Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

“... prices slashed and bent over sawhorses, every price and every avenue, discounts and bargains, latest in fragrant designer footwear...”

Past a doorway of a boarding house — was this the place? But the door bulged outward, wood going to rubber, then the lock buckling and the door flying open to erupt people, vomiting them onto the sidewalk in a keystone cops heap, but moving only as their limbs flopped with inertia: they were dead, their eyes stamped with hunger and madness, each one clutching a shopping bag of trash, one of them the Chicano street crazy who’d tried to warn him: gold roses clamped in his teeth, he was dead now; some of them crushed into shopping carts; two of them, yes, all curled up and crushed, trash-compacted into a shopping cart so their flesh burst out through the metal gaps. Flies that spoke with the voices of radio DJs cycled over them, yammering in little buzzing parodic voices: “This Wild Bob at KMEL and hey did we tell ya about our super countdown contest, we’re buzzing with it, buzzzzzzing wizzzz-zzzz—”

A bus at the corner. Maybe get in it and ride the hell out of the neighborhood. But the vehicle’s sides were striated like a centipede and when it pulled over at the bus stop its doorway was wet, it fed on the willing people waiting there, and from its underside crushed and sticky-ochre bodies were expelled to spatter the street.

“... one money sale, the window smoke waits. One money and inside an hour we’ll find the paste that lives and chews, prices slashed, three money and we’ll throw in a...”

He paused on the corner. There: the Crossroads Hotel. A piss-in-the-sink hotel, the sort filled with junkies and pensioned winos. Crammed in between other buildings like the Casa Valencia had been. He was afraid to go in.

Across the street: whores, with crotch-high skirts and bulging, wattled cleavages and missing limbs that waved to him with the squeezed-out, curly ends of the stumps. (It’s not true that they have no feet, that their ankles are melded into the sidewalk.)

“One money will buy you two women whose tongues can reach deeply into a garbage disposal, we also have, for two money...”

The whores beckoned; the crowd thickened. He went into the hotel.

A steep, narrow climb up groaning stairs to the half door where the manager waited. The hotel manager was a Hindu, and behind him were three small children with their faces covered in black cloth (the children do not have three disfigured arms apiece), gabbling in Hindi. The Hindu manager smiling broadly. Gold teeth. Identical face to the bartender but long straight hair, Hindu accent as he said: “Hello hello, you want a room, we have one vacancy, I am sorry we have no linen now, no, there are no visitors unless you pay five money extra, no visitors, no—”

“I understand, I don’t care about that stuff,” Ash babbled. Still carrying the backpack, he noted, taking stock of himself again. You’re okay. Hallucinating but okay. Just get into the room and work out the stress, maybe send for a bottle.

Then he passed over all the money in his wallet and signed a paper whose print ran like ink in rainwater, and the manager led him down the hall to the room. No number on the door. Something crudely pen-knifed into the old wooden door panel: a face like an African mask, hyena and goat and man. But momentum carried him into the room — the manager didn’t even use a key, just opened it — and momentum, too, closed the door behind him. Ash turned and saw that it was a bare room with a single bed and a window and a dangling naked bulb and a sink in one corner, no bathroom. Smelling of urine and mold. The light was on.

There were six people in the room.

“Shit!” Ash turned to the door, wondering where his panic had been till now. “Hey!” He opened the door and the manager came back to it, grinning at him in the hallway. “Hey, there’s already people in here—”

“Yes hello yes they live with you, you know, they are the wife and daughter and grandchildren of the man you killed you know—”

“What?”

“The man you killed, you know, yes—”

“What?”

“Yes they are in you now at the crossroads and here are more, oh yes—” He gestured, happy as a church usher at a revival, ushering in seven more people, who crowded past Ash to throng the room, shifting aimlessly from foot to foot, gaping sightlessly, whining to themselves, bumping into one another at random. Blocking Ash, without seeming to try, every time he made for the door. Pushing him gently but relentlessly back toward the window.

The manager was no longer speaking in English, nor was he speaking Hindi; his face was no longer a man’s, but something resembling that of a hyena and a goat and a man, and he was speaking in an African tongue — Yoruba? — with a sound that was as strange to Ash as the cry of an animal on the veldt, but he knew, anyway, with a kind of a priori knowledge, what the man was saying. Saying...

That these people were those disenfranchised by the old man’s death: the old armored-car guard’s death meant that his wife would not be able to provide the money to help her son-in-law start that business and he goes instead into crime and then to life in prison, and his children, fatherless, slide into drugs, and lose their hope and then their lives and as a direct result they beat and abuse their own children and those children have children which they beat and abuse (because they, themselves, were beaten and abused) and they all grow up into psychopaths and aimless, sleepwalking automatons... Who shoved, now, into this room, made it more and more crushingly crowded, murmuring and whining as they elbowed Ash back to the window. There were thirty in the little room, and then forty, and then forty-five and fifty, the crowd humid with body heat and sullen and dully urgent as it crowded Ash against the window frame. He looked over his shoulder, peered through the glass. Maybe there was escape, out there.

But outside the window it was a straight drop four floors to a trash heap. It was an air shaft, an enclosed space between buildings to provide air and light for the hotel windows. Air shafts filled up with trash in places like this; bottles and paper sacks and wrappers and wet boxes and shapeless sneakers and bent syringes and mold-carpeted garbage and brittle condoms and crimped cans. The trash was thicker, deeper than in any air shaft he’d ever seen. It was a cauldron of trash, subtly seething, moving in places, wet sections of cardboard shifting, cans scuttling; bottles rattling and strips of tar paper humping up, worming; the wet, stinking motley of the air shaft weaving itself into a glutinous tapestry.

No, he couldn’t go out there. But there was no space to breathe now, inside, and no way to the door; they were piling in still, all the victims of his shooting. The ones killed or maimed by the ones abandoned by the ones lost by the one he had killed. How many people now, in this room made for one, people crawling atop people, piling up so that the light was in danger of being crushed out against the ceiling?

One killing can’t lead to so much misery, he thought.

Oh but the gunshot’s echoes go on and on, the happy, mocking Ishu said. On and on, white devil cocksucker man.

What is this place? Ash asked, in his head. Is it Hell?

Oh no, this is the city. Just the city. Where you have always lived. Now you can see it, merely, white demon cocksucker man. Now stay here with us, with your new family, where he called you with his dying breath...

Ash couldn’t bear it. The claustrophobia was of infinite weight. He turned again to the window, and looked once more into the air shaft; the trash decomposing and almost cubistically recomposed into a great garbage disposal churn, that chewed and digested itself and everything that fell into it.