ā•multiplicity

by Ricky Toledano

The midday temperature is just above freezing when Ricky enters the redline “L” heading northbound. Assessing the distances between passengers, he plops himself in the empty middle of the car. The sky is the same grey of the winter city through the window of the elevated train that chugs above the street. In front of that window there is an older woman seated across from Ricky. She is so white she is pasty, and she keeps looping her gray hair around her ear as she gesticulates, conversing with someone on her right, but there is nobody there. Ricky notices that odder than her behavior is her attire. She is dressed in fuzzy pink pajamas with cartoon characters under a grey coat with stains on it. Noticing her shopping cart, Ricky surmises she is carrying all she owns. To the right of Ricky at the end of the row is a skinny man mumbling intermittently in a Spanish that he identifies as Caribbean. The man fills the silences between his rambles with a violent stomp of his foot, punctuated with a slap of his knee. Walking back and forth in the train car is a man dragging a bright yellow blanket that is soiled. He is tall, and Ricky notices the pick in his hair almost hits the metal hand bars. He smells unclean and smokes a cigarette as he shuffles between the different accommodations in the corners of the train. At the next stop, a short man enters on the train car with a bicycle. He is young with green eyes and whiskers that peek out over his mask. He starts slapping the seat of his bicycle in irritation, and when he can’t stand the insolence of the smoker any longer, he moves to confront him in fluent Chicago streetwise. The indigent man retorts “I don’t care what you think, dammit! I fuckin’ live here!”

The city isn’t what it used to be, Ricky thinks, wondering if he should abandon the train and take a cab the rest of the way uptown, as members of his caste had apparently done years ago. He remembers the warnings they had given him: “This is a third-world country now!” He smiles because he has lived in a couple of those. He had always found their metros clean and cruelty-free. How funny it is, this need to rank countries.

A blonde mother and daughter enter at Belmont. Ricky sees how they scan everyone in the car without looking at anyone, using the same prejudice used to decide where to sit in any city of the world. Ricky sees that they notice him, dressed in a stylish woolen coat and fine leather shoes, and he already knows the blonde ladies would sit opposite of him, next to the pink woman. Mother and daughter mutter in a Slavic language as they look at Ricky. He returns their gaze, which is interrupted by the smoking man who trapes between them with the soiled yellow blanket on his way back to his den in the corner.   

Almost thirty years have passed since Ricky lived in his hometown. On these visits, he often has these moments, feeling that he is standing outside looking in through the window of a country that has gone down the merry path. He wonders if others can see that the story a country tells of itself is rarely true.