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part of the woods. I could only wonder now just how
debilitated Mr. Zalen had become via the rigors of opiate addiction
and impoverishment. The latter stages of such misfortunes regularly
left its victims incoherent or fully mad. Should this be the case
with Zalen, my trek could well prove pointless.
    A ten-minute stroll left me standing before
the new fire station where several men chatted amiably while they
washed and polished the grand, new pumper truck. Not half a block
on, I found what could only be the poorhouse.
    The single-floored length of small
apartments looked pressed down by adversity, as though soullessness
were as salient a feature as the compartments’ peeling paint and
rag-stuffed broken window panes. From them issued the smells of
urine and rotting food. An elderly man sat slumped and glassy-eyed
before one dingy-doored room, to the effect that I thought he might
be deceased until he shivered once, and hacked. An obese blind
woman with a white cane sat just as dejected at the next unit. She
looked up sightlessly when she’d no doubt heard my passing, then
rose from the milk crate she used for a chair, tapped back to the
doorway, and went in. The door slammed.
    The end unit struck me as darker than all
the rest, though the sunlight here shone evenly across the entire
length of apartments. A doorless postal box revealed no occupant’s
name, and I noticed a grease-stained garbage bag sitting roadside
filled with stubs of burned down candles, expended flash bulbs, and
empty food cans aswarm with flies. A cracked walkway led me forward
until I stopped, forced to eye a curious door-knocker mounted in
the beaten door’s center stile, a queer oval of tarnished bronze
depicting a morose half-formed face. Just two eyes, no mouth or
nose, no additional features.
    I wrapped hesitantly with the knocker,
staring uneasily at the name plaque posted just above: C.
ZALEN.
     
     
    3.
     
     
    What the door opened to show me was more of
what I expected: a thin, pallid man demonstrating every sign of
physical squalor. He still wore the ruinous black raincoat, which
hung open to show him shirtless, sunken-chested, slat-ribbed.
Frayed trousers torn off at the knees were what he wore below the
waist, as well as rotten shoes. His already sunken eyes appeared
nearly non-existent by the smudge-like crescents beneath them. I
made every attempt to smile and seem unfazed.
    “Ah, Mr. Zalen. My name is Foster Morley. I
saw you cutting home through the woods but I guess you didn’t hear
me.”
    The man frowned. Longish black hair had been
slicked back off his brow by either tonic or, more likely, the
natural oils from his scalp that had accreted from not washing
often. “What do you want?” he asked in a voice that sounded more
hardy than I would expect from such a dilapidated unfortunate.
    “You’re the photographer, correct? The
newspaper man, or have I been informed in error?”
    “That was a lifetime ago,
but I guess if you’ve been informed about me, you’re either police or a client… and
you don’t look like police so I guess you better come
in.”
    So he must still have some
clients for his photography business, I
reckoned. Which meant he had some money coming in. He invited me inside to a living
room in worse repair than the exterior: a legless couch, the
sparsest furniture, and one of those large wooden cable spools on
end, to serve as a table. A chemical scent in the air suggested the
solutions of photo development. Before he closed and bolted the
door, he peeked both ways outside, as if suspicious of something.
He oddly reached behind a bookcase whose shelves dipped at their centers,
and withdrew a simple folder.
    “Fifty cents each, Mr. Morley,” he told me,
and handed me the folder. “I can tell by the way you dress you’re
not on the outs like a lot of folks these days. You want to buy,
not sell.”
    I couldn’t imagine what he meant but I could
tell by viewing the folder’s side what it contained: a