Two

Only one corner of the snapshot was creased. The rest of it was crisp: glossy sepia in a white border with scalloped edges. The building before Greta, L'Royale, was neither crisp nor glossy.

At the door, Greta tapped hesitantly, then again, more urgently. When no one came, she slapped her palm against the glass in desperation, rattled the dark pane. Still no one. Greta gripped the snapshot in both hands. Her breath accelerated, lurching in, rushing out of her lungs. The skin under her fingernails turned white with pressure against the snapshot. Then she slipped the photo into her breast pocket and cupped both hands to the dark pane. Peering between them, she found yellowed eyes staring back.

Greta started, inhaled a clipped gasp. The face that surrounded the eyes was palely yellow too: old man cheeks and forehead, bulbous nose. Where lips were once, sunken skin gathered itself in converging wrinkles, pointed to the lack of teeth.

Below the face, a bolt unlatched, knob turned. The face moved backward so the door could swing in. A wheelchair revealed itself beneath the face. Smoke unfurled out of the mouth and through the open door; Greta exhaled.

Silence.

Old eyes waited for an explanation. A hand carried a cigarette butt, glowing in the dark, to the sunken mouth; lungs filled with nicotine air. Greta gave her name in pieces. "I'm Greta. Emerson." The man waited. "Moore." She added the third as a side note: quieter, less important. From inside her jacket she withdrew the snapshot. The man took it in the hand without the cigarette. He held it close to dull eyes.

For a moment the man froze. Then, in one motion, he thrust the snapshot toward her and shoved his chair away. His hand jerked toward the door to send it hurling back to it's frame, then stopped, extended in mid-air.

"Why do you have that?"

"The woman in the picture is my grandmother." Greta could summon no greater explanation than that.

"Grandmother." The man extinguished the cigarette on the arm of his wheelchair. He seemed to cave into himself, sink further and further. In the dim room behind the man, Greta saw a woman emerge from the shadows: short, aproned, Asian features.

Greta waited for a few minutes, then began to turn away. The man lifted his head at her movement. "Wait," he said.

"The man next to your grandmother was me."

One

The bus decelerated, wheezing, before a imposing building and pair of waiting figures. Greta watched the pair carefully as the bus approached. The man, in stained diner smock and navy windbreaker, held a double-folded paper in two fists. His eyes, in a head that drooped forward a little, were trained an inch or two above the top of the paper.

Two or three feet down the bench sat a woman, perhaps younger than the man, but not young. Every part of her (knees, feet, hands, elbows), thought Greta, was carefully contained -- except her eyes. Her eyes wandered over the street, into the sky, onto the man.

Inside the building, Greta gave her name to the manager, a woman in an ill-fitted skirt suit who sat behind an empty desk and flipped through a celebrity gossip magazine.

"Can I leave my bags here for a little while?" Greta asked.

The woman pointed to a corner of the grubby office. "I'll be back soon. I'm just going to L'Royale Theater."

The woman raised her eyebrows and scanned Greta's jeans and jacket. "L'Royale, eh?"

Greta nodded, puzzled. "Actually, could you tell me how to get to the theater?"

The woman pointed to the street beyond the grubby window. "You came in off Rouse. That street there on the side is Polaski. Walk a block down that and you'll hit Main. You can only turn left. The, uh, theater will be on your right. "