S
omeone is wailing. It’s an intense, reverberating howl, then a yelp. It surges out from just above me.
I’m lying on my back. There’s a slightly chubby Latino guy looking down at me. He’s holding a metal scythelike tool a little closer to my face than I’m really comfortable with. “Oh!” he says when I open my eyes. I wrap one hand around the arm holding the scythe and the guy gets the point and puts it down. He slides two fingers against my neck and frowns. Then we hit a bump and the guy cascades forward, grabbing something for support at the last minute before he utterly crushes whatever’s left of me. He settles back in and takes my pulse again. “You’re . . .”
“What’s the deal, Victor?” someone yells from behind him. The driver. We hit another bump. Victor’s face disappears for a second, and I just see the plain gray ambulance ceiling. There’s a clear bag of fluid dangling from it that’s probably attached to me somehow. I try to shake the bleariness out of my head, but it turns out I’m strapped down hard to something.
This can go nowhere good.
“I have to go.” I rip the taped contraption from my
forehead and pull myself upright, straining against all the crap that’s holding me down.
“No!” Victor yells, maneuvering around the stretcher and trying to push me back down. “You shouldn’t even be alive, man!”
“Well, I am.” I undo another strap.
“You have no pulse! How is that even possible?”
This is exactly why I won’t be going to no hospital. I cannot abide by all these ridiculous questions. Anyway, I have no answers. It just is what it is. “I have to go,” I say again, putting a little growl into it this time. Victor sits down on the bench and just looks at me. The driver lets out a few yelps of the siren and keeps barreling down the street.
“What . . . the fuck . . .” Victor says. It’s not a question, just a general observation.
I shake my head, sit up all the way. “I don’t know, Victor. But I won’t be accompanying you to the hospital, so you can tell your friend to pull this deathmobile over and I’ll be on my merry way, thank you very much.”
Victor’s having a lot of thoughts right now. They’re tangled and confused, a briar patch of curse words and years of street experience coming loose in his mind. “Can I just . . . ?” He reaches out to take my pulse one more time, and I let him, if nothing else because I’m still woozy and he seems like a decent guy.
“It’s there,” I say. “Just very slow.”
He nods, staring at me.
“But look, I’m okay. Okay? You want me to sign something?”
He does, but he can’t find the words to express that, so instead he shakes head slowly and then, without taking his eyes off me, says: “Rudy, pull over.”
“Huh?” The siren stops wailing.
“Pull. The fuck. Over. Rudy.”
Rudy swerves the ambulance to the side of the road and slows to a halt, mumbling a few curses along the way. Victor and I hop out, and Victor immediately puts a cigarette in his mouth and lights it. He could learn a thing or two from Baba Eddie about appreciating his vices. I guess I need to get my bearings, because instead of running off, I just stand there next to him. Then dizziness sweeps over me, so I sit my ass down on the bumper of the ambulance and light a Malagueña.
“Five-seven William,” Victor says into his radio. After a scratchy reply, he spits out some numbers that I assume mean their patient went AWOL and then sits on the bumper next to me. It’s surprisingly peaceful here, after the madness of the basement and then the rush of the ambulance.
“The Jewish guy called?” I say after a few minutes of quiet smoking.
“Mm-hmm. Said you collapsed. That’s why we hadta tape you to that backboard, in case you broke your neck or something.”
“Right.”
“But basically”—he takes a drag and lets it out—“you were dead. You had no pulse. You were unresponsive. I was about to put a tube in you that would not have been pleasant to wake up with.”
“That was what that blade was for that you were poking at my face?”
Victor grunts an affirmative.
“I see.” It’s turned into an unseasonably warm afternoon, and I suddenly remember I’d been planning to go to the Red Edge to see about Sasha tonight. Also, I have to let Riley know we’re dealing with more than just one ngk, that something foul is lurking.
I stand up.
“Wait,” Victor says. “What are you?”
I shake my head.
“What happened?”
“It’s hard to explain. But I don’t do hospitals. Too many stupid questions.”
Victor frowns.
“I mean, they’re not stupid. But you know. I don’t have answers.”
He nods like he understands, which is endearing even though he obviously has no clue what’s going on. He stands up and shuffles through his pockets for a moment before handing me a business card. “Take this. My girlfriend, Jenny, does natural healing. You know, herbal crap and all that. Doesn’t stand up too strong when you’re in cardiac arrest, but she’s pretty good at what she does.”
