I used to take silence for granted. At night, when all I wanted was to close my eyes and fall out of this world for a while, I assumed silence would be there to catch me with its open arms. You don’t know how valuable silence is until it’s broken. I thought I’d learned that lesson when I became a mom but, there’s another, deeper kind of silence, one I didn’t know about until that night.
It would’ve been late August. All day long I’d sat on the couch and listened to the sound of rain on pavement. Between feeding Roxanne and studying for my exams, I’d glance out the window at guys in dark hoodies walking by my stoop without umbrellas.
For once I thought it’d be a quiet night. No sirens. No fighting. No people on drugs arguing about drugs. Even Roxanne seemed to have checked out early.
I must have been asleep before… eleven?
The thumps woke me up at a quarter to two.
With my head all fogged up I couldn’t tell where they were coming from.
It was the squeal of the window panel in the other room that brought me to alertness.
I sat up and listened. That window never opens all the way without a struggle.
You’re just being paranoid, I told myself. When I heard nothing, I laid my head back on the pillow, closed my eyes and focused on the patter of Roxanne’s breathing coming through the baby monitor. Then it happened.
“He didn’t lay a finger on you, did he?”
I sprang out of bed, grabbed my housecoat from the closet door and burst into the hallway. It’s such a small apartment that before I’d even exhaled we were already face to face.
He was a lump of a man. The glowing stegosaurus of Roxanne’s night light only showed me the hem of his dirty blue trench coat. The light switch on the wall was closer to him than it was to me. I couldn’t risk trying to get there. I couldn’t really think straight either because…
His smell was unbelievable.
Bundled under that jacket were multiple layers of clothing, multiple layers of god-awful stench. Body odor, fungus, a hint of urine and other things that I can’t begin to identify. Even Roxanne was making faces.
Oh god, I thought, please, whatever you do, don’t wake up.
His hands were on the crib’s railing, all wrapped in white gauze. The fingers that poked through looked strange. Their nails were black and the skin was grey and covered in grime. Then he lifted his head and I saw that it was wrapped up in bandages also, all of it. Besides two yellow eyes and a thin pair of chapped lips, I couldn’t see one bit of him. He was looking at the golden letters that I’d pinned to the wall above Roxanne’s crib.
“Roxanne,” he said. “She’s gonna be a handful with a name like that.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
Slowly, he turned his body and stepped into the light streaming from outside. “Hey,” he said, “I-I just need help.”
He was short, very stooped, probably very old. His coat wasn’t just damp from the rain, it looked like it was slicked with a thin layer of yellow slime. Seeing him and smelling him, I could picture him as a regular sewer dweller, like a man sized rat who’d been driven to the surface by the heavy rains. His hands reached into the pockets of his coat. When they came out, they were holding rolls of fresh bandages still packed in cellophane, like he’d just lifted them from the drug store.
“My bandages,” he said. “I can’t change them. I need help.”
“Then go to the hospital!” I almost shouted. “Leaves us alone.”
“The hospital, oh no no I—I can’t go back there.”
His whole body started trembling, like something about the word “hospital” made him really afraid. The bandage rolls slipped through his fingers and tumbled to the ground. Two or three rolled under the crib. As he bent to pick them up something else fell out of his pocket and landed heavily on the floor. Under the window, there was barely enough light to see it, still, its dark shape was unmistakable against the wood. It was a gun. He looked almost as surprised to see it as I was.
“Hospital—“ he kept repeating, “she wants me to go to the hospital—how does she think I ended up like this?”
He picked up the gun with his trembling hand. I could hear the steel rattling as he tried to put it back into his pocket.
“Please,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone—I just need a little help is all.”
He said he didn’t want to hurt me, but the way he was holding the gun, it could’ve gone off and hit me in the chest. What else could I do? I had to calm him down.
“I’ll help you,” I said. “Just put that away.”
He looked at the gun like he’d forgotten it was in his hand.
Slowly, deliberately, he dropped it into his pocket. To my right was the door to the foyer. I could’ve made it out without giving him a chance to stop me, but then what? Bang on the neighbors’ doors until they opened? Run into the street and cry for help? Either way would mean leaving Roxanne alone with him. There was no telling what he’d do.
As I was thinking this, the man’s legs gave out on him and he slumped onto the rocking horse. Opening his jacket, he started pulling plastic bags out from its inside pockets. I closed my eyes and tried not to picture the body rotting underneath those rags. From the bags he shook out bunches of wet naps that he’d probably swiped from a local diner. The kind they give you to wipe your hands with before a meal. I had to ask him what he wanted me to do with them.
