The Bite
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Back home, over cocktails, he recounted the incident to Carol. “What did she think I was going to do?” he asked. “Grab her little dog and beat her to death with it?”
“Actually, Roger, it is a little disconcerting sometimes, hearing you mumble to yourself behind the bathroom door. All that woman saw was a scruffy stranger talking to himself. Considering what you’ve just been through, can you really blame her for assuming the worst?”
“I occasionally whisper to myself in private, Carol, I don’t talk out loud in public. There’s a difference.”
“If you say so,” she said, trying to draw a smile out of him. “But tell me, other than frightening the neighbors, how was your walk?”
“Fine. Why do you ask?”
“I just wanted to—”
“Because it sounded to me like a loaded question.”
“No, it wasn’t. I simply wanted to know how you felt being outside by yourself for the first time since Thursday. Isn’t that a reasonable question?”
“Not when you’re giving me the same bug-eyed look that woman was.”
“I’m doing no such thing.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I seem to be turning into a full-blown paranoid.”
“You’ve had a bad experience, Roger, and it’s made you jumpy and over-sensitive. But it’ll pass, if you’ll just be patient and let yourself heal.”
“I’m healing just fine.” He finished his whisky and made himself another, noticing her watching how much liquor he poured into his glass. “Something bothering you?” he asked.
“Well...”
“You think I’m using this as an excuse to drink more, don’t you?”
“No. But I do think you’re refusing to accept that you’ve been hurt. This is probably the last thing a man wants to hear, but in some ways it’s like you were raped.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Carol.”
“It’s true. This wasn’t like having your pocket picked. This guy really got to you. You have to deal with it. And doubling your alcohol intake isn’t going to help.”
“Okay, Dr. Brothers. I promise to attend my victim support group, right after my A.A. meeting. Hello, my name is Roger,” he said. “And I was attacked by a subway cannibal. He didn’t eat me, and now I’m trying to deal with my feelings of hurt and rejection.”
She shrugged. “Hey, if you want to tough it out on your own, go ahead. I’m only suggesting that counseling might help you over the rough spots.”
“And then again, it might not. You have to admit that on a sliding scale, my little adventure ranks pretty far down the list of calamities. I’m not saying it hasn’t affected me, but it isn’t like I was shot or stabbed. I’ll get over it. So why don’t we just drop the subject for now and start thinking dinner?”
“Fine,” she said. “Then I guess your manly stoicism will get you through next week on your own, right?”
“What’s next week?”
“Don’t you remember the real estate seminar in Miami? I told you about it.”
“Oh, right. Miami. Lucky you.”
She peered uncertainly at him over the rim of her glass. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“No, I’ll begin deteriorating as soon as you walk out the door.”
“Well, I’ll leave my number so you can call me at the hotel.”
“Will do.”
“And will you promise me not to drink on top of the narcotics? Because there won’t be anybody here to rush you to the hospital if you go into a coma.”
“Scout’s honor.”
* * *
Deciding that he needed to be clear-headed for the coming week, Roger stopped taking the codeine that night. Again he slept poorly, waking several times to go to the bathroom, and once to undo the bandage and check the wound, certain he could feel some small, squirming thing just under the skin. But under the light it looked okay. The redness and swelling were down, and the pain, though still acute, was far from unbearable.
With infection no longer a serious concern, he could honestly say that the attack had done very little physical damage. His only memento of the experience would be a bite scar on his arm, which made Carol’s earnest advice to seek counseling for his “trauma” seem even sillier now. He would be skittish in the subway for a while; that was to be expected, but he had no intention of changing his habits out of some nebulous fear of future assaults.
Nor would he even consider buying a gun or taking courses in self-defense. He’d had ample time to recover, and tomorrow he would resume his normal routine. The attack had been pure chance, and the idea that some personal trait or quality in him had motivated the attack was paranoid nonsense.
But as he lay tensely in bed, trying to get back to sleep under the watchful red glow of the digital clock, which seemed pleased to inform him that there were only three hours left before the alarm went off, he kept seeing glimpses of his attacker’s face in the darkness behind his closed eyes, and finally realized what had been bothering him about it: the man’s face was vaguely familiar.
Odd how the sense of recognition had come slowly, over the course of three nights, as if the memory had been buried so deeply that it had taken this long to surface. He had no context for the face, no name or period of his life to connect it with, yet the lines of familiarity had been discernible even under the beard, dirt, and facial distortions of insanity. His memory for faces had always been good, and he felt that another, and this time unhurried, look at the man’s face, especially if it were clean-shaven, would probably jog his memory.
