by Jack Skillingstead
Jack Skillingstead recently signed with Golden Gryphon Press to produce his first collection of short stories. The book will appear in the fall of 2009. Concerning the present offering he tells us, “I always wanted to steal a Hemingway title.” ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ didn’t quite fit the story, but fortunately ‘Cat in the Rain’ did.”
Daniel Porter got drunk in an Irish bar called O’Leary’s. He downed two shots of Jameson’s, then spent the balance of the night drinking pints of Guinness while he watched the TV mounted on the back bar between a dusty shillelagh and a bodhran. A neon beer advertisement bathed everything in nauseating green light. So much for atmosphere and the olde sod. Anytime it seemed possible somebody other than the bartender might speak to him, Daniel put out his famous repelling vibe. It was Wednesday night and O’Leary’s wasn’t crowded, anyway. O’Leary’s was never crowded, that’s why Daniel liked it.
The basketball game was interrupted periodically for special reports on the potential riot situation in Pioneer Square; O’Leary’s was up town, but riots tended to wander. Daniel watched the reports with detached interest. He was a police detective, and as far off duty as he could get. Rioting had become pandemic. One city or another igniting almost every week. Protests, anti-protests, Fat Tuesday, Super Bowl victory celebration, May Day, Arbor Day—whateverthehell. The Pioneer Square thing had to do with new city curfew laws scheduled to go into effect at midnight. It was as if the world had gone mad with violence. Or madder, anyway. The center will not hold, all that Yeats crap. The uncertainty factor. The impotence factor. The world seemed to have reached its ultimate crisis point at the same time Daniel Porter reached his ultimate crisis point. In his work Daniel never trusted a coincidence.
Daniel’s partner, Jimmy Bair, had a cousin who supposedly worked for the NSA. This cousin told Jimmy that, unknown to the public, alien satellites had appeared in high Earth orbit, and they were, as Bair put it, “Cloaked—you know, just like Star Trek. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not there. For all we know they’re shooting us with invisible Hate rays.”
Good old Jimmy. He was Scotch-Irish, big and aggressively chummy, with a nose like a red potato. A stand-up guy no matter what. The one guy Daniel would want watching his back.
“It’s a fucking sign,” Bair insisted. “You know, all that crap in the Middle East, AIDS, bird flu, wars, plagues, fucking terrorists, fucking pestilence. Plus things in the sky. Signs and portraits, right? It all adds up to the big picture. Like the Bible.”
Daniel cultivated detachment as a barrier against idiot theories, not to mention his genuine sense of impending doom. Daniel was hell on barriers. He wasn’t too bad on Doom, either. For corroboration one could consult his ex-wife. Daniel had always been an asshole, to hear Nancy tell it. But lately he had become the Emperor of Assholes. Daniel couldn’t help it. He reacted against the cesspool the world had become, the cesspool his life in particular had become. And he couldn’t listen to any more bullshit—especially his own.
The game was over (and how), the night progressed to the AM side of the clock. Daniel threw back the dregs of his last Guinness, paid and left.
It was a hot August night. He felt sick and dizzy. Hands in his pockets, he stumbled up the street like a badly manipulated marionette. A red Toyota Echo hunkered at the corner. Daniel recognized the creased quarter panel. He stepped around a pile of cardboard and rags, staggered against his car, fumbled the key into the lock, pulled the door open, and bundled himself into the back seat. He’d rest a few minutes, regroup.
Daniel’s head expanded and contracted like a balloon nippled in the mouth of an asthmatic. Time passed. Several voices rose up, all male. Something loud and metallic clanged. Daniel, folded and sprawled half conscious across the back seat, opened his eyes. Yellow firelight played on the roof. A rusty sound made him wince, stiff wheels grinding on pavement. Daniel sat up cautiously, his head in deflated mode.
Across the street four or five young men were pushing a burning garbage dumpster down the sidewalk. They bent their backs to it. Flames surged and lapped over their heads. Sparks, like swarms of fireflies, twisted in and out of chugging gray-black smoke.
