Shadows

The door opened inwards, revealing a dark room. Almost dark. The harsh yellow light from the corridor intruded upon the darkness and discovered that it was not alone. The shadow that lay on the floor belonged to the man at the doorway. His eyes scanned the room. The eyes of the shadow did not. He looked towards his left. A window. It was shut. He noticed that light from the streetlamp was leaking into the room through a hole in the window. He did not notice that this light fell on the shadow. It formed a spot where the chest of the shadow would have been. The dust trail it lit made it appear like the shadow had been shot and the bullet hole was still smoking.

The man looked around the room. For some reason, he felt satisfied. “It is as it should be”, he told himself. The light behind his head flickered and died. A sense of foreboding washed over the dirt of his satisfaction. Something told him he was not wanted here. A moth which had until now sat on the light, flew past him. “Your delusion is over for now”, he told the moth. He turned around and started walking down the corridor. The light came back to life. He did not turn back to see the door remain open, or that the hole of light on the canvas of darkness was still smoking.

He noticed that there were moths buzzing around all the lights in the corridor. It was the rainy season after all. Instinctively, he reached for his trench coat and his hat as he climbed down the stairwell. The alley was deserted. The rain was struggling to decide if it should come all out in its fury or if it should wait for a more opportune moment to give the city its long needed bath. “And God knows this city needs a bath”, he told himself. “Ha!” he chuckled. “If Murphy still holds as true as he has been in my past, the minute I remove my coat, the rain should start.”

He probably did not want the rain to start, for he held his coat close and continued walking. Further down, the alley extended its life by merging with the broad avenue. He turned right and walked on. Without asking for, or needing directions, he took the third right, entering another alley. This was narrower and packed on both sides with garbage dumpsters. “If only I had Moses’ staff”, he said, to no one in particular. “I would have cleared all this in a minute and paved a road to the Promised Land.” He stood outside the third door on his right. It was locked. He shrugged his shoulders and whistled a familiar tune.

“Meow!” “Hmmm, stray cats. This town was never short of them. Oh! How we used to fight, the stray cats and I, all for the fish crumbs that fell from the windows. Except for the mewling and the occasional secretive sex, I was a stray cat too. Would things have been different had I stayed a stray cat? May be I would have found a job cleaning windows, a wife, a family. Ah! How different would things have been!” The noise of his contemplation drowned out the sound of a whimper that interspersed itself with the mewling.

As the waves subsided within him, his ears tuned themselves to the whimpering. He moved closer to where the sound was coming from. There, between two dumpsters, trying to squeeze herself into the gap between them, for shelter and warmth, was a young girl. She must have been 12, but a stunted frame, the product of years of starvation and living off the streets, made her look 7. Her eyes, resembling that of a kitten’s, were equally full of fear. She cowered deeper into her imaginary cave, as though that would protect her from the full grown man who was standing in front of her.

“Oh, you street rat! Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.” At this, she appeared unconvinced; as if that wasn’t the first time she had heard the statement and had been subjected to the opposite of what it meant. He saw that in her shivering hands she was holding a fruit knife. “Now why would you have something like that? Here give it to me. There, there!” When it seemed that his words were not having the intended effect, he presumed that any further effort would merely be rebuked, although with a knife.

He rose to his full height. The girl peered beyond him to see if there was a way she could get out of this. He removed his trench coat, with an apprehensive glance at the overcast sky. “Here’s something to keep you warm”, he told the girl as he offered her the coat. She was unsure for a moment. A bony hand shot out, grabbed the coat and disappeared. He bent down again, took the knife from her, and put it into one of the coat’s numerous pockets. “Don’t play with such sharp objects. You don’t wanna hurt yourself in this place” he told her. As she examined the coat, he looked again at the sky. Murphy was being kind, for the moment.

“May be it is a sign”, he said out loud and continued walking, whistling the same tune, as if the entire point of this sojourn was to hand over his favorite trench coat to a random urchin on the streets. He was back on the avenue and for reasons unknown, started walking eastward.

“Leaving town, are we?”, a non-ominous voice asked from within himself. He nodded as if in agreement. On his left and right were buildings that were familiar to him. Some of the buildings even belonged to him. He had eaten and drank at some of the restaurants that lined the avenue. At others, he had puked, and made harsh love to strange women, willing to do his bidding so they could go back to smoking whatever they smoked. 

He had been walking for over an hour now. The night was on the verge of overstaying its welcome and was being pushed out by an inhospitable sun. As the curtains of rain disappeared, he saw Tom, old Tom, on his knees. Tom was blind. Old and blind. He would sit on the sidewalk with his hat in front of him. Whenever he heard footsteps, he would push his hat in the way of the footsteps, so the harried passerby would drop a coin or two, after which Tom would pull the hat to its original position. An oft-repeated joke in the neighborhood was that Tom’s hat would have moved enough number of times between the two points to travel the distance to the moon and back. And now, Tom was on his knees, scratching the pavement. “What was he doing?” Then he noticed. All that back and forth massage Tom gave the pavement had eaten off the fabric of his hat. It now had a hole, big enough for blind Tom to peer through. After his day’s business, Tom had lifted his cash box and it had emptied itself on the road.

“Oh Tom! What will you do now with your hat gone?” the man remarked. He walked towards Tom and looked down the pavement. The coins, bathed in the early rains of the previous night were now glinting in the rising sun. He picked up the ones he saw, in his left hand. With his right, he removed the hat from his head. He put the coins into the hat.

“Tom! Tom! This way! Ya. You know me, yes? Here, take my hat. I don’t need it anymore. It has your coins from last night. Oh no! It’s alright. You don’t have to thank me. Just do me a favor. Give me that old, tattered hat of yours, so I know you will use this one.” He took Tom’s hat and tried to wear it. The much bigger hat made him look slightly comical. It fell through his head and covered a part of his forehead. He patted Tom on his back and walked on.

The sun was rising. He was walking towards it. The tune he whistled, along with Tom’s hat and his jolly stride made him look like a happy tramp. He continued to walk down the still empty road. The sun was rising and drying up the insufficiently laundered town. As he walked with stars in his eyes and the wind on his tail, he did not notice that there was no shadow trailing his step.

The evening papers of the day carried his mugshot and an account of his deeds. Ironically, they missed the last night and had spoken about several other nights. The headline read,

“Notorious Mob Boss Found Dead in His Room.

Police Suspect Gang Violence.”