Текст книги "The Fuck-Up"

Автор книги: Arthur Nersesian

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Heated, I walked away from the barrel and started walking west on Third as it turned into Great Jones. I passed the Bowery, passed Lafayette Street. On Broadway I vaguely recognized the restaurant on the corner with the big clean windows filled with yuppies, and then I remembered. I had eaten there with Ternevsky. It was Caramba.

Drifting up Broadway, past the youth industry, complete with all the latest fashion outposts, I was a ghost. I tried to look into eyes, but if anyone cast a fearful glance at me it was only so that they’d be sure they were avoiding me. I was no longer a member of the human club. But I had to get back in. I kept reassuring myself that if I thought hard enough I could find a solution. But I was working under a ruptured brain. Thoughts braced against the incomprehensible, straining to pick up a weight just an ounce too heavy for my thought muscles.

There had to be a way out. I had undaunting faith that by tonight I would be carefully bathed and then nestled away in a warm bed, a full meal, full in stomach. Someone would be comforting me.

When the dust settled, the most obvious choice emerged—Sarah. The circle seemed complete. She was the only possible person I could think of. A corner pay phone. I made a collect call.

I could hear her phone ringing and ringing until the operator finally asked me to call back later. I called another operator and again it rang repeatedly, and again the operator said call back. The operators were obviously screwing things up. I hung up and marched over to her apartment. When I finally found her building, I kept my finger on the door bell for about a half an hour, but got no answer. The front door was locked. I sat and waited on the chilly front stoop. Occasionally tenants passed by giving me the look—a filthy bum on their stoop.

Eventually as they passed I would rise, distancing them from the dreaded me. Finally as one old fellow was leaving I was able to catch the front door before it slammed shut. The doorbell had to be broken. I banged on Sarah’s door for about five minutes. And then I just listened silently, not a creature was stirring, not even a cockroach.

Back on the front stoop, I thought about Sarah’s phone ringing. Where the hell was the answering machine? Finally I went up to look at her mailbox. Her name was there, but tagged next to it was another name. She probably had adopted a new boyfriend. Quickly it neared five o’clock. People filled the streets streaming homeward. As Sarah’s neighbors dashed back into the apartment, I noticed some of them mumbling between themselves. I could almost hear them, “Yeah, he’s been hanging out here for hours.”

As the street lights blinked on, I sat in front of Sarah’s door and recalled how many times I had thoughtlessly strolled through this hallway on the way up to Sarah’s apartment. Finally, despite or perhaps because of the cold, I started drifting to sleep.

Suddenly someone said, “Time to get up.” A cop was standing over me with some lady behind him.

“No, officer.” I rose to my feet. “I’m waiting for someone who lives here.”

“Come on,” the officer started swinging his night stick. “Get out.”

“I’m waiting for Sarah Oleski in apartment five.”

“She’s no longer here,” the lady standing behind the officer informed him.

“Where is she?”

“Hey, I’m not playing with you anymore,” the officer said, and then he whacked me on the forearm; years before the Tompkins Square tumult.

“I just want to know where Sarah is. I was her boyfriend. I’m concerned.” I was backing out of the building, cradling the forearm.

“She went off to school,” the lady told the cop. School, she was going to graduate school. It all came back to me. And out in the cold I started walking. It was night now, and I had no idea what to do. I walked by the Zeus Theater. From across the street I watched guys enter and leave. Soon it was midnight. I started back to the Men’s Shelter on Third Street. The big door was closed and locked. I knocked until someone answered. Quietly I was led into a room, where some guy asked some preliminary questions. I was required to take a shower. Then I put my clothes back on, as crappy as they were. They were all I had. I was assigned a bed, but I didn’t sleep at all that night.

The next morning, I pissed and joined the line in the hall. When Ernie started walking up the stairs banging his ladle against the pot, I lowered my head so as not to be seen. My pride wasn’t completely dead yet. I gulped breakfast down quickly and got a second helping. I then shoved my orange in my pocket and before Ernie could spot me I was out the door. I wasn’t sure where I was going to spend the upcoming night, but felt there was no way I could return to that shelter. I spent the day walking around places I had known when I was alive. Even if I saw Glenn or someone, I wondered whether I would have the guts to approach them. That night I went over to the Path Train stop on Ninth Street and without paying I rode the train from terminus to terminus, over and over.

