HUNGER

When David Farley came to New York City, he was a hungry man. In all ways. The job he landed proof-reading junk mail quelled one form of hunger; David was a small man, anyway, and rice, beans and pasta dishes were his forté since college. And being a careful man, conservative in his tastes and habits, he thrived in his poverty, living cheaply, but proudly. One room, hot plate, bath down the hall.

With autumn came the chance to apply for a job at a real magazine; sf fiction, major news stand distribution, subscription base, and paid lunch hours. Proof-reader, and part-part-time assistant to a senior editor. David applied, and another pang of hunger was silenced. But old hunger was stirred: David’s scant income was cut by a third. He was demoted from hunger to near-­starvation. YMCA, roach motels extra.

Months later, come September, on an afternoon when fall still seemed months, years away, David was hurrying back to work, crossing West 49th at Ninth Avenue, his mind on the miserable toothache throbbing along his left lower jaw, and the fact that he had had to leave the dentist’s office with only an appointment he could never afford to keep, when he almost ran into…her.

Her stench hit him first; fulsome, squishy-moist, like toes trapped in too-tight sneakers. Yet, there was a vague feminine odor about her, a sour yeasty tang that made David’s mouth fill with bitter saliva. She was coming from the direction of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but David doubted, instantly, with certainty, that she was one of the homeless who camped out around there, hoping to bum money off tourists in exchange for carrying a suitcase from the inside of the terminal to the sidewalk beyond, or sitting huddled in ratty blankets, like fraying cocoons, in the hard plastic seats within.

The woman—middle aged, old, eternal? David couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know with any certainty—was too flyblown, too far beyond normal pity or revulsion, for anyone to come near enough to slip her a quarter or let a dollar bill flutter into her cupped palms.

She might have risen from the streets, pulled from the spit and wrapper and ripped movie-ticket encrusted sidewalks like a heat shimmy, to waver and sway in the sun, all but invisible for her natural camoflage, save for her sick redolence, and save for her fluttering nostrils, her liquid hooded eyes.

Slowly, she moved in a curious sliding shuffle, a wind­-driven pile of sweat-ribboned scraps and debris, clinging slap­dash to her undefinable body. Oblivious to David as an empty Styrofoam cup rolling down the broad ribbon of sidewalk, she inched forward, head twitching and bobbing, heavy under the layers of folded and twisted sweaters encircling her filth­-encrusted dreadlocks.

That she was black seemed an afterthought, a mere chance of pigmentation under her patina of grime and dried mucus clinging to the furrows near her nose, her mouth, her heavy-lidded eyes.

Her clawed hands, the fingers twisting in configurations which spoke to David of alien hieroglyphics, shapes whose meaning was unknowable, unclean, framed palms of chalky white-grey: a sick, bloodless color which was scored with broken lines of embedded dirt, a map of the unknown lands from which she had shambled forth into the late summer sun.

Appalled, yet stirred by a numbing hunger to see just a little more, to look fully before looking away, David stood close to the curb, watching the progress of the street person as she oozed across the street (no cars whizzed past her; instead they eased far away from her, as if fearing what contact with her might do to their glossy paint jobs, their glittering radio antennas), her reek a live thing in his nostrils, stinging the tender flesh there, and clawing into his brain, touching soft, dark, shuttered places.…

Only, David stood there a second too long. She turned her massive swathed head, only a degree or so to the left, but enough. Eyes like oily marbles, cloudy with only the memory of dark color locked on his rounded blue ones, and in that second of contact without touch, David saw her; the tatter of pilled lace adorning one side of the Peter Pan collar on one of the layered blouses she wore, the fresh scab clinging to her bitten lower lip, an orange plastic child’s bracelet encircling one greasy wrist, the toes-gone greying sneakers with the tongues lolling across her high-boned insteps.

And, in that second of seeing, came the feeling of a hunger deeper than the soul, deeper than eye-pupil-blackness, of hips­-knees-shins-toes-souls numb from moving, moving from nowhere to anywhere forever, of looking for something for so long that remembrance would be of no help when and if the thing arrived in sight…of wanting.

The woman’s hand made contact with David’s bare forearm before he could jerk away, step back onto the safety of the curb, and run down the crack-veined sidewalk. And in the second in which David did slide his arm out from under her twisted hand, David sensed (knew) that if he hadn’t moved, the woman would have been all over him, pressing her raggy body against his thin, sport-shirt-and-droopy-tie-covered chest, cradling her massive woggling head in the hollow between his head and collarbones, feeding off of him.

