He looked at the clock in the kitchenette. That bastard had left with his money over two hours ago. He had asked a neighbor, a fellow vet who lived two doors down, to go to the market for him, to buy as many packages of hot dogs — cheap, filling, and quick to eat raw — as he could with a ten-dollar bill. He knew he should not have trusted this man, a chronic boozer who’d lost his legs just below the knee and who, several times a year, would lose his prostheses as well, and could on these occasions be heard returning predawn from an all-night bender — filthy and bruised and penniless — scuttling and grunting in the stairwell, violently refusing any assistance as he made his lone and legless way five flights up.
The apartment window was open, and the curtains eddied with the onset of a breeze. He pulled up his caftan to expose himself to it, wadding yards of cloth and gathering the rolled wad onto his forearms to pinion it against his neck and shoulders. This took some work, and he was breathing hard when he was done. It was a hot one today. Days like this made him keenly aware of how badly it smelled in his apartment, much of the stink wafting from the bathroom, which the volunteers cleaned for him three times a week. Years ago, when he had finally gotten too big to leave his apartment, the members of a local church banded together and made him their special project. They deposited his monthly VA checks, shopped for his groceries, cooked him an occasional hot meal. Toward the end of the month, when he frequently ran out of food, they urged him to call. “Just give us a jingle,” they chided, amused at his reluctance to summon them. They were reliable and earnest and devoutly generous, completely committed to their good works, and he could not stand having them around. They said “Howdy!” upon arrival and punctuated everything they said thereafter with either “Okey-dokey!” or “Alrighty!” When they gave him his sponge bath, or when they applied the ointments and powders prescribed for his lesions and fungal infections, they undertook these tasks with the glee of schoolchildren working a charity car wash. And they proselytized incessantly, paraphrasing biblical passages that warned against gluttony and submitting too readily to the appetites; they spoke of hunger and desire as one would speak of disreputable kin. They had given him a Bible, and reading through it — reading the whole damn book — he had found only a handful of references that warned against eating too much, but hundreds that celebrated eating and appetite. God rewarded his children with bountiful harvests, and the tribes of Israel, when not slaughtering each other, were always breaking bread. Jesus was the metaphysical short-order cook, serving up fishes and loaves and wine to multitudes wherever they gathered. And what about the Last Supper? Nobody was counting calories in the Bible. Everybody had their fill. But he did not engage this issue with them. He did not want to antagonize the people he hated needing to cook his meals and wipe his ass and offer the only companionship he had. So when he ran out of food, he did not want to give them a jingle. He tried to manage on his own, asking various transient tenants in the building to buy things for him.
He was surrounded by empty tortilla-chip bags, the partial remains of yesterday’s dinner — the last time he ate. Hunger cut into his guts like a razor. He sat with his head thrown back, panting through his open mouth, waiting for another breeze. His thoughts drifted to a memory of the last time he used a bathtub as a bathtub instead of as a toilet. He thought about the last shower he ever took, and the needle-spray of water on his skin. He thought about other things he missed. Driving, with the window down. Sex. Friends. His feet. His dick. He thought about the last beach he ever saw — the smell of the ocean, its tug and surge around his calves, and the suck of wet sand under his heels. He loved the beach. He thought about his dick again. He had neither seen nor been able to touch his penis in over ten years, and he missed that.
A breeze came. He heaved the caftan roll aloft, against his face. It was a good breeze, a sudden gusty one that sent empty chip bags fluttering and was cool against his damp skin. His skin was always damp. He never stopped sweating. He lifted one tit, then the other, then let the caftan drop about him. He halfheartedly reached for an empty tortilla-chip bag, sighed, and looked from the TV screen to the clock in the kitchenette, then back to the TV. The inside of his head beat like a heart. He would have to call the church people.
He turned to look out the window. From where he sat, he could see the tops of the trees of a downtown plaza that he used to walk to and sit in, years ago. He could see the skeleton of a skyscraper that was going up. He could see the sun reflecting from an apartment tower in the distance, its light flaring in the westerly windows, then winking out as the sun moved on.
He threw the remote at the TV. A blizzard of white erupted on the screen. He reached frantically for empty tortilla-chip bags. He ripped two bags flat, licked them clean, and tossed them aside. He rocked to get at more bags. The room groaned and creaked. The love seat lurched to the left and slipped off its four-by-sixes, and he fell. Pots and plates in the kitchenette clattered. The windows shuddered in their casements when he hit the floor. He was stranded on his back. Another bag was within reach. He tore it open and licked off the oil and salt. He tossed it aside, made fists of his hands, and hit himself in the face five times.
There was activity in the apartment below, movement in the corridor outside, pounding on the door. He lay still. He did not answer. The footsteps retreated. They would be calling 911.
He sighed, wiped the blood from his face. He looked up at the window. From the floor he could see no buildings at all, only a rectangle of sky. It was cloudless and intensely blue, and he stared up into it for a long while. Emergency personnel were soon crawling over him, cutting his caftan off, lifting and pushing at his naked body, rocking it into position over their slings. It is always the same engine company that comes to his rescue, the firefighters all chatty and familiar. “How you doing, Hector?” He ignores them. He keeps his rectangle of sky in view. He sees a man on a beach ambling barefoot along the surf’s edge. When the TV people arrive, with their spotlights and their boom mikes, the man on the beach breaks into a trot, angling up toward hard-packed sand. And then he turns, jogs backward for a moment, and waves goodbye — an insolent waggle of his fingers — to the people lurching through the surf behind him. He turns again without breaking stride, and he runs. He laughs. The firemen lift on three. A reporter asks why he’s laughing. He doesn’t hear the question. There is only the wind whistling in his ears and the sting of grit on his face and the ocean’s salt taste inside his mouth. He runs, fleet and swift, the balls of his feet barely disturbing the sand and leaving no trail for anyone to follow.
III.
They were on a blind date, arranged by a friend she worked with whose husband knew him. They had been chatting in the wine bar, waiting for a table at a popular Italian café that did not take reservations. They had been waiting over an hour, but neither of them seemed to mind, and their patience was rewarded with an intimate table, tucked into an alcove whose windows looked out on a lovely lantern-lit garden. There were long waits between menus and ordering, between salads and entrées, but they both seemed to relish the leisurely pace, which allowed the conversation to carom pleasantly from subject to subject. This was her favorite part of a date, its first few hours, when the pretense of best behavior held sway and the blemishes of individual personality had yet to appear. So things were going well. But after they ordered dessert, the subject of movies came up.