“Hey Grey Man, you lookin’ for some fun?”
“Grey Man, you got thirty bucks? You wanna blow job?”
“Girls, if Gris-Gris had thirty bucks, he’d have done drunk it by now.”
The women lounged against the bus shelter on the street corner. He knew their names from time spent sitting on the park bench to their right, beneath the sheltering shadows of untrimmed hedges. Sheila was from somewhere far to the north, a ten-year veteran of the street at twenty-five. May was in late adolescence, he guessed, with baby-fat lingering in her round face, round limbs. Carlotta, who called him Gris-Gris, was from Haiti. She was the only one who was afraid of him, though she hid it with her merciless tongue.
Every night, they would stand by the bus shelter (their “office,” they called it), clad in clothes so tight they outlined every curve, smoking cigarettes, chatting, and getting into the cars that slid in steady succession to a stop at the curb.
Rozokov didn’t acknowledge their taunts as he shuffled by. He never did. He suspected that there was some rough affection in them, some acknowledgement of the kinship of the lost. Or perhaps it only gave them some pleasure to flaunt themselves in front of someone to whom they could feel superior.
“You’d do it to Grey Man for ten bucks? Girl, are you crazy?” Sheila said, loud enough for him to hear. “It’d take thirty just to ignore the smell. And who knows when the last time he washed that thing.”
There was no denying the smell, he acknowledged with a smile he hid behind a bent head and a tangle of grey hair. The derelict from whom he’d stolen the clothing had not believed cleanliness was next to godliness, or had not aspired to godliness at all. The shabby pants, dirty shirt and grubby grey overcoat all reeked of sweat, urine and liquor. Much as the man had.
It had been Rozokov’s third night in the city. The first day he had spent in a sheltered drainage pipe in the ravine, the second in the dusty upper story of a garage backing one of the mansions that rimmed it. When he woke in the early evenings, he had carefully tried to recover the resources he had secreted away against his awakening. They were all gone—or completely inaccessible to him as he was now.
His bank accounts had long ago been reclaimed by the banks, the trusts he had so carefully constructed for his “descendants” now required at least three pieces of documentation as proof of his parentage and he had none of the basic papers this age seemed to demand. He did not even know who to contact to obtain forgeries, such as had so often served him in the past.
And each time he stepped into a bank, he could feel the traces of footsteps before him, could sense traps set up to be triggered by his attempts to reclaim the last remnants of his old life.
On the third night, confused and angry, he gave up. He retreated to the shadows of one of the landmarks he recognized, a great church that was not dwarfed by the monolithic glass towers that loomed around it, just as it had once reached heavenward over the more modest buildings at its feet. He tried to think.
In the asylum Ardeth’s stories had been, at first, a diversion, and then an affirmation that some life, some reason to endure, existed beyond the cruelty of Roias and the others. The world she described was both wondrous and recognizable. Despite the many strange and fantastic things she had told him, he had seen the seeds of war and technological development in his own day, had known that the pace of change had quickened over the span of his life. Such was the way of the world, he had thought. He would survive, just as he always did.
But when he was in it, in the heart of the vast city whose glow obliterated the stars, he found his certainty fading. The weight of the city’s towers hung over him, blotting out the moon.
Sometimes, in the midst of all the alien glass and steel, he would find some remnant of the world he had known. A carved stone façade of a building, a restored “historical site” that had been new before he began his long sleep, street names that made a mockery of their own familiarity by being set in lighted boxes, or followed by the cryptic glyphs of Chinese or Hindi.
But more often he could find no echoes of the old city in the noise of the new.
More than the buildings had changed. The streets thronged with people of every race and colour. He heard Greek and Italian shouted on street corners, sat on a park bench beside two old women who gossiped in a tongue whose accents made him ache for the lost Russia of his childhood. And there were languages he did not know, Chinese, Portuguese, Urdu, and the thick sing-song patois of the Caribbean.
But when he looked at the newspapers, he realized that for all that he saw on the street, the world had not altered that much—the faces of those who ruled this vast, polyglot city were white and male. As they always had been.
Here, as everywhere and everywhen, money meant power. Those who pursued him had money beyond his comprehension. Trapped in this world whose inner working still eluded him, he had no way to fight that. He could not flee to some other land; Ardeth had made that clear. And the shelter of the gothic buttresses of his past was illusory. There was no sanctuary here. Somehow he had to find a way to elude the traps set for him and conceal his nature from the world until he truly understood the way this new world worked, until he could find the weapons this new age could offer him.
