Authors: Ekaterina Sedia
Then he catches a glimpse of Raph behind me and starts pulling away, seeing something I don’t, some revelation his drugged-out brain throws up. “Keep him away from me! Don’t you see what he is?”
Raph, following a few feet behind, stares back stonily, eyes drilling into the patron. The drunk gets more and more agitated and I tell him not to worry, to just walk out, but he seems oblivious to me and then tries to run as we enter the foyer, dodging to his left and around a group milling outside the toilets. Raph is already blocking his way to slam him in the chest, and we drag the guy kicking and swearing out the front to dump him on the pavement. He rolls into a ball at Raph’s feet, wrapping his hands protectively around his head, and then there is a bark behind me: “That’s enough, get back inside.” I turn and Lucs stands glaring at us, two doormen behind like twin Cerberus statues at the gates of hell. There are people in line staring at us, elderly couples and families from surrounding cafés, theatergoers passing by. Too visible.
Raph slinks beside me as we head back to our posts, his bleach-blond hair and powerlifter-traps like talismans splitting the crowd before him. He leans in as we reach my post: “These sheep don’t understand anything else”, then leaves me staring after him.
I continue my watching, unnerved and searching for order in the madness, in the frenetic, restless movement; for some shifting code, some meaning in the faces that coalesce into momentary distinction only to become unformed clay when I look away—brown eyes, blue eyes, blond hair, black hair, blue hair, in an interchangeable melange. I search for joy, for revelation, for knowledge in the faces, for some reason why they come here to waste away their lives with drink and mindless primal movements. All I find is blankness, slack-eyed vapidness. I’m so sick of this.
A hole opens in the crowd and I wonder for a moment if the dancers are ducking someone’s vomit. I look closely at those ringing the gap to see if they have that coy disgusted fascination, like dogs trying to avoid their own shit in the backyard. Then I see the swinging arms and sudden surge of bodies across the space and even as I raise the two-way hear a voice, Gabe’s perhaps, rattle in my hand:
“Security to Dancefloor, Security to Dancefloor,”
and I jump off to push roughly through the crowd, chest and shoulders hard and unforgiving, distantly savoring the passing looks of dumb shock. I emerge into chaos and grab two of the fighting patrons, tearing apart their clutch by pushing one away, grabbing the other around the neck. The guy I’m holding starts lashing out instead with his feet. “Settle down,” I yell with a jabbed compression of his neck for emphasis and he subsides. I look around and Gabe, Mikhaels and Raph are also restraining fighters. We stand each with subdued patrons hanging in our arms searching for further threats, for something missed.
I’m about to turn and haul off my captive when from nowhere comes a fist swung wild and hard to smash into my temple. I hear the disembodied thump rather than feel it—having had much worse before—and swivel to focus in on the terrified tanned face. I drop my forgotten captive and like a berserker lost in fury pummel the face. On the edge of vision I see the other security react as if under fire, choking out their quarry and launching into the crowd with random punches, staining the beer-soaked floor with spatters of blood.
And then I’m sitting on my attacker’s chest, yelling at his dazed face: “Why the fuck did you do that? We were breaking it up!”
Spit splays into his mouth as he tries to speak, no air in his lungs. “Be— Because you . . . hit me.”
I grab his shirt: “Like fuck I did!” and bring his face up to mine.
He persists: “So—Someone hit me.”
I stare into his glazed, convincing eyes and then a hand lands on my shoulder; quick spin and armlock, bending the elbow back to breaking point, my fist cocked—and Lucs stares back at me, a hand raised instinctively to protect his face. I let him go.
He moves in close, goatee like a pointer: “Kill him.”
I step back though it’s hard to hear him above the music, above the screams of the crowd. “What?”
He surges in again: “Now, while there’s still confusion, while there’s justification.” I push him away, open-handed against the hard solidity of his pecs. “Damn you,” he says slit-eyed, “stop fighting it.”
I stand over the bleeding kid and, eyes still on Lucs, reach down to haul him up: “Get the fuck out of here.” The kid looks at me in disbelief so I slap him across the cheek, bringing sudden clarity to his eyes. I look back at Lucs as he watches the patron disappear into the crowd. Lucs glares at me and walks away, saying something to Mikhaels.
