He had been at it for three days. There was an American twenty-dollar bill stuck behind a Coke machine, and his sister’s snatch if he couldn’t use twenty-dollars American. It was out of reach, though it took him 10 minutes to admit it to himself. He didn’t want to go outside to his cart — those fuckin’ bastards will search him again, he just knows it; the last time, the fat one had particularly seemed to enjoy himself — so he combed around through one of the trash barrels behind the Lufthansa desk. He found one of those cardboard poster-tubes, the kind he used to use like a telescope when searching for Nazis as a kid. “Seems the krauts found my secret stash,” he chuckled to himself before returning to the Coke machine and the possible funding of his next couple of bottles. 20 minutes later and he was still trying to convince himself that the bill wasn’t stuck in a dried, sticky patch of spilled soda.

With a resigned slump to the floor, the man gave up. Three days later, he was still there.

Three days wasn’t such a long wait. He had once waited eleven days for a garbage truck to move a dumpster so that he could get to an old and tattered coat that was stuck underneath it. The coat wasn’t much to look at, but it would keep him warm on those cold and wet London nights, those nights when even stray cats found something better to do than be outside. The man would find some big tree, hide under its branches for shelter from the wind and in its shadow for shelter from the police.

Three days wasn’t much at all. It took Christ three days to come back to life. If Christ could wait three days to breathe again, this man knew he could wait three days for a twenty-dollar bill.

He held out a glimmer of hope for the possibility that when the time came to refill the machine, he might be able to talk the Coke guy into removing the heavy metal lock that kept the machine securely in place, and he might be able to talk the Coke guy into sharing the money with him. While it wouldn’t be perfect, it’d be better than nothing.

At night, when the airport was empty of all but the poorest and freest of travelers, he talked to a silver queue-pole in front of the Lufthansa desk. His shoulder pressed against the side of the Coke machine, and his back against the wall, he yelled the 20 meters to the pole, his breath rotting the air between him and it.

“It’s the type of thing that they call a non-zero sum game,” he yelled, “In a non-zero sum game, nobody loses or everybody loses. And if all goes well, there’s no losers will be here. Coke guy wins. I win. ‘Course I’d be playing what they call ‘Sucker’s Role,’ putting my trust in some strange Coke guy and all, but if I don’t trust the Coke guy, I walk away with nothin’. If he cooperates, as they say, then I get somethin’. If he don’t, I still get nothin’.” He started laughing and traces of drool crawled out of his mouth like maggots out of a decaying apple, “And it’s not like I got anythin’ else to do. Christ, practicin’ altruism’s as good as walkin’, right?”

The pole kept its opinions to itself.

“Only problem is, it ain’t as easy,” he continued, his raspy voice carrying throughout the terminal like the sound of a well-deserved disease that everyone knows is coming, “’Course that’s only ‘cause we won’t let it be.”

He shook his head at the pole, angry at it for some reason.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “You’re just a dumb pole and you haven’t got a clue.”

The pole didn’t say anything.

“You think so, huh?” he said, “Well I think you’re wrong.”

The man kept quiet for a while after that, like the way a young man keeps quiet after telling his father that he doesn’t agree that the President is doing a great job with the country. His face was screwed up, as if trying to keep his mouth shut because he knew it was pointless but the taste of the words stuck in his throat made him want to vomit.

He knew what it was like have something to say but not the patience to say it. He had been a university professor for eleven years and understood that some people just aren’t worth the effort. He found out early in his career that it was easier to stop your words when you had a bottle of whiskey between your lips than it was when it wasn’t there. After years of that strategy, he forgot to care about why the whiskey bottle was there.

After that, it only took the administration another month to release him. His department chair, Stan Kusko, a fat man who spent too much time talking about the weather and not enough time experiencing it, called him to his office and told him in so many words that the university couldn’t retain a drunk. The man remembered the way Stan had whispered the word, drunk, as if the sound of it would spoil the crops of young minds sitting outside on the quad, as if a pestilence of alcoholism would reap an intellectual famine for the next generation of students.

