Bombay

It hadn’t worked out for me. Not because I hadn’t tried, or didn’t want it to. Surely I did, probably more than anyone I know. It didn’t work out only because it didn’t, which is just how it is for some people, and I didn’t settle. When it was wrong, there was no trap set for me from which I could not chew off my foot to escape. I could have settled for her, or her, or her, but I wasn’t right for them and they certainly weren’t right for me. So it felt as though I was cheating them or they were cheating me out of a destiny promised to us by the very nature of our existence. That unspoken craving of the soul to couple romantically and be happily fulfilled with someone who desires the same of you so contentedly that there is room for thoughts of no other. 

I guess this is the way bachelors and bachelorettes are made, out of bitter disappointment, a blind-sided spurning, or a likewise reluctance to settle. Like my uncle who is seventy four and living alone in some drab woman-less apartment somewhere waiting for death to knock upon his door. I remember he had a girlfriend once and how unearthly uncomfortable they looked together like two hapless mismatched socks. The pain in his face was as obvious as the despair in hers. They were playing cards at my parent’s house and I was seven or eight. Or my old football coach, who died making love to alcohol but left a string of women who came to his funeral like Avon ladies.

I often spend afternoons at the half-priced book store on 74th Street where I had met some beautiful women, but who shot through my life’s sky like meteors, burning so brightly and brilliantly for a few moments until they trailed off into the inevitable darkness of their destined obscurity. I recently read a book I bought from that bookstore about men who die alone. It was a different book than men who died virgins, which I read years earlier, but included some of the same people. There is a long history of distinguished men who gave up women, or who have been spurned by women, or who, for whatever reason, die alone without them. Throw out Oscar Wilde, of course, and J. Edgar Hoover, who was thought to be asexual. 

I suppose it was inspiring in some way that such important men as Napoleon and Tesla ended up dying alone, and I didn’t think about me never conquering a continent or inventing the light-bulb, I only thought of how similar we were in our ill-fated bachelorhood. It made me feel less downtrodden living in this empty Manhattan apartment in the most crowded city on Earth... an apartment that seemed to crave a woman’s touch as much as my rusty netherlands did. Rusty, only in the metaphoric sense of there being the lack of a feminine touch in my life. I was like an old bike left on a rack for years whose lock longed for a key. I suppose I should say, rather, I was a lost key who longed for a lock to turn. I’ve lost my mind in such useless metaphors which I don’t wish to posses or contrive of everyday things in relation to my lack of companionship, but which come regardless... though I don’t.

I could me a monk. I often observe myself in mirrors and windows and the person looking back is sometimes as foreign to me as a stranger on a busy street. And I say hello and he says hello back and I remark on how handsome he is in certain lights, wearing particular shirts, or sunglasses, or jackets, or in the way his hair is parted or shines a golden shade of brown sometimes. And it is remarkably sad how he is alone, as I am alone,  not seeming fit or destined for another soul, but kind of floating there in an inverse glass world, moping at times, but sometimes giddy-looking when I catch him unexpectedly as though he still has that slight sliver of hope which only fades upon his own scrutiny. When I see him, and he sees me, that optimism deflates like air out of a blown tire and all that is left is the husk of another boring person on a busy New York street. Someone part of an oil painting, perhaps, or a tourist’s photograph. An indiscreet brush of thoughtless color meant only to contrast with the next person, or not meant to contrast at all. Meant simply to bleed together and be indistinct.

But he, like I, have had some glorious romances with some very beautiful women who have come and gone, who each have their attributes and flaws, but whose latter outweighed their former fatally in a novel full of tragic short stories. Some shorter than others. And I have given up on telling his tale for I can hardly tell my own. And I stand here in the musty aisles of half-priced romantic books thinking of all the hopes an expectations that these books were written with, and how the writers all died deaths of obscurity and faded away, yet here are their dreams in bold black letters on bound white pages, explicitly spelled out for a disappointing audience. I favor those books more than the big name authors who pompously wrote novel after novel, churning out New York Times’ bestsellers. I have read many obscure books and have thought of finding the writer...and how incredible that story would be. The rise and fall of their hopes and dreams. But I haven’t bothered for what if they were happy doing something else, teaching World Literature to a public school in Queens. I guess I ashamedly reveled in the thought of their tragedy for maybe the thought of theirs made mine a little more bearable.
 
But there she passes. Like some mythical animal who I am not sure exists at all, but for in the fancy of my thoughts. Perhaps she is only fiction that I have dreamt to existence in exact proportion and specifications to my fantasy. She walked past as I was having a coffee and a bagel sitting on a park bench and pigeons in reverence parted as she passed. She was wearing a long black raincoat and black boots with beautiful faded golden hair and big black sunglasses. Her face was perfect with freckles upon it, beautiful lips and chin. She modeled, perhaps. 

