Dark Maze

great one for studying the essence of things. You know, like I have been studying you all these months—”
    Traffic noise interrupted. Picasso stopped talking and stared at the bodega window through the passing cars and trucks and vans and taxicabs. A Mercury convertible with Jersey plates and front and back seats full of raucous teenage girls out cutting classes waved at the ill-clad guys standing around a bus stop, which is one of the main activities of teenage motorists from Jersey.
    I looked at Picasso looking at his rendering of the doomed pig and I said to myself, You can let all this wormy stuff go; you have all sorts of other things to do; it is the first day of your well-earned furlough; you recently made the acquaintance of one Ruby Flagg, and she is very gorgeous, and it is the spring of the year.
    Instead, as if I cannot get enough of this sort of thing, I waited for the traffic to break and asked him some more about himself: “What do you do for actual money?”
    “As little as possible since I am saving myself for my art!” He laughed another one of his malignant laughs. “Lucky for me, though, I am a resourceful old bastard and get by.“
    “How?”
    “Sometimes I will return bottles and cans for deposit. Sometimes passing out palm cards for this topless joint over on Seventh Avenue, the Horny Poodle. Sometimes this and sometimes that. You know how it goes in this fine service economy of ours.”
    “Do you live around here?”
    He waved an arm, taking in a large part of the neighborhood. “Around here, around there. You know.”
    “What about medical?”
    He sneered again and said, “By that, your meaning is what? I’m ready for the drooling academy? People call me Picasso and so you go figuring that I need my head shrunk, is that it?”
    “What I mean is...“
    “Aw, save it! Let me tell you this: you’re sent to the puzzle house nowadays on account of one basic reason, which is you went and did something so bad that it ain’t acceptably nuts, it’s barking nuts—if you see the difference. Then one day..
    He stopped and took in a deep, rasping breath. Then he went on. “One day, they just suddenly put you out and wish you all the best. That’s all they know how to do once they finally admit they ain’t got the answers, only questions. The streets are full of us. You think maybe I’m wrong?”
    “I think you’re right,” I said. When another clump of noisy traffic had passed, I asked, “How come you’ve been shadowing me? And how come you want to tell me all this that you’re telling me?”
    He said to Nobody, “Now he wants to know ‘how come?’! This one’s maybe the last bleeding heart left in a bloody old heartless city, hey? Can you beat it?”
    He looked down the avenue. The M-ll bus was idling down at the light over Forty-second Street. It would be up at the park stop in a few minutes. He dug around in his pants pockets for coins.
    Then he turned to me and calmly inquired, “You know from extenuating circumstances, am I right?”
    I said he was.
    “Of course you do. You’re a cop. So maybe I wanted somebody to know about me and my ‘extenuating circumstances.’ Which even a nutso has got. And I am a genuine
    regulation nutso since I have been checking in and out of Bellevue since somewheres during Ike’s second term, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “But Bellevue, see, it’s no use to me. The doctors are right guys and all, but they’re still only ignorant doctors who can only see maybe two sides to a story. Real stories with real people in them have got lots more than two sides, you ever
    notice?”
    “I have noticed that real stories are full of extenuating circumstances,” I said.
    He smiled and said, “Yah” because my remark pleased him. For a change, the smile was pleasant. And then he became hurried and counted out coins in his hand, enough for bus fare. The M-l I was now a block away.
    “So since you’re interested,” he said, “I will tell you that once-upon-a-time I was another kind of regulation guy, with a wife and a kid. But as a husband and a papa, I was a lousy flop. The family wasn’t so much better. The wife, she went rotten; the kid went Christian.
    “Oh, but hell, family life and all that apple pie, it ain’t my game. When I figured this out, I took off to New York. Which is where us odd socks belong. In a manner of speaking, I ran away to join the circus.”
    He laughed at this. One of his joyless barks it was. “Yah, that’s