M ilgrim dreamed he was naked in Brown’s room, while Brown lay sleeping.
It wasn’t ordinary nakedness, because it involved an occult aura of preternaturally intense awareness, as though the wearer were a vampire in an Anne Rice novel, or a novice cocaine user.
Brown lay beneath New Yorker sheets and one of those beige hotel blankets that sandwich a sheet of plastic foam between layers of polyester moleskin. Milgrim regarded him with something he recognized as akin to pity. Brown’s lips were parted slightly, the upper one quivering slightly with each exhalation.
There was no light at all, in Brown’s room, save for the red standby-indicator on the television, but Milgrim’s aural dream-self saw, in some other frequency entirely, the furniture and objects in Brown’s room presented like screens of carry-on baggage. He saw Brown’s pistol and flashlight, beneath Brown’s pillow, and a rounded rectangle, beside them, that he took to be a large folding knife (no doubt in that same greenish gray). There was something vaguely touching about Brown sleeping with these favorite things so close to hand, something childlike.
He found that he was imagining himself as Tom Sawyer, Brown as Huckleberry Finn, and these rooms in the New Yorker, and in the other hotels they kept returning to, as their raft, with Manhattan as their chilly Mississippi, down which they floated—when he suddenly noticed that there, on the particleboard cabinet, identical to his own, that housed Brown’s television, was a bag. A paper bag. A crumpled paper bag. Within it, revealed by the potent aural vision that was his in his nakedness, and which perhaps made all other things naked, were the unmistakable oblongs of pharmaceutical bubble-packs.
Lots of them. Really quite a number of them. Quite a supply, really. Perhaps a week’s worth, if one were frugal.
He craned forward, as if drawn by magnets embedded in the bones of his face—and found himself, having experienced no transition whatever, back in his own airless, overheated room, no longer supernaturally naked but clad in a pair of black cotton briefs that could have done with changing, and with his nose and forehead pressed against the cold glass of his window. Fourteen floors below, Eighth Avenue was virtually empty, save for the yellow rectangle of a passing cab.
His cheeks were wet with tears. He touched them, shivering.