THEY KILLED THE WRONG MAN

Ethan On Wednesday I was murdered. It was Wednesday I remember, because I had been thinking all the shift about Thursday, and that is when my landlord had told me that he would change the locks unless I paid him two of the three months I owed him. I recall wondering how a man who claims to be generous happens to be standing in a doorway to which I won't be able to live anymore. I had forty three dollars. I was three hundred and eighty short. It took me twenty-two minutes to walk home after washing the building I cleaned, but I took the direct route through Pelham Ave and through the alley behind the laundromat. I never used the roundabout. My mother had told me that shortcuts were the reason why people ended up in situations and even though my mom had been wrong about most things she used to say in her life, the particular scenario the woman spoke of, had always seemed to me to be very reasonable and worthy of following. I made the short cut that night. I was pondering over the three hundred and eighty dollars. I was counting whether the plasma center on Fifth would be open, whether I could sell the watch that I did not own anymore, whether the woman in 4B who sometimes put the groceries outside her door would notice if one of those bags was missing. The alley was not a thought of mine. I was not thinking about the man who stepped out of the shadow beside the dumpster with his hand already extended and his voice already flat in the way of one who had done this before and found it was nothing special. "Wallet," he said. I gave it to him. I had heard long ago that courage is a luxury and I lacked the means of luxury. I took the wallet out of my back pocket and held it out without saying a word. He took it. Opened it. Gazed at the forty-three dollars. Something changed in his face, I saw. Not anger exactly. “That's all,: he said. "Yes," I said. He gazed at me for a moment. Then he looked again at the wallet. then he did such a thing as I had not been expecting, that he did not leave. He stood there, and I could see that he was making a decision, and that this decision was not going to favour me. The knife was not a big one. I never saw it till it was in my side, just below the ribs on the left, and the sensation was not what I supposed it would be, not sharp exactly but more like a sudden pressure, as though my own body was protesting against something that was going on too fast to be processed. I laid my hand to it. He stepped back. He stared at me in a manner in which people stare at things which they have created but they are unsure of what to do with it now. He did not run. That was what I had in mind when I recalled that life. He did not run. He merely watched me fall down onto the wet pavement of the alley at the back of the laundromat on Pelham Ave and when I was on the floor he turned and walked away at a normal pace, like a man who had finished a task and was now ready to go home. The concrete was cold. I thought of my sister. I wondered about the three hundred and eighty dollars. I realized that nobody was going to come and that nobody was going to come to see the gap I left and to my surprise, the thought did not arrive with sadness. It came with a flatness which I had no name to give, such as a man looking in a box which he already knew was empty. The light flickered. The light went out. Soon I opened my eyes. I was lying on a sidewalk. Not the alley. A sidewalk--clean and broad with a small tree in a square of earth at the curb and a building opposite it with a glass front that reflected the lights of the city back upon the building. I was lying on my back. There was no blood. I looked around me, where the knife had been, and where there was none now, not a wound nor a mark, not even a tear in the jacket I was wearing, which was no jacket I had been wearing in the alley, nor was it even a jacket that I owned. I sat up slowly. My surrounding city was both familiar and wrong at the same time. The same traffic, same light, same surrounding. The skyline was off though. It had a tower on its eastern horizon which I did not recognize, and which, easily the tallest structure in sight, rose on its upper levels in that blue-white pulse that breathed. People were walking on the road with the usual aim of an evening of the week, and majority if not all of them had a small band on their wrist that had a low steady light, pale in color, and most of them white and a faint yellow and here and there a green. My wrists looked at me. Nothing. A woman who passed by with a coffee cup looked down at my wristbands and looked away. I had been used to such glances too many times to be unaware of it. It was as though I was already a category before I uttered a single word. I stood up. My body seemed right, no pain, no left-over damage caused by the knife, no dizziness. I made an organized inventory: same face, I thought, as I lacked a mirror. Same hands. Similar memories, poking behind my eyes in the specific manner that grief does when it is not yet grieved. Forty-three dollars, which I found in the coat-pocket which I did not recognize, and which was not only absurd, but also, as it happened to be the only money I had, necessary. I stood at the next corner stopping a man to ask him where I was. “Veran,” he said, with a slight vexation of one who had found the question a peculiar one. "Veran City." He examined my wrists. “You come in, out of the outer districts?” “Something like that,” I said. He directed me to a building three blocks north with which he said they were dealing with new registrations. “You'll need a band,” he said with the slightly embarrassing neutrality of a man describing an obviously and slightly embarrassing thing. “There is no classification you can use to get half the city. Services, transit, the Towers, any of it.” I said, “Thank you.” He walked away. I stood at the corner and looked at the eastern tower with its slow blue pulse and the street full of people who knew what their bands meant and I thought about the alley, and the forty three dollars, and the man who had not run, and the concrete that was going hard beneath me. So I pulled the collar of the coat I was not familiar with and began to walk north. I had been nobody in the preceding world. I was going to research whether it was a rule or a habit.