The Man Who Ran

He ran until the street ended, and then he walked, and then, because his legs would no longer hold him, he sat down on the first bench he found.

It was in a small public square four blocks from the firm, between a closed fountain and a statue of a man in a cloak, and it was wet. A thin cold rain was falling. It beaded on the iron slats and on the shoulders of his white jacket, and he sat in it with his hands on his knees and his chest heaving, and the soup, he now noticed, was still on his shoes. It had soaked through to the skin. It was cooling, and the smell of onions and bay leaf rose from his own trousers, and he found that he could not bear it, and bent forward and was sick on the gravel between his feet.

When it was over, he stayed there, bent, with his forehead nearly touching his knees. An old woman with a shopping cart went by and looked at him and kept walking.

He tried to think.

It was very hard. Every time he reached for a thought, the picture came, the dull cream wall and the round clock and the squares of the floor, gray-blue, worn pale at the center, in a long skewed line away from the glass. He had known it at once. He had known it with the first breath. It had been as if someone had taken a hand and laid it, quite gently, across his eyes, and said: look.

It was the room.

He knew it as he knew the inside of his own mouth. He had stood in it. He had stood in it, not a year ago, in the long holiday week, on a Saturday, when the whole building was empty and the lights were off in the corridors, and his sister had come to him in the kitchen with a bucket and a worried face and said, with her hands, Eric wants it scrubbed before the inspection. There is a stain by the door, and I cannot lift the shelves alone. Will you come? And he had come. He had lifted the shelves. He had carried out the folding chairs, and the boxes of toner, and the stacks of forms, and he had washed the floor on his hands and knees beside her in the dim yellow light, square by square, the gray-blue ones, and she had scrubbed at a mark by the door and laughed at him with her round silent mouth because he had splashed her shoes.

And the clock on the wall. He knew the clock. And in the corner of the picture, small, on the left, a coil of cable beside the wall, and a thing beside it, on a shelf, that he had not at first allowed himself to see.

A gray cart.

It had a bucket on the left and a bag on the right. And on the bucket, in the corner, where the plastic was cracked, there was a strip of red tape.

He had put that tape there himself.

…

A policeman came by at half past one.

He walked slowly along the path under an umbrella, a square young man in a blue coat, and as he passed the bench he slowed, and glanced down. Tomas felt the glance on his neck. He thought: now. Now I can say it. He thought of standing, and of taking the man's arm. He thought of the words he would use, in his heavy careful English, and how they would sound.

Officer. I think my sister's husband has killed a man.

He sat very still.

"You all right, sir?" said the policeman.

"Yes. Thank you. I am only tired."

"You been sick?"

"A little. It was the soup."

The policeman looked at him for a moment, at the white jacket and the wet trousers and the cap, and shrugged. "Get yourself home," he said, kindly. "It's no day to be on a bench."

He went on, under the umbrella. Tomas watched the blue coat vanish behind the statue. He put his face in his hands, and the thing in his chest, which had been rising since morning, closed over his head.

He could not say it.

He sat and made himself look at why. It was not that he did not believe it. He believed it entirely. He had believed it from the moment the mask came onto the screen, and perhaps for a long time before. What he lacked was not belief. It was a place to put it. There was no door in the world that he could walk through with this thing in his arms.

He was a cook, and a foreigner. He had a license that was renewed every two years, at a counter, by a clerk, under the signature of a director. He had a daughter on the other side of an ocean whose second term had been paid by a check, and whose third was waiting on a promise. He had a bed, a room over a garage, a place at a table, and for six years he had eaten at that table every night and had not paid. He had a sister. He had a sister who had said, in the kitchen, with her chin up, my husband is a good man.

And what had he seen?

A mask, on a screen, a month ago. A face, in a doorway, with a look of satisfaction. A clock. A floor. A cart with a bit of red tape. He could not have said what he had seen. He could not have told it in a language that any policeman would take for evidence. A room that looks like a room. They would laugh. Or worse, they would not laugh, and they would write it down, and a car would draw up at the gate of that neat gray house, and his sister would open the door in her apron, and look at him across the lawn.

He wept, then, in the rain, with his big hands over his face.

…

He came home at six, and by seven he was at the table.

He did not know how he had got there. He seemed to have been walking for hours, down streets he did not know, and at some point he had washed his face in a public fountain, and turned his collar up, and changed his trousers in the garage. He sat in his usual chair, with his hands on his knees, and the plates were laid, and the napkins folded in plain rectangles, and the kitchen was full of the smell of roast chicken and potato.

Luna was setting the dishes down. She had a dark smear of flour on her wrist. She did not look at him.

Eric came in from the hall.

He sat at the head of the table, as he always did, and unfolded his napkin and laid it across his knee. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a paper tissue and folded the tissue in four. Then he looked down the table, at the three of them, the wife and the boy and the brother, and a faint, grave, concerned expression came over his long face.

"Tomas," he said.

"Yes."

"You look unwell."