For the hunger was there, in her gelid eyes and cracked, working lips, and David found himself spinning around so quickly he almost caught his foot on the curb and splayed forward into the sidewalk; almost, but not quite. From the slight elevated safety of the street itself, David stared down at the woman for a second, before walking a block down West 49th until he could lose the woman in the steadily thickening traffic.

David hurried back to work, almost running now, his toothache all but forgotten as bitter saliva swirled in his mouth, like acidic fire he couldn’t spit out into the gutter, lest the woman be drawn to the expectoration.…

Yet, as he walked briskly, jacket draped over his free arm (his clean arm), he kept scrubbing his forearm, the one she’d touched, against his hip, scrubbing the flesh until fresh sweat made the skin sting, until he could no longer feel the lingering heat of her fingers there, pressing down on his skin.

It was his own fault, for waiting, for gawking…but had she any right to linger by him, when he had no offering of money in his hand, and no lure of fancy clothing or assumed wealth?

Neither of them had had any right in looking, in lingering, yet…the fact that they both had done so niggled at David, as did the persisting sense of want, of need, of hunger, he’d felt rising off the woman like steam from something warm, hidden, suddenly exposed to pitiless cold.

And with the persistent memory of her, of her smell, of her unwelcome touch, David felt the reluctant opening of something deep and scarred within him, the flying open of shutters, the splintered wood banging against moldy walls of bitter remembrance.…

* * * *

Before David came to New York, before he finished college, to be exact, his grandmother had gone crazy over the course of one spring and summer. Just what happened to her already-slow mind was hard to say; when people dropped by to try and talk some sense into her, she’d burrow further into her saggy and worn lavender sweater, pull her hairless, shiny, skinny legs close to the legs of her rocker, and let her frazzled mane of stringy brown and grey hair fall over her greasy face before barking, “Mindyerownbusiness!” in that phlegm-clotted voice of hers. Soon, people learned not to stop by and urge her to see a doctor. Soon people quit coming to the house altogether.

And then David’s grandmother retreated to her bedroom, off the living room, leaving her door open only wide enough to watch a sharply slanted image of the television set in the opposite corner of the living room. David’s family sometimes heard her cough, or sneeze, or snore loudly and moistly, a sloppy fluttering buzz that all but drowned out the television. (Turn up the volume, though, and she’d mumble sing-songed accusations: “Inconsiderate bastards” “Need some manners around this house” so David’s family just began to edge closer to the set, like guilty moths.)

And she did things: Broke David’s sister’s little glass carousel, the one she’d received after appearing in the chorus of the college summer musical of the same name; broke the base of the fragile spun glass bauble, then tried to re-arrange the shattered fragments next to the base, but Susan knew what had happened, and bawled out loud before saying in a few choice words when she saw the damage. That only brought the old lady out of her room with a shuff-shuff of her frowzy blue slippers and shaking of her plush red bathrobe (and this was in July, hot, sticky, muggy July), and with every step the old woman’s mouth was working, working, making the turkey wattle under her chin sway and shiver like the last glob of misshapen gelatin in the bowl.

And as this thing that had once been David’s grandmother called Susan and the rest of them vipers, bastards, liars and fuckers, David breathed through his mouth; after weeks cooped up in her bedroom (emerging only to sneak food from the kitchen which lay beyond the bathroom which was connected to her room, or to occupy the sole bathroom long enough to cause extreme discomfort for the rest of the family), the old woman stank. The smell was worse than the lingering odor she left behind after she finally flushed prior to vacating the bathroom, more cloying than excrement, yet sweeter, too. Like chicken gone slimy, or old perfume soured by sweat.

The old woman had been spending less and less time bathing over the past year or so—self-righteously she claimed that since she never sweated, she couldn’t smell bad, even though David’s mother had to wash the old woman’s clothes separately from those of the rest of the family, because of the greasy-sweet bacon reek her garments gave off—so David should have been used to the smell, but he wasn’t.

David’s grandmother’s hair hung down from under her bandanna in greasy, limp strings, too clotted with dirt to move in the rush of air from the fan in the corner. Idly David wondered what had happened to the woman who’d gone religiously for her permanent every spring and fall when he was a boy. That woman was his Gramma. Not this…creature which bellowed in a throaty croak, shaking a yellow-nailed finger at his sobbing sister. Reflexively backing away, David wondered how anyone could have loved the woman in the red robe long enough to help her conceive David’s own mother. By the fall of that year, David and his sister were back in school, but his parents moved out of the house which his mother and grandmother co-owned. There the old woman puttered about and half-starved herself, even though their town had Meals on Wheels and Kinship for the elderly.

