Ash Wednesday at Tel Twelve

I’m sitting in the Tel Twelve food court trying to come up with an image to complete “Images” with, looking around at all of the people and things and motions, listening to the sounds and smelling the smells.

There is a group of contractors next to me; one of them is talking to a friend who’d happened by about their current project, and about the weather (bright and sunny, more like April than February).

Several tables over, there’s a young couple. He’s rather plain but she has too-red hair, obviously dyed, standing over him and holding his cup up so he can sip from its straw, as if he’s an invalid. She leans into him, her petite breasts level with his eyes, his hand stroking her bottom, and then she kisses him with an obliviousness that could only mean love. When she moves away, her nipple casts a small shadow on her blouse.

A cleaning woman passes by, distracting me. The entire cleaning staff is Black, and work for Master Janitorial Services. I don’t know if the irony of this has ever struck them, though they do seem to hunch into their work with a special bitterness.

A group of seven Green Day refugees – short-cropped hair, disheveled clothing, some of them bleach-blonds – sit down, putting their trays down in front of them. One has a cross of ash on his forehead. Another wears a Brother Rice jacket – The Brother Rice Warriors, Class of ’99. The end of the millennium.

A balding old man whose aura reminds me of my grandfather’s sits, legs spread, arms stretched, as if he’s just bought the mall and is surveying his new domains. His lip juts out accusingly at everyone who comes too close to him.

The woman sitting next to me has oxygen tubes running into her nose. She’s eating fruit salad and a baked potato with just cheese, the liquid kind they put on potatoes. She’s reading a book called The Angel of Darkness, and I notice there are nine Green Day refugees now.

I look around, watching the people: Kristy Alley’s twin sister scuttles by, drinking java through a Dart Sip-Thru lid. A man in a suit that looks sort of gray and sort of green stands by the garbage, chewing the last of his sandwich as he wipes his face and throws the napkin in the garbage. An old man wearing a green Reebok baseball cap watches me nonchalantly. A nebbish wearing a purple tie stares directly in front of himself as he eats. Rare and exotic Michigan Palm trees are lit by the sun seeping through the skylight. Neon glares out its advertisements. A pair of Black women walk past Olga’s, holding hands.

There are two more Green Day refugees now, and I’m beginning to wonder if they’re reproducing immaculately, in the silent spaces, when I look away.

An old man in an incongruous beret, stooped over from osteoporosis and shaking from the nervous incompatibility of his age, sits across his wife, who’s even more stooped, and holds one shoulder higher than the other. I realize how many older people are here now, in the late afternoon when everyone of working years is working, except the late lunch stragglers like me.

Lon Chaney, a Black man in the teal Master Janitorial shirt, his beard scruffy and his eyes deep, dark, and angry, sweeps up some litter near my table, then wanders away, and I wonder how many other people pass me by every day, earning little more than a glance and slipping out of memory.

I notice that, despite the bright sunlight glowing through the skylight, the lights are on.

I consider the remains of my lunch: An untouched eggroll, rice spilling over onto the table, sweet and sour sauce congealing on my plate. If someone were writing about me at this very moment, what would they write? What would they notice about me? How would I fare in their judgment?

Thirteen Green Day refugees now sit around the table, Jesus and his twelve apostles, and Judas is handing Jesus an orange cream cooler from Olga’s. This is the last lunch, Jesus and his ashen forehead cross looking animated and enthusiastic for someone doomed to die in forty days.

A voice behind me says, “‘We gonna talk,’ she say, but she didn’t say anything, though.” A pair of Black women with obscenely complicated hairdos – vaguely reminiscent of a grandparent’s couch – sit where the contractors had been sitting.

I decide to stop, and I close my pad and see the terrible drawing of Keroppi that I made one day while I was in a meeting and thinking about Kate instead of the meeting. I smile at myself, knocking the entrails of my lunch into the garbage, the rice skittering off the tray.

I make my way out the door, passing the smokers, looking around at all the cars going wherever they’re going, the drivers looking annoyed, when a line attributed by Falco to a Vietnamese general talking to the war photographer Kappa pops into my mind: “Are these the shots you’re waiting for?”

Later, as I sit in my car, writing more notes to myself, I look up. In the Kmart parking lot, one of the contractors I’d seen inside gets into his LeBaron. I know it’s him from the bright yellow-orange of his shirt, and I realize that this is the shot I was waiting for.

I realize I could sit here all day, looking for images, angles, moments frozen in time, but they wash past me, each more poignant than the previous. As I drive off, I see a couple that I’d almost written about before, an older man and a younger woman, the latter of whom is wearing a stylish leather coat and clutching her handbag like a treasure, and I feel a moment of camaraderie with the world: We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not.

I’ve decided to leave “Images” unfinished, because it’s either finished as it is, or it will never be finished. The slideshow of life flickers by, trees fall in uninhabited forests, and those who stop too long by the wayside get washed over in the flood.

And that’s all there is to say for now.

(1999)