THE ENCOUNTER

“Why am I here?”

“Oh yes, the assistant district attorney. She should arrive at any moment.”

I waited in the park across from the courthouse, circling a lamppost. Beside it stood a bench buried under old, wrinkled newspapers.

The pile was in the wrong shape. Too long. Too heavy.

Oh God. Is there someone under there?

I whispered it beneath my breath, though there was no one to hear.

Then the newspapers stirred, and an arm slid out from beneath them, slow and deliberate, as if it had been waiting for me.

“Even what you treasure most must be surrendered. It’s the only way to secure the continuing course of compassion.”

The voice rose from the bench, low and unhurried. The old man hadn’t bothered to sit up. He lay flat beneath the newspapers, and his stench reached me before his face did: a deviant bouquet of rotting garbage and sweat, the perfume of those who live in streets and alleys.

“Why do you tell me this?” I asked.

His eyes opened halfway. They held a soft glimmer and a tenderness I had seen only in the eyes of a dying man.

“Because you’ll ask.”

I stared at him, irritated by the answer and by his misery. Here was a man sprawled across a public bench, wasting space and consuming what belonged to the productive: the benches, the parks, the very air. People like him were a flesh-rotting cancer on our great society, and I made no effort to hide what I thought.

Yet the tenderness never left his eyes.

“I saw you looking desperately for an answer,” he said. “I saw you standing here alone, dressed like a man who has everything and knows nothing of why he’s alive. I saw you pace, and sit, and look at your watch, and yet you waited for no one.”

“I’m waiting for someone,” I said briskly. “That person happens to be late.”

He grinned and pushed himself up into a casual recline. There was no sarcasm in his smile, no malice. Only friendliness.

“She is not coming. Which means you wait for no one.”

She?

I had never said the person was a woman.

Men of my station do not debate hobos, and this conversation, which was about to become an argument, had already gone too far. Without a word, I turned and walked toward the courthouse.

Halfway there, something began to rise in me: a hollow, familiar feeling. I knew it. But from where?

Then it came to me. It was the emptiness that followed a courtroom victory, when I sat alone over a celebratory drink. The same emptiness that left me cold after sex, lying silent beside my girlfriend in the dark. It was the feeling of something missing, something left behind, and with every step away from the old man, the fear grew that I was abandoning something important.

I stopped on the third step of the Roxbury District Court. A cold wind bit at my face. Winter had not yet surrendered our great historic city; the park behind me was only beginning to turn green, and the air still carried the gray sting of steel.

I didn’t move. I felt paralyzed by one all-consuming thought or by the sudden halt of all thought, and silence closed over me. I had no choice but to look back.

And there he was.

He hadn’t left his bench. He was still smiling, bright and wide, and his gaze did more than suggest. It demanded that I return.

A bone-deep chill ran through me, and it was not the wind.

I tightened my gloved hand around my Louis Vuitton briefcase and, in my soft black Bally shoes, marched back toward the vagabond. But as I drew near, something peculiar began to happen.

He threw off the newspapers he had used as a blanket, and before my eyes, the hobo seemed to change. He was much younger than I had thought. His clothes, loose pants and a shirt in earthy tones, were simple and clean. And the smell had changed. The garbage was gone, the rot was gone. In their place was something intimate and safe, something that carried me to a garden, to a faint memory of flowers lining a private yard.

Which flowers?

Yes, of course. Magnolias.

By the time I reached the bench, the now strangely familiar man had risen to face me, and only then did I understand what he was. Of all the people I might have met, he was a “Cholo.”

In my native Ecuador, the word meant more than mestizo, the mix of European, African, and Incan blood that left a man somewhere between a mulatto and an Indian. A cholo was poor, and worse than poor: a person of little human value. They begged in the streets, labored for wages, or worked as servants, carrying shopping bags for their patrons and running every errand for the rich of relatively clean European descent. They were the disposable, unmissed people of misfortune.

I was of the upper middle class, from a strong, unmixed Spanish lineage. I was one of the lucky ones. In the city where I was born, families like mine lived behind tall stone walls that stood mighty as an army, protecting us from infection by the countless poor. I remember cholos trying to scale ours to reach the mangos on our trees.

Now, in Boston, there were no walls between us. Only a bench.

I tried to be polite and asked his name.

