eerie light of dawn. When the Dunkin’ Donuts opened he walked across the street and brought back a dozen doughnuts and set them on the ground and ate them by the pine tree. The other stopped saying food, food, and started saying leg, leg—but he continued to eat the doughnuts and ignored him. One by one the bankers showed up and filed into the bank. He crawled out from under the pine tree and went inside. He was tightening his belt in the lobby when a woman came forward and greeted him. He told her he needed to reallocate some funds and maybe establish a trust. He really didn’t want to deal with the belt anymore. The far notch was too tight but the near notch was not tight enough. The woman stared at him while he debated which notch. He finally settled on the near one.
He noticed an urn of coffee on a nearby table. He walked over and poured himself a cup and sat down on a padded chair with his legs outstretched. Contentment should have buffered him all around but the other kept moaning leg, leg—so eventually he pulled up the cuff of his chinos and looked at the leg. Something had torn right through. The cut was deep and clean, from shinbone to calf. He had no memory of it happening. Blood had dried down the leg. One of the bankers approached. The banker watched him, dressed in a soiled T-shirt and ripped chinos, peel the blood-stiffened sock from his skin. He looked up and saw the banker watching and clapped his hands on his knees and said, “I need to reallocate some funds and maybe establish a trust.”
“It looks like you might need stitches,” said the banker.
“I might go to the drugstore later,” he said. “Get some analgesics.”
When the banker took him back and accessed his portfolio with the various websites and passwords he’d been given, he saw an inordinate amount of money diversified across a wide spectrum of investment vehicles. This caused him to turn away from his computer screen and stare at the man across from him. His foot was perched on the edge of the desk and he was picking dried blood from his leg and collecting the flakes in the palm of his hand. The banker fished the garbage pail out from under the desk. “Do you need this?” he asked. Tim pocketed the flakes of dried blood as if they were so many nickels and dimes and settled back in the chair and looked past the banker. The banker returned the pail to his desk.
“Are those your diplomas on the wall?” he asked.
The banker turned to the wall and said they were.
“They’ll come down someday,” he told the banker.
When he finished banking, he walked out into a cold and still afternoon under solid ashen clouds. Cold pricked the insides of his nostrils. He wandered through a parking lot and then followed the exiting cars to the road where he walked along the curb to an intersection of three competing drugstores. He patronized the closest one. In the middle of the store he found a rack of sweatshirts. Among them was one of orange cotton with an iron-on decal of a cornucopia spilling forth with vegetables and rich with autumnal colors. It said Happy Thanksgiving. He bought it. He also bought some rope, a steak knife and a box of cookies. He threw his old belt away behind the drugstore, where his breath blew white, and with the knife fashioned a new one out of the rope.
He circled a downtown rotary. He fell asleep in the city square. In the morning he woke up to a young man squatting a foot away. The young man wore a blue polo with an official insignia visible between the flaps of an unzipped down jacket. He held a small cardboard box with a cardboard handle and fruit emblazoned on the sides. He had been trying to wake him without violating one of the first rules of training: never touch the Client. Sometimes the Client had bloodshot alcoholic slits for eyes and took a minute to orient himself, in certain extreme situations, like the victim of a car crash.
Tim clambered to a sitting position and leaned back against the gray stone of the city building.
“Good morning,” said the young man. “Would you like some lunch?”
He offered him the cardboard box. When he made no move to take it, the young man said, “I’m going to