The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  Shouts behind me suggested that maybe my earlier pursuer had friends. Or that my flight had drawn attention. I was in shadow—but the yellow tracksuit wasn’t anyone’s idea of good camouflage.

  Gravel crunched and turned under my feet. I pushed the top of the bent chain triangle up and ducked through, into the moist darkness under the bridge.

  Things moved in the night. Rats, I imagined, but some sounded bigger than rats. What else could live in this filth? I imagined feral dogs, stray cats—companion animals abandoned to make their own fate. Would they attack something as large as a man?

  If they did, how would I fight them?

  I groped along the bridge abutment, feeling with my toes for a stick. The old stones swept down low, the arch broad and flat. I kept my hand up to keep from hitting my head on an invisible buttress. The masonry was slick with paint and damp, mortar crumbling to the touch. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but light concentrated by the oily river reflected up, and I could see the stones of the bridge’s underside clearly.

  I crept into that dank, ruinous beauty until the flicker of lights against the chain fence told me that my pursuers had found me, and they had come in force. My chest squeezed, stomach flipping in apprehension. I crouched down, tucked myself into the lowest part of the arch, and fumbled out my phone.

  “Police,” I said. Even if my contract had been cancelled, that should work. I’d heard somewhere that any phone can always dial emergency. And there it was, a distant buzz, and then a calm voice answering.

  “Emergency services. Your taxpayer identification number, please?”

  My voice stuck in my throat. I’d never been asked that before. But then, I’d never been calling from an unskinned phone before. Without thinking, I rattled off the fourteen digits of my old number, the one that had been revoked. I held my breath afterward. Maybe the change hadn’t propagated yet. Maybe—

  “That number is not valid,” the operator said.

  “Look,” I whispered, “I’m in a dispute with Revenue Services. It’s all going to be sorted out, I’m sure, but right now I’m about to be mugged—”

  “I’m sorry,” said the consummate professional on the other end of the line. “Emergency services are for taxpayers only.”

  Before I could protest, the line went dead. Leaving me crouched alone in the dark, with a glowing phone pressed to my ear. Not for long, however: in less than a second, the dazzle of flashlight beams found me. Instinctively, I ducked my head and covered my eyes—with the hand holding the phone.

  “Well hey. What’s this?” The voice was deceptively pleasant, that seductive mildness employed by schoolyard bullies since first Romulus beat up Remus. The flashlight didn’t waver from my eyes.

  I flinched. I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have a voice.

  I tried to find the part of myself that managed unruly students and lecture-hall hecklers, but it had vanished along with my credit accounts and the protection of the police. I ducked further, squinting around my hand, but he was just a shadow through the glare of his light. At least three other lights surrounded him.

  He plucked the phone from my hand with a sharp twist that stabbed pain through my wrist. I snatched the hand back.

  “Huh,” he said. “Guess you didn’t pay your taxes, huh? What else have you got?”

  “Nothing,” I said. The RFID chip embedded in my palm was useless. Would they cut it out anyway? I had no cash, no anything. Just the phone, which had my whole life on it—all my research, all my photos. Three mostly finished articles. There were backups, of course, but they were on the wire, and I couldn’t get there without being skinned.

  I wasn’t a skin anymore. Objects, I realized, had utility. Had value. They were more than ways to get at your data.

  “Your jacket,” the baseline said. “And your shoes.”

  My toes gripped the gravel. “I need my shoes—”

  The dazzle of lights shifted. I knew I should duck, but the knowledge didn’t translate into action.

  At first there wasn’t any pain. Just the shock of impact, and an exhale that seemed to start in my toes and never stop. Then the pain, radiating stars out of my solar plexus, with waves of nausea for dessert.

  “Jacket,” he said.

  I would have given it to him. But I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t even inhale. I raised my hand. I think I shook my head.

  I think he would have hit me anyway. I think he wanted to hit me. Because when I fell down, he kept hitting me. Hitting and kicking. And not just him, some of his friends.

