In turn the sense of guilt over something he had only briefly entertained the thought of doing made him wonder just what he must look like to the residents of this little town … A young man with short hair, swarthy skin, delicate features, clean-shaven—he had managed to get into the bathroom for that long this morning—wearing blue jeans, a polo shirt, a navy windbreaker, construction boots that still looked new … carrying an overnight bag … nothing remarkable about his appearance, he concluded with satisfaction … except for one thing!—there was not another soul walking along these streets—

  All at once, as if it had been caused by his own premonition, he could hear a car slowing down behind him. Then he could hear its hushed idle as it coasted closer. Didn’t dare look around. Now, in his peripheral vision, he could tell that it was right beside him. Which was the cooler thing to do, ignore it or turn toward it?—since the driver would know you were bound to have noticed the car by now? Decide!

  He turned his head. Sure enough, a police cruiser, with a gold badge and the legend CHAMBLEE TOWN POLICE painted on a white door. The policeman, thickset, wearing aviator-style glasses, was smiling at him … just that, smiling at him and letting the cruiser drift forward at the pace of Conrad’s walk. Conrad was already ransacking his memory for the answer to the inevitable question—Why? At the same time, another decision: which was cooler, to maintain eye contact and stop, maintain eye contact and keep walking, or break eye contact and keep walking? Decide!

  He nodded with a neutral and, he devoutly hoped, cool expression on his face, turned his head, and kept walking. The cruiser kept drifting along beside him. What now? Ignore him or not? O Zeus! Decide—

  “Where you heading?” Whirr ya headin’?

  Conrad turned his head and then stopped. The man was still smiling. Conrad fought the urge to swallow and to blink. A scrap of memory—caught it!

  “I’m looking for a shop, an antiques shop, called Hello Again.”

  The policeman, his big neck straining against his shirt collar, kept staring at him and smiling. Conrad fought to keep control of his eyes, his mouth, and his throat. It was precisely now that the man was deciding whether to check him out or let him go. Finally:

  “Up there at the next street?” Up’irr’t the next street? “You take a right?” You take a rat? “And it’s two blocks from there, that way.” In it’s two blocks fum’irr, ’at way. He pointed in that direction.

  Then he dropped the smile and said, “Have a nice day,” and … winked and pulled away in the cruiser. Winked—as if to say, “I don’t believe a word of it, but I’m gonna let you be.”

  Conrad’s heart was pounding. He figured he’d better head, for real, to Hello Again, a shop he’d had a single stray glimpse of the first day after he arrived.

  The shop was in an exhausted old wooden frame house on a corner. Part of the original clapboard façade had been cut away and framed to create a show window. The merchandise was above the level of a flea market, but not a great deal. The prize item was an old J. C. Higgins balloon-tire bicycle, unfortunately a bit rusty.

  Inside, in a room that must not have been painted in a quarter century, were an old man and an old woman. Both were morbidly fat. The old man was sitting at a desk in the rear reading a pamphlet. As he checked out Conrad, he opened his mouth and stuck his big bulbous tongue into a stretch of gums where there was a row of teeth missing. His pants, an old pair of navy serge pants now shiny at the knee and on his fat thighs, were zipped up as far as they would go, which was where his underbelly began bulging out in a thoroughly irreducible way. The old woman, who was standing in the front, wore a capacious shift, apparently homemade, with no sleeves, so that the pitted gobs, the garlands, of fat that jiggled on the backs of her arms were exposed. Her skin was a livid white, and her hair was random wisps of gray, but on her face were red splotches that spread or grew smaller according to how much she exerted herself. All around, on shelves, in freestanding glass cases on the floor was … stuff … pieces of tarnished silverware, most of them knives and spoons, wrinkled Victorian Christmas cards, a partial set of teacups with handles in the shape of nymphs doing back bends, teetering stacks of old National Geographics … inkstands with the silver plate wearing off … a pair of women’s rubber galoshes with scalloped edges where one side closed and snapped over the other … a moth-eaten fox stole in which the fox seemed to be holding his tail in his mouth … In short, junk. Little as Conrad knew about antiques, the thought of trying to sift for the precious pieces possibly hidden among these heaps was too demoralizing to be attempted. The room had a sharp, slightly sour smell that reminded Conrad of something familiar, but he couldn’t name it. A sooty gray-green wallpaper was torn away at the corners, revealing a veritable archaeological dig of various wallpapers underneath.

