–Since-
Blind man's night is music to the deaf, and everyone has two paths, not one, whence comes tragedy and comedy, forsooth and damn straight, son.
He stood just within the flap of the tent and the old woman saw him and he saw her and the statuette,and it would be hard to guess who was more surprised of these two strangers who somehow knew. And, oh, the things they said without speaking or moving; the anger, the pain, the justifications, all silent, perhaps all imagined, until he ran, once more,never stopping until he reached the river, which agreed to carry him, once more, away from one set of troubles into another. Out of pangs of the heart and into torments of the flesh.Hell of a way to run a coach service.
–Since-
After all, they had entered the bar, and, more importantly, he must trust his instincts, which had gotten him out of as many fixes as they'd gotten him into. The same could be said of his knife, and perhaps there's a moral there.
Was this time going to be any different? Of course.They all are. He was breathing heavily but not painfully, his strides were long and even, though he was tired. He stopped and rested for a moment beside a high wrought-iron fence, with a lower chain-link fence outside it, then he walked on, looking back frequently.
There was a gate in the fence, and someone stood beside it. His first thought was. It is Luci; I am caught.But no. He could make out little of her form in the gloom, but her face had the stamp of beauty with suffering etched into the lines over her brows and next to her eyes. A squirrel at her feet chittered loudly as he approached, started to run, then relaxed. The woman turned at his footstep. He looked into her eyes and she into his. He felt a slight tingle at the base of his skull. Her eyes glittered. She said, "You are hereto replace me, that I may rest?"
"I don't understand."
"Why are you here?"
"I am merely walking. Running, in fact. You?"
"I guard this place, so none may pass who should not. You should not, I think, unless you are to replace me."
He looked past her, through the high wrought-iron fence, and understood. "No, I still live. You must wait for the next to die to take your place."
"How then can you see me?"
"Because I am who I am."
"Who are you?"
"I'm not certain. Who are you, and how did you come to die, so young?"
"Leukemia," she said dreamily, as if it made no difference to her at all, and perhaps it didn't. "My name is Karen."
"How long have you stood vigil here?"
"I'm not certain. Only a few days, I think. I relieved a tired old man who had been here four days."
The squirrel jumped closer to him, then back again.
"You will not have to wait long, I think. Then you may rest."
"Yes," she said. "Will you see to my man? We lived together for three years, and he was very kind when I was dying, but it was hard for him. Harder than for me, I think."
"What is his name?"
"Brian MacWurthier. We lived at three twenty-seven Roosevelt, upstairs."
He repeated the name and address to himself, so he wouldn't forget it. "Very well," he said. "I will-"
"A light fell upon him. He turned and his heart jumped as he saw the police car. He began to run, knowing already that it was too late."
"I'm sorry," he heard her say. The squirrel bolted between the bars of the cemetery as if escaping from a cage.
"It is nothing," said Charles softly as the two policemen took his arms and threw him against the chain-link fence. Their hands were rough and thorough as they searched him. What are their feelings at such times, he wondered. Boredom? Professional pride?
"My head hurts," he said softly. They didn't seem to hear him.
The older one found his knife and let it fall with a gesture half careless and half deliberate. Charles winced as he heard it strike the sidewalk. The younger one held his upper arms in a grip like steel. It was painful- He thought about resisting then and there,but he couldn't decide, and soon it was too late, for they wrenched his arms behind him and put handcuffs on him.
This felt familiar. Why? A piece of the Sight, or the shards of real memory? The policemen pushed him into the back of the car. He had to sit sideways because of the cuffs. He tested them, and found that they were connected by a rigid bar, rather than a mere chain. They knew him then. He frowned, his shoulder pressed uncomfortably against the seat back.There was a time when it would have pleased him that they showed such fear. There was a time,…
He walks aimlessly upon the Old Manor Way, his feet twisting in the coach tracks. He sees her before him-the one whom he had loved, and who betrayed him to marry a rich man.
"You have destroyed me," he cries. "You have broken my heart." He reaches into his chest, then, and pulls his heart from his body to show her, but she, filled with shame or pride, won't look, so he flings it down onto the road.
Soon, an old dry-nurse comes along and sees it. "Well, "she says. "We can't have this." And she calls three times like a raven and screams three times like an owl, and a shape appears beside her. The apparition, a woman who is younger than the nurse and older than the lover, takes the heart from the roadside, and brushes the dirt from it and holds it to her bosom. He looks closely, and sees that it is the ghost of his mother, still watching out for him from beyond the grave.
Lover, dry-nurse, and mother all vanish into the mist,into the dust. He takes back his heart and replaces it in his chest and continues on his way.
The holding tank was seven paces by nine. The walls were of tile, to chest height. The floor was of cement, with a large drain in the middle so the place could be hosed down. A tiled bench, perhaps eight inches off the floor and eighteen deep, was built into two of the walls. Across from it was an aluminum toilet, all of one piece. Charles, realized, after a moment's thought, that this was to ensure no one could use the toilet seat as a weapon. The sink was also aluminum. There were neither soap nor towels. The cold water worked, the hot didn't. A chest-high wall next to the toilet provided a token measure of privacy from the thick, wired-glass window next to the door.
Two pair of fluorescent light fixtures, two bulbs in each, made the tank very bright. The fixtures we recovered in heavy plastic shielding. To protect them when the place was hosed down, perhaps, since the ceiling was far too high for anyone to reach.
There were two others in the tank with him. For just a moment, Charles thought of his brothers, but,though he no longer remembered what they looked like, he knew these were not they. One prisoner was in his later thirties, perhaps. He had already been there when Charles was brought in. He was tall,stringy, with dark hair that was graying just a bit at the temples. He was sitting on the bench and he wore a black tee shirt. The other looked to be in his middle fifties. He'd been let in just a few minutes before, and Charles had the impression that this wasn't his first time in this place. His grey hair was slicked back, he had a bit of a potbelly. He wore a faded red shirt with fake pearl buttons, very old jeans, and cowboy boots. He paced in a lazy oval near the door. He was shorthand he stank very badly when Charles got too close.Charles wondered if he'd been fished out of a sewer. All three of them avoided proximity with each other, so staying away wasn't difficult-
He tried to reconstruct the events since he'd been picked up, but they blurred and faded and slipped through his fingers. He had been thoroughly searched by two bored guards with a camera watching, and there had been an old, sour-faced woman who took his picture and fingerprints while a fresh-scrubbed clerk with a weak attempt at a blond mustache had asked him questions he mostly couldn't answer, and then his possessions and even his boots had been taken and he'd been put into the tank by a guard who looked like a Nazi and carried the largest key Charles had seen since-