RL's Dream

Zero

Pain moved up the old man’s hipbone like a plow breaking through hard sod. So much pain he could barely think. He shit himself on the long walk from the shelter toward home and fell in the street more than once. No one moved to help him — passersby steered a wide path to get away from the smell. Soupspoon Wise staggered up Bowery toward the East Village imagining being home again, away from the dormitory of disheveled men. Those gibbering and farting men calling out to people who weren’t there.

Three blocks from the apartment he felt a crack come into the bone. A blood-black splinter that went so deep he cried out, “Oh, no!” His diaphragm trembled and the choked sobs came out in a broken whine. He went down on his left knee while trying to keep the right leg straight. He could have died on that frozen street, counting out the time between sighs — fingers drumming on his chest.

Music thrummed in his body; the rattles of death in the tortured song of his breathing. Soon he was moving his head to this rhythm; even the crackling pain in his hip pulsed in time. He got back to his feet and hobbled to the new music, reeling and rocking on a river of unsteady feet. Maybe he’d die before he got there. But he’d die singing and making music out of life the way real men did it a long time ago.

In the hot apartment the pipes still clanged and hissed steam even though it was spring. Soupspoon fell into the bed — soiling it. Even the feather mattress hurt him. Pain pulsed in his ears and leg until he longed to turn it off. His body shook with every heartbeat. He counted the beats until he forgot the pain and then, when the ache came back, he counted again. Soupspoon got to know his body weight so well that he could make minute shifts to keep the pain at bay. But he couldn’t make it to the toilet and he couldn’t sleep. Instead he conjured up a young man with short nappy hair and one dead eye. The young man didn’t care about Soupspoon’s plight but he didn’t mind stopping awhile to visit. He wore homemade overalls and no shirt, and smirked like a fox with a belly full of chickens.

In the afternoon the old man crawled from the fouled mattress. In the kitchen he clung to the sink and sucked water from the tarnished spigot the way he’d done at the well when he was a boy in Cougar Bluff, Mississippi. Then he pulled a five-pound sack of flour from the cabinet, letting it fall heavily to the drainboard. While eating the raw powder he considered going into the hall and lying on the cold concrete out there until someone took pity and killed him — or saved him.

Leaning over the kitchen sink, using his arms to keep his weight, he felt less pain. He let the water run until it had the cold bite of a deep well in winter, holding his hands under the flow until they were numb.

There were rat turds on the sink.

“Po’ rat gotta eat too. They’s more than enough flour for the both of us.”

When the doorknob jiggled he didn’t notice. Even when the door came open he wasn’t surprised. He turned, though, to see who it was. That’s when he realized that his arms had gone numb and he fell hard to the kitchen floor.