Maybe it was because I had spent so much time on the other side of that brick wall that I now found it hard not to stare at it. Quigley liked to say that I had not come very far, after all, no more than the fifty yards that separated the window in my cubicle from the windowless wall of the building across the way. While waiting for our orientation meeting to begin, I stared at that wall. It beckoned like a siren calling through pursed brick lips. Somewhere in the darkly stained bricks in its center was a face about to emerge, if only I looked long enough and hard enough. I feared that it might be the face that had been the constant visitor in my dreams, but I was working hard to convince myself that I could see the outline of Marilyn’s flowing hair. We had met a few days ago as the first recruits for this pilot program, and I had found myself thinking about her. I did not hear her knock at the door.
         “Meeting is starting.”
         I looked up at her, and then back at the wall across the way. She followed my eyes.
         “Are you okay?” she asked. She looked out the window and then back at me. “Do you see something I don’t see?”
         “Yes,” I said, and I ground out my cigarette. I ran my fingers through my beard, remembering that I had intended to trim it this morning, but with my eyes bleary from lack of sleep, I had not been able to locate the scissors.
         We sat around the conference table waiting for Quigley, who was sorting through a small pile of folders, to begin. I shifted my eyes from one colleague to another, three men and Marilyn, all of us survivors of lives that had been shattered. We had been selected for this Great Society program, which offered us the opportunity to work ourselves back to coherence and independence by helping others. It was an idea of its time, and as ridiculous as it now appears even to me, I then felt it might work, thinking that losers helping losers was like two negatives making a positive. I entertained that happy idea until I first laid eyes on Quigley. There was something about his manicured nails, clean shaven face, and trimmed sideburns that told me he was exactly the wrong man to be put in charge of this program. He had stacked the folders he had already reviewed in a neat pile to one side, and he was running his finger down the paper from the last one. I saw his lips tighten, and I was sure he was reading about me. I looked away from him and let my eyes pause on the curve of Marilyn’s breast beneath her sweater. She caught my eye, furtively, and then offered an immodest smile. Quigley slid the paper back into the folder, and placed it atop the others.
         “I know something of your histories,” he said, patting the pile of folders. “But, as the first step in any therapy is self-knowledge, and since all of you have had some difficulty relating to others, let us start by introducing ourselves. I’m old fashioned enough to think of ladies first. Marilyn, if you please.”
         Marilyn looked at each of us in turn, and then rolled up her sweater sleeve to reveal the ragged white scars on her wrist. They ran across her blue veins.
         “I have learned that I would have done a better job of it,” she said, “if I cut in the same direction the veins run, rather than across them.” And she showed us the recommended stroke for cutting wrists. I stared at those scars, as if by so doing, I could bring them to my lips. She pulled her sleeve down. Quigley’s expression had not changed. He picked up a folder.
         “Mr. Monkowski. You’re next.”
         “I’m back from the war,” I said. “I still have nightmares.”

The man stood in my doorway the next morning. I had the Intake Data Review Form in my typewriter. Marilyn and I had reviewed client intake procedures last night over dinner, and I knew that the man should hand me an appointment card, without which nothing could be done. Quigley had emphasized this point.
         I smiled encouragement. The man was wearing a blue raincoat that seemed much too large for his slight body. I extended my hand palm up for the card, but he drew the belt of his raincoat more tightly about his waist. I was hoping his card would have the name of one of the other caseworkers on it, even Marilyn’s. I was not prepared for my first client to stir my memory as his features did. His bright, dark eyes did not leave mine. After a moment their expression softened to trust, and he smiled.
         “Do you have your appointment card?” I asked.
         His smile broadened, but he said nothing. I found myself smiling with him. I took out my cigarette pack, lit up, and then offered him one. He shook his head.
         “I’m Don Monkowski, your caseworker,” I encouraged.
         He stretched his smile yet another notch.
         “Why don’t you call me ‘Monk’? Everybody does.”
         He nodded. “Mr. Monk,” he whispered behind very white teeth, and then he bowed his head.
         A quarter of an hour and several cigarettes later, I knew that my first client’s name was Warren Minh, and that he lived in Chinatown, nothing more. And that much information had been retrieved with much flashing of teeth and nodding of heads by both of us. I found Quigley filing our folders.
         “What can I do for you, Monkowski?” He lingered over the last two syllables of my name. “I’m busy. I’ve already told you that you won’t be paid until the end of the month. Nothing I can do about that.”
         “I’ve got a man sitting in my cubicle, and after fifteen minutes all I know is his name. I might have his address, but I’m not sure about that. What am I supposed to do with him?”
         Quigley’s eyebrows shot up.
         “You say you have his name?”
         “Warren Minh. He might live on Mott Street.”
         “Vietnamese, I suppose. We seem to be getting more and more of them as the war progresses. Unfortunate. But I’m sure you know about that.” He waited, but I chose not to take the bait. He shrugged. “You have, I suppose, studied the procedures.”
         “Marilyn and I went over them last night.”
         “Oh, I see.” His lip twitched. “Then you certainly know that your client should have been screened, that he should have an appointment card, which would have his name, address, telephone number, if he has one, and,” he paused, “his problem.”
         “But he doesn’t,” I shrugged.
         “No appointment card?”
         “No.”
         “Then no problem, Monk. It’s too simple. Send him on his way to be screened.”
         I remembered how I left Minh, huddled in my cubicle, his body lost in the folds of his ridiculous coat, his face merging with another only recently repressed in my memory.
         “I don’t think I can do that.”
         “I’m busy,” Quigley said.
         “Yeah, I know.”
         “And Monk, you know there’s no smoking in this part of the building.”
         “Yeah, your asthma, I know that, too. That’s why you didn’t go.”