The old lady alienated every able-bodied man in town who cut lawns, shoveled snow or did any sort of handiwork, until she reached the point where the house was slowly going to rot and David’s folks had to stop by to bring her food and to arrange for the house to be fixed up. And still the old woman used every opportunity to cut down, criticize, and out-and-out insult everyone with whom she came into contact.

David wouldn’t go to visit her—what Susie did was her own fool business—but a few times he grudgingly spoke on the phone with her. Upon hearing that saccharine warble “Gooood­bye!” he’d slam down the receiver with one hand, and whip her an unseen bird with the other. Sometimes he’d mumble “Bitch” for his own benefit. But still…he couldn’t help but feel funny when he opened the card Mom relayed to him from the old lady for his twenty-first birthday. The unsigned card more suitable for a young boy than an adult, with the note written in a shaky, huge hand which was folded around a $100.00 bill:

Dear David;

May you have the ‘Happiest of Birthdays’ every day of the year. To me you have been the joy of my life always.

Love,

Your Gramma

The note made David mad and sad and a little bit exasperated. He couldn’t forgive the old lady for the way she’d been, even before she went out-and-out crazy, but…yet…something inside him told David that he’d been the rotten one, no matter what names she’d called him when he was a teenager, no matter what she’d done to his graduation pictures (sneaking into his room, into his desk, to grub around in his papers for the pictures of her posed with honors-graduate David—so that she could draw huge blue ball-point-pen goggle eyes over her own shut-against-the-flash-glare thin-lashed eyes), no matter that she’d bemoaned the fact that his parents bought Susie a carnation and rosebud corsage when she graduated high school, saying to whomever was within earshot, “We could have bought a loaf of bread for what that flower cost.”

For she was his grandmother, even if she stank, even if she was a balding, wattled, greasy bloated whathaveyou by the time she finally died of ovarian cancer. He’d had to take the word of his family about her bullet-hard bloated belly under the greasy robe, and the other physical changes. He’d refused to come to the funeral, knowing that he’d smell the lingering odor of her flesh over any flowers in the church.…

Just as he knew that buying the bouquet of flowers from the vendor near the Museum of Modem Art (he had no appetite for the wares of the hot dog and cold pop vendor also camped out near the broad front steps of the museum) was his way of trying to tell himself it was all right that he’d stopped to gawk at the street person, that he deserved a little something beautiful and sweet smelling and fragile-alive to comfort himself, something to stop the hunger he felt within himself for human contact, for time spent without the need for money to exchange hands—even as the lingering memory of the foul woman’s touch burned his skin from within, and a nagging hungry voice whispered within him, What she was offering you wasn’t wrapped around a $100.00 bill.…

* * * *

David Farley’s hunger diminished when he was offered a promotion at his sf magazine after a year of diligent, uncomplaining work. Assistant Editor, a permanent desk, and no more missed appointments at the dentist. Good-bye YMCA, and left-behind roach motels. One room plus kitchenette, and half bath on the lower west side. He no longer walked anywhere near the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

A scant five months later, a second promotion; editorship of a sister publication of his sf magazine, an experimental soft sf/fantasy venture David didn’t expect to last six issues, but the money meant good cooked meals at home. Recipes which didn’t call for rice, beans, or anything but the fanciest Italian pasta.

The (temporary, he assumed) editor’s chair meant that David had suddenly, magically, reached what he considered the inner circle. During the annual party thrown by the parent publishing firm, he was sought out by toadying would-be writers, and treated with some measure of respect by established figures in the genre. Other editors called him, and sometimes agents would take him to lunch, sometimes buy him drinks. Nothing cheaper than white wine, nothing consisting mainly of beans.

When an agent for a well-known but recently luckless sf writer (the supposed best-seller wasn’t, no matter how well it had amassed votes in the Nebulas) offered to take David to lunch in order to sell David on the un-best selling writer’s latest novella, for serialization, David (who had already half-made up his mind to buy the novella anyhow) feigned indecision and accepted the invitation. Anything to escape the ever-growing mound of subs piled on and next to his desk.

