Gail gleans what the equation is all about by patiently waiting for some language-equivalent translation to cross Jeremy’s mind.
Gail’s anger is unfiltered now. It washes over Jeremy like a black wind.
Jeremy pauses.
Gail forms an angry response, but then stifles it.
He forms an image of himself nodding.
Gail raises her mindshield to think about this. She does not shut herself off from Jeremy, but the contact is less intimate, less immediate. Jeremy considers following up on the exchange, trying to explain further, if not justify, but he can feel her absorption with her own thoughts and he decides to save the conversation until later.
“Mr. Bremen?”
He opens his eyes and looks out at his class of math students. The young man, Arnie, has stepped back from the chalkboard. It is a simple differential equation, but Arnie has missed it completely.
Jeremy sighs, swivels in his chair, and proceeds to explain the function.
Rat’s Coat, Crowskin, Crossed Staves
Bremen lived in a cardboard box under the Twenty-Third Street overpass and learned the litany of survival: rise before sunrise, wait, breakfast at the Nineteenth Street Salvation Army outlet, after waiting at least an hour for the minister to arrive and cajole them with motivation, then another half an hour for the prewarmed food to arrive … then, out by 10:30, shuffle twenty blocks to the Lighthouse for lunch, but not before more waiting. There is a job call at the Lighthouse and Bremen must line up for work in order to line up for lunch. Usually only five or six out of the sixty or so men and women are tagged for work, but Bremen is chosen more than once in April. Perhaps it is because he is relatively young. Usually it is unskilled, mindless work—cleaning up around the Convention Center, perhaps, or sweeping out the Lighthouse itself—and Bremen does it uncomplainingly, pleased to have something fill his hours other than the endless waiting and walking from meal to meal.
Dinner is at the JeSus Saves! near the train station or back at the Salvation Army storefront on Nineteenth. JeSus Saves! is actually the Christian Community Service Center, but everyone knows it by the name on the cross- shaped sign out front where the middle
The food is much better at JeSus Saves!, but the preaching is longer, sometimes running so late that most of the waiting audience is asleep, their snores mixing with the rumbles of their bellies, before Reverend Billy Scott and the Marvell Sisters allow them to queue up for dinner.
Bremen usually joins some of the others for a walk along the Sixteenth Street Mall before returning to his box by eleven P.M. He never panhandles, but by staying near Soul Dad or Mister Paulie or Carrie T. and her kids, he sometimes receives the benefit of their begging. Once a black man in an expensive Merino wool overcoat gave Bremen a ten-dollar bill.
That night, and most nights, he stops by AlNite Liquor and picks up a bottle of Thunderbird, carrying it with him back to his box.
April had been a bitch in the Mile High City. Bremen realized later that he had almost died during those last weeks of Denver’s winter, especially during his first night out from the hospital. It had been snowing. Bremen wandered through a cityscape of black alleys and slush-filled streets, the buildings dark. Finally he had found himself in a block of burned-out row houses and had crawled in among the blackened timbers to sleep. He hurt everywhere, but his battered mouth, fractured ribs, and dislocated shoulder were like volcanic peaks of pain rising above an ocean of generalized ache. The shot he’d received hours earlier no longer diminished the pain, but still served to make him sleepy.
Bremen found a niche between a brick chimney and a fire-blackened beam and had crawled in to sleep when he awoke to a vigorous shaking.
“Man, you ain’t got no fucking coat. You stay here, you gonna fucking die and that the flat truth of it.”
Bremen had swum up to semiconsciousness. He blinked at the face scarcely illuminated by a distant streetlight. A black face, wrinkled and lined above an unkempt, twin-spiked beard, dark eyes just visible below the soiled stocking cap. The man wore at least four layers of outer clothing and they all stank. He was pulling Bremen to his feet.
“Lemmelone,” Bremen managed. His few moments of sleep, while not dreamless, had been more free of neurobabble than any time since Gail had died. “Lemmefuckalone.” He pulled his arm free and tried to curl into the niche again. Snow was falling softly through a hole in the shattered ceiling.
“Uh-uh, no way Soul Dad lettin’ you die jes’ ’cause you a stupid little honkie fuck.” The black man’s voice was strangely gentle, somehow appropriate to the softening night and the silent sweep of snowflakes against black beams.
Bremen let himself be lifted, moved toward the loose boards of the doorway.
“You got a place?” the man was asking over and over. Or perhaps he asked it only once and his thoughts echoed in both their skulls … Bremen was not sure. He shook his head.
“All right, this once you stay with Soul Dad. But just till the sun’s out and you got your brains back in your head. Okay?”
Bremen staggered alongside the black man for countless blocks, past brick buildings illuminated by the hellish orange light of the city reflected back from low storm clouds. Finally they came to a tall highway bridge and slid down a frozen slope of weeds to the darkness beneath. There were packing crates there, and sheets of plastic spread like tarps, and the ashen remains of campfires between abandoned autos. Soul Dad led Bremen into one of the larger structures—a veritable shack of plastic and packing crate, with the concrete buttress of the overpass