“On my face,” he said. “You know? Otherwise the bandages just soak it up.”
I considered telling him to move to the bathroom, but then, did I really want to see him under a real light? I hadn’t even made up my mind yet about what I was going to do.
“Everybody’s got a heart of stone these days,” he said. “But you’ll help me won’t you?”
His hand slipped back into his gun pocket.
“My husband’s coming home soon.”
The words surprised me as I blurted them out.
“Husband?”
His yellow eyes scanned the apartment, measuring just how tiny it was.
“Must be a nice guy.”
Actually he’s an asshole, I whispered under my breath. “You promise that you’ll leave?”
His eyes looked to me like two sallow balls of wax.
“Sure,” he said with a jokey laugh. “I’ve got places to be, he heh.”
With eyes half-closed I reached for his head and searched for a seam in the bandages. They were resistant to unraveling. The slime that covered him had thickened, which caused the layers to stick together. Out of morbid curiosity I opened my eyes fully. His foot had kicked Roxanne’s light out of its socket. I think he was ashamed of what he was and didn’t mean at all for me to see him.
The last bandage fell away and my hand brushed against the side of his exposed face; it had a texture similar to that of chewing gum. Using the wet naps to clean him, I felt my fingers trail across the bridge of his nose, it too was like a twisted nub of exposed soft tissue. On his cheek, my fingers found a dollar-sized hole. My body recoiled at the sensation of his tongue.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
He answer to that was, rambling. He said he didn’t blame me for being scared because a person wasn’t safe anywhere these days, not with “him” around. I don’t know who he meant. Then he said something about it being even worse in the sewers. How the birds down there didn’t have wings or something like that.
There was a lot of sadness in his voice too. Sadness, resignation. An attitude that came from a place beyond any disillusionment that I could imagine.
Then he started talking to me about silence. I have no idea what he meant by this, but he said that in a world like ours all you hear today is silence, silence of the heart. I don’t fucking know. The wet napkins were still bunched in my hands and their alcoholic scent was so distracting that I hardly caught what he was saying. “Wait here,” I told him. I went to the bathroom and grabbed a couple of clean hand towels. I let the tap run until the water ran hot, then I soaked them. Back in the living room I put the towels on his face. His head was so soft I was afraid he’d melt into a puddle of slime.
I dropped the towels to the floor and wrapped the fresh bandages around him.
Keeping his word the man refilled his pockets with all the loose crap he’d taken out of them. Then, as if nothing strange had happened, the old guy opened the front door and walked out—just like that. Through the window I watched him stop on the stoop and light himself a cigarette. Then I ran to the bathroom and vomited. Afterwards I took a shower, put Roxanne in my bed and cleaned the other room with clorox. Throughout it all, she never made a sound.
It took some time for the shock to work its way out of my system. When I felt strong again I made it my mission to find out who that man was. I didn’t go to the police, my story was too strange to be believable.
I went to every homeless shelter around to see if I could find something about him. A few people said he sounded vaguely familiar, but none had any real clues. Not until I went to the halfway house on the east side run by a charity group called the 4S society. It was a drab place connected to the local orphanage. The lady who managed it told me that the man I’d met sounded like “Wally.”
Wally, you believe that?
She told me that Wally didn’t show his face to anyone. It had something to do with a degenerative disease.
Wally lived on the street and only came in sometimes during the winter. Wally also had a strange habit of writing letters to people. He’d put them in envelopes and even buy stamps but, instead of sending the letters, he’d stuff them in the pockets of his jacket and keep them there until the papers rotted. The last time he’d been there he’d left some of his letters in a box under his bed.
“Could I see them?” I asked. Maybe if I knew who he was writing to, I’d be able to track down one of his relatives. “Sure,” she said. She was getting tired of holding onto them anyway. Without being too obvious about it I flipped through his envelopes until I found one with my address on it. I tried not to let the surprise show on my face.
Dear Nice Lady that I met last night. You’re probably wondering how I got into your apartment. I think you should know, the door was open. I saw him leaving, that man, he likes to hurt people. I see him everywhere these days. When I heard your daughter sleeping I had to make sure she was okay. I even opened a window so that my smell wouldn’t bother her. Roxanne’s a beautiful kid, I’m sure she’ll make a beautiful woman. I guess we all started out beautiful. Anyhow, before I left I said a prayer on your doorstep, because you were so kind to me and I want God to protect you. He’s always listening you know, even when you bite your tongue.
Your Friend,