Ricky breathed in hard, and pocketed the key.
He walked away fast from the bus station, pausing only once when he believed no one was watching, to scoop some dirt from the sidewalk and rub it into his hair and face.
By the time he’d walked two blocks, sweat had begun to rise beneath his arms and on his forehead, and he wiped it away with the sleeve of the overcoat.
Before he’d reached the third block, he thought: Now I look to be what I am. Homeless.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For two days Ricky walked the streets, a foreigner to every world.
His outward appearance was of a homeless man, someone clearly alcoholic, drug- addled, or schizophrenic, or even all three combined, although if someone had looked carefully into his eyes, they would have seen a distinct purpose, which is an unusual quality for the down-and-out. Inwardly, Ricky found himself eyeing people on the street, half fantasizing who they were, and what they did, almost envious of the simple pleasure that identity gave one. A woman bustling ahead, gray-haired, carrying shopping packages emblazoned with Newbury Street boutiques, spoke one story to Ricky, while the teenager wearing cut-off jeans and hefting a backpack, a Red Sox cap tilted on his head, said another. He spotted businessmen and taxi drivers, appliance deliverymen and computer technicians. There were stockbrokers and physicians and repairmen and a man hawking newspapers from a kiosk on one corner. Everyone, from the most destitute and abandoned, mumbling, voice-hearing madwoman to the Armani-wearing developer sliding into the backseat of a limousine, had an identity defined by what they were. Ricky had none.
There was both luxury and fear in what he was, he realized. Belonging nowhere, it was almost as if he were invisible. While there was a momentary relief, knowing that he was hidden from the man who had so successfully destroyed who he once was, he understood this was elusive. His being was inextricably wrapped up with the man he knew only as Rumplestiltskin, but who once had been a child of a woman named Claire Tyson, whom he had failed at her moment of need, and now was alone, because of that failure.
His first night was spent alone beneath the curved brick of a Charles River bridge. He wrapped himself in his overcoat, still sweating profusely with the leftover heat from the day, and thrust himself up against a wall, struggling to steal a few hours away from the night, awakening shortly after dawn with a crick in his neck, every muscle in his back and legs shouting outrage and insult. He rose, stretching carefully, trying to remember the last occasion he’d slept outdoors, and thinking it was not since his childhood. The stiffness in his joints told him that there was little to recommend it. He imagined his appearance, and thought that not even the most dedicated method actor would adopt his approach.
There was a mist rising from the Charles, gray banks of vaporous fog that hung over the edges of the slick water. Ricky emerged from the underpass, and stepped up to the bike path that mirrors the bank of the river. He stood, thinking that the water had the appearance of an old-fashioned black typewriter ribbon, satin in look, winding through the city. He stared, telling himself that the sun would have to rise much higher before the water would turn blue, and reflect the stately buildings that approached the sides. In the early morning, the river had an almost hypnotic effect upon him, and for an instant or two, he simply stood stock-still, inspecting the sight in front of him.
His reverie was interrupted by the rhythmic sound of feet slapping against the macadam of the bike path. Ricky turned to see two men running side by side, approaching fast. They wore shiny athletic shorts and the latest in running shoes. Ricky guessed they were both close in age to himself.
One of the men gestured wildly with his arm toward Ricky.
“Step aside!” the man yelled.
Ricky stepped back sharply, and the two men swept past him.
“Out of the way, fella,” one of the two said briskly, twisting so that he wouldn’t make physical contact with Ricky.
“Gotta move,” the other man said. “Christ!”
Still within earshot, Ricky heard one of the joggers say, “Fucking lowlife. Get a job, huh?”
The companion laughed and said something, but Ricky couldn’t make out the words. He took a step or two after the men, filled with a sudden anger. “Hey!” he yelled. “Stop!”
They did not. One man glanced back, over his shoulder, and then they accelerated. Ricky stepped a pace or two after them. “I’m not…” he started. “I’m not what you think…”
But then he realized he might as well have been.
Ricky turned back toward the river. In that second, he understood, he was closer to being what he appeared than he was to what he had been. He took a deep breath and recognized that he was in the most precarious of psychological positions. He had killed who he was in order to escape the man who set out to ruin him. If he went much longer being nobody, he would get swallowed by precisely that anonymity.
Thinking he was in as much danger in those minutes as he had been when Rumplestiltskin was breathing down the back of his every action, Ricky moved forward, determined to answer the first and primary question.
He spent the day, going from shelter to shelter, throughout the city, searching.
It was a journey through the world of the disadvantaged: an early morning breakfast of runny eggs and cold toast served in a backroom kitchen at a Catholic church in Dorchester, an hour spent outside a storefront temporary work broker on a nearby street, milling with men looking for a day’s work raking leaves or emptying trash bins. He went from there to a state-operated shelter in Charlestown, where a man behind a desk insisted that Ricky couldn’t enter without a document from an agency, which Ricky thought was as crazy an insistence as those delusions the truly mentally ill suffered from. He stomped angrily and went back out to the street, where a pair of prostitutes working the lunchtime crowd laughed at him when he tried to ask for directions. He continued to pound the pavement, passing alleys and abandoned buildings, occasionally muttering to himself whenever anyone came too close to him, language being the rough edge of madness, and along with his growing fetid smell, a pretty successful armor against contact with anyone other than the disenfranchised. His muscles stiffened and his feet grew sore, but he continued looking. Once a policeman eyed him cautiously, at one corner, took a step toward him, and then, obviously, thought better of it, and walked on past.
It was deep in the afternoon, with the sun still pounding down, making wavy lines of heat rise from the city streets, that Ricky spotted a possibility.
The man was rooting through a garbage can on the edge of a park, not far from the river. He was about Ricky’s height and weight, with thinning streaks of dirty brown hair. He wore a knit cap, tattered shorts, but an ankle-length wool overcoat that almost reached down to one brown shoe and one black, one a pull-on loafer, the other a workman’s boot. The man was muttering to himself, intent on the contents of the garbage can. Ricky moved close enough to see the lesions on the man’s face and the backs of his hands. As the man worked, he coughed repeatedly, remaining unaware of Ricky’s presence. There was a park bench ten yards away, and Ricky slumped into it. Someone had left a part of the day’s paper behind on the seat, and Ricky grabbed this and pretended to read while he devoted himself to observing the man. After a second or two, he saw the man pull a discarded soda can from the garbage and toss it into an old steel shopping cart, but not the type that one pushes, instead, the type one pulls. The cart was almost filled with empty cans.
Ricky eyed the man as closely as he could, saying to himself: You were the doctor just weeks ago. Make your diagnosis.
The man seemed suddenly enraged when he pulled a can from the trash that had some problem, abruptly throwing it to the ground and kicking it into a nearby bush.
Bipolar, Ricky thought. And schizophrenic. Hears voices, has no medication, or at least, one that he is willing to take. Prone to sudden bursts of manic energy. Violent, too, probably, but more a threat to himself than others. The lesions could either be open sores from living on the street, but they could also be Kaposi’s sarcoma. AIDS was a distinct possibility. So was tuberculosis or lung cancer, given the man’s wracking
