Crushed
by Matt Leibel
I noticed a woman walking down Market Street in a red bowler hat, and I wanted to say something. I wanted to compliment her, I wanted to say “nice hat” or “I like your hat,” but I didn’t want to sound like a creep, I didn’t want it to sound like a come-on, unless she wanted it to sound like a come-on, in which case, come on, of course I wanted that, haha, except maybe I didn’t, who knows, what if she wielded the hat as a weapon to vanquish her enemies, or what if she were a henchwoman who had her hat at the ready on behalf of some white-cat-stroking international supervillain or syndicate of supervillains, something along the lines of a female Odd Job from the James Bond films? But maybe I shouldn’t have been wary at all, maybe she would deploy her powers for good, maybe she’d be supportive of me, use her hat to slice through my enemies, or at least the people standing in the way of that promotion I wanted at work. Were I in a position to do so, I imagine I’d support her career goals as well, whether or not they had anything to do with the red hat, but my God, how could they not, why would she wear such striking headwear if she didn’t want it to represent her as a person, as a professional? I realized at this point that I was objectifying her, reducing her to an object associated with her, yet on the other hand, it was an object she chose, not an object she was born with, and I knew as well the hat had had a life before it even met the woman’s head, it had been created in a hat factory, which is a building where they make hats and not a building in the shape of a hat, though I suppose it could be that as well, there are lots of buildings that are designed to resemble the things that they make, and even before that the fabric itself had been created, probably in the fabric district of some far-flung foreign city, and likely, I knew, the hat was manufactured by people, most probably women, who were paid far less than they deserved, and certainly far less than I made in my relatively cushy job here in the city. In fact, I guessed that the hat fabricator likely made less in a year than I made in a single one of my direct-deposited, biweekly paychecks, and this thought made me think of grabbing the hat from the woman’s head and flinging it at the factory owners and clothing companies who exploited these workers, or at least made a healthy profit off their blood, sweat, and tears—and was it, I wondered, actually the workers’ blood that gave the hat its striking red color? I’d once read that carmine red was produced by crushing the bodies of cochineal beetles, common in South America, and wondered if some of the beautiful hue of the hat I so admired was achieved by some analogous crushing of the factory workers’ spirits. As I was pondering all of this, the woman in the red hat had passed out of view, and out of my life, perhaps forever, I thought—yet because I walked this way en route to work every day, and apparently so did she, I saw her again the next morning, and each weekday after that. Each day, I resolved to speak to her, and each day I failed in my resolve. One afternoon I had an idea: I would go to a hat store and buy the exact same hat, and that would make her notice me without my having to even say anything to her. But it didn’t work the first day, or the second, or the third. So I had another idea: I would buy a second hat and wear it on top of the first hat. Still, she didn’t blink an eye when she walked past. I added a third red bowler, then a fourth, fifth, and so on. It got to the point where I was wearing a thousand hats at the same time, in the literal sense and not in the idiomatic one of a skilled multitasker, though I was also that, and I was even paying a guy who operates a crane to carefully place the hats on top of my head (ideally, at a jaunty, Leaning Tower of Pisa angle) on my way out the door to work each morning. I wanted to ask the crane operator what he thought, was I wasting my time, had I gotten drunk on the crushed sour grapes of a failed romantic obsession. But I doubted the operator would be honest with me, he’d likely humor my madness, because I was paying him quite well, certainly compared with the third-world hatmakers who’d enabled my ability to purchase mass quantities of hats affordably. So he and I communicated silently, engaging daily in the delicate operation of outfitting me with a thousand red hats. I learned to hold my head more still than I thought was possible, and when I’d mastered the technique I could leverage my new skill by portraying a gold-painted statue like the folks who play this role for spare change in Union Square. Still, despite all my efforts at stillness, one morning there was a gust of wind that blew all the hats off my head and scattered them billiards-style throughout downtown. Hats landed