Chaos Smiles From Beyond the Window

I stepped out of the dingy, grey Chevelle-Malibu—year model 1970 and the first car that I ever truly loved, pity it didn’t belong to me—and into the chilly wind of a central Texas winter; a piece of garbage in my pocket crackled audibly as I bent and stood.  The lot in which I had parked was divided in half by an iron rail.  The section nearest the courthouse serviced it, even though a street separated them, and the other half belonged to two adjoining businesses.  The first of these was The Crazy Lemon bar, open and nearly empty; not surprising for ten A.M. on a Tuesday.  The building next to it bore a more dignified sign, proclaiming it to be the law offices of one John Lee Blagg, and I wondered, for a moment, if he was any relation to Deedee Blagg, the high-school Spanish teacher.  Coincidence in names is the exception of small-town life rather than the rule, and chances were good that, if two people shared a name, they also shared blood or a connection by marriage. 

Suppressing the string of random thoughts that so often tug at my attention, I tugged my leather jacket tight against the teeth of the chilly gust and jogged the crosswalk of Fisk Avenue, just as the first little spits of rain began to fall.   

The courthouse was a place I’d only been to a handful of times previously and never on my own.  On the outside, it was mostly of brick construction and not overly impressive.  I knew, though, that a certain measure of care had been taken to craft the interior of the building from appropriately grave materials.  There was marble in the floors and granite in the walls.  Square pillars of fluted grey concrete towered above the brief steps that led to twin sets of glass doors, the only entrance to the building.  Externally, it was common; internally, it was dour.

I was reaching for the door-pull when I noticed a sign dominated by silhouettes corralled in a red circle with a slash through the middle, the universal emblem for NOT ALLOWED.  Guns, knives, and hypodermic needles were unwelcome here, it would seem, and as I examined it, my hand instinctively went to the pocket of my jeans, feeling for the folding knife that was clipped there.  I drew it out and closed my fist around it, thinking.  I didn’t want to walk back to the car to deposit my contraband; I’d parked far from the entrance to ensure that other petitioners would be reluctant to park next to me precisely because it was a long walk.  Though the drizzle was light, I could feel the cold in it, having no hat to keep it off of my neck.  I glanced down at the well-manicured hedges—prisms of green in a sea of dead, yellow grass—and saw how dark their shadow was beneath that canopy of leaves.  Carefully, I hid my knife in the shadow of the narrow space between the plant and the concrete lip of the courthouse step.

Again, and more hurriedly this time, I ascended the courthouse steps, my steel-toed work boots making muffled thumps against the stained and weathered face of the artificial stone.  I opened the glass door and, though the sign glared accusingly, stepped into the cool semi-darkness of the courthouse.

Two blue-uniformed men leaning against a boxy, black-painted frame set against the red granite of the far right wall peered at me and said nothing.  It took me a moment to recognize the thing; it was a metal detector.  I had been through security checkpoints more times than I could count, but at every other one I had seen, there was some kind of barrier—even if it was just those bronze posts and heavy ropes on clips—to funnel people through the machines.  Here there was none, and the effect was comic.  A pair of men were being paid by the state to guard a door-frame that had been set in empty space, and they expected visitors to pass through it rather than go around even though there was not anything actually preventing it.  Keeping a smirk, I approached, already beginning to empty my pockets.

The black monstrosity shrieked loudly at me as I passed through, and I stepped back and extended my arms, expecting to be wanded.  I realized that I had forgotten to take off my boots and that doing so would mean my socks would get wet.  I’d tracked in some of the rain, now coming down in sheets. One of the guards, a portly gentleman who leaned heavily against the shelf on which I’d my keys, wallet, and phone, spoke.  “You wearing a belt?” He asked, crossing his left leg over his right.  The shelf bowed more noticeably under the new weight.

I lifted the front of my shirt, exposing the double-bitted buckle. 

He nodded and waved me on, instantly returning to some story he had been busily recounting before I’d interrupted the stillness of his morning.

