The Bite
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
He got through his eight hours somehow, finding in a day rife with unpleasant discoveries that he might have made a passable actor, so good was he at pretending to look busy. On his regular route to the subway, he passed a bar that had changed hands several times in the last few years and, remembering with mixed feelings of loneliness and relief that Carol was out of town all week, he decided to stop in for a drink. Its latest incarnation was a noisy, overpriced bar/restaurant catering to young professionals, so he asked for a booth and ordered some dinner, which helped soak up the four whiskies he put away.
It was after eight and quite dark when he left, but he was feeling pretty good, just a little tipsy, and he took his time walking to the subway. In spite of his looseness, he was becoming more aware as he neared the escalators that there was nothing waiting for him at the end of his ride but an empty house and, although he was looking forward to calling Carol at her hotel, he had to admit he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of spending the night alone. There was a theater within walking distance of his stop, and he seriously considered taking in a movie but, when his train came, he got on.
When he changed over to the Red Line at Metro Center, he entered a nearly empty car and, as it pulled out of the station, he leaned his head against the window and let his eyelids droop, realizing for the first time how tired he was. It was a twenty-minute ride from here to his neighborhood stop, so familiar by now that he’d trained himself to wake up just in time, and the gently rocking car easily lulled him to sleep.
He had left his briefcase at the restaurant and gone back for it, but, when he got there, it was his office, and a gleeful Barry Fischer was sitting cross-legged on top of Roger’s desk, the carelessly forgotten briefcase open in front of him, from which he passed out filthy rags of clothing to shivering co-workers in their underwear.
Roger unwrapped the bandage to show him the bite and noticed something small and brown embedded in the wound. He picked it out and saw without surprise that it was a rotten tooth. He kept pulling out more, filling his pockets with teeth until they bulged out the sides of his overcoat.
The train was just pulling out of Woodley Park, three stops away from his station. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than ten minutes, but the Hispanic couple had gotten off and he was now alone in the car. In grade school he had spent a good portion of his free time alone, perhaps too much, yet he had rarely felt lonely, at least not that he could remember.
But beginning in college, the most gregarious period of his life, through the twenty-three years of his marriage, Roger had gradually lost the knack for solitude. His own company had grown painful to him. Now he needed the presence of others, traffic sounds, planes taking off, books, television, movies, music, anything that helped to drown out the tiresome respiration of his own thoughts.
As the train screeched and rattled around a curve in the tunnel, he remembered bits of the dream and wondered how many nightmares starring the bearded lunatic his brain would manufacture before the memory of the event lost its sting.
God, he was tired, he realized all at once, desperately tired, so tired he could hardly hold his head up, not only of his job and his marriage and his aging face in the mirror and the dreary thoughts behind that face, but of everything, the whole monstrous, creaking wheel of things, forever turning day into night without reason or purpose. And he knew at last, with the strangest feeling of lightness, of liberation, that this final exhaustion, so far beyond the power of sleep to repair, was a point toward which he had been moving for a very long time.
* * *
Roger got off at Tenleytown and trudged toward the huge exit escalators, the few other riders at that hour striding past him with a bounce and a purpose in their steps that broke his heart to see. There was a homeless, morbidly obese woman who had lately taken to squatting in an alcove next to the escalators on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue, and he encountered her as he came out. She half-sat, half-lay on a grubby sleeping bag in the dusty corner of an unoccupied building, hemmed in by her grocery cart and several plastic bags, and as he passed her, she extended a pillowy hand.
“Sir, can you help me?”
“You bet,” he said, reaching for his wallet. He handed her a twenty, then on an impulse, another ten and two fives.
“God bless you.” Her gap-toothed smile was an unpleasant reminder of the dream.
“My hope is that you’ll spend it on good quality liquor,” he said.
“I don’t drink,” she said.
“No kidding. Listen, I wonder if you can help me. You know a lot of homeless people around town, right?”