His wife left him the same day. She refused to waste any more time with a loser who couldn’t see past the next bottle to know not to pick it up. That was another long wait, he remembered. It took him almost a month to leave the house after that. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, but he hoped it would kill him when it came. When it didn’t come, he left the house looking for it. He hadn’t been home since.

He couldn’t contain the words any longer, “All right, you fucking pole. I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. Look at this vending machine here. Some guy comes around every day carrying dozens of cans of Coke in American-red cases and wearing an American-red uniform. The Emergency Coke Man from the Globalization Unit. He’s wanted here — and some might even say he is needed here. Regardless, this Coke Man has a destination and nothing will keep him from it, not a six-car pileup on a rain-slicked road and not a live-TV presentation of the Queen’s abortion. He comes, opens the machine, fills the machine, closes the machine, and then he walks away.

“But wouldn’t it be so much better if he just left the machine open? I’m not saying all Coke guys should leave all their machines open, and not even some of the guys and some of their machines, but this one guy and this one machine. Coke makes plenty of money — as they should, because the people who work for Coke work awfully hard to make the rest of us want Coke; it’s honest work, and they don’t do it because they want to the rule the world, rather they do it because they have mortgages they have to pay and children they have to feed and lovers they have to pleasure as honestly as they know how and it just so happens that Coke is prepared to pay them for whatever skill they may possess, whether it is answering phones or giving the keynote speech at a stockholders meeting — and is it so bad to want to let someone pay you for your skills?”

He paused, as if listening to someone on the other end of a telephone.

“That may be right, that may be right. But sometimes I think there’s too much put on this whole world-is-run-by-evil-people-at-corporations thing. The truth is — and I know of where I speak, by the way; the motherfucker that fired me for drinking too much might have been a motherfucker, be he sure as I ain’t shit wasn’t evil — the truth is that it’s all of us. Nobody’s evil. But us is evil.

“Now you’re thinkin’ that I just slipped you some Pogo, ‘They is us,’ but think about it a second, huh? They is us. And just as they is evil, us is evil. The CEO of Coke doesn’t want to run the world. He just wants his daughter to go to a good school, and his wife to be smiling when she gets in bed at night. When he started, he probably worried about phone bills just like the rest of us. But someone saw something in him, and helped him out — of course someone helped him out; no one gets that far without help — but the important part is that someone saw something in him and chose him to be the one to help out, as opposed some asshole sitting next to him. The CEO of Coke just took advantage of every opportunity, and wouldn’t you if you could? Christ knows that I would.”

The pole remained stoic.

“The point remains, however, that Coke as a corporate entity has plenty of income, and that they won’t miss whatever percent of that income this one particular inventory in this one particular machine means to that one particular quarter of that one particular fiscal year in the bottom line of that income. And so this one particular Coke guy could at one particular time leave this particular machine open for anyone and everyone. All of the recipients would have gained something for the price of absolutely nothing, and the Coke guy would have risked something to contribute it. But would anyone be upset at him, in reality? Not really. But in theory, his manager could find out about it and fire him. But chances are that won’t happen.

“So, does the Coke guy do it? Of course not. Why? Because if someone did hear of it, he would lose his job. The risk is minimal, but it exists. And that’s pretty much the rub for all of us. We could do that little thing that helps so many people out, but we won’t even take the slight risk to try.”

The pole didn’t respond.

On the third night, a boy riding the back of a luggage cart flew past him. The boy, who might have been old enough to be a man, was obviously drunk and possibly on drugs stronger than alcohol. His eyes kissed the room and his smile was too honest for polite society. The boy’s clothes looked like they were drunk as well, spending time in the airport only to give themselves a sense of sanity between whores and dives. The boy’s clothes, much more so than the boy, were dirty, smelly, and experienced. As the luggage cart careened by, the boy had let out a resounding “Whooooo!”

