“You’re doing this because you
want
to be here. You do. With me. But you’re ashamed.”
Ruben frowned. “I’m not ashamed of anything.”
Andy laughed. “Right. Which is why we only touch in the dark. Why you won’t turn the lights on or open the blinds.”
“I’ve been trying to protect you, jackass.”
“Me? Really? From who? Light bulbs? Oso, you hide from everything. You keep everything bottled up. Your whole life you’ve been hunkering down in these bolt-holes while the world happened around you. Keeping yourself in a cage so your hope never gets loose and embarrasses you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Well, here we are, man, the whole goddamn world outside your bottle. I’m right here inviting you to come be in it with me.” Andy extended his hand, but Ruben didn’t take it.
“I don’t need your help.” A lie, and he knew it.
“I need yours.” Andy paused.
“Stop lying to me.” He’d known that first day:
Nobody can be as honest as this guy looks.
“I don’t get why you’re so flipped out, Rube.” Andy held up his hands in defeat. “Look, Marlon’s still solvent. Nothing has happened to that douchebag. I haven’t done anything. I can pull the plug before he’s plugged. If you tell me no, I won’t.”
“Andy, I don’t believe you.” And that was it. Everything. The boy cried wolf because there were wolves.
The boy cried.
Ruben wiped his nose. Oh well. He’d ruin this thing he had with Andy too, like anything he ever touched or cared about.
Congrats, Oso! You’ve won… a new low bar!
The trajectory of his latest failure painted itself so plainly that his disappointment almost felt like relief. Fucking up was his real expertise; it belonged under special skills on his resume. “You’re going to get yourself killed. You want me to watch you get killed. To prove something to your shitty family.”
“No. No, Ruben.” Panic now. “You have nothing to prove.”
“You think you do. It’s like you’re walking backwards. You can’t even see what’s in front of you ’cause you can’t stop watching what you left. You want to be exposed and shamed and drag them all down with you.” Ruben blinked. “And I’m part of that too. Looker, leaper. The dumb thug you fuck for kicks to rub it in their face. Bought and paid for.” He slapped at the tailored suit and the three-hundred-dollar tie.
Andy froze, pinned by the words and obviously upset. “Wait a minute. I never asked you to do anything crooked. I spent a month keeping my nose clean to protect you.”
“Revenge for growing up rich.”
Andy raised the glass, sloshing to the last bit of whiskey, and all his ice gone. “More like the horrible realization that being ‘most likely’ to do anything is a fucking curse, and that everyone is waiting nearby to help you into the mud.”
“Worst part, you think people saying mean shit to you in suburbia is the same thing brown kids get. Boo-hoo, you didn’t get a supermodel handjob when you went skiing in Aspen. Spoiled.”
The tic in Andy’s forehead firmed into a prominent vein. His jaw clamped into two ugly knots at each side of his scowl. He swayed on his feet by the spiral staircase leading up.
Run. Go now. Leave now.
Ruben pressed his feet into the floor so the impulse didn’t take over.
“You know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Andy’s bleary voice sliced like a sword.
“Jesus. Go ahead. Bait the cavemen, genius. Kill ’em all.” Ruben spat back at him. “Spend the rest of your life fucking your friends over, drinking for company, paying for sex.”
“Fuck you.” He swallowed that last mouthful of Scotch like it was worms and Drano.
Medicinal reasons.
Ruben shook his head, but the thought stayed. “I need to leave. Now.”
Andy didn’t like that. “Where’re you gonna go?”
“Nowhere. Away. A walk. Cool off.” A meeting, he should have said, but even that seemed impossible right now.
“It’s ninety degrees outside. Have a—” Andy stopped the words before he said anything stupid. “We should eat. I just need a refill.” Andy tipped the glass back and emptied it down his throat, larynx bobbing.
Just then the living room felt too harsh, the recessed lights blazing as if Andy’s off-stage adversary had set them to broil.
Ruben tried to claim the glass. “I think you’ve had plenty.”
Andy wasn’t having it. “Plenty of nothing. I’m not a drunk, Mr. Oso. I don’t have to watch myself.”
