This was the last city for the old man. The last city in
the world. Towns would try to jail him or drive him to the border
and watch him walk away with their shotgun eyes. In cities, meandering
among glass cliffs and stoplights, he was mostly ignored.
His long beard was cloud-white. Wide wrinkles hid his eyes.
It had been so long since he had heard his name.
“Excuse me,” he said to a suit with a fresh newspaper pinned
under an arm.
“I don’t have any change.”
The suit, new and hemmed, face shaven like a block of cheese,
glanced at the foot-long hole in the old man’s coat. The old man
coughed.
“Do you have a few minutes to spare?”
The business man looked at the magnifying lens on his Rolex without
looking at the time.
“I have a...”
“All you have to do is say ‘I bequeath you five minutes’ and
then you can go,” the old man said softly.
“Fine. To you, old man, I bequeath five minutes.”
A sudden pain shot through the suit’s chest. The newspaper
dropped and gusted down the street. His head felt intense heat. but
after a breath, it was all gone. The suit looked at the bum, who
stood with the slightest almost undetectable smirk, and walked quickly
away.
The old man spent the morning and afternoon walking down sidewalks,
between skyscrapers, requesting bits of time, never asking for money or
food. As the sun fell, he fled the business district of the city
and headed for the nightspots, restaurants, bars, clubs, and the subway
stops bringing people in like voltage to an electric chair.
People hurried to dinner or drinks, the same as the heel-toeing
to work or the bus or home. They thought about time but in the wrong
way.
“Good evening,” the old man said to a well-dressed, middle-aged
woman walking out of a wine shop.
He got her to bequeath him five minutes, and as she said the
words, she felt lightning bolts strike her teeth down to her knees making
her drop her bottle. Red pooled on the sidewalk as she ran into the
oblivious crowd of invisibility.
Late that night, as bouncers locked barroom doors and lights
died, at least for the night, a drunk with his fill approached the old
man.
“C’mon, buddy, I got some shelter down the way.”
“No, thank you,” said the old man.
“Don’t you wanna get some sleep?”
“No, not yet.”
The drunk went his way, and the old man began to wander the streets
seaching for diners or drugstores or anywhere open all night. He
asked his same request to cabbies or cooks out for a smoke and finally,
as the sun began to paint the darkness, to two women getting off the graveyeard
shift from an all-night market. He stared at the pain in their faces
before turning back toward the coming light of the business blocks.
The old man followed this design for as long as he could, until
there were no more people to ask, a short time considering how many people
moved in and out of the city. He walked through the slums and the
secret spots and down by the water. He crossed bridges and bus routes.
He passed churches and monuments and slow cement clocks. He watched
people at train stations kissing and crying. He saw pizza deliveries
on dollied bicycles. He saw sweat and gritting teeth and bloodshot
eyes. And dust and haze and tired legs. He wondered why people
had to go so fast, so fast that they had stopped talking to each other,
stopped seeing simple beauty, stopped helping one another get to where
it really mattered.
Feeling a little dry, the old man entered a greasy diner almost
deserted save a couple of hardhats eating fried eggs and apple pie.
A single purple lilac in a plastic water glass drooped next to the old
register. The old man ordered a cup of coffee as he sat on the last
broken-vinyl stool. He rubbed his temples and wondered if it was
time.
The coffee dreamed of steam as he lifted the stained cup to his
broken lips. The construction workers waved good-bye to the flirting waitress,
and the waitress disappeared into the kitchen as the men drove off in their
company truck.
Alone, the old man sat and sipped until one moment when he noticed
a woman sitting next to him. She was strong with thick limbs and
black hair and a face beaming deep green eyes.
“When did you come in?” the old man asked.
“Always been here,” she said.
The old man felt something strange about the woman, something
new but old, like she knew what he was doing, though he couldn’t say the
same for her. He noticed the flower in the water glass had bloomed
toward the greasy windows. He felt cold, but it was fading toward
numb.
“Can you spare five minutes?” the old man said.
The woman took his hand and locked her eyes on his.
“I bequeath to you forever,” she said.
The old man saw a flash of light, and his eyes turned to dust
and blew around the diner. The hand the women held grayed up his
arm and fell off onto the counter into dust. The laces popped off
his beaten shoes, and his legs disjointed from his hips, but he did not
scream or react with any pain. Without eyes, he somehow looked at
her and nodded.
“I love you,” she said to him.
The color fled from his face. Its skin flaked off and began
to rain ashes into his coffee. His face blank and flat, her breath
blew his ashy brain around the stools and booths, some under the door to
the street. His clothes rotted off; white shirt buttons swirled in
the corner next to the mop and bucket. His shoulders and ribs fell
to the floor and shattered into a billion pieces. And finally, all
that remained was his undersized heart resting on a small hill of dust.
A mouse scurried from behind the wall, put the heart on its back,
and vanished back into its home. The dust and ash blew and flowed
like river water until none could be noticed beyond the normal state of
the day.
The woman left the diner, though the bell over the door never
rang. A pair of sparrows flickered by above her, on their way to
where she and the old man already were.