"It is nothing."

"No. I don't think so." Eric put the tissue down. His voice was low and gentle, the voice of a man speaking to a patient. "There was an incident at the firm today, I understand. A pot. A spill. I had a call from the human resources office, as a courtesy, since your address is on file with the state. They said you had left rather suddenly."

"I was taken ill."

"Of course. These things happen." He nodded, slowly. "I don't think we should ask more of you today. Tomorrow you'll stay at home. There is a procedure for these situations, you know. One rests. One drinks water. One lets the body recover before returning to work, and I would not wish you to do otherwise." He smiled. "I can speak to your manager. It won't be a difficulty."

"Thank you."

"Please. Let me." He reached for the tureen. "You must have something to eat."

It was a plain white tureen, the one Luna used on Sundays, and it held a thick yellow soup of potato and leek. He lifted the ladle and filled a bowl, quite full, with care, and passed it down the table to Tomas, with both hands, as one passes a cup to the sick. A little steam rose from it. It smelled of butter.

Tomas took the bowl.

He looked at it. He looked at the pale thick surface, and at the spoon beside it, and the small floating leaf of parsley that Luna always put on top. He lifted the spoon. It was shaking. It rattled faintly against the china, a thin bright tapping, and he saw, from the corner of his eye, that the boy at the foot of the table had stopped eating and was watching his hand.

He put the spoon in his mouth.

It was hot. It was creamy and soft and exactly as it should be, and he could not swallow it. It sat on his tongue like wet sand. The muscles of his throat refused. He sat there with the spoon between his lips and tears, absurdly, starting in his eyes, and for the length of five heartbeats nothing at all happened at the table.

"Slowly," said Eric, kindly. "No rush."

Tomas swallowed.

It went down like a stone. He put the spoon in the bowl. He folded his hands in his lap, under the table, where they could not be seen, and across the cloth, in the lamplight, Luna's eyes met his for the length of a breath. They were very wide. She was holding a dish in both hands, quite still, and he saw, with a chill, that she knew. Not what. Only that there was something.

She looked away.

…

After dinner Eric came to the door of the garage.

Tomas was on his knees on the concrete floor, folding shirts into an old gray suitcase, because it was the only thing he could think to do. The overhead bulb swung a little in the draft. He had put the shirts in, and the jacket, and his razor, and the small framed picture of the girl in the cap and gown, and he did not know where he thought he was going. He heard the step on the threshold and did not turn.

"Tomas."

"Yes."

"I won't keep you." Eric stood in the doorway, with the light behind him, a tall thin figure in a cardigan. He held a white envelope in his hand. "I wanted to give you this. You will need it, I think. For the days at home. There is something extra in it; don't argue. Family."

Tomas got slowly to his feet.

He took the envelope. It was thick. It was warm, from the man's hand, and he held it between his fingers with a feeling of horror, as one holds a snake that has been handed over politely.

"You are very kind," he said.

"Not at all." Eric looked past him at the suitcase, and the shirts, and the picture, and his face did not change. "Mia is such a bright girl. I hear it from everyone. I'm sure she'll do very well. I hope she is happy there. I do hope she remains safe, living so far from home. One worries about the young."

There was a pause.

It was only a second. It was so short a thing that no one could have called it a silence, and no one could have called it a threat. It was only a courteous sentence about a girl in a cap and gown. But it rang in the bare concrete room like a dropped coin, and Tomas felt his whole skin draw tight.

"Yes," he said. "I hope so too."

"Good night, Tomas."

"Good night."

The door closed. Tomas stood in the center of the garage with the envelope in his hand. After a while he put it in the suitcase, under the shirts, and snapped the latches shut, and carried it out into the cold.

…

The side yard lay black and wet in the dark.

He came round by the porch, with the case in his left hand, to the front path, and the light from the hall window lay in a long yellow bar across the grass. He did not know where he was going. He thought perhaps to the bus station. He thought of a cheap room, and a telephone, and a number, and what he would say. He stepped up on the porch to go through the hall, and stopped.

The boy was on the fourth stair.

He sat there, as he always sat, with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging, and the dim lamp on the landing lit one side of his pale face. He had changed into his pajamas. His feet were bare. He was looking at Tomas with the flat, steady, unreadable gaze of a child who has sat on one stair for a very long time.

Then, slowly, he lifted his hands.

He had learned it from his mother. Tomas had watched him learn, year by year, the awkward fingers of a small boy becoming sure. He signed now with great precision and no expression at all, each shape distinct, as if he were setting down glasses on a shelf.

What did you see?

Tomas stood motionless in the doorway, with the suitcase in his hand and the cold night at his back.

He did not answer. He could not have said, afterward, whether it was kindness or cowardice. He only looked at the boy, at the straight dark eyebrows and the pale unmoving face, so like the face of his father and so like the face of his mother, and he saw in the eyes of the child what he had seen all evening in the faces of the grown, and he turned, and went out of the house, and the screen door banged behind him.