“Some, yeah.”
“Have you ever seen a real dirty white guy in an overcoat anywhere around Farragut North, about my height and build, long, curly gray hair, bushy beard, bright blue eyes and violently crazy? Likes to attack people and bite the living shit out of them. Seen anybody like that in your travels?”
She threw her huge head back and searched her memory, rubbing her sparsely-bearded double chins thoughtfully, then shook her head. “No. Ain’t seen nobody like that. Wouldn’t want to, either.”
“I hear that. Well, thanks anyway,” he said, walking away. “I’m sure you’ll sleep better than I will.”
“Not with some crazy biter around, I won’t,” she called after him.
“Don’t worry,” he called back. “It’s me he’s after.”
“Why you have to go telling me shit like that?” she yelled.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry...” His ‘sorrys’ faded to a mantra-like murmur as he headed down River Road, as if he were apologizing in advance to all the people he would soon offend, hurt, or disappoint. He must have been on to something, for he slept better that night than he had in days.
* * *
The next six months brought a dizzying series of changes to his life, all of them self-initiated: separation from Carol, resulting in an even deeper estrangement from his son, followed by the loss of his house and most of his assets in the divorce settlement. Hurt, bewildered, enraged, and finally vengeful, Carol had loosed her lawyers on him, and his instructions to his own attorney to agree to all their demands seemed only to increase her fury.
She couldn’t have known that ending their relationship was the first step in what he had come to realize was a necessary process of disencumberment, nor did he presume himself capable of explaining it to her. But, although frequently awash in guilt, he never doubted the rightness of the path he’d chosen. He moved into a criminally overpriced dump of a garage apartment in Mount Pleasant with the few possessions he’d kept for himself, and passed most of his evenings as the newest regular at the corner bar.
As soon as the divorce was final, Roger quit trying to fake his way through his job, but even with his spotty attendance and ostentatious goofing off, it took them two months to fire him. He never lost his amiability and basic gentleness, even when he came back from lunch half-loaded, and because he hadn’t entirely squandered the sympathy over what everyone was certain was a truly traumatic stress reaction, he managed to walk away with a generous six-month severance package.
Everyone liked Roger and wanted to help him, even the cop on his beat who first arrested him for public drunkenness and on later occasions saw that he got home safely. His car was long gone by then, and since he went everywhere on foot or by bus, his had quickly become a familiar face in the neighborhood. A surprising number of people — mostly the kind he used to ignore — were on speaking terms with the tall, graying, handsome man with liquor on his breath and a courteous, if slightly absent smile on his face, who urged everyone to call him Roger but never gave his last name.
He thought of himself as a seeker in disguise, who found it necessary to exploit his only real gift — his affability — in order to gain entrance into places where his old Loggins & Burnside self would not have been invited. He searched for his nemesis in the subway, on the streets, and in the memories of those most likely to have encountered him: the homeless, buskers, street vendors, and his fellow bus and subway riders. He chased down leads that led to other shaggy, homeless white men, but never to the man about whom he had so often dreamed.
The fact that he still had nightmares about the attack proved that his fear still lived in him, though oddly enough, he no longer dreaded an attack when walking alone at night. On the contrary, he had never felt so free as during these last few months, not even in college. He had acquaintances everywhere but deliberately fended off all overtures of friendship or romance, preferring to spend his nights either quietly drinking himself into a stupor or watching a tiny television in his apartment.
Even when smashed he was often lonely, terribly so, yet it wasn’t from an impulse to do penance for the sin of abandoning his family that he deliberately prolonged a solitude that was painful to him. Somehow he knew that he would find the man who haunted him only by stripping himself to the barest essentials of existence, by training himself to see the world, at least partially, through his enemy’s eyes. True, he drank self-destructively, in order to kill the pain of regret and to drown out his dreams, but when he was sober, he was a man on a mission.
