—Jonathan Sherwood

 

It was a bad rain. Like knitting needles stabbing you in place. Insect collector needles. Days since the streetlights slept. It came down dull and mad. Straight and muttering. It stabbed at me, so I ran.

    At the corner of Crost and Lake I slipped on the worn concrete and fell hard against the sidewalk, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even slow down. I was up and running across the street, socks sloshing in my shoes.

I lurched through the door of Candy Wrappers. Big Billy rose off his stool, but dropped back when he saw it was me. I high-fived him as I passed and he winced at the wet slap. Stay there Big Billy. Guard the door.

The men’s room was cold. A black tie with a guy behind it came out of a stall and the guy swooped his hands under a faucet. “Still raining out, I see,” he said. I pulled a brown paper towel down the back of my neck and looked at his reflection.

    “Yeah,” I said to it. “Still raining.”

He spritzed the last of the water from his fingertips, sneaking a quick glance at me—at my arm—before he pushed open the plywood door to where the club convulsed to the rhythm of breasts. I’ve got only half a left arm. I get used to that look.

   When the door slammed shut, I shivered out a long breath. It had been in me since Judy’s and I couldn’t get it out. Not because of Judy, but because of the absence of Judy. Judy was never absent. Judy was always home. But twenty minutes earlier I had been pounding on her door, blowing rain off my lips and getting pissed. Then getting scared. I imagined her fallen in the tub with crimson eddies whirling around the drain. We were supposed to meet for lunch like we did every Friday, but she didn’t come when I knocked. Judy, close-cut hair and far-cut nose, never went out farther than to pull the door shut. Maybe she stepped out, just this once, I thought. Please. Just this once, she ran out for milk or something.

    Please.

    But she wasn’t out for milk. I’d be the one who found her. In five days her feet would still be gently swaying twenty inches above her bathroom tiles.

    It would still be raining.

    When I pounded on her door beneath the ringing fire escape, I’d been more angry than anything. The water wriggled its way down my neck all the way to my shoes. I smeared prints of my face against her window. I tried yelling “Judy!” over the static rush of water. Anger was just ebbing when I took a step back and looked up. And then I forgot all about Judy.

    The tops of the buildings in her little cul-de-sac nudged each other way up, and I felt like I was six-and-a-half years old again, trapped in the bottom in our apartment building’s old steam vent. Before ceiling fans, they’d let the steam out of showers by just cutting a big hole in the wall above the shower head. All the holes led to a shaft that rose up through the stories to the roof, where the steam let out. But back then, I didn’t know it. Every time I took a shower I’d look up above the shower head and wonder where the hole went.

    One day after school, I climbed up halfway into it and fell in. We were on the second floor, so it wasn’t like I fell far. Other boys could have gotten out, but other boys have two arms. I landed at the bottom of a three-by-three-foot well that lay wedged between apartments. Way up, ten or more stories, a bright patch of brown plastic kept the sky out. And nothing between it and me but shower vents and steam-ripened mold. I pulled myself into a ball and waited. My second set of foster parents did finally find me, but not until about two in the morning. I sat at the bottom of the vent in a ball, my heels to my butt, my good arm holding my half arm against me, and tried not to see or hear or feel or breathe. I knew something was watching me.

    Mold glistened from the brown skylight above until the sun set, then yellow-creme lit the shower vents. People showered, laughed, flushed toilets, gushed steam into the vent. The steam carried little bits of them away, drifted toward the hole of a sky, but stuck on the way up. Stuck to become the slick skin of the walls. The bits and pieces of themselves that people wanted to get rid of lined the brick, sunk into the wood, clung over their vents, peered in when they peed. When they were gone, when they were dead, it would still be here. I looked at all this when I sat at the bottom, and realized something was living in here with me.

    slimies and snakies and slippery sliders,
    centipedes, millipedes, insects and spiders

    I rolled up into a ball. My sneakers disappeared as the gray that covered the water healed around my ankles. The thing had to be behind me, stuck to a wall, its feet steeped in human mold. God of his shower-vent. Thing of old skin. My eyes were so tight my head hurt. It was a spider on the wall behind me. It stared at me, shaking with rage. I didn’t want to fall into its vent. I didn’t want to sit here. I wanted him to know that, but I didn’t want to twist around and see him fuming. I kept my crying quiet. I wished someone would see me. But far, far above, the brown window dimmed, and the world went on without me. Nobody knew me. Nobody would ever miss me. Nobody. I’m nobody. My foster parents would just shrug, and I would sit here forever as the spider hated and hated and hated me. When the flashlight beam waved around and lit up the lichens around me, I barely moved; only looked up. I didn’t say anything when they called me. I hadn’t felt the spider move. He was waiting for the right time and I didn’t want to make it by speaking. I sat in a pit at the bottom of the world until my foster father picked me up and whispered such nice things. Condensed skin-water fell as he carried me.

    As I stood outside Judy’s door, watching rain appear from the brown patch of dead sky between the buildings, I felt the mold wrap around my feet, and someone staring at me, shaking with hate. I bolted from the alleyway, skidding across the street, rushing through the eighteen-day rain to get away away away. I didn’t think about how wet I got and I didn’t care if I looked like a fool.

    The spider was all grown up.

~

 

The long breath came out of me and misted the restroom mirror for half a second. I rubbed my hair one more time with the paper towel and made my way to the back of the club to see Tarla. Agatha the professor was on, letting mankind get a worm’s-eye look-see between her thighs.

    I’d met Tarla in the grade after the shower vent. My first day of first grade told me my difference mattered, and Tarla showed me it didn’t matter to her. She just walked up and said, “What’s wrong with your arm?” I explained I had all the parts of my arm, but everything from my elbow down never grew past when I was a really tiny baby. I told her it didn’t look like anything, but she wanted to see anyway. And then she sat next to me.

    Tarla Ladeu was baby-blond and baby-fat. She wore Elvis Costello glasses before Elvis made them cool, and pleated skirts when it was hip to burn your bra. We somehow got sorted into all the same classes from first grade to sixth, which I took as fate somehow. I figured it was love when I had my first memorable case of diarrhea. I thought I was just going to pass gas as the bus came to pick me up, and suddenly as the doors opened before me, I realized I had pants full of crap. It wasn’t like I could just turn around and walk home—there was a bus full of kids staring at the one-armed boy. I sat in my own crap on the bus, and everyone around me exaggerated the effects of the smell. When Tarla got on I was a statue looking out the window. But she sat next to me. After junior high wedged itself between us, I saw her only every now and then, still waiting for pleated skirts to cycle back into fashion.

    “Hey!” I sang.

    “Hey cutie!” she swiveled her eyes under a mascara brush. “You’re all wet.”

    “It’s all wet out.”