The bar near Broadway and Fifth wasn’t crowded as David and the agent waited for their drinks, but the man in the cheap tie with the stripes going the wrong way insisted on standing right next to David. While the agent was present, playing up his client, the wrong-tie man was easy to ignore, but the agent was wearing one of those clip-on beepers; when a call came through from the agency, the agent downed his Manhattan, bid David a hasty, temporary fare-well and trotted off in search of the nearest pay phone. David smiled slightly over his Tom Collins; the lapels on the agent’s plaid jacket didn’t line up right. That secret nubbin of superiority David had gained over the agent was sure to mean that he’d get the novella for what he was offering, not what he was being asked to pay.

David was still bent over his drink, waiting for the agent, nursing the last few sips of liquor, when the backwards-tie man spoke up. Shimmering circles of ghosts of the glasses already downed ringed the man’s folded hands resting on the bar. In a far corner of the wall, the brackets-mounted TV was tuned to CNN Headline NEWS (stock market listings scrolled across the bottom of the screen, a busy ribbon of blue); the volume was too low to hear, but some report about the on-going shuttle problems at NASA was on. File footage of the Challenger appeared; as it mushroomed into white mist and oblivion, then did it again in slow motion, Mr. Wrong-tie said slowly, solemnly, “Know what I was thinking…when it happened? Not now, but the first time?” David sipped his drink, not letting on that he could hear anything, least of all the man beside him.

“Was sitting in the living room, watching, and all of a sud­den Bill Murray’s in my head. In Stripes, the scene with the fancy drill work—” Wrong-tie was pantomiming a shouldered rifle, that much David could see out of the comer of his left eye”—an’ when they ask Bill where his commander is, Bill, he shouts, ‘All blowed up, Sirrrah’ And Bill, he was in my head, all that day, day it blowed up. Just Bill going ‘All blowed up’—”

David quickly thumbed some bills out of his pocket, left them by the tall sweating glass and vacated the bar (the agent would just have to haul mis-matched lapels over and look for him), Wrong-tie’s shouted “Sirrrah!” booming over-loud in his ears.

Outside, Fifth Avenue was almost devoid of pedestrians, so there was really no reason why David should have bumped into anyone, or stepped on any living thing, until.…

.…the cat wound itself through and around his legs, forcing David to come to an off-balance stop in mid-stride. When he looked down, the cat was still there, a dark smudge against the already darkening sidewalk.

It was just standing there, off to his right, looking up at him with pus-covered green eyes. It was a male; the spread­out face and almost flat nose were unmistakable. Unneutered. And either old or starved enough for it to have a splatter of stiff white hairs in among the flat black fur. The ears were the shape and texture of rotted morrels, almost without points. In fact, the cat’s ears were so cauliflowered that there was almost no openings left in them.

The left hind paw was missing from the hock on down. The tail was short, fading away to pencil-thinness. Stiff, broken whiskers jutted out from either side of the mouth, and from the lips hung pendulous rodent ulcers. One fang was broken off close to the gum line, the top of the tooth encrusted with shining, mottled black and brown tartar, like mold gone unchecked on the skin of Brie cheese.

A three-legged cat…wandering around in New York City. David looked around, assuming he’d see a street person nearby, waiting for him to take pity on the animal and offer money to its “owner.” Yet another scam, like the black youths and not-so­-young men who hung near intersections, waiting for a red light and the chance to swish a filthy rag or squirt fluid from a pump bottle on the windshield of some car, and who wouldn’t wipe off the scummy water until they were paid. Fivers or better. Not that David didn’t pity those who called cardboard boxes or sheets of newspaper spread over a grate home. He’d lived the borderline life himself, or as close as dammit to borderline. And the hungry animals hauled around by street people may have been company, family, even…but David felt sorrier for the ones who hauled their kids around from shelter to abandoned car to park bench.

But the cat was alone. Ungracefully it sat on rat-furred haunches, staring at David with pigment-spotted green eyes. No one passed either of them for a few seconds. The wind picked up, a cool pressing hand urging him to get back in the bar, or go to his office, or get back home, but something about the cat (the very smelly cat—its odor wafted up to him, redolent of old ear wax, dried excrement and whatever else the animal had rubbed against) made David hover over it, numbed mentally and physically.

