Worlds Apart

Helio saw them. Men and women. They passed close to him but did not pay him any attention. They would soon. He carried in one hand a stack of papers, carefully folded, printed with the words it took him five years to perfect, words he dragged from his unconscious, that had been pounded into his soul over the course of forty years. He was here now to share it all. At least two hundred people would know today. That was how many pamphlets he had printed.

Standing there in the churning of the downtown San Francisco sidewalk at midday, people moving fast here and there, carrying a briefcase, a sandwich to chew on the way back to the office, smoking a cigarette and savoring the sensation of the smoke filling and seeping out of blackened lungs, Helio could not believe any of them were real. They didn’t even seem to notice him. He was alone in a rippling lake of fast-moving bodies with not a single eye feeling him out of place by his simply standing still in the middle of it all, watching them scurry past, a blur of motion to a steady gaze. It was almost unreal. It was as if he were in another world. It was another dimension that he could see and hear, even smell, but in no way actually be a part of. Somebody would have to see him for that to happen.

He looked at the homeless man leaned up against a lamp post with a tattered cup in front of him. Even he was in another world. He did not see all of them. He only saw flashes burst past him. He only could hope that a bit of them would fall off, a clink of coin falling right into his cup by the simple direction of chance. Even he didn’t see Helio. That was why Helio was there.

Helio had seen these faces before. They were the same faces as when he walked down this very street as a child. He was nine and with his father. It was bright that day. Helio had never been downtown before. The school he went to was near the outskirts of the city. He was used to the green expanse of land the school stood on, a parochial school his parents paid a lot of money for him to attend. This was different. Everything around him was man-made. Even the trees lining the sidewalk were carefully trimmed and placed in holes that were bordered with carefully lain red bricks. 

Helio’s father was an important man. He wore the nice suits, even better than the rest of the men on the street. That was a time when men wore hats and coats when they went out. When people gathered all you could see was a basin of hats of all different colors. Helio’s father walked with him, hand in hand, on a short break from the office, Helio’s attention split between the impossibly tall skyscrapers and his father’s mirror-shined black and white shoes—wingtips.

His father brought him out once a month to “show off,” as he called it, all the businesses he now had a hand in. They would start at Market and Van Ness and stroll all the way down almost to King Drive with a short layover in Union Square. The walk would take more than an hour but his father never tired or rushed. When they walked his father stood tall and Helio had to reach up high to hold his hand, and hold on tight to be swung around cracks in the pavement and over high curbs when he wasn’t paying attention. His father paid all the attention. Helio didn’t have to worry. They were all alone together in a world that consisted of nothing but stationary organisms, frozen as they passed, all of their eyes on Helio’s father, Helio the only one of them that didn’t have to struggle to be a part of it all.

Later on, after Helio got out of college, his mother explained to him that his father took him out every month, not only because he enjoyed spending time with his son, but because he liked being able to show off that he was the boss. Walking along with his son and coming back only when he was done gave off a sense of heedlessness, a power to do simply because he could. His mother had said, “He used to say, ‘It’s just my way of stopping time, for a little walk.’” And when they were out they were as oblivious to the others as the others were focused on them.

That was a long time ago and things had changed since. The bricks had all been replaced, for one. It was to be expected on a busy street like Market. The place had endured a regular pace of change since it was built. People all passed through this street, Market street. Did they all see what they wanted to see? The thought had never occurred to Helio before. How long has this been going on? There was no reason people should have been seeing any clearer back then than they did now. Back then San Francisco was more of an immigrant town. People came from all over the world with dreams of what they would find when their ship pulled into harbor, those dreams lifted from the tattered and smelly pillows they had slept on, now coloring all the sights and sounds that they had plunged into.

It was a very different time but people didn’t see any more reality now than they did then. The reality just changed. That’s all. Now people looked for people that looked like them. They didn’t see anybody else, really. They didn’t see who they didn’t care about being seen by. They wouldn’t care about strolling along in their bedclothes in front of a bum who ate, slept and shit in front of them all, every day, with no shame.

When he was out with his father Helio remembered the eyes all on him, seeing how both were dressed, watching the rhythm of their steps. But had Father seen them? Helio now wondered. He stopped in the middle of the red brick sidewalk to think about this. He probably did not. Father was too consumed in his acquisitions, his buildings, his downtown, his city; not so much about the people in them. Helio looked at the blind faces. Were they different than Father? Then he thought, Had I seen any of them either? He didn’t remember. He had been as guilty as all the others, all this time, and didn’t even know it. Here he stood, unshaven for the past month spent obsessing on the right words which would awaken them all. No. Helio did see people. That was part of what he marveled at. The people coming and going, in all different colors and hats, the vibrancy of the men on the corners calling people to play a game with three cards on a box; this was as much of the thrill as everything else.

Helio looked down the block at the corner where he saw a couple old homeless men with long, dingy beards and tattered coffee cups in front of them. Open for business. He remembered that spot. That was where he saw him—the man that changed his life. It was summertime, warm outside too. Helio was almost thirty-five. It was close enough to his birthday that he was thinking of what to do after the party his friends had planned for him. His father was older and no longer strolled Market. It was Helio who did most of the business now. Helio was one of the men standing in front of his building, leaning against it, sipping a cup of coffee, a cigarette smoking in the other hand that hung down by his side. He liked playing the game, the game his father had started teaching him when he started high school.