Sensing movement behind him, Daniel turned. The pile of rags stood next to the car. He had barely registered the rags before, avoiding them with his drunk-dar. Now he realized they constituted a derelict. As the Hellfire dumpster passed on the opposite side of the street firelight flickered on the derelict’s face. Except, below his ratty watch cap, he had no face. It was like a rudimentary manikin’s head displaying the subtlest impressions and protrusions, suggesting features not yet formed. As Daniel watched, the impressions deepened, as if invisible thumbs were pressing into soft wax. Shadows quivered in the eye cups. A wet gleam occurred. Daniel’s breath caught, and there was a tremendous crash across the street. He jerked around. The dumpster was now tipped over inside the display window of Talbot’s. Real manikins turned into torches. The young men capered like savages, their identities lost to a mob impulse. When Daniel looked back, the derelict was gone—if he’d even been there in the first place.
He steered the Toyota up Pine Street toward Capital Hill, hunched forward, both hands fisted at the top of the wheel. Behind him sirens ululated. He became confused in the residential back streets. Nancy had kicked him out of the house only a couple of weeks ago. In the dark the hulking brick building where he now resided looked like any other. Daniel hated the apartment, hated the smallness of it, the feel of other lives having passed through. He’d almost rather sleep in the Toyota. Finally, exhausted, he parked randomly, stubbing the front tire on the curb.
His balloon head carried him through shadows, puddles of moonlight. He swayed against a noisy fence, fingers hooked in the chain link. A girl gazed at him from a third story window. She was wearing a light summer dress. There was no glass in the window. He blinked and she was gone, an apparition of his mind. The building, which otherwise appeared abandoned, seemed to lean toward him. Daniel’s head drooped, balloon deflated. He felt his gorge rise for the umpteenth time since leaving O’Leary’s. Without looking up again he lurched away from the fence. The next thing he knew, he was pushing open the door of his apartment.
* * * *
Daniel lay on his bed and stared at the dingy white plaster with its sags and cracks and stains. His ears were ringing. Sleep eluded him, his mind meandering down empty paths. His mouth had Saharan aspirations. He worked his throat, swallowed. Finally he got up and shuffled into the bathroom. Bare feet planted on the cold tile, he leaned over the sink and slurped at cold, metallic-tasting tap water. He heard a voice conducted down the air shaft and cranked the tap off. A girl reciting a nursery rhyme, that sing-songy cadence. But it was not a child’s voice. Daniel turned to the window and raised the sash. Counter-weights knocked inside the frame. A gray concrete wall faced him, so close he could almost reach out and touch it. The voice stopped. Below was a forlorn slab. He craned around and looked up. At the same time a head stuck out of the window on the next floor. A round-faced teenaged girl, eighteen or nineteen, looked down at him, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. She was very pale and serious, her shoulder length black hair hanging straight down.
Daniel said, “Hi,” in a phlegmy voice.
“I thought I was all alone,” the girl replied, then withdrew from sight and closed her window.
* * * *
He slept into the afternoon and awoke with a headache. The sight of the unpacked, cluttered, and dusty apartment depressed him. Upon moving out of the Ballard house he’d taken two week’s vacation. He wanted to settle into his new life alone, to establish himself in his new environment. But the interruption of the work routine left him prey to wounded maunderings and depression. The drinking had gotten on top of him. He knew he had pushed Nancy’s last button. The button’s name was Julie. But he had only wanted Julie so long as he couldn’t have her. Instead he achieved what he had really craved all along: to be totally alone. He’d even given up the girl on the internet, the one Nancy never did find out about. Daniel’s isolation imperative throbbed as though infused with cosmic energy, perfectly accomplishing his estrangement. He’d felt this way before, when he was fourteen, during his suicide summer. Nobody knew about that.
