Corner Man
by Marc Eichen
You must think you own this corner. Our corner. You hustle out there every day and most of the time you just move like a boat through water. A little this way. A little that way. Skim along the top.
You get out of the car at the Amoco station and try to avoid the puddles, so they won’t splash up from the curb cuts onto your stockings or ruin the shine on your heels. Sometimes the sun hasn’t broken through the clouds and the fluorescent lights of the station reflect mercilessly down from the awnings and up from the gasoline-infused puddles.
The highway is below and no matter what time you arrive, the sound from the trench fills the corner more than light or the smell of gasoline or air itself. It wasn’t so long ago, you know, that the highway wasn’t here. It was built, a monument to progress, for the World’s Fair, or so I was told. I look old, like I should be part of the cement and steel of this place, but I’m not. I’m just here. This is our corner and hey girl, I’m your corner man.
You ever wonder what it was like before that highway sound ground everything away in its path. The El train has been here since the twenties. Back then, before the train, this was as flat as a tabletop. Cleared. Wiped clean. Away from the avenue with the El, most of the streets hadn’t even been laid out. Imagine the confidence, the balls, to put the train on that tabletop and say, ‘Here will be a city. Lives will be lived. Truths will be known. Stories written. Lies told.’ In the pictures there was a Masonic temple on one corner, a clapboard boarding house with a candy store on another, and a Dutch Reform church and parish graveyard on another over there. These days you have to wait a hundred years before taking over a graveyard, knocking over the gravestones and paving it over. Then, such comforts for the dead were hardly observed. The El came and in little more than twenty years, the highway, the houses, the diner, the Amoco station.
Of course, it’s not just the Amoco station that lights night and day with blue fluorescence, it’s the El itself. This is a big stop, the end of the line. I counted 448 separate florescent bulbs. But you know what the station doesn’t have? Entrance doors and locks. Why should it? It never closes. Me neither.
You ever think about the El sound and how it’s different from the highway? I mean, the highway you hear all the time up from the trench. And unless there’s an accident right here, it’s mostly the whoosh sound of tires at fifty, fast on pavement and trucks gearing down for the hill and whine and grunt you hear everywhere of engines moving metal. I hear it in my head all the time. When I’m eating behind the diner. When I close my eyes in the park. In the summer when the rain beats on the cardboard. All the time. People around here hate the El because it clatters by and shakes their windows. They hate the braking sound of metal on metal. But for me the El is like a clock. Lots of trains when the sun is low in the morning and evening. Every six minutes. Hardly any at all at night.
And then there is the sign, forty by one hundred. Black and yellow, mute and shouting. Lock It In. All News, All the Time. Sometimes I stand back, here, on the corner, and try and figure out what that sign is really saying.
Other times I talk to the sign.
“Hey, what’s that you hear? What’s new? What’s new with you?”
I’m tryin’ to lock it in all the time. I have my own radio and I lock it in, but I don’t hear nothing that is new.
The El and the sign are their own p-e-n-u-m-b-r-a. You didn’t think I knew a word like that. Reflective into the night sky at a mile. Fluorescence at two hundred feet. Daylight at fifty. Darkness underneath. Iron and steel and rivets and concrete all to build that darkness.
Maybe in that darkness you got lost. I saw it all: you getting out of a car near the Amoco. You close the door. Smoke in your hand. Fake fur on your shoulder. Fake hair on your head. Stretch pants. No big deal. And you turn toward the El. It’s late for you. The sun, just coming up, reflected off the windows of the buildings. Almost white, a smile shining off the windows of the train. You wave to another car and look up to catch a piece of the new morning as it lights your face. The truck driver makes the left from under the El onto the east bound avenue. You are hidden in plain sight as the darkness under the El gives way to the piercing brightness of day. He picks you up. In the blur of sound from train and highway and in the blur of light from darkness and daylight you get in the truck. And then nothing. No cops. No EMS. No body in a zippie bag.
Except what I remember. Because I live at this corner, am I the only one to remember the smile? Your kindness one summer night, late in the park. For nothing. If I’m the only one to remember, is that enough? Is that enough to remember that smile? That life?
I smash a bottle and yell up at the sign, “This is news. Come on. Let’s hear it.”
All news doesn’t cover it. But I lock in and you’re with me here, in memory and light, sailing on our corner, a little this way, a little that way.
Marc Eichen has a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. From 2015-19 he was a Visiting Faculty member at the State University of Zanzibar. His fiction focuses on life in Zanzibar and in red-state America. His stories have appeared in Still Points Arts Quarterly, West Trade Review, The Good Life Review and Toyon. He is the winner of the Richard Cortez Day Prize in fiction. Current projects include a book of short stories in both Swahili and English to be published in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 2023, a mystery set in Zanzibar and a novel of loss and renewal set in Sandpoint, Idaho. He is represented by Kristen Che at Blue Hen. You can find more of him at marceichen.com or on twitter @MarcEichen.