Those That Wake

ANNIE

MAL’S EYE WAS PURPLE and yellow. It didn’t hurt as much as his knuckles, which always stung fiercely the day after a fight; nor as much as the back of his torso, where he’d taken a kidney punch; nor his wrist, which had hyperextended in a clumsy block. Nevertheless, it was the eye that Sharon noticed.

“What do your new parents say about that?” she asked, and maybe her voice was smug, or maybe that was how she always sounded. Mal couldn’t remember. “I’m sure they love it, knowing you’re coming into their home with other people’s blood on your knuckles.”

“They get me an ice pack,” he said, “and ask me if I’m okay.” A lie. He had gotten out of the house before the Fosters had even seen him.

Sharon was a tired woman, washed out and wasting away, scrubbed at by a rough and bristled life. It was the same thing Mal thought he saw in the mirror; something strong in his face worn away, the defining and striking sharp edges dulled until strength had become sorrow and a gleam in his eyes had become a dull flatness.

“And do they care that you aren’t in school?”

“If they do, that’s their business now. Not yours. I’m here to talk about Tommy. Or are you finished with him, too?”

Her jaw hardened. She bit something back, then nearly spat out her next words.

“I told you already, I haven’t actually seen him in months.” As she sat on the edge of her couch, her face wasn’t softening, but her fingers wouldn’t stay still, searching for a smoke, or something more powerful. “Tommy always talked a good game and dropped the ball as soon as things got hard. He barely graduated, then he couldn’t find work.” She snorted. “I hounded him about it, but what the hell good did that ever do? He’d make a halfhearted try, then never follow up. George arranged an interview for him; more than one. Tommy didn’t even bother showing up for the last one. George yelled at him, said it made him look bad; said Tommy had to pull his weight if he wanted to stay. Tommy said he’d pull his weight.” She laughed, her eyes looking inward. “Pull his weight right out of George’s house. And he did. Only solid decision he ever managed to stick to.”

Mal nodded. He had never been to this apartment, tiny and crowded with the objects of a life he had nothing to do with anymore. No light found its way in here, through the grimy windows. A bulky shadow loomed outside, cutting off the sun. He had not been in the same room with his mother more than three times since his father had marched out, pulling Mal behind him. But his mother still had the same harshness in her look, a look of perpetual accusation.

“So he got a job, found a place,” Mal supposed out loud.

“I guess so,” Sharon said. She didn’t sound convinced.

“You don’t know what he was doing, nothing like that?”

“Christ, Mal, at least I had his address. When’s the last time you saw him?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” He had meant it like that. “What about his friends? Do you know any of them?”

“Well, sure, there’s Danny and Miles and Tony. Oh, you mean their last names, don’t you? So we could, like, look them up and ask them about all this?” Her unpleasant sarcasm was also something he remembered well about her. “You’re not the only one with a brain in your head, Mal. I never spent much time with his friends. I doubt I’d have been welcome to if I’d wanted to.”

Mal nodded. She was steamed, and he was only making it worse, which was their classic dynamic playing out beautifully to form. He saw it among guys at the gym again and again. Some climbed into the ring just because it meant a couple of bucks or some recognition or a chance to punch an anonymous face. Other fighters had it in for each other specifically, and it had nothing to do with a shared history. It was purely chemical. Mal and his mother had a history and they had that chemistry. They suffered through it, at each other’s throats for the first eleven years of his life, when Sharon was sober enough to pitch a fight and wasn’t bothering to have one with Mal’s father.

“How about a girlfriend?” It was all he had left. “A blond girl, real pretty.” Sharon was shaking her head.

Mal’s eyes wandered around, and finally he nodded and stood up.

“Okay,” he said, instead of offering anything reassuring or hopeful. What did he owe her, exactly?

“So, what, are you going to go back to his place?”

“I guess I am. Maybe he’ll show up.”

She led him to the door but stopped in front of it and held her place.

“I think we should call the police,” she said.

What he thought about the police, generally, was that you shouldn’t call them. But Tommy was actually gone. Not missing like he went for an unexpected walk, but missing like he had called for help and there were people after him. At least that would explain why Tommy was blocking locator apps when he made his call to Mal.

“Okay.”

