wandering the meridian
Marcelo was the neighborhood’s leaky faucet. He dripped through our alleys and parks, sometimes climbing fire escapes, and, at his worst, pissing on lawns. Description of his presence was quickly amended from consistent to maddening, but you couldn’t pin blame on him: he was thirty-one but stuck forever at five, his wanderings the byproduct of the city closing its mental health centers. We’d try to do good by him and make him feel alright — the Spiderman shirt he wore every day gave him the easy nickname, and that even earned him a theme song: ‘Swinging through your town like your neighborhood Spiderman’ said the Wu-Tang fans whenever we spotted him, ‘Protect Ya Neck! It’s Marcelo!’ Like the real Spiderman, Marcelo didn’t have parents, or anyone, except us, to protect him, or at least give the illusion that we did.
He didn’t have any powers either. With nowhere to go and scribble days away, and no one to pretend to fix his head, he scoped gangways with a fish net he found sticking out of a sewer, looking for mariposas. Maybe going blind, on top of everything, or otherwise unable to tell any difference, he mistook potted flowers for the hues of monarchs and swallowtails. He’d swipe at the plants like a fat samurai and leave petal paths. We could always tell where Marcelo had been and where he’d wandered off to — his trail looked like a wedding aisle. Mrs. Rosés, our block’s aptly named green thumb, would get so frustrated. ‘Why does this boy hate color?’ she’d cry with her nose pressed to dusty window screens, mistaking his illness for a deep and vile attack on all she considered good: dots of life on asphalt canvas. ‘Why do you hate color, boy?’ Maybe he heard her, I don’t know, but he’d wave his hand, as he often did, and bite his lip, as he would, and stumble mutely out of mind until the next time you sneezed because of all the goddamn pollen in the air, and remember him, or at least, by association, the Wu-Tang.
Like the rest of the block, Mrs. Rosés grew slowly to understand, and find comfort in, Marcelo, especially when her husband fell ill. The Spiderman’s drip, above all else, was consistent. She needed that. She called him her Magellan, likening his aimless paths to those of old Portugese and Spaniards. She’d say, ‘Those explorers weren’t so great, they just ended up somewhere,’ and said that Marcelo, while also not that great, would end up somewhere too. But in the meantime, as he circumnavigated our tiny block over and over, Mrs. Rosés would buy and plant more orange and black monarch-esque flowers, thinking of Marcelo as a cocoon himself who’d one day discover the merits of nurturing a plant rather than destroying it, and so open a neighborhood garden in the empty lot where they tore down his old clinic, and she would protect him still, his surrogate mother and Argus.
But Mrs. Rosés died not long after her husband did, and Marcelo still wanders the meridian.
