Polyphemus

My right eye is still crusted shut, even after four days. I've been sleeping out on the beach. I thought the salt air might do something to salve the burn, but no dice. I just have to sit here and burn until I find the gypsy woman -- makes me feel better to call her a gypsy woman -- who touched me with that scum-riddled hand. And God, does it burn like hell.

The sun's out, but it's not nearly as oppressive as usual. September's bringing cool air even here, to the beach. The time for cut-off jeans, if such a time exists, is passing. Thursday night was downright cold, and I had to dig myself a little trench in which to keep warm. No one freezes to death on the beach, but that doesn't stop the nipples from turning hard as the droplets of a diamond chandelier. Some of the drunks on the strip swear by Sailor Mighty, a coconut milk beverage fortified to 22 percent that they sell up at Glen's on Providence, but I try to tell them it doesn't actually keep you warm. 

"Sure as hell feel warm right about now," one of them said. "You gonna tell me different about what I feel?"

I mostly don't talk around the gypsies. I look like them; my hair's a black mop, and my skin's unevenly burnt from the maritime sun. My cut-off jeans are the only pants I own, and my shirts been a newspaper-stuffed pillow for weeks now. To the summertime tourists, and even to the kids from the college, some of whom are even older than my 22 years, I'm a gypsy. But the real gypsies know I'm not. They know I'm a pretender. They know I'm from somewhere, and worse, they know I can go back at any time. I'd like to think they hate me for it. Truth, though - I don't think they anything me. 

At the rare book store across the street, there's a line forming. At first I think there's an accident, like some meth-face collapsing on the sidewalk or a stabbing like we had last summer. But I see the A-frame sign in front, and remember; there's a writer coming. A woman. There's a black-and-white picture of her face on the A-frame sign, already starting to curdle around the edges. She's older than me, but young. Dark mess of hair that might be red or auburn. Glasses from forty years ago. It's a put on.

Don, who'd be King of the Gypsies if they actually thought of themselves as gypsies, rustles through his backpack, one of those metal frame kits that strap to your hips. Far as I'm concerned, it's a magic sack. It's a Batman belt. I've seen him pull out an antique revolver, a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, a prototype vibrator, and of course a thousand or so bottles of Sailor Mighty. He sees me coming.

"I don't got nothing for ya."

"I just need a shirt. And some flip flops."

He eyes the line outside the bookshop, and then looks me over.. "They ain't gonna let you in there looking like that, Polyphemus. Yer eyeball might as well be rotting outta yer head. Go home. Go to the doctor. I don't got nothing for ya."

"I'll bring them right back, I swear." I see he is already strapping the old thing back down. "Five minutes."

"You gotta shit? Is that it? You wanna shit someplace nice? Like the bookshop? Go home."

"Please - "

He whirls on me, looking like a scarecrow's nightmare. "Yer not touching my clothes nor nothing I else in the bag. You got plague on yer eye. I told ya, we all told you, stay away from Doris. She's diseased. You wanna lose that eyeball?"

"No."

"Go home. Go to the doctor. Leave us alone." He slings the pack onto his shoulders - it probably weighs more than he did - and hoists himself up the fire escape ladder to the rooftop where all the gypsies sleep. 

Most of the people in that line have already filed into the book shop. Through the window I see the fat woman who runs the place standing in front of a jumble of folding chairs. She's talking. I've heard her talk before, usually spouting some hideous bile at one of the gypsies. She's got a voice like a Brussels sprout fart. But the writer woman is beside her. It's darker in there than it is out here, but I can see that her hair is auburn, with a white streak running from the middle of her scalp to her earlobe, like a scar if hair had scars. I find myself walking toward that bookshop, barefoot and nearly naked save for last winter's abbreviated blue jeans, and soon I'm at the window. The fat woman who runs the place sees me, and gets to her feet. But the writer woman also gets to her feet, and gets to a podium, and the whole place is silent. She's gonna read.

She stops. She sees me.

I see me, too. I see my crusted eye. I feel it burn hotter than it has ever burned. I remember the summer my father set my mother on fire, and how my hand felt as I moved to put her out. I can feel the ice that stuck to my charred skin, and the cool cream they applied as they lied about how it would soothe the pain. I am afraid to cry out of this eye, the one cursed by a night with a gypsy, and I wonder if Don the Gypsy King is right, if I will lose my sight, if I will be maimed for eternity like Polyphemus, with no choice but to gobble down Sailor Mighty for warmth as the cold tide grows closer and closer ...

And then I see nothing, for the fat woman has pulled down the bookshop's black blind, as the reading continues inside.