I knew she must live nearby because I had seen her a dozen or more times in passing, in various places around the bookstore, but never once had I the opportunity to say hello. I suppose I could have, when she stopped at the light of a crosswalk once or twice. But she was so beautiful I was afraid she would shoot through like another comet, or if I startled her and called attention to my observation of her, she would exist no more. Her beauty and being was so fragile I dared not to disturb her in anyway at all. I just let her be and hoped to again see her soon because she, this anonymous woman who came and went so gracefully, gave me the slightest sliver of hope which I would not otherwise have possessed. And to have a dream of her being my soul mate was better than to have lost it with knowledge of the tragic reality that she is married or simply not interested in a dreamer such as me. It is simply beautiful to have such dream, even one that just passes through.

New York City is littered with businesses that come and go like hot romances. Manhattan, especially. If you walk the streets, any street you pick, you’ll see stores you didn’t see last year, or last month, empty buildings waiting, buildings getting a make-over with the faded square of a sign since removed branded on their foreheads, ones with vinyl banners tied haplessly until permanent signs could be affixed. Tourist shops, mostly. Restaurants, someone’s lifelong dream being realized or being packed away in boxes. 

In one shop little different than any other, without a sign but with a blue neon light that read “Palm Reading” under the image of a hand that bled into the dark street, I walked in and the West African lady greeted me and smiled. She said her name, but I couldn’t make it out through the thickness of her accent, but I reasoned it hardly mattered. I was taking a walk which I do at night, which had become habit, in hopes that I would run into my mysterious romantic soulmate who I had never seen in darkness, and who I didn’t know to exist at all but in my daydreams.

The room smelled beautifully of incense, and candles flickered giving it an aura of mysticism, and the shadows of shrunken heads and other weird things I could not verify the authenticity of made strange shadows on the walls. The one question I had for her which I paid her twenty dollars to tell me, which I could have spent on another kind of hand job in another more unsavory shop up the street, if I was so inclined, was if I will ever find the woman of my dreams. Or would I wonder the city aimlessly until I got cancer and died somewhere in front of some nurses and doctors who saw thousands of people die the exact same way so they couldn’t fake real compassion anymore. And this beautiful older woman in her purple and gold gown stroked my arm and ran her dark index finger across the lines of my palm and calmly said that I would live a long life and I was destined to find my soulmate, but my soulmate was a cat.

“A cat?” I asked obviously let down.

She shook her head. “Yes. Cat,” in her thick Ivory Coast accent. She held out her white palm for the twenty and Andrew Jackson looked at me in disgust for blowing him in such a heedless way.

I left even worse off than before. I shouldn’t have gone. There are things we should know and not know and things we should just leave to mystery and fate. Having calendars in phones and meal plans and grocery lists was never for me. I thought about it. I didn’t like cats much. I had no problem with them and I wasn’t allergic, but I had no particular fondness for them where I could conceive that a cat could ever be my soulmate. Then I thought of Ernest Hemingway and his cats in Key West. Those six-toed cats, whose ancestors still live at his museum. I had dated women who had cats, and I never particularly warmed to them. But being a believer in things such as West African palm readers, I went to the humane society and looked through their selection of feline companions and I adopted one that struck me. Her name was Daisy and she was a Bombay cat, midnight black with bright yellow eyes. Daisy, I knew was the one for me because she shared the name with Gatsby’s heartbreaking love. And it was a sign because The Great Gatsby had and will forever be my favorite novel.

“Alright, Daisy, let’s go home.” I tucked her under my arm and she happily went with me. I figured if she jumped out of my arms and ran into traffic, then she wasn’t really my soulmate. I left the windows open in my apartment as I always had, figuring if she chased a bird on the ledge and tumbled twenty stories to her death, she wasn’t my soulmate. But she never did. She just stood there and looked at me.

Daisy turned out to be a good pet. She was comforting and nice and not standoffish like other cats. She didn’t have a bad attitude, which other cat enthusiasts playfully call a “cattitude.” I gave her good food and catnip once in a while and when I lied down and read my half-price broken hearted novels, she curled up next to me and purred softly. Still, despite my growing affinity for her, I wasn’t convinced that she was my soulmate, and the empty feeling would not abate. Perhaps, I could get a dozen more cats and one of them would give me the kind of contentment I had always desired, but I couldn’t bring myself to becoming a crazy cat man and the thought of the smell of cat piss becoming normal to me or cleaning four or five litter boxes every weekend didn’t sound like a very good time.    

A person doesn’t realize when they give up, they said in my book about men who died alone. At some point it becomes normal to them to be alone and the desire to couple just withers away. Acceptance, they call it. I suppose I believe that somewhat. The idea of meaningless relationships no longer appealed to me. Dating sites and that other nonsense. Falling in love to have my heart inevitably broken, or to break someone else’s, to move on too soon after and make a worse mistake. Moving things in only to move them out later. Deleting pictures or taking them down from my apartment walls, leaving bare spots where they hung to fill with art prints I didn’t really like. It was redundant and hackneyed. 