He was sitting exactly where I had left him. I was determined to deal with him, and not the man he reminded me of. I was afraid if I sent him away, the other would come back, and I had just spent too long exorcizing that ghost.
         “Well, Mr. Minh, let’s try again. I can’t help you with your problem until you tell me what it is.”
         He seemed to have been thinking about how to tell me.
         “They tell me come see caseworker. Help me with problem.”
         “Yes?”
         “They say, I cannot work without papers, and papers must be signed by Uncle Tran in Buffalo.”
         The effort of disclosing so much information appeared to have wearied him. He sank back into his chair. He studied my face, and then straightened himself. The motion seemed to demand a huge expenditure of energy.
         “I need to work to make money to go to Buffalo with papers for my uncle to sign.” His voice oozed an oleaginous layer onto his words, anointing them in the pauses while he wrestled with the unfamiliar syntax and vocabulary of English. It was like watching a snake stretch and then coil itself. I was waiting for the sudden strike of its fangs.
         “Why don’t you mail the papers, or call your uncle?”
         Minh’s smile disappeared, leaving just a little curve on his lips. His brown eyes darkened to black. Beneath his lips, his incisors appeared unusually sharp, almost as if they had been filed.
         “I must go to see him.”
         His voice had modulated into a soft but high pitched, keening wail. I closed my eyes and I was there again, in that hut, a woman emerging from the shadows, her mouth open in a scream. I snapped my lids up, and there was Minh, looking at me as though he understood where I had just been, that in fact, he had been there with me.
         “If he only has to sign the papers,” I said.
         “He is my guardian, my mother and father dead long time.” He paused. “Back in my country when I was little.” He seemed to wait for my reaction, but I kept my expression neutral, and he continued. “When I come to this country, I live with Uncle Tran in Buffalo. Then I come here, get job in restaurant with my cousin. But they say I am alien. Every year paper must be signed.”
         He lapsed into silence. A trace of a smile played at the corners of his mouth, his incisors now covered by his thin lips. I stared at the choices for the boxes under “Problem” on the Intake Data Review Form. I typed an x for “Other.”

The waitress placed the coffee in front of us. It slopped over the tops of the cups onto the table next to some crumbs from somebody’s dessert. She reached for a gray rag in her pocket, took one inaccurate swipe at the spill, and then walked away. Marilyn daubed the coffee with her napkin.
         “Well, what do you think I should do?” I asked. Her eyes were on the wide and retreating back of the waitress. “About Minh and his uncle,” I added. She shook her head at the waitress and then turned to me with full attention.
         “Quigley will never go for an emergency payment to him.” Her hand moved up my thigh under the table. “Tell Quigley, Minh, all of them to go to hell.”
         I began to say that I couldn’t do that, that Minh’s pointed smile fused onto that other man’s face had started to push its way through the bricks on the wall. I was about to tell her it had come unbidden, even now, but then her fingers drove that image away.

