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CINCINNATI, OH—
June 28-July 7, 2024
This piece is another I’ve written for the Markus Summer Workshop, combining his assignments from weeks two and three with my journal.
Days 95-104:
“A window might not be something to look for, but a thing to be looked through.” - Peter Markus
“The hotel room dwelled in shadow, untouched by the sun for five days. The window-shade hung like a closed eyelid, the world outside a bustling murmur. I was a man without a name, a figure adrift in the quiet. On the phone, Greg, his legs dormant for now, spoke words that walked my own.” - From a napkin I’d written on in my room, July 7
My friend Mark Kremer has known me since we were four. Our families attended the same church and lived a few blocks apart in Plymouth, Michigan. This made things easy for getting together when we were kids. He’d walk to my house. I’d walk to his. At the end of June, I walked to his house again—only this time from the Atlantic Ocean.
Mark moved to Cincinnati with his wife, Summer, three years ago. They were married then, a wedding I had the great honor to stand in. Now, he rode a few miles east of their home to retrieve me from East Fork State Park, where, a thousand miles trod, I sought something between the missing and the made-up. Road and home, the line blurred.
When he pulled into the parking lot, Mark perceived a man with a backpack huddled beneath an awning in the rain, legs spent and mind even more so. Mark walked over and offered to tote the man’s backpack to the Kia, but the unshaven declined, apologies thick for the stench he carried with it to the car. Mark assured him it was no big deal, but by then the man had succumbed to that mental fog where he couldn’t look someone in the eye. The face framed by the brim of a weather-beaten hat reading ‘Certain Steps’ and a wild, untamed beard crossed the threshold of the passenger-side door. The pores on his soot-streaked skin met the electric chill of the AC as he climbed in, drying him to the point of a slight shiver. Mark jumped in on the driver side and the two drove on, laughter and nostalgia trailing in the damp air.
Twenty-three-month-old Leroy was the first to greet them when they walked through the door. He toddled quick to the one who calls him son. Mark scooped him mid-stride and turned him toward the man he’d picked up from the road. The man looked to the boy, and the toddler flushed, turning away shy into his father’s chest. In a mischievous instant, he snapped his glance back, locked onto the core of the man’s eye, giggled, and stuck out a tiny finger, pointing true to his soul. Beaming, he called the man by the name the man uttered when alone before the mirror.
“Youuu!”
The man liked it better when the boy said it. And the man could look him in the eye and not feel tired.
They would point and say this to each other over the next four days.
Mark, kind in every act, wanted the man to feel at ease as a guest in his home. He spent the first evening showing the man around his house, it being his first time there. He then offered him a shower, laundered his dirties, served him pizza, and introduced him to their six rambunctiously affectionate dogs. He played tug-of-war with them in the middle of the living room while his family and the man watched in amusement, Big Brother playing in the background on the TV. The night was soft and pure.
When he would leave for his adult job in the mornings, Mark saw through the pass-through the man sprawled on the couch, either asleep or writing on his phone like some bum scribe. The man carried himself as if he needed something to obsess about, something to consume him whole as compensation for not walking. This was no surprise, for the man had always been marked by obsession. This time, it was the Pages app on his iPhone that tunneled his vision.
When Mark returned in the evenings, the man would be there on the couch, still hunched over his phone, writing. His fingers moved, seeking justification for the hours spent, but often, he merely stared at the screen, waiting.
One day while Mark was at work, Summer, seven months along with their second child, drove the man to the FOX19 studio in Cincinnati for a news segment about his walk. The man had always held a quiet regard for his friend’s wife, her sharp wit and affinity for sarcasm making her presence easy in Mark’s absence. She was refreshingly free of the sort of social mask everyone else seemed to put on instinctively. Little Leroy, maskless in the freedom of innocence, rode along with them.
Yellow numbered ping pong balls skittered across the carpet as the boy tinkered with the small-scale “The Quiz With Balls!” model in the waiting room. Meanwhile, the man paced in and out of the bathroom nearby, nerves pushing on his bladder.
"Shouldn't have had so much coffee," he said on piss number three to a chef at the adjacent urinal, who was slated for the segment after his.
“I’m just goin’ ‘cuz I’m nervous,” the chef said mid-whiz.
“Haha,” the man lied.
But his jitters proved unfounded by the time the cameras rolled. The interview went well; the journalist was warm and kind and inquisitive. The man had spoken better than he’d expected to, and Greg Mans was happy with it. That made the man feel good.
Later that day, Mark drove his family and the man to a fair in Hamilton County. There was a petting zoo with camels and llamas and goats and water buffalo. Horses too, though Mark kept his distance, deafeningly allergic as he was to horses.
The man drifted toward the camel. The drylands dweller loomed solitarily in its pen. The creature looked sad and tired and distant, and so the man lingered there, feeling some touch of camaraderie in the shared experience of mammalian longing. When their eyes met, he grinned, subtly pointed, and uttered,
“Youuu.”
But the man was not the desert, nor did he possess the boy’s charm. The camel, entirely uninterested in his clumsy attempt at connection—no doubt in part because such attempts were the reason for its predicament in the first place—looked no less detached from its depressingly bovine reality as it chewed cud and contemplated the futility of its existence. And the man could not pet the camel because a sign forbade it. And the man felt tired.
He meandered back to the Kremers. As he approached them, Leroy, who sat in a pull wagon next to his mother and father, pointed at the man and smiled. The man fist-bumped the boy. And the man felt less tired.
After scarfing down some fairground grub, the group wove their way through the crowd, drawn to the cacophony from the ongoing pig derby. There, a South Carolinian boy with a low-country drawl emceed the race. His voice went a-ta-wang-a-yang-yang-yang-uh!
They stood and watched as the starting bells shot three-hogs-a-bundle from their chutes. Dirt and pig sweat and ruckus and the sizzling aroma of deep-fried everything filled the air as the swine tore around the track, their engines squealing at the absurdity.
‘What are they saying?’ Greg Mans might’ve said.
After the race, they left for home. It was Leroy’s bedtime. In the car, Mark and Summer recounted how they first met, a story the man had asked them to tell again, despite having heard it before. He enjoyed listening to such stories multiple times, but not for their details. He noticed couples almost always glowed when recalling their romantic origins, and he found a certain comfort in their radiance.
Leroy, his waking mind too young to grasp that this was his own story, looked through the window at the streetlights streaking past. The lull of sleep urged him toward the collective subconscious that held such knowledge, guided by the hum of the road and the rhythm of tires slapping pavement seams.
Vrrr. Ba-dum.
Fading.
Vrrr. Ba-dum.
Fading.
The man awoke a week later in a hotel room, still tired and having not moved from it for days. Over the phone, the cadence of Greg’s voice led him to the closed window-shade.
“Maybe it’s okay that you stopped for a second,” Greg said. “Maybe it’s all okay.”
“Yeah,” the man said in earnest.
He rolled up the window-shade, jolting the room awake from its slumber. He laid his eyes on the world beyond himself, neither missing or made up. The line between road and home hadn’t blurred, but blended.
I realized I was no longer too young to grasp that this was part of the story, too, so long as I looked through the window at all the light streaking past.
And so I walked the illuminated path awake, now knowing that the road walked, too.
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