* * * *
He lay on the bed in his underwear, watching TV with the sound turned off, a Merlot bottle on the bedside table and an empty stem glass balanced on his stomach. The picture quality was bad. It was an old portable television. The antenna imperfectly snagged broadcast signals out of the air.
There was weeping in the airshaft.
For a while he pretended he didn’t hear it. Then she started in on the nursery rhymes again. He couldn’t quite make out the words and it bothered him. He put the glass on the table and stood up. It took him two tries, which is how he discovered he was drunk again.
In the bathroom he knelt on the floor, arms folded on the window ledge. Mary’s lamb had a white fleece. As white as snow. Go figure. The girl’s voice was sweet, trembly. There was something about that Rhyme, something he couldn’t quite remember, something important. Daniel struggled with it for a minute, then gave up. As he stood, his elbow knocked a bottle of shampoo off the window ledge. It hit the slab and the cap popped off.
The girl’s voice stopped for a moment. Then she said, “Is somebody there?”
Daniel stared at the blunt concrete wall. It was almost as though he were snug and safe inside a chimney. Safe from the anxieties that plagued him, safe from the world. He didn’t want to come out.
“I didn’t think so,” the girl said. “Just another nasty trick.”
Daniel cleared his throat.
“Hey—” the girl said.
Daniel addressed the wall: “I’m here, I’m not a nasty trick.” He had the strangest feeling he was talking to himself.
“Let me see you.”
Daniel extended his upper body out the window and twisted around. As before, she gazed down at him, her hair hanging straight.
“God,” she said.
“No, just me. Dan.”
“Eh. I’m Frankie.”
He stared at her. Frankie was the name of the chat girl he had abandoned. This couldn’t be...
“What were you crying about?” he asked.
“My cat ran away.”
His Frankie had a cat, too. So had his ex. Daniel was allergic. Before they married, Nancy used to put the cat out when he came over. One night he woke up to the sound of rain. Nancy was asleep. The cat clung to a branch outside the bedroom window, miserable, fur matted and dripping. That was the night the damn thing disappeared. Who knew what happened to it. Hit by a car, run off. He had felt bad. Nancy told him it wasn’t his fault, of course. Sixteen years later, though, she let him know how it had been his fault. And how she didn’t even believe in his allergies. “It’s all psychosomatic with you,” she had said. “You don’t want anything around that demonstrates love, that might need you, or that you might need. Not me, not even a cat. You can’t take it.” Well, she had a point. He really couldn’t take it.
“That’s too bad,” he said to Frankie.
“He’s all I had left. Now they’ll get me.”
“Who will get you?”
“The saucer people.”
Daniel felt tired.
“Will you come up here?” Frankie said.
He didn’t reply. His back hurt.
“Please? I want to show you something. I’m scared.”
“What is it?” he said.
“You have to see it.”
* * * *
The hallway seemed to tilt. Daniel kept bumping into the wall. It was too dark. On the ceiling inverted bowls glowed dimly yellow. At the end of the hallway a hydrocephalic moon leered through the broken window. Trash littered the floor. It was as though he were in two buildings at once. Which one was real? Either of them? Daniel had to haul himself up the stairs using the rail. He closed his eyes for a while and kept climbing. When he opened them again the third floor appeared normal. He found the right door and knocked.
* * * *
Frankie was a small person, not much over five feet. She wore a faded summer dress in a flower print. Her legs and feet were bare. She was pretty, in a way. Mostly she made him conscious of his age, just as his unseen internet girl had. He was forty-nine.
“How old are you?” he said.
“Nineteen.”
The same as his Frankie.
“I think I know you,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” she said, taking his hand and leading him through a duplicate of his apartment, minus the clutter. He didn’t want her to touch him but he allowed it. In the kitchen she said, “Feel that?”
He did: a cold exhalation, a draft. She pulled him to the other side of the kitchen. The draft was coming out of the narrow space next to the refrigerator. He should have been able to see the back wall. Instead there was a velvet shadow, an impression of depth, a vague iridescence. The draft raised his hackles. There was a strange odor. It evoked slaughterhouses, the smell of wet concrete after they’ve hosed the blood away. He took his hand out of Frankie’s.