Minh was waiting for me in the morning. He followed me into my cubicle and took his place in the client’s chair. I offered him a cigarette and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. He refused both. I took my cup to the coffee urn in the workroom down the hall. When I came back, I found him just as I had left him, sitting erect in the client chair. I had to squeeze by his bony knees without spilling the hot coffee on him. I could feel his kneecaps beneath his raincoat. He didn’t move as I edged by him.
         “Mr. Minh, my supervisor says there is no way he can authorize giving you the money to travel up to Buffalo to see your uncle when there are appropriate alternatives to meet your needs. I’m afraid you’ll just have to mail the papers up to him. Send them registered mail, if you’re concerned about them getting there.” I reached into my pocket, and took out a five, which left me with two quarters. I held the bill out toward him. He narrowed his eyes, and shoved my hand away.
         “That is no good. I must hand papers to Uncle Tran. He will not read them if they come in mail. That is the way it is.”
         I felt anger lift my voice.
         “Then call him. Use this phone, right here. It won’t cost you a dime. I’ll have to explain why the hell I’m calling Uncle Tran in Buffalo, but that’s my problem. What’s his number?”
         I reached for the phone, but Minh stood up, his face rigid except for flaring nostrils.
         “You think I do not know how to dial? Or that I do not have money for phone call?”
         “You’ve been telling me you’re broke, and that’s why you can’t take the bus up to Buffalo. So what is the problem?”
         “You do not understand!” Minh’s voice sounded as though it had been wrenched from his bowels. “You must understand.”
         “I wish I did,” I said. But the truth was that I was beginning to. Somehow Minh was my nightmare incarnate, as though it had followed me from the hospital.
         He pulled his raincoat about him and left.

The next morning, Quigley emerged from his office to intercept me. He motioned toward my door.
         “He’s in there. Get rid of him. You have other clients waiting, ones who have been properly processed.”
         “I’ll try.”
         Quigley stepped close enough so I could smell his aftershave and see the red blotches on his skin from his razor. The aftershave smelled like pine trees, although Quigley did not appear to be the outdoors type.
         “There are worse things than staring at a blank wall,” he said. “You could be back on the other side.”
         I fought back the images, row on row of stained white tiles and pastel green uniforms. Pills forced down my throat.
         “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I was medicated most of the time.”
         His face formed an evil smile.
         “Come, now, Monk. There’s no need for modesty with me. I am sure you remember. You were quite a famous patient. It wasn’t MyLai, but all the papers did run your story. No doubt you could have instructed Marilyn on how to use that knife.” His face hardened, and he turned on his heel. “Get rid of him, or I will be forced to report that you seem beyond the therapeutic reach of this program.”
         I opened my door and found Minh in the client’s chair. On the floor next to him was a vinyl suitcase.
         “I was thrown out of my room last night. No money for rent. I explain about Uncle Tran, but landlord only want his money.” His lips peeled back from his incisors. “So I come here.”
         I lit a cigarette and offered him one, as I had done each morning, so that it had become a part of our interaction, as had his refusal, but today he slid a cigarette from the pack and motioned for a light. I held out my cigarette, and he cupped his hands around it as he lit up. His fingers were stained yellow.
         “Well, what are you going to do now?”
         He did not answer. Instead, he puffed deeply. I read his thought. At least it would get Quigley off my back. And just maybe a flesh and blood Minh would dispel the other.
         “Okay, but just until I can figure out what to do with you.”

“Minh, if you’re gonna stay here, you’re just gonna have to stop leaving your goddamned half drunk glasses of tea all over the place.” The day old tea bags lay on the bottom of the glass in liquid thick with leaves, all of it a murky brownish color.
         Minh stirred on the couch and then emerged from beneath his raincoat, which he preferred to the blanket I had offered him. He slept in his dingy gray underwear. I did not know when, or if, he bathed. Or what he ingested besides tea. He yawned and then he tapped the glass down on the table top to show he had heard me.

I was able to forget Minh and Quigley in Marilyn’s smile.
         “I’d like to see your place some time,” she said.
         I’d had the same thought. I had even started a shopping list with champagne and lobster, and then scaled it down to a bottle of Thunderbird and meat loaf.
         “Soon. I want to fix it up a little.”
         “I’m not that interested in the decor.”
         I forced a smile.
         “Something has to be removed.”
         Her eyes narrowed.
         “Like, maybe, your girlfriend.”
         I shook my head.
         Her eyes twinkled, thinking we were playing.
         “Your mother? But I thought …”
         “She did, years ago.”
         “Well, what, then? I don’t know how many more times I can send my roommate off to the movies. She goes to this rerun house that specializes in body snatcher films. She’s talking about moving out.”
         “Because of me?”
         She laughed.
         “Don’t flatter yourself. Her boyfriend is getting out soon, you know the one she insists was framed.”
         “Nice friends you keep.”
         “I know, but then I picked you, didn’t I?” She leaned back, her body feline. “Well, what or who?”
         “Minh. In his blue raincoat which he rarely removes and which fits him like a tent over a scarecrow, who drinks tea by the gallon, in a glass, he is right now asleep on my sofa.”
         Her eyes widened.
         “He?”
         “Himself.”
         “Living with you?”
         “It’s a long story.”
         She whispered against my ear. “We’ve got to get him out.”

