Shelby Raebeck
The Fourth Person
What separates me from the rest is my utter lack of any distinguishing characteristic. I am the one among us who betrays no hint whatsoever of an organism responding to its own peculiar set of circumstances.
This is not to say I lack the complexity of the modern human animal. No, only that my behavior does not reflect it, not any of it. Look at me as I sit each day before the great window in Southstreet Café. Do you see any sign of modern affectation? An angled cut of hair demanding to be constantly swept from my eyes? A glaze of nostalgia settling upon my visage as I peer through the window, back toward those early years in Colombia, to a youth misspent here on the streets of New York, to a budding manhood that slipped first into lethargy, then into a dark misanthropy, a hole from which I may never have emerged were it not for my discovery of American baseball, a game with an orderliness, a symmetry impervious to the vanity of its participants?
Dispassionately, I sip my coffee, examine the Yankees box score, and be sure to ask Abbas how he is feeling today. To which Abbas responds as only he can. Each day, as if my question were a key to a vault of exotic artifacts, Abbas’s concerns reveal themselves in all their brilliance. He mentions his fiancée, Feeren, and his face glows with blood. He speaks of Ahaad, the cook and owner of Southstreet, and his voice hushes into a hesitant stream, quivering slightly as he expresses the fear that he may have to leave for a higher paying job. He speaks of Tehran, and his sentences shorten into syncopations, as the emotion cuts into the words, backtracking against their own syntax, toward what he left behind. “I don’t understand what they want, William. They rule with no heart—my family is there—my younger sister—William, I don’t know.” And the blood withdraws from his face, the hope draining away. But Abbas’s blood does not descend too far and is soon recalled.
For me the blood doesn’t stir; the complexion remains uncolored, even when confronted with the most extreme situations.
Take last September, the day my beloved Yankees lost the pennant to the Red Sox, the very last day of the regular season. Five stops from the stadium on the number 4 express, I walked into Southstreet. Abbas brought me my coffee.
“Bases loaded, one out, and they cannot score?” Abbas said, his eyelids peeled back behind imploring eyes, the television above the counter now turned off. “This Rodriquez, he cannot hit the ball past the infield?”
“It is a shame,” I said. “Although the Red Sox did make the plays.”
But Abbas’s emotions are not easily dispelled. “Catching pop-ups, William? The children on my street catch pop-ups.”
“You are quick to suspect the Yankees of a personal betrayal,” I said. “Don’t forget, there was a fellow pitching to Rodriguez. And today that fellow was better.”
“Not better, William, hungrier. Our Yankees did not want it.”
“Wishing a sated animal to be hungry may be a waste of a wish,” I said.
Yet you could not say Abbas cared for the Yankees any more than I. My season box seat cost twenty percent of my yearly pension. The difference was that I no longer let things beyond my control affect my wellbeing. What if the Yankees never won another pennant? What if they packed their bags as the Dodgers of ’59, just five years after my father had fled La Violencia in Colombia and brought me to New York? What would I do then? Would I become so enraged as to throw things across my rented room on 8th Avenue? Would I hurl the years of diligently acquired memorabilia—the framed portraits of Larson and Ford, Maris and Mantle, the encased score cards from every game attended, the eighteen, eighteen, foul balls—against the otherwise unadorned walls? Would I enter a deep depression as my father did and consider—to the point of purchasing two plane tickets and actually taking me, his trembling child, as far as the JFK Express beneath Rockefeller Center—returning to our war-torn home city of Villavicencio, giving up the eighty-one—plus the playoffs, God willing—trips to the park, the walk cross-town through Washington Square, the five stops on the Number four, the hot dog after the 3rd inning and knish with mustard during the 7th inning stretch, the post-game recounting with Abbas over fresh coffee?
No. My father took his grief to his grave more than thirty years ago, and though it did, admittedly, take me a number of years, the surface has since smoothed over, leaving scarcely a ripple on the placid sea of my life. Indeed, the equilibrium I’ve achieved is such that I now speak of that person sealed in the past—the child growing into the mystified teenager and into the bitter young man—without trepidation. My recollection may be a bit imprecise—it is not a person I think of often these days, or rather, think of in the 3rd person.
