The Words of the Prophets / Catherine Tung

My mother, she’s practical, after my father died she told me that I should take over the vending stand for the summer. Here were her reasons: she said, “Angie, you have lots of time during the summer, you’re home from college, you can make extra money, it’s good work.” She wants someone to keep the vendor going, and she has her own job, so the vendor fell to me.

My father sold Greek specialty food as a street vendor. He had a heart attack in the spring. Our family isn’t Greek, but the gyros and baklavas are popular in the city, and customers didn’t much care that my father didn’t sell the snacks with a Mediterranean flair. He had this job ever since I was little, and, my mother’s right, it makes pretty good money. He always set up his vendor by the river landing downtown, even though no one’s really supposed to sell things there. There’s a big sign in front of the landing that prohibits soliciting, fishing, biking, running, and drinking. And if people actually followed those rules, no one would ever be on the landing thirsty from exercise, or hungry from hours of sitting by the water, watching a thin clear line tug and give. And then no one would ever have bought from my father’s stand. One prohibited action facilitates another.

On the first day of June I drive the vendor downtown, straight down Market Street, thirty minutes to the river. As I drive through the city I watch the townhouses of the west side bleed into center city’s towering skyscrapers, then bleed back into two-story shops that run until they hit the river. This is where I stop.

I set up under the bridge. The sun is out today, a breeze is coming in from the water. The bridge arches over me, Market Street stretches out in front of me, the river lies behind me, and all around my stand knots of shoppers and strings of joggers flow by. I sell cigarettes to pensive college kids, salads and water to the joggers, sticky baklava to kids who tug at their mother’s sleeves and ask for treats. I do this for five hours. It’s beautiful where I work, with the water and the bridge and the shops and the people, but I can’t really see any of it because I’m enclosed in this metal box. By the end of the day I’ve made two hundred dollars. When I drive back home I park the vendor where my father always parked it, behind the little gray car that says JUSTICE on the back windshield in faded construction paper letters. He made a point of parking behind that car. No one knows whose car it is, but it’s always parked on the same corner, around the block from our building, on the left side of the street.

The next day my friend Jeremy, he finds out that I’m vending for the summer, and now he wants me to hand out fliers for his band with every item that I sell. “You’re interacting with the public, Angie,” he says, gesturing his cigarette with authority. “It’s a unique opportunity to communicate with people, to give them a message with their food.” His words are lame, but his band is good and I have nothing else to do, so I make copies of the flier that he stuffs into my hands and I stack the copies under the cash box in the vendor. It’s not a bad design; it’s got the band name at the top in this square stencil, then the members listed in alphabetical order, then the dates and places for their next gigs. Jeremy sketched pictures of electric guitars and drum kits around the border. He can draw pretty well when he wants to.

The first girl who buys from me that day, she buys a Coke and a Greek salad, and when I hand her her soda I wrap Jeremy’s flier around it. I watch her read it as she turns around and walks down the landing; she’s still reading when she disappears behind a crowd of teenage girls with shopping bags and sunglasses.

“I handed out all your fliers today,” I tell Jeremy that night. We’re standing on the fire escape outside my kitchen, six floors up, smoking cigarettes and drinking iced tea. The trolley tracks across the street are spread out in front of us; the blue line passes by every twenty minutes. My mother is doing the dishes behind us at the sink, frowning through our smoke as it drifts in through the open window, clanging pots and pans and telling me to grab a towel and dry off some of the plates. I leave my cigarette burning in the ashtray and climb into the tiny room to help her as Jeremy says,

“Yeah, that’s great. If we sell out next week at the Tower I’ll owe you one.” He pauses and turns to face me through the window. “There’s this other group opening for us, they’re called Handout or Handover or something. Do you think you could give out some of their stuff tomorrow, too?” He smiles expectantly. My mother sneezes.