Minh was still asleep when I opened the door to my apartment late that night. I felt drained, but pleasantly so, as though a warm current ran just beneath my skin. Minh snorted beneath his raincoat, and I had the sudden urge to toss him out with the trash that reached to the brim of the garbage pail in the kitchen.
         Instead, I made coffee. A tea glass, its sodden bag submerged in thick brown liquid, stared at me from the sink, and I tossed it toward the garbage pail. It tottered for a second on the top of the heap and then shattered on the floor. The phone rang, and Marilyn’s sleepy voice asked if I had made it home okay. I assured her I had. I knew she wanted to ask about Minh, but she did not. I hung up, and he was standing in the doorway in his raincoat, open to reveal his dingy underwear, his straight black hair falling like a screen before his eyes.
         I pointed to the mess on the floor.
         “I threw out your damned tea glass.”
         He brushed back his hair.
         “But Monk, I was going to clean it this morning.” His voice was a whisper.
         “Then you can clean it up now.”
         “Was that Marilyn on the phone?”
         Somehow her name in his mouth sounded obscene. I seized his neck in my hands. He did not resist. I almost thought he smiled. I dropped my hands.
         “I clean it now,” he said.

“But that’s ridiculous,” Marilyn said. “I mean I’d love to have you here, all the time, but not for this reason.”
         She had just showered, and her hair hung dark and limp over the collar of her terry cloth robe.
         “I should throw him out. But I can’t.”
         “Because of what happened over there?”
         “Yes,”
         “But he’s not that man in black pyjamas in a hut.”
         “I know.”
         She stepped toward me, and I smelled a lemony soap on her skin.
         “Stay here, today, if you want. And tonight. Then we’ll see.”
         “I want,” I said.

Over the next few days we talked about my returning to my apartment, but we didn’t mention Minh. At night, as we lay together before the open window next to her bed, his presence slid over us like a chilling wind. I don’t know if Marilyn sensed it. I think she did. I would feel cold and then her warm body pressed against mine. I stared through the window behind the bed at the brownstone across the street. One light on the top floor was on and I felt a little better for the sense that somebody else was awake. But when I closed my eyes, I again saw Minh’s smile on that other man’s face, and then my hand holding a knife to that man’s throat, and then the blood, his dead hand clenched around the wooden pestle I had thought was a grenade, his wife’s lips moving in a scream as she emerged from the shadows, their toddler crawling over the body of his dead father as though it had been placed there for his amusement.
         At work, I chased his specter into a corner, but I could not look Quigley in the eye. I had turned my desk around so my back was to the window. His face had formed on the wall. When Marilyn passed my cubicle, she looked at my client chair, but did not mention his name.
         Saturday morning I awoke with conviction.
         “I’m going back to my apartment today.”
         “You want company?”
         “No.”
         “Hurry back,” she said.
         A ball of dust, lifted by the opening of my door, settled at my feet. The lights were out and the blinds drawn. I felt my way into the living room and turned on a lamp.
         Minh was lying on the sofa, his raincoat balled up at his feet. His underwear was streaked with grayish black sweat stains. A glass of water and a small towel were on the cocktail table next to the sofa. When the light flashed on, his eyes fluttered. He tried to raise himself, but collapsed back onto the sofa.
         The ambulance attendants wanted to know what had happened. I started to mention Uncle Tran and Quigley, and then I shrugged and said he was my roommate and I had been out of town.
         “He’s lucky you came back when you did,” one of them said.
         “Yes,” I replied.
         They rolled him onto the stretcher.
         “He’s just bones,” the other one said.
         “I never saw him eat,” I replied.
         Minh smiled a little as they lifted the stretcher, a little movement of his lips, just enough to show his pointed teeth. I placed his raincoat over him.

