A man sits disheveledly on the sidewalk, back pressed up
against the hard plastic of the bench bolted to the concrete. He stares angrily at his feet, cursing the slippers
that have abandoned them. His toes are
gnarled and his soles whitened with callouses earned step by step as he
wandered the city streets, shuffling between sky-kissed monoliths, in search
for a quiet corner of rest.
His eyes are unfocused and dry from lack of moisture; he can’t
remember why. If he could recollect, he
would ponder on the last time he had encountered clean water, the last time he
could remember eating food that didn’t come from the trash pit of a restaurant
littered with pale-skinned and shiny tourists.
He looks down at the sidewalk again, barely making out the
line of a sandal, dark against the light-colored cement. Suddenly overcome with a despairing anger, he
picks up the first object his hands find and begins to beat the shoe mercilessly. If he could construct a reasoning within a public
court of appeal, he might claim that exhaustion drove him to a kind of madness
to lash out at the object whose absence had caused him so much pain and grief. He might claim the shoe was society and had
abandoned him to live in the grime and oil of society’s modern runoff.
But he could not explain his motions, only continually
attack the object within his sight, within his control, within his cathartic
reach for release. The sound of the
beating echoed off the glass and metal giants standing quietly in reproach,
ignorant of their inner complicity.
