His last three hundred thousand he cashed out. He planned to drive up the coast and hand out stacks of bills at diners, rest stops, beaches, Walmart parking lots. He liked the idea of making a palpable difference. Here you go, he’d say, buy yourself a meal, buy some diapers for your kid, put it toward rent, whatever. He just wanted to walk away from the transaction knowing he had earned nothing but a smile in return. That felt like a more honest currency of light than any he had dealt before.
He bought a used Buick and grew out his beard. He toyed with different names when checking in at dive motels, and finally settled on one. Mike for his middle name and Juniper for the trees that blurred past his window as he drove north. Some of them were thousands of years old, he knew, and they appeared unkillable but tormented by their long life, twisted and gray.
To avoid an investigation, he left a suicide note that said they would never find the body. There was a brief media frenzy, but he was by all accounts dead when a few weeks later he walked along the Willamette River in Portland, feeding seagulls torn-up pieces of bread and handing out hundred-dollar bills to the bench-sleepers and trash-can-pillagers. “You look like you could use a little help,” he would say, and more than one person said in response, “So do you, buddy.”
There was blood in his cough and his urine. Every few steps, he had to pause and close his eyes to make the world stop quavering. His skin was bruised and sunken in some places, red and swollen in others. He felt like he was growing inside, shrinking outside.
He wasn’t walking anywhere in particular, just following a trail of litter and syringes and shopping carts stacked high with cans. He spotted a group of teens wearing ratty hoodies and stained jeans. They catcalled, practiced skateboard tricks, handed out the Street Roots newspaper, bummed for change.
Juniper dropped a hundred-dollar bill in a ball cap, stuffed another in an outstretched hand, and it didn’t take long for the teens to close around him, everyone snatching the bills he offered and saying, “Thanks!” and “God bless!” and “You’re a good man.” He didn’t smile. He let them take it all, every last bill, hurling the last of it in the air as though it was confetti. He said, “That’s it, that’s all I’ve got on me!” and sank to the ground and remained there long after they departed and the sun began to sink and the shadows thickened. He didn’t feel any sort of peace, only a crushing exhaustion, like the weight of night.
He vaguely heard the boots clomping toward him and vaguely felt the toe nudge his shoulder. His eyes were crusted over, and it took some effort to open them. A face swung into view—a woman with white hair and a black stripe running through it. Black jeans, motorcycle boots. Sarin, though he didn’t know her name then. She smoked a cigarette, and when she spoke, it ashed on him. “You’re the one giving away money?”
“I was.”
“I all of a sudden get twenty, thirty customers—throwing down hundreds, asking me for hits—so I naturally get curious.” She paced a circle around him, studying him from different angles. “You’re one of those saintly do-gooders, then? Give away all your money before you croak?”
He tried to speak, but his lungs felt deflated, and he coughed and turned on his side. He was on a ledge before a black metal fence that overlooked the wide gray stripe of the Willamette.
She got in the way of the view, crouching before him. She looked old enough to be his mother, but acted twice as vital as he was. The tip of the cigarette burned bright when she sucked on it. “You’re on the spectrum, I see,” she said.
“I’m what?”
“You’re like me. You’ve got a little light in you.”
He didn’t know how to respond to this. His life felt so utterly absent of light that he had stopped believing in any of it.
“Somebody put a mark on you,” she said, her words made of smoke. “What did you do to piss them off? Or were they just in a bad mood? Whoever they were, they obviously wanted you to suffer.” She dropped the spent cigarette—nothing but filter—and crushed out the ember. “Fucking demons.”
Juniper had put the man—the black thing in the hotel room—out of his mind. He was nothing more than a nightmare. Or a hallucination from the cancer fingering into his brain. But her words recalled the vision of him now. His voice like many deep whispers sewn together. His tendons creaking when he moved like the floorboards of a rotten house.
“Jesus. I can smell it on you even. You stink, you know. Like sulfur.” She laid her hand across his cheek, then ran it down his neck, his chest, flattening her palm over his heart. “Lucky for you I’ve always been a sucker for charity cases.”
The warmth of her hand changed over to a searing heat, focused through her fingers.
When he said, “What are you—?” she said, “Shh.”
There was a throbbing sensation. At first it felt like a second heartbeat. Then it grew more intense, like a mouth sucking greedily. The edges of his vision blackened and fluttered, as if a bird were perched on his head and beating its wings. Gravity seemed to shift, the world flipped over, as if she were carrying his weight, everything balanced, centered around that hand of hers.
And then she was pulling something away from him, something that didn’t want to leave. It looked like a kind of octopus, but black with too many tendrils dangling from it, many still clinging to him until she yanked it fully away. She lobbed it then—through the air, off the ledge. Together they watched it tumble through the air before splattering against some rocks and oozing into the river. A few seconds later, several fish went belly-up and pinwheeled away in the current.
“All right,” she said, and wiped her hand off on her thigh. “There’s my good deed for the year. You owe me some whiskey, I’d say. A swimming pool full of it.”
She left him there, at the edge of the river. Eventually he rose to his knees and wept, a position of prayer, but he did not thank God. He thanked her, whoever she was, whatever she was. He thanked the light.
He had been given another chance, and this time he wasn’t going to waste it on himself. Stashed in the trunk of the Buick, he still had a duffel bag of cash, more than a hundred large—and he pumped it all into opening The Weary Traveler. He would earn his oxygen by helping others.
Over the next year, he asked around about the woman. No one seemed to know who she was. He thought he would never see her again, but then one day, there she was, pushing her way inside the shelter, a lit cigarette pinched between her lips. “There you are,” she said, and blew smoke and walked through the cloud of it. Her eyes tracked his body, which had filled out again, slabbed with muscle and sheathed with a healthy layer of fat. “You look good. Healthy anyway. Kind of like a grizzly bear in jeans.”
“I keep thinking I dreamed you, but here you are.”