The Terminal

I want a face like that of the man who sets up his small table, chair, and worn typewriter in a corner of the bus terminal in the center of the enormous city and types the letters of the illiterate. They stand next to him, in a posture of awkward confession, carefully giving him the words. They pay him by the sheet, and for the stamp on the envelope, and the envelope. Because they cannot read what is on the page after the letter is finished, they do not know about the mistakes he makes and lets go without correction, or the corrections he makes to their grammar. He has done this for many years, near the man who polishes shoes, near the woman who sells boiled peanuts. His face is as placid as a god’s, affixing a category to each letter. Money, infidelity, illness, despair, longing, gossip, grief—the way we identify saints by the things that tortured them.