by Julia Nimchuk

There was a pleading in his voice that resonated so genuinely and with such humility that not one person could resist stealing a glance in his direction. His face was kind, with familiar grey eyes and long eyelashes, his dark hair was matted and greasy, and he stunk of a strange combination of fish and Old Spice. He was always grinning, not in a sinister way, but as though he fully appreciated the irony that he was once one of those people on the subway platform, commuting to work with extra cash in his wallet that he never removed for the benefit of a stranger in need. What must he have thought of us every day, huffing and puffing about train traffic, spilt coffee, jacket and pants mismatched in our dark bedrooms? What must he have thought of me, throwing a pitying, unreciprocated smile in his direction?
     In his hands was a once-white paper cup with a couple of bills in it and a handwritten sign. The sign had evolved from his first appearance on the platform a few months prior, which had started as a simple Anything you can spare written in black sharpie in the middle of a stiff cardboard square in surprisingly beautiful penmanship. Week after week, he would add a new declaration:

I won’t buy drugs
Drugs are $$$
My parents are dead
Coffee is $$$ too
Fuck capitalism
My Name Is Cody
Crack is Wack
Bitcoin accepted
Be NICE to Women 🙂
#dumptrump
Too honest to steal

     He had vermin for neighbors and a hole by his crotch but Cody still kept his sense of humor. When temperatures on the platform jumped north of a hundred degrees, he created a new sign out of a discarded kitchen cutting board with the words, Merry Christmas. He was singing out-of-season carols with sweat pouring down his face.
     Cody’s cup was never full; he was careful to stow his earnings away in his pockets when there was enough. Maybe he was afraid of someone stealing from him, or maybe he didn’t want people to think he was successful as a homeless man. His face remained thin, which made me worried that he was, despite his sign, surrendering to a certain array of powders and flowers all too easy to find on the street.
     There was the day we finally made eye contact. I smiled as usual. His face fell. I dropped a five-dollar bill in his cup, understanding I might be setting a precedent for my generosity for the rest of my commuting days. He didn’t say “thank you,” but I didn’t do it for a “thank you.” My eyes searched for his but came up short; his attention had shifted to a tall suited man behind me who had, by the sound of it, dropped some change on top of my bill.
     “Bless you,” Cody said to the man.

One particularly muggy Thursday morning, the fishy Old Spice stench had reached new levels. The sound of coins being scattered on the floor echoed for a brief moment before it was drowned out by an oncoming Brooklyn-bound train. Almost everyone watched the exodus from the train as a cover for finding the source of the clattering. A child in pink jelly sandals and pigtails tugged on her father’s suit and pointed in Cody’s direction. His paper cup lay a few feet from him, surrounded by what seemed like several dollars’ worth of quarters on the ground. We all understood together, very suddenly, when a teenage boy came running back and kicked the change off the platform and onto the tracks. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything. Some people’s faces reddened in frustration, some people squinted at the boy in his salmon shorts and boat shoes. Everyone else tried to pretend they hadn’t noticed what had happened.   Everyone always hopes someone else will be the hero. The boy ran away again and bounded up the stairs with a friend in fits of laughter.
     Motionless of all was Cody, his face buried in his filthy hands. Months of being ignored, of pitying stares, of relying solely on the passive generosity of others—that was expected. But this pushed Cody into a darker place, a place I was surprised he hadn’t already found in his situation. He stopped smiling after that. He stopped asking for money. He just sat there on the platform with his cup and his sign, which was sometimes upside down, like he had accepted that he might just die there. It took weeks of convincing before he finally agreed to come home.

Had I been the one living on a subway platform for four months, I would have run straight for the shower. But Cody settled into the corner of our living room, the one closest to the door. He put his cup and sign down with care and sat on the hardwood floor against the wall. From there he could survey the entire room, cautiously keeping tabs on me.
Cody wouldn’t eat on the first day, but who can resist a roast chicken fresh out of the oven? He resisted reaching for a drumstick when I set a plate down in front of him in his corner, but when I turned my back, he immediately got to work tearing the meat off the bone with his mustard yellow teeth. I watched him from the kitchen. I barely recognized him. His hungry eyes glimmered in satisfaction, almost betraying a hint of insanity behind them. He dropped the clean chicken bones onto his plate, licking every dirty, oily finger, dry.
     “Just like I remember,” Cody said, the first words he’d said to me since he left. I hadn’t prepared myself for a conversation just yet.
     “Oh, good,” I finally said. Now I was the one avoiding eye contact. “Glad you enjoyed.” We sat there in silence for a few minutes. The only reprieve was the faint ticking of the second hand on my watch and the low hum of the air conditioner.
     “Well?” Cody asked, suddenly exasperated. A lump appeared in the back of my throat.
     “Cody, I—”
     “Look, just say your piece so you can feel better about yourself and move on. I’ve moved on, so just get it over with already.”
     I didn’t know what to say.
     “Come on, why else would you be going through all this trouble?” He gestured to the chicken carcass on the kitchen counter. “I’m not stupid. I may smell like balls but I’m sure as hell not stupid.”
     “I’m not going to say what you want me to say. I got there too late,” I said. Tears were welling up in my eyes, but I blinked them back; I didn’t need his pity. “There was nothing I could do. She was gone.”
     “You could have taken her to the hospital, called for help, called me,” he shouted, his voice cracking in his parched throat. “You expect me to believe you walked in right before I did? That you missed it by that much?” He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together so hard his knuckles turned white. “I know you hated her, but she was still our goddamn mother!”
     There was the pleading tone again, like he was back on the platform in his safe space. I wiped my nose and stood up, hoping words would magically manifest out of my mouth that could make him trust me again. But nothing happened.
     “She wasn’t a druggie. I know that. The Oxy was yours,” he said, quietly, as if still trying to convince himself.
     “They were prescribed to me after my surgery, you know that,” I said, trying not to sound too defensive.
     “But why did she take them? Why would she take them right before we were supposed to see her? Why would she do something like that?”
     “To guarantee us PTSD for life? I don’t fucking know, she was an awful woman. Who knows why people do what they do?”
     “You mean what you did,” he said, glaring.
     “What the hell did I do?” I said.
     “You let her die.”

Julia Nimchuk is a sophomore at NYU and was born and raised in New York. She recently switched majors from Real Estate to Creative Writing—she has been in real estate for the past six years, so it was time to disrupt the monotony. Aside from a semi-successful blog in high school about trivial pet peeves (think: different shades of black, three pronged forks, sawdust, etc.), the most comprehensive creative writing experience Julia previously held was writing her resumé.