Party

It looked like a party. Small clusters of people standing around talking. Some people talked more, some people more loudly, some people more passionately, but everyone talked. The voices just piled up, and I looked at the windows, nice ones, large doors opening onto a thin cement balcony with a woven wrought iron rail. Cigarette smoke grew downwards from the ceiling, encroaching on people’s headspace.

Someone tapped a glass and gave a speech in Catalan, and throughout the guy with the violent eyes whispered in your ear. Immediately after the speech people starting arguing, presumably about what’d been said, and you began listening ferociously.

Eventually, someone asked me in English what I thought. “I missed the subject of the conversation,” I told him, and he asked what I felt about the situation of working people in the United States. I told him I didn’t know because I decided not to work there since most of the people I knew hated their jobs.

Then they asked you, and you told them, specifically, how many millions of people worked but lived poor, how many were uninsured, the unemployment rate, etc., etc., etc. They were much more impressed with your answer—I was impressed too, but I didn’t know whether those numbers were abnormally high or low or what. Where you learned them and what you made of them were a mystery to me. I felt dumb, and that’s why, when you found me later, slightly drunk and staring at the moon, I told you I didn’t really have fun at the party. It was a good party. I’m glad you took me.