I was going to die eventually and my soulmate was a cat. So I resigned myself to writing a novel of my own with the hopes that it would be in the half-priced bookstore someday for someone like me to read. Maybe, I thought tragically, a female version of me. A woman who was my soul mate, just born too late, or I too soon. And maybe all she would have of me is that book and a heart full of love for someone she never met, but someone she knew in his soul for his soul is his words written for her without ever meeting. I sat down to my laptop and began to write that story, though I struggled to title it. And the more I wrote it, the more I resigned myself to be only for someone yet to be born, fated to the wrong day and age. The haunting thought occurred to me that my soulmate had come before but I had to reject that idea or I knew I would find myself busy at graveyards, or hosting hopeless seances like one of those kooks in the Enquirer who marries a ghost. 
 
On one of my walks I walked down that string of shops where the palm reader had been but she was no longer there. There was a sign in the cracked glass window that said, “Make money for participating in scientific research. Inquire within.” So, for lack of anything better, I inquired. The man who greeted me looked like an Indian version of Dr. Emmett Brown. I resigned myself to be a part of a scientific experiment that paid well, half up front and another half at the completion of the research. I had to be injected with a deadly virus that would shorten my life. I wouldn’t die painfully, they said, but I would be prone to deep sleeps and in one such sleep I simply wouldn’t wake up. I wouldn’t live past 50 or so and I couldn’t ever have sex with anyone or even kiss anyone deeply, he said. I could have casual social interaction, but nothing overly physical. I signed some forms and they issued me a check for fifty thousand bucks. Then Doc “Bombay” Brown injected me with the virus that burned a little as it went in.

“What is it called?” I asked.

“Ah, you must not ask any questions or disclose you having this virus to anyone, particularly not the CDC! You must come in once a week and we will take your vitals and track your progress. At the completion in six weeks, you will be awarded another fifty thousand dollars. We are trying to develop a cure to the virus that kills many people in Bombay. Many people.”

I researched it online and couldn’t find anything out about a mysterious illness that killed anyone in Bombay. But I called it the Bombay Plague, for lack of anything better. I doubted that the check would clear and I would suffer some horrible side-effects, but neither was true. The check cleared and I didn’t feel much different at all, other than I was more tired than normal and fell into deeper sleeps that felt like comas, as I imagined a coma to feel anyway. It concerned me that I would fall asleep and not wake up one day, but without my soulmate, it hardly mattered. I read some books on reincarnation and felt hopeful that I would be reincarnated to another more successfully romantic life, one in which my soulmate existed. But I was fifty thousand dollars richer in this one and would be 100,000 richer when all was said and done.

A week or so later I was in the half-priced bookstore and searching for book about vampires when I reached for The Bohemian, but my hand was touched by a prettier one that was reaching for the same book. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed her before, but the store was crowded and sometimes I don’t notice such obvious things. She laughed and apologized and insisted that I take it and I looked into her eyes and smiled and told her she could have it being that I had already read it, which was a lie. One of those lies that is okay because it makes life better. She was the mysterious woman I had seen a dozen or so times before in passing, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. And without those dark sunglasses her bright eyes were windows into an even more beautiful soul. She was color on an otherwise colorless canvas. An exceptionally skilled brush stroke. The incidental face in the tourist’s photograph that stood out among all. My God, she was real and she stood right there before me as though God had forced the issue of her.

She smiled and thanked me for the book and I watched her turn and walk away after a slightly deliberate pause. Hell, I was dying anyway, I thought, I had nothing to lose so I caught up to her and she smiled as I did and I couldn’t think of anything clever to say so I just asked her if she would like to have coffee.

“I know a place around the corner,” I said.

“Only if you promise not to spoil the ending of my book.”

I must have just stood and stared at her a little too long, or drifted away somewhere, because she smiled and asked me again if I would promise not to spoil the ending of the book and I came back to life and promised that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, she didn’t know, for I had never even read it. I had a few books to pay for and I stood behind her in line, enjoying the smell of her hair and the feeling of her presence in a state of quiet and contented bliss that I had not known for a very long time, perhaps not since I was a baby in my mother’s warm arms. There was a peacefulness in her. She waited for me outside and when I got out I realized I hadn’t introduced myself.

“I forgot,” I said. “I’m Adam.”

“Adam. Nice to meet you. I am Kat,” she said.

The blue palm of the palm reading shop that had faded in the oblivion of ghosts of merchant’s past returned to me from several weeks ago and burned vividly in my head and the Ivory Coast accent of the beautiful older lady echoed in my ears. Cat, she promised me. I must have looked like quite a dope standing there when Kat smiled and asked me if I was okay. No, I wanted to say. I was the world’s greatest idiot. And I had the Bombay Plague.