“The Sleeve,” she said. “It’s like a connecting corridor between here and there. The saucer, I guess. Like that tunnel thing at the airport that you walk though to get on the plane? It’s for people like us.”
Daniel really wished he hadn’t come up.
“Where do you think you are right now?” she said, suddenly intense.
“Uh, your kitchen?” Daniel said.
“Wrong. They mess with our minds. First they shoot us with rays to make us crazy. Make us more alone. You want to know what my theory is? To be human, to belong on Earth, you have to be connected to other people, you have to be yourself and part of the human web. When we lose that sense of connection we’re vulnerable. They isolate us then they replace us. It’s like an invasion. They’re replacing us.” (And he saw his own shadowed face in a cracked and spotted mirror, mouthing those words: They’re replacing us.)
Daniel rubbed his eyes. Except for the rays and invasion bullshit her words sounded familiar. Web of human connection. He’d read that somewhere.
“Sleeping so close to an open Sleeve, my dreams started telling me things,” Frankie said. “That’s how I know. But I had Mojo to protect me. He isn’t human but he kept me on this side. You have to go voluntarily. That’s part of it, I think. You have to not care. You allow the replacement to come through. Kind of like inviting a vampire into the house?”
“Vampire,” Daniel said.
“There isn’t any getting out. I opened the door once. I was afraid to, but I opened it. I had the dumb idea I could leave the building. Mo slipped past me and I couldn’t even chase after him. I call him but he doesn’t come. He’s not a dog. I guess they’ll get me now. Except, I mean unless you and I connect?”
Daniel moved to the other side of the kitchen, leaned against the counter, folded his arms.
“It’s relationships,” Frankie said, “real human connections that keep us in the world. That’s all.”
She moved close to him, invading his famous boundaries. Her body was practically touching his. And Daniel’s body responded to her proximity. But it was just his body. Every other facet of his being wanted to get away. He knew the drill, Alien Lonely Hate Rays not withstanding.
“I have to go,” he said.
“We should stay together. Maybe we can anchor each other? I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
“Frankie, I have to go.”
“Let me come with you.”
(His own face in the spotted mirror)
She wrapped her arms around him. He gently moved her back. She did not hold on, did not resist or cling. She was used to this. She courted it. Rejection was her drug. He could see that in her eyes. He’d seen it before, in other eyes. He was just another in a long line of rejecters, when he left her there in the slaughterhouse draft. It’s what he told himself.
* * * *
In the hall he noticed the faded pattern on the rug was the same as the one on Frankie’s dress. And suddenly he remembered maryslamb was his Frankie’s chat handle. He turned back to the closed door, brought his hand up, but didn’t knock. After a moment he turned away.
* * * *
He found a station that endlessly ran programs from the 1960s, shows that he’d watched when he was a kid, some only because his mother watched them, and his dad whenever he happened to be home, which wasn’t often. The Fugitive, Run For Your Life, Burke’s Law, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and so on. His mother eventually ran off with some other man. Daniel remembered the terrible fight his parents had, how his dad struck his mother a hard open-handed blow across the face before she slammed out of the house for the last time. He had been twelve, and after that he mostly raised himself. But it was strange. With his eyes closed Daniel could see his mother’s face. And he could see Robert Stack’s face, Rod Serling’s face—but not his own father’s.
He was drinking beer, watching Richard Kimble and his TV ghost images. His mind was unmoored, disconnected. Footsteps creaked across the ceiling. He turned the sound down on the TV. There was more than one person up there. He listened. After a while there was only one set of footsteps. Then it was quiet.
He got up to use the bathroom. A window rattled open in the airshaft. He turned the light out and stood quietly. But after a minute he couldn’t help himself. Loneliness moved through him like a subterranean tide. He opened his own window. He leaned out and looked up. The rain fell in silky whispers around her head. Her straight hair was wet and dripping.