Back in the early eighties, the cash machine enclosures were not nearly as ubiquitous, so subways were the predominant sleeping sites. The Path was much cleaner than the New York subway, but it was also better policed. Several times I was thrown off the train. The next afternoon I was accompanied off the train at the Christopher Street station. The cop who escorted me had thrown me off the train earlier. He told me that if he found me sleeping in his train again, he would walk me into the tunnel and shoot me, and that in six months’ time the rats would have completely devoured my body. I’m not sure if he was serious, but I admired his rich use of detail. I walked down Christopher to the river, where I envisioned old bodies floating on the surface. Manhattan on the Ganges. Some guy came up to me, and mumbled, “The Pier is closed at sunset.”

I reentered the labyrinth of streets and started getting very hungry. Passing an outdoor Korean fruit stand, I carefully snuck up to the very edge and slowly put my hand on a cantaloupe. When I removed it, others came rolling down, and the cashier guy ran out at me with a big machete.

“I’m fucking hungry, asshole!”

“Fug yer!”

“My great great grandfather fought in the Civil War!” I yelled back before I limped away. He probably didn’t even know about that war. Soon I spotted another street person holding shopping bags, an old ugly guy. With nothing else to do, I followed him. When he got to the corner, I watched him going through a garbage can. He ferreted out some kind of discarded food product, which he carefully scrutinized and then he only ate several bites. Fumbling through the garbage, he pulled out a couple beer cans, which he emptied and shoved in his shopping bag.

“How do you know you’re not going to get sick eating that shit?” I stepped up and asked him. He only looked at me and then walked away; some were idiots, some were psychos, and some were just luckless.

Imposed distinctions started fading. Periodically I had to stand in a doorway or over a subway grating in order to thaw out a little. After that, I had about a fifteen minute duration before the cold started hurting again. Inspired by other foragers, I found a bag. I went from trash pile to trash pile rummaging for cans; I did this mainly because it was something to do. Only a couple of times did I actually cash in the cans for the nickel deposits. While working the can circuit down Greenwich Avenue, I looked in the window of the bookstore at Greenwich and Sixth Avenue and spotted the new issue of the Harrington.Leaving my bags outside. I went over to the magazine and flipped through the pages to my poem.

“Shoo! Out!” Looking up, I saw the cashier, a well-dressed guy with long wavy hair and wire-framed glasses.

“I wrote this poem. Want me to sign it?”

“No thanks,” he replied, plucking the issue from out of my hand and escorting me out the door. It was then, while picking up my bag of cans, that I remembered. Owensfield was rich and he respected my talents. It didn’t occur to me that he might feel screwed by the theater deal. I took the cans to a deli. The guy didn’t want to cash them, but I started crying so he just handed me a quarter. I found a pay phone outside and got the number of the Harringtonoffices. Putting my quarter in the slot, I dialled for salvation. The receptionist answered.

“This is one of the contributors to the current issue,” I said professionally “I’d like to speak to Mister Owensfield.”

“I’m sorry Mister Owensfield just left town.”

“Left town!”

“I’m afraid so. He’s on his first vacation in two years.”

“When will he be back?”

“In about a month.”

“A month!”

“The next issue doesn’t come out for another three months. Rest assured, there’s plenty of time for any submissions.”

“No there isn’t!” I groaned.

“Perhaps I can help you?”

“Listen,” I said desperately, “I’m nothing, I’m a fucking street bum. I’m eating shit out of the garbage and I crap in doorways…” The phone went click. I had made a faulty approach.

Wandering, I begged, I looked for little bites here and there, for possible places to grab some shut-eye, for discarded garments that might come in handy. I addressed remote questions I never imagined I would have to consider: How badly does food have to be decomposed before it’s no longer edible? How cold should I be before I need warmth? Shame diminished; I was becoming accustomed to expelling waste in public. Pain became a passive verb: I no longer hurt, I was just in pain. I hadn’t really experienced hunger before, now it was a constant.

