Sightings

He was one of those derelicts you see on the street all the time, one of those nameless, faceless, shabby creatures you look right through and treat like an ugly part of the scenery, or a running sore on the upper lip of a dear friend, just sort of looking around it to catch what he's saying to you but it's there all right, just waiting to jump out at you... He shambled down 14th Street wearing a grimy, tattered blanket with faded teddy bears on it over an equally tattered, equally grimy army field jacket (in spite of the heat) and a pair of dirt-stiffened bluejeans. He wore no shoes; his bare feet were covered with scabs and sores. His face - what I could see of it under his wild, tangled beard and hair - was a twisted knotwork of lines and scars and bruises, a tapestry of pain and failure there for the world to read - or not. His eyes blazed blue like distress flares from a doomed ship, staring from the shattered ruin of his mind.

This man wasn't down on his luck, or unfortunate, or trying to come back from whatever purgatory he'd been to. He was past all that; he'd lost his reason, his hope - maybe even his soul. He was stone crazy; a gibbering, putrid ruin that only loosely passed for human.

He stumbled toward me. I instinctively moved a bit to the side - never know what might happen if he touches you (yes, it's politically incorrect, but I felt that way) - and I heard him talking. He'd apparently been talking to himself the entire time he'd been walking, but it sounded less like a monologue than a droning, tuneless dirge... rising and falling like a litany of pain:

"...goddamn commie motherFUCKERS ain't got no RIGHT sending us to the fuckin' NAM so's I can get my fuckin' BALLS shot off while fuckin' KIDS back in the fuckin' WORLD can have their PROTESTS an' shit an' sit at HOME on their rich little ASSES fuckin' talkin' 'bout PEACE an' shit while I gotta go get fuckin' WASTED over there an' I can't even get a decent cup of fuckin' COFFEE so many fuckin' DRUGS an' shit in the WATER an' I get so fuckin' MAD I can't even THINK straight an'..."

And his voice went on and on, as if he'd been muttering that way for days, maybe for years, all the hate and pain and anger finally snapping his mind and running out through his mouth like poisoned drool. I caught a whiff of him in the still, heavy air; the stench was indescribable, wrapped around him like a distorted olfactory cloak.

And just as I passed him, my eyes were sort of drawn to him, you know? Like when you see a really bad accident on the Beltway, or when you walk down a hospital corridor, and you look into some of the rooms, peekaboo, lookahere sort of thing; morbid curiosity, I guess. And just as my eyes got to his face, he looked at me.

And through me.

And into me.

And it was like what a microbe might feel when the scientist looks at it through a microscope; like what the patient in the operating theater feels just before the anesthesia takes over and he sees all those faceless surgeons with their glittering machines and eager knives; like the last thought of the drive-by victim, just walking along, just as the slug enters his skull. That bum looked at me like that, and all the while there was a terrifying feeling of distance, as if he was staring at me from a vast height, or maybe an infinite abyss. And in that moment, all the drool and the bile and the stench and the hate was burned away, sloughed off, cast aside...