CHAPTER 73

The name on his passport was Harvey Erickson, and it identified him as blind. He wore large sunglasses with heavily tinted and slightly mirrored lenses, a long copious overcoat, and equally copious facial hair. His teeth were bright and even, his hands gloved with fawn calfskin that relinquished their hold on his red-tipped white cane only when he was sitting.

He had passed the flight and subsequent train ride in almost complete stillness, ignoring flight attendants as if they were not there, speaking barely a dozen words in the last twenty-four hours, proffering tickets and identification when requested in silence. He sensed that people avoided him even with their eyes, but he liked his solitude so that was all to the good.

He didn’t like Japan with its strange smells and noises, but he tapped his way along the sidewalk, listening to the way the crosswalks sang their cheery electronic prompts anchored in old melodies, until he found his way to a cheap hotel in a corner of the town cluttered with bars, pool halls, and timbered yakitori houses. By nightfall the streets were quiet except where dubious women lured drunken, red-faced “salarymen” inside for the kinds of pleasures he would never experience.

That was okay too. He had other sources of amusement.

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror, minus the coat and gloves, and removed the heavy glasses with his long pale fingers, catching the way his irises contracted in the low but sudden light. Playing blind had been no great hardship, and as well as granting him a particular kind of anonymity, it had allowed him the darkness he preferred. He slid the wig from his bald skull and peeled away the beard, rubbing the spirit gum away as his familiar features took shape again. The cut across his scalp had closed, and most of the bruising had faded to a slightly metallic shadow.

Lastly he grimaced into the mirror, his lips pulled back from his teeth like a snarling dog, and dislodged the molded dentures, revealing the filed points of his own teeth beneath them. He flicked a pink, wet tongue and hissed at his reflection with something like pleasure.

Famine was back.