It was an interesting phenomenon to sit and watch streets flood with people, sidewalks that were bone dry just an hour earlier. Time, now, was something for those who could use it. At night, I would go through the exit door in the subways. Occasionally a cop would catch me. But they never arrested; sometimes they’d hit me. Usually they’d just throw me back out, a fish too small to keep. Then I’d just go to another subway station and go through. Now and then, at night, a cop would expel me from the train. Usually though, I’d awaken in a train packed with scrubbed, well-dressed people swarming around me. Instantly I’d know that I was heading toward the city and that there was daylight above the tunnel.

Slowly the world seemed to be curving around my view of it. I kept hearing people screaming my name, a name that had outlived its purpose since no one knew it. My identity was my experiences. Everyday sights were turning into aberrations of a past breaking through; garbage in front of a lamp post resembled my grandmother from a half block away. I could’ve sworn that a discarded pile of newspaper was my old dog.

SEVENTEEN

I avoidedthe cold, dark, and dangerous and adhered to the dry, warm, and lit. On the occasions when I misjudged the two I usually ended up incurring some form of pain. Even though diarrhea had set in and I’d gotten uncleanably filthy, the smell didn’t affect me. Ever since Junior’s pals had kicked my nose in, I barely smelled a thing. One night, though, I perceived this strange phantom odor of flesh decaying. I had a bad flea infestation and I had scratched my skin raw. Like a vegetable out of a fridge, I had started to rot. I had no preservatives, a poor shelf life. I was getting more sick, tired, dull, and pain was no longer even painful. Based on the fact that I didn’t know how I was going to turn out, I should have been either helped or executed. Death is the final shield from life.

I was moving away from myself; silly ideas and images moved their way across the desert of my mind. I no longer had control; all I could do was watch them and react; sometimes I’d laugh, sometimes I’d cry. The great caravan of thoughts passed more and more rarely until soon there was just the great desert: tabula rasa.

Life became a brutal continuum. The chronic fragments—the streets, the garbage cans, the crowds, the subways, the police—were all indicative of a life closing, sealing like an old scab. All the fragments were piecing together for a final kill.

I clearly remember the morning that time resumed. Weeks, maybe months, had crumbled since that party at the Harringtonoffices. I was snoozing on a bench in Grand Central Station until I was awakened by a cops night stick. The night stick wanted me to leave the terminal so I left and started walking westward.

Soon, I saw the great steps of the Public Library, and there I sat and watched the cars. I don’t know why, but at one interval, when the lights turned green, I walked into the center of the street and looked down Fifth Avenue. I suppose I wanted to see where all the cars were going. That’s when I saw the Washington Square Arch. As I watched cars speeding down Fifth Avenue, their roofs disappearing toward it, I realized that I was trying to picture the white hood of a car, a Mercedes! And that’s when I saw it, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, Amen. After being on the brink for so long, after the bland and aching season of decay, in that distant arch I wiped my watery eyes and focused on the glimmer that wasn’t death.

Moving more quickly and more determinedly than I had in weeks, I walked over to the IND station at Sixth and Forty-second Street, opened the exit gate, and entered. Soon an F train rolled in. I boarded and counted the stops: Thirty-fourth, Twenty-third, Fourteenth, West Fourth, Broadway-Lafayette, Second Avenue…. Here a cop boarded and looked at me. If he was a good cop he’d have tossed me off. I sat up stiff and formal trying to give the impression of having a destination. He got off at Jay Street and two stops later, at Carroll Street, before the train came to a halt I got up.

My feet were numb as I walked down that platform, but I couldn’t stop the smile from my lips. For the first time in weeks, even years, every step had a meaning. Time and space were now finite. I was walking the shortest distance between two points. When I got up the stairs, I could see it in the distance and I could feel the relief. Sensations were beginning to return. I thought about these last couple of years. I had washed ashore here, formed a tiny beachhead for myself, and for an instant felt like I had a shot at the big time: an opportunity to get published, a classy abode, even part ownership of my own business. But swifter than it came, it went. Like a cockroach on water, I had floated on my spindly arms and legs in the giant toilet bowl of New York.

I was only a block away now and I started chuckling. When I had parked the Mercedes there, it was the day after Helmsley’s wake.

During his last few years, he moved away from literature and more and more toward history. When I asked him about this interest, he replied that when he got old and turned senile his memories might fuse with this vast bank of historical data and the history of the world would seem like his own personal past. I felt somewhat senile as I walked to my Mercedes. Glenn’s son still wanted to mutilate me; Ox would probably toss me in the same jail cell with Miguel, if Miguel was in jail; Ternevsky would try to have me castrated.

