That was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen. For awhile I thought about it every day. 1 know I thought about it when at the end of that summer I was hitchhiking home and had gotten as far as Oregon, where I slept entented in a tree-screened dimple on a field by a white house, hoping that no one in the white house would see and hurt me, and the next morning I ducked under the fence and was back on the shoulder of the freeway and it was already a very hot morning, so I was drinking from my canteen (which I'd filled at a gas station in Portland) when another hitchhiker came thumping down the road toward me. He was like a prophet from the old times. He wore a long robe and carried a great wooden staff which he slammed down at every step. He was not so old, and yet his beard was long and gray (possibly from dust), and his gray hair fell to his shoulders and his eyes were wild like a bull's. His face was caked with dust. He licked his lips as he came near me, and his eyes were on me unwaveringly, so I offered him water as he came closer and closer, continuing to stare into my eyes, and then he shook his head sternly and walked on. I did not live up to his ideals. There was another hitcher I'd met in Washington State who'd been crazy and called himself the Angel Michael and whispered to me that he didn't know anymore whether he was a boy or a girl and I believed him because he was so angelic: angels are undoubtedly hermaphrodites. In the same way, I believed in the prophet wholly. I could not but admire him for rejecting me. He went on and on down the freeway shoulder, with barbed wire at his right shoulder and can at his left, growing smaller (though I could still distinctly hear the tapping of his stick) and I wondered what he would have done or said if it had been he and only he who came across the woman whom the mosquitoes were eating. I could almost see him there on the Al-Can, toiling on, mile after mile, his face black-veiled like that minister in Hawthorne's tale, black-veiled with mosquitoes; he'd walk on and stab the gravel with his staff and never deign to brush away a single mosquito; he'd glare terribly through eyes swollen almost shut by mosquito bites and go on, mile after mile, week after week; and maybe someday he'd come upon that woman shrieking in her crazed torment. Would he have stopped then; would the mosquitoes leave her for him in a single flicker of his divinity, after which he'd pass on in silence, followed by unimaginable clouds of humming blackness? Would she fall to her knees then and thank God and regain herself? — Or would he never have stopped at all, marching contemptuously on, ignoring her need as he ignored my gift, and dwindled just the same along that highway's inhuman straightness?
In the River City Deli he was always happy, no doubt because inexperience remained his friend. Sometimes Brandi the whore went by and he could run out and kiss her. He felt loved then. That was at night. Sometimes he'd sit drinking a beer in the middle of a rainy Sunday afternoon, the only customer there, and his knees didn't hurt anymore. At that time they had beers from all over the world. From the ceiling hung flags of all beer-drinking countries, and beer labels and plaques. There were over a hundred imported beers in the fridge, so they said, though he never counted them. Later they cut back to fifty and then the sandwiches got smaller and then they fired John and turned into a soup place and he stopped going. John was the one who used to make the giant sandwiches.
He'd known John for two years. He wrote him notes about the excellent and doubly large sandwiches he made and John put them up on the bulletin board. Then John would get in trouble for making the sandwiches too big, but John didn't care. John had been a student forever, making films. John turned up the radio as he chopped onions, sang
There had been an aquarium a few years before John, but the fish died one by one. Now there was a jukebox instead.
The girl who stood in for John that night was thin and blonde and homely. He was drunk and so he loved her through his heart's arch-windows of phallic narrowness. He knew what love was because he always felt it. It was simple loneliness.
If he had a gun right now he'd probably go kill himself, but he'd be calm and very very happy.
