A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

It started to get dark, and as nature’s generator went dead, the town turned on its auxiliary ones and went ahead working on its own juice. A sort of blazing neon moon came up all around that made the real one of six hours or so before seem as if it had been dim and dingy by contrast.

I kept right on standing there where I was while the changeover took place around me. I’d been standing there like that without moving for some little time now, as if I’d taken root on the spot. As if the impulse to keep on going had run down and needed winding up again. Or as though I’d forgotten what had brought me that far. But I hadn’t.

I was right at the edge of the intersection, my toes almost overlapping the curb-lip. Across the way from me, one flange of a street-directional sign spelled out “Lexington Ave.” Abbreviated like that, with no room to take in the whole designation. The second wing, at right-angles, was telescoped by perspective so that it narrowed-down and couldn’t be read.

But I knew which street it was. It was the right one, it was the one I wanted. It had been the street she lived on; now it was going to be the street she died on.

A pedestrian cross-walk sign facing me bloomed a warning red, but only the WALK part of it came on, in palsied letters. The wiring loose. Then DONT showed up beside it after it was nearly time for the whole thing to go off again. But nobody had mistaken it for a go-ahead anyway. They went by the color and not the capitals. (Parenthetically the thought occurred to me: Acolor-blind person could’ve got knocked down right then, in those few seconds.)

Then it made the switch-back to green, and the whole process repeated itself. But I still didn’t go over to the other side.

It wasn’t because I was undecided; if I was undecided, I wouldn’t have come this far. It wasn’t because I was afraid; if I was afraid, I wouldn’t have come at all. It wasn’t because I wanted to back out; if I wanted to back out, all I had to do was turn around and go away.

It isn’t as easy to kill someone as they tell you it is. It isn’t as easy to kill someone as you think.

People were going by in droves, but none of them looked at me. They wouldn’t have believed it if someone had said: See that man standing where you just went past? He’s on his way right now to kill someone, someone who lives down on the next block.

Here’s what they might have said, various ones of them: How can you report it before he’s done it? You have to wait till he does it first, and then report it. You can’t arrest him just for carrying a thought around in his head.

Or: You report it. I have to meet my wife and pick up my car. I’m late now.

Or: Not me. I have an appointment at the beauty-parlor. If I miss it by even ten minutes, they won’t hold it for me, I might have to wait a whole week before I can get one again.

Or: I have my own troubles. I just got a ticket. Why should I cooperate with those guys? It’s their baby, not mine.

If you looked straight up overhead, the buildings made a picket-fence around the sky that only left a little well of it open in the middle. The rest was all converging lines of aluminum lashed together with gleaming zircons. Like railroad-tracks tilted up into the sky, with tiers and tiers and tiers of twinkling ties spanning them, growing smaller, smaller, smaller as they climbed... Until your eyes got tired and dropped off, and you lost them near that end-of-the-line called heaven. That subway-station in the sky.

This was New York, beautiful but cold.

And not for little men and little women and their grudge-matches.

Billowing life all around, and imminent death standing there, still, in the middle of all of it. Elbowed a little bit over this way, edged a little bit over that, nudged a little bit back the first way again. A bus overshot its yellow-stenciled unloading-slot, came a little too far forward, and opened its steaming door right in front of my face. A woman in rubber jack-boots got down heavily sideways, and one of them landed right on the toes of my left foot. I pulled them out from under, and she glared at me for having my toes there right where her foot was going to come down.

I reached to feel for the gun, not to use it but to see if it had become dislodged, the way you touch your hat to straighten it after a slight collision.

It was all right, it hadn’t been disturbed.

The bus paled into an azure silhouette for a moment behind a parting gush of exhaust-fumes and then went on its way. CINZANO stared back from its rear end, in a diagonal, in big block-capitals. Then they contracted into lower-case. Then they contracted into italics. Then into undecipherable molecules. Then the traffic coming behind blotted them out altogether. But the world had read their message.