I could see the car on the corner. Then I realized that I no longer had the key, but I knew how to hotwire engines.

And then like the Cheshire Cat the hope vaporized leaving only a mocking grin. I realized that this wasn’t the car. I looked around and down the street. My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.

Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn’t care anymore. I couldn’t hang on anymore. I didn’t have the guts to kill myself, but I didn’t want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry. I wandered through the neighborhood.

The religion of the car—the diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence—allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yolk: it lives the real life, the true life. It wasn’t comforting. The car would have been better.

“Spare any change?” I asked one guy who looked as if he could. He ignored me. I asked another guy, who walked by more quickly. And then another and another and another and so on.

“Get a fucking job, you bum,” an apelike man said to me.

“I’m… not well,” I replied meekly, unstably. But then some gear locked into place and I started yelling back, “I got nothing to lose. I could do anything I want to you, and the worst that you think you can do to me can only be better than what I’m going through now. I got nothing to lose, nothing…”

I walked some more, and I guess the light got dimmer, but it was still day; time wasn’t going anywhere. I felt very tired and I went into a doorway and dropped to my knees and instinctively looked out for cops and foot-stomping kids. I saw cars and legs and sniffing dogs. My eyes trailed up a street pole. It was Sackett Street. What difference did it make? It could have been Mahoegushmoegel Street, and so what? And I laughed at that.

After some time, I started thinking. It would have been so good to see the Mercedes there. It would have meant there is a God and he’s a good guy and he’ll give you a break from time to time. I wondered what had happened to the last of Helmsley’s books that were in the back seat of the car. If the car had been stolen, they probably would have been chucked; if the car had been impounded, they still probably would have been chucked. While I wandered around the neighborhood, I kept an eye out for them. But I saw no sign of them. The great sandcastle of literature that he had built for himself had completely vanished.

Before getting up to scrounge for food, I wondered if ever at any time anything—maybe a God or angels or some invisible force that watches everything—would know that I died, just know about it all. And then I thought. This has got to work itself out somehow. I wondered where I would be in a year. And then I realized that for the past couple of years, if asked where I would be in a year I’d probably have predicted that I’d find some meteoric, inexplicable success. For the first time, I realized that if I didn’t die, I would probably just survive, and the next year I would just be grateful to have a place and maybe a couple of bucks in some savings account and a small TV or something, and that’d do fine. God was time, I remember thinking. Time was everything. God was the pace of time. I remember thinking about this magical unit of time, a year, just a small clip of God’s pinky nail. I had faith in the duration. A year would come somehow and save me. At some point, I started repeating the phrase aloud, like a chant or a prayer. I remember that much, not because my prayers were answered, but because they got a response.

EIGHTEEN

“What the fuckare you mumbling?” A set of clothed knees were in front of me, glaring at me.

“Just a year,” I replied and looked up meekly, and I recognized the face. “Your name is Bonnie, isn’t it?”

“No, asshole; Angela, remember? What the fuck happened to you?”

“I got sick and…” I clucked my tongue and raised my eyebrows and asked for some money.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

Then I started crying because someone was actually asking me that, and I started begging her for some food or anything and said that I was in deep shit in a really bad way and needed help, and I knew that she didn’t like me and could laugh at me and walk away, but please don’t just leave me! I cried till I was exhausted. She just stood above me and looked down; her expression didn’t change.

“You’re right,” she finally spoke. “I don’t fucking like you at all. You’re scum.” And I thought she was going to spit at me, and she turned to go, and I swear I don’t understand it, but she turned to me and said, “Follow a half a block behind me, you capisce?” I nodded. “I don’t want anyone knowing you’re with me, capisce?” I nodded.

She started walking down the street slowly, passing the OTB and saying hi to a couple of old guys. I followed slowly behind. I wasn’t sure what the fuck it was going to lead to, but figured even if she was going to lock me in some room and beat the shit out of me, there was still some hope that maybe I could convince her to feed me, so I could feel the pain more acutely. There wasn’t any more hope in that doorway.

