Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney Read Free Book Online

whirring of his mind. Yes, he looked clever, which had not helped him at the Tombs, but he didn’t look half as well educated as he was, and that suited him, for now. All he wanted was a job, any job.
    Time and again, whenever the clerk rose to call a name, he raised his head, eager for his chance, optimism rising, willing to do almost anything, but the clerk never called his name.
    It was five days now since he’d left the Tombs, over two weeks since the fire. White flakes had just begun to filter from the clouds that morning when he’d set out from Wah Kee’s flophouse on Mott Street. It was the cheapest thing anywhere—full of Chinese, Italians, sailors, drunks, bedbugs and the likes of him. There was also a general store at the street level, but Wah Kee made most of his money selling opium in the basement to people of every background—men and women almost as broke as our hero and adventurous bon vivants as wealthy as the Astor whose cell he’d mistakenly inhabited. The stableman had watched them stumble up from the cellar room with the sweet, acrid whiff of opium on their clothes and seen the strange justice of the drug. The poppy was a great democratizer—for however divergent the quality and state of their wardrobes, they all looked the same when they left: not happy, not anxious, just blissfully blank, regardless of their station. The look implied a feeling that the stableman envied, and he’d have joined them in a moment if he’d ever had the extra money. But the remnants of his wages had gone, coin by coin, to Wah Kee for his bunk, to bowls of soup, to a plate of salty kippers, to a shave in a barber shop before heading to the hiring office, to coffee and eggs. As of noontime, when he’d eaten from a pushcart, he’d reached the very end. All of the expenditures had seemed essential, but all were fleeting, and now he didn’t even have the money to sleep in the flop another night.
    His timing was particularly poor. Of all recent nights, this would surely be the worst one to go without shelter. The snow had grown heavy and the day bright white as a storm settled in. By afternoon, hardly anyone was still abroad, and the stragglers were nearly hidden from sight by the white haze. The door opened only now and then to let out a man with an assignment. As the winter sun crested and slid around fast and low, the stableman could almost feel his whiskers creeping out. There was no end to their growing, and suddenly that most trivial fact was an emergency. Tomorrow, after sleeping on the street or, with luck, in some church foyer, he’d be a bristly hedgehog, a lowlife without even the cost of a morning shave to his name. It seemed that unless he found work that afternoon, and it was waning fast, he never would.
    Finally, late in the day, he felt his hope fail. No one would look at him. At least before, he had had the animals. They had known him and in just the short time he had worked for Barnum’s had come to trust him. But all his gentleness, which had made them lose their skittishness around him, had done no good. He had let them die. It’s better, surely, that he couldn’t imagine what came next, at the soap and glue houses over by the river, where the animals’ bones would fall apart from one another and sink to the bottom, their severed heads bobbing in the bubbling foam, their eyes hard-boiled.
    The waiting area grew colder and emptier as dark fell, and he moved closer to the smoking stove by the clerk’s counter. Soon there would be nothing left to do but knock on church doors and seek lodging for the night. Station houses offered shelter, too, but he couldn’t very well imagine going there, unless he wanted to be hanged. He brooded over other possible avenues but came up only with cold alleyways. Well, it was warmer by the stove at least, and he stretched out his legs toward the heat.
    He surprised himself suddenly with a twitch—he’d been asleep. He raised his head from his chest. Strange