Lafayette Park

The heat is oppressive. The moisture in the air an obstruction through which one must knife courageously. He wipes his brow and soldiers on.

He angrily slaps his neck, imagining a leech but coming away with only the plastered wings and body of a trigger-happy mosquito. “Stay away from my face!” he mumbles at the other mosquitoes he knows to be following him through the jungle, swatting at the air above his head and thwarting, he imagines, numerous attacks already in progress.

The sweat beads on the tip of his nose and falls with studied indifference. A man can die in this heat, he knows. Dehydration creeps up on you. Delirium then finishes you off. A guy he had known had choked to death on dirt, thinking he was quenching his thirst. The jungle has killed before, and the jungle, the heat, will definitely kill again.

He shouts as he plows through a dark wall of undergrowth. He shouts not at the thorns that snag on his clothes and skin but the noises of the jungle, which taunt him unceasingly. I will die on my own terms, he thinks. Mock me all you want. Go ahead. “Let’s see who’s tougher,” he mumbles, gazing straight ahead, refusing to capitulate to the shadows dancing in his peripheral vision.

White spray for spit. What he gathers with his tongue explodes from his mouth, dry and foamy, never making it to the ground. He spits again, defiantly.

He stops under a piercing ray of light, under a tear in the otherwise unbroken canopy. If the jungle is going to kill him, he will die honorably. He has no intention of crawling under a tree and curling up in the shadows. Tipping his head back, he catches with his face the full force of the sun. He then opens his eyes. If he is going to die in the jungle, he is going to die on his terms. Honorably and courageously, and without fear.

Martha had been people-watching from her regular bench in Lafayette Square Park all afternoon. That morning she had made ten dollars an hour demonstrating outside a downtown hotel. For two and a half hours she and a few other men and women from the shelter had carried signs and marched up and down the sidewalk. Out of the original twenty-five dollars she had earned, she now had a little over six dollars left. Being a bit drunk meant that the passersby, be they tall or short, white or black, tourists or locals, looked pretty much the same. Felt pretty much the same, that is. Felt the same because she was watching the passersby with her eyes only. And then a homeless man she had never seen before entered her narrow field of vision and she felt herself jump up from the park bench. Only the slats were still there, her hands informed her, she was still sitting down. It was her blood that had jumped. The stranger needed help, she knew. She didn’t know how she knew, but the way he stood there, challenging the sun, burning defiantly, she somehow knew he needed help, and knew she might be the only one who could help him.