on the heads of the homeless, on the tops of storefronts, in the grates of sewers. Hats thwacked into the glass windows of office towers, floated inside cable cars. They alighted, jauntily, on the necks of streetlights. They caused traffic accidents, cars and buses and bicycles, including several injuries and two fatalities. I didn’t feel great about this, but also wasn’t keen on copping to the cops that I was the one who was the proximate cause of it. The crane operator and I continued our code of mutual silence, realizing we were both, potentially, implicated here. And the woman—the honestly still spectacularly appareled woman of whom I’d taken notice, who I regarded and still regard as the initial ripple that went on to cause a wave of consequences—I no longer saw on my daily route. I continued to search for her, and continued to be unsure as to what I’d say to her if I found her, what my opening line would have been. I was humbled now, by the interaction of my own desires with the consequences of said desires, writ large. But of course I couldn’t avoid the woman forever, even if I wanted to, which I honestly didn’t. So when I finally saw her again, crossing paths on Market Street, we were both hatless, which in my mind was tantamount to our being naked, so there was an intimacy to our interaction, a peek-behind-the-curtain thrill of vulnerability, however brief. I froze in place, like a less convincing and unpainted version of those Union Square human statues, inadvertently blocking her path. She spoke to me for the first time, saying simply “excuse me,” and shuffling through. When I turned to watch her walk away, I noticed her shoes, deep-blue pumps, like nothing I’d ever seen before—and I was so distracted I walked straight into the side of a Halal food cart, and gave myself a big bright-red welt, a crushing blow, right on the meat of my forehead.
When I came to, I was more determined than ever to catch her attention. Somehow the bump on my head had imprinted the color of her shoes deep in my brain—not in the place where I store my idle thoughts, not in the place where I write bad-pun parodies of popular songs that I never share with anyone, not in the place where I rank my favorite kinds of pasta, not in the place where I think about what the ocean might be trying to tell me when I listen to it through a seashell, but in this deeper spot, this premium suite of the brain’s inner sanctum, the place where pure color lives. The next day I spent my lunch hour at work scanning women’s shoe sites, looking for the precise pair I’d seen on her. It was impossible to see color quite accurately on a screen, so I had no choice but to order all the pairs that were even close—dozens and dozens of pairs, but none of them, when they arrived, were quite right. Then I remembered reading about lapis lazuli, the deep-blue metamorphic rock prized since antiquity for its color. The shoes I had ordered were a similar color, but it wasn’t an exact match, so I decided to travel halfway around the world to Afghanistan to acquire some lapis lazuli, at great personal risk. But the risk paid off, and though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t meant to abscond with the precious stone when I left the country, I was able to do so, under shady and somewhat nefarious circumstances, feeling something like a badass Bond villain in the process. Upon my return to America, I decided to show the stone to a shoemaker and have the pumps recreated in my size. I had no idea where to find a shoemaker for hire, given that most shoes seem to be made in factories by large companies, companies who exploit their workers as much or more than the hat-making companies do; my only real shoemaker reference was that there was once a famous racehorse jockey with that name, but that was a long time ago, and mostly irrelevant to my current purpose. What I did was call up my friend, the crane operator, who seemed to be someone who knew a lot of handy people, and he said he’d be happy to help me locate a shoemaker, for a price. I paid the price not because money was no object—it was very much an object, and my rational self could easily raise a compelling objection to paying as much as I did—but because I’d been swept up by a wave, by a deep-blue wave of a woman, and by what that woman had dared to wear. The shoemaker took in my breathless description and my smuggled central Asian rock, and used them to craft a pair of shoes that I was satisfied mirrored in both hue and style those worn by the object of my desire, as she sashayed down Market each workday. The pumps fit my feet perfectly, and I felt like Cinderella, or maybe more like Cinderfella, a portmanteau that made me cringe just as soon as I thought of it. I taught myself to walk gracefully in them, and soon I was wearing them to work, crossing paths