He stared out at the small park that lay before the church, its salvation from the concrete that seemed to have been poured over every other blade of grass. Against the street-lights, the white eyes of the cars, he could see figures moving. Those on the sidewalk strode quickly, sure of their path through the night. The shadows in the park itself shuffled, seeking the shelter of tree-root beds or the bounty of wire garbage cans.
A dark shape lurched across his vision suddenly, exhaling alcohol and human stench as it stumbled into his alcove and leaned against the wall. “Fuck ’em, fucking assholes . . . that’s what I say . . . fuck ’em,” the man muttered, then seemed to see Rozokov for the first time. “Got a buck, mister,” he demanded, leaning forward to peer into the shadows.
“No.”
“Fuck you then. Got any booze?”
“No.”
“Fuck you then,” the man repeated, then slid down the wall to sit in a sprawl of dirty rags on the ground. “Need some booze,” he announced at last. “Need some goddamn booze.” The man’s hair was long and unkempt, his features lost beneath a matted beard. His gaunt face and wild eyes reminded Rozokov of the religious hermits of his old land, drunk and demented by God. He twitched his nose in automatic distaste as the man shifted and the night breeze delivered the odour of urine, liquor and despair.
The mad eyes moved to him again. “Got a buck, mister?” the man asked. Rozokov shook his head.
“Nobody’s got a fuckin’ buck. Nobody’s got a fuckin’ drink. Fuckers don’t even see . . .” the drunk muttered and his head slumped forward suddenly. He looked as if he were praying.
“Fuckers don’t even see. . . .” Rozokov whispered and the answer to his dilemma came to him. There were only two paths to anonymity—great wealth and great poverty. One was effectively blocked but the other lay before him, cloaked in the filth and miasma of alcoholism. “Friend,” he said quickly and the man snorted, head jerking, then blinked blearily at him.
“What? What ya want?”
“Do you want a drink?”
“Ya got one? Where ya got one?”
“Here. Come closer.” The drunk crawled deeper into the shadows, behind the rose bushes that sheltered them. Rozokov felt a stab of sorrow at his trusting desperation. The last two, the woman the first night, the man the second, had known nothing, remembered nothing when they woke in their ground-floor apartments. But this one—this one he could not spare, could not leave as a clue to his new identity.
“Where’s the booze?” the man demanded plaintively. Rozokov moved forward, caught the filthy hair in this hand, and lifted the man’s face up to his.
“Just look in my eyes. There is all the wine you want.”
When he had drunk, he stripped off the man’s filthy clothing and his own stolen attire. He could not help his shuddering as he pulled the greasy, tattered cloth over his body, and eased his feet into the rotting shoes. He bundled up his old clothes—the drunk had no use for them. He crawled from the bushes without a glance at the huddled figure in the sodden underwear.
He had made sure the man did not suffer; that was the only comfort he took. Once he might have told himself that it was a kinder fate than the wretched existence of the street, a sweeter death than a long, drunken dying, but he was too old for that now. There were few, living or undead, who welcomed the end of whatever life they had. He killed, could not help killing, but he could not delude himself that it was mercy—or justice. It was only survival.
That had been a month ago. Since that night, his existence had been reduced to the essentials—to finding a place to sleep each day, to finding sustenance each night, to finding something to occupy the long hours in between. Ardeth’s mention of abandoned houses had led him to a boarded-up warehouse and in its damp, earth-floored basement he found shelter from the sun. Sometimes, in the dark of midnight, he sat on the roof and counted the few stars that penetrated the clouds and the city’s glow.
The growing warmth of the summer nights kept the city’s homeless population on the streets and so solved his second dilemma. He was careful and wary, but his victims were often malnourished and ailing; there were deaths despite his caution, and rumours had begun to be muttered on the street corners and in the parks. They were easily dismissed, even by the street people themselves, but they made him even more wary, so that he lived with a constant edge of hunger rather than risk a mishap.
