Shapiro set his alarm for six a.m. and slipped out of the hotel before Penwad could come for him, consequences be damned. Ha ha-the day was his! Screechy traffic flew cheerfully through the streets, and toxins gave the air a silvery fish like flicker as the sun bobbed aloft on waves of industrial waste.
Shapiro walked and walked, he passed through grand neighborhoods, where armed guards lounged in front of high, white walls. And he passed through poor neighborhoods, where children, bloated with hunger, played in the gutter, their eyes dreamy and wild with drugs. Beyond the surrounding slopes lay the country side-the gorgeous, blood drenched countryside.
In some parts of the city Indians congregated on the side walk. Some sold chewing gum or trinkets on the corners, some seemed to be living the busy and inscrutable life of the homeless. Their clothing filthy and tattered, but glorious none the less, Shapiro thought, glorious, noble, celebratory-like the banners of an army in rout.
Shapiro considered them with terror. The destitute. People who were almost invisible, almost inaudible. People to whom almost anything could be done: other people. At home in the last five to ten years they had encamped in Shapiro’s neighborhood. At first he thought of him as a small and temporary phenomenon. But now they were everywhere-sleeping in parks or on the pavement, ranging through the city night and day, hungry and diseased, in ragged suits and dresses acquired in some other life.
Everyone had become used to them; no one remembered how shocking it had been only a few years earlier to see someone curled up in a doorway, barefoot in freezing temperatures. Most of the time they were just a group at the periphery of Shapiro's vision. But when a student failed to show up at a lesson, or no concert work materialized, or the price of a newspaper went up, or some unexpected injury Shapiro's precious hands would tingle. Injury. Arthritis. Even as it was, daily life was beginning eating away at Shapiro's small savings. And at such time Shapiro would see those other people with an individualized and frigid clarity would search their faces for proof that each in some reliable way different from him, as though he were a dying man approaching the gauzy crowds waiting for judgement.
And they-what were they seeing. Perhaps he and his kind seemed a ghostly population to them-distant, fading…Perhaps at some terrible boarder you’d simply leave behind everything that you now considered life, forget about once precious concerns, as though they were worn out shirts or last years calendar or old lists of things that long ago it had seemed important to accomplish.
Shapiro walked and walked, he passed through grand neighborhoods, where armed guards lounged in front of high, white walls. And he passed through poor neighborhoods, where children, bloated with hunger, played in the gutter, their eyes dreamy and wild with drugs. Beyond the surrounding slopes lay the country side-the gorgeous, blood drenched countryside.
In some parts of the city Indians congregated on the side walk. Some sold chewing gum or trinkets on the corners, some seemed to be living the busy and inscrutable life of the homeless. Their clothing filthy and tattered, but glorious none the less, Shapiro thought, glorious, noble, celebratory-like the banners of an army in rout.
Shapiro considered them with terror. The destitute. People who were almost invisible, almost inaudible. People to whom almost anything could be done: other people. At home in the last five to ten years they had encamped in Shapiro’s neighborhood. At first he thought of him as a small and temporary phenomenon. But now they were everywhere-sleeping in parks or on the pavement, ranging through the city night and day, hungry and diseased, in ragged suits and dresses acquired in some other life.
Everyone had become used to them; no one remembered how shocking it had been only a few years earlier to see someone curled up in a doorway, barefoot in freezing temperatures. Most of the time they were just a group at the periphery of Shapiro's vision. But when a student failed to show up at a lesson, or no concert work materialized, or the price of a newspaper went up, or some unexpected injury Shapiro's precious hands would tingle. Injury. Arthritis. Even as it was, daily life was beginning eating away at Shapiro's small savings. And at such time Shapiro would see those other people with an individualized and frigid clarity would search their faces for proof that each in some reliable way different from him, as though he were a dying man approaching the gauzy crowds waiting for judgement.
And they-what were they seeing. Perhaps he and his kind seemed a ghostly population to them-distant, fading…Perhaps at some terrible boarder you’d simply leave behind everything that you now considered life, forget about once precious concerns, as though they were worn out shirts or last years calendar or old lists of things that long ago it had seemed important to accomplish.