He wears a wolf mask, and that’s okay. I’m fairly forgiving.
I find him standing in full sun on a patch of grass across from our hotel, watching the city unroll itself. He left our room that morning without saying.
“It must be hot inside that mask.” As soon as I say it I wish I hadn’t. He’ll think I’m accusing him of another bad decision.
He mumbles something muffled and shifts his eyes inside the eyeholes. I mirror mine to see what he sees. A woman in a plastic rain cap climbing inside a dumpster. It isn’t raining. I think she lost something important, and a familiar panic rises inside me. I swallow it whole. But she just wants a pulpit, a peak from which to see her world. You never know what you’ll see if you look around.
A naked man rides a bike past me on the busy street. I wonder where he sees fit to tuck his junk on such a small seat but then decide it’s one problem I don’t need to solve.
Years ago, after Pineapple passed, I began counting cats in windows. Shops, apartments, lofts. Cats are everywhere if you pay attention. Watching, memorizing, judging. Aliens sent to observe humankind.
Other things I notice: Young girls in pony tails, short skirts, and black boots who smoke while guessing tourists from locals, judging. I was one of them once.
A phone booth no one can use. A singing ice cream truck selling orange Push-Ups from the side window. Flowers in bunches in buckets. Flowers enough for a funeral. Lillies smell of death.
Memory pulls strongest from tastes and smells and sounds and drags me bruised.
Sometimes I’m a tourist and wherever I go there are cats in windows. Cats that speak languages I don’t know. That makes them smarter than me.
Horns, sirens, voices.
I tug his arm. “Let’s get breakfast.”
He lifts the mask to his head, so it’s staring at sky. “What’s the point.”
I shrug. “You tell me.”
He’s watching the dumpster queen as she shouts about God and industry and making sweaters for alpacas—giving back for all we take from them. She makes as much sense as everything else. She stops midsentence and rummages through the dumpster again.
There are some things I need him to say out loud. “Why don’t you look at me and just say the thing so we can be done with it.”
His eyes paint my face with cool colors.
Neither of us is religious but I wait for him to say grace every Sunday dinner before we eat. Not a drawn-out diatribe. Just the word. Grace. He always asks why I can’t say it, but I can’t. I wait for him.
And here we are now. Me waiting for him to say what I already know. I just can’t be the one to say it.
The problem with being a tourist is that memories pack themselves. I remove them. They find their way back into stuffed suitcases and force me to carry them around. Even if it’s only the one memory I beg to stay behind, it refuses.
He must see it every time he looks at me. He has the same memories, and they must follow him too.
I want to melt into him and rewind back to the beginning and do it all better.
What I see more than cats are babies. Babies who are still alive.
I hate feeling like a tourist in my own life.
“Please just say it. One way or the other.” I don’t blink, hoping to force him into it.
He pulls the mask back over his face.
He says it’s late. At least that’s what it sounds like. But maybe he says it’s too late. And maybe he means it’s too late for breakfast and we should get lunch instead. Unless he means it’s too late for us. I don’t know what he says or what he means, and I don’t ask.
I stare at him hoping to see in his eyes what he’s not saying, but I can’t. The eyeholes are a different shape than his real eyes and I suspect he can’t see that well from inside the mask. What if he can only see what’s in front of him but not at the edges? And what if that’s okay with him because he doesn’t want to see the real world anymore? I feel sorry for him because he’ll miss all the cats, judgmental teens, naked bicyclists, obsolete phone booths, flowers in buckets, and anything new that comes along.
Cats don’t always sit inside at windows. Some roam streets alone.
I look everywhere for answers. He looks nowhere.
The woman in the plastic rain hat yells. “That’s my wolf face.” I turn to see her pointing at him. She climbs down from her perch of dumpster trash like a raccoon, removes the plastic rain hat and heads his way, her hair a riot of gray curls.
“Don’t make me take it from you. I’m not afraid.”
I stand fixed, secretly applauding her courage.
“You think you can hide from me?” She stands a foot from him, elbowing herself between the two of us. She holds her hand out, waiting. “You’re not a real wolf.”
His eyes blink tired.
Everyone on the street rubbernecks, even a cat in shadow under the flower cart stops licking a paw to watch, waiting to see if he’ll unmask himself or if she’ll do it for him.
I envy her that she’s found so easily what she lost. I wish it were that easy for us.
He doesn’t move, doesn’t reach up to remove the mask, so I do it for him, careful the elastic doesn’t snap at him. The woman puts on the mask and a wolf walks away, rambling about itemizing her belongings.
He blinks from the sun, and I slip my hand in his.