The man who leaned against the Coke machine watched him pass, and then closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

Several hours later, the boy returned. Still drunk, the boy’s adventurous spirit had led him to the early-morning hours’ quest of taking a photograph of every sleeping person within the walls of the airport. He had taken enough pictures to fill almost two rolls of film.

The most exciting experience occurred when he went to take a picture of a redhead who had curled up under the AVIS counter. The counter had been blocked off with a velvet rope, but it wasn’t enough to keep out an exhausted woman who had just spent sixteen hours on a train sharing her compartment with a strange but handsome Italian man whose eyes and hands said much the same thing as his mouth, unlike all of her experiences with men back home. It also wasn’t enough to keep out a drunken, hallucinogenic, and aspiring young-photographer.

As he laid his head against hers, positioning the camera so that they both were looking at it, the boy felt her eyelids flutter against his cheek, like the shy kisses of a butterfly. As the flash of the camera went off, he turned his head to look at her. By the time he got her eyes in view, they were closed, but he imagined that as soon as he got the film developed, he would learn that her eyes were open for a minute, and that she had let him take the picture and let his face get that close. Even though it happened almost 90 minutes before he came upon the homeless man next to the Coke machine, the feeling of those eyelids still felt like someone had poured warm honey on top of him.

The homeless man smelled of whiskey, but so did the boy. To the 17-year-old American, a homeless man was supposed to smell like whiskey, as was a 17-year-old American backpacking through Europe, especially if that boy has come to Heathrow Airport via Amsterdam. He got down to his knees and put his face next to the man’s. The scraggle of the man’s beard felt like a rat’s fingernails scraping against his face. The man’s snoring, foul breath almost peeled the American’s skin.

The flash woke the man up with a startle, but the boy didn’t flinch. He had taken too many pictures now to mistake his actions as covert. He walked in without caring whether his subject awoke, took the pictures without caring, and walked away as loud as he pleased. If his target woke up during any of it, he continued anyway. He knew that he had at least seven pictures of a subject pushing his head away, but he thought those as honest as the others and so didn’t try to prevent them from happening by sneaking from subject to subject. When the homeless man jumped, he was just another honest subject for just another honest photograph.

The words the man said as he started, however, were different from the startled words of any other subject’s, though they were just as honest.

“You the Coke guy?” he asked.

The boy brought the camera down to his side and said, “Nope. Just an American.”

“Coke guy’s American,” the man said.

“I suppose he is,” the boy agreed, winding his camera.

“They got altruism in America?” the man asked.

The boy stopped winding the camera, thought for a moment, and then responded, “I think they do.”

“Yeah?”

“I think so.”

The man, who hadn’t moved anything other than his eyelids at this point, jerked his eyes at the machine, then back to the boy, and as he did so, said, “Think my Coke guy’s altruistic?”

The boy smiled and said, “I think he might be.”

The man moved, and he moved so quickly that anyone other than a drunken and drugged-up boy would have jumped back in horror. The man grabbed him by the shoulder, pulled himself up, and then, leaning on the boy for help, said, “Take me over to that pole.”

The boy looked at the terminal full of poles, and then asked, “Which one?”

“That one there,” the man said, pointing with his head, “The cynical one.”

The boy accepted this description without reservation and helped the man over to the correct pole. He didn’t see it before the man pointed it out, but he thought to himself, “That is a rather cynical pole.”

When they reached the pole, the man thanked the boy for his help, and then let himself slump to the ground next to it. He looked up at the boy and said, “Can you go out to my shopping cart — it’s right outside those doors over there — and bring me back the black cane that’s inside it?”

The boy looked at him questioningly.

“I’ve got a lot of walking to do, and I don’t think I can count on you being here to help me forever, can I?” The man chuckled after he said this.

The boy chuckled as well, and then, pointing at them, said, “Those doors there?”

“Yeah. It’s right outside.”

A few moments later, the boy had brought him the cane.

“Thanks,” the man said.

“Don’t mention it.”

