Husk

by Dave Zeltserman

  Jill sensed something had been wrong, and asked if I was OK.

  I reached for the water glass. My throat had become drier than if I had swallowed a handful of dirt, and I wanted to drink some water so I could answer her without my voice cracking. But I was still too jittery, and with how badly my hand was shaking I was afraid I’d spill the water all over myself. I pulled my hand back and hid it under the table so she couldn’t see the tremors running through it.

  ‘I’d never been in crowds like that before,’ I said, my voice surprisingly mostly normal. ‘But I’m feeling better already.’

  I was, too. I wasn’t feeling as funny inside as I was earlier, and my heart was no longer racing so fast that I thought I might expire. It was soothing looking straight into Jill’s face, especially her soft but brilliant blue eyes. I found myself touched in a way seeing her brow wrinkled with concern.

  ‘You must’ve been having the beginnings of a panic attack,’ she said. ‘Has that ever happened before?’

  ‘No, I can’t say it has.’

  ‘Hmm. It could be agoraphobia.’

  I stared at her blankly. In the roughly four hundred books I’d read, including the copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary dated 1909, I had not come across that word.

  ‘Fear of being in crowded places,’ she explained. ‘Also the opposite. It can also mean fear of being in wide open places.’

  ‘I can tell you I don’t suffer from that. I’ve been in many wide open spaces in my life. Places as desolate as anything you could imagine. I’ve never felt anything like that before. But sitting here with you like this is making me feel better.’

  A light pink flushed her cheeks. She made me promise to tell her if I felt any of that panic again.

  The restaurant she’d brought me to served Indian and Chinese food. When Jill asked me earlier what type of food I wanted, I told her it didn’t much matter as long as they offered vegan dishes. I had learned the hard way that there was a difference in their world between being a vegetarian and being a vegan when I bought myself an apple muffin at one of the markets where I sold vegetables. I’d first warned the wrinkled gray-haired woman selling me the muffin that I was a vegetarian, and she’d promised me I had nothing to worry about. All it took was one bite of that muffin for me to be knocked to my knees by chills and nausea, and when I could stand again I went back into the market to complain that the muffin had to have been made with either eggs or cow’s milk. That same gray-haired woman listened patiently before explaining to me about vegans and vegetarians.

  Our waitress was a short, plump foreign woman with eyes almost as dark as my own. I asked her for an Indian dish with lentils and eggplant after being assured that it was vegan, and Jill ordered a vegetable stir-fry dish that was on the Chinese side of the menu. She waited until the waitress left with our order before asking me how long I had been a vegan.

  ‘As far back as I can remember.’

  ‘Your parents raised you that way?’

  I nodded.

  She seemed to appreciate that with the way she smiled. ‘They sound very enlightened. I’ve been thinking for some time that I should become a vegetarian for moral reasons, and you inspired me today to order what I did.’

  I didn’t correct Jill about how enlightened my parents or any other member of my clan truly were. Morality has nothing to do with why we don’t eat animal, fowl or fish meat, or animal milk, or chicken eggs. It’s because our bodies can’t tolerate any of that. If we could help it, we wouldn’t live the way we do. We’d gratefully find a way for animal flesh to satiate our cravings so that we could live among them. But that option just doesn’t exist for us.

  My food was served on rice, which I’d never tasted before. Same with lentils. I’d eaten eggplants, though, plenty of times in the past, since we grew far too many of them. I didn’t know quite what to make of the meal since I’d never had anything like it before, especially the spices. I wouldn’t say that I disliked it entirely, just that it was different from what I was used to. But then again, I’d felt the same way about vegan chocolate doughnuts the first time I tried one and now I liked them quite a bit. The same with coffee.

  Jill suggested that I try the chai tea, so I did. In my clan, those experienced in the art make tea from flowers, mushrooms, and roots. This was very different, but once I’d added three packets of sugar to it I liked it almost as much as the chocolate doughnut I had earlier. We talked some more over our tea, and Jill rightly guessed that this was the first time I’d had Indian food. Beaming and clearly proud of her city, she added, ‘Here in New York you can get anything.’

  That wasn’t true. I wished it was, but I was certain that no restaurants here served the stews I was familiar with. But I saw no reason to correct her on that point.

  When the bill came, I made only a token effort to pay it. Fortunately, since I didn’t have the necessary money, Jill was adamant about treating me. At the beginning of the trip I’d spent most of the money I’d brought with me on fuel for the van, and I’d planned to get more money from the ones I picked up. Once Jill’d successfully battled me for the bill, I sat back while she triumphantly handed the waitress a credit card. We talked some more while we waited for the waitress to bring back her card, and I realized I was feeling different than I’d ever felt before. Lighter in a way I couldn’t quite explain, and nervous too in a way that I didn’t understand since I was still not being fully honest with myself.

  Jill noticed the lighter part of how I was feeling. She told me I looked much better than earlier. ‘Most of your color is back.’ She hesitated before adding, ‘You had me worried before with how pale you had gotten and how much you were perspiring.’

