Scareship_Issue8

with as many curses as you please.” Anybody. A kind word? He’d
wait a year for that, if it brought a harsh word now.
The day itself is warm and breezy, with a scattered froth of
unthreatening clouds passing lazily above. It is a gift from a God
he stopped believing in years ago, who should be torn down and
burned for what has been done here. What has been allowed. The
gulls laugh at their own jokes, the river pours coins toward the sea.
A gift, and nobody to share it.
The FDR Drive is littered with cars in scattered tangles or
draped over rails. Up by 96th Street, two colliding cars had
exploded, and the stink of gasoline, rubber and plastic is still there
like a ghost. It’s a pungent stench, but somehow comforting, as if
the cars held something of the people more than the houses and
apartments he has passed. This isn’t just human presence, it is
human activity, places to go, people. Tommy frowns and curses,
the beauty of the day as insubstantial as vapors and smoke.
Part of his mind is puzzled. He hasn’t cared about people
before. A few persons, yes, but people? Now the void of the city is
a void in his chest. It is a bitter growth.
Up along the river, shouting at the high-rises and brownstones
of Harlem. He detours into the streets and finds a 24-hour deli with
water, and more coffee! He takes one sip and swallows it with a
grimace, realizing a second later that he could have spat it out, no
witnesses, but he’s glad he didn’t, he’s not sure why but he’s glad.
He tucks small packages of cookies into his pockets, and
makes a tea with hot water—damn that’s better. He has no idea
how to run the meat slicer, but he finds a plastic knife and hacks
some thick wedges of roast beef, and stuffs them in a split kaiser
roll, following that with a few slices of provolone, and spooning
some potato salad on top. He writes his name and phone numbers
on the back of a menu, and puts that under a sugar dispenser in the
middle of the counter up front. Tomorrow, he can go back to the
office, and photocopy hundreds of sheets of this information.
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