Playing with the handle of the cane, the man looked as if he was inspecting the hairline of old friend. He wanted to see its flaws before seeing the whole thing. “I’ve had this cane for over 10 years,” he said, “And I don’t think I’ve ever really seen it until now.”

The boy nodded, “It’s a good looking cane.”

The man smiled, “It’s not that it’s good looking. It’s that it’s good living. This cane has been places.”

The boy nodded again, then said, “Hope someone says that about me someday.”

The man laughed, “Don’t we all, don’t we all.”

The boy shook his head, “I’m not sure we do.”

The man laughed as if someone had told him laughing is cancerous.

“You think I’m wrong?” the boy asked indignantly, “Then why do we have war and famine when both can be cured by the goodwill of men? I’ll tell you why. It’s because most people don’t know what good living is. Good living is new. It’s new experiences. New people. New places. New ideas.”

The man kept laughing.

“It’s new friends and new love and the newness of the moment that happens every time we try to kiss someone new. It’s sharing and learning and loving. It’s travel and well-told tales. It’s the laughter of a mother when her baby has gone to bed. Good living is red wine by an outdoor fire under a new moon. It’s talking loud and saying something louder. It’s everybody dancing when the music is tight, and everybody patient when it isn’t. Good living is a dark hallway when you’re hung-over. It’s 35-year-old men playing an impromptu game of Marco Polo in a hotel pool.”

The man laughed even harder.

“I’m telling you man, most people don’t know good living, and that’s why we got all these problems.”

When the homeless man had composed himself enough to speak, he said, “You’re telling me that people don’t know what good living is? Do you know how young and how American you sound?”

The boy had heard things like this before, and so he didn’t say anything. Part of him had the feeling that all of Europe was right, but he was too American to truly realize it.

The man turned serious, “Listen, KID,” — he spat the word — “The truth is that you don’t know shit. That vending machine knows more than you. On the other hand, you seem to be more informed than this pole, but we’ll get to that later.”

The boy stayed quiet.

“How dare you think that you know what good living is?” the man continued, “Have you ever done anything in your life? No. You’re just some KID. That vending machine has at least seen its share of humanity. Every day, every damn day, thousands of people walk past that machine. Some of them are escaping life, some of them are embracing it, but each of them has a story. And this vending machine, more than you or I anyway, has access to those lives. They speak in front of it as if it were nothing but a dumb object. But there’s something there, something you can’t see, though part of me is seeing more of it every day. And this something knows us. It’s different for each of them, the vending machine over there, this pole here, or the cane in my hands. But in each of them, it knows us. It knows us like our mirrors know us.

“This thing — and though it is different for each, it is one thing — this thing understands that each of us are just trying to make our way. Not all of us can be heroes, but none of us are the bad guys. Why, in the morning rush alone, I bet you and I could find six or seven individuals that we would think are evil. These people would run evil companies, one or two might even run an evil country, and almost definitely, one would beat his saintly wife. We’re talking bad people, the red spots in a puddle of wet shit. But between the three of us, only the vending machine would understand that for each of these nasty motherfuckers, there is an empathetic rationale for each of their ghastly actions. That vending machine hears the stories people tell when God says, ‘I know what you’ve done. Admit it.’ I’m talking the types of stories that even priests don’t hear.”

The boy looked at the man like a 15-year-old Chinese kid looks at an elderly White woman who tells him she’s never been to China but she sure likes the way they do chicken fingers.

“Christ, KID!” the homeless man yelled, “That vending machine moves just slow enough to read our thoughts. Don’t you know that?”

The boy took this information, turned it this way and that in his brain, tried to see every part of it, even wondered for a moment what its center looked like, and then, after he determined it couldn’t hurt him and had put it in one of his mental pockets, said, “You think so?”

“Think about it, would ya? Everything is motion, right? I mean, you got these electrons rotating around these protons and neutrons, and then these atoms are rotating inside the molecule, and enough of these molecules are rotating around something enough for us to call it matter. And this matter, it looks solid and steady to you and me, but it’s really spinning spinning spinning. And that’s what’s goin’ on everywhere. It’s going on inside my brain and inside yours. It’s this spinning that causes our thoughts. It’s the electricity created by all this spinning friction, like two gears hitting each other at super-fast speeds, that is us. That is this thing we call life.

