LITMIR.BIZ

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The driver scoffed and waved him off. Michael stood back as the bus drove away, generating a wave of water that shot out of the gutter and across Michael’s legs. Inside, the windows immediately steamed with the breath of passengers. He suddenly missed the relative comfort of the motorbus he had been in earlier that day. His vision began to blur, and the falling rain blended with the cement to create a giant sheet of gray surrounding him. A moment later, he was able to see clearly again. Behind him, on the bench and under the awning, a fidgeting man with an open, saffron-colored mouth was trying to curl up.

      “Find your own bench,” the man scowled before Michael had time to speak, exposing his gapped teeth and releasing foul-smelling breath. His hands were claws nearly as terrifying as the rain.

      The sunlight faded; darkness filled the city, and the rain bit like sharp teeth. He looked up. Another drop in his eye. Perhaps this was how the one-eyed man had been blinded—he had stared into the sky and something had fallen, something as simple as a raindrop but with just the right composition to destroy his sight.

      His detached arm felt like putty in his other hand. Michael started to run, spotting an alley ahead that he hoped could provide cover. There he located a dumpster, and for a moment, he recognized the fact that he was willing to hide inside it. Had his life this quickly come to this? But the lid was locked. His feet had become heavy, like bricks that he had to drag. A man in an elegant trench coat passed the alley, and Michael put out his good hand, already bent in a pose familiar to any beggar. There had to be one person who would help.

      “Please, do you have any cover?” he mumbled, but the man casually veered away from him without stopping.

      He would not hold up much longer. In the strange painless way his body worked, it was telling him he was falling to pieces. The visions of blurred surroundings came in stronger waves. Soon, he thought, he might be blind.

      A cluster of umbrellas marched past him and disappeared around the corner. There were no trees on this street. No awnings, no overhead covers. The only trees visible were north, on the hill, too far away. There would be nothing left of him by then. And so he reluctantly headed south, past the locked doors and occupied benches, where further along the street Michael finally found hope: a large bridge that scalloped along the city skyline. He used a building wall to support himself but then saw that he was smearing a streak of black ink across the stucco. His painted fingernails were gone; he now had white tips for fingers—it was as if he was seeing bone. His legs became as heavy as bags of coffee beans. Yet a voice inside remained optimistic: a few more steps.

      It was an extreme effort to make it across the street. The water was ankle deep, and his feet became heavier with each step. The water seeped up his legs. He was absorbing it fast, and he only saw everything below him as one mass of dark colors. He rushed to the bridge. To avoid a large puddle, he had to go back a half block to find a spot where he could cross onto the sidewalk. Then he ran, past discarded wrappers of trash and bones of dead fish that had been glued to the uneven pavement and were now being loosened and were floating away.

      Under the bridge he celebrated deep breaths of dry air. He loosened his tie and squeezed out some water, but his body was too heavy. He fell to his knees on the curb and had to steady himself. It might be too late. The water was inside him, and he had become a sponge. His detached arm fell out of his sleeve again. He gave in to the weight and lay on the sidewalk. Above him, several rats and a flock of pigeons huddled near the stone arches. He felt strangely at ease. Just to make it to the city seemed like enough of an accomplishment. Perhaps that was all he was meant for. Or perhaps all along he had made a terrible mistake. He thought about the rare times it rained inland. How was it possible, he wondered, to be awake and aware of his body disintegrating before his own eyes? Inland he had watched the rain coat the coffee bushes and form the small streams that flowed between them, never afraid of the rain because he was always inside, safe behind the glass of a window. Two contrasting worlds connected by clear material. Here there was no glass.

      Just then, the glowing headlights of a bus materialized through the curtain of rain, roared along under the bridge, and splashed a large puddle that had formed in the gutter and spread into the street. It coated him with slime and debris and shoved him to the ground. He vomited water. As he leaned over, in the small puddle forming before him he saw the reflected outline of his face—it was not a shape he recognized. Perhaps his ability to see details had permanently vanished.

      He thought he might be able to step out of his body and suddenly be so light that he could fly like a pigeon in the rain. The drops would roll off his wings and he would find that apartment in the high rise he was meant to live in, and below he would see the mash of pulp and pile of clothes he had once been. He would only need to splatter open the spot inside himself that would liberate those qualities capable of transforming him.

      On the ground, he was dying—he was certain of it—pulpifying. The few details visible were rats and pigeons watching with their small, reflective eyes. One of the rats broke from the group and ran across him, sniffing like the uniformed inspectors on the bus. Then, emerging from the mist that shrouded the bridge, a vague pair of thin human legs approached. Someone had been out in the storm longer than him. No one here would help him, he had decided, so he thought it best to blend in with the surroundings and let the pedestrian on his way.

      He didn’t have the strength to move. The pedestrian would have to either step over him or—more likely—on him. His mouth opened. The person approaching was wearing high heels. Above, she had a strangely shaped head—but then he realized she was covering herself with some kind of square or panel. The panel was removed and lowered toward him. Then softness—fur—brushed him with gentle strokes.

      She was doing him a favor. He was sure of it. She was going to suffocate him and put him out of his misery. He wanted to say thank you, but his mouth would not close for him to speak. The fur moved across his face; he coughed once, and realized he had stopped breathing. A moment later, he closed his eyes.

      4

      FIRST THERE WAS DARKNESS, THEN IT WAS FILLED WITH SOUND. Soothing orchestral music entered his head. A slow string section played a waltz, a clarinet moaning the melody. Then his vision returned. He found himself lying on a kitchen table, wrapped in a mantle of fur, staring at a ceiling covered with brown blossoms of water stains. The fur quickly slipped off when he sat up, as if, once released, it was trying to escape from him.

      The music played from a radio on the kitchen counter. He focused on what he thought was his heart beating but then discovered it was a steady stream of drops into a body of water. Behind a thin curtain drawn across one side of the kitchen was another room, filled with rainwater. The curtain fanned in time with the rhythmic dripping and the waltz on the radio. He glanced to his right and there on the stove sat a baking pan holding his detached arm.

      His body’s newsprint had dried like a crisp shell, shriveled with a skein of tiny wrinkles spreading across it. He stood up and learned that his feet were soft; he could not stand without holding on to the dining chair. The room, he noted, exuded a whiff of fungus.

      He staggered down a narrow hall that led to a bathroom, its wall displaying several framed photographs. One was a family photo, a father and mother with two girls, but the rest were of a pretty woman, probably the one who had rescued him. Some looked professionally taken, glamor pictures, and others were blurry self portraits almost purposefully out of focus. In the dim light, he thought of home. He had grown up in a decommissioned primary school that his father had purchased at auction. The long hallway that connected all the classrooms to the former office was decorated with drawings, paintings, and photographs. These were the pieces his father—an art teacher by profession—had been unable to sell. In some ways, it should not have surprised anyone that Michael’s father used his own artistic skills after Michael’s accident. He distrusted medicine and blamed pills for the cause of his wife’s death. The subject of most of his father’s unsold work was the change of his own sons, so when Michael had walked down that hall, he passed pictures of himself from the time he was a baby to the young man he was now. While the photographs illustrated the growth of his younger brothers from boys into men, Michael, from the age of fourteen on, appeared the same in each one.

      Inside the bathroom, Michael stood before

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