We finished work at five. No time for dinner. The weather was bleak and getting bleaker, windshield wipers swatting sleet and sleet still coming, brake lights strung like beads along a northbound red zone—Google Maps rerouting. Thirty minutes turning into forty, forty into forty-five, but this could be our lucky break. We were determined to arrive.
The venue hunkered by the railroad yard, an old brick building, a single black point on a scatterplot of dive bars, warehouses, and unpaved lots hemmed in by wire fences. “We’ll make sure you get a parking space,” we had been promised, but all the lots were full, new cars lined up on muddy gravel, flank to flank and end to end. The venue glimmered in the rearview as we crunched down narrow roads. My wife had on a purple maxi dress, too thin for winter, even for someone whose knees were not arthritic, swollen. Stepping from the car, her boot went straight into a pothole.
From the darkness came rushing another young couple, heads bent against the rain. We’d parked in a space that belonged to a bar, they warned, stamping their feet, breathing raggedly into their scarves. The bar towed.
From the car, we tried the coordinator’s personal number, once, then twice, and then again, until she finally answered. Her directions reeled us back the way we’d come.
Inside, the venue’s sloping banisters and ornate chandeliers offset its decrepit exterior. On the second floor, the coordinator met us, showed us to the buffet table, then melted back into the crowd before we could ask for the gluten-free options. They knew we’d skipped dinner and had promised us food. My wife had explained that she didn’t need much, just a quick bite to balance her blood sugar levels. They’d said no problem. She’d mentioned Celiac’s. They’d assured her that she would be taken care of. But now there was nothing for her on the table. Everything was breaded, fried.
Being vegetarian, I also had limited options.
According to our watches, the event should’ve been in full swing, but the stage was still empty, the attendees still milling around, sipping from their glasses, nibbling hors d’oeuvres, circling back to the table for seconds and thirds. They all seemed to know each other—or maybe they were just too drunk to notice that they didn’t know each other; that with each fresh exposition, they were sending flecks of beer-foam-tinted spittle into the faces of strangers, not kin. We found a wooden bench against the wall and sat there, looking on—or, rather, I looked on. I watched. My wife listened.
She is blind. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have been the featured speaker at that night’s event, a fundraiser hosted by an organization where she’d once gone to study technology. They’d made her attend cooking classes and mobility training, though she’d been feeding herself and navigating the physical world for years. To learn what she’d gone there to learn, she’d stayed up late each night for the duration of the training, reading manuals, downloading software, and memorizing keyboard commands on her own, alone in the room that her government sponsor was covering as long as she remained enrolled.
That room was the reason she’d remained enrolled.
Now, years later, no love was lost between her and the organization, but she was a rising star, and they’d reached out to offer her an opportunity. If she agreed to sing their praises, they would get her in front of some wealthy donors, men and women who might also take interest in our fledgling business, a boutique author-support platform.
“Come on!” The coordinator, materializing from nowhere, seized my wife by the arm and wrenched her into the crowd. “Here’s where you’ll stand,” I heard her saying as I followed, her black bag looped over my arm. “And here are your bullet points. The ones I sent you, remember? Here’s what I want you to say.”
Onstage, an attractive young woman was talking fast into the microphone: “DoIseefivethousand heyyy fivethousandgoingonceandgoing doIsee seesixthousand!”
“Like my screen reader,” my wife had wryly observed moments earlier, “when you turn it up to three times speed.”
Up for auction was a week at a Floridian resort, where the most generous donors would bask in the glow of their unmatched largesse amid the palms, the chlorine-scent, the sand.
“This is where you’ll go,” the coordinator was saying, talking as fast as the auctioneer, yanking my wife so hard she nearly stumbled on the beer-slick floor. “Around this way, back here, through these cables. Watch out for the cables. Don’t trip. Pick up your feet now. And then you’ll take a big step up onto the stage. Do you think you can do that?”
“Ten thousand!” somebody screamed, sending a plume of spittle into the hazy incandescence from the chandeliers.
“I think we can handle it,” I heard my wife say, but her words were drowned out by the auctioneer bellowing, “Sold!”
When the time came, I walked her to the stage, retracing the route at a steadier pace this time, signaling the imminent step with the same little squeeze I always use to signal stairs and curbs. Her ascent would’ve been effortless if not for her swollen knees. As it was, no one else noticed her falter.
The volume had spiked with the final sale, and now the night was unraveling, the taps flowing like Heorot’s, post-Grendel, the scavengers plundering scraps from the tables like massive, beady-eyed, crumb-hungry birds. I hovered behind the stage like an umbrella stand, gripping my wife’s bag, her coat, and her cane.
She’d spent forty minutes in the car rehearsing: first, a token tribute to the organization; then a few words about her turbulent past to stir the listeners’ emotions; and then the meat of the presentation, the work that we were doing now, helping authors. She would mention the books we were writing, the services we were providing, and the resources we were circulating. She would revisit the importance of telling one’s own story, the sense of empowerment gained. Then she would tell everyone to visit our website to learn more.
“People! People!” the coordinator barked, snatching the microphone from her. “Listen up! This is something I want you to hear!” But there was no pinging those towers. The venue might as well have been a disco, drunken bodies moshing. “She’s got a really amazing story,” she added helplessly. “I want you to hear.”
I’d seen the bullet points that she’d sent to my wife. They’d been borderline nonsensical, all jarring transitions and unqualified claims. My wife is a brilliant storyteller and a seasoned speaker, and the version that she’d been rehearsing had been wholly of her own creation. Yet when she began to speak, I did not recognize the words. Not their version, not hers, not even really a speech at all—just enough words to produce the impression of having spoken, though she might as well have lapsed into another of her half-a-dozen languages, before an empty room, into an unplugged microphone. We might as well have stayed home. We might as well have waited in our car, on private property, until the tow truck came.
Then the coordinator started clapping.
The donors, noticing, started clapping, too. Cardboard grins twisted their faces. Tropical paradise was waiting for them, miles and miles from the black sleet beating on the glass block windows. The hors d’oeuvres might be gone, but the taps were still flowing, the night was still young, and their indulgences were paid.
I helped my wife down from the stage. She was limping. The cold, the arthritis, was eating her knees.
We’d recently ordered new business cards, but the ones she passed me, as we pushed our way toward the stairs, were the old ones. We’d hoped to give them all away that night and start anew. Deep in the sweaty squeeze, punch-drunk in the heart of that raucous, philanthropic solipsism, we let the old cards slip between our fingers, scattering them like petals or confetti on the floor, adding one more layer to the fast-accumulating strata: spittle, booze, and gravel and mud tracked in from the lots, and the salt that the city had put on the roads—but maybe a few would survive. Maybe a few would still be legible hours later when the venue emptied and the night crew came. Maybe one would catch a janitor’s roving eye. Maybe that janitor, scanning whichever side was facing up, intrigued, would sound out our unusual names.
Maybe, come morning, that janitor would google our unusual names.
Maybe, having cleaned up after countless bacchanals like this one, that janitor would have a few stories.
Stories we could help tell.
*****
Mekiya Outini is an author, editor, and educator. His fiction and nonfiction may be read in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, Modern Literature, The Stonecoast Review, Hidden Peak Review, MQR, Chautauqua, Lotus-Eater, The Brussels Review, Men Matters, DarkWinter, Gargoyle, Sortes, and elsewhere. He and his wife, Itto, are collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, an author support platform. Mekiya is grateful to the MacDowell Foundation for supporting the completion of his memoir. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas.