“Now your thoughts,” he continued, “Are different from mine because your gears are spinning at a different speed. But me talking to you here, I’m throwing some of my electricity your way — these words are like invisible ninja stars that I’m throwing at your thought gears, and if I’m lucky, my timing is right enough to get the ends of these stars stuck inside your gears and change your whole frequency, change it to a rhythm that is more my speed. And that’s what we call understanding. My well-aimed word-weapons are changing the gears of your thoughts to my speed.”

The boy’s eyes said that he had no idea what the homeless man was saying, but that he wanted the man to continue because sometime in the near future, the boy might understand, and he was willing to invest the time.

“But the stars I’m throwing at you with my words are just one of the weapons I have to attempt to make you understand me. I’ve also got the slower-working weapon of body language. Slower-working in the time it takes to reach your consciousness, but a much quicker weapon than words when I want you to react without knowing. You’re using the same weapon, however — for example the way your eyebrows raised when I said ‘body-language’ told me that you recognized where I was going. That all of my talk from here on out would be gratuitous. Your eyebrows told me that you understood that the analogy I was making had worked. That both you and I could continue this conversation without me telling you that all of this was just a long-winded way of saying that both inanimate and animate objects can find a least common denominator in our ever-spinning sub-atomic particles and that this common root might be enough to consider both people and vending-machines the same ‘thing,’ so to speak, and that it is awfully chauvinistic of us to bemoan the right of our inanimate brothers to possess the ability to listen.

“And what’s more,” he continued, “Their ability to listen is better than ours. To return to the speed of rotation, the thought-gears of inanimate objects move much slower than ours. So slow, in fact, that the no-see-um ninja communication-stars thrown out by the electricity of our own private thoughts are picked up by the vending machine. It understands you even better than you understands you.”

It took a moment for the boy to realize that the man was waiting for him to respond, and then said, “Really?”

“No, not really. Of course not, but what does that matter? What’s important is that you understand me. No one cares whether it happens really. In 100 years, both you and I will be gone, and no one will care. At most, we might show up in some great-grandchild’s school report on his family tree, but even that is asking a lot. I can tell you for damn sure that I don’t know the name of my great-grandfather.

“So what does really matter, if you and I don’t matter? The only thing that matters, kid, is that you and I communicate. Then I know I’m not alone. And you know you’re not alone. That’s what all those pictures are for, the ones you’re taking. It’s to tell you that you didn’t experience this night alone. I can’t afford a camera, so I’m talking to you. I talk to you and you tell someone about this night. When you tell someone about this night, kid, that means someone else knows about me. Someone I’ve never met knows I exist. What’s that old saying? The one about how to tell when it’s true. It’s something like, ‘If there’s one, he’s crazy. If there’s two, they’re lying. If there’s three, it happened.’ So what does really matter? Better what really matters as opposed to what’s really matter. At least that’s the way I see it.”

The man stared at the pole as he spoke. When he finished speaking, he continued staring. The boy was silent, as if waiting for a priest to start speaking again or to stop pretending that people had their heads bowed in pious prayer.

“’Course, there’s always the other way to read our minds,” the homeless man finally continued, “You gotta understand infinity to understand that, however.” The man looked away from the pole and up at the boy, “You think you can understand infinity?”

The boy nodded, “I think so.”

The man laughed, “All right, KID” — the spit was back — “What’s infinity?”

The boy thought for a few minutes, then answered with a self-conscious smile, “It’s the universe and then some. It’s everything and the only thing. It’s both what’s inside the universe and what’s outside it. It’s the only answer to the only question. It’s what we’re looking for, man. That’s what infinity is.”