She looked up at him, letting her guard down just long enough to show him she was frightened, then shut it away again. What did she do about her fear these days? Did she still go on week-long benders, or had George cured her of that? And why should Mal care, really?


He blew off school for the rest of the day. Would anyone realize he wasn’t there? He wasn’t good enough or bad enough for teachers to care one way or the other. There were people who knew him, of course, but no one who particularly sought him out, unless it was for a fight, because he had a certain reputation in some circles. He didn’t make a habit of ditching, but he did it when he needed to. Sometimes they called his foster parents, sometimes they didn’t. What would the Fosters say if they did? He had no idea. They were nothing but a pair of faces to him at this point.

He sat in Tommy’s apartment again. The place was nothing new in the daylight, though the hall outside was noisier. Music played too loud through one of the doors, and two different sets of people yelled at each other in two different languages from behind two other doors. Smells of spicy food filled the hall and seeped into Tommy’s place.

He poked around, embarrassed when he found some condoms and surprised when he came upon a sketchpad filled with rough pencil drawings of things and people. The sketches made something funny happen in Mal’s chest. At first they made him feel as if he were seeing something about who Tommy was, but as he flipped through them he started to feel as though he was searching through a stranger’s life. He left the rest of the apartment alone and just waited. Pacing, he kept finding himself in front of the picture of Tommy and the girl at the beach. Important enough for Tommy to take a hard image off his cell and put on display. Was Tommy the sentimental sort, or had the girl in the picture made this choice? Was she the reason Tommy had stayed out of George’s house without crawling back, had managed to keep an apartment of his own for months? Mal looked at the photo intermittently for minutes until he finally convinced himself he might need it to show their faces around. He removed it from its frame and slipped it into his back pocket.

He played the last half hour of a movie about an alligator terrorizing a city, beaming it from his cell onto a cracking wall, and was into the last rounds of the week’s Blood Match X-Treme finals when he started to wonder if he was going to be here forever. When he’d decided to wait, he figured it could be for as much as two or three days, but now, just two or three hours started to seem interminable. He abandoned the ball game and went to the window. Outside, the world looked gray. He felt as if he remembered a time, as a child, when there was a sun and people looked up at it instead of down, embroiled in a conversation on cell, or into the palms of their hands, surfing as they walked, their minds on anything but the gray world around them.

And there was a knock at the door.

He limped hard to the door, adjusting to the stiffness that had set into his injured body as he’d been sitting there. He hesitated, remembered looking through the peephole last night and seeing those four faces staring weirdly back, right at him. Cautiously, he checked the peephole again and saw a young face framed by blond hair. It had five thin silver rings in the left ear and a tiny silver stud in the left nostril. It looked worried, and sweeter because of it.

The door had no functioning lock left. Mal wouldn’t have been able to get in if it had. It was pure luck—or something harder to explain—that the place hadn’t been cleaned out last night after he’d gone. He pulled the door open, and the girl looked happy, then surprised when she ended up looking into a chest instead of the face she was expecting to see. She followed the chest up and seemed to relax once she got to the head.

“Um, hi,” he said, guilty about getting caught in a place he didn’t quite belong. “I’m Tommy’s brother.”

“I know.” She smiled. “Mal; you’re kind of … uh… big, for a little brother. It’s hard to tell in the pictures.”

“You’ve seen my picture?”

“Sure. Tommy has pictures of you in his cell.”

That was shocking enough to keep Mal staring dumbly for too long.

“I’m Annie,” she said, trying both to be polite and to look behind him into the apartment at the same time. “Is Tommy back?”

“He’s not, actually. Why don’t you come in?” He let her pass, closed the door, and followed her back to the couch. With her here, he felt like he was the guest now. She sat down and, obviously sensing the same shift, gestured for him to take a seat.

“So, do you know where Tommy is?” she asked.

“I don’t. Do you?”

She shook her head, looked down somewhat darkly.

“No idea?”

She shook her head again without pause. She’d obviously been over this on her own.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday afternoon,” she said. “I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

That wasn’t such a long time, Mal thought, but she was talking about it like he had been marching off to meet his doom.

“Where was he headed?” he pressed a little. He felt foolish doing it. He wasn’t a cop or a truancy officer; he wasn’t even Tommy’s brother in any way that really counted. But what was left to do? He had taken up a mission of some kind, and he’d come back here for these answers.