  ‘No need to worry. My family are a hardy sort. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

  ‘If you’re up to it,’ she said, ‘I’d like to take you to the most touristy thing you can do in New York. If you wait even a week, you’ll be like the rest of us New Yorkers and never do it, which would be a shame since it really is such a worthwhile experience.’

  I told her I’d be up to it, no matter what it was.

  Jill’s credit card was brought back. As we got up from the table, concern weakened her eyes. ‘You’ll let me know if you feel any more of that panic? If you do, I can call for an Uber to take us back to my apartment.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I won’t be feeling any more of that.’

  She didn’t seem completely convinced, but she didn’t argue it any further. Once we stepped outside, her hand found mine. I’m not a fool. I knew this gesture of hers was more to comfort me than anything romantic. Still, as her delicate and fine hand disappeared within mine, I was grateful for the touch of her skin.

  All of my kind have a strong sense of direction, and without needing to ask I knew we were heading north. Jill leaned in closer to me and asked if I’d mind if we walked to where she wanted to take me. ‘It’s probably about a two-mile walk. But it’s nice out, and after all the driving earlier a walk would feel good.’

  I told her I’d like that, too. The sidewalk was as crowded as before, but being among them didn’t affect me like it did earlier. I couldn’t ignore their heavy scent or the heat from their bodies, and their presence caused my senses to be heightened, but it didn’t bring about the panicky feeling I’d had earlier. I think what kept me calmer was partly getting used to having so many of them around me and partly the feel of Jill’s hand in mine. I was able to keep most of my thoughts centered around Jill and how nice it was having her body so close to mine, but after we had walked four blocks another thought entered my mind. Everything in their world costs money, and wherever Jill was taking me was going to cost more than I had. I had little doubt she was planning to pay for me, but I didn’t like the idea of that or the thought of her finding out I had no money. I waited until we were approaching a coffee shop and asked Jill if she wouldn’t mind waiting inside the shop for me.

  ‘There’s something I need to do. It will only take ten minutes. Maybe tw
enty at the most. I’ll be back then.’

  She gave me this confused, uncertain look, like she wasn’t sure she’d be seeing me again, but told me she’d get a coffee and would wait for me inside. Once she was inside the shop with her back turned away from me, I moved quickly and retraced my steps to where we had come from.

  After two blocks, I turned down a side street heading west. This street wasn’t so crowded, although there were still plenty of them on the sidewalk. I found it interesting how little attention they paid to one another as they went their way. It was as if they felt completely safe and didn’t realize there was a predator among them. I couldn’t blame them for that. While my kind is as old as theirs, we separated from them almost a thousand years ago, invading their villages and towns only when necessary. For as far back as I could remember, my own clan had been able to make do by taking no more than eighty of them each year. The other thirty-eight clans I know of probably take close to that same number. When you add it all up, not enough of them go missing in any one year for the rest of them to pay attention, and the ones that do go missing are mostly the ones the rest of them don’t care about. So it’s not surprising that they had long ago forgotten about us.

  Thirty feet ahead of me I spotted what I was looking for. He was walking in the same direction I was. Well-fed, with carefully combed thick orange-yellowish hair. His suit expensive, fitting him as if it had been custom tailored. When his suit jacket rode up, I saw the bulge that his wallet made in his back pants pocket, and I quickened my pace to make up the distance.

  As I mentioned earlier, none of them were paying attention to me or anyone else, so none of them bothered looking my way when I lengthened my stride to where I almost stepped on the back of his shoe and at the same time drove my fist into his kidney. His body seized up, and I grabbed hold of him with one hand while deftly removing his wallet with my other. As if I were simply a concerned member of the public, I carefully lowered his body to the sidewalk while yelling out for help, all the while making sure to keep his wallet hidden from the others.

  ‘This man’s ill,’ I yelled. ‘I think it might be his heart.’

  Others slowed down, and some of them gathered around us. The man I had struck a minute earlier would normally have looked wealthy and aristocratic. But that wasn’t how he looked as he lay crumpled on the pavement. I had tried to hit him only as hard as needed to immobilize him, but it was likely I had caused serious injury, given how his eyes had rolled up into his head and the sickish-yellow pallor of his skin. He was still alive, though. I could tell that from the way his feet were twitching.

  I backed away from the crowd. More of them were gathering to look at him. I said something about trying to find a doctor. They weren’t paying attention to me, at least most of them weren’t. One of them was. This girl who was probably the same age as Jill. She looked at me in a way that made me think she had seen what I’d done. But she didn’t say anything, and she made no attempt to follow me as I made my way away from the crowd.

  SIX

  Jill appeared tense when I spotted her through the front window of the coffee shop. I don’t think I’d been gone more than the twenty minutes I promised her, but I guess she didn’t fully believe I’d be returning. Her attention was focused on her cardboard coffee cup, so she didn’t notice me entering the shop, or as I approached the table she was sitting at. When I sat down across from her, the look she gave me had a little bit of hurt and indecision mixed in.

  ‘Did you get done what you needed to?’ she asked as if she didn’t truly believe there was anything I needed to do.

