The Tourist

Photograph by Zachary H. Arnold

I’ve seen how the other half lives. I have only just begun to live there, but I know it well. Quaint. They bathe in buckets. One would think it a far cry from our marble tubs, but marble is quite cold, and wood has a pleasantly soft texture. The luxuries of the poor never cease to amaze me. I am not averse to adversity.

Let it be known, then, that I am not a wealthy man. My father was a wealthy man. His father was a wealthy man. His father was a wealthier man still. And yet, I chose to live a greater life away from the funds to which my elder kin and I have been thus far adjusted. I live now in a bare hovel on 43rd street, purchased by my father yet otherwise uninhibited by the grand failings of my wealth. I am as shrewd as I must be, for I should reiterate that I am not, or at least no longer, a wealthy man. My only connections to the riches I once had are my education and the letters I write almost daily to my relatives and some college peers. I resign to stay connected to these classmates not for the monetary reasons that so many of my former class deem pivotal towards a relationship but for legitimate friendship and personal pleasure. I do not seek a measure of wealth only attainable through networking.

However, my hands are bright and smooth and show little sign of wear. I am green behind the greenbacks. It is unfair to say that the methods of my new life are alien to me, but they are not so easy to study as I have done to all the matters of kings and bishops the past decade of my schooling. Little is to be known or said in history, most likely due to the commonality of the knowledge in the present, of the magic and methods of the common man.

I met a girl my age, or perhaps a couple years younger; She was certainly well within college age if she had gone or could even afford to go. I was lounging on my stoop, drinking seltzer, when I noticed her. She was doing laundry on her fire escape. I must admit, this was in the early days of my revolution, and I had yet to learn this trade. I was wearing a ragged undershirt, which I had purchased for a meager sum off the back of a drunkard. How he had used that money to purchase another fifth of rum before I saw him again with neither shirt nor shoes, I will never fully understand.

But, the girl! I saw, first, her shoes. Raggedy things, and quite small. They peeked at me through the slats lining the fire escape’s floor. They pressed into the grates with the unmatched agility of a ballerina yet carried with them the remarkable metallic thud of a steel mill. This paradox was resolved when I walked out further into the street to see that she was buttressing what must have been two or three times her size worth of laundry. I watched as she washed, rinsed, scrubbed, and dried each piece. I was mesmerized. I called out to her.

For two months, we were inseparable. She taught me how to wash my clothes and dishes, grow vegetables on my windowsill, and appreciate the birds as they fly overhead. She taught me where to buy cheap meat, where to relax in the breeze, and why to drink and be merry. I read her poetry. I painted her. I sold some of those paintings, too; It was the first income I had ever received. I felt emptier having lost them, but she was proud. To her, things were meant to come and go. Creations were meant to be shared. That income, too, would be lost, but it would be lost in the pursuit of my own enjoyment and health. I wondered, then, if she, too, was something lingering only for the moment. And if one day she would be gone by her own mantra.

She fell ill one day. The name of the disease was not so simple that I may remember it, nor simple enough to ease her nerves. It was, at least, simple enough that she sought to ignore it. She could still walk and go to work. And so she did. She could still do laundry and wash dishes; She still cooked, drank, and danced. All the while well aware of a deep-seated pain within her, destined to metamorphose.

I told her to see a doctor. Every day, I told her to see a doctor. She refused. She said she could not afford a doctor. I did not understand. I could not understand. Health is of the utmost importance to me. But to her, it was more important to feel free and unburdened of the debts of healthcare. I chose not to press the matter. We continued.

I must admit that the whole matter stressed our relationship to a degree. This was something obvious to me. My insistence on health bothered her some, and the pain sent her into occasional rage. But I soothed her the best I could. Unbeknownst to her, I was seeing a doctor on the side. I paid for him by my lonesome, but I paid in full. My paintings began to fund themselves, having been so learned in the craft in my younger days, and I was doing well enough to afford a consultation. She never would have allowed it if she knew. With this doctor’s hidden aid, her health improved for a time. Our relationship did not.

When I was a boy, my mother had a vase. We knew of the vase’s origins because it contained a note relaying such. As it goes, the vase was stolen by a grandfather 5 generations above my own from a palace for which he tended the garden. It stood out among our family artifacts, being not the oldest but most certainly the most extravagant of its age. It goes without saying, as otherwise this anecdote would be rather nugatory, that I broke the vase. From that day forward, it was simply missing in my and my family’s lives. That was the moment I realized the existence of mishaps unfixable through my personal wealth. It was a pain I knew twice or thrice. Grace felt it nearly every day.

She had a leaky roof, a torn dress, cracked plates, uneven tables and chairs, flickering lights, and a bowed floor. To her, these things were not at their end. If they could not be fixed by her means, then they most certainly could not be replaced. Their original form was gone and could not be returned.

When her sickness returned, I begged her to seek treatment. She refused. Her family needed that money, and she would need to eat, drink, and bathe. If she recovered, she and her family would be nearly destitute. I told her I would pay for it. I told her about the consulting doctor I had already hired. I told her that he said it was nearly terminal. She was angry. She told me that she cannot be indebted to me. She told me that I should not have wasted the money on her. To her, she was just another thing that could come and go at any time. To her, she was temporary. I will never understand this. I told her as much; I told her that I would never understand her. She said there was nothing to understand. That it was simple to her. That all the facts of my life led me to an illusion in which I am watching gods play out fantasies as men and in which I can never achieve mortality or the insecurity of flying without a parachute, no matter how I seek it. I gave her a check to cover the treatment and left. 

I know she will eventually, after much thought, discard it. When she does, I will have long forgotten her.

And so she made aware to me in the lurid form the fact of my life among these people which I had always consciously known: That I am a tourist. That my debts will always eventually be paid in full. That a rainy day will always be covered, and a fatal illness will be fatal at half the rates of theirs. That one day, when I am sick and tired of the drab, peeling wallpaper and the delirious slog of indentured servitude to a boss I likely owned in turn, I could simply hang up my work uniform on the nearest hook and walk out, never to be seen again, completely lacking in repercussion.

I will go home and want for nothing.