# mwnshi He goes into the restaurant. He orders “the usual,” and the girl stares. It’s meant to be jokey—he’s been coming here for years, he knows the rules. But she’s unsmiling and unpleasant—like always. He doesn’t tip. He goes up the spiral stairs, boots clanking on the corrugated steel. Up here is a good place to sit. There’s a bar; it’s comfortably dark; there’s enough people energy but not too much. A group of six or seven mwnshi clomps up the stairs, crowds the beaded doorway, and finally bursts into the room {like a slick shit popping out of an anus}. The seating is close and interlaced here; there are pillars and beams and nooks and concavities. The mwnshi settle in, rustling and swirling, and he can smell them. There’s no use in not talking at this point; mwnshi always want to talk. They make small talk and he joins in. Given the blend of comfort and discomfort that arises between members of groups that are supposed to be able to get along—why shouldn’t they?—it’s impossible to get along without the constant background hum of “hey—look at us—we’re getting along! we’re fine; we’re doing it right; this is normal; I’m a good person”—and then deeper in than that, there’s “I’m pretty cool because look at how normal it is for me to be getting along with these people; I don’t know why *you* people think it’s a big deal; I must be enlightened”—not to mention the even farther-background hum of “this is good; these are good people to be friends with in case shit goes down.” Whatever they talk about is almost immediately forgotten amidst the layers of all these clouds. One of the mwnshi gets soup. He’s a young tight taut male with an intelligent smile that’s warm and dangerous. The server hands it to him over the heads of everyone around the table. Misjudging how much the small talk has advanced the social situation, our “hero” jokes around and acts as if he’s going to intercept the soup. But he’s all elbows in his eagerness to perform unselfconsciousness, and he jostles the server’s arm and the soup spills. There’s a frozen moment. The young taut male looks disproportionately sad. Our guy apologizes profusely, outwardly about the soup but inwardly feeling at least as much mad at himself for having fucked up a tenuous situation whose tenuousness was supposed to have been thoroughly invisible by one’s deeper, purer nature. After that endless beat, more than enough time for primeval atoms to begin to coalesce into a recognizable (and therefore tragic) universe, the forgiveness of the mwnshi as a group is conducted via the limited vocabulary of the intersection of their linguistic rituals and his. In a way, this is the worst outcome, because he can sense (or thinks he’s sensing) that the young taut male is going along with it because of the dynamics of the group; the young taut male’s personal forgiveness is like an innertube being towed along behind the stern of the great freighter that is the group’s collective forgiveness. The day steams on toward night. More mwnshi come and join the group. Our guy almost feels attached to them by sticky bands. Whether because of the spilled soup or in spite of it, there is advancement of inclusion! He’s almost starting to feel as if he belongs, in a certain conscribed way. He can’t read their faces or their voices fluently enough to know, by the time it happens, whether the gift of invisibility they proffer is wrapped in irony or ingenuous humor. But teeth are shown in nonthreatening ways; there is laughter, there is swirling color, it is dark outside and it is warm in here. The gift takes the form of a tiny golden chest, a lockbox a lot smaller than a breadbox. It almost burns into his astonished palm. Eventually, he has to go. Why? Does he have a job? A spouse? Responsibilities? At this juxtaposition of moments, these are incongruous, gratuitous, but nevertheless, the lives we carry around do have a way of reasserting their magnetic fields—(until someday when they longer do, when all is dissolute). There is a disjointed, melodic goodbye. Has it been the establishment of symbolically diplomatic relations, or has it been a random encounter in a friendly establishment? He makes his way between the crenellations of the upstairs space. Along the hallway at the top of the stairs, there is an array of little storage lockers where restaurant patrons can leave their personal belongings. The mwnshi’s belongings are resplendent (if not a bit suspicious) compared to everyone else’s drab collections of stylish utility. Around the corner, out of sight now, the mwnshi are yelling at each other, in the musical way they do; their night stretches out ahead. Impulsively, our guy steals the shine of one of them. It’s a homemade amulet. They all have one—everyone knows this, but not everyone understands what it means. Is it a ritual? A thing they get at a certain age? Magic? Superstition? Religion? They make them out of discarded parts of common consumer items—padlocks, bottle tops, bobbins, door hasps. They’re based on dull metal, but get personalized with glass, other metals, rhinestones, etchings, and the slow burnish of hands and fingers in pockets. Why did he grab this one? It has blue and yellow arranged in a flower pattern in the center, like an innocent eye. He rounds the corner and starts to descend the stairs, but it bangs loudly, ringing out, against the bannister. They hear; they look; they discover. Unevenly, about half of them lurch to their feet. He uses the invisibility they gave him to get away! But he lurks, out of sight, in the asphalt cold outside, peering back up through the wide open window on the second floor. Heart pounding grotesquely. They hold an impromptu council. They want to kill him. Why does he reveal himself? Is he drunk? He’s not drunk. Did the shine betray him? That’s nonsense. Was it an accident; did he kick over a garbage can? Is he that stupid? None of these is it; what is it then? He calls up to them, baring his soul to the open window. He throws himself on their mercy. They hold court, framed by the window, stars as witnesses. The matriarch, who is broad and wide and evokes gentleness and the strength of the sea, voice like the low end of a mahogany marimba, overrules the more violent ones, and they let him go. But he’s outside in his underwear, sweat drying in the dark, a long way from home.