Dog Days - (Episode 2 of 4) - "An Honest Man"

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost. Scary stories. This is Dog Days. Episode 2. An Honest Man.

0:28 The water came on for one hour a day and then it didn't come on at all. That first week without the elevator, there was still an hour they'd announced it on the radio before the radio stopped meaning anything. Two to three in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, as if to make you choose between drinking and not fainting on the way to the tap. I'd take my jugs down to the second floor and wait at the pipe with the other. No, there were no others.

1:00 I keep doing that. I keep remembering a line of people who weren't there. It was only me, kneeling at a tap in the dark with a flashlight in my teeth, listening to the pressure die a little more each day. A full jug, then a half, then a brown trickle that smelled like a penny. Then, one afternoon, I knelt there and turned the handle, and the building gave me nothing at all. Just the sound of a dry throat and which is a sound a building should not be able to make. I want to tell you what the heat does to you, because you need to understand the state I was in for the rest of what I'm going to say. It does something to your mind before it does anything to your body. Or at the same time, I could never sort out which came first. There's a

1:52 headache that isn't in your head, it's behind your eyes, a band tightening by the hour. There's the thing time does, where you set down a cup and pick it up, and it's two hours later, and the light has moved across the floor like a slow animal. And there's what you start to see at the edges. Not ghosts. Nothing so kind as ghosts. Just movement. A shape that's only the curtain. A person in the doorway, who is only the coat on the hook. Your brain, starved and cooking, keeps offering you company. and you keep having to turn it down. I gave Edith most of the water. I want that on the record too. Whatever else I tell you, hold on to that I drank less so she could drink more. I am not all bad. I have never

2:46 been all bad. That may turn out to be the worst thing about me. She was weaker by then. The crossword sat unfinished on the arm of her chair, the same square, empty for days. She didn't tell me stories anymore. She'd start one and lose the thread and her eyes would go to the window. But she still knew me.

3:11 There's my girl. And one of those afternoons, while I was wringing a cloth out over the basin we kept for her, she told me, very matter-of-fact, that Harold's revolver was in the bottom of the sideboard, under the linen. and that I should know where it was. For the looters, she said, and almost smiled. I found it where she said.

3:36 A heavy old thing, cold in my hand, the only cold thing left in that apartment. I checked that it was loaded the way you'd touch a stove, to see if it's hot, flinching at my own hand. Then I put it in the pocket of my robe, and I forgot it was a real object that could do a real thing. The way you forget anything you're afraid of, if you carry it long enough. I needed it three nights later. I heard him on the roof first. That's the thing I'll never get out of me, that the danger came from above. You spend your whole life braced for the thing at the door, and then the footsteps are over your head, crossing the roof, slow and deliberate.

4:21 A man pacing out the size of a building he meant to come down into, Then the roof door. We had a roof door at the end of the ninth floor hall. And I'd checked it. I'd checked it twice. But a lock is only a lock. And I heard it give. And I heard the footsteps come down into the hall outside my own front door. I didn't breathe.

4:46 I stood in the dark with Harold's gun suddenly remembering exactly what it was. He knocked. Polite. That was the worst of it, the politeness. A soft, reasonable knock, and a man's voice, dry and cracked as mine, saying he'd seen my candle, that he wasn't going to hurt anybody, that he only needed water, just a little water. He had money.

5:11 He had a watch. He'd trade.

5:14 Please, he said, I can hear you in there.

5:17 Please.

5:19 I told him to go away. I told him there was no water, which was nearly true. I told him I had a gun, which was entirely true, and I heard him go quiet, and for a moment I thought that was the end of it. And then Edith's voice, from her chair across the hall, through her open door, and mine thin, but clear, the clearest she'd been in days. Dana, she said.

5:45 Dana, who is it?

5:47 And I felt the man on the other side of my door hear her too. I felt him understand what I'd been hiding behind the gun and the empty apartment story that there were two of us that one of us was old that one of us could not run. I have wondered since if that's what broke him or what fixed him, knowing there was someone in here even more finished than he was. I called back to her to stay in her chair, to stay quiet, that it was nothing, that I had it. I'm glad you're here, she said, the way she always said it, even then, even with a stranger's breathing in the dark behind my door.

6:44 I don't know what I'd do, and the man heard that too. Then the door came in. It wasn't a movie kick.

6:54 It was worse.