  It’s a blur, mostly. I remember some particulars. The stomp that crushed my left hand. The kick that broke my tailbone. I got my knees up and tucked my head, so they kicked me in the kidneys instead. Gravel gouged the side where kicks didn’t land. If I could burrow into it, I’d be safe. If I could just fall through it, I might survive. I thought about being small and hard and sharp, like those stones.

  After a while, I didn’t have the breath to scream anymore.

  * * *

  At first the cold hurt too, but after a while it became a friend. I noticed that they had stopped hitting me. I noticed that the cuts and bruises stung, the broken bones ached with a deep, sick throb. My hand felt fragile, gelatinous. Like a balloon full of water, I imagined that a single pinprick could make the stretched skin explode back from the contents. I prodded a loosened tooth with my tongue.

  But then the cold got into the hurts and they numbed. Little by little, starting from the extremities. Working in. It mattered less that the hard points of gravel stabbed my ribs. I couldn’t feel that floppy, useless hand. The throb in my head slowly became less demanding than the throb of thirst in my throat.

  In the fullness of time, I sat up. It was natural, like sitting up after a full night’s sleep, when you’ve lain in bed so long your body just naturally rises without consulting you. I thought about water. There was the river, but it smelled like poison. I’d probably get thirsty enough to drink it sooner or later. I wondered what diseases I’d contract. Hepatitis. Probably not cholera.

  My cheekbones were numb, along with my nose, but I could still breathe normally. So the nose probably wasn’t broken. The moving air brought me a tapestry of cold odors: sour garbage, rancid meat, urine. That oil-tang from the river. Frost rimed the gravel around me, and in noticing that I noticed that the morning was graying, the heavy arch of the bridge a silhouette against the sky. There was pink and silver along the horizon, and I knew which direction was east because the sun’s light glossed a contrail that must have sat high enough to reach out of the Earth’s moving shadow.

  Footsteps crunched toward me. I was too dreamy and snug to move. I’m in shock, I thought, but it didn’t seem important.

  “What’s this?” somebody said.

  I flinched but didn’t look up. His shadow couldn’t fall across me. We were both under the shadow of the bridge.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. The crunch of shifting gravel told me he crouched down beside me. When he turned my chin with his fingers and I saw his face, I was surprised he was limber enough to crouch. He looked like the bad end of a lot of winters. “And you lost your shoes too. What a pity.”

  He didn’t seem surprised when I cringed, but it didn’t light his eyes up, either. So that wasn’t a bully’s mocking.

  “Can you walk?” He took my arm gently. He inspected my broken hand. When he unzipped my jacket, I would have pulled away, but the pain was bad enough that I couldn’t move against him. When he slid the hand inside the jacket and the buttons of my shirt, I realized he was improvising a sling.

  As if his touch were the opposite of an analgesic, all my hurts reawakened. I meant to shake my head, but just thinking about moving unscrolled ribbons of pain through my muscles.

  “I don’t think so.” My words were creaky and blood-flavored.

  “If you can,” he said, “I’ve got a fire. And tea. And food.”

  I closed my eyes. When I o
pened them again, his hand was extended. The left one, as my right hand was clawed up against my chest like a surgical glove stuffed overfull with twigs and raspberry jam.

  Food. Warmth. I might have given up, but somewhere in the back of my mind was an animal that did not want to die. I watched as it made a determined, raspy sound and reached out with its unbroken hand.

  Letting him pull me to my feet was a special kind of agony. I swayed, vision blacking at the edges. His steadying hand kept me upright. It hurt worse than anything. “Come on,” he said.

  I remember walking, but I don’t remember where or for how long. It felt like forever. I had always been walking. I would be walking forever. There was no end. No surcease.

  Pain is an eternity.

  * * *

  His fire was trash and sticks ringed with broken bricks and chunks of asphalt. It smoldered fitfully, and pinprick by pinprick, the heat reawakened my pains. The soles of my feet seeped blood from walking across the gravel. I couldn’t sit, because of the tailbone, but I figured out how to lie on my side. It hurt, but so did anything else.

