Hunger and Thirst by Richard Matheson Page A

walked on and the train started again, the moan of it disappeared and there were only horns and motors and the clicking of heels on wet sidewalk. He tried to locate the sound of his own feet. There was a slight sucking sound where his worn sole pressed down on the wet concrete.
    Rain, drizzling, misty rain on Third Avenue.
    It sprayed him as he walked. All in brown he was. His hat was brown. It glistened under the street lamps and there was a stain, a beginning puddle on the greasy crown. His coat was huge and heavy and brown. It was a shapeless box of wool on his body. It was as though he walked in a tight-fitting brown coffin, his legs sticking out the bottom and he had decided not to wait for the hearse but to walk to his grave and get a good eternity’s sleep. A coffin-like coat all wool and heavy and threadbare.
    He passed bars and bars, bars, bars. They sat leering and secret behind their green and red neon eyes. They chuckled out from behind glass, filled to the gorge with men standing in shoulder to shoulder camaraderie, friends to the end—of the drink. Men drinking and talking and making up dreams and trying to forget and forgetting. Men, word-sprinkling the past with a glamour it never had. Men painting the future with hues it never would have.
    And drinking.
    He looked in at them and watched them drink. Drink me one, he thought, drink me a long drink of forgetfulness and violence. Tonight I am going to rob. He shivered. And tomorrow I am gone from the lot of you.
    And his pants were brown. They were brown and wet and unpressed and the cuffs were caked with dry mud and frayed.
    His shirt was brown, khaki brown. And the socks and the shoes were brown. Oh what has become of our little boy brown? He thought it as he came closer to the shop.
    Soon he’d be there. Was that why he felt himself trembling as if he were approaching doom? Was that why his stomach was slowly turning and turning, turning and
    God damn all weakness!
    He screamed it suddenly into his own face, fleck-lipped and furious.
    He tensed himself, crying out in fury at his mind—that layer is gone. Fear and conscience and holding back are all undone. They are no more.
    He kept himself walking firmly, forcing his feet on, ignoring the mounting desire to turn and flee back to his room. His mind kept him going. The old man is alone, alone with his money in the lead box, with
my
money in the lead box.
    That’s it!
    The idea suddenly appealed to him, reasonless or not. He had hocked endless things there. The old man had no right to that money. He would just be taking what was rightfully his. You call that robbery, judge? Well, I’m telling you, if the law calls that robbery then the law is a son of a bitch set up by rich men and userers.
    He felt almost convinced. And, convinced or not, his feet kept carrying him toward the shop. Tomorrow, he told himself, I’ll be free of this blight called a city, this infested jungle and its designing denizens, this alien bug heap. Alone. Without memories or regrets. Far from Leo and her acid demanding, far from past and failure. To a new life. On
this
walk, he thought, I’m dealing in positive terms. It is not like the other one, a futile, maudlin, self-searching. This time he was dealing in actions.
    “I’ll do it,” he muttered anxiously, angrily, that he should still have to argue with himself over what seemed the obvious to his mind.
    Of course he’d do it. Only a degraded coward would stop.
    He passed a barbershop and saw the still pole, no longer spinning out its never ending streamers of color.
    He passed a cleaning store and the words—
Pressed While U Wait—
settled on his mind, then slid away.
    He passed a spaghetti house, a grocery store, a fish restaurant, and bars, bars and bars. “Drink,” he changed slowly under his breath to forget where he was going, “Drink.” Without ever changing pitch. “Drink, drink, drink, drink…”
    The shadow of the el made the street a latticed cave. The