A Commonplace Glossary, vol. 1

I cannot think of where I work as anything but a bubble; I don't wish to but I must. There are police at its edges, where university students and hospital workers go one way and poor people go another. We are easy to distinguish. We wear scrubs, khakis, suits. Once a man mistook a group of us for lawyers, and insisted on shaking each of our hands. We wear name badges, lanyards, ties. We stand out and we walk quickly. My father used to work at Metro West, a block north of the bubble, when he and my mother first moved to Baltimore. His only advice when I started working here was: keep moving, no matter what you're asked.

Most people don't ask. I don't want to overstate things. But when they do ask, it's for money. A quarter, sometimes for bus fare, sometimes just because. I have always said no. I used to ride the metro to work. Every morning, there would be a woman standing at the top of the escalators. She smelled terrible, had a wild unfocused look to her eyes, and jangled her feet as she stood leaning against a brick barrier. She sometimes asked for a quarter as the mass of us swept past her. Sometimes she said nothing. I never saw anyone ever give her any money. I told myself: you can't, if you give her some one day, you'll feel like you should every day. I am ashamed of myself for thinking this way. Some of us make it easier for ourselves and carry no cash at all, instead use plastic cards to buy our lunches and our drinks. When people ask for quarters, we can be truthful when we say we don't have any. The university has invented a plastic card of its own that you can use to buy snacks out of the machine down the hall and burritos from the Mexican place next to the Hippodrome. Inside the bubble, you don't need to handle money at all.

Past her, I would walk through Lexington Market. Almost none of the stalls would be open by that point in the morning, but the pizza place was. There would be two or three men standing there drinking Bud Light from plastic cups. They looked bad off too, like they had not had a shower or a shave in a while, but not as bad as the woman. They never asked for money. I would see them in the market at lunch sometimes too, milling around, listening to the Friday bands. The bubble is pierced at lunchtime in Lexington Market. Everyone needs to eat, and everything is cheaper outside the bubble. You can buy sushi 40 cents a piece and a sub and a bag of chips for four dollars. Fire trucks and ambulances park outside the entrance while they take their lunch break. Crowds ring around the deli counters, trying to catch the eye of one of the workers. Lines of office workers and single mothers alike form at the turkey sandwich stand, the one place that can be unambiguously counted as healthy. In this mix, there's safety and perhaps the feeble beginnings of a community, but then there's never really danger from 9 to 5, when there are crowds to stay lost in. I keep an eye out for pickpockets but I think it is only paranoia. At 5, everything closes, even the shabby stores around Lexington Market. The metal shutters come down. By 6 o'clock each day, it is nearly deserted around the market.

Once I was walking down Vine Street, a shortcut behind the mental health facility. It was lunchtime and there was a couple pushing a stroller. They stopped me and the man started to explain that he had just come from the VA down the street, he had just gotten back to the United States and he didn't have any money because of some mistake with processing papers, and his family was hungry. I looked in the stroller. There was a baby there. He did not ask for money, only help. He had clean clothes and spoke in a calm voice though his sentences had no punctuation. He offered to show me his VA ID as proof. I told him I didn't need to see it. I didn't even know what a VA ID looked like, anyway, and the cold logical part of me pointed out that a VA ID didn't prove anything at all. I told him to come with me and started to walk to the sandwich shop I had been planning to go to for lunch.

On the way, I asked him what branch of the service he was in.

"Special Forces," he said.

I knew he was lying but there was a baby.

I walked into the shop; he stayed outside. I could guess why. I asked for an cold cut sub, for myself, and two extra bags of pretzels. I couldn't see anything else on the racks I could give them that wasn't junk food. I should have bought another sandwich. I wasn't thinking clearly. A young girl, maybe twelve years old, came into the shop while I was waiting and asked me for a quarter, something that had never happened before though I had been to the place many times, and I said no. It made me nervous, that it was happening to me twice. When I came out and gave him the pretzels, the woman looked at him but didn't say anything. I was wasting their time. Maybe I was supposed to ask him what I could do to help instead of coming up with an idea. Maybe he would have asked for money then. I said goodbye awkwardly.

That was the only time I tried to help anyone.

I saw the man again later that week, same place but he was alone. I was walking with a coworker to the parking garage. It was around 5:30 and there weren't many people still left out. He began to speak to us, I didn't hear what he meant to say this time, but there was no baby.

"You," I said and pointed at him. My tone of voice carried an accusation, I don't know of what. He turned and walked away, and my coworker didn't ask a single question at all.