The Wax Museum
Every summer he returns to me in his
white suit, carrying his briefcase. I
look up at him. He
looks down at me.
We’re together on this bus, forever, it seems.
I have bronchitis, a bad
job, perhaps
a urinary tract infection.
Am I bitter?
Yes. However, I also have
a bit of luck today:
a seat
on this crowded bus, this crowded
bus I’ve boarded every day for months, and never
gotten a seat on it: not once.
He doesn’t.
The man in his white suit is too late
for that. He boarded at the second stop. But
he looks young enough, and healthy, maybe
rich, full of confidence, or so it seems to me. It’s
so hot.
Chicago
humidity.
He has to stand.
Let him stand.
So what?
(But he can’t.)
This humidity.
To try to breathe: it’s
as if, together, all of us are not
only on a bus, but we’re beneath
a vinyl tarp, a vinyl tarp tossed over
a vinyl tent
inside of which a hundred feverish infants have
secretly been kept, a mad
scientist using them to invent
August
in Chicago
out of their damp breath.
I cough.
It’s been like this all summer. I
must have bronchitis. Go
to a fucking doctor, my coworker says.
He’s sick
of listening to me cough
all day. He’s
grown to hate me. He might still hear me
and my cough, all
these decades later, still
in his dreams, waking him up
just when he’s fallen asleep. Get
an antibiotic. Jesus. That’s what medicine is for.
But I don’t have a doctor. Or insurance. Or
sick leave. Or money. However —
today I have a seat on the bus, the same
bus I’ve never before boarded
to find an empty seat
waiting there for me. It’s
a seat this man, in his white suit, does
not have. He has to stand. And, as it happens, he
stands in front of me. We
see each other, but I
pretend I haven’t seen. He
reaches up to hold
the railing above his head. Its
purpose, that railing, is to steady
passengers without seats. He
tries to hold it, tries to stand.
He can’t.
I have
long since looked away from him, but I
still I feel him looking down at me. So
I cough, wanting
him to hear, to understand, how
this summer I’ve become, the sick one, the girl
at the front desk, the one
who answers the phone
in an office full of angry, healthy men, the girl
who might, eternally, return to her coworker
in his dreams, still coughing. The girl
he’d like to kill, since he
can’t cure me.
Not his specialty.
My bronchitis.
Not his problem.
I am to him as this
man on the bus is to me.
He loses his balance at every stop, loses
his grip on the railing, stumbles
forward, backward, forward again. until
his briefcase is dropped and spills
papers and thumbtacks and pill bottles all
over, for all to see. His
hand ends up on an old
woman’s shoulder, and then on a businessman’s head
as he tries to steady himself with them, and
they shake him off, recoil. Hold
the rail, for
God’s sake, that’s what it’s for, someone says.
He can’t.
He needs a seat.
But am I not
also in need?
I have bronchitis, perhaps
an infection, urinary. Twice
in two days
there’s been blood in the toilet with my pee.
He can’t
hold on, however, and he can’t stand, and
his stumbling returns again to me. So
many stops. So many more passengers
board, also
without seats. Until, finally, despite
the rest of them trying to elbow and block and
force him to stand, he
falls to his knees
at my feet.
Then, I rise, surely, from my seat
to offer it to him. I
do this, of course I do, in my memory, for
not to do it would have been a sin.
And if I didn’t? What then
might have become
of him, or of me?
But why is it then, that every
summer, when
the air gains weight like this, and
the tears of those infants inside their vinyl tent begin, in
the heat, to condense, but never
to rise to heaven, to linger instead
all around us, so that
whenever we must leave
our air-conditioned cars or houses to go
to work, or to the store, or to the gym, we
pass each other on sidewalks, in parking lots, pretend
to fan ourselves with our
empty hands, and say, “It
sure is hot and humid again today.”
Why then — if, as in
my memory, I offer him my seat, and
then I stand — does the door to all of this
hesitate at his stop before
convulsing open, as it always did?
And he always enters
with the scent of wax. But not
of candles, not anything
flickering romantically at the center of a table, or on
an altar, sacredly. This
is how those lifelike figures
would smell if they were melting
in the wax museum, as
their features slackened, their
face behind their expressions
exposed. The
slouched one, the slumped one, the one
who’ll be
completely unrecognizable in an hour
if they don’t adjust
the temperature in here. Even
our movie stars are turning to puddles. Elvis
on his side, on the floor, liquefying. Princess
Diana will soon be just a smear
of time and loss
in a wedding gown.
The presidents, all of them, going back to George
Washington, sag into each other, becoming one.
And I —
I offered my seat to him, surely.
Didn’t I?
No one else did, so
I would have been
the one because, if I wasn’t —?
And he hasn’t changed, unlike
the rest of us, although
he recognizes
everyone. Sometimes
he even dreams of me, and —
here he is again.