Hunger and Thirst by Richard Matheson Page B

elevated tracks stood on great rusty legs like an endless giant centipede curling its body through the dark city and carrying the city’s people on its back.
    He passed the lost legions of Third Avenue.
    I’m not one of you, he thought, no, not ever. He almost wished one of them would stop him and ask him for money just to prove he wasn’t one of them.
    He kept thinking of it in order to forget where he was going.
    Was it possible, he wondered, that they all knew him and saw him and, in their silent aloofness, called him brother?
    He was sorry he’d thought of it. The idea caused a hot sinking sensation in his stomach and loins as though someone were pouring rich, scalding coffee into his stomach and it was running into his arteries and veins.
    He walked on past never ending ranks of empty men, staring and stumbling, asking for pennies, plunging black-nailed hands into trash cans. Not alive, he thought, not alive at all.
    An old man stopped in front of him.
    They looked at each other.
    The old man had yellow, stained teeth. He wore an old tattered grey overcoat that was too small for him and was torn off the right shoulder. The greasy black of a suitcoat sleeve extended down his right wrist and over the top of his hand.
    The man bore himself like a prince. He might have been a nobleman approaching a fellow.
    He ran a trembling, filthy hand over his long and greasy black hair. You’re going to lie, Erick thought as the old man spoke.
    “Sir,” said the man in a fine, proud voice, “Could you help me out, sir?” As though it were really something laughable, a delicately amusing trifle between wealthy comrades, “You see sir, I meant to get a haircut but I find myself a nickel short.”
    He inhaled the old man’s fetid breath and smelled whiskey and all the odor of unclean things. I find myself a nickel short. It was so ludicrous that he felt impelled to laugh out loud and pound the man on the back for making such a good joke.
    “Could you help me out?” asked the old man. There was a break in his voice, “I need it
badly
, sir.”
    Erick felt himself tighten.
    You give away the game, old fool! He wanted to scream into the man’s lost face. You show the truth in all its bald horror, you turn over the stone, throw up the filth and the stench and the maggots crawling. Get away from me, you are out of the club!
    “I’m sorry,” he said flatly, “I haven’t any change.”
    He always said that automatically. That’s what his mother used to say to “panhandlers.” Most of the time, in his case, it was true.
    The old man bowed a little, instantly regaining the pain-taught pride and poise of a truly degenerated man.
    “I thank you, sir,” he said, “I thank you.”
    He put his right hand on his right lapel like some casual orator and passed by grandly. The separated.
    The old man had said thank you, he thought. They always said thank you. They were always gentleman, proud in their emptiness. They were always well-mannered skeletons. Why was it that only the doomed were gentlemen? And they
were
doomed. Doomed and dead before death. That would be a book he would never write someday.
    Dead Before Death
by Erick Linstrom.
    He passed a bearded man in a grease-hardened dark suit. The man was selling chestnuts. The fat-laden, reeking smoke gushed from the wagon top and filled Erick’s nostrils and made his eyes water. It made him cough, a hollow, fretful cough like that of an old lady with incurable consumption who wastes away in elegant poise.
    He halted abruptly.
    Everything was caught up in the shock.
    There it was across the street. The shop.
    He shuddered violently and was suddenly conscious of the rain spattering heavily on his hat. He held up his hands and saw that they were wet too but not with rain. His throat contracted. Abruptly, the plan seemed ridiculously conceived, impossible to execute. There was the shop. Could he actually go in there and rob?
    Imagining was easy. One could grow used to any idea,