He's bent over, nose almost touching the chiseled lips. Almost possessively, he strokes a soft shadow behind the right ear, filling in the little hollows and hills.
It's been a full year since the man in the long coat stopped by this place, and he regards the sign on the door with some pause. Cars and people rush past in the streets behind him, as though the past year has meant nothing. As though it didn't matter that the lives of two people ended one afternoon, exactly twelve months ago. In a city of eight million people, none seems to care.
Finally he sets the pencil down and leans back to regard his work. The tilt of the eyes aren't quite cynical enough, and those lips convey more death than wry humor. But he can't help the death. The face on the page won't grin. Those eyebrows will never knit together in disdain. But more than that, he knows that every time he draws this face, another image comes to mind. And it makes him recall how the world lost its color in thirty-two seconds.
Long ago, there was one who cared. A person who came when called, who chuckled softly at his jokes. There was warmness in this life then. The man in the coat hadn't known warmth before. Hadn't wanted warmth before.
He'd gone back after the mess had been cleaned up, stood at the edge and looked down, replaying that final conversation over and over again. So much time has passed since he last felt the warmth of another person's hand. He yearns to touch the angular structure that he'd never tried to touch before.
That was a year ago, and the man in the long coat is no longer sure if he would be welcomed back into that comfortable life. The last time they faced each other, blood had been spilt. For so long, the man in the coat feared going back and looking for that life – less because of the possibility of abandonment, and more because that would acknowledge his dependency on another being.
No. It's still not right. And suddenly he is taken by a fit of madness.
But he's brought himself this far now, and the keys still fit the lock. Then his hand is on the knob and, though he isn't sure how he got there, he's past the foyer and walking up the stairs. The place is quiet. The wallpaper a shade dimmer than he remembered. In fact, everything looks faded, which is strange, because it all seems so clotted with color in his dreams. Maybe the place is empty, and he almost sighs in relief, barely suppressing the emotional display. His leather shoes snag a bit on the carpet, and he realizes he's been holding his breath.
The faces splinter into a thousand fluttering scraps of paper. As they rain down around him, he tips onto his desk and begins to cry.
Two steps now, then he turns the corner. And all he sees are faces. Scraps of paper taped to every surface, spilling over onto the ceiling and crammed into the corners. Little piles of rejected sketches are strewn across the floor. Different angles, different expressions. Some are drawn so the viewer and the subject are on opposite sides of a room; in others, the viewer must have been standing so close, their eyelashes could have brushed. The man in the coat observes that the drawings are produced by pencils of varying hardness, etched on random scraps of paper—the artist had drawn whenever the impulse had struck him.
The man in the coat is, rightly so, a genius. Without nary a pause, he begins stripping the scene of its secrets. He notes that the drawings are of varying degrees of skill. The artist lacked proper training, but learned through obsessive effort. A desperate attention to detail indicates the subject was of importance to the artist. Little smudges, where a finger must have stroked the page, point to something akin to romantic interest, but rough erasures belie the artist's hesitations about leaving physical evidence of the attachment.
Every one of those faces belongs to the man in the long coat.
As he steps forward into the room, his shoe crushes a crumpled ball of paper. The unexpected sound startles the man in the next room, who looks up from his desk towards the entryway.
And both men see home.