Bob woke up slowly.  The faint light of the streetlight outside his bedroom window washed over the dull yellow of the ceiling, lending the room an anemic glow, like the phosphorescence of some cave-dwelling fungus.

A train whistle sounded in the distance.  A cool wind rustled the old cotton drapes.  Bob’s mouth tasted brown, the residue of beer and cigarette smoke.  His bedside alarm clock’s hands glowed softly; four-thirty in the morning.

He heard breathing. 

It was a small effort to turn his head.  The woman lay on her back, her arms over her head.  The sheet had slid down, uncovering her breasts.  She wore a small, contented, dreaming smile.  She was a small woman, probably in her late thirties, with a slim figure and sort, gamine blond hair; she claimed to be just divorced.  Bob couldn’t remember her name.

Bob’s head pounded.  He reached to the nightstand, picked up his cigarette pack, shook out a Lucky Strike and stuck it in his mouth.  He couldn’t find his lighter, remembering finally that it was still in his jeans pocket.  He got up, slowly, carefully, so as not to wake the woman.

He dug into his jeans pocket, found the old Zippo he’d carried since the war.  He lit the cigarette.  He stood, smoking quietly, looking at the sleeping woman for a moment.  Outside, a passing car’s headlights illuminated the street briefly, revealing chipped concrete and blowing trash.  Bob looked out the window, looked back at the sleeping woman.

If she woke up, Bob knew, she’d want to talk.  Bob didn’t want to talk.  He put on his jeans, pulled on a shirt he found on the floor, retrieved an old pair of tennis shoes from the closet and put them on.  A moment later he was outside, walking aimlessly down the sidewalk.

The street was dark.  Bob stayed out of the intermittent splashes of dull light from the streetlamps.  He walked quickly, with his head down, smoking as he went.  His first cigarette burned down.  He tossed the butt into the street and lit another Lucky.  The night was growing cold with the wind blowing in off the big lake.

Bob didn’t notice the chill.  He had something turning over in his mind.

He walked down the street, looking up now and then at the shuttered businesses, the darkened taverns.  He walked past the bar where he had met the woman, the evening before.  It had been a long time since Bob had slept any way but alone.  Not since he had left New Orleans, the year before.

He stopped at the corner.  A tendril of smoke from the Lucky rolled around his head.  He looked up at the few stars that were visible.  Another train whistle sounded, louder; if Bob listened carefully he could hear the Diesel locomotive, even the clack-clack-clack of train wheels on the tracks.

It had been a strange night for Bob, leading up to his wakening with a strange woman in his bed.  In the bar, it was as though the whiskey had let some other person into his body; he had laughed, joked, flattered, and all along it was though he was outside, looking in at some other person.  He had danced with her, taken her home, and all along he knew at some level it wasn’t really him.  Bob wondered how that had happened; was it the whiskey, or something else?

A train platform lay off to his left.  Bob saw a movement, looked over at the train stop.  Two men stood there.  One of them flipped a spent cigarette onto the tracks.  Something in the movement broke Bob’s concentration.

Behind him, in the apartment, the woman would still be sleeping.  Bob smiled, just a little, and turned to head back.  Whatever happened had happened; even the end of the world couldn’t change that.  She should still be there sleeping when he got back.