Title: Help (or See How the Other Half Live)
Author:
Rating: G
Character/Pairings: Max, OC, No Romance
Disclaimer: I don't own it.
Notes: This woman could very well have been my mother, except it was 1980 and she ended up in Michigan. On the actual work, it's rather stylized, and it's purposely written in present tense. It's also the first piece of fanfiction I've written since I was 11. Five years is a long time, so please be kind! :)
New York is nothing like home, she decides.
Home is children (playing in the dusty streets), red bean soup (sickly sweet and cold as ice), and familiar faces (this man, her uncle; that fish vendor, a family friend). Home is the heat. The heat, unbearable to some, was a comfort to her. It was a constant companion, a reminder of the soil, the land which claimed her from birth.
But, that was before the war.
New York is different. New York is daunting and revolting and exhilarating all at once. Swarms of people pay her no mind as she gapes at buildings standing as tall as colossal sentinels, reaching into the blue sky. Even the sky here is unusual, she thinks, it's somehow more distant and endless. And here is another oddity. Motor cars, such a rarity where she came from, strangle the streets here in New York. They move dangerously fast, swerving and maneuvering as easily as the rickshaws did in the quietly bustling streets of home. Inwardly, she laughs because she had thought her brother's motorbike was fast. She feels silly and naïve.
Fleetingly, she thinks she should have stayed in California with her Auntie, but then, her brother is why she came here. We'll find each other, he said, as if America were a small town. How long has it been, how long since he left for this city?
It doesn't matter. Days, months, years. They all meld together. To her, there is only before and after. In the before, all is ablaze with life and light of gold. For a moment, she is home again. Sunlight filters languidly through green, green leaves while friends and neighbors laugh—loud, boisterous, and perfectly content—in their shade. But even in her mind, that is stained by blood, darkened by the war, by the after. Laughter gives way to screams. Around her, the sounds of the city blend seamlessly with the thunder of bullets and the roar of the helicopter, a rising cacophony threatening to overtake her.
But she won't allow it. She refuses to drown herself in the memories. She shuts her eyes instead, waits for the moment to pass.
She opens her mouth as a woman rushes by, but the words die before they leave her throat. She sighs and wishes she had paid more attention in the English classes at school.
" 'Cue me," she tries again and in her mind it sounds like excuse me.
The tall man—everyone is so very tall in America—shrugs her off; he doesn't have time to waste on her.
She looks down, dejected, and clutches the scrap of paper in her gloved hand until her fist quivers. The paper crinkles and smudges the writing, so she smoothes it out quickly even though she's read these words so many times she knows them better than her own name.
The weight of her bag, the remains of her worldly belongings, grounds her. It feels solid and real and prevents her from drifting along with the massive crush of people. People who speak only English and cast strange looks at her. People who are ever shifting like the waves of the ocean which carried her so far from her family. She stands, unmoving, in a sea of American faces. Alone. For the second time, she wishes she were elsewhere. She wishes she were home.
We are people without a country, someone in the refugee camp said. No, she thinks, she is an American. This is her country. This is her home.
If only somebody would help.
-
She needs help, he decides.
And Max would help. He knew the moment he saw her—grasping blindly for assistance, for the kindness of a stranger, struggling in a foreign tongue, only to be brushed aside—that he would help.
He takes a long drag from his cigarette and flicks it to the ground, extinguishing it with his heel.
"Excuse me," he says, laying a kind hand on her shoulder. She must have been a foot shorter than he.
She looks up at him. Dark eyes and darker hair.
He knows this face well. He sees it in the ghosts which haunt his dreams and wander the corridors of his memory, memories which haven't diminished even after all these years.
This face, familiar and frightening, is young. Bundled in a winter coat (it's June, he registers vacantly), she looks even younger. He understands though. He knows more than anyone. It was so unbearably cold here after that place.
He thinks he was her age when he suddenly found himself so far from home.
"Do you need some help?" he asks.
Her eyes widen and something of a hesitant smile ghosts over her lips. She hands him a slip of paper, relinquishing it from her trembling grasp.
On the bit of paper (he notices it's really just the corner torn off a newspaper), an address is hastily scrawled in a beautiful hand.
He knows the place. Of course he does; he is a cab driver after all. He also knows it isn't far.
Suddenly, a car backfires, startling them both. Their eyes meet. They can see their own demons reflected in the eyes of the other.
"I know it," I know your pain, your sorrow. It is my own, he seems to say. The sound of his voice calms her, "I'll take you there."
He holds a hand out to take the bag she has clutched to her chest.
-
His is an America face, with eyes of ice and hair the color of the sun. But his eyes speak to her. And so she allows him to take her bag.
-
"This is the building," he murmurs, more to himself than anything.
He stops before a crumbling, decrepit old building, and her eyes dart between his face and the apartment complex. He turns to her.
"You go to the third floor," he says, holding up three fingers for emphasis, "and find number fourteen. Will you be alright if I leave you now?"
She nods and looks as if she would speak.
"T-Tank-kyoo," she says after a moment, and Max understands she means thank you.
She smiles, shyly, and Max smiles back. She takes her bag and ventures into the building.
Max stands and watches long after her shadow has disappeared.
-
"Max!"
A voice, familiar and comforting, finally startles him from his reverie.
He turns, and the fading sunlight reflects off his flaxen hair. The light of the dying sun casts the city in orange and red and burnished amber. Everything is golden and beautiful.
Jude is still calling his name as he crosses the street, smiling and waving.
"What're you doin' 'ere, Max?" concern laces his voice, darkens his eyes.
Max is silent for a moment. He lets out a quiet breath through his nose before he looks up at Jude. He smiles absently.
"I had a meeting with my past."
-
Xin chào