After a few weeks I’m used to spending my days inside the vendor. I’ve tacked up pictures of my parents and of my hamster on the inside walls, I’ve got magazines stacked on the floor, I have a little radio going in the back corner. Sometimes the college station will play Jeremy’s band, but they usually get the song names wrong. It’s still a tiny space, the vending stand, but at least now I’m filling it with more comfortable things.

Business goes up and down during the week, but for the most part it’s pretty steady. My father sold in this spot for so long that he built up a pretty good base of customers; people know where to get their Greek vendor food when they’re downtown on the river landing. Sometimes people ask about him and I tell them what happened. They say they’re sorry and I smile and give them a flier with their food. Right now I’ve got three different fliers going, one for Jeremy’s band, one for the group that opens for them, and one for my neighbor’s poetry. That last one is kind of unexpected, but I guess Jeremy happened to talk to this kid who lives across the street from me, happened to tell him about the fliers. This kid, he’s in high school, he writes lots of poems and sends them off to magazines and of course nothing ever happens, but he keeps writing them, and when he found out about Jeremy’s fliers he asked me if he could put his poems on a flier and have me give them out and it didn’t really make sense to say no. People don’t seem to care about the fliers one way or another; they either read them or throw them away, and no one complains. Some people, the kids, seem to like them. It gives them something to do while they’re eating. Jeremy’s show has sold really well the past few weeks. It hasn’t sold out yet, but he says the crowd gets bigger every time they play. I went last weekend; they let me in for free. I stood in the front row and closed my eyes and let the drums and guitar beat into my ears over and over. The crowd pressed into me and the space was so tiny that with my eyes closed, I felt like I could be in the vendor. A tight fit.

Now every friend I’ve ever had, and all the friends they’ve ever had, they’ve all found out about my vendor/advertising booth, and they all want in. Yesterday I had twenty different fliers and I started telling people that I couldn’t make copies of twenty different things, that the copies were getting too expensive, that I’d have to cut everything up and lay it out on one sheet of paper, and that they’d all have to pay me for it. I thought that would end things, but people came through with their money—just to cover copies—and Jeremy said he’d help me lay out the different ads onto one flier.

We spread all the papers out in front of us on the kitchen table. My mother has given us drinks and gone to her room to watch television; I think the idea of us working on something productive is comforting to her. The different fliers form a huge sheet of words on the table: sound bites for each of my friends’ pet projects, whatever they come home to and work on after their day jobs and night classes. Jeremy wields a pair of orange-handled scissors and picks up the first sheet.

“This won’t be so bad,” he says. With his other hand he taps his cigarette absently. “It’ll be like the yearbook layout in high school.”

“I never did that stuff.”

“You missed out.” He begins cutting the flier, separating the words into strips. It’s an ad for our friend Lari’s play. He arranges the words on our one sheet of blank paper.

“Tape.” I hand him the scotch tape and he fixes everything in place. Lari’s ad takes up the top left corner. I pick up the next flier—it’s by my neighbor Chris—and fill up the right hand corner, and we keep going like this.

It turns out to be a pretty intricate job. We stop talking after a while, and just focus on these tiny strips of paper, arranging them on the sheet so that they fit snugly but it’s clear that each is separate. The only sound is us breathing: the steady rhythm of our chests rising and falling. It keeps the time. I try to fit each ad in a different shape. Some of them run vertically down the page, some slant across the center, some coil around each other. Our worlds narrow down to the bit of paper we’re holding, the white space in which we will fit it, our fingertips and scissors, the roll of tape. We finish a pack of cigarettes between the two of us. It takes about three hours. When we finally finish Jeremy holds it up to the light.

“We should sell this as an ironic art piece.”

“Neither art nor ironic.” I brush off my hands and stand up. “Let’s go take a walk. I spend way too much time sitting in one place.”

When I give out the fliers, which are basically ad collages, at the vendor the next day, I get my first strange looks. The pages are full, packed with type, and the dense black-and-white is probably a little hard on people’s eyes. But I think it’s a good thing; it seems like the first time that people are actually looking at the fliers with more than a passing glance. It’s July, it’s getting hot down by the river, and I feel like I’m drinking half the soda offerings in the vendor just to stay cool inside the tiny space. When I’m in there, it’s hard to remember that there’s a river behind me.