She had no face.
Daniel jerked back. The top of his head caught the sharp edge of the window sash. Black stars pulsed around him. He reached up, fumbling, slammed the sash down, crawled back to bed.
* * * *
The dawn arrived in smoky darkness. The rain was constant, thunderous. No amount of heat could dispel the dampness inside the apartment. Black mildew spotted the walls and ceiling. Daniel felt the damp entering him, greening his bones. He had lost weight. In the kitchen, rummaging for food, he held his pants up.
Something strange was happening outside the kitchen window. Just beyond the dark rain-lashed trees that crowded the building the sun was shining. Bright afternoon sun. It made little misty rainbows on the outer edge of the downpour, but penetrated no further. On the lanai attached to one of the apartments across the alley a woman stretched out on a lawn chair. She was wearing a yellow bikini top and dark glasses.
Daniel rubbed his eyes, a cold, crumbly piece of Gino’s cardboard pizza in his mouth. A violent gust thumped the window, and he jumped back.
* * * *
From the bathroom mirror a Dachau survivor stared out at him. He fingered his ribs. I’m losing myself, Daniel thought. How long had he been here? If Jimmy Bair could see him now. The alien Lonely Hate rays would never get Jimmy—he was too goddam jovial and big-hearted.
He recalled the faceless thing in the airshaft. It couldn’t be true. He had been drunk. Frankie was still up there. His Frankie. He shoved the window open and called her name. When there was no reply he got dressed, not bothering to knot his shoelaces, and lurched out into the hall. Immediately he felt exposed, hollowed out and filled back up with terrible anxiety. He mustn’t leave the apartment. But he did. The elastic hallway tilted and stretched and swayed. He climbed the stairs. Frankie’s door stood open. He entered and found the apartment empty. In the kitchen there was no slaughterhouse draught. The Sleeve had closed, if there had ever been a Sleeve.
* * * *
He lay flat on his back, sweating in the damp chill, breathing shallowly, staring at the ceiling, his mind vacant. He was dimly aware of something scratching at the door. He ignored it. Besides, the scratching seemed as much inside his head as outside it. A cool draft touched his bare feet. Daniel’s heart clenched with fear, but in a way he was ready to go. More than ready. He got up. His knees felt weak. In the tiny living room, rain shadows drained over the piled boxes and furniture. The unnatural draft emanated from a voided section of wall. Velvet darkness stretched back into vague iridescence. Something moved in there.
Daniel forced himself to turn aside, his heart speeding with fear. He stumbled out of the living room, remembering what Frankie had said about the cat anchoring her in the world, that small connection. He yanked the apartment door open. The hallway was empty. He tried to step out and his guts clenched and knotted, as if he were trying to step into an airplane propeller.
“Come on, Mojo,” he said.
The hallway remained empty.
Daniel’s throat tightened. Not even a fucking cat—
Then Mo came around the corner where the stairs dropped to the first floor. His fur was tawny and puffy. He hesitated, seeing Daniel.
“Here, kitty?” Daniel said, without much hope.
Mo looked at him, for a moment stood stock still with tail high, then padded over.
* * * *
Chuck Norris and his ghosts hawked the Total Gym at the foot of Daniel’s bed. The rain was like sand blowing against the windows. A slaughterhouse draft breathed through the apartment, and Daniel mostly stayed under the covers. Mo curled against him on top of the bedspread, his little furnace body thrumming. Mo wore a collar, but the name on the collar was “Fritz,” not “Mojo.” This nagged at Daniel. His mind tried and failed to get around it.
* * * *
Mo didn’t care for his new diet of frozen pizza. His stool was runny and especially odoriferous. Daniel couldn’t house-train him, since he himself was afraid to leave the apartment, let alone the building. He tore pages out of an old Esquire magazine and arranged them on the bathroom floor between the sink and tub and tried to direct Mo’s bowel to evacuate there and only there. No dice.