with my intended once again, hoping that she’d finally notice me, as something more than an obstacle. Days and weeks went by and I got no reaction from her, nor from anyone else for that matter—a man walking in a pair of woman’s shoes on the streets of San Francisco is, pun intended, about as pedestrian as it gets. Eventually, once again, I stopped seeing her. Maybe she had noticed me wearing the same shoes and had become self-conscious about it. Maybe she’d moved to a different city, gone to LA even, to act, or model, or to live out her ultimate destiny as a Bond femme fatale. I decided to keep wearing the shoes, as uncomfortable as they were, because the uncomfortable truth was I’d become convinced that the shoes had magical powers, or at least suggestive ones, and that the energy they exuded would, through some alchemical process I was at a loss to competently articulate, draw her back to me. And just as no one on the street judged me for the pumps I chose to wear, I didn’t judge myself for my continuing obsession—although in retrospect, perhaps I should have. One morning, while standing on the sidewalk amid the hustle and bustle of the grab-a-coffee-and-get-to-work set, I stopped at a row of newspaper kiosks and scanned the headlines through the glass panes. I paid my two quarters and pulled out a Chronicle. I read as I walked—and upon seeing my own face in a photo on the front page, my feet grew wobbly. I was wanted, in the criminal sense, for what I’d caused, for what the papers had taken to calling the Hatpocalypse. I hadn’t thought a lick about consequences when I’d started this quest—because consequences be damned—but now here they were, starting me in the face from my own literal face, or at least its flattened, unflattering newspaper image facsimile. I tried not to panic, though if I were really the type not to panic, would I have acted the way I did up until this point? I turned around to see a pair of cops who were clearly not following me and who were, in fact, sipping on their coffees and staring off into the middle distance aloofly. But the mere sight of them must have triggered me, and I broke out into a dead sprint, careful to dodge the food carts and newspaper kiosks, the bearded man speaking angrily into a megaphone about Jesus, the second-tier Michael Jackson impersonator, and the cellphone-besotted masses. The pumps, of course, were poorly suited to sprinting, and so it wasn’t entirely surprising when I turned an ankle rather badly, and fell into oncoming traffic, where I was crushed by a number 7 bus.
In the afterlife, which looked a lot like San Francisco, only hazier, if that’s possible, I continued to search for her. I realized she wasn’t here quite yet—but I’d wait, pacing the cloud-lined streets, my colorful hats and shoes replaced with a white frock and afterlife-assigned sandals. But my will was undimmed; death had not put a fatal damper on my dreams. I needed her in a way I’ve never needed anyone, and to be honest, I didn’t know the first thing about her. Well, that wasn’t true, was it? Her red hat was the first thing I knew about her. Her blue shoes were the second thing about her. The third thing about her was that she was lovely, and the fourth thing about her was that she liked to walk, and she did so every workday. But I didn’t know the fifth thing about her. That’s what I would say to her if I got another chance to make her acquaintance, or her spirit’s acquaintance: I don’t know the fifth thing about you. It was an advantage, I knew, that I even knew the first four things: she didn’t know the first thing about me, that thing being that I even existed. But I no longer existed, strictly speaking, so there was little for her to learn about me. Meanwhile, days, weeks, months, and years passed in a blur—by which I mean my eyesight, not spectacular to begin with, continued to deteriorate rapidly in the afterlife, and it wasn’t like there was anywhere I could easily go here to renew my contact lens prescription. Soon everything in my field of vision became reduced to abstract shapes and colors—which I realize, in some ways, is essentially what I’d reduced the object of my affections to, now long ago. And also: Where was she, my eternal crush? Was she ever going to join me, or was she somehow immortal, in the same way that James Bond was, never dying because his death would necessarily mean the death of a successful film franchise? Or was she already here, unrecognizable to me minus her red hat and blue pumps, evading my fast-dying eyes, my still-living desires, my endless pursuit, and my shambling attempts to make meaning out of the fabric of her existence: inscrutable, impossible, irresistible.
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Florida Review, The Normal School, Socrates on the Beach, and Wigleaf. He lives in San Francisco.