Munching filled the dark sewage line as a man sat there, engorged in his meal with a solemn expression. The silent light of the lamp flickering with the cold drafts that blew across the dark empty gutters.
The bread had gone soft on one side, the mould slowly spreading in across the bread, a grey patch that had eaten most of the crust by now, it truly looked disgusting but he just ate it. He turned it over in his hands, found the parts that hadn't gone yet, and started there.
It wasn't good. It had never been good. The first bite always tasted like the paper bag it came wrapped in, faintly, underneath the staleness, and he'd stopped noticing that a long time ago the same way he'd stopped noticing the cold under him or the smell rising off the gutter two feet away. He chewed slow. There wasn't a reason to rush. Nobody was coming to take it from him, not here, not in this stretch of alley that even the rats seemed to avoid on nights the water ran high.
He picked around the mould for a while, working the edges first, saving the middle for last out of some habit he couldn't place the start of. Maybe someone had told him once to eat the bad parts of a thing first and enjoy the good part after. Maybe nobody had told him that at all and he'd just always done it. He didn't spend long on the question. Questions like that didn't go anywhere.
Halfway through, a rat came out from a drainpipe across the gutter and sat there watching him eat, small and wet and unbothered, and he watched it back for a while without either of them moving. He'd killed rats before. More than he could count, some years back, when a man with hands like vice grips had shoved a blade into his palm and stood over him until he stopped missing. This one he let be. It wasn't doing anything to him. There didn't seem a reason.
He finished the bread down to the last mouldy corner, chewed it anyway, swallowed, and wiped his hand once against his trouser leg.
Then he sat there a moment longer than he needed to. Not thinking, exactly. Just letting the gutter keep running past his boots, black and slow, the way it did every night, the way it probably would keep doing long after he'd stopped being around to watch it.
Eventually he stood.
The ladder was rusted through in two places and groaned under his weight the way it always did. Behind the tin panel the bucket had iced over, thin as glass, and he broke it with two knuckles and shoved his hands in anyway. Cold. He didn't react to it. His hands had stopped being able to tell him anything useful about temperature years back, not since the winter the boy who used to run with him lost two fingers to frostbite and hadn't noticed until they'd gone black.
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He washed fast — face, neck, under the arms, the crease behind his ears where the alley smell liked to hide — and dried off on a rag that hadn't been properly clean in months. The scar over his eye pulled tight in the cold. It always did that. He'd stopped touching it around year two.
From the plastic bag he pulled the shirt, the trousers, the boots he only wore here. He put them on in the same order every time — he wasn't sure when that had started either — and pressed two fingers of cologne against his collarbone, once, careful with it, because the bottle was down to its last third and he didn't know when he'd get another.
Then he walked around to the front gate.
The lanterns were red, same as always, hung too close together along the eaves so the light pooled thick against the wet stone. A laugh went up somewhere behind the papered windows — a customer's, or one of the girls performing one for a customer, he'd stopped being able to tell the difference between the two kinds of laugh months back, if there ever had been a difference.
The guard ahead of him clocked him coming and left without a word, the way it always went. No nod. Rules didn't allow it, not that either of them needed the rule to remember not to bother.
He took the post.
Cars went by sometimes. A woman crossed the road early to avoid walking past him — heels loud, fast, gone. He watched her go, more out of the fact that she was the only thing moving than any real interest in where she went.
His hands stayed loose at his sides, low, the way he'd been shown once, back when someone still bothered showing him things. He didn't think about who that had been. Didn't think much about anyone from back then. There'd been a boy, once — Tuan, or something close to that, he wasn't certain anymore he'd ever had the name right — who'd died two feet from him with a pipe still in his hand, mouth open around a word that never made it out. He'd picked up the pipe after. Kept it a while. Lost it somewhere he couldn't remember either.
He didn't talk much these nights, or most nights. When he did the words came out slower than they should, catching somewhere in his throat like they weren't used to being asked for. Nobody minded. Nobody was there to mind.
The scar itched. He left it alone.
Another laugh went up behind him and cut off fast — the paid-for kind, the kind that stopped the second the minute ran out.
He didn't turn to look.
Down the street a dog barked at something and gave up before whatever it was worth barking at came close enough to matter, and then it was just the wet stone and the lanterns and him standing there the way he stood most nights, not thinking about the night before or the one that would come after, because there wasn't a version of either one that looked different enough to bother comparing.