    “No kidding,” she said, bent at the mirror. Around the mirror were twenty bulbs advertising wattage. The vanities came with cheaper bulbs, but all the girls replaced them with good old tungsten. It made their skin look more human. Bass thumped through the drywall the manager built. Nobody wants to see real faces. “What’d ya think?”

    She stood up and opened her robe, the same one she stepped into from a shower. Beneath were three little triangles of tiger skin. One per breast. One per crotch.

    “Nice,” I said. I pulled a chair from one of the other dressing tables.

    “There’s really nothing in back,” she swished closed and sat. “Just my butt.” Her eyes gleamed as she set a brown pencil to them. “I want to wear it to that song; the one about the tiger.”

    “Which one?”

    “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the darkness of the night. That one.”

    “I think it’s ‘jungle of the night,’ isn’t it?”

    She shrugged. “I don’t even know if it’s a song, but it’s kind of creepy. This tiger lurking around and all. I hope some of the guys get creeped out. I love doing that.”

    “You’re cruel and unusual.”

    “Yes I am.”

    “Have you seen Judy around?” She must have heard the funny way I said it, because she looked at me.

    “Yesterday. I brought her my cactus. Why?”

    “Cuz we were supposed to have our lunch today and she wasn’t there.”

    Tarla drew a slow line between her lower lashes and her eye. She didn’t breathe or move but for that line. The dressing room was an acute triangle of two brick walls and one piece of drywall. A door near the farthest corner was open to an alleyway that hissed rain like an engine. The doorway was old, with a brick-arched peak. Sodium light ricocheted off puddles onto the ceiling in here. It looked like a fabulous Roman sewer. I pulled my camera out of my fanny pack, held it between my knees while I flipped up the lens cover, and held it up to catch her without breath. She hovered in front of her reflection, undulating light fading in her hair, little finger steadied against a cheekbone as she tried to draw herself into the Roman backdrop. The flash went off and ruined the shot.

    I’ve always hated these little instamatic things. You’re lucky if you remember to turn off the flash when you don’t want it. Otherwise it just gives it to you like TV dinner broccoli. If I saved up my parent’s social security checks, I could probably afford a real SLR with macro lenses, zoom lenses and filters. But it wouldn’t make much difference. I’ve never heard of an SLR you can operate without a left hand. I’ve got a quote from the French photographer Atget on my wall that says it’s not the equipment; it’s the soul that moves it. If I keep plugging away at it, even with my little one-hander instamatic, I’ll make it. Just one great photograph is all I’ll need. Just something to say, “I was here.” Otherwise, what’s the point of it all.

    “You probably caught her in the bathroom,” Tarla said, a strain to keep from smiling so long. “Call her from Tommy’s.”

    “Oh!” I said, rummaging through the fanny pack. “I got it today!” I handed her the cell phone.

    “I can’t believe you got one of these,” she said as she held it like a remote. “How can you afford this?”

    “I got rid of my normal phone,” I said, trying to hold a scrap of paper against my leg with my palm. “I can actually save money if I only use it after nine. Then I can afford that new Tri-X Pan film Mrs. Witherspoon bought special.” I scribbled the last of my new number on my leg and handed it to her. “Don’t call me before nine though unless it’s an emergency.”

In three and a half hours Mrs. Witherspoon would call. It would be the only call I’d ever get. It would be an emergency.

Having shut off the flash, I got the shot of Tarla. It wasn’t as good as the one where she was drawing on herself, but it was good enough to go up on my wall. My apartment walls are covered with my best pictures, mostly of the gang; Tarla, Mrs. Witherspoon, Lincoln, Judy, and Tommy. Whenever I started to get the chills, started to think I was nobody, started to think if I was still at the bottom of a vent shaft the world wouldn’t miss me one bit, I’d sit in the middle of my apartment, and look at the work I’d done. It’s calming to see it all and know, someday, when I really am gone, the world will still think of me. He was sure something, it’ll say, boy am I glad he was alive.

    Tarla’s the only one who’s seen my little sanctuary. Mrs. Witherspoon has seen most of my photographs since I slip them under her incisive eye, but Tarla is the only one who’s seen them on my walls. About a year back the club got cited for electrical violations and shut down for the weekend. Tarla and I spent the entire weekend together. We slept, we read to each other, we ordered every kind of food that could be reached by phone; we procrastinated against going to the bathroom until it was almost too late. It was winter and too cold to go out. She said she liked my photography but thought she looked sad in it too often. I told her it was my style, to capture things without glamour. I told her I needed to have my own style to make it big. She didn’t understand why I needed to impress people I didn’t know. I’ve been trying to explain it ever since.

    I took some more pictures of her, laughing. We even did some nudes, and the second night she slept nude, but nothing happened. Whenever I looked at her I could see a little seven-year-old with baby-blond hair and baby-fat cheeks sitting in her head, pulling levers to make her slender limbs move. I guess she saw a one-armed boy with his pants full of crap.

Agatha the professor stomped out of the tiny hallway from the stage. Her mostly-skin boobs vibrated with each clunk of her heels. She was a real professor from a college out west. She was on sabbatical. She didn’t talk much.

    “Gotta go, cutie,” Tarla said. She stood up, bent over and kissed my head quick. Tiger stripes loomed. She dropped her robe, pulled on heels, and became Brandi Bliss.

    “Keep an eye out for that tiger song,” she said, now three inches taller than me. “Tell Tommy I said hi, and Mrs. Witherspoon I’ll see her tomorrow.”

    “See ya on your break. Knock ‘em dead.” That’s what my second father used to say.

    She winked at me and trotted down the hallway, her thonged rear-end gnawing like horse lips at the bit.

    Agatha pushed silently by me to the bathroom. The thumping music seemed to fade far away, and all I could hear were the insect needles smacking the puddles outside. I wondered if Tarla ever sat here, alone, and hesitated with the eyeliner; wondered if she suddenly saw herself in the mirror; panned back to see herself alone in this room; farther back to see herself alone in this building, on this street, in this city, on this hemisphere. We lay in bed that weekend and stared at the stained ceiling. I talked about what it would be like if, before they were injected into fetuses, souls got to take a look-see at their lives to be. Just one point in time. What would ours think just then, looking down at a dark hemisphere, zooming in on our little pin-pricks? Your life will only take one path. This is where you are. Would they be happy? Or disappointed. Tarla didn’t say anything. She just stared up, out of the dark hemisphere.

    When the noise of the club gave way to her pulse in her ears, and no-one else was here to see her, did she ever suddenly think, And this is where I am. At the bottom of sixteen stories, with the world passing by on all sides, not noticing me.

    At least the critics of the future would see her in my work and stroke their chins in approval.

I suddenly felt the overhead stare and hustled to get going. Zipping my fanny pack, I made for the door, stopping just under the sodium light. The rain hadn’t changed. For eighteen days, straight down. One speed. One sound. It eroded the nerves. But it was just rain. Nothing else. I stepped into the alley.

    spider, spider, burning bright

    I ran all the way to Tommy’s.