  I nodded and handed her a pin in the shape and color of a yellow rose. The pin was made of glass and silver and had cost me $54 at a store a block and a half away.

  ‘When I saw this in a store window, I decided more than anything I wanted you to have it.’

  The lives of my kind are filled with hardness and drudgery, and we’ve never developed the custom of gift-giving – the idea of it is completely foreign to us. The clothes, money, and other useful items we get off of them, we keep. Anything else of value, especially jewelry, we sell; or more specifically, I sell, usually at one of three pawnshops I’ve learned about who don’t ask any questions. Anything else, we bury.

  The first time I encountered someone giving a gift in a book, the concept was difficult for me to fully understand, especially since this book had a father giving an expensive train set to his young son. In my clan, and I’m sure all the others as well, children at a very early age are expected to do for their parents, not the other way around. But as I read more books, I realized how prevalent that custom is, especially for a man to give jewelry to a girl that he favors. So while I’d hoped Jill would be pleased by the pin, I didn’t expect her eyes to moisten with tears like they did, nor for her to leave her chair so she could kiss me on my cheek. Since I was sitting down, she had no problem this time kissing me higher on my face than earlier.

  ‘This is so sweet of you!’ she said. She used a knuckle to wipe away some wetness near her eye. The smile that broke over her face was brighter than any I’d ever imagined from the stories I’d read. ‘After being with Ethan for two years, I’d forgotten what it’s like to spend an afternoon with someone with a good heart.’

  Her cheeks blushed a deeper shade of pink, which was a nice color in contrast to her honey-colored hair. I might’ve blushed myself if I hadn’t been paying attention to the wailing cry of a siren. I braced myself as the caterwaul grew louder. But the noise just as quickly began fading, letting me know that the police car had already driven past the shop. I found I’d been holding my breath, and let it out in a slow exhale. When I first heard the siren approaching I thought that girl might’ve followed me to this place and had sent the police after me, but that wasn’t what had happened. The girl might still have told them her suspicions and described me to them, but it was doubtful they’d be looking for a man walking leisurely with a pretty little thing like Jill. If they did find me, it would be a shame, but I was pretty sure I’d be able to handle them.

  I told Jill, ‘That was the way I was taught to be.’ This wasn’t exactly a lie. I might not have been taught that way from the elders, or my ma and pa, but I had learned it from the books I read. ‘And I thought it would look nice on you.’

  Jill attached the pin to her shirt, and indeed I did like the way it looked on her. It was as delicate-looking as she was, with the rose’s yellow petals matching her hair nicely. It was fortuitous that I needed to buy it for her as a way to excuse my absence. Even after its cost, I still had over eleven hundred dollars from what I took from the man I’d robbed and possibly killed.

  ‘I was right. It does look awfully pretty on you.’

  Her eyes lowered. She might’ve blushed more, but if she did I couldn’t tell, given how pink her cheeks had already become. ‘We should continue on with our adventure,’ she said. ‘I need to get you there while it’s still daylight.’

  We both got up, and once we were back on the sidewalk her hand found mine again. Maybe it was still partly to provide comfort, but there was more to it now.

  There was a cacophony of other noises outside, but the only sirens I could hear were far away. That didn’t mean I was safe, and before too long a police car slowly approached us from behind. Out the corner of my eye I could see that both police officers in the vehicle were searching the crowds on the sidewalks, and I could feel one of them staring straight at me. I knew it would be a mistake to show that I was aware of this or to let my pace quicken, and I concentrated on keeping from doing either. Still, I was expecting the car to pull up next to me and for a confrontation to occur, but neither happened. The police car drove on past us, and I kept an eye on it as it continued on out of sight. If that girl had given the police my description, either she’d done a poor job of it or Jill was doing a better job of allowing me to escape their notice.

  We continued walking for a spell, and Jill ended up taking me to the Empire State Building. I was rig
ht about everything in their world costing money. Thirty-five dollars a head to ride in an elevator. The greed in their world amazes me, and I couldn’t help smiling, thinking of how many hours of fuel that would buy for the generators back at the clan. But I insisted on paying for our tickets, even though Jill fought me tooth and nail over it.

  ‘It was my idea that we come here. Please, let me treat!’

  I refused, and I kept refusing, and eventually Jill had no choice but to give in. We took the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor, and I’ll admit it took my breath away looking out over New York from that height. They certainly could build impressive structures and machinery. After a while, though, as I looked out into their world it made me bitter thinking of the primitive shacks that most of my clan still live in. But how could it be any different? There are so many more of them than there are of us. We have no choice but to hide in the wilderness and to live almost the same as we did hundreds of years ago. These and other such thoughts were darkening my mood when I became aware of Jill standing next to me. Without looking at her, I knew she was staring at me intently.

  ‘Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?’ she said.

  Her hand found mine again, and my dark ruminations calmed.

  ‘I had to take you up here before it was too late,’ she said. ‘It’s like a virus that invades us New Yorkers. It makes us think it’s too lame and touristy to ever come up here, which is a shame because this is such an amazing view. It makes you fully appreciate how incredible this city really is.’