The Bite
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Roger Dennison always tried to be alert to the dangers as well as the pleasures of the city, so he was as much irritated with himself as surprised when, distracted by thoughts of a project he’d been working on for several weeks, he smelled something rank, looked up and found himself confronted by a filthy and clearly deranged man, whose approach through the rush hour crowd waiting on the subway platform he had failed to notice. The man’s face, all but masked by layers of dirt and grime, dense, greasy curls of yellowish-gray hair and an unruly beard, was notable mostly for his glaring, bloodshot eyes that happened to be as vividly blue as Roger’s own.
Roger was about to edge away from him when the man glanced down and bent at the knees, as if to pick something off the ground. Then he made a garbled sound that might have been a curse, spread his arms and lunged upward from the balls of his feet. Roger had time only to raise his left arm defensively, a movement slowed by the weight of his briefcase and, before he knew it, he was on his back on the concrete floor, grappling desperately with his attacker.
Though distantly aware of people yelling and crowding back out of harm’s way, Roger seemed to exist in a kind of bubble of silence, his world narrowed down to the weight on his chest, the foul breath in his face and the black-nailed hands mauling him about the face and shoulders. That no one seemed to be helping him didn’t even register until several seconds after he felt the man’s teeth sinking into his left forearm just above the wrist, and both the pain and the sound of his own cry shocked and galvanized him into greater effort.
Using his legs, he managed to shift some of the man’s weight to the side, which gave him enough leverage to begin punching him in the temple and ear, again and again, until he heard a squeal of pain, and then the weight was off his chest, and two bystanders were helping him to a sitting position. He saw the guy running at full speed toward the subway exit, his soiled overcoat flapping behind him.
Roger’s blood was up now. He tried to go after him but found, to his surprise, that his legs wouldn’t support his weight. The two men were holding him under his arms and speaking in low, urgent voices, trying to calm him down. It was only when he looked at his arm and saw the blood that he realized how badly bitten he was. He was so pumped with adrenaline he could hardly breathe, and his right hand felt broken.
A transit cop was first on the scene, followed soon after by two uniformed patrolmen. They got him to his feet, one of them carrying his briefcase, then walked him out of the subway and sat him down in the back seat of their squad car. He described his attacker as best he could, though he realized as he tried to recall the man’s features that it was the crazed, pastel-blue eyes he remembered best, not to mention the man’s dreadful body odor, which still wafted from his own clothes, as if he’d been sprayed by a skunk.
A few minutes later an ambulance came and took him to the nearest emergency room. After the touch of queasiness that came over him when the young surgical resident cleaned and bandaged the wound and then administered tetanus and antibiotic injections, he began to feel better.
Luckily it turned out that his right hand was badly bruised but not broken, and the bite wounds were left unsutured, although the reason given by the surgeon hardly comforted him. “Human teeth are pretty dirty,” the young doctor said. “We leave the wounds open for a day or two so they’ll heal cleanly.”
“He put all he had into that bite,” Roger said. “I think he was actually growling.”
The surgeon shook his head and whistled. “Well, he may have been half pit bull, but he didn’t damage any nerves or tendons. You were lucky.”
“I guess so,” Roger replied, still shivering over the thought of a madman trying to bite his arm off.
* * *
The jangly adrenaline feeling was giving way to tiredness now, as he sat in the crowded waiting room watching for his wife, Carol, who was on her way in from the suburbs to pick him up. Having been the center of attention during the police escort out of the subway and the ride in the ambulance, he now found himself all but unnoticed amidst the hubbub of human misery, his torn coat on his lap, his shirt and tie stained and spotted with blood, trying and failing, as the codeine kicked in, to focus his eyes on a roughed-up issue of People magazine.
Pleasantly foggy now, he recalled his last visit as a patient to an emergency room, some thirty years before, after slipping on an icy front step and breaking a rib. That injury took longer to heal than this one would, but the doctor warned him that he might experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress: nightmares, sleeplessness, depression.
Four and a half hours after the incident — the ER wait was interminable, and it took an infuriatingly long time to fill the prescription for pain medication — he was still a little shaky, but finally able to feel some distance from it as he sipped wine over a long-delayed dinner with Carol.
“Somehow I missed seeing him walk toward me,” he said. “But even then, looking into the craziest eyes you can imagine, I remember thinking: ‘Why him? Why not me? What did we both do to deserve what we got?’ But I was scared, too.”
“I’m glad you felt sorry for him,” Carol said, reaching across the table to squeeze his uninjured hand.
“Part of me still does,” he said. “But most of me wants a rematch.”
“Any idea why he picked you out of the crowd?”
“Well, this hadn’t occurred to me until just now, but maybe he zeroed in on me because our eyes are the same color.”
“I read in the paper the other day that blue-eyed people form the majority of alcoholics, criminals, and psychotics. Isn’t that odd?”
“Does that mean I don’t get any more wine?”
She laughed. “Well, you probably shouldn’t, not on top of the codeine.”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t,” he replied with a sour smile, his bruised hand trembling as he poured himself another glass.
“I called Christopher and told him what happened,” she said. “He was very upset about it.”
“Was he really?” Even now, he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice when the subject of his son came up.
“Yes, really,” she said, catching his tone. “He wanted to drive down tonight to be with you, but I talked him out of it.”
“That’s good,” he said. “With his grades, the last thing he needs is an excuse to leave school.”