  The old woman sized up Conrad, then cocked her head in a slightly challenging way, and said, “Help you, young man?” Then she resumed chewing her cud.

  “I was wondering about the bicycle in the window,” said Conrad.

  “That old J. C. Higgins?” she said. “Pretty thing.”

  “I was wondering how much it is,” said Conrad.

  “One hundred dollars,” she said. “Got good tires, too.” Got good tars, too. “You can ride it right outta here.”

  There was a lump in her cheek that she kept moving around with her tongue. Then she took a McDonald’s paper cup out from behind a lamp with four glass Ionic columns as a base, held it up to her face so that it covered her mouth, and spat into it. Chewing tobacco.

  Conrad shook his head. “Can’t afford that much. I need a way to get around, but—” Rather than try to finish the sentence, he shook his head some more.

  She said, “How much can you afford, son?”

  The old man made a hawking sound in his throat. Conrad looked about; the old man also had a McDonald’s cup over his mouth. Then he put that one down behind a framed sepia-tone picture of a baseball player named Cecil Travis and picked up another one and tilted it back to his lips. The sweet smell of brown whiskey, bourbon or rye, spread through the room.

  It was part of an even ranker odor, which was the odor of poverty. As his eyes got used to the gloom of the place, he noticed a potbellied stove obscured by the great bulk of the old man. An old-fashioned stovepipe rose from the stove and curved into the wall. That no doubt accounted for the sharp, sour smell: coal fumes.

  “I don’t exactly know,” said Conrad, answering the old woman. Somehow—he couldn’t have accounted for why—he trusted her. “I need a way to get around, but I also need a place to stay.”

  The old woman glanced at the old man and then said, “What kinda place you want?”

  “A room somewhere, I guess,” said Conrad. “I can’t afford much.”

  “Where you staying now?” she asked.

  “With some friends over near the highway,” said Conrad. “But they don’t have enough room.”

  “Over’n Chambodia?” said the old man with a chortle.

  “I don’t know,” said Conrad, not wanting to get onto that topic. “I think they said it was Chamblee.”

  “Huh,” said the old man, “that’s what we used to call it.”

  “We’ve lived in this house for four generations,” said the woman. “Us Mungers I’m talking about. Our granddaddy, Brother’n’mine”—she nodded in the direction of the old man—“fought in the Civil War. He wasn’t a drummer boy, either. He was in the infantry, started out as a private, fought at Chickamauga, Atlanta, Jonesboro—finally got wounded at Jonesboro. He was a major by then. Battlefield promotions. Our mother went to Agnes Scott College; for two years.”

  Conrad could think of no adequate response to these revelations. “Ummmmm,” he said, nodding his head as if in pleasant surprise.

  “I’ll be switched if I know how this town suddenly went Oriental,” said the woman.

  “You know darn well, Sister,” said Brother. “It’s’at chicken plant in Knowlton. Won’t no white man work there and no black man, either, these days. So they wants the Orientals, but they don’t want’em living in Knowlton, so they park’em in Chamblee and Doraville.”

  “Well, to tell the truth, that’s another thing,” said Conrad. “I need a job, too. What about the chicken plant?”

  “Naw, naw, naw,” said Brother, who always massaged the toothless part of his gums with his tongue before he spoke. “The smell’ll finish you off all by itself.”

  “What smell?”

  “The smell of thousands of chickens—and we’re talking about thousands—the smell of thousands of chickens with their intestines hanging out.”

  “You go to church?” said Sister.

  Conrad hesitated. He knew from the very question itself that the proper answer was yes. So he took a chance. “I go to the Church of Zeus.”

  “Church of Zeus?” said Sister. “That’s a new one on me.”

  “You sure it ain’t the Church of the Zion Crossroads?” said Brother.

  “No, it’s Zeus,” said Conrad. “Started up about the time of Nero.”

  “Where you gon’ find one around here?” said Sister.

  “That’s the problem,” said Conrad, “not many of’em anywhere.”

  “Sister’n’me’s Methodists,” said Brother. “Our mama and papa were UB’s, but we’re Methodists.”