I thanked them without really knowing why, retrieved my effects, glanced around.  I could see two hallways and a staircase.  I assumed the staircase led to the actual courtroom, so that was out.  There was a plate-glass door at the head of the hallway to my right, which, in capital block letters, professed to be the COUNTY REGISTRAR.  Was that what I needed?  Registrar . . . registration . . . it made sense, but this was a governmental building.  I had learned that intuitive logic was not necessarily a compass through bureaucracy.

“Beg pardon,” I said to the guard who had spoken to me. 

His grin curdled, and the story died on his tongue, mid-sentence.  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.  “WHAT DO YOU WANT,” these said, also in an easily legible, bold type.

“I need to get my car registered?”  I said.  This was partly a lie; the car wasn’t mine.  It was technically my Dad’s, but I was driving it almost exclusively, so the registration fee would come out of my pocket.

The guard I’d addressed rolled his eyes at me, and it was his partner, a red-eyed brother in arms on the bloody front line of guarding absurdist portals to nowhere, who pointed a finger the size of a link sausage at the doorway I’d considered.  “That way Chief,” he said and waved a hand at the other, pressing him to continue.

Again, I thanked them and shuffled on.  My boots seemed overly loud as they slapped against the marble flooring.  

Ka-thump, ka-thump.  Ka-thump, ka-thump.

The door opened easily when I pulled, and I stepped inside onto yellow carpeting that had been trod a dirty brown.  Counters lined either side of the entryway here, and batwing hung between them, at the end.  Seated beyond were five ladies, all quite occupied at their computers, fingers flying over the keys that they navigated with cold precision.  Together, they were a clattering cacophony of order-made-industrial, and I again found myself hesitating to interrupt the rhythms of this place to which I, so obviously, was an intruder.

Timidly, I approached one of the counters.  Almost on queue, and without actually looking up from the matter she was keying into the computer, a thin woman in a yellow dress that sported a pin at the breast—featuring Betty (poop-oopie-doop!) Boop and her dog-boyfriend Bimbo, rendered in oddly disconcerting colors, spoke to me.  “Can I help you?”

I fished in my left pocket and drew out a sticky piece of garbage I had lodged there before opening the door to the Chevelle.  Last year's registration sticker had doubled on itself in the pocket of my jeans, forming a tube of paper and tacky plastic.  “Uh, hi.  I need to get the registration for my car renewed.” 

The typist, who had no nameplate standing on her desk that I could see, responded without a second’s thought.  “Do you have your proof of insurance?”

“Err . . . no, I left that in the car.  I guess I need to go get it?”

She nodded as her fingers went tikka-tikka.  She said nothing further.

I shrugged and turned, realizing that I would end up putting my knife in the glove compartment after all, and then I remembered the thing that was stuck to my hand.  I turned back and held it up.  “Do I need this?”

This, finally, merited her full attention, and her fingers halted in their flight.  She reached down and drew up a pair of half-rimmed spectacles from the place they had been hanging at her chest, and she peered through them at the thing which, a day earlier was a stately seal signifying that I was in the good graces of the greater powers and had, in the hours since, lost its mystic spark of legitimacy and legal blessing.  It was now a bit of refuse coated with the tacky residue that had, until I’d peeled it up, allowed it to cling tenaciously to my windshield.

It took her a moment to realize what exactly it was, and then she turned back to her work. 

“No,” she said.  Her fingers moved across the keys.  

Tikka-tikka.

“Oh,” I said, and scanned the floor for a garbage can.  There was none.  “Could you throw this away for me, then?”

“I can’t do that.”  Her words snapped off crisply, decisively, and as she spoke, she shook her head mechanically.  

Tikka-tikka.

I sighed deeply, and my forced air of chipper cooperation was expelled in that single breath.  Cheerfulness, politeness: they were impotent here, and maintaining the form of friendliness had grown tiresome; the iron facade of the folk who had made legal registry their business did not soften at human warmth.  

