I've been sleeping at the Scott Mission
for six months now and no one has given me a second glance. They can't
even steal my stuff, because when they try, when they come for my shoes
or my food in the night, I'm always awake and watching them and just
shaking my head."
The whole living room stank of whiskey fumes with an ammoniac
tinge. "What if I find you some clothes and a towel?"
"Would I clean myself up? Would I get rid of this protective coloration
and become visible again?" He drank more, breathed out the fumes. "Sure,
why not. Why not. Time to be visible. You've seen me, Krishna's seen
me. Davey's gonna see me. Least I got to see them first."
And so he let his older brother lead him by the hand upstairs to the
bathroom with its damp-swollen paperbacks and framed kitsch-art
potty-training cartoons. And so he let his brother put him under the
stinging hot shower and shampoo his hair and scrub him vigorously with a
back brush, sluicing off the ground-in grime of the streets -- though
the calous pads on his hands remained as dark with soot as the feet of
an alleycat. And so he let his older brother wash the stumps of his toes
where the skin was just a waxy pucker of scar, like belly buttons, which
neither of them had.
And so he let his brother trim away his beard, first with scissors and
then with an electric razor, and so he let his brother brush out his
long hair and tie it back with an elastic taken from around a bunch of
broccoli in the vegetable crisper.
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