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going?”
    â€œGot some business to tend to. I’ll be back.”
    After he disappeared into the alley, Amy glanced at me, shrugged, then began loading Smith’s belongings into the trunk and backseat. I moved to help, handing her a framed photograph of two young black servicemen so fit their uniformsseemed molded to their muscular frames, both grinning toward the camera, one of them (Smith, I was sure) holding up two fingers like rabbit ears behind the head of a friend I guessed was Stackhouse; and I found several paintings, one canvas portraying Jesus as a work-toughened carpenter, rendered (Amy told me) in the style of G. Bierman’s
The Ascension
; another—a watercolor in the manner of Kawase Hasui—depicted an ancient temple all but hidden by jungle growth and was entitled
Borobudur
, while a third showed a sparsely furnished hospital room in Elgin as van Gogh might have imagined it, and in the last I saw a young black woman with three good-looking boys done in the vein of a Matisse. I stared at these paintings for the longest time, lost in them, startled by Smith’s talent, his shape-shifting ability to change styles as rapidly as others changed their garments, and then Amy was telling me to hurry up, so I moved on, passing to her some shoes eaten away at the soles, slacks and shirts so old they could only have come from rummage sales or Goodwill; there were a few dented pots and pans, a battered saxophone, a worn Bible with notecards inserted throughout its pages, sandals made of rice straw, a straight razor, a cloth bag with Chinese characters I could not read, a wicker hat, a Smith & Wesson .357 (Model 27), a seven-inch Army knife in its stiff leather sheath, and wrapped in a quilted blanket a shabby black robe and a tatami mat. Judging by the cardboard boxes at my feet, whatever Smith lacked in clothing he more than made up for in books. There were volumes from Moody Bible Institute, translations from the Coptic Gnostic Library (unearthed in 1945 near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt), the Rhineland sermons of Meister Eckhart, the Dhammapada, texts on the Sufi and Tantrism, and on their front pages, in their margins, he had scribbled his commentaries in a script so small, so microscopic, it might have come from the hand of a mathematician.In other boxes I found Japanese pornography—magazines with page upon glossy page of photos showing teenagers (some of them dressed as schoolgirls) doing things I dare not describe, but which I guessed he used for masturbation, and then!—I saw playing cards depicting a different, more terrifying kind of pornography: Thai pictures taken in morgues, showing bodies in different stages of decomposition, used by Theravada monks for meditation on the transitory nature of all things.
    With each box and shopping bag of Smith’s things I found myself falling through his past and into passageways of a constantly mutating soul which, I’d wager, even his therapists at Elgin had not fully charted. Poking through a shopping bag, I pulled out expired passports stamped by half the countries left of Hawaii, a sketchbook filled with his poetry and drawings—penciled images of well-known locations in the Loop, and possible portraits of what his own father might look like (one was a derelict feeding himself from a Dumpster, another was Daddy King)—hypodermic needles I was afraid to handle, and eight scrapbooks in which he’d pasted news articles about, I thought, himself. I looked again. These were stories about King, some of them dating back to the Montgomery bus boycott. He’d saved everything—from the
Time
magazine “Man of the Year” cover story on King to cartoonist Mort Drucker’s satire of the Movement in
Mad
magazine. Smith had flagged the numerous articles critical of King, as if he took a delicious pleasure in publicity that diminished the man he so resembled and clearly revered.
    I was dazed, staring at