bounced back to the pavement and commenced to ooze fluids. His belongings - the satchel, the umbrella, a gold tie bar, a Tag Heuer watch - skittered on down the street, ricocheting off tires, shoes, manhole covers, some coming to rest nearly a block away.
Charlie stood at the curb trying to breathe. He could hear a tooting sound, like someone was blowing a toy train whistle - it was all he could hear, then someone ran into him and he realized it was the sound of his own rhythmic whimpering. The guy - the guy with the umbrella - had just been wiped out of the world. People rushed, crowded around, a dozen were barking into cell phones, the bus driver nearly flattened Charlie as he rushed down the sidewalk toward the carnage. Charlie staggered after him.
"I was just going to ask him - "
No one looked at Charlie. It had taken all of his will, as well as a pep talk from his sister, to leave the apartment, and now this?
"I was just going to tell him that his umbrella was on fire," Charlie said, as if he was explaining to his accusers. But no one accused him, really. They ran by him, some headed toward the body, some away from it - they batted him around and looked back, baffled, like they'd collided with a rough air current or a ghost instead of a man.
"The umbrella," Charlie said, looking for the evidence. Then he spotted it, almost down at the next corner, lying in the gutter, still glowing red, pulsating like failing neon. "There! See!" But people were gathered around the dead man in a wide semicircle, their hands to their mouths, and no one was paying any attention to the frightened thin man spouting nonsense behind them.
He threaded his way through the crowd toward the umbrella, determined now to confirm his conviction, too far in shock to be afraid. When he was only ten feet away from it he looked up the street to make sure another bus wasn't coming before he ventured off the curb. He looked back just as a delicate, tar-black hand snaked out of the storm drain and snatched the compact umbrella off the street.
Charlie backed away, looking around to see if anyone had seen what he had seen, but no one had. No one even made eye contact. A policeman trotted by and Charlie grabbed his sleeve as he passed, but when the cop spun around and his eyes went wide with confusion, then what appeared to be real terror, Charlie let him go. "Sorry," he said. "Sorry. I can see you've got work to do - sorry."
The cop shuddered and pushed through the crowd of onlookers toward the battered body of William Creek.
Charlie started running, across Columbus and up Vallejo, until his breath and heartbeat in his ears drowned all the sounds of the street. When he was a block away from his shop a great shadow moved over him, like a low-flying aircraft or a huge bird, and with it Charlie felt a chill vibrate up his back. He lowered his head, pumped his arms, and rounded the corner of Mason just as the cable car was passing, full of smiling tourists who looked right through him. He glanced up, just for a second, and he thought he saw something above, disappearing over the roof of the six-story Victorian across the street, then he bolted through the front door of his shop.
"Hey, boss," Lily said. She was sixteen, pale, and a little bottom heavy - her grown-woman form still in flux between baby fat and baby bearing. Today her hair happened to be lavender: fifties-housewife helmet hair in Easter-basket cellophane pastel.
Charlie was bent over, leaning against a case full of curios by the door, sucking in deep raspy gulps of secondhand store mustiness. "I - think - I - just - killed - a - guy," he gasped.
"Excellent," Lily said, ignoring equally his message and his demeanor. "We're going to need change for the register."
"With a bus," Charlie said.
"Ray called in," she said. Ray Macy was Charlie's other employee, a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor with an unhealthy lack of boundaries between the Internet and reality. "He's flying to Manila to meet the love of his life. A Ms. LoveYouLongTime. Ray's convinced that they are soul mates."
"There was something in the sewer," Charlie said.
Lily examined a chip in her black nail polish. "So I cut school to cover. I've been doing that since