Perhaps David hovered too long, for without so much as the characteristic wiggle of the rump, the cat sprang up into his arms. Up close, its smell was a living creature in his nostrils, clawing up into his brain, pawing open a forgotten nest of memories. The cat flexed rough-padded paws on his jacket, worn yellowed nails pressing his skin through the double layer of fabric. The thing’s mouth was foul; the setting sun glinted off drool-slimed rough lips. And yet, his eyes were so trusting, so utterly, unequivocally trusting that David was sure the cat would willingly snuggle into his jacket, hiding silently and gratefully during the subway ride home. David could even feel/hear the thing’s stomach rumbling, through his jacket and shirt. But the moment came when David had to either support the furry body with his arms, or let the cat drop.

When the cat hit the pavement, it paused to stare at him—­not with reproach, but with that same blind trust and affection. Before David could make up his mind whether to follow it or to briskly walk away, the cat lifted its pathetic rat tail and scooted off, moving surprisingly fast on three feet.

The odor of its paws remained on his jacket, a sharp tangy reek of old pee, cement and vegetation. Park grass, perhaps, or straggler weeds growing up between slabs of broken pavement. Brushing off his jacket, flicking away flecks of something dried and brown and unpleasant, David felt his tongue curl, finally flattening against the roof of his mouth in distaste and something else, something like guilt.…

Before David and his sister and Dad and Mom and her mom (not yet crazy, but boy was she getting there) moved from the crappy house on the far outskirts of town, the dump with no insulation, no running water, and no sidewalk, that had been all they could afford many lean years ago when they first moved to Ewerton, Wisconsin from downstate Illinois, to the much better house close by downtown, the big white cement-block house with the high ceilings and hardwood floors in most of the rooms, David’s family had to get rid of the cats. Not the indoor cats, not Diablo and Blackie and Arthur, but Missy (Arthur’s mother), and Bandito and Terri, his litter mates. Females, all unspayed (“Not enough, not enough money”) had already mated with both sisters, producing sickly litters (Terri’s kittens had all died), so Grandma’s decree went down—the girls were to be banished to the chicken coop in the back yard. They were in heat constantly, some sort of hormonal screw-up (or maybe cancer, David realized years later, after Diablo—also unspayed, but relegated to the back porch of the old house—lived for another eighteen months with mammary cancer, finally dying in his parents’ new house, after the hegira from the big white house), and half-wild to boot. So Dad, hoping that they could eventually have the three pretty females fixed, always in that hoped-for later, fenced them in, put them in the chicken coop where they lived for a year, maybe more. Living on scraps of food and oatmeal, by Grandma’s decree.

David hated thinking about it all, about how brutal life in the country had made them. Like starved creatures themselves, all of them. The hungriest time in his life which David sought to bury deep, deep in his subconscious—a time he almost did manage to forget…except for what happened to the cats.

The three cats weren’t too bad off in the coop; they were fed, their poop was shoveled out for them, and the snow covered their pee come winter. The walls of the coop were thick and sturdy. (His mom had put her foot down when it came to Diablo, the cat he and his sister found out by the sash and door factory two summers before their move. Diablo was delicate, a refined and good cat, and she lived in the house, or out in the back porch when in heat. Grandma bitched, but Mom was getting fed up herself by then.) But when the money Mom and Dad had saved for the new house was finally loosed from Grandma’s account, she laid down a last ultimatum, a final jab in her fury about being ousted from the ugly house in the country she’d grown to love. The three indoor cats could stay in the new house. There was a basement for the males. But the “crazy cats,” the females who spent their days pumping, endlessly pumping their hindquarters when not eating, Missy, Bandito and Terri (named for the black patch of fur around one eye, like the people in those old Terryington cigarette advertisements) had to go. As in…as in on the day after they’d moved into the new house (the day the old lady kicked Diablo just because she was pissed about moving away from “her” home), David and his dad drove out to the old house, bearing a last breakfast of hot oatmeal and milk in a big plaid thermos (it was late February, not cold-cold out, but still—) for the girl cats. David watched them slurp up their final treat, until he had to walk away to stand behind the ugly grey house and wait with eyes shut while Dad fired his rifle. Four times. Four times, for three cats.

And in the pick-up on the way to school, the high school set out in the boonies on the other side of town, David half-listened to his Dad say how the cats didn’t run away, but waited their turn, trustingly. David didn’t ask which one got shot twice, or why she’d been shot twice, as the last warmth of the slain cats seeped into David’s feet. Dad had placed the bodies in a plastic sack in David’s foot well, prior to driving their bodies out to the dump. Cats there or not, David wasn’t about to swing his feet over by Dad.