“Thanks,” I say. I don’t really know what the hell he’s talking about, but he seems genuinely concerned. I pocket the card, nod at Victor, and trudge off to find Riley.
T
here’s what?” Dro doesn’t look too good. He’s the guy who’s always got that unshakable thing about him—pretty much glides on through whatever shit may come. He must still be shook from the ngk, because the fact that he can raise his voice above a calming whisper is a novelty to us. “Get me another drink.”
I signal Quiñones, the surly one-eyed bartender at Burgundy, and he places three more shots of rum in front of me. We exchange a nod that might mean all is understood and might mean he thinks I’m out of my fucking mind. Doesn’t matter either way. I put one down my throat and place the other two in front of the empty seats on either side of me for Riley and Dro to sip.
“The way I see it,” I say as the alcohol runs burning circles through my bloodstream, “it’s still not an infestation. We can’t panic yet. I mean, sounds like these guys do show up here and there and it still doesn’t wind up as a full hive of them.”
“You don’t understand,” Dro says. He’s straining the way some drunks do when they’re convinced no one will ever grasp the simplest possible concepts. “The shit I’ve been reading . . . The ngks don’t just precipitate disaster:
they
are
disaster. There was this plague, one of those nasty European ones back in the fifteen-whatevers, right?”
“Mad meticulous with your details, huh, Dro?”
Dro plows past Riley’s comment without noticing. “The numbers of
little people
sightings right before and in the early days of the outbreak were startling. Even this local pastor commented on it in one of his journals. And then I started looking . . .” He waves his hands and widens his eyes to dramatize “looking.” “It wasn’t the only time. There was another one, Amsterdam, I think, and it was the same thing: people see these strange little men and then horrible Black Death shit happens. Bubonic and whatnot.”
“Brooklyn’s full of strange little men,” I point out. “But ain’t nobody gone bubonic yet.”
Dro narrows his eyes at me. “You know what I—”
“Look.” I cut him off before he can go into another rant. “I’m just saying, it’s not like every time an ngk shows up, shit goes haywire.” I say it, but his disorganized little presentation has given me something to think about. “Anyway, what I’m more worried about is whatever that thing was that was down there with us.”
“You didn’t get a good look at it?” Riley asks. He’s been pretty quiet this whole time, mostly scowling and grunting as I relayed the past few hours to them.
“It was fast and caught me off guard. Plus the basement was pretty dim.”
“Dead or alive?” Dro asks.
I’ve been tussling with this one since it happened and haven’t come up with a good answer. And I’m the one who’s supposed to know these things. “I’m not totally sure.” Riley grunts irritably, and I ignore him. “The Realtor saw it, so either he’s got the Vision, or the thing’s alive.”
“Or the third possibility,” Riley says.
I get all cold and uncomfortable. I hadn’t wanted to
think about that possibility, so I hadn’t. But I knew it’d come up one way or the other.
“That it’s a Carlos?” Dro says unhelpfully. Riley nods.
“I don’t think . . . I mean . . .” Words are not my friend right at this moment. I want to express that that’s probably not the case, even though it very well might be the case. Instead I just shut the fuck up and order another shot of rum.
“It’s a possibility we need to explore,” Riley says. “Especially considering you just bagged a halfie on New Year’s.” I can’t stand that he’s being so professional and quiet right now; it’s really bugging me. “Might be related.” He’s not even bothering with his shot.
“Fuck,” Dro says. He’s bothering plenty with his shot, and I’m a little worried some of the less completely demolished drunks will start to notice.
“Either way,” I point out, “there’s no need to get all shook.”
“Yeah,” Dro says as if I were talking about someone else.
“True.”
T
hing is, I dress pretty slick. Comes naturally to me, actually. I like the way the crease in my pants feels, the certain swagger that goes with knowing everything fits just right, the perfect puzzle. All that. No matter what kinda supernatural fuckshit is going on, I take my time getting dressed in the morning. Not to the point of obsessing over it all, mind you, certainly not in any kind of teenybopper way at all. But I relish sliding each button into place, feeling the whole package that is me come together.
Tonight I take special pleasure in it. I’m a little extra slick from the three rum shots taken straight to the head. A sultry rumba blazes from my little stereo. My shoes are shiny; my hat fits just right. Each element complements the other, and when I hit the street, the weirdly warm end-of-winter wind seems to carry my dapper ass along down the block. When you come dressed correct, the whole world moves with you on whatever divine mission you set out on, even if that mission is making time with some fine forbidden piece of ass that you should really know better than to mess with.