“Tommy had a little…” She searched for a word that would get the urgency across but not betray Tommy. “A little trouble, I guess you could say, with some people.”

“Yeah, I met them.”

“You did?” She looked up, her eyes showing doubt and hope, fused together.

“Sort of. Weird bunch.”

She shook her head, not understanding.

“They were street, but they were kind of missing the attitude.”

“Street kids? No.” She shook her head. “I never saw him, but Tommy said the guy he met always wore a suit. Tommy said he was … what? Like, kind of cold. Quiet, but you knew he didn’t think much of you. That’s what Tommy said, like he was just a tool to this guy.”

“So he was never into trouble with any street kids?”

“No.” She didn’t waver for a second. Tommy was her open book.

“So what about this guy? What did Tommy do for him?”

Her eyes wandered away, fell on the sketchbook that Mal had put back in its place on a windowsill.

“Look, Annie, I’m not trying to find Tommy to make trouble for him. I think I’m probably enough trouble for him when I’m not around. He called me last night and said he wanted to see me, and he sounded a little scared. I wasn’t there when he called, and when I finally got here, he was gone. I just want to find him and help him if I can. That’s all I want.”

“Then we both want the same thing.” Annie was almost crying. He could see the tension in her face and neck as she tried to hold it back. She took a moment or two before she went on. “I don’t know exactly what he did. Carried things sometimes, I think. He was well paid for it. I’m just not sure.”

Good pay for carrying something around meant only one thing to Mal. He knew kids who’d taken that kind of work. Most of them lived high on the cash for a little, then the consequences came crashing down on them. Which, unfortunately, sounded like Tommy to a T.

“Do you know where he does business, this guy in the suit?”

“I know where Tommy used to meet him.”

“Show me.” He stood up and offered his hand to her, which she promptly and gratefully accepted.


Rain came down from the gray sky in cold needles. Cars had their headlights on and steam rose from the streets, and it made it look like nighttime even though it wasn’t. They descended into shadow, pushed through the scanners, got on a subway, and went downtown.

The attack on Con Edison some years back, a day that the national voice had christened Big Black, had ostensibly been the work of that ubiquitous scapegoat of unforeseen disaster: the terrorist attack. A few said that this was merely a story given by authority in an attempt to mask the real, though more mundane, cause: negligence. Other, more cynical voices said it was the corporations, seeing that they could sink their profit margins into the necessary rebuilding. Whatever the case, Mal remembered hearing the explosion from across the river. He remembered the darkness the city had been plunged into for nearly two weeks afterward; riots, looting, murders, residents too terrified to step outside and buy candles to light their pitch-black homes. Mal even remembered what the faces of people looked like before that fear had set in permanently, before so many who lived or worked in the city realized they had lost someone—a neighbor, an employee, a sister—in the incineration of the four blocks surrounding the power plant. Faces that used to look up, determined, now looked down, into cell screens or at their own feet. Anywhere, anywhere but ahead, anything but facing what else might be coming toward them. Not just the people, but the city itself. In the wake of Big Black, the city, already under the strain of the nationwide financial collapse, had allowed several public services to be taken over by private concerns.

And so, the subways. Scanners, installed at every access point, inspected your metal when you pushed through the turnstiles. Some people said that they scanned the MetroPass feed on your cell, too, and told the corporations what stations you were leaving, where you frequented and spent your time and money. The trains themselves: instead of repairing or maintaining the cars, the private concerns had left the structures to languish, acquiring tears and blemishes of rust, seats cracking apart, the walls collecting a miasma of graffiti. Rather, the corporations removed every window and installed in their places HDs in every car, locked behind high-impact plastic that cost more than the entire train itself. Now people gazed emptily at flickering ads for businesses passing by high above, the same ads scrolling down the sides of their cell displays, so they could key in and learn more. If you did not want to fix a thing, then what you had to do was make people ignore it.

What the city did contribute to its subways, all its public transportation now, was the watchful eye and the drab gray uniformed figures of the MCT. The Metropolitan Counterterrorism Task Force posted two officers at every station, the scanning lenses of their security goggles burning into everyone passing by, falling on surprised individuals and finding on them the offending set of keys or leg brace or new model of cell. This was the environment that travelers faced every morning, every evening, every ride in between.