~

 

Tommy lived on the same block as Candy Wrappers. I splashed around the sidewalk corners and into the alcove of his doorway. Tommy’s button had no name, just a piece of stickum. I thumbed it and stepped backward into the rain. Building tops faded in hazy silhouettes and streetlights spread yellow sacramental circles around themselves. The sky glowed a pearly brown and lay flat and featureless. But there was a patch of blue. Always there was a square of blue sky. Seven stories up and nine stories over, the ass of a TV stuck out of Tommy’s window. And always around it, a square of flickering blue. Finally the door buzzed, and I leapt out of the long hairy legs of the rain.

    “Tom-my.”

    “Wil-ly,’ he threw back.

    I crossed the room in one bounce and wrapped my arm around him. Actually, I laid it against him. Even if I had a set, I’d never get them both around Tommy.

    “Man, you’re drenched, bud.” Tommy had a way of deep way of speaking from another dimension, one that used a whole world as a coiled bellows. “I got towels in the bathroom. Man, dry yourself off.” Real big bellows. “Haven’t you got an umbrella?” he asked as I fumbled in the dark bathroom for a towel. Tommy has no lights. Tommy uses only natural lighting. Sky-blue.

    “I gotta call Judy.”

    “How is she?”

    “Tell you when I call her.” Tommy and Judy were the only friends that had never met. She was afraid of the outside world and he was afraid of missing it. He had a two-line cordless phone, six hundred and sixty cable channels, and the four local stations that were on the air but not on cable. With the TV backed into the window, its aerials hung outside, splayed like brass tack backs, Tommy could catch everything. Except trains. If Tommy and I had grown up on the same block, I’d’ve found my face at the high school end of the sewer system several times. He was the first to sprout a shadow under his chin, and shoulder blades that stuck out farther than his spine. With a musculature a mile wide, Tommy was well on his way to a career inside a security uniform. And then, just before high school tossed him his badge and belt, Fate smiled. At three o’clock on a school night, he and some friends went train jumping and he was rescued from a life of swaggering by Jim Beam and two train wheels. Sitting there on the couch, the stubs of Tommy’s thighs stuck out from under his vast belly like the barrels of a gunslinger shooting from the hip. He tended to flip past trains on TV.

Judy wasn’t home. Judy, at least, didn’t answer her phone.

    “What’s up?” he asked. Toward the TV, not me. He always spoke toward the TV.

    “I don’t know. Judy and I were supposed to have our lunch today, but she wasn’t home.”

    “Don’t sweat it. Probably had a doctor appointment.” His head was tilted back so he could speak just over the Doritos dancing on his tongue. “Check this out, man. You gotta see what the weather is doing.”

The view out the window magically flipped to the weather channel. Tommy didn’t even move. He could feel buttons on the remote. It was always aimed. He knew all the channels. He was his own remote. A man trapped in a suit stepped aside so we could get a soul’s-eye view of the nation’s weather.

    “Lookit that.”

    A long worm of computer-generated ugly rippled in vibrant blues and whites along the southwestern states, across the southern coast, taking a sharp turn up the eastern seaboard. The underbelly’s brown. The man in the suit explained the jet stream was dipping far lower than usual, and it was sucking up all the moisture and dumping it on the northeast. It hadn’t so much as squirmed north or south in eighteen days. They had no idea when it might. The man smiled as he waved his own little remote control. “Seems like Fate doesn’t like somebody in the northeast.” He laughed at his own joke and nodded a commercial.

    “Believe that?” Tommy asked, swiveling his head toward me. Head toward me but eyes still on the tube. “It’s just gonna rain here forever.”

    “Hey, Tarla says hi.”

    “I know man, she was here yesterday. She picked up my laundry for me.”

    I was behind the couch at this point. I didn’t have a lot of pictures of Tommy. He didn’t do a lot, but I took it as a challenge. I squatted down, held the camera under my half-arm, pushed the damn tiny buttons to turn off the flash, and tried to frame the back of Tommy’s head with the window. He was flipping through channels again. “Find something with good weather.” He flipped some more. I clicked a shot of Tommy on a football field, of Tommy in a talk show audience, of Tommy racing with a cheetah.

    The one thing that kept most kids away from me was the one thing that made Tommy and me friends. He met Tarla and me at the same time. When he pushed his wheelchair into Tarla’s dressing room just to apologize for whooping at her, we looked each other over, said, “train accident,” and, “birth defect,” and talked so much we didn’t notice Tarla go to work. We argued over who had it worse.

    “Jogging,” he said.

    “Balance,” I said.

    “Football,” he tried.

    “Football,” I agreed.

    “Dancing.”

    “Hugging.”

    “Stairs.”

    “Typing.”

    A deviously smug smile wormed its way across his face. “Going to the can.”

    It took me a long, long minute of thought. Ready. Aim: “I might be left handed.”

    I kind of won that argument, but lost it in practice. I think Tommy has it worse. That was the only time any of us saw him out of his apartment.

    “How ‘bout this?” he asked. A hundred yards of green.

    “Hey that’s nice.”

    For half an hour the rain fell just beyond the TV as our team lost in the play-offs. Usually Tommy and I would get together to watch some of the really awful science fiction that came out in the late sixties. It was one of those things nobody else liked. We couldn’t even talk about it with Tarla or Judy. They’d just roll their eyes. But every Saturday night was “Shame of the Sixties,” where all the real beautiful embarrassments of the film world ran for six hours straight. We weighed the previews of tomorrow’s show, but Tommy wouldn’t see it. It wouldn’t be until Tuesday that the landlady would crack his door locks and find him. He flipped through the channels until he found a scene of a brilliant, sunny sky in India. We took the short tour, and learned a little more about people we’d never meet.

    “You know what gets me?” I asked. A man with a dull white turban bowed at the edge of a squared moat. The city around him was built around the moat. In the middle of the moat was a temple. The temple was finished in pure gold. The man had walked hundreds of miles just to give a pair of his dead wife’s gold earrings to the keepers of the temple to help refurbish its shine. He bent down so far his turban got wet. “We’ll never know what it’s like to be him.”

Tommy, a little round head on a great Buddha of a belly, frowned at the television.

    “I mean, he had a childhood, right? He played in some field near his house, learned to like his little sister, never heard of electricity.”

    “Yeah...” Waiting.

    “And we’ll—you and me—we’ll never have that same childhood.”

    “So. He’ll never have ours either. He’ll never own a car.”

    “Right, that’s just it. Look at him. All he’s got of his wife’s is those earrings. And he just walked three hundred miles to give them away.”

    “Pretty stupid. He could a sold ‘em.”

    “Right, but he didn’t.” The man stood up, and without a gesture, turned around and started back home.

    “I ain’t followin’ you, man.”