His second looks at me then heads towards the front doors, pushing past the doormen and disappearing outside. I wonder what the hell Mikhaels is doing, leaving the club halfway through the night. I don’t understand anything about this place any more.
I watch as Gabe and Raph drag away the injured. But the patrons soon start dancing again, the music an unstoppable Pied Piper-calling to their gyrating and fondling, to the slackening of the vague, drugged faces. Their shoes smear the forgotten blood into the polished floor.
I’m dismissed from my post at the Pit and sent upstairs as punishment. Danteis, who I’m relieving, passes me on the stairs with a nod, grateful to be heading down to the world of the big boys for a change. Heaven, the upstairs bar and club’s wasteland, looks much easier to patrol than downstairs: a bar and small dancefloor on one level, leading up to another small bar, some pool tables and a series of isolated grimy couches ringed around a balcony overlooking the Pit. I stand midway up the stairs that split the levels and look out over the sweaty, milling drinkers by the larger bar.
I can’t take in anything. I feel strange, panicky. The faces around me, the colors of the lights and bright yellow walls seem to warp and shift. I wonder if it’s the cocktail of drugs I’m taking: uppers to get through the night; stanozolol to maintain my size, my intensity. I feel like I’m tripping.
A girl wearing only a black bra-top and set of tiny shorts walking up the stairs towards me catches me glancing at her. “You want a fucking picture?” She is gone before I can respond, before I can even take offense at her insult. She passes me later, smirking over her shoulder, knowing her allure, as she heads downstairs, tight, arrogant ass rolling beneath the black leather.
“You’re not naïve, David.” I jump at the voice in my ear; Lucs has sidled up beside me while I’ve momentarily closed my eyes. He stares out over the drinkers, eyes reflective and distant, silent for a moment. I follow his gaze. “Look at these weak cockroaches,” he finally says quietly. “Most of them can’t even string two words together; fill them with alcohol and they become zombies, mindless scum.”
“And that justifies killing them?”
He turns to me, as if contemplating this for the first time. “This is the way it’s always been. You know that. There has always been those like us willing to seek the truth, to unlock the darkness inside.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Think about it, David. Think of how you feel about them. How you feel about your
girlfriend
. Remember that night at the Terminal.”
“What do you know about my girlfriend—” I start to demand, having never told them about Lisa. Then he touches my shoulder.
Sudden pain along my chest and arms, as if I’d done a heavy workout, the muscles burning and flaring. I want to recoil but the muscles on my arms and chest ripple in sympathy. I shudder as a wave of pain surges through me; like something opening out inside.
Just like I felt after beating the gangster. Jesus. I’d forgotten that, suppressed that weird feeling as I’d knelt on the cobblestones.
I break his grip and back away, spooked, mouth groping for a reaction. I grab my chest but the pain has just as quickly receded.
Lucs stares at me as I back down the stairs. What the fuck was that? What’s wrong with me? He watches me go.
I stumble downstairs, knocking patrons out of the way as if they aren’t there. The radio bucks in my hand but I don’t hear what’s said. Lucs perhaps, telling the others. One of the doormen—that asshole Pēteris who hated me from the moment I arrived, as if I didn’t deserve to be here—appears from the foyer near the front door and stands waiting for me. I double back, heading for the back. I traverse the edge of the dancefloor, trying to keep out of sight of the other security perched like gargoyles on their posts.
I reach the Stage unharmed and burst through the double doors into the muted corridor to rest panting against a damp wall, waiting for my smoke-stained eyes and nose and throat to clear. My pulse throbs in my head, keeping complicit time with the music rumbling through the walls.
The one hanging light casts weird shifting sprays of illumination down the corridor. I touch my chest again, recalling that strange pain. I must be going insane, too many late nights, the shock of seeing someone killed. Maybe it’s the drugs finally getting to me.
Yet Lucs’ words nag at the back of my brain.
I force them from my mind. All that matters is getting out of here and I push off the wall and head for the back door.
I round a corner. Too late realize I’m not alone.
A figure is coming towards me, filling the narrow space. When I see the size of the guy I instinctively put one foot back, planting myself.
Gabe. He’s big—bigger even than me—and in the tight corridor he almost scrapes the roof with his head. I tense and wait for him. Then I glimpse over his shoulder another darkened figure bent over something on the ground, something framed by yellow—it is blond hair, it is a woman. Tight black shorts. Bra-top.