“Did you get that when you met the kids you thought were after Tommy?” Annie asked Mal, her back to the HD and her empathetic eyes locked on him.

“What’s that?”

“Your eye.” She gestured and grimaced a little.

“No. That’s, well, that’s from a weak defense on the right.”

She nodded as if she understood, or more importantly as if she didn’t have to understand for it to be all right.

An MCT officer walked through the car, swinging the reflective circles of his goggles back and forth like a searchlight. Mal and Annie both instinctively looked down. Meeting the eyes of the gray sentries always bought you sharp and suspicious attention, sometimes worse. Better to look at an HD or down like you were working on a cell, even if you weren’t. Better to appear absorbed in anything but the real world, until the officer passed. He did, inevitably, and left deeper silence in his wake.

“Have you and Tommy been together a long time?” Mal asked when the officer had moved into the next car.

“What’s a long time? About four months. It feels like longer. In a good way.”

Mal wanted to ask what Tommy had said about him, what picture she had seen, but it seemed desperate. He was getting a good sense of his shortcomings as a brother. He didn’t need to put them on the table for everybody else to shuffle through.

“So Tommy sketches? I didn’t know he ever had an interest in that stuff.”

“No, the sketchbook is mine,” she said, and a little piece of the picture Mal had been putting together of his brother disintegrated, leaving what felt like a larger blank than had been there before. “But,” she went on, “he’s interested enough when I do it. He won’t sit for me.” She smiled softly. “He could never stay in one place long enough for that. But for my birthday, he took me to the museum to see da Vinci’s sketches. That was a good day.”

“Your sketches are very good. I mean, I think they are. I’m no expert at all.” His face creased a little. “The sketchbook was just lying out. I thought it was Tommy’s.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, but her cheeks reddened. “I’m glad you liked them.”

The subway rumbled on. He stole glances at her reflection in the window across the way, as though looking at her could tell him more about Tommy. She seemed young, though she was probably Mal’s age or older, if she was about Tommy’s age. Maybe it wasn’t about age, maybe it was more that she just looked happy. Worried, sure, but somewhere between seeing her picture and now, Mal had decided she was a happy person. Tommy never seemed like a happy guy, exactly. And no wonder.

Maybe it made her happy to fix things, because that sounded like what she was doing to Tommy. Trying to do to Tommy. Mal reminded himself why they were here.

The subway stopped in midtown, and she rose and pointed at their stop. He got out with her and glanced at his watch as they went up the steps. He looked at it, squinted, shook it, but it had died. It made him think of the crack in his mirror. Was the entire world starting to fall apart? He shook his head and followed her out.

The buildings here were massive and shining, and even the thick gloom couldn’t quite kill the sense of self importance about them. In some ways, they seemed like the only real, solid things in a world of ghosts.

“There.” She pointed. Mal followed her finger.

“The one with the planters in front?”

“No, next to it. There.”

“I don’t…” He shook his head.

She glanced up at him queerly, then gently took his chin in her fingers and pointed his face just a little to the left.

“Right there,” she said.

And there was the building, all reflection, breaching the gloom above and disappearing into the dirty white of the rain clouds. He wasn’t sure how he could have missed it.

“We’d stop by here, sometimes,” Annie said, “if I was with him when he needed to pick something up. I’d always wait outside, but he’d never be more than five minutes or so. I don’t think he ever even had to go upstairs or anything. I think he just went into, like, the lobby or the lounge or whatever’s right in there.”

Funny thing. Mal didn’t while away his hours in midtown, but he wasn’t a stranger to it, either. He couldn’t remember ever seeing this building before. True, many buildings looked alike around here, and it was so crowded with them, one seldom noted any building apart from another. But this one was so tall and composed of nothing but reflection. Even at the ground floor, the doors lacked address numbers or even a name plate. They were just two long rectangles of dark mirror, reflecting the droves of passing people hunkered down in their own worlds, and the street beyond them, and, across that street, Mal and Annie.

“What kind of trouble did Tommy say he was in with this guy?”

“He never said specifically. He never even said he was in trouble exactly. We were just talking about getting together and I knew he needed to come by here, but he said he wasn’t going to. I pressed him a little, but he just kept saying it was nothing. But it was something. It’s easy to tell when Tommy is nervous.”

Was that true? Mal wasn’t even sure.