* * *
The money ran out, of course, as he had known it would. If his enemy had shown himself in the interim, there would have been no need to descend to the next level and he could have re-examined his life in the context of a man who had accomplished his objectives, and perhaps even begin patching himself back into the world. But in spite of his growing intimacy with the streets, the man he was searching for remained elusive, and so, eleven months after the attack, immediately following his eviction from his apartment, he packed what clothes he needed, stuffed them into a small backpack, and took to the streets.
It was a descent for which no one who had lived the previous forty-nine years of his life with a roof over his head and someone to care about him could possibly be prepared. It was like falling into a coal-black cave filled with icy water, where steep shorelines ruled out the possibility of rest and the only alternatives to immediate drowning were to keep swimming or tread water until one’s strength gave out. For the first warm months, Roger worked at day-labor jobs, where he could use the washrooms and earn enough money for food, liquor, razors and laundromats. He stayed in homeless shelters until he learned that he was safer sleeping on park benches, behind dumpsters or under overpasses.
He made both allies and enemies among the hundreds of homeless men and women who shared the streets with him, but maintained a distance from the hard cases, the terminal drunks and psychotics. He made a point of keeping himself fairly clean and well-groomed, and for a long time he ignored the advice of those who had befriended him and refused to panhandle. He still believed that he could leave the streets and return to something like normal life as soon as he had found the person he was looking for.
But as the days grew shorter and colder, and his struggles simply to get through the night without freezing to death occupied more and more of his energy, he found himself losing ground. When work grew scarce, Roger turned for the first time to panhandling, spending what little money he earned on wine or beer. Food was available at soup kitchens or in fast food dumpsters, though the competition for scraps was fiercer than he had supposed and he frequently went hungry.
He stopped washing, shaving or cutting his hair, wore the same clothes for weeks on end, and was too befuddled by drink to notice that his nightmares of the attack had all but ceased. He had pictures of Carol and Christopher in his wallet and looked at them sometimes, but one day his wallet was stolen as he slept and after that his memory of their faces grew vague and idealized.
The one thing that kept him going was his unceasing efforts to find the man who had marked him so deeply, or at the very least, to remember where he had seen him before. The elusive familiarity of the man’s face continued to nag at him, but after all these months he felt no closer to remembering. He would walk the crowded streets of Georgetown or Adams Morgan, exhorting himself in a loud voice to work harder, to think more deeply, to subject every day of the past twenty years to a superhuman effort of systematic recollection, certain that the key name or situation that would trigger recognition lay hidden just beyond his grasp. It was the most maddening feeling in the world, to know that he himself held the solution to the mystery, he and no one else, yet he might die tomorrow and never know who the man was or what he had done to deserve such hatred. Sometimes he cried out and slapped his forehead in sheer frustration, oblivious to pedestrians warily stepping aside as he passed.
* * *
One afternoon in March, he was loitering on the platform at Farragut North, not panhandling, just jaded and hungover, when he succumbed to an old habit and pulled up his cuff to check the time on his long-since-pawned wristwatch. On an impulse he unbuttoned his sleeve to look at the bite scar, and was shocked to see the smooth, unblemished skin of his forearm. He ran his fingers over the skin, feeling for the indelible marks of human teeth, but they were gone, as if they had never been there. He began to tremble, then, looking up and feeling his gaze drawn with an almost magnetic force into the crowd, he spotted the object of his long search.
His heart pounding the blood and rage into his tightening muscles, he slowly and carefully closed the distance between them, until he was standing before the tall, gray-suited man holding a briefcase, whose face he knew so well, and who, looking up and meeting his fierce, unblinking stare, seemed, if vaguely and fearfully, to know him, too, this man so blind to the lie that was his whole life that mere words, however passionate and direct, could never reach him, whose complacency was breachable only by the most direct and desperate means. Marshaling all that was left of his dissipated strength, he crouched low, spat out an intimate curse at Roger Dennison, and attacked.
Copyright © 2025 by Jeffrey Greene