* * * *
Mo grew restless. He prowled the confines of the apartment, hunting avenues of escape. Daniel erected a barrier of boxes between the hallway and the living room, afraid Mo would disappear into the Sleeve. He almost wished the cat would disappear. Daniel’s eyes and nose were runny. When he breathed his lungs made a raspy sound. He knew Mo was his protection against them. Nevertheless, there were times when even Mo’s presence was too much. The shit and allergies didn’t help.
* * * *
Daniel woke out of fitful sleep. His nose was completely plugged, and his eyes felt gritty. When he tried to sit up, Mo was right there, practically smothering his face.
“Gah.” Daniel pushed the cat roughly away, off the bed. It landed solidly on all fours. “Why don’t you go take a shit somewhere,” Daniel said.
Later, after he’d splashed cold water on his face and woken up sufficiently, he felt bad. He called Mo but the cat didn’t appear. There was plenty of junk in the apartment, plenty of hidey places.
“Come on, Mo.”
He began to panic. He searched more vigorously, shoving boxes aside, crawling on hands and knees to peer behind bookcases, kitchen appliances, under furniture. Finally he gave up. Standing in the bathroom, hugging himself against the cold damp, he said, in a voice choked with tears: “Goddamn it, Mo. Fuck you, then. Who needs you.”
* * * *
Two lightbulbs burned out, one in the kitchen and one in the hall. He’d kept every light burning continuously and had no replacements. The apartment became gloomy. Daniel dreaded the dark. He stayed in bed, watching TV. He was always cold and he huddled under the covers, a scrofulous skin-and-bone man.
The television reception became worse. Ghosts overlapping ghosts, overlapping ghosts, and everybody with a mouthful of static. Daniel felt sick with isolation. But he didn’t think about Nancy or anybody else, particularly. He was long past thinking about Frankie, for instance. Or his parents. But the cat was a fresh wound. He missed Mojo, the uncomplicated companionship.
* * * *
Dampness seeped through the walls. The ceiling was fuzzed with mold. The plaster appeared soft, mealy. Daniel was almost not there. He stared at the Andy Griffith Show. Endless television buoyed him on a sea of alpha waves.
A lightbulb directly above him burned out with a thin glassy pop. Daniel stiffened.
The Sleeve beckoned. A slaughterhouse draft breathed through his covers, shivering him. It was time. His isolated heart had extended an invitation to the vampire. He threw the covers back and swung his feet to the floor, pulled on a pair of pants and cinched the belt to the last notch to keep them from sliding off his skinny hips.
Daniel started down the hall, fatalistically drawn to the Sleeve. Wind whumped the loose kitchen window. He glanced over. Mo was out there in the blowing rain, clinging pathetically to a branch, his fur matted and streaming. Daniel experienced a pang of guilt and deep yearning loneliness.
And then stopped.
Because it was impossible for Mo to be out there in the rain. Flat impossible. All the windows were shut tight and the door firmly closed and locked.
That was Nancy’s cat.
And the illusion began to collapse around him.
The light dimmed, flickered. The familiar clutter vanished, replaced by stark emptiness, brown walls, broken lathe and plaster gritty underfoot. In the kitchen an ancient electric stove was pulled away from the wall, the front gaping like an idiot mouth. He’d been alone all this time. He’d conjured Frankie up out of memory and imagination and desperation.
They mess with your mind.
And his mind messed back. He blundered backward down the hall. Glancing into the bathroom, he caught his haggard reflection in the cracked and spotted mirror—the face that talked to him. He backed up to the apartment door, cranked the knob behind him, pulled it open and fell into the hall. Nancy’s cat. And Frankie was maryslamb, that dumb phrase she used to type about the web of human connection, referring to the net. Daniel rolled onto his knees, looked up. The hallway was a ruin. Light fixtures dangled by wires from the ceiling. An overlapping occurred. The broken window at the end of the hall was momentarily restored, then crashed out and haphazardly boarded over, then restored.
