a throaty suction. The elevators were going down, into the garage. Marites noticed her feet were wet. The line all around her was getting louder and louder, the voices rising from a murmur into a melee of sound that battled against itself in a general and sharp discontent.

Marites did not mind. She had changed. After the death of the beggar, something had hardened inside of her.

The next time she was sent for copies at the store, she counted the change in front of the man. When it was twenty pesos short, she slammed her hand on the counter and charge the man, loudly with theft and fraud. The glassy look in his eye left, replaced first with anger, then acquiescence as heads turned. He grunted and threw a thick nickel-plated coin that tinkled across on the glass. Marites held his lizard’s gaze for a long moment before turning to leave.

When she felt a small hand pinch her ass while walking a crowded sidewalk, she spun around to catch the hand of teenage boy. His eyes turned to saucers as she slapped him across the face, spitting at him while his friends laughed.

She grew confident in kicking dogs. It even amused her.

A second skin had cocooned around her, made of dust and broken glass, moldering concrete and bloody threats. She had learnt to navigate the human geography, an eddying sea of black eyes through a dead and deathless giant.

Someone bumped into her again, and she looked back to see the beggar woman. Behind her, no one else remained. Her was face clear and her eyes were bright, black pools that reflected the sheen of the fluorescent hallway. She looked at her with the same expression as when they first met.

Her smile showed every smile she had ever seen, every smirk and curse that had been thrown at her and returned in kind. She said nothing but pointed towards the steel doors.

They were before her. Marites had never noticed before how organic they had looked, behind their sharp contours and hungry animation. She had never noticed how much like a gorge the building’s entrance was, how hungry it had seemed to her. She felt a small push at the small of her back, and she entered the elevator, the other woman at her side. They were the same in there, a single homunculus expression of the greater whole around them. Marites realized the thought had never entered her mind to speak with the woman.

Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember ever seeing her apartment.

Before the doors swallowed them, she heard her mother’s imperative once more.

Don’t get eaten alive out there.