I followed at a good distance. In case anyone was watching from a parallax angle, I deliberately walked this way and that—no one could have second-guessed my destination. I kept a tight line of sight on her. She was the only fish on my only hook, and I couldn’t reel myself in until she was inside. Her door slammed shut halfway up the street, and I kept straggling this way and that, looking in garbages, keeping in character. Boy, was I hungry. In a moment I was in front of her house. I saw that the door was slightly ajar and I dashed in.

“Did you run right here?” she asked sharply as soon as I slammed the door behind me.

“I swear I didn’t. I was real careful, I swear it.”

“All right, come on then.” She led me into the bathroom, put some clothes on a hook, and put a black garbage bag on the cover of the toilet. Before she left, she pulled the shower curtain aside and gave me some calamine lotion for the scabs and cuts.

“That goes,” she said, pointing to my beard and handing me a razor. “Put your old clothes in the bag and seal it.”

I towelled off, sheared the beard with scissors I got from the medicine cabinet, and shaved. I eagerly put the clothes on. Although they were not new and hung loosely from me, they were soft, well ironed, and smelled delicious: they seemed edible. When I looked in a full length mirror, I had this strange recognition and inspected the clothing carefully until I realized that I was wearing Helmsley’s garments. I still had only my old shoes, and although I had these new clothes, I had no intention of throwing out my old clothes. There were still cold days ahead. At best this might be a comfort station, where I could get a meal, a shower, and a change of clothes. Then, perhaps, I might get some kind of job. At least I could sit in coffee shops without being thrown out immediately. I could shoplift without being an instant suspect.

“Hey, how did you get Helmsley’s clothes?” I asked upon leaving the bathroom.

“He left a bunch here…. You can have them.” She took the garbage bag and was about to take it out the door.

“Hey, I still need that stuff.”

“Not in my house.”

I remained silent as she threw the bag into a trash heap outside. Did she expect me to stay the night? Or perhaps just for dinner? If I asked her what exactly I could anticipate, I might make her nervous and panicky. I was in a very bad way and had little latitude. Like a fine tool or a dumb animal, she could be used and manipulated for one’s benefit—or misused and made into a danger to everyone around her. Helmsley, in all his braininess, couldn’t use this tool properly.

When she returned, she saw me standing in the middle of her living room floor, just standing there thinking.

“Well, sit down or something,” she said as she walked off into another room.I sat up against the wall and thought about how horrible the outside was. To be outside was terrifying to me; the security of being indoors was unbelievable. To have a place to come to of one’s own design seemed unfathomable. An idea occurred to me: if I committed a crime, I’d go to prison. A place is an extension and confirmation of the identity, I thought. If you’re neurotic or afraid or losing control, you might keep the place nunnery neat, with soups alphabetized in the cupboard or pillows on the couch arranged symmetrically. Strangely although I’ve always liked the idea of a clean place, I’ve always been a messy person. A place too clean and orderly makes me feel self-conscious. Angela’s furniture, knickknacks, and such seemed to be watching me. No, more than just watching me, they seemed to demand, by example, a code of behavior. I had to remain within the protocol of the order of the place.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“What did I do?” I asked, rising unsteadily.

“Why are you sitting on the floor?”

“What am I supposed to do, sit on the wall?” She pointed to a chair and started hollering about how it was the latest invention. I don’t know why I didn’t even consider the chair.

“I’ve sat in chairs before, okay?” I yelled back. “I had a good reason for sitting on the floor. Did that ever occur to you?”

“What reason?”

“’Cause I have an edema build-up in my knees, and I was trying to put some pressure on the area.”

“What, you got water on the knee?”

“Yeah,” I replied, rolling up my pants. Fortunately my knees were swollen so she bought it.

“Whatever suits you.” She left the room. I sat in the chair. In a minute she returned, carrying some crumpled sheets.

“Well, what are you doing in a chair now?” she yelled.

“You made me feel uncomfortable sitting on the floor,” I mumbled.

“Sit on the fucking floor if you want,” she barked. And grabbing the back of the wooden chair, she yanked it so that I fell to the ground.

“My knees are fine now.”

