Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

A white man with a huge mustache was seated there next to him.

“Mr. Grey?”

“Who?”

“You.”

“That’s me. I’m the one you talkin’ to.”

“I’m Dr. Ruben.”

“Do I know you?”

The man smiled and a fear nudged at the back of Ptolemy’s mind. It was an old fear, faded and flaccid like a balloon that had lost most of its air.

“I’m a friend of your niece,” the man, whose name Ptolemy had already forgotten, said.

“Uncle Grey?”

Turning his eyes to the other side of the bed took all of his concentration. He saw and registered and forgot many things on his way. The empty room and the green door and the feeling that he had accomplished an ancient task that had been behind a door and under a floor. There was blood somewhere out in the world, through the window, and then came the girl: eyes like sharp ovals and chocolate skin, she was beautiful but what Ptolemy saw was that she was one of a kind, like the woman who had come to his door and yanked him out of his sad and lonely life.

“Rob, Rob, Robyn?”

Her smile was filled with gratitude. Ptolemy’s heart surged like the, like the soil under his father’s spade at the beginning of the season. There was pain in his chest.

“Are you okay, Uncle?”

“What’s my name?”

“Ptolemy Usher Grey.”

“That’s a king’s name.”

“Yes it is.”

“And why am I here?”

“You been sick, Uncle. Dr. Ruben come to see if you was still alive, but I told him that you’d outlive the Devil himself.”

Ptolemy knew that the child was making a joke but he forgot what it meant. Still, he smiled for her, pretending he understood.

“Alfred died at the hospital, and the police wanted take you to jail but Moishe Abromovitz got a paper on ’em an’ they said that they’d wait till you got better.”

“Did I kill?”

The girl nodded. When Ptolemy tried to remember her name he was brought back to the yard in front of his childhood home where birds flocked around him, eating stale breadcrumbs and wailing out their songs.

“You was right about Niecie,” she was saying.

“I was?”

“Yeah.”

The man with the mustache rose and departed the hospital room. Ptolemy gave this movement his full attention until the green door had closed.

“What did you say?” he asked the girl-child.

“I said that you was right about Niecie?”

“What, what did I say?”

There was a piano playing on the radio.

“You said that she’d try and get the law on me. I had to move out yo’ apartment. I had to get a place on my own. Beckford tried to stay there wit’ me but he kept gettin’ mad about the money an’ finally he just had to go.”

“Slow down,” Ptolemy said.

“It’s okay now.”

“It is?”

“Yeah,” she said, but he could tell that there was more to the story.

He held out his hand and the girl who reminded him of birds singing took it into hers just like he thought she would. He sighed and maybe she asked a question. The music became a sky and the words the man on the television was saying turned into the ground under his feet. One was blue and the other brown, but he was not sure which was which. Everything glittered and now and again, when he looked around, things were different. Another room. A new taste. The girl always returned. And the door that was shut against his forgotten life was itself forgotten and there were feelings but they were far away.

A coyote that talked like a man whispered in his ear, and then licked his face, and then . . .