Years later, when Diablo died, his folks said to hell with the city ordinance against burying pets in the city and laid her to rest outside the living room double window. And planted a rose bush over her that grew middling tall, high enough to reach out and snag you when you least expected it to do so. And no matter how many cats his folks and his sister got later on, David could still hear those four shots. For three cats. But Dad said they didn’t run away.…

* * * *

After figuring Screw the agent, screw the meal, David trotted to the nearest subway entrance, but he kept seeing the last image of the black tom cat, the last look he’d gotten before hurrying away from the bar. The cat had only scurried so far, just close to the mouth of a narrow gap between two buildings. Then it stopped, sat down, and waited for him. Even after he’d let it drop to the ground. Even after he’d scooted off, bumping into people going the other way. It had looked at him without rancor, waiting patiently for him to return for it. And David didn’t stop shaking inside, tongue still protectively jammed against his upper palate, until he was jerking along with the moving subway deep under the ground where the cat was still no doubt standing, waiting for him in pure trust and faithfulness.…

* * * *

When David’s magazine folded, not after six but fifteen issues, David went back to doing what he had done before. Assistant Editor at the sf magazine. He was used to the work, and the money was still good. David even managed to move to better digs, three rooms plus bath, not too far from Central Park. He ate at better restaurants, ones which never featured beans or rice in their entrees. He gradually gained some of the weight he’d lost in his physically hungry years, but still got enough exercise to keep himself looking reasonably fit, reasonably hungry, and held onto his savings. The YMCA still had rooms to let.

Then, after some of the stories and novelettes from the last issue of his now-defunct magazine went on to gain berths in the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy ballots, and a story actually won a Hugo (and was rumored to have come in very high in the Nebulas), David’s ship came in. A cargo ship, at that. He was offered the editorship of a rival sf magazine, the one whose pages supplied most of the rest of the writing award ballots. At one and a half times his old salary. Taxi time. His days of walking past stinking street people (she touched me, with those claw hands—) and mangy gimpy cats were all but over; when no taxis were available, he knew which routes were free of hooded watery eyes and trusting felines, or nearly so. When necessary, he lowered his eyelids, washing unpleasant scenes in a veil of wavering rainbows and eyelashes. He began to take vacations, far out of the city, where the street people did not dwell and the animal shelters had the time to round up limping strays.

Then, not long after his Christmas vacation in Pennsylvania, David was forced, due to traffic, to drive back into the city through Harlem. The Lincoln Tunnel was jammed with inching cars, and unfortunately the George Washington bridge wasn’t too jammed, so David reluctantly drove through Harlem as quickly as traffic and the slippery streets would allow, all the while feeling a nameless dread, a calling of poor to formerly poor that pulled at him like the irresistible force of gravity upon a body falling from a great height to the hard coldness of the pavement below. The rented car was his awning, his shield against the brutal pull of gravity upon his body, his memory, his heart, upon the deep hungering void within him.

David tried to keep his eyes on the ice-encrusted center line, tried not to notice the dull splotches of the people’s faces outside the car—the street sitters (more than a few with dogs and scabrous cats in tow, still more with vacant-eyed youngsters), the wanderers, the crazies lashing out at the icy air, the wall-slouchers. He tried not to see the broken windows, the badges of wood and chain-link and tin the buildings wore, their shining surfaces failing to shine much in the white-cold late afternoon light. Newspapers yellowed to the color of dying, jaundiced skin, fluttered a few inches above the ground, too bedraggled to take full, free flight.

David tried to keep moving—until the yellow light turned to red too late for him to spurt past the yellow line, and David found himself caught. The heater puffed warm air at him, air that gradually took on a different, worsening smell as the light stubbornly stayed red. David tried to breathe through his mouth, but that only made his mouth taste terrible, like yeasty old underwear and sweaty rags and rancid bacon and ear wax and dried dung and old sour tom-cat-pee and pungent vegetation. With an undercurrent of freshly cooked oatmeal.…And still the red light shone, misting slightly in the cold, stretching seconds of agony into minutes of agony. Thinking that a watched light never turned green, David cast his eyes off to his left, looking up, up, up—and then, he saw the window.

At least twelve stories up in a fourteen story building. A grey-tan structure, most windows jagged teeth surrounding maws of black within, save for the window near the right hand side of the building’s front façade. The one almost near the flat roof, the one with the old air conditioner jammed into the glassless space.