“I couldn’t be better,” I lied again.

Despite the virus that raged in me, I saw Kat on a regular basis for the next few weeks. She wasn’t married, she had a kid, and she, like me, was a hopeless romantic and a half-price book junkie. We had more coffee and lunch and dinner and took walks in Central Park and watched a movie or two. We ice skated in Rockefeller Plaza after realizing neither of us had ever done so. We seemed to laugh as much as we talked and we fell in love like tourists with the city and with each other somewhere along the way. Maybe it was on the subway, or at karaoke, or on the Staten Island Ferry. Maybe it was on a Ferris Wheel at Coney Island or at a Rangers game when they put us on the Kiss Cam and rather than slipping her my virulent tongue, I kissed her like a gentleman.

It was like I dreamed it would it be. There wasn’t hardly a moment that passed that I didn’t think of her and I got butterflies every time that I saw her and every message and phone call was as though it were floated to me in a surreal dream. It all felt celestial, but I knew that I was doomed in the fact that we could never progress for I had the mysterious virus that killed so many pour souls in Bombay, and that would eventually kill me. She waited for me to kiss her with passion, but I couldn’t and she didn’t understand. When the moment arose, I simply smiled and said or did something to change the mood. And it went on that way until I told her that I had an incurable virus and was a dead end, apologizing for wasting her time. And she told me that it was remarkable because she had just read a book that was kind of like the same thing.

“Virus or no virus, I want to be with you,” she said inching closer to me in the dim light of the black-and-white movie on my sofa. Her hand slid down to my key and I knew I had found my beautiful lock. Daisy watched from the window sill. Her lemon-yellow eyes all over us. “This life or another matters little,” Kat sighed, “Together in love is all that matters.”

“I couldn’t let you,” I said uneasily.

“Then you don’t love me,” she bluntly countered.

“But I do.” And so, against my better judgment, I kissed her and the parade of emotion and feeling led to what comes natural, very naturally and pleasurably. Afterwards, we lied contented in bed, I in guilt and regret but conflicted with love, and she with her arm and leg draped over me smiling up at me. “I have never had the opportunity to prove my love in such a way to someone,” she whispered. “I have always dreamed of being able to do so, of being like Juliet. Now I am. So how long do we have to live?”

I told her all that I knew and there wasn’t a moment or the slightest hint of regret in her eyes or behavior. In fact, quite the opposite, the more I told her the more her eyes lit up like Daisy’s yellow eyes stalking a fat bird on the window ledge. She was like a time traveler who bought a ticket for the Titanic and merrily boarded despite its doomed destiny, or a soldier who signed on with Custer’s cavalry. It was very peculiar.

I took her to the little shop where I had been injected and received my first 50,000 dollars, thinking maybe she could get a share of the research money. Doc Brown met us eagerly, close to six weeks after our initial meeting, three weeks after I met Kat. He hooked me up to a polygraph machine and asked me a series of questions. Most of which were about my relationships with other people and about my sexual behavior. Have I had sex with anyone other than myself for the last six weeks? Yes, I answered truthfully. Have I experienced more periods of deeper sleep than I had before I was injected with the virus. Yes, I replied. Did I do anything I normally wouldn’t have done because I had a terminal virus? Yes, again truthfully. I spoke to a woman I never would have said a word to without knowing my life was doomed. Doc Brown wrote me another check for 50,000 dollars. He smiled tearing it out of a checkbook. He had long brown fingers, I realized, not that it mattered, but they were peculiarly long. 

He looked at me then at Kat grimly. Then like Willy Wonka he smiled and spread his happy arms and announced in that thick Indian accent that he was bullshitting us. “This was a sociological experiment paid for by the government of India. You’ve not been injected with an actual virus at all. No, no, no! It was a placebo! Our intent was to only study the change of human behavior when the subject feels an imminent threat of death. We have had a researcher follow you around to observe your behavior. The eminent threat of death made your life better! In nine out of ten cases, it made the subject’s life better.”

And Kat floated there in the Atlantic, perfectly safe on a life preserver as the Titanic plunged to it’s inevitable icy tomb. And we left fifty thousand dollars richer and I held her hand and she held mine and she turned to me and playfully said, “Well, now that you know how much I love you, where’s my ring?”

I smiled at her as we walked back to my apartment and still feeling like I was living one incredible dream, I replied what would also be the last line of my untitled novel. “My dear, truly, these are our humble beginnings, but the best is yet to come.”

Where the palm reader and the curious Indian research office was, there was soon a jeweler from Morocco, a fat man who called himself Bo, but whose name surely wasn’t Bo. I bought a beautiful ring off him, an very timeless antique, as he described it, and waited for the right moment, forever grateful that I held on to the sliver of hope that love would come with patient time.