    “It’s…” I tried to grasp the thought. So many people, one little life. “It’s like, there’s so many people in the world, right, and you only get to be one of them. You only get to go through life as you. You don’t get to know what it’s like to see the world completely different. If you were somebody else.”

    “Here you go again. I gotta remember to tell Mrs. Witherspoon this one.”

    “Wait listen. If you were a doctor, that’d be great, right? But it’s not everything. Because if you were a doctor your whole life, you’d never be a lawyer. You’d never do the millions and millions of things lawyers do. You’d only do doctor things. We always walk around like we can do anything or become anything we want to be. But we can’t. Because what if we wanted to be two things? What if I wanted to grow up in India and in America?”

    “Yeah, but, if you grow up in America you can watch how people grow up in India on television. That’s what I do. Not only have I got my life, but I can experience everybody else’s.”

    “Naw, you just get to watch them. Not be them.”

    “It’s close enough.”

    “No way. Here’s a real basic thing. What about Lincoln down at the laundromat? He’s colorblind.”

    “So, I can just watch black and white movies or use a black and white TV and see what he sees.”

    “Yeah. But how will he ever see what you see?”

    Tommy stared deep into the sky-blue of the screen. Deep into the electronics to see how the world worked.

looked inside, nothing there

    “And that’s just on the basic level,” I added, seeing something turning over heavily in his head. Something that had been put to sleep a long time ago. “We only get one life. Anybody. We get one set of eyeballs, one set of limbs, one set of parents, one childhood. Boy, when you look at your future, it always seems like you have a million choices. You can be anything you set your mind to be. But you can’t. You’ll only take one path from the time you’re born till the time you die. You’ll only take one. There may be a million to chose from, but you only get one.”

    Tommy was still quiet. Still watching the gears inside the television. I felt like I’d spouted off. I stayed quiet for a minute, and then went to the kitchen to toss out my beer. When I came back, Tommy was watching a wrestling show.

    “So what made you go nuts?” he smiled.

    I was still standing. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

    “No, hey, it got me thinking. Still got me thinking. Just wondering what got you going on it.”

    “I don’t know. My photography I guess. I’ve been real keen on it these last few days. It’s messing with my head.” I picked up the phone, hit line one and Judy’s speed dial button. The phone in her apartment rang.

    “Whatdaya mean? Messing with your head?”

    Nine rings. Ten. Eleven. I pushed “off” on twelve.

    “I don’t know that either. Just... I kinda feel like I’m being followed.”

    Tommy turned and looked at me.

    “But I think I’m imagining it.”

    “By who?”

    in the darkness of the night

    “It’s nothing. The thing with Judy just got me spooked is all.”

    “Weatherman said long periods of rain like this can screw up your chemical balance. Make you act weird. Not enough sunlight or something.”

    I nodded. “That’s all it is. I’ve gotta go to the laundromat to get some new film. Why don’t I grab your stuff there and I’ll bring it back.”

    “Yeah, thanks,” he said, still looking at me. Since that day we’d met in Tarla’s dressing room, this was the longest we’d looked at each other. I flipped the locks and grabbed a bag of Tommy’s trash.

    “Hey, Willy.”

    “Yeah?”

    “What you said, about how you only get one shot at everything, you believe that?”

    I nodded again. “That’s why I take pictures. If I can’t know most people, maybe most people can know something about me.”

    Tommy was still looking at me.

    “I want to get to Mrs. Witherspoon’s before she closes. I’ll be back with your laundry in a bit.”

    On the way down the stairs, I thought about what the weatherman said—that lack of sunlight can cause depression. There was a long, wide band of these clouds covering a quarter of the states. Sucking up moisture as it heads our way. Depressing a million people and then absorbing their sweat, their skin, the water out of their eyes, their spit off pavement. Carrying it all here. I pushed open the side door with my butt and dropped the bag into the garbage. The rain came straight down. Same pace. Same sound. Just off the doorstep, dirty water sluicing off the sidewalk ran a constant current toward sewers. When I was younger I wondered where dirt in a city came from. There was no actual dirt, just concrete. No leaves or plants to decay. I found a big black book that showed a picture of these hideous alien bugs. Insects that lived off the skin that falls off people. Ninety percent of dust is skin, it said. Insects that eat dead people. I figured the dirt that clogged in pavement cracks and sidewalk edges were clumps of skin the creepy-crawlies missed. All gummed up and nowhere to go. I wondered how many people were washing under the doorstep, rushing off to some distance sewer. I stepped over them into the downpour. Like I said, it was a bad rain.

~

 

“Do I look like a biologist? How would I know what spiders eat?” Lincoln said over the bell of his cornet. It stood out a brilliant bronze in the rain. He had such a beautiful voice. If he didn’t play an instrument that hogged his mouth, he could have made a million just talking. Tommy’s voice came out of his colon. Lincoln’s just resonated forever in his throat like wine in a barrel. In an hour and a half that barrel would be permanently full of water. He’d stare out of his tub for days. I leaned into the street to fit all of him into the viewfinder. He had new white sneakers. Against the opinionless brown of the laundromat, all I could see was the flash of gold and the shine of white, and somewhere in-between stood Lincoln.

    I got the credit for nicknaming him Lincoln, but I think anybody could’ve. He was mostly black, which the president wasn’t, and he played the cornet, which I don’t think the president did either. But he had those cheekbones that rode so high it was an effort for his eyes to see over. And for as long as any of us had known him, he’d kept his beard neatly away from his upper lip. I pushed the button, and Lincoln’s cornet and shoes were immortalized. Back under the awning, I dried my camera against my shirt. Six feet and some inches leaned tight against his bones. His spine curved backward when he played, as if the piece of brass in his hands needed the rest of him as a counterbalance, but boy did he keep that piece of brass level. Always firing straight and even, dipping only to thank pedestrians that jingled quarters in his blue velvet case. If my camera wasn’t busy rewinding, I’d have gotten another keeper.

    “When did you get the sneakers?” I asked. He was firing a long note across the street that couldn’t be interrupted. The tunes with the long, sad notes were reserved for days like this. Not because of the weather, because of the lack of people. This was one of the songs he couldn’t play to crowds because crowds don’t like to be sad. When you play depression you like to keep it to yourself.

    “I never pictured you as the bright-sneaker type. What’d you do with your old shoes? They seemed so you.”

His eyelids came down dreamily behind his cheekbones, and the note from his body rose and held steady. It cut through the needle-hiss and the sound of cars tearing paper through the streets. It rose like warm air to the rattle of water on the awning and made it seem like oil dripping on warm dough. It spread out between the concrete boxes and kept the sigh of rain back. But then his lungs ran out, and in just the second it took to refill them, the rain stabbed back through. We all knew how good he was. Maybe he even knew how good he was, but he never said anything about it. It took me months of prodding to get him to play in a club, but he tried out for a spot in a blues bar and now Saturday nights are all his. He could go bigger than that though.