“Actually, it’s Dead Week.”
“All the more reason for him to stay where he is. We’d just fight all weekend if he came. And anyway, I’ve got you to hold my hand, don’t I?”
* * *
His boss, Barry Fischer, sounded genuinely shocked when Roger called his office the next morning — which happened to be a Friday — and told him what had happened. Although Barry insisted that he take the day off and Monday, too, if he needed it, Roger assured him he’d be back on Monday. Things were getting tighter at the office, and they both knew he couldn’t afford to take two days off, though the bite worried him more than he cared to admit.
His arm was red and swollen around the bandage and, although the skin wasn’t quite hot to the touch, a telltale sign of infection, he could almost feel the bacteria multiplying inside the wounds as they shrugged off the antibiotic and grew into an army. He knew it was just his paranoid imagination, sparked by the creepy-crawly feeling of his skin under the bandage that had so disturbed his sleep, yet inseparably linked as it was to the rather nauseating idea of human teeth, driven by the convulsive strength of madness, piercing his flesh and contaminating his blood, it had mushroomed over the course of the night into something close to fixation.
The intensity of his feelings surprised him, for he had never been particularly squeamish or sickly. He enjoyed the pleasures of life and tried to be stoic about its pains, took reasonably good care of his health and, while a day never passed without some kind of memento mori, he was hardly preoccupied with his own mortality, or at least no more than most people seemed to be.
He assumed that this temporary inability to shrug off having been bitten by a man instead of, say, a dog or a rat, had something to do with the post-traumatic stress reaction about which the doctor had so pointedly warned him. He was still shaken up, after all, a wounded animal newly sensitized to his own fragility and understandably concerned about the very real possibility of infection.
It wasn’t melodramatic to say that he had been spiritually as well as physically attacked, not just by the germ-coated teeth of a mentally ill street person but also by the poor man’s diseased imagination. He had been drawn suddenly and involuntarily into a stranger’s nightmare world and, until the man was evaluated by a psychiatrist, who could say what it was about Roger that had triggered the attack as he stood there on the platform minding his own business? It was probably just bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And considering the limitless possibilities for fatal misfortune, he ought to consider himself lucky. All he had to do was recover from a bite on the arm.
* * *
He napped as much as he could over the weekend, though he’d always had trouble sleeping during the day, even with earplugs and a sleep mask. He tried reading in bed and, later, on the sofa, but the pain pills had turned his brain to mush, and he soon gave it up, turning to a baseball game on TV, the geologic pace of which benumbed even his narcotized senses.
He puttered around his work room in the basement, but nothing could hold his attention for long. The pain of his injuries were kept pretty well at bay by the codeine, at the cost of feeling slightly nauseous whenever he lay down. Carol would check in on him from time to time, asking how he felt or sounding him out on her planned dinner menu.
It was all so soothingly domestic, yet he wasn’t soothed. In fact, her presence irritated him. Not that he wanted to be alone, either. He didn’t seem to know what he wanted. It was as if his attacker’s teeth had punctured some delicate gland containing his sense of purpose, which was slowly leaking away.
He called the police twice in two days, asking if any arrests had been made, but the detective assigned to the case had no news for him. His interpretation of the cop’s bland assurances was that he shouldn’t expect an arrest anytime soon, if ever, and that, in fact, he should stop calling overworked policemen and concentrate on putting this thing behind him. Roger wasn’t quite sure what he was hoping for. Did he really want a schizophrenic homeless man arrested and charged with a crime, or just taken off the street and hospitalized before he could do any more harm?
He knew that the odds against another attack, especially from the same man, were extremely high, but his fears proved resistant to reason when he went out for a short walk through his neighborhood on Sunday afternoon and found himself glancing frequently over his shoulder, as if the man had somehow gotten his address and was coming back to finish the job.
His fear, he realized, would only be lessened, not eliminated, once the man was in custody, for he was beginning to understand that the core of his anxiety lay not in the fact that the man was still at large, though that was certainly a factor, but in learning, or failing to learn, the identity of his attacker. He felt that if he knew the man’s name and something of his history, he would possess the key to mastering his fear or, at least, gain a partial understanding of why the man had been drawn to him out of the hundreds of others in that rush hour crowd. Was it a purely random attack, as the police had suggested, or could it have been something as simple as their eyes being the same unusual shade of blue? He had to accept that he’d probably never know.
He’d been walking through the peaceful, shaded streets of his neighborhood, immersed in thought, hardly caring where he went, turning on a whim up this street or that, some familiar, some new to him, and when he was thinking he had a habit of talking to himself in a low whisper, as if conversing with an absent friend.
He passed a well-dressed woman about his age. She was walking a small fox terrier. Roger gave her a friendly nod as they passed. She didn’t nod back, in fact she seemed afraid of him, even stepping off the sidewalk and shortening her dog’s leash as if concerned for its safety, too. He turned to look back and saw that she’d quickened her pace, glancing over her shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following.
It was a minor misunderstanding, yet it made him angry and sad, seeing the fear in her eyes, the recoil as if from something unclean. Well, he was a stranger to her, and it was true that he was wearing his weekend work clothes, his arm was bandaged, his face scratched and bruised, and he hadn’t shaved for the last two mornings, but surely she could tell the difference between a sane man recovering from an assault and a mental patient.
Copyright © 2025 by Jeffrey Greene