The Red Edge is a classy spot. True to its name, the
inside is all varying shades of dark crimson; it’s mostly candlelit and full of long, flowing curtains and surly bar maidens. Fortunately, David’s not here—probably will never come back again, now that I think about it. I strut in feeling good, great actually, and there’s Sasha, perched like a sad and gorgeous little bird at a table in the corner. I order a rum and Coke and a red wine and sit at her table, ignoring the little rumbling of uncertainty in my stomach.
She looks down at the wine and then up at me. She’s more beautiful than she was in the picture. The smile has been replaced with a pout, and a miasma of sorrow is on her like a fancy perfume. It stays there for about two seconds after we make eye contact, and then there’s nothing, and I remember: she’s like me. She immediately knows what I am. And she knows I can see her, see all the spinning satellites of her fears and pleasures dance through the air. And what’s more, she can see me and mine.
For half a beat, I trace the tangled web that stretched between us before we even met—the one that begins and ends with me murdering her brother. Then I come to my senses and suck it all back inside me and it’s gone.
I search her eyes, hopefully not with the frenzy I feel, to see what she has seen, but she gives me nothing. Or perhaps that glow that I want to drink into me and succumb to has blurred my senses. Either way, the next thing that happens is we both smile. It’s a true smile, an admission of the explosive awkwardness that just passed between us, and it makes me happy in a way I’m not even sure what to do with. The bar spins around us: bad nights and mediocre nights and epic life-changing nights—they all play out like tiny television shows, sending their scattered bursts of light into the atmosphere.
I could give a fuck.
This woman, this
woman,
is looking back at me and truly seeing me. Even if it is in a way that requires both of us to put up all of our guards and retreat into our innermost sanctums—what a feeling:
to be seen
. Acknowledged. Finally, the pulsing between us settles into a more manageable kind of awkward, and she takes a sip of her wine and says, “Mmmm, why, thank you, sir.”
I raise an eyebrow in a bid to look dashing and nod. “It is my pleasure.”
I want to tell her everything.
I want to swash it all onto the table and let it do what it does, all the unruly, troubling information, because I can’t bear the thought of holding on to it for another second. But I also can’t bear the thought of this moment right here mutating into some horror show. I can’t. There will be trouble ahead; this is certain. But I want this right now to be what it is: two people find each other in a crowded room, in a crowded world, and connect.
I let the moment pass, allow the confession to die on my tongue, and then I smile at her.
Sasha rests her chin on one hand and says, very slowly, like she’s weighing each word as it comes: “Maybe . . . we should agree . . . not to . . . look too deep . . . for now?”
Yes. I chose correctly. This is not the time. Plus, she clearly has her own secrets to keep, which gives me some sense of balance at least. I nod. “Agreed.”
Another silence follows. It’s one I could just sit and simmer in for days. A warm glow may or may not be emanating from our table, and I wonder if other people will start to notice. She’s wearing a loose red top, one of those amoebaesque female fashion thingies that somehow hangs just right, revealing just enough but never enough. Seems to flow with her movements—a mostly solid, teasing little cloud more than an article of clothing. Her skin is a
few shades darker than her brother’s with only the slightest hint of gray. Her mouth starts small, when she’d had it squeezed into the mourning pout, but when she smiles, the damn thing expands all the way across her face and looms large like the moon. Her black hair is pulled back beneath a headband and then explodes out and down to her bare shoulders in twirly strands. A blue necklace wraps around her slender neck and dangles between her breasts. Her breasts. The top slopes peek out from behind her swirling shirt, and I imagine them bouncing in front of my face while she rides me.
“Are you looking at my breasts, sir?”
I look up at her. She’s smiling. “I was, yeah. Were you looking at mine?”
“No!”
“Because you can if you want to.” She laughs and swats me off. It’s stupid, really, and I’m pretty terrible at flirting, but somehow, it doesn’t matter. We’re flowing along like two leaves in a river. It’s a corny river, but I don’t care. I’m just happy to be here and that she’s my other leaf. The twisted universe has conspired to give me this moment and this night and those eyes looking back at mine, all amid the hurricane of infestations and betrayals and possibly imminent doom, and I will take what’s mine. I’ll be Baba Eddie and this’ll be my death stick, and I’ll milk it for every sweet, lethal drag.
Sasha’s looking at me more seriously now. “How did you find me?” I open my mouth, but she throws up a single finger and stops me. “No. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
I make a fair-enough face and wait because she looks like she has more to say.