    “Geez, you sound great. You’ve got to cut an album, you know that? You’ve just gotta. Listen to you. You’re awesome.”

    “Recording costs money,” he said, licking his lips and looking off down the firing range.

    “So you save up.”

    Lincoln tipped his horn down and opened the spit valve. “What’s wrong with playin’ right here? Don’t people like hearin’ me right here?” Spit hit the sidewalk. Ran for the gutters.

    “Yeah but, you could still play here, and be selling an album on the other side of the city. Or another city even.”

    “I don’t need the money.”

    “It’s not about the money. Think about it. You sound awesome, we all know it, but think of everybody who doesn’t know it. What about all those people who don’t pass this way on their way to work? They’d never get to hear you.”

    “They can come to the club.” He leveled the brass again.

    “No, I mean after you’re gone, y’know? Think about it. Geez, you could be sold all over the world. Somebody in Australia could listen to your album and think, ‘Man, this guy is good. I wish I could’ve met him. But I’ll think about him every time I listen to this.’ Just think about it. You could be immortal. When you only play here or in the club, it disappears. It’s great while it lasts, but it doesn’t last.”

    The silver mouthpiece kept two inches from Lincoln’s lips.

    “Think about one of your favorite musicians, what’s his name, Cold Bobby Brown?”

    “Cold Bobby Bruen.”

    “You said he only made one record in like the thirties or something? Don’t you wish he would’ve made more? You know he wrote more than those four songs, but you’ll never hear ‘em because he didn’t make anything else permanent. Think about it. By this time, everybody who ever heard him play any of those other songs is probably dead. Whatever he did way back then is gone. Lost. It’s as good as if he never wrote any of them. If it wasn’t for those four songs he recorded, it’d be like it didn’t matter in the slightest whether he ever lived at all.”

    He was still sighting down the scope of his cornet, but wasn’t looking at the buildings anymore.

    “You just can’t let that happen to you. When Mrs. Witherspoon and Tommy and Judy

    twenty inches off the floor

and Tarla and me and everybody else who ever heard you are dead, it’d be as good as if you never were if you don’t get some of this stuff recorded. What if Cold Bobby Bruen never recorded those four songs? What if he outlived everybody who ever heard him, and then on his death bed, what’s he gotta be thinking? ‘Everybody who ever knew me and my music is gone. I’ve never left anything. Nobody will ever hear my music again.’ God, that’s why I work on my photography. When I’m lying there, I’m gonna know some part of me will live on. I’ve gotta contribute something so it’s not like it didn’t matter whether I ever lived or not.”

    The brass bell was drooping, so he dipped it farther and opened the spit valve again. “Recording costs a lot of money.”

    “I thought you were saving up.”

    “I was.”

    “What happened to it?”

    He shook the cornet. “I bought me some new shoes.” His bright white sneakers shone like snowballs. “I’ve got my feet in marshmallows.” He looked directly at me. “What’ve you got?”

    I laughed it off, but I wanted to say, ‘I got a picture of you with your feet in marshmallows.’

~

 

Inside the laundromat, Mrs. Witherspoon had to keep moving. She wore a dead-yellow leather coat and brown pants, and she wore them every day since she’d opened the laundromat twenty-eight years ago. Her laundromat was the color of all laundromats, so if she didn’t keep moving she’d have blended right into the walls and never gotten free.

    “Lordy, don’t you have an umbrella?” She asked as I stepped in past Lincoln. She was making as much to-do about taking an abandoned soda can to the garbage as a crane moving half a building.

    “I haven’t found a store with any left. You don’t have any do you?”

    “Should be so lucky. Your new film’s come in.” She walked over to the front window like she only had control from her hips up. Hope the feet know what they’re doing. In the front corner of the laundromat a counter guarded a rack of Tide, Wrigley’s, Nytol, and Nuprin. When her sister died, she’d left Mrs. Whitherspoon the remains of a convenience store. When Mrs. Witherspoon died, she was going to have everything she owned sold and the money would go to the child of a second cousin she’d never met.

    “Here. Tri-X Pan, that’s what you wanted, right?” Stepping up to the counter was stepping out of the smell of boiled soap and grout, and into sweetened cardboard. No matter where she was, Mrs. Witherspoon leaned half her weight on something. She was once Amée Latart. Mr. Witherspoon didn’t make it past their paper anniversary. That was back when she had black hair, just enough skin, and a gleam that allowed her to be picky in saying yes to Archibald Witherspoon. That was back when they were both immortal and vivacious enough to wait a few years for a family, and then he collapsed in the shower one day and with him went all her children. She moved here because her sister lived here, and then her sister left for good, and here was Amée in a laundromat.

    “I hope this film is worth the price,” she said, staring at the package as if she might make out the difference of the silver inside. “That’s two bucks more a roll.”

    “Oh, I’ve gotta show you.” I pulled out my cellular phone and explained how it could save about seven bucks a month. That’s how I could afford the new film. I scribbled down my new number for her. She pinned it to a board behind her with a tack and a look that said “whatever.”

    “Let’s see your last roll,” she said, nodding toward my pack. I pulled out the folded contact sheet and flattened the creases. Before I was done she was bent over with a magnifying glass. I stayed silent while she looked, but ants got into my underwear. “The last two,” she said, “are good. The last one is very good.” I bent with her and followed her fingertips down a line of streetlights losing themselves in the rain. “This second one. When you print it, chop off the side with the building. That wall being there is distracting. But that’s a great use of lines on that last one. Good choice for focal depth, too.” She pulled a secret silver pen from her silver hair and circled the two prints.

    I was beaming. This was my first two-good-pictures-from-one-roll yet. I was dying for her to say I was getting better, but I knew she wouldn’t say it on just one in a row. I’d have to have about five two-good-in-ones before she’d be sure enough to say I was getting better. And then she’d say it in some way that kept me in my britches.

    “Brighten this one up when you develop it and maybe it’ll turn into something.” With one finger resting on the page, she almost winked. She’d given me this camera. She said it had belonged to her sister, but I’m sure it was too new. She put it in my hand, told me to go out and shoot the roll, and she’d pay to get it developed. After going over every one of the twenty-four shots I’d taken, she said, “Good,’ and started carrying boxes of yellow film between the green Wrigley’s and the blue Nytol. No one else ever bought any and I think she only charged me cost. She never made a cent off me. Or Tarla. Or Tommy or Judy or Lincoln. Before we could pack a washer she’d be there thumbing quarters in its maw. To the dryer, too late, cachink, cachink.

    Lincoln had been ousted from countless doorways before he met Mrs. Witherspoon and her laundromat. He used to stand just at the edge of her storefront, under the awning years ago until she waved a walnut-knuckled hand at him and quietly demanded he play in her doorway. She kept the door open, every season. All year. Let the sound inside and the warmth scuttle out. It cut down on her clientele in the winter, but the ones who mattered kept their coats on. Lincoln arrived to work every day at noon, said good morning to Mrs. Witherspoon as she handed him the key through the rolly-gate, lifted the gate into the ceiling, and kindly refused the muffin that Mrs. Witherspoon made him take anyway. At a dark eleven o’clock, he reached into the ceiling and closed her back in. “Sleep well, now,” he’d say. “Always do,” she’d wink. And back upstairs she’d amble.