He staggered to his feet, fighting dark/light visions, flung open the door to the rear, outside stairs. He staggered down to the alley behind the building. Rain pounded deafeningly on the sheet metal lids of the garbage dumpsters. A dark brick ruin loomed over him. Swinging drunkenly around the side of the building, he saw Mojo huddled at the base of the tree, the rain having beaten him to a yellow rag of matted fur. Not Mo. Fritz. That was Nancy’s cat: Fritz. Frankie (maryslamb) had a cat named Mo but he never saw it, because he never saw her. They had messed with his mind, and his mind had fought back, conjuring companions, unraveling.
Whatever its name was, the cat reacted to the sight of Daniel, darting around to the front of the apartment building.
There is no fucking cat, Daniel thought wildly.
He started to follow Mo anyway but made it only as far as the tree. He fell against it, the rough bark digging into his cheek. The rain was drowning him. He thought of his good bed, the covers pulled up, the television soothing with the familiar ghosts of his past. Up there is where he belonged. He raised his head. On the second floor a dim figure stepped back from the window.
Follow the cat.
He lurched away from the tree, came around the front of the building. Mo/Fritz was gone. Beyond the dark veil of rain a vague, muted light persisted. Daniel stepped toward the light ... and encountered a fence. Chain-link. Summoning reserves of strength he hoisted himself up and over, ripping his shirt on a sharp twist of metal. He fell to the other side, rolled and stood up, and first the rain and then even the sound of rain fell away. He held his hand up, palm outward against the brilliant August sun. Time dilation, he thought, remembering some science fiction movie. A sign attached to the fence announced the building’s future demolition. It wasn’t his building. Little wet paw prints tracked away on the white sidewalk. Daniel began to follow them, bare feet slapping the hot paving. And then the prints vanished before his eyes, and his clothes were dry, and he was just a raggedy man staggering along, voices mumbling in his head.
* * * *
He lived on First Avenue. His home was a broken down cardboard box that had once held a forty-six-inch plasma television set. He sat on the box and waited for people to drop coins in the old Starbucks cup. A certain number of passersby did so, and they were his tenuous web of human connection. Most people ignored him, though. And even those who paused, because he looked as though he had once been a normal person, a nice man, a down on his luck man, were eventually repelled when he told them about his cat and the saucer people.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, when coins rattled into his little cup. “I have a cat to feed, you know.”
There was no cat. Daniel knew he was crazy, and he wished someone would lead him back to his senses.
* * * *
Twilight was upon the world, and he was afraid. He dragged his cardboard into the recessed doorway of an Army-Navy surplus store. Nights were bad. Wherever he huddled he was alone and could feel the slaughterhouse draft, the opening of the Sleeve, the dreadful invitation formulating in his mind.
“Dan Porter, is that you?”
Daniel looked up. A tall, wide man in a sport coat a size too small stood above him. He had a potato nose.
“Jimmy Bair,” Daniel said.
Bair crouched beside him. “My God. Flynn told me he saw you. I told him he was out of his fucking mind. Look at you.”
“You were right,” Daniel said.
“Yeah? What about?”
“The alien satellites and their invisible Hate Rays, for one thing. Only they’re Lonely rays, too. Jesus Christ, Jimmy, they’re ruining the world. They’re replacing us.”
Jimmy Bair nodded but he looked sad.
“Sure, and don’t I know it,” he said.
“You’re the one who warned me.”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy reached out and touched Daniel’s hand. Daniel pulled the hand away.
“I—I don’t like to be touched,” he said.
“I know.”
“It’s part of it. They mess with our minds. They want us to be isolated, so we’ll go and they can take over.”
“If you say so, Danny.”
Tears welled up in Daniel’s eyes. None of it was true. He wanted to get better. “Thank God you’re here, Jimmy. You don’t really believe it all, do you?”
“I do.” Jimmy Bair smiled. Then he poked at Daniel with his fingers, not touching him, but almost touching him, and when Daniel cowered back, whimpering, Jimmy Bair’s smile got wider.