Rags, mostly red plaid against dingy white, were stuffed around the gold-tan air conditioner. A few raw tatters flapped listlessly in the wind, overhanging the window sill outside. What space there was above the air conditioner was filled with some jagged glass, taped in place. And then David saw the swipe of black against the top of the window, a glancing shadow with only the mere suggestion of a form. But the black shape was cat-sized.

And only as the light finally flickered back to green did David’s mind admit to him, Someone lives up there. In the emptiness, the filth, the cold…and it could, it just might now, have only three legs. And its owner could be layered with Peter Pan collared blouses and rags, and crowned with a turban of old sweaters. For perhaps want had found trust and formed a home, not just a dwelling, a squatter’s nest, but a home.

David found a parking space between a rusted-out Saab and a muffler-less Ford of uncertain make or year. His mind a dizzying rush (paw gone below the hock eyes like oily marbles Dadfiredfour times wonder who got blasted twice rancid bacon smell on her on her clothes “joy of my life always” it waited for me in the alley), David did remember to lock the rented car—­the hub caps were on their own—before hurrying up to the boarded-up front door of the building. Tin under the wood, and a thick chain. With a padlock. No go.

Thankful that the biting cold made the gangs of kids and roaming adults sluggish, huddled near warm steam gratings, David hurried around to the back of the building, squeezing through a bricked alley. The very bricks smelled bad, as if something reeking and maybe even oozing had rubbed against them frequently. And the stubbled, broken cement between the narrow, hovering walls was dotted with mounds of pale, runny cat excrement…and one pile still steamed, pure fragile white steam.

There was no opening to the back of the building, but there was a long fire escape, rusted herringbone stitches against the crumbling fabric of the structure. As he uncertainly ascended the metal ladder, feeling like a dizzy kid climbing his first big slide in the park, David wondered if the street woman had had enough of the bus terminal. Either that, or her stink and her strangeness had long ago become too much for even her fellow cocoon-sitters to tolerate. As the rusty railing left chalky, gritty stains on his soft-gloved hands, David figured that the cat (it can’t be that cat, not all the way over here) wouldn’t mind a little stink for company, not with its sewer breath and crap-encrusted paws.

The fire escape slats were surprisingly sturdy, the flat rungs clean from frequent use, no doubt. That odor (that horribly familiar odor) clung to the very metal, lingering in the cool air, enough to make his eyes water…but he did remember not to go opening his mouth again. As it was, he’d had to spit a few times over his shoulder to rid his tongue and teeth of the fulsome aftertaste of the car’s forced air heat. And as he climbed, pausing at each landing, he ticked off the floor numbers on his cold­-stiffened fingers. Starting again on his left hand after the tenth finger was ticked off, his steps grew slow, faltering. Suppose he walked into a crack house? Suppose someone killed him? But the worst “suppose” of all stopped him in between the eleventh and twelfth floors, where he stood vulnerable and unshielded on the open metal steps. Suppose the woman and the cat really were there…waiting?

Just what he’d do under such a circumstance was something he’d only know by finding out—and then just doing it, period.

When he reached the twelfth floor, the window nearest the fire escape was broken out, all shards of glass carefully removed, no doubt to facilitate easy entrances and exits by someone perhaps swaddled in layer upon layer of filth-stiffened clothes.

As David climbed into the building through the window, his nostrils quivered when his face brushed too close to the wood frame, for her smell had rubbed into the very wood, in the places where the paint was only a colorless memory. But the smell did keep his mind off the fact that he was doing gyrations up over a hundred feet in the air, in Harlem, with only a metal staircase between him and the filth littered alley below. At least no one was in the alley; David could only imagine how idiotic he looked, breaking into a building while wearing a Yuppie uniform of L. L. Bean slacks and down-filled jacket.