I start doing a different flier layout each week. Jeremy’s band has started playing a lot more, so he can’t help me as much anymore, but lately I’ve liked it better, working alone. I usually start around midnight, after my mother’s gone to bed and told me, with a pat on the back, not to strain my eyes too much. The fliers are spread out on the kitchen table in front of me, a chaotic jumble of words and pictures. Sometimes my friends’ names will jump out at me from the top corner of a page somewhere, but mostly it all fades together. It seems overwhelming at first. I break the task with the first cut of the scissor, and from there I keep going. Word by word, piece by piece, I start to put everything in order. I keep my eyes on the space in front of me and carve a growing hole in the spread of fliers before me, reducing each one to a few cut-out words on the final copy. The job keeps me focused. It’s all about the focus, really. When it gets very late at night and I’m still working, it becomes so important, because otherwise I’d fall out of the trance and everything around me would collapse.

Last night, when I finished this week’s copy, I walked out to the street with it and just sat in the vendor for a while, looking at it by the light of the streetlamp. It was about three in the morning. I just sat in that space for a while, where my father spent so much of his time; it was still parked behind the JUSTICE car. I could see the hood of the car from the vendor’s mirrors, but I couldn’t see the letters. I got out and walked around the car, looking at the back windshield. The letters were so old; they were cracked and starting to peel off the glass at the edges. I looked at it for a long time. When I’d been younger, I’d taken some pictures of this windshield for a photo project; they never really turned out because the flash reflected against the glass, and I’d had to go with pictures of something else instead, flowers or something. I walked back to my building and when I got to my floor, I went to the kitchen table and peeled one of Jeremy’s ads off the flier layout. He’d had an ad there every week; he wouldn’t miss it this one time. It was at the top center of the page. In its place I took a black marker and wrote the word JUSTICE in all capital letters.

Now JUSTICE is the headline for my fliers, like a title. Jeremy was a little upset about his ad, but I put two in for him the next week and it was alright. A few days ago I started putting copies on the hood of the little gray car around the block, and they always disappear, so I know someone’s taking them. No one else comments on my headline; I guess it blends into the rest of the page and can go unnoticed pretty easily. But it’s on every copy, top and center.

It’s August, and the vendor gig is winding down. My mother says she’ll hire someone to run it during the year, which I’m pretty sure is unheard of among street vendors, but she wants to keep it going and she doesn’t have time to do it herself. I’ve already made enough money to get me through the fall semester, but I decide to keep going with the vendor and the fliers until it’s time for me to leave.

It’s Friday, and when night comes I decide to go to Jeremy’s show. I haven’t seen it in almost a month, and he says he’s written five new songs.

“Five songs? How long did it take you to write them?” I ask him before the show. We’re backstage, he’s tuning his guitar. His drummer is arm-wrestling the bassist on the table behind us. Jeremy taps on the strings, frowns.

“Only about a week.”

“They can’t possibly be good then.” I smile; his guitar twangs in protest.

The band that opens for them is actually called neither the Handouts nor the Handovers but the Hopefuls, and they are about as good as a band could be that’s opening for my friend Jeremy. When he comes on, the band’s all business. They play this really crunchy stuff, real loud, punchy songs that don’t give you time to breathe. Their sound arches over the crowd, fills the entire space, expands and contracts. It’s dangerous, it hurts. The music pummels me like waves; I close my eyes, and it’s like I can’t take it, I can’t take it, but I need to keep listening. When they reach their last song, I’m ready to fall over, but the energy of the crowd keeps me up.

Afterwards I tell Jeremy, “So the five new songs worked out okay.” He’s driving me home, and I realize that we only ever see each other in the summer anymore. The music always hits me hard, tonight was the hardest it’s ever been, but the effect fades so quickly after the show. I yawn absently. We’re nearing my house. When we’re a block away, my hand hits the window and I yell for him to stop.

“Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit,” I murmur, circling the vendor. Jeremy stands behind me, biting his lip. It’s been spraypainted on the sides, the mirrors are shattered and dented in, one tire is slashed. The JUSTICE car is completely smashed in. Cracks run through the windshield like a spiderweb. The construction-paper letters are beat into the shards of glass. The sides are keyed. The thing’s been killed.

Jeremy wants to call the cops, but I don’t like cops, and anyway, anyway, what are they going to do?

“Angie, it’s just some bratty kids on the street that saw a big target,” Jeremy says.

“Exactly,” I say. “What can any cop do about that? Everything’s already smashed in.”

We argue about it for a while, and once I start banging my hand on his car’s hood with every word I’m saying, he gives in. “Okay, we’ll call in the morning. In the morning, Angie,” he says, and I just nod. He squeezes my shoulder hard before he leaves, and honks as he rounds the corner. I stand in the street for a few minutes after he leaves; I don’t dare turn my head to look at the cars. Then I walk back to my building. I skip the elevator and take the stairs up to my floor.

My mother stopped wearing her engagement ring after the funeral; she still wears the wedding band, but she said that the diamond just seemed too celebratory now. She’s asleep, so I take off my shoes and make sure to keep quiet when I crack open her jewelry box and slip the ring on my left hand. It’s a little tight, but it’ll do.

I walk out into the street. It’s cool outside, and the sky is full of clouds. When it’s this cloudy at night, it doesn’t even seem like nighttime. The sky isn’t dark or open or starry; there’s just this kind of bright empty space over your head, waiting for the morning sun to fill it up. There’s no traffic, so I just walk down the middle of the road. It’s so quiet that all I can hear is my bare feet stepping slowly.

When I’ve gone a few blocks, I see what I’m looking for: a line of parked cars, faithfully following each curve of the trolley track that lies across the road, on the other side of the chain-link fence. The cars lead down to Market Street; the cars are like a path, an arrow. The first car I see, the one in front of me, is a dark red. I roll up my sleeves and walk up to the red car and get started.

I stand in front of the car, like a face off, peering over its hood and into its windshield. What can you put on a car that won’t get torn off or blown away or crumpled up and thrown in the trash? I turn the ring on my left hand so that the stone is facing away from me, toward the palm. I raise myself onto the car’s hood and kneel before the windshield. In one smooth movement I wield my left hand like a pen and begin to carve on the glass.

It’s like I’m writing with my bare hands; it’s like ink is running out my fingers. I drag the tiny diamond across the windshield over and over again, moving my hand in broad strokes, like a conductor draws duple-triple patterns in the air. I work deep grooves into the glass, and by the time I’m finished I’ve chiseled my letters across the entire windshield. I brush the glassdust from my hands, jump off the hood, and move on to the next car. This one’s white.

I work my way down the line, marking every pane of glass on every car, tattooing each one permanently. I never got a tattoo; I was always afraid I’d regret it. But Jeremy got one, he got the name of his band tattooed on his wrist, and he said that the feeling of needle against skin, that the thousands of tiny little pinpricks every second was exhilarating. That was the word he used, exhilarating. “I can see how people go back and get dozens of these things all over their bodies,” he said when it was over, rubbing his wrist. “It hurts like hell, but when it’s over you want more.”

I’m on my fourth car now. I start stabbing the glass with my ring, over and over again, wearing tiny little chinks into the glass, one at a time, until they start to form a larger shape. These windshields all have letters on them now; some of them are the words from songs, some are people’s names, my mother’s name, my father’s name, the name of Jeremy’s drummer, some are road signs warnings (keep out—slow children—do not enter), but by the time this is all finished, by the time I’ve reached the ends of the line and morning comes, every one of these cars will just say JusticeJusticeJusticeJustice… all the way down the street, as far as you can see.