Maybe the best thing, though, was what he found in the closet. A big red bag with hammers and wrenches in the outside pouches. He unzipped it. He cursed under his breath with wonder.
Tools. A beautiful set of brand-spanking-new Milwaukees, bright silver and red. A framing nailer, a roofing nailer, a Skilsaw, a chop saw, cordless hammers, screwdrivers-must've been three thousand bucks' worth of stuff. It made his heart beat harder. He loved good tools.
Crouched over the bag, he looked around him, nodding to himself. He thought of the foreigner. He felt gratitude to the old dude. Even some affection for him.
New mang. New life. Like princess in fairy tale.
He stepped out of the brownstone. He stood at the top of the stoop. It felt like the times he'd gotten out of prison-that same dizzying sense of open space. Your soul shrank when you were inside for too long. It shriveled to the size of the cell you were stuck in. When you finally came out, there was all that wide world whirling around without you in it. It was unnerving. You were afraid that if you let yourself go, if you let your soul expand again, there might not be enough of you to fill all that emptiness. You might drift away like some kind of mist and finally evaporate and be gone forever. Some guys never did dare to do it. They lived the rest of their lives all shrunken up inside as if the cell walls were still around them. Shannon had seen it happen. If they put you in prison long enough, you were in prison forever, even after they let you go.
But that was the whole point here, wasn't it? He wasn't going back to prison. Not at all, not ever. He had a new face, a new identity. New mang, free mang.
He went down the stairs like a top-hatted dancer. Down the street like the mayor. Taking in the sights. Excited. Growing bigger inside with every breath. He passed a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. He passed two men and a woman flirting on a brownstone stoop. He passed two older women in skirt suits. They smiled at him as they went by. They had Bibles in their hands. They were coming home from church. He could hear the bells ringing. It was Sunday morning. Nice day, blue sky, temperature spring-cool with an undercurrent of the coming summer heat.
He went on down the block of brownstones. Past cars parked under green sycamores. That reminded him… He reached into his pocket. He pressed the button on the key to his Honda. A horn honked nearby. Sure enough, there it was: a blue Civic, his own car. About a year old, clean. In pretty good shape, it looked like. He'd have to give it a spin later. But not now. Now he was walking, like a top-hatted dancer, right out in the open, like anyone, like the mayor.
Then he reached the corner and turned and stopped short.
Suddenly, he was staring at a scene of devastation. It stretched into the distance, as far as he could see. In the foreground: brownstones gutted by fire, their windows broken, their brick charred. Beyond those, there were stucco apartment buildings, stricken and slumped like stroke victims. Beyond those, there were piles of churned mud and litter where lawns had been in front of piles of debris that had been houses. In the distance, he could see emergency trailers standing by empty lots, the garbage in the lots making a weird, rocky landscape of appliances and rubble, metal and stone. And all this led at last to the skyline, broken and jagged against the horizon. Light shining through the scorched framework of ruined towers. The city's signature spire snapped off as by a giant's hand. Shannon was never one to watch the news or read the papers much or to fiddle around much online. He'd heard about the floods here and the riots and the fire-you couldn't help but hear. He just hadn't thought about it much. He hadn't thought it could be this bad.
Standing there, staring, stunned, at the extent of the destruction, he tried to maintain his exuberant mood. He tried to tell himself it wasn't so bad. Hell, he could always leave if he wanted to. He was a free man, that was the whole point, that was the really important thing.
But it was no good. He'd had such high hopes there for a minute, but now his heart was sinking. He felt sick with disappointment, with bitterness even, even with anger.
All the places the identity man could've left him, and he left him here, in the ruin of the world.
He spent the next few days exploring the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes in his car. He drove slowly past toppled trees that blocked the sidewalks, past mountains of stinking garbage, past houses washed right off their foundations and abandoned in house-shaped jumbles by the curb. The sights depressed him. He cursed the identity man. He wished he had enough money to start over somewhere else.
He walked through neighborhoods overrun with gangsters, prowling young thugs with their eyes all over everything, their hands itching to strike out and make some kind of grab, probably any kind. Watching them, he could feel their antsy energy inside himself, that old agitation. He caught himself following their glances, casing their lawless neighborhoods for jobs. If only he had enough money…
Identity like stain, he thought. He shook off the antsy feeling. No, no, no, no. Not here, not this time. New life. New mang.
The gangsters stared at him balefully and he stared back. They knew a hard guy when they saw one-new face or no new face-and they left him alone.
He walked on, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, depressed.
One day, he parked across the street from a hobbled brownstone. He watched from his car as three ambulance guys rolled a body out of the ground floor on a stretcher. The corpse was enormous, impossibly bloated. It must've been lost in the flooded basement all this time.
A clutch of onlookers shook their heads and covered their noses. A bunch of homeless guys laughed about it, drunk on their bagged bottles. Even where he was sitting, Shannon caught the stench of the waterlogged dead.
Man, what a town. What a town this was.
Patrolmen were standing guard over the scene, their eyes shifting and their hands on their holstered guns. They were the first cops Shannon had seen since he'd gotten here. Their nearness startled him.
One cop's roving gaze came toward him. Shannon seized up inside, afraid of being spotted and caught. He almost hit the gas and sped away. Then he realized: he didn't have to. He didn't have to worry anymore. He had his brand-new face on. He sat there boldly. The cop's gaze never hesitated. It just passed over him and moved on.
Shannon smiled to himself as he watched the bloated corpse shoved into the back of the ambulance. He felt again the power of his anonymity, the possibility of a fresh start.
As he drove away, he thought to himself: New mang. Don't blow it.
The next day, he was still thinking along the same lines. He was walking on a narrow street. Ruined brick apartment buildings slanted and loured on either side of him. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder. He saw this guy stepping out of a pale green Ford, a Crown Victoria with a white scrape on the side. He was a small guy, hungry-thin or maybe drug-thin. He was dressed in a cheap black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. He had a shaved head. He had smart, searching, dangerous eyes. They looked in Shannon's direction-then quickly looked away.
About half an hour later, Shannon caught a glimpse of him again, the same guy, on a corner several blocks to the north. It made him nervous. Was this fucktard following him?
He ducked into a restaurant to see what would happen. He watched through the front window as the guy wandered off.