“Okay. You can take off if you want to. If you want to give me your phone number or something, I’ll give you a call later on.”

“No, I’ll wait here for you.”

“I’m probably going to be more than a few minutes. It’s raining and all.”

“I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

He wanted to pat her on the shoulder. He would have if she were a guy. He nodded instead, then turned and looked at the building.

“Be careful.” She touched his arm. “That sounds silly, but be careful anyway.”

He nodded again and jogged across the street. He stood for a moment at the front doors, looking at himself looking uncertain, then pushed.

The doors whooshed open onto a massive lobby. There was a security desk before him with space for three or four people. There were cubbyholes for coffee shops and newsstands in the walls. A bank of elevators sat in two huge columns in the center of the room, with more lobby hidden beyond them. But it was all unfinished, form without façade. No guards at the desks, no stores. It was all metal and concrete, grays and more grays. Someone had made this lobby and stopped short of giving it a personality. And it was empty; massive, open, capable of containing and occupying hundreds of people at a time, but utterly barren of those people.

He stood still as the doors whooshed closed behind him, cutting off the sound of the street completely, leaving him in a cold silence. He turned around, foolishly, just to check that the street was still there. It was, sure enough. People hurried by, unmindful of what was in here, blind to the strangeness of it.

He craned his neck to see beyond the twin bank of elevators and stepped forward to move around them. His muffled footfalls practically boomed in here, open as it was. He hurried along, sliding more than walking, trying to stay flatfooted. He went around the elevators and saw more lobby on the other side. There was a lounge of sorts, a large space for small tables and chairs spread out so that people on their lunch break or visitors to the various businesses above could sit and look out on the small garden or fountain constructed at the lounge’s center. Except there was no fountain or garden, there were no tables and chairs, no people on their lunch break, no visitors. There was just a space, filled to the brim with nothing.

A ding from just behind gave him a start, and he saw the indicator light over an elevator glow stark yellow. He hurried back around the other side of the big central columns, hidden from view. He heard the elevator doors open and one pair of feet step off and head toward the lounge. It was one person, he was sure of it, though he couldn’t see. Once he stopped walking, there was silence.

Mal waited, hearing his breath and afraid that anyone would be able to hear it, an illusion perpetrated by the all-encompassing silence.

There was a whoosh, then, from the front, and the booming footfalls of a person coming in a hurry. The person went from the front door, past the other side of the elevator bank and over to the lounge. Mal heard the arrival shout a greeting, which was unreturned.

The acoustics and lack of competing noises made hearing the two quite easy.

“Take this to the library on Forty-Second. There will be a woman at a table on the third floor, looking at a book about fairy tales. Give it to her.” It was an odd voice, not like a normal speaking voice at all; large, but somehow hollow. Mal recognized the voice, almost. Not like the voice of someone he knew, but a tone or a timbre that he had heard before, maybe many times. “This is your money,” it went on. “I won’t need you again until Friday.”

“You got it.” This voice was nervous and a little breathless. It sounded younger, but old enough to know better than to do this. Whoever it belonged to hurried out.

As the arrival’s footfalls boomed away, Mal moved across and peered around the front of the elevator bank column to catch sight of the departing figure. He was worried—more than that, even, he was pained—by the idea that if it was his brother, he might not even recognize him from the back.

He knew instantly that it wasn’t Tommy. It was a young man in jeans and a sweatshirt, which was what Tommy still favored himself, for all Mal knew. But this guy was taller and much thinner than Tommy, almost scrawny. He had a wrapped package in his hand and he pushed through the doors and took off.

No sooner had the doors whooshed closed than the footsteps in the lounge padded back to the elevators. There was another ding and elevator doors opened and closed, and Mal was alone again.

He went out to the lounge and made a quick circuit of it. There was nothing more to see, nothing to indicate where the two had stopped to speak, or even that they had been there at all.

He went back to the elevators and stood before them, deciding just how far into all of this he was going to plunge. It seemed like a big step, going up, maybe running into someone, but he’d committed to this last night when he heard Tommy’s voice on the machine. He had even come here intending to confront this man or one of his associates, though that had been before this turned out to be something very far from what Mal was expecting.