    Tarla and I tried to take her out once, but she’d have none of it. “There’s nothing I need out there,” she said. “Just you all. Make sure to come back tomorrow. I got eighteen packs of Wrigley’s that’ll go outdated tomorrow.” The box of blue Nytol never expired. Apparently her customers were never so excited they couldn’t sleep. I got Tommy’s laundry bag and headed for the door.

    And Lincoln wasn’t there. It occurred to me I hadn’t heard him since I came in.

    “Mrs. Witherspoon?”

    She glided along the beige row of dryers.

    “Where’s Lincoln?” Eight feet before me the rain bit into the sidewalk.

    “Probably came in to use the bathroom. We didn’t see him.”

    “His case is gone.” Each raindrop forms around a single speck of dust.

    “Probably didn’t want it to get wet.”

    “Yeah,” I said. Ninety percent of dust is human skin. People fell out of the sky.

    “What’s the matter with you William?”

    The florescent light sank deep into her shallow skin. Her eyelids had wrinkles.

    “You ever have a hunch?”

    She was bending far down to pick up a tiny scrap of paper. “What do you mean, William?”

    “Ever think you know something, and don’t know why?”

    “Sure.” She had hold of the paper. Hoisting it up. Swing toward the garbage.

    “Do you trust your hunches?”

    “Sometimes. Get to your point, William.”

    Bits of people falling out of the sky. Sweat they were happily rid of. Skin joyfully loofahed off.

    “I think somebody’s following me. I think somebody’s watching me whenever I step outside.”

    Her fingertips tickled each other. The paper drifted into the garbage.

    “I think he’s watching me right now. I think he was watching me talk to you and to Tommy. I think he started following me back at Judy’s.”

    She was leaning most of her weight on the rim of the can. “I don’t know, William. Sounds silly to me.” The thought was brushed from her mind by a wave of walnut knuckles. “Let me see how you develop those two shots. I want to see how your darkroom framing is coming.” One hand against dryer windows, she heeded the call of a lint screen. I stepped into a rain heavy with the absence of Lincoln.

~

 

I had to hold Tommy’s laundry bag between my knees to ring his doorbell. I tried to keep his bag under the alcove but the rain found its way in. For a good thirty seconds he didn’t buzz the door. I jammed my good shoulder into his button again, and stepped back into the downpour. Seven stories up, nine stories over, his sky flickered. Blue sky and rabbit ears. I strode right up and leaned on the doorbell.

    “Who is it?” came a crackle. I’d never used his intercom.

    “Geez, Tommy, it’s me.”

    Crackle. “Who’s me?”

    “Tommy!” I yelled, getting wet and pissed. “It’s me, Willy, with your laundry!”

    I pushed against the door, waiting for the buzz and click. I got a crackle.

    “How do I know it’s you?”

    What? “Tommy, cut it out, it’s pouring”

    “How do I know it’s you!”

    Behind the little grill of the speaker box, somebody’s voice broke.

    “Your favorite channel is Sci-Fi, you were wearing a pink tee-shirt an hour ago and eating Doritos.”

    In the pause I was hit by three hundred bits of skin.

    “What’s my middle name?”

    “You don’t have one! Tommy it’s wet out here!”

    “Come up, but be careful you hear? Just come up, and when you get to my door… when you get to my door knock three times, and then four times. And don’t talk to anybody on the way up. And make sure the door is closed behind you.”

    I made sure the door was closed behind me, and bounded up the stairs. At Tommy’s door we had to play the whole charade over again.

    “Geez. What’s gotten into you?” I dropped his bag on the couch.

    “Shut the door,” he said, pushing his wheelchair over and shutting it himself.

    “Tommy!”

    “It’s you. That’s what’s going on.”

    “What?”

    “That guy, that you said was following you, he’s here, he came here. He came right up to my door! My doorbell rang. I buzzed the door open. Then I waited. And nobody came to my door. I started remembering what you said about being followed. I started watching the line under my door instead of the TV. Nobody came Willy, but somebody was standing right outside my door. I yelled at him to push off or I’d call the cops but he didn’t say anything.” Tommy’s flesh was moving like it’d never had a bully’s body in it. “Holy shit, Will, I don’t know who it was, but he wanted me bad. I could feel it, you know what I mean? I could feel him just standing there. Holy shit, he wanted me bad. I could just feel him like some kind of doom, man, some kind of doom.”

    “Tommy, calm down. Calm down, I’ll get ya some—” I was in his kitchen trying to find a beer.

    “Man, Willy, you don’t understand, I could feel him for an hour! An hour of the worst feeling I ever had, man.”

    “Tommy,” I handed him a beer. He took it without noticing and held it to his chest. “Tommy, are you sure someone was there? Are you sure? Remember what the TV said? About rain this long messing with people’s head? Did you see him?”

    Still looking at the door, he shook his head.

    “Geez,” I sighed. “Tommy, somebody just buzzed the wrong apartment. That’s all. I got you all spooked. I’m sorry. I’ve been wacko lately too. I’m sorry.”

    “It was the worst feeling,” he said quietly. His chair was still aimed at the door. He dropped his face into a hand.

    “I had my cell phone. You should have just called me.”

    “It was like he was everything and I was nothing. Like he was wrapped all the way around my apartment. I couldn’t think of anything outside my apartment. I couldn’t remember you guys. I couldn’t even think to call the cops. I didn’t want to look out the window. I couldn’t think of anything past what I could see. Man, I felt so nothin’.”

    “Hey,” I rubbed the shoulder of cool sweaty mass. “I just spooked you with all that talk. It’s nothing all right?”

    He kind of shrugged me off. Feeling a little foolish already.

    We watched sci-fi reruns of a test pilot who crashed and got mechanical limbs. He was better than he was before.

I stayed around because Tommy needed to cool off. I stayed because I needed to cool off. When the show was over and everyone was saved, it was time for Tarla’s break. I told Tommy I’d promised to go see her, but I’d be back when her break was over. And I’d have her come up after and the three of us would watch cable. I’d even stay overnight.

    “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” I said, pulling the door behind me.

    “Hey Willy.”

    I pushed back in. “Yeah?”

    “That rain,” his chin pointed at the window streaks. “Is it like that everywhere outside? Just the same stuff coming down?”

    “Yeah,” I replied, “I think so.”

    “Almost hard to believe.”

    “Hey, Tommy, I’ll be back in an hour. Just lock all your locks when I leave, okay? There’s nobody out here. There’s nobody out anywhere.”