I took a two week leave. Quigley told me to come back without my cigarettes, or not to come back at all. I told Marilyn that I would be staying in my place alone for a while. She did not understand, and I could offer no good reason. I could only hope she would wait for me.
         On the day I returned to work, I called Marilyn.
         “I wanted to hear your voice,” I said.
         “I’m still here,” she said.
         “I just wanted to be sure,” I said. “I’ll be a little late.”
         I stopped by the bus terminal on the way and then found Marilyn at her desk.
         “I’ll go with you,” she said. “Your first day back, and all.”
         I opened my door, and she rushed by me into the cubicle. I followed her to where she stood, her back to the corner next to the window.
         “What is it?” I asked.
         “What did you say happened to Minh?” her lip trembled.
         “I didn’t say. Because I don’t know.”
         She stepped away from the corner. There on the coat rack was the raincoat. I took it off its hook, and smoothed the fabric. It smelled of stale tea.
         “I knew it was in there,” she said. “I checked your office after you stopped coming in. I don’t know why. That’s when I saw it. I was going to throw it away, but then I thought you should decide what you wanted to do with it.”
         I pulled the bus ticket out of my pocket.
         “Buffalo, right?”
         “Yes,” I said.
         “I don’t suppose there will be too many Trans in the phone book.” She held out her hand. “But this might help. It has an address on it. I found it in an inside pocket in the raincoat.”
         It was Minh’s appointment card. I jotted down the address.
         “Quigley saw me going through the coat and now he’s turned Minh’s case over to me. I’ve got his folder on my desk. Quigley wants to know when I am going to fill out the Intake Data Review Form.”
         She took the card back from me.
         “I’ll just put it in his folder,” she said.
         “See you tonight?” I asked. “My bus doesn’t leave until Saturday morning.”
         “I just don’t know,” she answered. “Maybe if you can tell me something.”
         “What?”
         “Would it have been better if it had been a grenade and it had blown you to bits?”
         “I ask myself that.”
         She nodded.
         “I need you here,” she said. “But I’m not strong enough for both of us.”
         “I know.” I took her hand and pushed up the sleeve of her blouse. I ran my lips over the thin white scars. She suffered my kiss there for a moment and then pulled her arm away.
         After she left, I sat behind my desk and stared out the window at the wall. I wanted to see her face there again, but it was as though the bricks were shuffling themselves like a deck of cards. When they stopped moving, the face that appeared was his. I felt my chest tighten and I opened the window. A gust chilled me, and I pulled his raincoat about me. A cloud darkened the outline on the wall for a moment. When the sun shone again on the brick, I could see nothing but the irregular surface. But I was sure the face would return again and again. I would need to find Minh. I got on the bus wearing his raincoat.

But I didn’t find him or Uncle Tran in Buffalo. When I returned I hung his raincoat next to the window and trained myself to look at it and then the bricks across the way. One morning I stopped by Marilyn’s office, but her door was locked. I felt Quigley’s hand on my shoulder.
         “She called in sick today.”
         I started to step back toward my office, but he still held me.
         “There is one more thing. She said you should read this week’s Village Voice. Do you know what she had in mind?”
         “No.”
         I returned to my office and looked at the wall. I stared but saw nothing in the bricks. I crumpled the raincoat into the wastepaper basket. I thought about burning it, but I didn’t have any gasoline to ignite it. Quigley looked in at quitting time. I was hunched over the typewriter typing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” over and over.
         “Time to go home, Monk,” he said.
         “Just want to finish this up,” I replied.
         “I trust you’re not trying to impress me.”
         “Nothing like that.”
         He left and I pulled the paper out of the typewriter and turned it off. A short while later I heard the rumble I had been waiting for. The custodian came in, nodded at me, and emptied the wastepaper basket. As he did, he plucked the raincoat from the bin and held it up against his shoulders. He looked at me.
         “Take it,” I said.
         And he did. I picked up the Voice on the way home. I sat on the couch where Minh had lain and turned the pages of the paper until I found the classified. There it was, in the Roommates Wanted listing: “Needed to Share, Top Floor of Brownstone in Carroll Gardens. Prefer Retired Masons.”
         I could only wonder what kind of calls she might be getting. I picked up the phone and dialed.

Born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, STEPHEN LEWIS holds a doctorate in American Literature from New York University, and he recently retired as Professor of English at Suffolk Community College, on Long Island, New York.  He now lives with his wife and daughter on five acres in a restored farmhouse on Old Mission Peninsula in northern lower Michigan.          He has published five novels, including most recently the three book series Mysteries of Colonial Times for Berkley. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Pangolin Papers, North Atlantic Review, Nutmeg, Pulp: Fiction and Poetry, Karamu, Convergence, Brooklyn College Review, Zephyr, Confrontation, Nebo, Dunes Review, and Jewish Currents. Another story, "A Lick of Blood," featuring characters from the Berkley series, will be published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine next January. He has also produced five textbooks, the most recent being Philosophy: An Introduction Through Literature, (Paragon House, 1992).          He is currently at work on a historical novel and a collection of stories.