Second Watch. We’ll need a car too. Carl Stagg.”
From the booth he could see warehouses, some converted to apartments, some still serving commercial functions: textiles, lumber, paint. His eyes settled on the four-story directly across. The building’s framework stood exposed at the near corner. The bricks had broken away unevenly. The matrix of beams, once precisely arranged along several planes, had wilted into a jumble of iron, soot-covered and twisting into the evening sky. An intense blaze must have shriveled the metal, but the beams, tangled almost sculpturally now, meant there had been combustion as well. A flammable inventory, probably. Whatever it was, the building was unsound, unusable, abandoned. Its lower windows were boarded, as were the doors, as of course were many others now throughout the city, not only warehouses but restaurants and shops and public facilities.
Through the building’s charred scaffolding the moon was visible, a brilliant white haphazardly fragmented by metal. He walked back down the passage and sat on the wall, waiting, with the woman at his feet.
4
Light arrived as a plane, projecting through the slit between drawn curtains, cutting the bedroom in two. Stagg sat at the foot of the twin bed, on a short pine bureau intersecting the light. He passed his hand through the beam and watched sun-kissed dust swirl within its borders. He pulled the thick curtains apart and two dimensions became three, the light broadening until it was nearly the width of his little studio apartment.
In the street below, a small child and an older one, not quite a teen, hurried along with brows pulled low and heads whirling. The woman from last night, her broken body, the picture came to him. What will Penerin want to hear?
His shirt was heavy with sweat. He pulled off the black tee and balled it up in his hand, felt the damp in it before wiping it across his neck. It took some of the stickiness away. He reached down to the tiny metal handles and opened the second drawer of the bureau beneath him, sliding his legs out as far as the drawer itself. The clothes, overstuffed in the drawer, plumped as he did. He’d not looked at this surplus in over a year, ever since he’d moved in, after returning to the city from England. Everything in his closet was on the floor at this point, and as filthy as the tee shirt. At least these were clean, he thought, even if they looked like someone else’s clothes to him now.
Along the top layer he found a crushed blue button-down with a mangled spread collar and flannel trousers. He opened the drawer below with his toes threaded through the handles and kicked a three-pack of generic boxers to the floor. They looked as if they’d been bought at a drugstore. Why he’d bought them, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t troubled by it. When you drank like him, little oddities like this lost their oddness.
It was only after piling the retired outfit on the bed that he noticed the small loaf of olive bread on the nightstand. It must have been there, sitting on the red plastic plate, since he’d last slept here. Two nights—three nights—now. One of the two chunks was nearly eaten. Only a hard beige crust covered in semi-elliptical ridges remained. The other chunk formed a complete half, its exposed interior a gauzy white punctuated by oblong streaks of purple. The sight of it seemed to hollow out his stomach. He felt a weakness in himself he hadn’t known only a second before.
He pressed his arched fingers against the white of the bread, but like a cast that had set, it was no less firm than the crust itself. He gripped the half-loaf with two hands, his fingertips lining up in parallel along the white. One twist and the shell gave way. He pulled the quarters apart, put one in the palm of his hand, and dug his fingers into the crumb as close to the crust as he could. This was not so close, as some of the crumb had also staled. Leaving the husk on the plate, he pulled out the
From the booth he could see warehouses, some converted to apartments, some still serving commercial functions: textiles, lumber, paint. His eyes settled on the four-story directly across. The building’s framework stood exposed at the near corner. The bricks had broken away unevenly. The matrix of beams, once precisely arranged along several planes, had wilted into a jumble of iron, soot-covered and twisting into the evening sky. An intense blaze must have shriveled the metal, but the beams, tangled almost sculpturally now, meant there had been combustion as well. A flammable inventory, probably. Whatever it was, the building was unsound, unusable, abandoned. Its lower windows were boarded, as were the doors, as of course were many others now throughout the city, not only warehouses but restaurants and shops and public facilities.
Through the building’s charred scaffolding the moon was visible, a brilliant white haphazardly fragmented by metal. He walked back down the passage and sat on the wall, waiting, with the woman at his feet.
4
Light arrived as a plane, projecting through the slit between drawn curtains, cutting the bedroom in two. Stagg sat at the foot of the twin bed, on a short pine bureau intersecting the light. He passed his hand through the beam and watched sun-kissed dust swirl within its borders. He pulled the thick curtains apart and two dimensions became three, the light broadening until it was nearly the width of his little studio apartment.
In the street below, a small child and an older one, not quite a teen, hurried along with brows pulled low and heads whirling. The woman from last night, her broken body, the picture came to him. What will Penerin want to hear?
His shirt was heavy with sweat. He pulled off the black tee and balled it up in his hand, felt the damp in it before wiping it across his neck. It took some of the stickiness away. He reached down to the tiny metal handles and opened the second drawer of the bureau beneath him, sliding his legs out as far as the drawer itself. The clothes, overstuffed in the drawer, plumped as he did. He’d not looked at this surplus in over a year, ever since he’d moved in, after returning to the city from England. Everything in his closet was on the floor at this point, and as filthy as the tee shirt. At least these were clean, he thought, even if they looked like someone else’s clothes to him now.
Along the top layer he found a crushed blue button-down with a mangled spread collar and flannel trousers. He opened the drawer below with his toes threaded through the handles and kicked a three-pack of generic boxers to the floor. They looked as if they’d been bought at a drugstore. Why he’d bought them, he didn’t know, but he wasn’t troubled by it. When you drank like him, little oddities like this lost their oddness.
It was only after piling the retired outfit on the bed that he noticed the small loaf of olive bread on the nightstand. It must have been there, sitting on the red plastic plate, since he’d last slept here. Two nights—three nights—now. One of the two chunks was nearly eaten. Only a hard beige crust covered in semi-elliptical ridges remained. The other chunk formed a complete half, its exposed interior a gauzy white punctuated by oblong streaks of purple. The sight of it seemed to hollow out his stomach. He felt a weakness in himself he hadn’t known only a second before.
He pressed his arched fingers against the white of the bread, but like a cast that had set, it was no less firm than the crust itself. He gripped the half-loaf with two hands, his fingertips lining up in parallel along the white. One twist and the shell gave way. He pulled the quarters apart, put one in the palm of his hand, and dug his fingers into the crumb as close to the crust as he could. This was not so close, as some of the crumb had also staled. Leaving the husk on the plate, he pulled out the
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