    He wheeled toward the door.

    “Back in an hour, okay?”

    In the alcove of Tommy’s building door, I listened to needles smack the ground. Catch you, pin you, flail arms and legs. Behind them, beyond them, moving around like he was one of them, somebody walked upright on eight legs. I pulled my collar tight, and walked to Candy Wrappers with head up, not down. No one was going to slip by me. No one was going to slip behind me. No one was going to follow me. “See ya,” Tommy’d said to me. “See ya later,” I said, but I wouldn’t.

~

 

The fire escapes rang their dim metal note and backs of awnings, tarps, and streetlights prattled on and on. At the end of a thin rent of alley lay the Roman sewer door. Still open. I trotted through.

    “Hayo, Willy-yum!” shot Tarla’s voice through the four or five bodies stepping high in heels. “Christ you’re wet!” She threw me a towel pink with foundation.

    “I need to find an umbrella.”

    It was Friday night and the club was now pounding out arrhythmia. We had to shout. There were dancers there who only worked the weekends. They never cared that I was there. Maybe Tarla told them about the crap.

    “I was just over at Tommy’s,” I yelled. “We kind of spooked each other.”

    “Yeah?” she shouted. She held a chair for one of the other girls to throw on more blush.

    “Yeah, do you want to go over after you get off? I think he could use the company.”

    “Yeah sure.” Two young women came through the hallway, slick and topless. Tarla grabbed the towel from me and rubbed my head and neck. “I gotta do this thing,” she yelled through the towel. “It’s a cop’s bachelor party. We’re doing a six-some number.” She shrugged. “Sometimes gotta kiss ass. Big asses take big kissing.” The towel draped over my shoulders as she turned around and plucked something black and transparent off a hook. “’scuze me.” She dropped her robe and stepped into the thing, rolling her shoulders under straps. “Stay here. I just have to do the one number.”

    They all filed up the hallway and the arrhythmia changed rhythm.

    I leaned against the edge of the brick door. Outside, at the far end of the alley, profiles of headlights went from dim to narrow to flashing past. Nobody walked. That weekend we spent lying in bed I told her how sitting in the middle of my photographs made me feel like I was worth something real. I said I always hoped that if our souls got to get their random glimpse of their lives-to-be, that mine would catch me surrounded by my work. I think it would have been so proud. See what I’ve become? I’ll leave my mark. I will have mattered. I asked her if she ever thought about her soul getting a preview of what she’d done with it. She lay twisted in the sheets for a long time. “Right now, it’d be okay.” I couldn’t tell if she was happy to say that, or not.

    “Hey!” she called as she trotted out of the hallway. Her shoulders rolled back under straps. “Too many freakin’ people on the stage. I’m just going to do a number with Agatha after this instead.” She grabbed her robe. “What’re you looking at?”

    “Nothing. Just out. Up.”

    The sash whipped around her waist like a snake. She stood next to me and looked up.

    “You remember, that year ago when you and I stayed at my place all weekend?”

    “Yeah.” Up through the fire escapes.

    “You remember I was talking about how I always thought about if your soul got one random, sneak-peek at its life, what if it saw you right then?”

    She didn’t say anything, but slipped off one of her heels and sunk lower then me.

    “Well, you said, ‘right now it’d be okay.’”

    Her toes stroked the fallen spike of the heel. “Well, it was okay.” The pounding behind us changed, and she abruptly rolled the heel upright and stepped into it. “Anyway,” she glanced quick at the sky, “nobody up there is seeing anything down here through that.” She dropped her robe on her chair and checked the mirror. “It might be a few minutes, are you gonna wait?”

    “Um, yeah. If you’re gone for a while I’ll just jog over to Tommy’s.”

    “’kay.”

    “Call over there when you’re done,” I said. “I’ll come get you

    burning bright

just ‘cuase I’d just feel better walking you over.”

    She smiled. “I’ll be fine.”

    “You can never be sure.”

    “I’ve got a surprise for anybody in my purse.” The mischievous smile leapt about. “I’m pretty sure.”

    “Well, I’d still feel better walking you.”

    “’kay. Then if you’re not here when I get done, you’re at Tommy’s?”

    “Yup.”

    Four sweaty girls came down the hallway. Agatha waiting onstage. I kept to the doorway while the girls dressed behind me. Puddles couldn’t keep still. Jumping jumping. Under the warm yellow sodium lamp, the rain seemed it might be warm as bath water. For the first time in the last few days, I felt all right. Claustrophobia of weather gone. If I was being followed, he wasn’t anywhere in sight.

    And then my cell phone rang.

~

 

    “Hello?”

    “William? Is this you William?”

    “Yeah. Mrs. Witherspoon?”

    “William, Lincoln didn’t come back.”

    “What? Whatdaya mean, Mrs. Witherspoon? Didn’t come back from what?”

    “He left, William, when you were here. He didn’t go to the bathroom. He left and he didn’t come back. I had to have a customer help me pull down the gate.”

    Lincoln hadn’t missed helping Mrs. Witherspoon once. Ever.

    “William?”

    “Do you know where he lives?”

    “No. This isn’t like him at all. He’s never just left me. He knows I can’t get the gate down. William, something’s happened to him.”

    fading

    “He seemed all right when I was talking to him.”

    “William, what did he say? Think. Was he acting strange?”

    “No.—

    fading with his dying tone

    —He was fine. We just talked about how he should make an album. He seemed fine.”

    “I don’t have a good feeling about this. I really don’t. Something’s wrong.” Rain is bad for transmission. Thinned her voice.

    Where did he go? Did he go? We didn’t see him. He was just there, and then he wasn’t. No blue velvet bank. No size twelve shoes or eight and a half hat. He was there, and then he wasn’t. Like he never was. No marker. No trace. Nothing.

    “You said you were being followed. Are you? Is this something to do with that? What’s going on William?”

Who took Lincoln? Someone was right there. While I was in the laundromat. Someone took him right behind me. Someone...

    “Who helped you pull the gate?” I sputtered.

    “I told you. A customer.”

    “What’d he look like?”

    “I don’t—”

    “What’d he look like!”

    “Just a man. Brown hair, brown eyes, skinny arms and legs.”

    spider, spider

    He’d followed me. I probably walked right by him. I probably stepped around him on the street. He followed me, saw me talking to Lincoln. What’d he want with Lincoln?

    “William, I’m getting nervous.”

    Followed me to Lincoln from—

    “I’ve gotta go. Mrs. Witherspoon. I’ve gotta call Tommy.”

    Tommy was right.

    “I’ve gotta call Tommy. Keep your gate locked.”

    Someone was waiting outside his door.

    “I’ll call you back.”

    I hung up and thumbed in Tommy’s number. Keep the locks tumbled. Keep the chain tense.