  There was tea, as promised, Lipton in bags stewed in a rusty can. I hoped he hadn’t used river water. It had sugar in it, though, and I drank cautiously.

  The food was dumpster-sourced chicken and biscuits, cold and lumpy with congealed grease. I ate it with my good hand, small bites. The inside of my mouth was cut from being slammed against my teeth. If I chewed carefully, on one side, the loose tooth only throbbed. I hoped it might reseat itself eventually.

  Why was I thinking about the future?

  The sun had beaten back the gloom enough for even my swollen eyes to make out the old man across from me. He had draped stiff, stinking blankets around my shoulders, but as the sun warmed the riverbank, he seemed comfortable in several layers of shirts and pants. A yellowed beard surrounded his sunken mouth. His hands were spare claws in ragged gloves. He drank the tea fearlessly and warmed his share of the chicken on the rocks beside the trash fire. I thought about plastic fumes and kept gnawing mine cold.

  After a while, he said, “You’ll get used to it.”

  I looked up. He was looking right at me, his greasy silver ponytail dull in the sunlight. “Get used to being beaten up?” My voice sounded better than I’d feared. My nose really wasn’t broken. One small miracle.

  “Get used to being a baseline.” He bit into a biscuit, grimacing in appreciation.

  I winced, wondering how long it would take me to start savoring day-old fast food fat and carbohydrates. Then I winced in pain from the wincing.

  The old man chewed and swallowed. “It’s honest, at least. Not like putting frosting all over the cake so nobody with any economic power can tell it’s rotten. What’s your name?”

  “Charlie,” I said.

  He nodded and didn’t ask for a surname. “Jean-Khalil.” I wondered if first-names only was part of the social customs of the baseline community.

  The shock was wearing off. Maybe the sugar in the tea was working its neurochemical magic. My broken hand lay against my belly, warmed by my skin, and the sweat running across my midsection felt as syrupy as blood.

  I kind of wanted the shock back. I looked at the chicken, and the chicken looked back at me. My gorge rose. Bitterness filled my mouth, but I swallowed it. I knew how badly I needed the food inside me.

  I balanced the meat on the fire ring next to Jean-Khalil’s. “You eat that.”

  He wiped the back of his hand across his beard. “I will. And you need to get to a clinic.”

  I put my head down on the unbroken arm. If I didn’t get the hand seen too, even if I survived—even if I didn’t have internal injuries—what were the chances it would be usuable when it healed? “I don’t have a tax number.”

  “There’s a free clinic at St. Francis,” he said. “But it’s Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  I managed to work out that if I normally met Numair on Tuesdays, it would be just after dawn on Wednesday. Which meant, depending on when the clinic opened, something over 24 hours to wait. I could wait 24 hours. Could I sleep 24 hours? Maybe I’d die of blood poisoning before then. That might be a relief.

  I had heard of St. Francis, but I didn’t know where it was. Somewhere in this neighborhood? If it offered a clinic for baselines, it would have to be. They couldn’t get through the chip gates uptown.

  Despite the blankets heaped over me, I thought I could feel the ground sucking the heat out of my body. The old man nudged me. I opened my eyes. “Edge over onto this,” he said.

  He’d made a pallet of more filthy blankets, just beside where I lay. With his help, I was able to kind of wriggle and flop onto it. I couldn’t lie on my back, because of the tailbone, and I couldn’t use the hand to pillow my head or turn myself.

  He rearranged the blankets over me. Something touched my lips: his gaunt fingers, protruding from those filthy gloves. I turned my head.

  “Take it. It’s methadone. It’s also a pain killer.”

  “You lost your tax number for drug addiction?” I had to cover my mouth with my unbroken hand.

  “I’m a dropout,” he said. “Take the wafer.”

  “I don’t want to get hooked.”

  He sighed like somebody’s mother. “I’m a medical doctor. It’s methadone, it’s 60 milligrams. It won’t do much more than take the edge off, but it might help you sleep.”

