Seven City Centers

Seven City Centers
by Brian Achilles

Story One
Boy in the Building Way

The morning was so cold it took the car ten minutes to warm up and you left your gloves on for the whole twenty minute ride to work.  From the arterial that flowed into the hear of the city, drivers and their passengers who looked right at The Towers could see the boy in the becess of the building's southeasterly corner.

The Towers was an elderly housing complex "soaring" twelve stories into the city's stumpy skyline.  A mass of brick and concrete, its exterior seemed the last place to warm soft, supple flesh.

Yet the boy knew that the weak winter sun threw its best early rays into the recess and that the enveloping concrete arms and the building's huge flank, however stone cold, were still barriers against the January wind which came from the nortwest.

The boy was dark haired and thinnish, somewhere near the end of childhood and the beginning of adolcesence.  Through poverty, neglect or a boy's bravado, he was without a hat.  His jacket was not nearly thick enough but he did not allow himself to appear cold.

Only those drivers topped by the red light at the crossing avenue had time to pick up such details, though few noticed, and the fact that he deftly bounced a small hard rubber ball around the corners and angles of the enclave. A few drivers had seen the boy there on other mornings, a full half hour before he needed to be at school,

In point of fact, the boy greeted each winter's day, sunny or not, within the recess of the corner.

Mrs. Mildred Collins, 77, always liked to let in the early morning sun.  Her tenth story window high on the apex of the hump of the peninsula between the waterfront and and interior bay, created the impression of the sun hanging beside you instead of glaring from above, especially in winter.  After a lifetime of seeing the sun as an overhead presence, Mrs. Collins never tired of the effect.  She had much time for such passive amusements, much time.

As her eyes followed the flow of inbound cars on the arterial, Mrs. Collins saw a ball shooting for the curb.  It must have been thrown from or bounced off the building she thought as a slim dark boy easily outran the ball to the street and dashed back toward the building below her line of sight.

Whatever can he be doing there, she wondered.  Then she realized. Of course, he's in the corner doorway.  Not really a doorway, more of an alcove.  The original plans for The Towers run in the newspaper had shown a doorway on all four corners so that each wing of the complex could have a more or less private entrance with a separate elevator.

But four elevator shafts were expensive and they never did put entrances on each corner, explaing to the elderly tenants that a central entrance and elevator bank of two would provide greater security.  Informally, they said it was more sociable.  As always, officialdom made a financial decision and then had someone clever think up a human explanation.

So a plane concrete clab running to ground level flanked by two concrete isoceles windbreaks stood where the plans called for corner entrance ways.  A natural ball court, thought Mrs. Collins who knew about such things as she had raised four boys.  She recalled boys from long ago who would play ball against their garage even on the coldest winter mornings.

And the summer.  In the summer, the first sound she hear every morning was of her boys slamming the balls off the bricks below.  A pleasant thumping sound, not harsh, almost hollow, mixed with their laughter and rough kidding.  The sound had been a part of every summer and not the worst by far.

Still, she was supposed to call Building Management or Security.  There were some rough tenements and housing projects near The Towers and the tenantshad all been notified frequently that they were all responsible for buliding security.  The kids around here weren't the same.  They were different and often dangerous. Thieves usually or worse.

It seemed as if everything was different here at The Towers.  From a sun that stared directly into your windows to the nature of boys playing ball.  Different.  Newcomers to the Towers were always talked to in terms of better, safer, more convenient, less lonely and so on and so forth.  To live at The Towers was supposed to be better in every way. But it wasn't better. It was different.

You lived in a house on a street and life worked one way.  You lived in an elderly high rise apartment and it worked another.  That's what Mrs. Collins wanted to talk about.  But people seemed uncomfortable when she brought it up so mostly she didn't.

She smilled to herself as she decided she wouldn't call anyone about the boy.  She'd enjoy the illicit thrill of complicity in an unreported security risk. She'd defy the rules of The Towers knowingly and with malice. She would commit her little act of definace without paying too much attention to the fact that it was also very much in keeping with her passive nature not to call.

Down in the recess of the fake entrance, the boy stepped out to catch sight of the bank clock.  He bounced the ball one last time and headed out.  He would arrive at school five minutes late, as usual.
                                     
                                                end




Story Two
Morning Coffee

The wind was a true winter wind, from the northwest, raw and cutting.  The upturned collar of his trenchcoat flapped with the constant shears between city buildings.  The wind in the city was always made crueler by the avenues and alleys and open squares which sent it veering in all directions, defying all positionings of coats, collars and caps to fend off its bite.

He stepped in short little stiff legged strides over patches of black ice, treacherous to all who trod upon it.  The few hours of melting on some of the milder late winter days followed by renewed freezing at night meant one day's safe path was a danger the next day.  Winter is not so severe in the northeast as it is unrelenting, long lived, devious and deceptive; seemingly fading one day only to return with a vengeance the next.  The very sun itself is in league with New England's winter, shining brightest and most invitingly on the bitterest cold days.  Coffee would be good.