The man frowned and said, “You’re so full of shit and you don’t even know it. That’s the saddest part. And that’s what I’m talking about from before. All of us are full of shit and none of us knows it. That’s what makes the CEO of Coke so goddamn human like the rest of us. Because, yeah, he’s trying to pay his bills like the rest of us, but at the end of the day, he knows, he bloody well knows that his bills are going to get paid. Yet he has the audacity to think that he worries about his bills being paid. He wouldn’t know that worry if his kid died from it, like the children of so many other parents. He’s full of shit but he doesn’t know it. Just like you. And just like me.

“Still, it seems like I might know I’m full of shit. After all, I’m telling you aren’t I? But the fact that I’m telling you any of this proves that I don’t know shit about shit, and I sure as shit don’t really know that I am full of shit. At the end of the day though, my shit stinks and the CEO of Coke’s shit stinks; it’s just he can afford a big enough exhaust fan that no one knows his shit stinks.”

The boy laughed. “My shit stinks too,” he said.

“Yeah,” the man said, “But you don’t think so. And neither do I. That’s why we can keep on living together even though we stink so badly. We got the same stink. The stink of understanding and not being able to do nothing about it.”

They sat quietly for what seemed to the boy to be about 10 minutes. The man breathed heavily the whole time, like he hadn’t spoken this much in years and the risk of it was just hitting him for the first time. The boy had read enough literature and seen enough decent cinema to realize that he was in the middle of a moment, and he knew that the one thing one didn’t do during a moment was say the wrong thing. His entire life he had made it his one rule of conversation to always say the wrong thing — he prided himself on it — but he understood that all of those a moments had been imitations of this one true a moment, and some things are too true to mock. The boy trusted that the homeless man would know what to say and when to say it, and so he kept his mouth shut.

Finally, with a sigh and a wistful look at the vending machine, the man said, “Of course, there is that other way to read our minds, the way that takes advantage of the infinite.”
He smiled, then continued, “You think you can understand the infinite?”

The boy smiled in return, “I can try.”

The man chuckled and said, “Okay, so the vending machine moves slow enough so that each of the gears is compatible with ours, no matter how fast or how slow we spin them. This pole here,” he continued, grabbing the pole with his dirty hand, “This pole moves fast enough so that its gears are also compatible with ours.”

The boy still didn’t get it, but gave him the nod to continue.

“Okay, think about it like this. On one stage, a man is playing electric guitar, and he’s playing so fast that it seems like his hand is going to catch on fire. On the other, another man is playing so slow that you almost fall asleep before he plucks another string, carrying the note for dozens of minutes at a time. Imagine that the fast man is playing so many strings so fast that only one note becomes apparent to your ear, and it’s the same note as the guy on the other stage. Fast has become, in effect, slow. That point is infinity.”

The boy didn’t understand what the man was saying, but he was even less sure of what the man was doing. As he spoke, the man had raised himself off the floor using the cane. Then, once he found his feet, he continued, “The vending machine over there is playing one note at a time,” — he changed his grip in the cane to hold it like a baseball bat — “While this here pole,” — his voice rose to a scream — “Blazes by so fast that it’s slow! But because the apparent reality is the same, they both pick the frequency of our thoughts with the same ease!”

As he screamed, he began beating the pole with the cane.

“And this fucking pole…”

Thwang!

“Knows what I’m saying…”

Thwang!

“And won’t admit…”

Thwang!

“That I am right!”

Thwang!

“That people are altruistic!”

Thwang!

“And that my Coke guy will give me the money!”

Thwang!

“And that my wife will forgive me!

Thwang!

“And that my boss will hire me back!”

Thwang!

“Not because I deserve it…”

With a last, half-hearted thwang, the man stopped, and whispered, “But because people are altruistic.”

The boy, who hadn’t flinched the entire time, waited for the man to make the next move. He understood that the man hadn’t been talking to him. That he was witnessing nothing more and nothing less than the private moment of nothing man. After what seemed to be an appropriate amount of time, the boy finally spoke. “Really?” he asked.

The man didn’t even look at him to smile, but still he said, “No, of course not, but what does really matter?”