“I think you’re a fucking liar about the knees.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“I don’t know;” she replied. I didn’t say anything, and she walked out of the room. What was she doing in the other rooms? I crept to a doorway and peeked. She was making a bed. I moved silently back into the living room, went over to a bookcase, and surveyed its contents. There were a bunch of pastel-tone romances; the John Jakes historic novel series, named after frontier states and illustrated with covered wagons and cleavage; and glitzy soft-porn best-sellers with embossed red lettering. As my eyes travelled along the colorful, gumdrop-colored paperbacks, I suddenly spotted a dusty hardcover on an out-of-reach shelf: H. Lefebre’s biography Diderot.I strained high to pick it off the shelf and, upon opening it, recognized Helmsley’s Ex Libris mark—it was a first American edition printed in the 1930s. I quietly put it back, took my seat on the floor, pulled my knees up, placed my arms on my lap, and let my hands hang between my legs. I wished I thought of sitting on the chair from the start.

“Hey, hey!” I awoke from a deep sleep with her yelling and shaking me.

“Huh?” I jumped up nervously.

“This ain’t a place to sleep, asshole.” It was time to go.

“Okay,” I said nervously and asked if I could use the bathroom.

“I don’t give a shit,” she said. I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I didn’t have to do anything, but I didn’t want to leave until I absolutely had to. I sat on the toilet seat and leaned back on the tank, drifting off.

“What the hell you doing in there?” she screamed while banging on the door.

“Nothing, nothing,” I replied, opening the door.

“I thought you died in the bathtub or something.”

“No, I’m okay,” I replied, but used her idea. “Do you mind if I take a bath?”

“You just took a shower!” she hissed. But then, more gently, “I don’t care, go ahead.” She was about to close the door, but stopped and asked, “What were you doing in here all that time?”

“I guess I drifted off.”

“Well, why don’t you go to sleep?”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I confessed.

“Go to bed, asshole, in there.” She led me to a room where she had made the bed earlier. I thanked her, and as soon as she left the room, I tiredly thanked the darkness, which seemed to embody a great presence, God maybe…. Sleep popped me down like a pill, producing a remarkably fulfilling emptiness.

“Are you hungry?” she screamed in at me. I sat up instantly. My mind raced, trying to bridge the gap between deep sleep and what seemed like an interrogation. She repeated, “Are you hungry?”

Instinctively I said no. If I say yes, I thought, she might interpret it as me trying to make her into a maid or expecting a service from her. I was surprised to see morning light streaming in through the windows.

“At least have coffee.”

I got fully dressed, shoes and socks and all, and went into the kitchen, where I sat at a dinette table. She made herself a full breakfast—hash browns, eggs sunny-side up, three strips of perfectly crisp bacon, toast, and coffee. I longed for the smoothness of yolk, for the texture of salty bacon, and lightly done, buttery toasts. She chewed equinely. She might just as well had been chomping on oats and grain. When she had consumed barely a third of the plate, she tossed the meal into the garbage and then walked off into one of those rooms. I raced over to the trash can and scooped out a large splat of solidified egg white. But then I heard her coming and shoved the egg white deep between my sock and ankle, a cache to eat later.

She walked by the room. My God, she was dressing, probably going off to work, and that meant I’d have to leave at any moment. Angela glanced in.

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” she asked, noticing my peculiar expression as I felt the egg white slither into my instep.

“Nothing.”

She then marched off, cursing. I shoved a catsup bottle down the front of my pants. I took some bread and shoved it into my shirt. I saw a can of string beans on the shelf and shoved it in my pocket. I took a spatula and before Angela returned I frantically bent it so that it slid along the leg of my pants. Angela returned, fully dressed in street garb.

“Here’s the key to the place. Lock up and turn out the lights if you leave,” she instructed and walked out. Just like that.

When she left, I took the egg white out of my sock and found a cellophane bag. I put it in the bag along with other little bits and pieces of food she had thrown out. I wrapped up the scraps of food, went back into the bedroom I’d spent the night in, and hid them under the mattress. I then looked through her cupboards and inspected her other foods. I poured out a half box of spaghetti, which I’d found can be eaten raw if you chew very little bits. I broke up the spaghetti into four peg-size parts, wrapped a rubberband around them, and put them behind the schlock in the bookcase. She had four cans of Del Monte Creamed Corn, so I took one and hid it in one of her winter boots in the hallway closet. I hid flat things like bologna and Swiss cheese under the living room rug. I took other small items, too, not even knowing what they all were. The biggest dilemma was deciding how much food I could take without its absence being noticed.