It wore on him by then, though. He had started to take lunch by himself and just walk the area for an hour before returning to business. That time alone was the only time he could think. He’d stand there against the corner of the building and just see the city. He’d even watch the people sometimes.

That day he was thinking of how little it had changed. The same men walked here and there, except instead of talking to other men on the street they talked to men across town or even across the country or the world, on cell phones. Instead of hats they wore sunglasses.

Then Helio saw him. It was a man he had seen in the area for the past month. He was one of the homeless that lined the buildings, cup in hand, but he was alone today, and sprawled out perpendicular to the building. His face pressed the concrete. Men and women walked around and over him. Nobody looked, just moved like water around an inconvenient rock.

Don’t they see him? Helio wondered. Don’t they see this man? Helio tossed his cigarette and hurried over to him. He put down his coffee and shook the man’s shoulder. He didn’t move.

Helio felt empty inside, hoping not to see what he imagined when he turned the still man over—a rotting face with the skull poking out of the thin and sun-tightened skin; bugs getting their nutrition, keeping the cycle of life going. Helio grabbed the man’s shoulder and pulled him onto his back and looked at the face. It was dingy with a knotted beard. He was very pale. His eyes were open and glossy. His mouth was spread just enough to make out a cracked yellow tooth with one missing next to it. The man was dead.

Helio looked around at the people passing by. Nobody looked at him. How could they not see him? He grabbed the sleeve of a man that passed close to him. “Don’t you see he’s dead?” The man yanked his arm away and looked at him strangely behind dark sunglasses and then turned and kept going as if he had never stopped. “What the hell is wrong with you people?” Helio shouted. “This man is dead!”

Did the men now in residence know another had died in that same spot? A man just like them? Nobody had ever left flowers. No memorial for a fallen brother. Helio doubted anybody but him knew it had even happened. He also doubted that even if they did, they would care at all. He was, after all, outside of their vision. Why did he matter? He wasn’t even real. He did not exist.

Helio remembered the look on his father’s face when he recounted what happened. It was calm. It was as if he were explaining some instructions to program his VCR. “A man just died!” he shouted, standing over his father who still sat quietly behind his desk.

“I know,” he replied. “You just told me.”

Helio looked at the man who used to walk him all through the city. He just didn’t care. He was just like the rest of them.

Helio stomped out of his office and down the steel stairway next to the elevator. He didn’t want to see anybody. He started walking and didn’t stop for most of the day. Then he sat down near the courthouse on the steps. He stayed there. Now he stood near the spot where that faceless man died, a stack of 200 papers in his hand with the carefully printed text of the man’s death, and in bold on top “open your eyes,” and also a little surprise in the back of his pants. It was a firecracker of sorts, aimed at getting attention. He hoped it would snap people out of their daydreams of what they thought the world really was, certain unseemly individuals omitted.

He stopped now. It was time.

“Don’t you see me?” Helio shouted. He spun slowly, trying to catch the eye of somebody in the square but nobody looked. People passed him in their dark glasses, too busy going to go to stop and notice another crazy man shouting more nonsense.

“Believe it or not, I do exist!” Still there was no answer above or below the din of traffic passing and feet slapping red bricks.

“I am a man you blind bastards! I am here talking to you all and still you cannot see me! What is wrong with me? If you cut me do I not bleed?” Helio paused to smile for the irony he had planned.

“You!” Helio pointed at a man leaning against the same corner he himself used to lean against. The man looked away still. Helio approached him. “You there with the blue jacket. Do you see me? Did you know I used to stand just like you? I saw everybody. Why can’t you see me?” When Helio got close the man turned and started down the block. “You blind bastard!” he shouted. Still nobody listened. But he would get them. He just needed to appeal to them properly.

Helio went back out into the thick of the crowd, the people spreading apart to clear his path, but not one looked at him. “See? You move for me and yet you still do not see me. It is the subconscious that makes you aware of me but your consciousness insists that I am invisible, readying to break my fist on your faces to get your attention.” Still, nobody saw him. He was not even enough for a police officer to be called to pick him up. He was that transparent. 

“What will it take for you to see me? Men have died under your watchful eyes and still you could not see them. What do they matter anyway? They are not a part of your world and don’t want to be. You have made them a bad dream you refuse to remember when you wake up. You think you will never wake up!”

Helio looked all around him. A homeless man on the corner saw him for a moment and their eyes met somewhere in between their worlds. Then he looked away and was again in his own.

It was time. There was no getting these people to see. At least not with words. Not with going quietly. He needed a bigger noise. The stack of papers fluttered and swirled in the soft downtown breeze. The sky was beautiful blue with thin clouds swimming lazily around the cool sun. Air filled his lungs and he smelled the acrid grit of car exhaust with it, a taste of reality mixed with his idea of what the world around him was. He smelled it, even tasted it.

Then he pulled out his firecracker. It was an old .380 revolver with a snub nose, sure to make a crack in that square loud enough to shake them out of their make believe world. He put it to his head and looked around one last time, just to see if he had anybody yet. There was one. It was a little boy in a blue hat. His father watched the sky. The boy looked right into Helio’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Helio whispered, to the only one who cared. He never should have to see a man die like that. The explosion rang through the streets immediate to him and died down just as fast as it sounded.