Blameless and Damned

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

As soon as Shahyar saw her sandwich, he knew she was the one.

Admittedly, a sandwich is an unusual omen. Then again, it was an unusual sandwich. Corned beef and peanut butter on whole-grain toast.

There’s room for whimsy in this world. If you look closely enough, beneath the veneer of the mundane and the ordinary lie particles of wonder. Shahyar knew that. It was his job to know that.

But there’s whimsy, and then there’s just the indescribably bizarre.

Corned beef and peanut butter? That’s just bizarre.

She was sitting on a bench in Lafayette Square. The day was overcast and muggy, not a pleasant day for dining al fresco, but she was there anyway. The paths that crisscrossed the park and the sidewalks that bordered it were busy, filled with important young people in smart suits focused intently on getting wherever their important jobs required them to go. Few of them noticed the plainly dressed young woman with her absurd sandwich. And none of them at all noticed Shahyar.

He approached her casually, pretending to read an e-mail on his phone, watching her out of the corner of his eye. When he saw her look in the other direction, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a badge on a lanyard. Nothing remarkable; badges on lanyards were practically part of the dress code in this town. But it would give him a little more credibility. It would make things easier.

He slowed his pace a little bit, timing it just right. When she glanced at him, he let the toe of his wing-tip drag just a little, catching the edge of an uneven seam in the brick path. He stumbled, waving his arms crazily before recovering.

She laughed.

He snapped his head around, indignation that melted almost immediately into shy embarrassment. He grinned sheepishly at himself, an expression he’d practiced carefully in front of a filthy mirror in a public restroom, trying to get it just right. His new face made it tricky.

He walked to the nearest bench — hers, of course — making a big show of watching his step. She giggled.

“Nice save,” she said.

“Thanks,” Shahyar said, messing in some non-specific way with his shoelace. “You know, the polite thing to do would have been to pretend not to notice.”

“You never would have believed me,” she said. The paper around her sandwich crinkled in her hands.

Shahyar sniffed, twice. He scrunched up his nose. “Is that … is that peanut butter?”

“And corned beef,” she said.

He looked at her. Two sparkling brown eyes in an explosion of freckles, beneath a careless mop of bright orange hair. He looked at her sandwich, then looked at her again.

“Why?” he said.

“That’s what the guy behind the counter said the first time I asked for it. But I keep coming back, so he keeps making them for me.”

“If he really cared about you, he’d stop,” Shahyar said.

“I don’t want the deli guy to care about me,” she said. “I just want him to make my sandwich.”

As Shahyar finished tying, untying and re-tying his shoe, she took a bite. Not a big bite. Not even a normal bite. A dainty, tiny bite. An instant of self-consciousness. An affectation.

This was going well.

He offered his hand. “I’m Mark,” Shahyar said. It was the name on his badge. A false name printed in block letters beneath a picture of a face Shahyar barely recognized..

She wiped her hand on a coarse brown napkin before shaking. “Jennifer,” she said.

“Do you work around here?”

She nodded around another tiny bite. “A couple of blocks,” she said, pointing toward K Street and the office blocks that lined it. “You?” she said.

Shahyar just nodded. “You eat lunch in the park so you can see people make fools of themselves when they think no one’s watching?”

“Mostly just for the fresh air,” Jennifer said. “The show is just a bonus.”

Shahyar glanced around. No one was watching.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

She didn’t answer him immediately. She took another bite. Chewed and swallowed. “Why do you ask?” she said.

“Because nobody’s from around here,” he said. “Everyone’s from somewhere else.”

“Where are you from?” Jennifer asked.

“Damascus,” Shahyar said.

She cocked an eyebrow at that. “Syria?” she said.

He laughed. “No, Oregon. Little town just outside Portland.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling shyly. “How little?”

Shahyar made a show of thinking about it. “Maybe twenty thousand people?” he said. “Maybe less. I haven’t been back there in years and years.”

She took another bite of her ridiculous sandwich, nibbling at it half-heartedly. “Small-town people are the greatest people in the world,” she said.

“You’re from a small town?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I was born in Chicago. But my grandparents lived in Taswell, Indiana. I spent a lot of summers there.”

Shahyar just nodded. He knew this already. He knew everything about her. All the facts of her life. He could have written her biography. He knew everything except the one thing he needed to know.

“What do you want most out of life?” he asked.

