Every few feet, another man sold them: important-looking folders in red, green, blue. The men held them open, displaying a certificate with SAMPLE and an eagle shield across it.
“Let’s get some,” I said, tugging at my father’s hand. “Let’s buy them for ours.”
My father, hurrying so we wouldn’t be late, shook his head and kept on toward the doors of the auditorium. “We don’t need fake leather folders,” he said. “We’re going to be real citizens.”
“Apparently my Dad was really good at escaping during the Revolution,” said the woman on the BART train. “He was good at changing his hair and sneaking across rivers and shit. I never liked him, and I just had a really harsh reality check because I didn’t know I looked like him. Now my Facebook picture is a picture of my Dad, and people think I Photoshopped it to put my face on his body.”
It was an unexpected deal, so different than all the rest of them.
“You really want to buy?” she asked. “Because I can draw up a contract right away.”
As she said it, she felt the weighty possibility of the blank paper in the printer, the pen in his back pocket, the checkbook certain to be resting in his briefcase.
“That’s a beautiful ring,” said the girl at the next table. “Is it a wedding ring?”
“No,” said the woman all in black, with a glance at the sapphire-encrusted band on her left third finger. “It’s just something an old boyfriend gave me.”
She’d said no already, then doubled back on her word, placing her feet the wrong way in her own footprints. There was no good explanation. It was just the way the rain misted her face, the way the light glistened on the path, the way the trees above swayed back and forth, sighing high above her.
“Are you making excuses?” he asked in a thick Russian accent.
“Of course not,” she replied. “What do they serve at these things?”
“Because it’s a free country,” he said.
There is nothing wrong with black night, she said. Nothing wrong with the way it wraps like silk, nothing wrong with its soft shadows.
He swallowed some of the air and pondered this. He reached a hand out into the ink. He swirled the hand about until she caught hold of it.
Why reach out into it, she said, when you can just be here with me, as if we were invisible to the rest of them?
He let his arm fall. That was enough of an answer until dawn.
100 Proof 