| Three arms.
So they know. They all know. I think it is part of the human condition to know things you wish you didn't. So it was no surprise to find wildly out of control blood pressure in everyone we checked last night. The people who bared their arms in that brisk night air all knew and wished they didn't. We could have seen more. I watched them walking past us, talking to one another, gregarious, outgoing, they would have talked to us. But I got caught up. It was a beautiful, clear night and I got caught up in a life story, pulling at me, hooking me as skillfully as an angler, twitching the line, keeping me there, listening. We sat together at the side of a stone planter in the perfect, clear night and crossed the border to Venezuela. We bought a house together in Colton and tried to keep the marriage together, working all day fabricating enormous parts that fit together to form freeway overpasses. But it all came apart somehow. There was an accident, fighting, a storm in the family. She threw us out of the little house. We can't face our only son. We huddle in a parking lot in the car that still runs, when we can afford the gas to keep it going. We scrape together whatever we can from recycling cans. Life is over. We wait to die. Why haven't we died? Why do we keep going when there is nothing left? I surface. The crowd has moved away, imperceptibly while we were talking. They are gone now, and we are alone with our shared disaster, now laid out between us. In my head are echoes of failure, inadequacy. I can't fix him. My brain scampers around in my head, trying to figure out how to put him back together, how to reunite him with his son, how to house him, how to house him. He is old, six years on the street out here. He is vulnerable. He will die soon, alone, on the street, and his son will be lucky to ever know what happened to him. And I can't fix him. Because I just got here, because I don't have a social worker with me or on speed dial, because I don't know my resources out here like I should, because I have no medicine for high blood pressure in my bag, because I haven't written the grant yet, because I can't think of how to get him to talk to his son, because I can't get him to tell me what the central failure of his life has been, what the core is, to name the addiction that took everything from him but his life, yet. Because I have no food to feed him, no apartment to put him in, no job to give him, no way to take the shame from him, no hope to even give him. He sits next to me in the cold, quiet. His face is kind, gentle. We sit together and fail; tonight we sit together and fail.
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