Sasha sips at the wine again, looking like she’s enjoying
making me wait. “Let’s instead talk about something utterly mundane and ridiculous, shall we?”
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all night.”
“Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we are just two normal people who met in a bar.”
“Do we like each other or are we just passing time?”
“That remains to be seen, I suppose.”
“I see. Well, fancy meeting you here.”
“Ugh!” she moans with an exaggerated eye roll. “You’re terrible at this!”
“All right, all right. Give me a chance to get the hang of it, jeez! What do you do . . . for a living?”
She puts her serious face back on. “I am a contract . . . negotiator.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know! I just made something up. Stop! Let me try again.” I nod at her to go ahead. “I am a construction worker.”
“Me too!” I say.
“No!”
“Yes! I construct.”
“You’re not even taking this seriously at all.”
“What’s your name?”
When she says it, everything gets quiet again. The bar, Park Slope with its boutiquey avenues, the trembling night and all that fresh winter air—the whole world around us takes a breath. Also, I’m pleased she didn’t lie. “And yours?”
“Carlos Delacruz.” I wonder if the universe performed similar acrobatics for her. Probably not, but women seem to roll in a whole different slipstream of flirtation from men, so I don’t give it too much thought.
Her eyes narrow like she’s telling me a secret. “From the cross.”
“Ah, you speak Spanish?”
She smiles and makes a guilty little
mezza-mezza
wave with one hand. “Un poquito. ¿Y tú?” The accent’s not a native speaker’s, but it’s not bad either.
“Sí. Do you know where you’re from?”
She looks downcast, shaking those curlicues back and forth. “Not a clue. You?”
“The folks who found me . . .” I slow down, realizing I have to tread carefully here not to give away too much. “. . . decided I was Puerto Rican. And it feels right. But, honestly, no.”
Now we both sit for a few seconds in the sadness of our own torn histories. I imagine each of our sorrows hanging over our heads, and then I see them merge into one and disperse away like a puff of smoke. I’m just thinking that it actually worked, and a swell of pleasure seems to descend, when Sasha looks up with almost tears in her eyes. “I have to go,” she says, and then she’s gone and the converged cloud of despair settles over me like a bad dream.
* * *
Once again, Herodotus is not cutting it. All those damn weird stories just can’t force out the single burning question: why (the fuck) would (fucking) Trevor send his own murderer to protect his (gorgeous fucking) sister? I find that I’m actually angry at the guy for the utter illogic of his decision. And he, he’s safely off in the deeper-than-death netherworld, probably some blissed-out cloud of ether mingling with the cosmos, and I am here, burdened with this irrational, inexplicable quandary.
That asshole.
I switch to poetry. Perhaps one of the Nuyorican masters will do the trick. My eyes glance over the dancing
stanzas of delicate and ruthless indictments, tragedies, revolutions, love affairs . . . but my mind returns to Sasha. And then, less pleasingly, to her damn brother. I’ve found my job is so much easier, moves so smoothly, when I don’t get into questions of right and wrong. The Council wants someone to be ended, I end them. It’s usually pretty clear why—basically if an afterlifer is minding theirs and staying out of trouble, they won’t be dealt with. If they start acting the fool, begging for attention, well, they know the Council will come calling in the form of some long-legged, blade-carrying motherfucker like myself. And really, bringing a bunch of college kids into the Underworld? Who does that? It’s an ignorant-ass move that’s bound to attract attention one way or the other.
There’s a little voice, somewhere in the back of my mind. It’s tiny, really. But it’s gnawingly aware of how ridiculous all of this is. Who’s the Council to decide what’s the proper amount of shenanigans a ghost can participate in? Why should they get to regulate that delicate line between the living and the dead?
This is why my job is easier if I don’t think too hard. These questions lead nowhere productive, obviously, because now I’m thinking about the inevitable moment when some minister up in the Council realizes Sasha’s an errant soul, an unacceptable ambiguity that must be brought in and destroyed. And then to the inevitable moment when Sasha realizes that I am a deceitful bastard who has no right whatsoever to woo or even speak to her. Does she even know her brother’s crossed over into fully dead status? Her whole countenance spoke of mourning, but that could be at his disappearance, not necessarily his death.
Too. Many. Questions.
I toss the poetry book and pick up a mystery novel,
read three lines, and realize that’s not gonna cut it either. Finally, as dawn whispers in through my windows, I give up and just settle into a confused, star-crossed stupor until sleep comes, and then I dream of killing Trevor, again and again and again . . .