There’s blood on her neck.
As I stare at it my vision narrows, focusing solely on its dark stain.
I forget about Gabe, about the club, about the patron being killed.
Pulsing sounds in my ears, strong, blotting out everything else. Spit fills my mouth. I can smell the blood. It floods my senses. My head spins at the thought of reaching out and touching it, feeling its dark slick against my skin, of
tasting
it. That feeling of a hollowing-out inside me again, of surging within. Of power. Something related to the blood . . .
I imagine Lisa before me.
I tear my gaze away to look at the hunched-over figure, but the shifting light edging past Gabe’s head and shoulders and underneath his arms warps everything and it seems the figure’s face is somehow stretched and lupine.
“Thought you were a patron,” Gabe says, breaking through my concentration. “Just as well.” He points at the blackening egg on my temple. “You got hit before.”
Disarmed, I raise my hand to my head slowly and feel the lump. My refined senses dissipate, leaving me feeling washed out and empty. I must be going insane. I look at the other security—it is Raph, his brother—but his face is normal. For a moment I’d thought . . .
“You can’t let that happen again,” Gabe’s saying. “They must fear us.”
I stare at him then look at the girl.
“She overstayed her welcome,” Gabe explains.
Raph hauls the black-shorts girl up underneath her arms and drags her to the back door. But there is blood on the wall behind, splattered like the blood on Raph’s cheek. He waits for Gabe to go down the stairwell and open the door and, as I stand watching, the girl’s head lolls to one side on a too-pliable neck and her mouth, split at the corners as if punctured by something, gapes open, drooling a line of spittle onto her top. Raph sees me looking at her face and stares back openly. He reads something in my eyes that satisfies him and dismisses me, dragging the girl outside.
“You should get back to your post,” Gabe says.
I hesitate, looking towards the back door. Instead I nod and head back into the club.
When I return upstairs Lucs is still on the stairs. I don’t ask how he knew I’d return. He doesn’t say anything for a while, then: “You okay?” I nod. He stares at me for a moment, then nods also. “I’ll check back soon.” He leaves.
I try to watch the crowd but I’m too fucked up, the scene in the corridor still whirling through my mind. In need of air I head up to the top bar to stand beneath the air-conditioning vent jutting from the roof, savoring its cool whisper over my sweating, fevered face.
I open my eyes and see Kelly standing at the bar, the one bargirl I actually liked and would speak to on occasion. But looking now at her tanned shoulders and the tight lycra top hugging her breasts only makes me think of Lisa, remembering the jut of her breasts above the bedclothes when I came home from work, the feel of her skin against me.
We’d met while I was still at the Terminal trying to work as many hours as I could to cover the rent. Some guy had been hassling Lisa in the nearby street as I was heading home for the night and for a moment I’d seen my father looming over my mom and I’d intervened without thinking. The guy—some crazy ex—had trash-talked to save face but when I advanced on him he soon disappeared. Lisa and I started going out soon afterwards. She used to call me her “protector.” Things went well for a while and she even moved in, but then it all began to change. She started complaining about my temper affecting the relationship. Or how I was spending too much time in the gym, only concerned with putting on size. How I talked about the scumbag patrons I had to put up with every night, the contempt in my voice never far. How I had no plans for the future, as if working my ass off night after night meant nothing. She started spending more time at the dance studio for what I thought was an upcoming show: her first. I tried giving her space to prepare. But after she found out I beat that guy and was now working at one of the big clubs in the Meatpacking District without telling her, I returned home one night to find all her stuff gone. She hadn’t even left a note. And then I found out about Paul. The other lead. Some lean-limbed, shaggy-haired dancer she must’ve been fucking for months—she’d mentioned him once or twice but I didn’t read anything into it, didn’t want to seem jealous. I didn’t know the bitch was about to leave me. I eventually found her new apartment and I’d pass by on the way home from work, sometimes sitting outside for a while. I felt stupid, jealous. But I couldn’t stop myself. Then one morning, about a week ago, I watched this Paul guy walk out of her apartment with her, intimate hands brushing her face as he left. The shock was quickly overtaken with anger, burning rage. I couldn’t believe the fury I was feeling. I wanted to rip them apart. It scared me. I didn’t know how far I would go. So I drove away. I chickened out. And now I can’t stop imagining what I could have done. Should have done.