    On the third ring I was leaning out the Roman door. By the fourth I was walking under the sodium lamp. On the fifth I was trotting. On the sixth I rounded the corner and was running too fast to hear the phone. I hit the alcove. Hit the button with the phone. Hit my ear with the phone. Seventeen. Tommy had no use for answering machines. He was always connected.

    Tommy, fingers everywhere

    Step back. Seven floors up. Nine stories over. The sky was off.

    “Tommy!” I yelled into the phone. Into the air. I hit the buzzer with the phone again. Listen. Twenty-four. “Tommy!” One two three four five six seven. One two three four five six seven eight nine. I blinked at the rain. Seven stories up and nine stories over. The TV was gone.

    “The party you are trying to reach—”

    Lincoln. Tommy. Where else was I? Mrs. Witherspoon’s locked up safe. Ta—

    I was running back. Cars hissed by me. Pins took their aim. I didn’t ask to fall in that shower shaft. I didn’t want to know what it was like. The sodium light seemed so far away, behind fire-escape silhouettes and dumpsters. I burst through the little brick doorway.

    “Tarla!” I yelled. “T—”

    Tarla scrambled to her feet. A man in a navy trench coat half turned. Tarla wiped at her mouth with both hands. The man shuffled. Tarla looked tired in heels. The man cinched his belt. Fiddled with his zipper. Dust on her knees.

    I looked at her. She looked at me.

    Someone looked down through the clouds.

    I pushed through the backstage door into the hollering club. Everyone else was on stage. Everyone off was drunk. The bathroom was cold. The window was open. My reflection looked alien. Judy.

    I hit the buttons. Ring.

    Judy, Judy

    Ring.

    five foot four

    Ring. Pick it up, Judy.

    twenty

    Ring. Judy.

    inches

    Ring. Pick it up.

    off

    Judy!

    the

    Judy!

    floor

    “Shit!” I took three breaths at my reflection and bolted. Everyone wasn’t on the stage. Everyone wasn’t whooping. Everyone was milling. A wave of people pushed to the dressing room door. The music still drummed. Agatha was shouting. I pushed past a cop into the dressing room. An arm wrapped around my chest. Tarla was head down on the vanity. Tungsten making her baby-blond hair bright red.

    “Back! Everybody b—”

    “Tarla!” Over the shoulder of the pig I could see there was no baby-fat girl working levers in her head.

    “Tarla!” Whatever reason she sat next to me on the bus was eking down her neck.

    “Tar—” More hands grabbed me and heaved me back into the club. Badges were out. Swaggers were out. The music was on.

    He was right there.

    I had stood five feet from a two-legged spider. I’d been looking at her, and he’d just shuffled away. I was standing in the dressing room with him. And then. He shot her. And she was… gone. He’d followed me, watched me, slipped away each time befo—

    The alley. He’d gone out the alley. Toward Crost Street. Tommy’s street. Lincoln’s street. The laundro—

Thumbs are clumsy things. The laundromat’s phone rang. I started for the club door. Two. Feet slapping wet. Three. Rounding the corner. Long, long way around. She picked up.

    “Mrs. Witherspoon!”

    “William.”

    With my only arm to my head I had no balance. I fell. I got up. I ran. “Mrs. Wither,” wheeze, “spoon. He got Tarla. The guy got Tarla. The guy who was following me. Got Tarla. He killed her!”

    Static sounds like rain.

    “And Tommy! Tommy too! Stay locked up!”

    morning hurts

    “Mrs. Witherspoon?”

    “He’s coming.”

    “What? I know. I know. Stay there.”

    “I can feel him.”

    “I’m almost there!” One more corner. One more block. “I’m—” sharp things lungs. “I’m at the corner!”

    “Oh god, I see him. I see him. I see him.”

    “I can see your lights,” breathe. “I can see the awning. I’ll catch him!”

    “He’s here. God.”

    One light was on in the laundromat. It was cut by the mesh of the gate. Locked down. Locked up. One fluorescent stick hovered over silver hair. She sat in the window, behind the sticky counter. The phone against her ear. I hit the mesh with a bang.

    “Mrs. Witherspoon!”

    “He’s here.”

    “Where!” I pressed my face to the mesh to see, and then spun about, back to metal. “Where? Where is he?”

    “Right here, William. Right here.”

    I pressed my face between the bars. “Inside? Is he inside?”

    Her backbone rose so high between her shoulders. The cord tugged at the phone.

    “Mrs. Witherspoon! Is he inside?”

    Amée Latart, alone at night

    “Mrs. Witherspoon!” I jammed the phone between the bars and pounded the glass. She started, as if awakened.

    “Mrs. Witherspoon! Where is he!”

    Dreamy lids tucked her eyeballs in. “He’s right here, William.”

    “Where?”

    good night, sleep tight

    “Where is he?”

    Mrs. Witherspoon stared at the floor. Sad. Some kind of sadness. Sorry.

    “You?” I breathed.

    Crackled gray rolled back, and her eyes rose up to mine. “No. William. You.”

    Her voice was thin in my ear. Behind me, the rain sought someone to pin against the sidewalk.

    “It’s not me. He’s following me!”

    Her head lost its balance on her slender neck. I kicked at the gate to make noise. I didn’t want the phone away from my ear.

    “Can you hear me?”

    She was staring at the sole-washed tiles. Through them.

    “It’s the man following me!”

    It seemed she’d only just become aware of me. Her head lifted again. “It is you. Every day, it’s you, William.”

    “What? No, no!”

    “Telling Lincoln to record an album he can’t afford. What’d you do? Tell him he was worthless without it?”

    “What?”

    Lincoln, out of breath and bone

    “And Tommy? What’d you tell him? Everyone’s living but him?”

    “What are you talking about?”

    Tommy, fingers everywhere

    “Every day. ‘Hello William, how are you?’ ‘Well, I’ll be just fine when I rise out of this miserable life you all find so comfortable’.”

    “I never said that! I never said anything like that!”

    “You said it every day, William. Every day.” Her head fell again. Rim of the phone leaning against brittle hair. The colors on the candy rack behind her looked wrong. “Could usually just shrug it off, but this weather, drives you crazy... add depression to depression....” The receiver hardly caught her sound. Yellow Kodak. Green Wrigley’s. “It was so hard not to listen to you.” No blue. “So hard to pretend you weren’t right. And now,” Head up. Drunken eyes sliding about. “Now, I’ve got nobody. Nobody at all.”

    Blue Nytol.

    Her phone hit the floor and popped in my ear. The cord reeled it in. Thumps of tile ridges in my head. It slid in a long, hoarse groan. Knocked aside the open Nytol box. Scurried behind the counter. And walnuts and silver slumped, toppled, and slept quiet.

    “Mrs. Witherspoon!” My voice squeaked out somewhere behind the counter. “Mrs. Witherspoon!”

    Judy, Judy five foot four
    Twenty inches off the floor

    “Mrs. Witherspoon!” pounding.

    Lincoln, out of breath and bone