Somewhere above, I was sure, a judge sat at his bench, meting out the justice he stored in the deep, black folds of his expansive robe, and it occurred to me that the women before me were really scribes, copying the words of Mighty Judge, who also took tithes and sacrifices when these were required to keep in the white.  It was a temple of order, really, and men and women came here to make obeisance, to seek the governmental blessings that were dispensed in the form of windshield stickers and marriage licenses.  The paladins, without, were clothed in the vestments of the temple, and were armed to keep the ruinous unclean from the halls of the hallowed and the temple of divine rule.  There was even a ceremony to determine the worthiness of the petitioner, a crucible of proof—the clearing of the metal detector.

More than a little disgusted—partly with myself—I turned away, fully intending to return to my car and drive away.  On the other side of the door, a feminine face with two enormous green eyes peered at me through the dirty glass, obscured somewhat by the block letters—COUNTY REGISTRAR—and the unkempt blonde hair that hung in her face.  My momentary bitterness evanesced, and the hard-won instincts of politeness asserted themselves overtop.  A stranger was staring at me, and I did the thing I knew to do: I smiled.

That smile masked me.  It looked genuine enough.  Getting the eyes have to crinkle?  That’s key.  If someone sees that mask, and the corners of his eyes don’t tip up with the mouth, then she immediately sees through it to what’s behind; the milk of human kindness curdled into something more like defensive disinterest.  Rather than “I am a potential friend,” or “I care about you even though I don’t know you,” that smile is meant to communicate, “I don’t mean you any harm.”  That’s all, and that’s it . . . but you still want the eye crinkles to be there.

For a tick, nothing happened, and the only sound was the tikka-tikka of the keyboards behind me.  Then, her face broke, and she smiled back, even her eyes.  

The moment ended, and she turned to face forward.   With a heavy metallic jangling, she shuffled along in her line.  The beige thing that covered her from shoulders to hips, comprised the upper part of a single-piece prison jumpsuit.  The two men to whom she was chained, fore and aft, marched in that same weighty rhythm, their footsteps ringing with prison hardware. 

Chang-jang.  Chang-jang.

The sound faded, as they ascended the steps, and was soon gone.

Again, but for the percussive march of QWERTY keyboards, I was alone. 

Had she meant it?  For me, smiling had been a reflex, a survival default.  I had seen a stranger’s face, I had reacted . . . and then she had hesitated.  She hadn’t simply thrown it back at me, like some variety of novelty gender-swapping mirror, but had given the thing some brief flash of thought, and then she . . . she smiled back, returning what I’d sent.  She had made a conscious decision to be warm.

And what had been the message in her smile?  “Hi there?”  Or “Thank you?”  Perhaps, simply, “Message received.  I mean you no harm, either.”

That exchange, that brief moment where two people had connected and would, in all likelihood, never meet again had broken what I’d come to think of as the rhythm of the courthouse.  I was nearly certain that, had one of the typists observed us, she would have frowned in steep disapproval.  The prisoner, whoever she was, had upset the system there, too.  Whatever the cause of her arrest, whatever wrench she had tossed between the cogs of the mechanism that maintained order by pumping chaos back out beyond the dike —whatever her crime— a human, empathic spark kindled her; she had allowed it to do so.

I’d found no little morsel of humanity in the servants of order.  I’d found it in a scrap of refuse, once legitimate but now no longer, that was ultimately destined for disposal.  I pictured one of her guards coming into the room, tugging the prisoner by the arm, and asking that same lady, “Would you mind throwing this away for me?”

The door before me opened outward beneath the press of my hand, and again, my boots fell on the polished marble surface of the courthouse floor.  

Why should it shame me that I would go to my car and get my proof of insurance?  Why did I feel cheap as I did so?  Was it the irritation of wading through bureaucracy?  Was it the callous treatment I’d received from public servants?

Was it the sound my footsteps made as I exited the building?

I heard the discord of boot soles striking that hard surface, and they were those of keyboards and of irons.  Tikka-tikka, rang the heel, Chang-jang, chimed the toe.

Listening to the twin sounds of order and chaos as they struck their discord beneath me, I opened the outer door and stepped into the rain.