By Travis Cohen
There is a ratcheting of hinges loaded down with a thick pane of glass that’s not quite bulletproof. You hear the way the little brass bell over the heavy door lets out a fizzy chime, more rattled than rung. It sounds too loud, like the swinging tin is crying, perhaps for help, perhaps in admonishment, perhaps to warn you. Perhaps all three.
A smell announces itself in between the bells, interrupting the warmth of baked bread and sweet almonds. It is a wild and intrusive stink. A mixture of solvents and mineral spirits, street sweat and Wild Irish Rose that blossoms angrily, filling the room and turning the morning suddenly, irrevocably.
Then, the screaming starts. You’ve been waiting for it since you got in line, since you got off the metro mover near Government Center, since you got out of bed and decided to take your chances on Flagler in search of fresh bread. If you had stale bread, you would have stayed home, but you have none and the sticky chew of manioc dough and cheese is one of the few pieces of the past that you still hold onto, that’s still a comfort, that’s worth chancing a trip to Downtown. Screaming is to be expected around here. Still, you’d have liked this to be one of the mornings where you got to avoid the commotion.
“Listen up,” the voice behind you bellows in a hoarse tone that sounds more like an appeal than a demand. “I said listen to me! I woke up this morning in a house on Third Street and I saw the devil. I tell you I woke up and saw the devil, and I need to tell you all what he looked like and what he had to say, and I need you to hear it—I need you to listen!”
You make it a point, you set an intention, you twist every inch of willpower toward not listening. You don’t even turn your head. Now you’re the only one in the room still facing the pan dulces, the only one who hasn’t laid eyes on him, though you’re confident in the picture you’ve painted from the stench and the wanton sound of angst in his voice.
It is a voice that lends itself to drawing easy conclusions about the rest of him. The gaunt skull set with bloodshot bugeyes, simultaneously vacant and overwhelmed. The skin draped with a deep flush, not the rosiness that percolates into the face after a run but the unnerving hum of purplish red that rises when the heart is pumping the blood to all the wrong places. You envision his cheeks, peppered with the ruddy half-growth between stubble and beard, like a cross-hatched dirty cartoon from the comic strip funnies. His forehead glistening with that greasy film that shines like a dead fish sitting in the sun.
You can sense how badly he wants your attention, not because it’s yours, but simply because you’re not giving it to him. Regardless of the words you’re ignoring, you can hear the distress in the rising register of his voice. All the same, your feet remain planted, your eyes fixed forward, focused on a face that no one else seems to be considering.
The baker’s daughter wears her dark hair in gelled ponytail flecked with flour and drawn tight enough to pull her remaining baby fat taut. She has a smile that comes more easily to her than smiles usually do in this part of town. She could be whiling away her Saturday mornings anywhere, taking some sun or taking a nap or taking time to catch up on homework. But she chooses to be here. She chooses to lend her father her free set of hands because she knows he can’t afford to put another pair on the payroll.
And so, it’s her hands on the till while he’s in the back, rolling out dough and transferring buns from the proofing drawer to the oven and from the oven to the case. You recognize the absence of teenage disdain in her face—distaste for being somewhere she’s told to go, of doing something she’s told to do. And when she greets you, you return her smile with one that’s courteous and cordial. Yours is not as easy, but it acknowledges her choice to don an apron and polish the plexiglass case and still smile on Saturday mornings.
Then, something changes in the girl’s face. Before the screaming and sweat and crazy mingling with the sweet smell of glazed breads, that face was the smooth face of a girl, a kid, a happy one. Now lines of confusion have communicated their way across her brow, and there is too much white around her pupils. Her teeth are still on display, but they aren’t hung in a smile anymore. Her mouth has become a small O—as in “oh no”—that is both limp and bone rigid. She doesn’t look like a kid anymore, but like a baby, frozen before its first breath in this new light of day, waiting to learn to cry. There isn’t an absence of disdain in the face before you anymore, but an absence of choice.
It’s not the fear flooding her senses and draining the color from her skin that holds your attention. Nor is it the stricken way her eyes keep darting around the room, silently asking who might stop the morning from hurtling into the metro section of tomorrow’s paper. You can see all of that, of course, but more than anything you see a fraught girl who didn’t choose this.
And what you see is a reminder of days gone by in these same Downtown streets when you were not given a choice. You remember sitting across from your own father, not in a bakery but a cramped studio apartment just four blocks away, between the reputable dealers of the Seybold Jewelry Building and the disreputable ones all around it. You wonder whether this girl has been given a nickname by her dad, and you hear your own in his voice: Diamond Girl. But that wasn’t really a nickname, even if that is what you told people, especially after the song came out—it was your job.
You don’t see the girl in front of you as she starts to crouch and cower behind the curved sheet of plastic and the pasteles inside. You don’t hear the wailing hardcase behind you or smell the gas station grain alcohol and cheap menthols pouring out of his skin. You don’t even notice the way everyone else in the bakery seems to move in unison, like a school of fish, reacting and retreating from the man whose mind has broken this morning as if he is not merely dangerous, but contagious.
Now all you have are your father’s hands asking for yours to carry what he couldn’t and the unfamiliar weight of things he told you not to ask about, those thick envelopes and little pouches he said were just as precious as diamonds, just like you. How he said nobody suspects good girls of doing bad things but said nothing of the bad things that happen to good girls. You remember all the times he swore there was nothing to be afraid of because you were never in any real danger, and you remember deciding that maybe he’d been right—you were just around it all the time.
When you were sent down blind alleys and up crooked staircases and found yourself surrounded by screaming and the hazy drone of whispers and moans creeping from unlit rooms with no doors. When you first realized there was as much to fear in the quiet as there was in the screams. When you realized just how much there was to fear in this town. When you no longer had a smile for Saturday mornings.
She is as you were once—too young for a world that makes you grow old too soon. You suspect that this is the first time she has heard the screaming or at least you hope so, and you begin to wonder how many voices like this one you’ve heard before. It’s been so long since the last time you had a choice to feel anything else that you’ve forgotten what it is to feel the fear of that choice being taken away. And then there’s a hand on your shoulder and you remember.