Yes, I have adopted one modern affectation after all—referring to myself in the third person. Not in the first person, yet as I think, not truly the third either, as it is, after all, myself to whom I refer. And so it is that I speak of this extinct self, this atavistic I, without any fear of reversion—the him that was me—the fourth person.
“William?”
It is Abbas. He knows I am prone to bouts of reverie and is hesitant to interrupt. I withdraw my eyes from the great café window that frames the activity on 8th Avenue and smile at my young friend—he always brings a smile to my lips—never a grin or guffaw, but a smile nonetheless.
“William, I need to speak with you. It is Feeren.”
“What is it, Abbas?” I sip the coffee he has placed on the table before the window. He brews a fresh pot when I enter with my newspapers.
“We are fighting,” he says, looking worried. “She has gone to her aunt’s. And her aunt is one of these Shia Twelvers, and does not like me.”
“You think she may stay there?”
“I am competing with the old world. And I am afraid Feeren is not ready for mine. I am agnostic, William, and she is unsure. I am afraid the Shia will take her back.”
“When you are fighting,” I say, “you imagine this possibility?”
“Yes.” Abbas glances back at the only other customer seated at the counter. “Yes, I am always afraid of this. When we select a movie, when we go out to eat. Whenever there is a choice, the imams are there, and I have to fight them.”
“You must evict them,” I say.
Abbas shifts to the side, as if from an angle he may better see my meaning.
“If they are always with you,” I say, “there would seem to be little question where they live.”
He nods at me. “Yes, they are there always.”
“Because you invite them in. Feeren, she loves you. Her aunt is not a competitor. A strong moon, perhaps, shining on her from the side, but you, you are her sun.”
How pleasing is the truth when one no longer has any stake in it.
“You see, my friend,” I continue, “these Shia, they live in your head, mere shadows. But there is a way to evacuate them.”
Abbas peers at me, his brown eyes deep as wells.
“Bring in the real Shia,” I say, “and the ghosts will flee.”
Abbas holds his eyes on me. Then he nods. “To know something is not to fear it,” he says. “Yes, I will call her aunt. I will speak with her directly. I will invite her opinions into my home. Thank you, William,” Abbas says. “You have pointed past the—I am thinking of the Farsi, it may not translate—you have pointed past the clothing and into the heart.”
I gaze into those grateful brown eyes.
“Go and get your Feeren,” I say, and strangely, my voice quivers, the body not cooperating as it used to, and I pull my eyes from his to the great window where a bicycle vendor winds his way through halted traffic, my eyes moving up across the grey stone buildings across the street, finding at the top a small opening of milky blue sky.
“The key, my friend, is to act,” I say, turning back to Abbas. “The angels retreat from a person who is waiting.”
I offer a smile, and he returns it, only for some reason his smile is sad.
I turn back to the window where a large truck has pulled up. One man in the cargo hold slides boxes down a ramp to another who stacks them on the sidewalk. They step away from the ramp—one into the truck to retrieve a box, the other to stack one—then return in unison to their positions at opposite ends of the ramp, exchange another box, step away, and return.
“William?”
I shake my head, captivated by the muted dance beyond the glass. “You go ahead,” I say.
But Abbas only stands there, and when I turn, his smiling lips are rolled in, his eyes shaded with remorse. I open my mouth to admonish this display of melancholy, to tell him, Abbas, it is appreciation I feel—for the beauty of the world. I raise a hand to either side, wanting to say, Don’t feel badly for me, my future is fixed, all uncertainty safely behind. But no words come.
Abbas blinks slowly, his posture straightening. And then, a bit of sparkle returning to his eyes, he completes our conversation in the customary manner. He leans across the table, places a hand on my shoulder, and kisses me, once on the left cheek, once on the right, his lips dry and smooth against my face.
Shelby Raebeck's collection of stories, Louse Point: Stories from the East End, has earned wide critical acclaim, including a starred review from Kirkus.
