Until one met the eyes. These were at once both black and pierced with light, aloof and penetrating, as if possessed of some underworld knowledge that rendered all waking truth both poignant and, in the end, utterly meaningless. Once seen, though the rest of the face remained difficult to recall, these darkened orbs were indelibly burned into memory---fierce, desperate, and dying. Restless, fearful, weary of the crumbling bridge that so narrowly separates life from death..... He had not always been this way. Though his childhood had been tragic enough---abandoned shortly after birth, stored like some kind of hazardous waste in orphanages and foster homes, moving on as he became a troubled adolescent (and who wouldn't be?) to jails and juvenile detention centers---it had not killed him, and that at least was something. He had run away (escaped) at the age of sixteen, and like so many other lost souls without hope or guidance, had gravitated to New York City to be tried by the relentless hell-fire of the streets. But unlike most, he had survived. Here, through various underground activities, ranging from petty theft and burglary to trafficking narcotics, he had somehow managed to keep body and soul together. And no one seemed to take much notice of one more suspected junkie, living in abandoned buildings and selling small quantities of marijuana, cocaine, and whatever assorted pills he could buy, make, or steal from dockside warehouses. He was left alone for the most part, and aside from the odd roughing up by the police, given tentative permission to exist. But as he unknowingly turned the page on his twentieth year (for the date of his birth was known to no one, and his childhood but a blur of pain and abuse without names or numbers for reference), and as he found his heart still beating, his lungs still demanding air, and the various hungers of life giving him no chance to cease his restless moving, a small miracle had occurred. Someone noticed, and more than that, fell in love with him: a fifteen-year-old Chicano girl named Kathy. Their meeting was chance enough, and would have passed like so many others, but for the small compassion that still lived in him. Finding her tearful and alone on the front steps of a tenement, in which her alcoholic father had beaten and fondled her for perhaps the thirtieth time, refraining from actual rape only because she screamed so loudly and the walls were thin, William sat down beside her, gave her his bandana to wipe the blood from her ear, and offered to take her to a public health clinic that he knew. When she declined as the result of a questionable immigration status (and a desire not to return to the even more brutal life of Guatemala City), he had given her an ounce of marijuana, along with spoken directions to the condemned building in which he slept on the floor on a mattress of flattened cardboard boxes. If she needed anything, he said, he would try to help.