Hunger and Thirst Read Online Free PDF Page B

place.
    He was still asleep, cold and shivering, dreaming of snow and winter.
    The room was chilly and the soggy underwear and pants clung to his flesh like cold wet paper. He stirred restlessly, his right hand jerking a little. Then it pulled out completely from beneath his leg as a wintry blast struck the him that dreamed.
    He shuddered and moaned and his eyes fluttered open.
    He looked dully at the ceiling.
    His eyes felt caked over with a hard dry crust. It still stabbed at the corners of his eyes. It annoyed him and he wanted to wipe it away.
    His throat was dry. His tongue shifted sluggishly as he licked his lips.
    There he was. Still there. Whatever hope that it had been a dream was now gone for good. It was as real as anything was real. He tried to sit up. But there was no point in it. He couldn’t sit up. He just lay there without moving, staring up at the ceiling.
    His back and right shoulder were still cold.
    Now his crotch and thighs and upper legs were cold too. The rest of his body was more or less comfortable. It was getting warmer outside. Sunlight was beginning to pierce through to the ground. It was easing out the knotted muscles of the city and himself. Everything was running smoother.
    The traffic sped and parted and throbbed and rumbled, never ending. And lives come and go, he thought, and eyes open on the mystery of life and eyes close on the mystery of death and still the traffic moves on, the elevated trains fleeing from station to station and back again. And back again. And again.
    Or do they?
    He drew in a shuddering breath.
    There was an odor to the room. He was beginning to get it. An odor of the old, the drying and the decaying. All mingled with the pungent, musky odor of his urine-soaked trousers. It was the smell of dying things.
    He asked the question of no one.
    “What am I to do?”
    And when he asked to know, his eyes flickered like pictures on a haunted screen and no one could tell what things were in his eyes.
    Again, he looked at the rose, still drying, still shriveling, the outside petals pulling away from the center folds.
    It was like some rare fruit being peeled by the atmosphere. The petals would pull away, one by one through the coming hours and drop onto the white dusty towel which was supposed to be a table cloth.
    And suddenly a feeling of intense might dropped on him and he closed his eyes, his heart beating quickly.
    What does it
mean
to lie paralyzed? To lie paralyzed and look at a dying rose? It had to mean something. The complete thing, the affair in its entirety.
    How many times had he been walking or standing or sitting, no matter where, and, suddenly, looked up and said or thought in the profoundest wonder—how long has
this
been going on?
    But this portion of it; lying paralyzed in a room on Third Avenue in New York in April.
    What did it signify?
    It had to mean something. It simply had to have some intimation of purpose. What was it in the wide world, in the vast universe that he should be here in this ugly, rotting room, unable to get up? What did it mean that his overcoat was a jumbled, caverned lump of wool on the dirty, spotted rug, that bills of large denomination made a pattern of scroll-worked green on the light brown rug?
    And that he, a human being, an amalgam of nerves and tendons and muscles and flesh and skin and a brain and vague hopes for a soul—was shot? Shot in the back by a wizened, miserly old man.
    Was there a meaning? Certainly there were facts. The facts were clear. He was in room 27 of this particular house on Third Avenue and the walls were green and thickly, clumsily plastered and cracked. And there was one wall board showing over there where the plaster had fallen off. That was by the other table on which his typewriter rested, silent and aloof. The wardrobe closet door was slightly ajar and so were all the drawers in the dresser but the bottom one and the mirror on top had a thin layer of dust hanging on its surface and the rose was