  “UB’s?” asked Conrad.

  “United Brethren,” said Brother, “but Sister’n’me’s Methodists. The only thing I don’t like about the Methodist Church is the hymns. John Wesley wrote half uv’em, and he never had the knack for it, if you ask me. The Episcopalians got the hymns. I’ll give’em’at much.” He burst into song:

  “Lord God of hosts,

  Be with us yet,

  Lest we forget,

  Lest we for-get,

  Forrrrr-gettttttt …”

  He had a surprisingly good tenor voice, which ranged over two octaves in those few lines. “What kind of hymns your Church of Zeus got?”

  “Not much,” said Conrad.

  “Well, it’s like I say. When it comes to your hymns, the Episcopalians are the beatin’est.” He burst into song once more:

  “A mighty fortress is our God,

  A bulwark never failing.

  Our helper he amid the flood,

  O’er mortal ills prevailing.”

  Then he said, “That’s another thing. If you’re in the Episcopal Church, they call you Episcopalians. If you’re in the Methodist Church, they call you a Methodist. Whatta they call you if you’re in the Church of Zeus? A Zeusian?”

  “No, a Stoic,” said Conrad.

  “A Stoic?”

  “Yeah. People tend to think of Stoics as people who are long-suffering and don’t complain. But it’s a whole religion.”

  “Don’t sound Christian,” said Brother.

  “It’s pre-Christian,” said Conrad. “The Stoics influenced the early Christians.”

  “Unh-hunh.” Brother gave Conrad a searching gaze. “What kinda work you done before?”

  “Trucker’s helper, warehouse man, construction—but I don’t have a trade. I’ll do anything, though.”

  “Truck loading—you don’t look the type,” said Brother. “Let me see your hands.”

  Conrad spread his fingers wide and offered his hands for inspection, palm-first.

  “I take it back,” said Brother. “Sister, look at—what’s your name anyway?”

  “Connie,” said Conrad. “Connie DeCasi.”

  “Well, thank the Lord for that,” said Sister. “A young man who volunteers his last name! All these kids today, they only have first names. Makes you think they’re drug dealers. Well, getting back to what we were saying—By the way, where’re your folks?”

  Conrad hesitated. “They’re both dead.”

  “Where was you brought up?” said Sister.

  “All over the place. Macon most recently.”

  “Where’d you live in Macon?”

  Luckily he remembered the address on his fake driver’s license. “Twenty-seven hundred block of Cypress.”

  “Don’t know it,” said Brother.

  “Getting back to what we were saying,” said Sister. “You say you need a room, eh?”

  “I sure do,” said Conrad.

  Sister looked toward Brother and must have gotten a sign of approval, because she said, “Well, we have a room here we rent out sometimes. It’s up on the third floor.”

  “How much is it?” asked Conrad.

  “Seventy-five dollars,” said Sister.

  “A week?”

  “No, a month. We like the rent in advance.”

  Sister led Conrad up a gloomy staircase, which had stacks of Atlantic Monthlys from God knew back when on every step, next to the wall. On the second floor Conrad got a glimpse of two dismal bedrooms heaped so full of books, magazines, and bric-a-brac, the only part you could see of their floors, which were linoleum, was the pathways they had cleared from the doorways to the beds. In a corner of the hallway was a small bathroom with an old soapstone basin.

  By the time Sister headed up the stairway to the third floor, she was breathing loudly. She had a way of moving from step to step by sidling her bulk this way and that. “Stairs in ’is house … gon’ finish me off … ’reckly …”

  The third floor was underneath the eaves. There were several small rooms with dormer windows, but they were so chockablock with … stuff … they looked impenetrable. Such light as there was in the tiny hallway came from a bulb screwed into the ceiling with a disintegrating parchment shade clipped to it upside down. Sister led Conrad to a doorway. A narrow dormer window, bereft of curtain or shade, admitted a shaft of light into the room within. In this one the floor was not absolutely choked with Sister’n’Brother Munger’s Hello Again collection, merely heavily littered. In a corner beneath an eave was a narrow bed, the narrowest bed Conrad had ever seen, much narrower than an ordinary twin-size, with an old painted metal bedstead and some sort of ornately handworked but dusty and yellowish-white counterpane. Half the counterpane was covered with ceramic lamp bases lying on their sides.