Half the seats at the counter were taken in alternating fashion as if everyone had instructions not to sit next to anyone else.  He too looked for the isolation of an empty stool to either side but none was available so he took second best and sat next to a fidgety read headed kid at the end of the counter chain smoking Marlboros.  The kid worked as a bus boy there later in the day.  His boring shift wouldn't start for another hour but the kid had no where else to be.

He sat down thinking about the several problems which confronted him.  Monday problems.  Money problems.  All of last week's losse ends.  It was early, just past severn, a full hour and a half before he was usually in the city.

The advantage of sitting next to the red headed kid was an empty stool to his right and the kid would be getting up soon and giving him a measure of privacy to ponder his worries. Two stools down sat a small old man in a great coat that came up all around him.  The old man stared into his empty coffee cup without once looking up or to his left or right.  The old man coughed repeatedly with a hollow, vaguely damp sound and wiped away spittle with his napkin.  For all the world, the old man looked as if he would nver rise again.

The red-headed kid who had a nearly albino white complexion tapped one foot and hand incessantly.  That was only mildly distracting until the kid began to get up and down in a flustered, herky-jerky manner.

"Where are they," the kid repeated over and again.  "I put them right here at the top of the pack. Where are they?"

"Here, use these."

"Are these yours or mine?"

"Mine, but us 'em."

"Okay, thanks."  The kid lit his third cigarettte in 15 minutes and kept on tapping.

He went back to fretting about his day.  Production would probably have problems.  Needed that report for Danton. What the hell kind of mood would Johnson be in? Bad or worse?

The read headed kid's voice intruded again. A nervous voice. Shrill.  Like the contrast between his flaming red hair and bone white skin.

"I had a lonely weekend."

"What kind of weekend" answered the parking garage attended getting coffee to go.  He knew the kid and his response was half mocking.

"A lonely weekend," the kid repeated but without emotion, just matter of factly, like saying "a warm afternoon."

The garage attendant went out.  He'd looked sympathetically toward the red headed kid but couldn't seem to think of anything else to say.  There's a lot of finality in "a lonely weekend."

Further down the counter an old lady with a tight bun of dull, tarnished silver hair had paid her bill.  Yet she still sat there looking suspiciously at each coming an going, seemingly ready to flee some unknown threat.  She didn't look capable of much flight, though, unless it was from a guy in a walker.

Mosly the old lady counted and recounted her change.  Twice she put the change in her snap wallet and placed the wallet in her purse and twice she reopened the purse and the wallet and recounted her change as though even her own purse could not be trusted.

Flora, the coffee pourer, was talking to a woman with short bleached hair like her own. Same cheap hair dresser, probably.

"I didn't do anything this weekend.  I had pain, bad pain, in places where you shouldn't have it.  I overdid it last week so I paid this weekend."

Flora looked like she couldn't overdo anything but who knew.

Then the other bleach job spoke.

"They made me put my mother in the nursing home yesterday.  They asked me why I left her, bed ridden and all, so I told them I have a job.  I can't just call up and say I'm not coming to work today.  So they made me put her in the home and they know I need her Social Security check.  Geez, it's warm in the apartment.  Her only problem is getting to the bathroom."

Flora nodded sympathetically.  "They won't bury her when she dies, will they.  They'll just get their hands on all the money now and leave that to you."

The red headed kid was still tapping and fidgeting and chewing his lip, already speeding at 7:30. Bone thin and bone comnpexioned, curled over his coffee like an animated pretzel that's had all the crust peeled off. A human in the shape of a question mark with his oversized work shoes providing the dot.  The old lady finally finished counting and left, still looking pursued.  The old man continued to wheeze.

Somehow he couldn't get his head back into the problems of the day.  Even his constant concerns and calculations about money wouldn't return.

Maybe that was because he was more and more fixed on the notion that he was the only solid, healthy sound person in the place.  The only one not infirmed by disease, disability, age, life, winter, wasn't he?  Yet he didn't feel superior. He felt out of place but surely he didn't want to fit in here.  Surely he didn't.

In an hour, other healthy young executies would be sipping coffee and scoffing over their morning papers.  That's where he would belong, a part of the 9 a.m. current of the city.  Now it was too early and the counter belonged to life's losers, those who had menial jobs which began very early in the morning or those who were too old or too sick or too useless to have any job at all.  It was just 7:30 and he didn't belong here and everyone else at the counter knew it.

Hurriendly finishing his coffee, he tossed a dollar on the counter and headed out, resolving never again to give a neighbor an early morning ride to the airport.  The wind was still raw and the sky was still gray.  In an hou it would be warmer but it would still be winter.
                                                    end