For the rest of the time, the hours between dusk and dawn, he hunted in garbage cans for newspapers and magazines, which he read word for word until the great gaps in his knowledge began to diminish. He stood outside electronics stores and pawn shops, watching the flickering images on the television sets in the windows. He visited the library in the early evening, poring through books on history and law and economics, seeking ways to penetrate the paper walls that kept him from his remaining resources. He researched the fire that had destroyed his resting place and discovered in the names the confirmation of his own suspicions about who was hunting him. He sat on park benches, invisible to the eyes of those who passed by, those who feared to look at him in case he asked for money and they’d have to decide between anger and guilt, and he watched.
He was watching tonight, in between careful perusal of The Wall Street Journal stock quotations. All business news had become part of his search for a way to deflect the pursuit set in motion by Ambrose Dale a hundred years earlier. He’d been fortunate to find a two-day-old edition in a garbage can on Richmond Street.
The street was quiet, except for the women’s customers sliding up to the curb to pay court and then just pay. Rozokov finished the paper and watched the commerce for a moment, trying to decide whether to move on. He was restless tonight, and feeling some measure of his age as a weight on his heart. In a month, he had spoken to another being only rarely, and too often they had been words of hypnotism to lure already clouded minds deeper into darkness. For the thousandth time, he wished that he had not had to send Ardeth away.
Hunger nudged at his consciousness and he rose to begin the shuffling search for sustenance. “Hey, Grey Man,” May called, “where ya going?”
“Grey Man’s got business. Places to go, people to see,” Sheila answered for him, as usual, and the trio dissolved into hoots of laughter.
Stirred by an overwhelming impulse, the sudden need to meet another’s eyes, to use the voice that rusted in his throat, he stopped and looked at them. “Yes, I have business. Unless you fair ladies wish me to stay. Perhaps I could take you up on your kind offers.”
“Jesus,” May breathed and he saw Carlotta’s hand move, unconsciously sketching a half-remembered symbol in the air between them. Warding off evil, he realized and shuddered, then hunched away from them, muttering his borrowed incantation curing the “fuckers.”
They will not remember, he told himself. They will cloud their minds with drugs and drink and think they imagined it. And it will never happen again.
Resolutely, his disguise in place again, he shambled down the first laneway, seeking the various hunting grounds he now knew well. From an open doorway at the end of the alley, he heard the steady thump of the cacophony this age called music. It signalled the presence of one of the city’s half-hidden nightclubs that seemed to bloom for a handful of nights on the back streets, then die as some other spot caught the attention of the fickle children who patronized such places.
He moved carefully then, staying in the shadows. The young moved in packs, and the boys could be dangerous in their alcoholic recklessness. Some nights they seemed to look for prey, and the old, shambling men who crouched in the alleys made suitable targets. He did not fear them but feared the risks he would have to take to defend himself.
There was a commotion at the other end of the alley and a group of laughing, shouting revellers appeared beneath the streetlight. He froze, invisible in immobility, and waited for them to move on. There was a dispute among them, some pointing down towards the door to the club, others clamouring for some other diversion. Finally, the schism deepened and half of them staggered off into the night. Rozokov waited impatiently for the three remaining to pass through the alley. Two were young oriental men, razored hair like black cockscombs over faces of almost feminine beauty. The third . . . his breath caught, and he wondered how he could have missed the glow of her presence. Once he recognized it, it blazed like the neon that coloured the city nights.
She looked completely different than the pale, haggard woman he had known in the asylum. Inky hair framed a pale face dominated by the red slash of lips. Her dress was short and black, revealing long legs in dark stockings, white arms that looked shockingly naked. Only her eyes, when she stopped and faced the darkness, were the same, incongruously soft among all her sharp angles and uncompromising colours.
She could not see him, her senses not mature enough to find him when he cloaked himself from her, but she stared uneasily down the alley until the young men tugged on her arm and pulled her into the dark mouth of the club.
Rozokov let out his breath slowly. Hide, he had told her. Change yourself so their eyes will not find you. And she had, with an efficiency that was almost fearsome. His heart ached for her suddenly, loneliness and sympathy combined. He knew the terrors of youth in this state, the desperate groping for some guide, when the only models were the one who had killed you and the accumulated misconceptions of the dark and fearful folklore. And you abandoned her to that struggle, his conscience reminded him.
He could force his way into the dark confines of the club, or linger amid the garbage bins to catch her as she left. But then the memory of Roias returned, along with the thought of what he could be forced to do if she were held hostage, and so he shuffled on, melting back into the skin of his disguise with more ease than he cared to consider.