Regardless of his own inability to put a name to the face, there could no longer be any question that the man knew him. For he was certain now, in the sleepless clarity of four in the morning, of what he had been unsure of before, that the flaring eyes had contained something else besides rage: recognition. And if that were true, if they weren’t strangers to one another, then the attack could not have been random. The recognition had preceded the rage. The thought chilled him. Somewhere in this city was a mentally unbalanced enemy who hated him enough to attack on sight. And as long as he failed to remember the man, to recall some reason for his hatred, he would remain a blind target.
* * *
His well-being had always been fragile, abnormally dependent, he had often thought, on a good night’s sleep. He was irritable and out of sorts on Monday morning as he shaved and dressed for work, ate a hurried breakfast with coffee that upset his stomach, then walked to the Metro station and descended the almost nightmarishly high escalator into the subway.
There was a small crowd waiting on the platform, and no one seemed the least bit threatening, but he still picked a spot with a good vantage and kept close watch on the people around him. He was unarmed, having decided against carrying a knife for protection, yet he felt reasonably calm, alert and clear-headed. No one was going to get the drop on him again, and if they did it would be his own fault.
At Metro Center, where he waited to change trains, he kept his back to a column and thoroughly scanned the faces of everyone around him, but he saw no bearded, dirty-faced men stalking him.
He could have lived without the fuss his co-workers made over him at the office, even if he was touched by their concern, which seemed to focus more on his psychological scars than actual injuries. Because they apparently expected it of him, he impersonated his ordinary self, playing the sarcastic, good-natured office humorist, a bit too cynical for his own good but at least consistently so, who wasn’t about to let some street crazy upset his apple cart. Laughing it off was how a grown man was supposed to deal with the lesser misfortunes, the kind that shamed your manhood rather than destroyed your health, left you in the poorhouse or, God forbid, took away your loved ones.
After satisfying their curiosity and telling it straight, like an urban campfire story, he got a laugh out of his secretary by suggesting that the attack had been provoked by the flaming red tie she’d given him last Christmas. It was a harmless lie, since she knew perfectly well he hadn’t been wearing the hideous thing on that day or any other.
One of his younger colleagues presented him with an elaborately wrapped gag gift on behalf of the entire office: a can of mace. He held it up, laughing, then clipped it to his shirt pocket, “for easy access,” he said, and everybody clapped and headed back to their desks, satisfied that good old Roger was back in the saddle. His act seemed to convince everyone but himself.
He was disturbed to find that he couldn’t concentrate on a column of figures long enough even to get started making a dent in the backlog of paperwork on his desk. He attributed it to the codeine and, more reluctantly, to what the doctor had assured him was inevitable post-traumatic stress.
It was easier to blame drug reactions and recent events for his complete lack of interest in the work that had so absorbed him up until last Thursday than to admit to himself that the project he had hoped would be the crowning achievement of his career now seemed like an elaborate hoax designed to keep a creatively used-up, middle-aged man on the payroll.
Forced early retirement was part of the firm’s new cutthroat style of staying ahead of the competition, and several of the graybeards — some only a few years older than Roger — had been quietly eased out in the last few months. For the moment, he had the sympathy vote, but he knew it was a matter of when — not if — he would be offered a severance package, in spite of his pretensions to staying ahead of the pack in drafting bold new marketing ideas.
He’d been too close to his project these last weeks to have any real perspective on its value to the company, but looking at it now, at a mere three days’ remove — which, for some reason, felt like years — he was shocked at the extent to which he had deluded himself. It was as if he were looking at the hackneyed scribblings of another person, a man clearly unfit for the position he now held and for whom the new, post-attack Roger felt nothing but contempt. He’d promised Barry a progress report by this coming Friday, and now, sitting at his desk, his gift can of mace dangling from his shirt pocket, the bite wound itching madly under the bandage, he realized with a feeling akin to panic that it would be professional suicide to unveil his project in its current form.
He tried to calm himself. Maybe he could stall for a week or two, play the PTSD card for all it was worth. It might buy him enough time to come up with something better, but it could also backfire. The firm might decide that he was damaged goods, a group insurance liability, and show him the door now instead of four or five years down the road, as they had probably planned.
He wanted to believe that eighteen years of loyalty and dedication still meant something to these people, but his ability to lie to himself seemed to have vanished along with his store of fresh ideas. He was an aging middle manager hanging on by his fingernails, who’d been getting by for some time now on steadiness and reliability, modest charm, and a slightly abrasive self-confidence that, since Thursday afternoon, he no longer possessed.
He now felt tentative and infinitely vulnerable, like a dreamer who finds himself naked at a formal party. Against this new and unwanted clarity, he was powerless to deny not only his shameful weakness but his obsolescence. He was a fraud who would soon be exposed for what he was.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Jeffrey Greene