  “Things sorta need puttin’ away in here,” said Sister, panting hard from the climb, “but that’s a good old bed, and nobody’s made a matelassé counterpane like that one right there in a hundred years.” A hunnut years. “Gettin’ hot out already.” She swept a perilously hanging droplet of sweat from the tip of her nose with the back of one hand and the sweat of her brow with the back of the other one.

  The little room was stifling, and the eaves were pressing down from both sides. But something told Conrad this was about as good as an exhausted unemployed escaped convict was going to be able to get on short notice for $75 a month. And besides—although this yearning he couldn’t have put into words—here he would have … fellow humans to talk to! … even if it was only this pair of old pack rats. Eccentric they were, garrulous they were, inert they were, tobacco chewers they were, and McDonald’s cup spitters, but they seemed to have good hearts. He had already lived in a place where everyone was young and bursting with energy to burn and every heart was malevolent. It was called Santa Rita.

  After completing his cash transaction with Sister, Conrad set about the task of “puttin’ away.” Even though it consisted of nothing more than arranging all the sad old rubbish in orderly ranks beneath the eave opposite the bed, it took him more than three hours. Then he took off his boots and lay down on the dusty, yellowing old matelassé counterpane and closed his eyes and listened to his heartbeat and sweated and congratulated himself. A bed of his own!—for the next thirty days! O Zeus!

  A bed of his own; and the grand sum of $197 left in his jeans.

  Day 2. No more Demerol. No more immersion in the mindless sea of narcosis, in the hemisphere of Whatever. Charlie was an enormous aching knee with attachments: his upper and lower right leg, his torso, his other leg, his arms, neck, his tormented head, and his bladder, which required him to undergo the indignity of a bedpan.

  As armor against such insults to his status, all of which proceeded from the hospital patient’s role as a frightened organism upon which superior beings practiced their medical arts, Charlie insisted on wearing a brilliant blue Thai silk robe with white Paisley designs upon it, as if it were a royal blue that would strike the hearts of one and all with fear of the king. In fact, regiphobia, if any, didn’t seem to deter his keepers for a second. Emmo Nuchols kept coming by and treating Charlie, who was twenty years his senior, as if he, Emmo, were a parent who, while patient and forbearing, would be obeyed. Specifically, he ordered him to obey his physical therapist, a hawk-faced woman who refused to be charmed or amused. She compelled him to do all sorts of painful things with his knee, even to the point of making him get out of bed and support his weight with his throbbing knee with only an aluminum walker to help him support his weight. The walker clanked and rattled in its aluminum joints with every tiny step he took. By the time he got back in bed, he would be panting like a dog.

  He felt deceived. Emmo had always described the operation as if it were a piece of carpentry. All the bones and cartilage in the model on Emmo’s desk had seemed so cleanly mechanical. Saw off a bit of this nice white plastic part here, insert a nice gleaming titanium tip there, tuck a nice inert piece of plastic padding between here and there—in fact, the sonofabitch had cut through living tissue!—taken a bloody saw to his thighbone and his shinbone, which were full of living blood, cells, nerves, molecules, DNA—he wasn’t sure about DNA; nerves there were, for sure. The incision ran from way up here to way down there, and it looked as if it had a tight red tube running the length of it and held in place by strips of flesh-colored plastic tape that ran crossways. The red tube was actually the flesh and blood where the incision had been closed, and the skin all around it felt as if it were about to burst.

  Charlie tried to keep his mind focused on the knee, the suture, the pain—surely the pain would be enough to keep his mind off everything else. There was a little machine called the CPM, for “continual passive motion,” which they had placed under his knee, and it flexed your knee for you, whether you wanted it to or not. Hurt like hell. Why endure so much pain when all you wanted was for God to take you away in the night? Somewhere out there, perhaps at this very moment, Fareek Fanon’s lawyer, a black man who dressed like a British diplomat, was making plans for a press conference at which he, Charlie, wearing a shabby mask of racial harmony, would hold forth in the insolent Cannon’s behalf—in an outright betrayal of Inman Armholster. And if he reneged on that deal, this guy Zell or Zale and PlannersBanc stood ready to strip him of every piece of real estate he had, starting with Turpmtine.