“Call me anything you want.”

“El Cholo,” I said.

The word was out before I could stop it. You don’t call a Cholo “Cholo” to his face. It’s like calling a hunchback “hunchback.” He began to laugh, but not the way a humiliated man laughs at an insult he cannot answer. He laughed like a man delighted by the creativity and perfect fit of his new name.

“El Cholo it is,” he said with enthusiasm.

Then a silence settled between us, and it was not the empty silence strangers share in moments of inadequacy. It was restful. A sparrow crossed the sky high above. Not far away, a squirrel climbed the trunk of a tree and settled on a branch. The whole scene seemed at peace.

Without warning, El Cholo gripped my arm. His eyes pierced mine.

“Do you know what’s happened to you, Francis Xavier?”

I looked at him in shock. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s not important,” he answered.

But it was. It was very important. No one in the United States knew that my first name was Francis. Here I had always been known only as Xavier Armand.

I closed my eyes. I don’t know why. And the memories came, uninvited, vivid, each one carrying its own emotion.

Two empty coffins sinking into the sinister murk of parallel graves. I was eight years old, standing in the rain at my grandfather’s side, reading words cut into wet granite: In memory of the loving compassion of Marlene and Carlos Armand.

My parents had vanished on a climbing expedition on Guagua Pichincha, swallowed by a landslide. In Quechua, guagua means child. Its neighbor is Rucu Pichincha, the old man. Officials never found their bodies. I never said goodbye. Margarita, my nanny, took the call and had the good sense to phone my grandfather before telling me. He sat me in a chair, held my hand, and told me I was an orphan.

I never returned to those graves. I never let myself imagine how they had died. I blamed a mountain instead, the Incan Guagua, the Indian child, and I swore to my grandfather Isadore, who raised me as his own son, that I would never go near a volcano for as long as I lived.

Then the images raced forward. The move to the United States when I turned twelve. Prep school. Harvard. The School of Law. And at last, the life I had built: the penthouse, the car, the furnishings, the clothes, the electronic gadgetry, my girlfriend, my career.

All of it seemed wrong. Out of place. I had poured my energy into a lifestyle that, at that moment, no longer felt like mine. My practice had begun to dissatisfy me, not for lack of success but for lack of interest. My girlfriend felt less like a girlfriend and more like an abusive materialist addict, always demanding exotic trips, expensive clothes, fancy dinners, and jewelry.

Something, no, everything, was wrong, and I didn’t know why.

I opened my eyes. This stranger seemed to know my deepest secrets. How? Who was he?

I tried to focus on who I really was and what really mattered. Then I thought myself crazy for listening to a homeless madman. I yanked my arm from his grip and ran. I ran as fast as I could, as if from an armed mugger. Or a ghost.

My running grew frantic. I was agitated and disoriented, and somewhere along the way I realized I had left my briefcase behind. The streets seemed unfamiliar; for a moment I couldn’t recognize the buildings along the narrow sidewalks. I shoved people aside. I made a woman drop her groceries. I glanced back at the fallen bag and a few oranges rolling across the pavement, and terror seized me once more.

A lanky man with spiked reddish hair was staring straight at me.

He was following me.

Adrenaline took over. I sprinted, turned a corner a few blocks later, and stopped. I looked around and couldn’t remember my own address. Then, seconds later, I saw it: the Metropolitan Tower, a millionaire’s dark-glass building looming down the road. The door opened automatically as I approached, and I ran past the concierge toward the elevator.

I pushed the button again and again. Sweat dripped from my eyebrow, and dizziness crept over me. The door opened. I stepped inside and searched my pockets for the private-floor key that gave me exclusive access to my penthouse, but it was gone. I pressed the penthouse button anyway, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, the elevator began to rise.

Forty-three floors up, the door opened. I crossed the private hallway and pushed into my opulent two-floor penthouse. The dizziness grew worse, and my head throbbed. I heard sounds and glimpsed shadows. I stumbled up the stairs, clinging to the banister, until I reached my bedroom on the second floor.

I opened the door. For a moment, my eyes focused.

The room was empty.

No furniture of any kind, only soft off-white walls closing in around me. I didn’t understand. I braced myself against the nearest wall, but my legs weakened and my vision began to fade. The last thing I felt was the thump and the cold marble floor against my skin.

After that, nothing.