Jennifer laughed openly, covering her mouth with one hand. There was a tiny smear of peanut butter on her thumb.

Shahyar put on his sheepish grin face again. “Sorry,” he said. He pulled up his sleeve and glanced at his watch. He’d picked it out carefully. Nice, but not too ostentatious. Notable but not flashy. Credible. It was all about remaining credible. “It’s just that I’m going to be late, and I wanted to learn something interesting about you before I go.”

Jennifer studied him for a moment. She wasn’t laughing any more, but she still had her hand in front of her face. Hiding behind it. “Why?” she asked.

For an instant, Shayar thought about telling her the truth. It wasn’t her fault. This shy, sheltered girl hadn’t done anything to bring this on herself. She’d committed no sin. Well, not any big ones, anyway. She was blameless.

Then again, so was the cattle-herder of Uz. Virtue means little when greater forces are at work.

“Why not?” Shahyar said, smiling with every ounce of sincerity he could muster. “In a minute I’m going to get up and go back to work. You’ll finish your sandwich and get on with your life. Let’s leave each other with more than we had before. Tell me your greatest dream.”

“What do I get in return?” she asked, eyes twinkling mischievously.

“I’ll tell you mine,” he said.

She considered this. He was just some guy, she thought. Just a stranger interrupted in the middle of his day by a girl who laughed at him. Harmless, she thought.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I want what everybody wants.”

“What’s that?”

“You know,” she said. “A peaceful life. No big tragedies. Just a normal life.”

He knew why she said it. He knew what she’d put behind her.

That didn’t make it any easier to hear.

“That’s it?” Shahyar asked. “You don’t want to be rich and famous?”

She giggled. “And have everybody talk about how snotty I am?” she said. “No. I just want a normal life.”

“Are you sure?” Shahyar asked, hoping desperately that she’d change her mind.

“Yup,” she said, then she took another tiny bite of her sandwich.

Shahyar sighed. It didn’t have to be like this. It could have been different. But the laws that bound him were immutable. Everyone he talked to had a choice. He had none at all.

He did what he had to do.

He granted her wish.

The quality of the light in the park changed in an ineffable way. Jennifer thought maybe the sun peeked out from between two clouds. But that’s not what happened. For just an instant, shorter than the blink of an eye, the man next to her was luminous.

The world changed. The course of Jennifer’s life changed. What had been a wide-open horizon became fixed, linear. Unimagined possibilities ceased to exist. The sound of an infinite number of doors slamming shut drifted over Jennifer like a breeze.

She took one last bite of her sandwich. Suddenly she wasn’t hungry any more.

The guy next to her reached down and gave his shoelaces a final tug. “Well,” he began, standing up from the bench. “It’s been nice talking to you, Jennifer.” He turned to leave.

“Wait,” she called. She stuffed the remains of her lunch back in the sack and chased after him. He turned.

“You didn’t tell me yours,” she said.

“My what?” he asked.

There was something different about him. He’d been so friendly just a minute ago. Now he was … distant. Cold. Now he was just like everybody else to her.

“What do you want most out of life?” she asked in a small voice, suddenly unsure of herself.

After a moment the man smiled at her. But it was such a sad smile, full of so much sorrow and weariness. Her breath caught in her throat.

“For it to end,” he said.

Ten thousand years. And ten thousand more to come. And ten thousand more after that, for all Shahyar knew. The witch-woman’s curse left no room for clemency.

But would she have been so quick to damn him if she’d known what would happen to so many innocents down through the ages? So many blameless people, people deserving of no punishment. Condemned by a long-dead sorceress to be given precisely what they wanted.

Shahyar left the park without stopping, crossed the street without looking. Traffic slowed for him without much fuss, drivers making way for him without conscious awareness. He pulled the lanyard from his neck and wrapped it around his lying badge. He stuffed the badge in his pocket, felt it evaporate from between his fingers.

He passed other pedestrians without glancing at them. He kept his eyes fixed on the sidewalk, his vision blurred with impotent rage. He looked at no one, made eye contact with no one, allowed himself to be noticed by no one.

His work for the day was done. His evil, demonic, accursed work was done. Tomorrow it would begin again, but for now, just for a few more hours before the dying sun set behind green hills so different from the great deserts of his youth, Shahyar could forget the curse, forget his damnation, forget all he had done and all he had yet to do.

For just a few hours, Shahyar could remember what it was like to be human.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.