| |
The Corridor
By
Eric Feezell
Larry Barlow received a manila envelope in the mail the following Monday, no return address. Inside was his wallet, all its contents in tact. It must have disappeared Friday, dropped out as he snagged his coat on the entrance to the corridor.
The world had been wrong. Wrong to him, to everyone. Nothing was left to do for Larry but disconnect himself from the fear. There was no living in this, couldn’t be. Not anymore.
By his own hand, that night, he was freed.
****
The feeling surged suddenly, approached unbearable.
Get off Market Street, now.
Larry Barlow dodged and weaved like a frantic pugilist, dialing as much momentary self-comfort as he could evoke. It took skill, he reminded himself – luck, even – for one to weave lightly, easily the necessary patterns and specific steps that would allow safe and quick passage through that main artery of the city, a swirling delirium of financial analysts, performers, and pickpockets.
What plagued Larry Barlow was not so much unfamiliarity with the vivid scene – a source of nervousness that, to him, might have been justifiable – but a paranoia that rested deeper, behind the analytical mind. It couldn’t be helped. Not by Larry. Not by Larry’s shrink. With chaos, Larry associated the potential for violence. And the city, to him, was the definition: Chaos, distilled, in its purest offering.
It had not always been this way. He could still summon up vague bits of the urban romanticism he had espoused upon first moving into the chaos, nearly three years ago. Modernity. The Melting Pot. Cultural happening. Social justice. Three years ago these ideas had been real to him, living things.
But, in September, Larry Barlow had been robbed, beaten badly, by six or maybe seven middle-aged indigent men, all black. Maybe even eight. He couldn’t remember some of the harder details, didn’t want to remember any of them.
Yet, he did, of course. Every day the violent ordeal replayed itself foggily in his brain – a murky, static nightmare always broadcasting on one channel or another. And although the attack had only lasted ten seconds – just a sliver of a fragment of a single day in his thirty-five years as a living thing – it went with him everywhere afterward, annexed to his memory bank.
It governed him. He’d seen himself change through those next six months after the fact, could do nothing to stop it. Life rapidly became fear for Larry Barlow, and eventually that terror gave way to constant guilt and self-hatred. He did not want to feel the way he did, had been better than that before.
But self-preservation had become more vital than any belief, any prejudice. He could live with the guilt, with a muddled version of who he’d once been, as long as he could
continue to live. This was what he told himself each day along his terrifying pedestrian commute.
With a left down Fifth, off Market now, Larry Barlow’s posture went from brick to jelly, almost seemed to sublimate; his hands unclenched and his pace slowed. Breathing deeply, deliberately, he had made it once again, he thought to himself.
He walked along Howard, over to Eighth Street, now just a few blocks from his apartment. Up ahead of him, across Howard, the sidewalk gave way to a corridor, about thirty feet in length, running beneath the scaffolding of a construction site along Eighth.
Larry walked this path each day, to and from work, hardly noticing anymore the dusty mess of scattered building materials and drywall debris around the adjacent building, which had been undergoing modification at a snail’s pace for months. There, at the corner, he waited for the signal to turn, then crossed Eighth, approaching the corridor.
Straight ahead of him was its entrance, which led into a tunnel encased by makeshift plywood |
