The Beautiful Struggle

Paul Dent loved Dukeport. He felt he was at a time in his life when he needed it, when he could be nowhere else. He hadn’t been raised in a city. He was born in a suburb, where the houses sat on wide lots and looked so warm and full with their windows lit behind their hedges. But a person only ever had what they’d brought with them in those houses. If anything was missing it was always missing. He’d had to leave.

So where does a person go? What came to mind when Paul Dent thought of the unique soul of America was its wildernesses for some reason, wild and open and unbridled places. The country was so vast; most of it was wilderness. But that wasn’t for him either. Where could you meet anyone in the wilderness? Where could you learn to walk in a crowd? Where could you get fine things. And stylish clothes? Where could you learn how to wear them? A young person had to get into the city and get experienced, because that is something other people give you. Lots and lots of other people. Dukeport was this great incomprehensible proving ground. Paul was invigorated by it. There is a beautiful struggle going on in big cities that makes people giddy and strong. When it doesn’t crush them entirely.

Now Paul had a job in a clean office at a hip company called Innoventis. An apartment of his own and he didn’t sweat the rent. He was paying off his inevitable college debt at a good clip and still had a few hundred dollars every month to burn. He couldn’t call himself rich, but he was richer than he’d ever been in his life. He withdrew petty cash from random ATMs. Service charge be damned! It felt good to think the city was lining up a beautiful American destiny for him, that it rewarded his worship. They were in it together.

Paul sometimes let himself forget how it had been in the first two months, before the job, when he was in a room in a residential hotel where visitors had to be out by nine o’clock, like curfew, and it was five chilly strangers sharing one white-washed bathroom at the end of a moldy narrow hall. He was out of there quick. Two months isn’t long and easy to dismiss. But at that time he was chronically anxious. He took long walks in the middle of the day to keep his spirits up. And one of those walks he would always remember.

Paul had come to an intersection and across the street in front of a discount coat store there was a man in a wheelchair. The man was bald and heavy, pale and unhealthy-looking. He caught Paul’s attention because he had his arms up and waving. He was kicking too, with his thighs going at an impossible speed until Paul realized that the man had no legs. They were missing below his knees. The man kicked under a blanket he had laid across his lap like a sash. He kicked and kicked. Then suddenly his wheelchair fell over sideways and he rolled heavily into the gutter.

The light changed and there was a wall of traffic. The sound of the cars covered everything except for one desperate shout. After the wave of cars Paul could see some young men had come to help the man. One of them had righted the wheelchair. Two others had stepped into the street trying to get the man under each arm to pull him out of the freaking gutter. The blanket had fallen away. The bald man was wearing short pants and his pruned paper-white thighs still kicked. A woman with her new discount coat over her arm was making a call for help on a cell phone, looking like she was just at the edge of panic. The light changed again.

When the charging cars had passed the man was still in the gutter. The helpful young men were actually backing away. The bald man was fighting them off. He punched at them and rolled away further into traffic. Paul couldn’t hear the words the man was shouting. Mayeb they weren’t even words. His eyes were full of fear. It was like watching a dream. Drivers laid on their horns and went slowly and uncertainly beside the man without stopping. The man flopped onto his stomach and then undid the waist on his short pants.

An ambulance was coming. The siren announced it. When it arrived it blocked a lane and two men jumped out.

By now the bald man had worked the short pants down. He kicked them off and rolled away from them. He was naked except for a white undershirt. He rolled on his back in the street like a swollen infant. One of the ambulance men went to the van for a blanket and spread it over the bald man. They stood over him, waiting for him to wear himself out. He still kicked and squirmed under the blanket but he seemed to know that authority had come and it was getting to be over. One of the ambulance men folded the wheelchair and packed it. The other laid a stretcher out on the street. They both wore rubber gloves. Kicking and kicking and then the bald man suddenly went limp as if he were dead. They rolled his listless body onto the stretcher and fastened him loosely with belts. They lifted him. His eyes were open and his mouth was still moving but the bald man went helplessly.

The legless man was nuts, of course. And when Paul shared the story people laughed or rolled their eyes. What Paul didn’t share was that he knew what the man had been feeling. It came from staying too long in the buzzing, numbing street. Paul had felt it on his walks. In those first months sometimes he’d had to hurry home to his room, to shut the door and the blinds and be quiet. Then he felt awfully close to disaster. Even a knock on his door might have cracked him up. It was like a panic. Then it would pass. And afterward he’d see a shadow of it in stranger’s faces on the subway, in elevators, in department stores, in bars. It was everywhere once he knew to look.