6:55 Slower a shoulder. And a crack. And the old frame letting go in pieces. And him stumbling into my front room half falling. This big ruined man with his shirt black with sweat. And I had the gun up in both hands and I was screaming at him to stop. And he stopped. He stood swaying in the dark with his empty hands out. And his eyes found the gun.

7:18 And he reached for it. And I let him take it. I want to be honest. I didn't fire. I could have, and I didn't. He took it out of my hands as gently as you'd take something from a child, and I thought, this is the moment I die, and I was so tired that the thought arrived as relief. He didn't shoot me. He went past me to the basin where Edith's water was, and he drank it, all of it, on his knees, with both hands, like an animal at a creak, And then he made a sound I have never heard a grown man make. And he set the gun down on the floor and he wept.

8:00 He'd had a wife.

8:02 He told me kneeling there in my front room, in the dark, with the wet still on his chin, a wife and a little girl, 11 months old. He'd gone out for water on the third day, walked two miles to a fire hydrant somebody had opened and stood in a line, and when he came back up to his apartment, the heat had. He couldn't finish it. He kept saying he'd only been gone a few hours. He kept saying he was an honest man, that he'd never in his life taken a thing that wasn't his, that I had to believe he was a good man, that he just needed somebody to know it. He asked me to forgive him, not for the door, for leaving them to go find water, for being the one who came back, and I'll tell you what frightened me. and it wasn't the gun, and

8:51 it wasn't his size, and it wasn't the door. It was that I understood him completely. I knew exactly the shape of what he was carrying, the way you recognize your own handwriting on an envelope you don't remember addressing. He kept saying, I'm an honest man, I'm an honest man, like the words were a hand he was using to hold his own face together. And I thought, I do that.

9:17 I have a sentence I say like that. I have been saying it since the elevator died. I told him I forgave him. I don't know if I had any right to. He was the only one left to ask, and I was the only one left to ask. And we forgave each other in the dark for things neither of us had any business forgiving. And then he picked himself up and apologised for the door, and he left.

9:43 Back up the stairs to the roof, I think. I never heard him again. I have wondered since whether he made it through the night and whether the wanting him to was a kindness in me or just the need to believe a man like that gets to go on, because if he doesn't, then neither do I. he drunk the last of the water that's the part i had to deal with after he drunk edith's water and there was none coming and she was so weak by then i went into her she was in her chair where i'd left her by the open window that let in no air, only more night. I knelt down and I took her hand, and her hand was cool. I told you she ran cool. I told you that at the very start, old people do. Their hands are always cool.

10:35 It's the circulation. So I wasn't worried. I held her cool hand and I told her about the man, and that he was gone, and that we were all right now, that it was over. that she could rest. She didn't answer. But she'd been so tired, days of not finishing her stories, drifting at the window. And it didn't seem strange to me that she'd finally let herself sleep.

11:03 I was glad.

11:04 I remember being glad she could sleep. I wrung the cloth out and laid it on her forehead. And her forehead was cool too. And I thought, good, the fever's broken. though I don't know now what fever I imagined she'd had. I lowered my voice so I wouldn't wake her. I talked to her anyway, quietly. I told her the man was sorry about the door, and that I'd forgiven him, and did she think that was the right thing. And I waited, and the room waited with me. And I decided that the silence was her agreeing, because she usually did agree with me. She was that kind of friend.

11:46 I told her we'd get the water back on tomorrow the city couldn't just leave people somebody would come and I let her not answer be a comfort to me instead of the thing it was I sat on the floor by her chair the way I used to sit by my mother's and I kept hold of her cool hand and I was not alone and after the night I'd had I cannot tell you what it meant to me not to be alone the window was still open A little before dawn the temperature dropped the way it does in the worst heat, two degrees, nothing, but enough that I felt it on my own arms. And I got up, careful and quiet. And I took the throw from the back of the sofa and I tucked it around her so she wouldn't catch a chill. In that heat, 104 in the dark and the sweat standing on my

12:41 own skin. And I pulled a blanket up to the chin of the woman in the chair. So she wouldn't catch cold. I remember doing it. I remember thinking it was a kind thing. That's where I have to stop for tonight. Not because there isn't more. Because I need you to sit with that the way I should have sat with it.

13:01 And didn't. A blanket. In the heat.

13:06 I told myself she was sleeping. I'd been telling myself things since the elevator died. And I was getting good at it. And you should know that about me before I tell you the rest.