Cigarette butts piled in an ashtray.  Crushed beer cans on the floor. Rain comes through unsealed windows. He places towels at the bottoms of the frames.

Water damage on the ceiling. Big brown circles mark spots. The dry wall is tearing apart. Photographs of naked women thumbtacked over holes. The old man sits in a recliner with foam padding pushing through the arms and seat. Springs are coming through the cushion. A bucket catches rain.

He’s reading Ralph Ellison’s  Invisible Man. Reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He lights a cigarette with a match and shakes it, throws it on the floor. Shakes the box in his ear. A few left, he says.

The old man remembers reading Ellison the first time. Race, politics, a country gone mad. Not far from what it is today, he laughs. Pages yellowing.

I wanted to be a communist when I was younger, he says to himself. I thought that was the best way. The romantic way, he laughs. He adjusts himself in the chair. Puts the book down. Lights another cigarette. 

He’ll be coming for me soon, he says. Maybe a year or two is all I have left. You never know. He stares at the damaged books stacked in milk crates. Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Miller, Ginsberg, Kerouac, to name a few. Yeah. He’ll come to take me soon. The old man coughs. And then all this will be gone. Dumped out in the street. Just like all the books in America right now, he sips on his Old Milwaukee.  We are done.