In the hallway of the twelfth floor, David had to think hard, trying to remember which windows, and how far in it was, for all the doors in the twilight-dark building (as seen from the street), and it wasn’t at the end or the middle but somewhere in between—and as if in answer to his mental question, the third door from the end on his left opened slowly, casting an elongated triangle of light into the hallway. Pale light, weak and wavery as if coming from a flashlight with bad batteries. And the pervasive smell grew stronger, more nose-stinging…yet comforting, too, in the way the odor of food soothed hunger pangs when he was a little boy. It was the street person from 49th and Ninth, not a crack dealer or a pimp with a messed-up brain and a sharp knife—

—at least that was what David hoped, as he walked forward slowly, cautiously. The yellow light was further marred by a strange shape, also elongated, but with a thin upright tail. The appearance of the dark shape was followed with a yowl, not of anger but of feline recognition. Soon the thing was rubbing on his legs, leaving rank hairs on his corduroy slacks, but oddly, David didn’t care any more, just didn’t give a tinker’s damn about getting fur on his pants or cat-paw stink on his jacket. He scooped up the lumpy animal into his arms, hoisted the purring beast on his shoulder (its broken whiskers tickled his ear) and then tentatively knocked on the inside of the open door before entering the street woman’s lair.

The bad smell was compounded by expelled human gas, fresh cat pee and some sort of found food that was going bad. Weak dirty light came through the mended top part of the window, and the grill of the air conditioner was a snaggle-toothed dead mouth, jutting into the room where she had made herself a nest: old crumbling newspaper, shed rags, limp vegetable things of uncertain variety, old sneakers, rusty bike parts and green-fuzzed cans.… And she sat in the middle of that nest turbaned and dreadlocked head even bigger than he remembered it, the furrows near her mouth even deeper and blacker than he remembered them to be.

But her eyes…even without the feeble rays of the battered flashlight stuck in one clawed hand, they would have been beautiful. Still oily, still hooded, but…wondrous to David nonetheless. For sheer wanting, sheer hungering need had to be nothing less than beautiful, transcendent, even.

The cat draped itself on David’s shoulder, purring, kneading his flesh through the padded fabric. And although its eyes were flecked with clumps of brownish pigment, half-blinding it, still the trust and love shone through, spreading sun-like warmth across David’s cheek. His skin felt almost warm, so dazzling was the trust in the cat’s green eyes. It blinked kitty-kisses at him, just like the cats used to do back home. The trust it held in him was that complete…as the woman raised her hands toward David, beckoning him with her hooded oily eyes.

And without thought, hesitation or trepidation, David moved closer to her, the street person whose odor all but caused the air to shimmer and David’s nostrils to collapse in on themselves. When he was less than eight inches from her, close enough to feel her body heat, David knelt down, let those hungering talon­-like hands with the horny black rimmed nails rake lovingly against his jacket sleeve, down, down to his gloved hand, and exposed wrist. He did not flinch when she rested her flesh against his, basking in whatever it was she was leeching from him, his being…but he did speak. Softly, so as not to shatter the radiance of this room, this place, this moment. David whispered:

“Grandma, I am so sorry…and girls, Missy, Bandito, Terri, I am so sorry…but what could I do? It was so hard to love—but the hardness didn’t make it not so, do you see what I mean? But it wasn’t hard for you all to love and trust, even when the craziness made it hard to know what was within you even when I wasn’t worth the effort. Even when it was hard for me I ran and ran from where I was, from what I was, but it didn’t stop me from hungering, from needing what I couldn’t take or ask for…but look. Here I am. I know sorry doesn’t make it right, can’t change what was wrong…but… well the feeling was there, somewhere, in me. There, y’know?”

And then the smells and the sorry sights blurred away from him, runny and watery as rain, as strange fluid squirted on a windshield. And later, he remembered the touch, on his sleeve, his face, the back of his neck, but the fingers and paws were all wrong—yet right, too. The fingers were too much like those he’d remembered from the time before his Gramma went crazy­-mean. And the small paws were too soft, too numerous by far.…But not wanting to shatter the precious thing given to him after long years of needing, of hurting, of hungering for forgiveness, he kept his eyes shut as he backed out of that stinking place, only opening them when he reached the hallway.

Then he ran, not daring to look back, to confirm, until he reached the window exit and barreled down the ringing metal steps, his breath a faint hazy plume behind him. When he reached the dark alley, he paused for a ragged breath; then, when his breathing was normal, he made his way back to the street where he saw in the frosty glare of the streetlight that his hub-caps, antenna and windshield wipers were gone, but the sight of his denuded car only made David smile. He hoped that whatever money whoever took the parts had gotten would go a little way toward stopping whatever hunger had driven the person to thievery in the first place. It didn’t matter to him which altar the person prayed before, seeking release from their private hunger and want.

It didn’t matter to David at all, as he climbed behind the wheel, and headed for his apartment, not even stopping on the way home for something to eat. He was quite full, for the first and final time.