  I didn’t believe him about being a dropout. Who’d pick this? But I did believe him about being a doctor. Maybe it was the way he specified medical. “I was a history teacher,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say professor. “Why do you have methadone if you’re not an addict?”

  “I told you,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”

  “And you dropped out.”

  “Of a corrupt system.” His voice throbbed with disdain, and maybe conviction. “How many people were invisible to you, before? How much of this was invisible?”

  If I could have had my way, I would have made it all invisible again. This time, when he pressed his hand to my mouth, I took the papery wafer into my mouth and chewed it. It tasted like fake fruit. I closed my eyes again and tried to breathe deeply. It hurt, but more an ache than the deep stabbing I associated with broken ribs. So that was something else to consider myself fortunate for.

  I knew it was just the placebo effect and exhaustion making me sleepy so fast, but I wasn’t about to argue with it.

  I said, “What made you decide to come live on the street?”

  “There was a girl—” His voice choked off through the constriction of his throat. “My daughter. Cancer. She was twenty. Maybe if she hadn’t been skinning so much, in so much denial—”

  I put my good hand on his shoulder and felt it rise and fall. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged.

  It was a minute and a half before I had the courage to ask the thing I was suddenly thinking. “If you’re a dropout, then you have a tax number. And you don’t use it.”

  “That’s right,” the old man said. “It’s a filthy system. Eventually, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “If you don’t want it, give it to me.”

  He laughed. “If I were willing to do that, I’d just sell it on the black market. The clinic could use the money. Now rest, and we’ll get your hand looked at tomorrow.”

  * * *

  I don’t know how I got to the clinic. I didn’t walk—not on those bare, cut-up feet—and I don’t remember being carried. I do remember the waiting room full of men and women I never would have seen before I lost my tax number. Jean-Khalil had given me another methadone wafer, and that kept me just this side of coherent. But I couldn’t sit, couldn’t walk, couldn’t lean against the wall. He got somebody to bring me a gurney, and I lay on my side and tried to doze, blissfully happy there weren’t any rocks or dog feces on the surface I was lying on.

  It doesn’t take long to lower your standards.

  I realized later that I was one of the lucky ones, and because of the broken bon
es I got triaged higher than a lot of others. But it was still four hours before I was wheeled into one of the curtained alcoves that served as an examining room and a woman in mismatched scrubs and a white lab coat came in to check on me. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Dr. Tankovitch. Dr. Samure said you had a bad night. Charlie, is it?”

  “The worst,” I said. She was cute—Asian, plump, with bright eyes behind her glasses—and I caught myself flirting before a flood of shame washed me back into into myself. She was a contributing member of society, here to do charity work. And I was a bum.

  “Honestly, there’s not much you can do for a broken tailbone except”—she laughed in commiseration—“stay off it. So let’s start with the hand.”

  I held it out, and she took it gently by the wrist. Even that made me gasp.

  She made a sympathetic face. “I’m guessing by the bruises on your face you didn’t get this punching a brick wall.”

  “The cops don’t come if you’re not in the system.”

  She touched my shoulder. “I know.”

  * * *

  I got lucky. For the first time in weeks, I got lucky. The hand didn’t need surgery, which meant I didn’t have to wait until the clinic’s surgical hours, which were something like midnight to four A.M. at the city hospital. Instead, Dr. Tankovitch shot me full of Novocaine and wrapped my hand up with primitive plaster of Paris, a technology so obsolete I had never actually seen it. Or if I had seen it, I’d skinned it out. She gave me some pain pills that didn’t work as well as the methadone and didn’t have a street value, and told me to come back in a week and have it all checked out. The cast was so white it sparkled. Guess how long that was going to last, if I was sleeping under bridges?

  She didn’t offer me the clinic’s contact information, and I didn’t ask for it. How was I supposed to call them without a phone? But I was feeling less sorry for myself when I staggered out of the alcove. I planned to find Jean-Khalil again, and ask him if he’d show me where he looked for food and safe drinking water. I was clearheaded enough now to know it was an imposition, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn. And he’d sort of volunteered, hadn’t he, by picking me out of the gutter?