He stabbed the button, and a door dinged open instantly. He poked his head in and found a dull metal interior that reflected only a vague, misshapen silhouette of him. He got in. There were two rows of buttons, the last one numbered eighty. There was one button beyond that, though, a single circle of plastic crowning the two rows, but it was blank. A penthouse, perhaps, or a maintenance floor. He pushed a button at random: thirty-two.

The speed of the elevator put pressure in his ears. In seconds, the door dinged open.

He had expected a floor like the lobby, embryonic and empty. Maybe some cubicles, maybe some offices around the sides, awaiting inhabitants that might, in the end, never show up. More remotely, he thought he might end up playing the fool again and walking out into some crowded business, a law firm or a publishing company, the self-important eyes of suited men and women turning to look at the bruised kid who obviously didn’t belong.

It was a big empty room, its walls lined with doors. There were dozens of them, with less than two feet of wall between each. They were gray metal, unmarked, with dull silver handles.

He stepped partially out, making sure the elevator didn’t close on him, and looked around like a man looking at a world turned on its head, the familiarity of its parts making it all the stranger.

There were something like thirty of them, and while his vision of the building from the outside was not photographically perfect, the size of the room seemed to rule out the possibility of the doors actually leading to anything but wall.

With a look of distaste, he abandoned the elevator and walked up to one of the doors, again at random. There was not a single thing about it but its place in the line to differentiate it from the doors on either side of it or, for that matter, the doors on either side of those.

He put his hand on the knob and turned it. There was no keyhole in it, and it was not locked. It opened up and showed him a white hallway, a gurney pushed against a wall, carts of medical supplies stationed in two different places. There was a patient on a gurney and an orderly near her, his back to Mal and the door. A medicinal smell, like the smell of a hospital, pushed out of the place.

Mal quickly threw the door closed and stood staring at it. He went to the next door to the left and pulled it open. It was dank and poorly lit, obviously a basement of some kind, yet somehow here on the thirty-second floor. He could hear the hum of the boiler and feel the heat within. Far down from the door, beyond rows of boxes and other doors, seemed to be a metal stairway. Mal yanked his hand away from the doorknob, letting the door swing closed, failing to note that it remained slightly ajar as his eyes shot wildly around the room. There were thirty doors in here. Did all of them lead to a place as large as these last two?

He rushed back to the elevator, and to his profound relief the door opened as soon as he pushed the button. He got in and pushed another button, nineteen.

The door opened on an identical floor: thirty more doors so identical to the ones above that Mal wouldn’t even have been sure he’d left the last floor had he not felt the motion of the elevator.

He looked back at the buttons. His eyes fell on the top one, again, blank and isolated from the rest. His finger twitched, the idea crossing his mind to press that one, go to the top. But his hand didn’t move. It couldn’t. The muscles suddenly locked, and his heart was beating too fast. He was afraid, choked with fear, in fact; paralyzed by it. The button put fear in him. No, not the button, exactly; the idea of using the button, of where it would take him. He remembered this kind of unreasoning, screaming fear from long ago. Growing up killed it; reason made it empty and silly. But he had known it as a child. Everyone had.

He didn’t toy with the notion of fighting it. He hit the button marked L, and when the doors opened, he ran the hell out of the place, his heart not slowing, his breath not coming evenly until he was back out on the crowded street. Some passersby noted him without more than cursory interest and went on their way.

He stood, blinking away the last of the strange fear that had taken him, then straightened up and looked across the street to find Annie.

But Annie wasn’t there.

He ran across, looked up and down the block, into the windows of a jewelry store and a restaurant and an upscale clothing store. Annie was not here anymore.

He whipped the picture of her and Tommy from his pocket, worried suddenly that she would have disappeared even from that. She was still there, pretty as could be, Tommy’s arm around her. He looked up at the people going by. Their faces were blank, often lit by the cell screens they gazed into. He could show them her picture, ask if anyone had seen her, but even though their bodies moved along this street, they were absent from it, enclosed in their electronic shells. They walked alongside one another, but each was completely alone; they were no more likely to see those around them than they were to spontaneously drop their cells and offer their assistance. This had become a city of phantoms.

Even if Mal shook one from his fugue, asked him if he had seen Annie, no one would have. Mal was sure of it. He looked back across the street at his reflection in the doors of the horrible building. He saw himself, standing there, alone amidst the phantoms. Before the fear could take him again, he ran off, up the block and away.