Slash Back Blazers

Avery Green finds himself in Chinatown. He'd left The Randolph on Broome Street just before it closed. Green is polite. The Bowery is two blocks away to his left, there's still traffic on it. He turns right. Chinatown is empty and smells like fish and rotting vegetables and his footsteps echo on the buildings across the street. Green knows he's somewhere near City Hall. He turns left.

There is a man on a corner. He's Chinese and overdressed, like Green. He leans on an umbrella. As Green passes, the man falls almost into step with him. They walk for almost a block. Green has his hands casually in his pockets, where he might have a knife. The man reaches in his own jacket pocket and takes out a box of cigarettes with a tiger fighting a dragon on it. He puts a cigarette in his mouth, but doesn't light it. A faint blue Chinese symbol on the cigarette down near the filter.
"Good evening," he says to Green. "Do you have a light?"
They stop, Green reaches for his platinum Dunhill lighter and pulls out long, thick red bead. It sits in his open palm.
"No, I don't seem to. Sorry. This, is a hair bead."
The man looks at Green. "I think I have some matches. Would you like a cigarette?"
"Thanks."

The woman Green had met two days ago at the Farmer's Market by the courthouse in Brooklyn sold essential oils in a stall. She'd been wearing a floor-length denim skirt and wrapped her dreadlocks in a brightly patterned fabric. She wore no makeup on her almond colored skin. Green came with her back to her house in Crown Heights where she made him roti and they drank coconut water. Unwrapped, her dreadlocks fell to the tops of her thighs. Green left the next morning. The bead had been in her hair. His lighter stands brightly polished on the windowsill next to her bed.

Green smokes. The taste is chemical and brackish.
"I was on Nostrand Avenue yesterday," he says. "There was a man outside his deli chopping sugar cane with a machete. He was selling it by the half-meter."
"You can chew it, you know," the man says.
"I don't know what you'd do with it. The man had a machete."
Green tells the man of a mural next to the deli. An angry black woman is being shot by a laser beam from a green and orange devil in the sky. The devil is dressed in a suit very much like Green's, his head is round and bald and he has angry eyes. The same woman is painted further down the wall with a caption: I've got my eye on you, Devil.
"I miss the country," the man says. "In the country you feel demons closer than in the city. That's what my grandmother says, anyway."
"The city's too crowded," laughs Green. "There are no ghosts here."
"Aren't there?" The man tosses away his cigarette and lights another. "My name is Lin."
"I'm Epson Miller." They shake.
His name is not Epson Miller, nor is it Avery Green.

Mr. Lin wishes Green a good night and disappears around a corner. Green continues downtown. He thinks of the loneliness of his life. He knows he can go back to his room at The Pennsylvania Hotel on Thirty Third Street. He turns right and heads toward Tribeca. It is dawn when he reaches the Battery and turns around. It's eight thirty as he walks up Mulberry Street between Kenmare and Spring Street. The sky is an almost electric blue tinged with white behind the red brick buildings. It is a perfect light.

These are the days like Edward Hopper paintings, thinks Green. Everyone in them is a ghost.