Ten thousand living things had made a home of the brownstone on West 161st Street. Jumping spiders, silverfish, German brown cockroaches, termites, fleas, mice, rats, lice. And two human beings removed from their place in society by unfortunate events.
There was another in the brownstone, too. She had been displaced and destroyed by humans in times past, and then had been remade the same as she had been, much the way the earth remakes a carrot, or a head of lettuce, or a burying beetle.
The young homeless woman said that she was depressed, and her husband said that he was depressed, too, but who could blame them? Christ, here they were, in a shitty abandoned brownstone in a shitty part of New York City, on a shitty day when they couldn't go anywhere even if they had wanted to, and it was goddamned cold, besides, and they were both goddamned hungry—Gee, wouldn't a steak be nice . . .
"Enough!" cried the young woman.
"Sorry," said her husband.
"Enough," she said again, more quietly, with resolve. "I have had enough. I'm not depressed, or sad, or any of that shit. I have just had enough!"
"I understand."
"I don't want you to understand. I don't want anything. I don't want a steak, or a TV, or a fucking bus ticket to South Carolina, or any of that stuff. I don't even want a bed to sleep in, or a nice pillow, or a fucking pet hamster! None of that stuff means anything because you lose it all anyway. It all gets taken away from you. You try to hold on to it, and it all gets taken away. Jesus!—I have just had enough!"
"I know. I'm sorry."
She didn't look at him. It would have been difficult for him to see her if she had looked at him, because the light had grown very dim in the room. Its two tall windows had been boarded over with plywood, and the only light was a rectangle of soft, blue-green phosphorescence at the doorway; this was light that the storm had let in from the city around them, and it was so dim that they could not see it unless they looked obliquely at it, the same way they might have seen a very dim star on a clear night.
"I don't like you feeling this way," the young man said.
His wife said nothing.
"Things will work out, you'll see. We'll just stay here tonight, and tomorrow we'll go and . . . hell, we can get some day jobs, and we can stay here for a couple of nights, if we need to, as long as we're trying to save money—"
"Shut up!" whispered the young woman.
"Yeah, sure, I'm sorry," said the young man.
He put his arm around her. She did not protest this, nor did she lean into him for warmth, or affection. He said, "Don't give up."
But she said nothing.
The other creatures sharing the brownstone with them were not interested in much besides warmth, except for the termites who, en masse, generated their own heat within the wood in the house as they made an extended meal of the place. The cockroaches congregated in another part of the building, where there was plenty to eat, and the jumping spiders—there were four of them in the house—spent their time huddled in corners, legs tight around their little dark bodies, their senses alert to the errant fly or spider mite or flea. It was a brutal existence for everything in the house. Lives ended and lives began cyclically, just as in the universe beyond the house, in the earth itself, in the plant life that sprang from the earth, in the insects that fed on the plant life, and in the birds that fed on the insects.
"Listen," said the young man. "I know you don't want me to talk to you. I know you want me to shut up. But is it all right if I just . . . talk? You don't have to listen."
His wife said nothing. She was tense under his arm. He could feel her breathing, though the noises of the storm covered the sounds of her breathing.
"Okay," said the young man. "I'll talk." And he did. He kept his eyes on her and he talked to her for a long, long while. He told her about how he was going to get them out of their crummy situation. He told her that he was going to go back to college and get a teaching certificate and get a job at a high school. He told her that he'd teach shop, or gym, and then he'd get tenured, so they couldn't fire him, which would mean that their future would be pretty secure, and they could have kids.
And when he stopped talking for a moment, and looked away from her—his eyes had adjusted to the dim light and he could see her profile; it was gray against the darkness—and looked at the blue-green phosphorescence that was the doorway, he saw that someone was standing in it, hunched over, hands on the doorjamb, legs wide.
And he screamed.
Erthmun said, "I don't know." He closed his eyes, looked as if he were in pain.
The doctor said, "Mr. Erthmun, perhaps it's best if you sleep."
"I've been asleep, damnit!" He opened his eyes. He sighed, looked at the doctor. "I've been asleep," he repeated. "I don't need to sleep." He closed his eyes again, opened them, looked first at Patricia, then at the doctor. "What is this place?" he asked.
"You're in a hospital, Jack," Patricia told him. "You're suffering from hypothermia," the doctor said.
"Hypothermia," Erthmun echoed.
"You're going to be all right," Patricia told him. "You need to rest."
"What is this place?" he asked again.
"A hospital."
"Hospital," Erthmun echoed. "Hypothermia." He closed his eyes, opened them, stared at the ceiling. "I dreamed," he whispered, as if to no one in particular. "I never dream. But I dreamed."
"Mr. Erthmun, it was a nightmare," the doctor said. "But you're awake now."
"I don't have nightmares," Erthmun said. "I don't dream."
"We all dream," said the doctor.
"I don't know," said Erthmun, and his eyes were still on the ceiling.
"What don't you know, Jack?" Patricia asked. He said nothing.
"Jack?" she coaxed.
He said nothing.