“The fuck did you say to me?” Ruben straightened. “What exactly did you just say?”
“That was outta line.”
“All of this is out of line.”
Andy put the glass down on a tread of the spiral staircase. “Wait—”
“I never shoulda moved into this place,
pintón
. Taken this job.”
“Ruben.”
Ruben wavered, not sure which step to take. “I never shoulda left Florida. Fucking brother. Fucking Hawaiian shirts.” He shook Andy’s hands off him. “Fuck you, Richie Rich.”
At the bar, Ruben dropped a handful of ice into a fresh glass and scooped up the decanter. For whatever reason, the smell made him feel like puking, but still he wanted that poison in his belly and blood.
HALT
, said Peach from her grave—and she was right.
“Stop it.” Andy took hold of his arm again. “Enough.”
Ruben raised the glass and toasted Andy’s felt-soft eyes, now wide with worry and anger. He brought the glass to his face, but instead of drinking it, he inhaled, filling his lungs with the peppery fumes. Saliva swamped his mouth as the drunk woke up in him and staggered toward the light.
“You’re not that person, Ruben. This isn’t who you are.” Andy pleading.
“Really? I used to think this was the worst addiction, but I was wrong.” Blink. Inhale again. “I was wrong. Everything is wrong.”
“Ruben, this is not my fault.”
Match, meet fuse.
“No.” Ruben stared through the alcohol at him. “The fault is all mine.” He lowered the glass and inhaled again as he bumped the rim against his dry lower lip, still swollen from the scrape of Andy’s stubble.
If he tipped it an inch, he could take the swallow. “Well, I quit.”
“A year, a year, Ruben. You’ve been sober for a year.”
“You don’t even know what that means.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I want to know.” Andy swallowed hard on nothing. “Ruben, talk to me and we’ll figure this out, huh? You and me.” His eyes glittered, wet.
Ruben scowled at the liquor, his jaw wobbling with a grief that froze his blood.
A born loser fighting fate.
Maybe that was the mistake: he’d wasted a whole year, squandered all the booze and blackouts he coulda had. He’d missed out on all those emergency room visits and drunk tanks where someone else woulda cleaned up his messes for him. What was he thinking?
“Ruben, stop.” Andy grabbed at the glass. Scotch sloshed over their knuckles and splashed the clear bear skull box.
“I already quit. You can’t make me do anything.”
“I love you.” Andy took the glass and Ruben let him.
“Me too.” Backing away, Ruben shook his head and exhaled in a sad nonlaugh. “Which makes no fucking difference to anything.”
I have to leave or I’ll cry or I’ll hit him or I’ll lose control and he’ll see exactly what I am: an open drain that leads into a sewer.
“I mean it.” Andy’s face broke, the gleaming stare shaken. “All of you. Every part. We’re so lucky.”
“Not me. Speak for yourself.” Ruben dragged himself to the foyer and pressed the only available button: Down.
Andy pleaded silently, a tic in his handsome, gee-whiz jaw.
“I guess that’s why I’m thirsty. I was born empty.” Ruben’s teeth chattered, and he wiped his mouth to hide it, wishing he was dead or drunk in Miami. Same difference. His gaze roamed over Andy, trying to memorize him standing there crumbling beside the bear skull.
So this is what it feels like to commit suicide.
“Do you know how lucky we are, Oso? Do you know how happy I am to have found you?”
“I know plenty.” Ruben stepped onto the elevator without turning, without looking back.
Sodom and Gomorrah.
He didn’t need any more salt to rub in his wounds. “I know what you do… to me.”
Andy moved forward to block the doors from closing automatically. “No. No you don’t. You’re terrified of being happy. Ruben!”
“Stop.” He couldn’t look Andy in the face. “Sorry, man.” The delayed elevator squawked in frustration. “I’m sorry for everything.”
I’ll never see him again.
All he saw was a world full of poison, rows of bottles waiting to drown whatever this feeling was.
Andy took a shuddering breath and wiped his mouth. “Ruben, you said, you said. All your steps should take you somewhere. Talk to me. Put your foot down.”
Ruben shut his eyes so he wouldn’t see and get stuck with the memory. “No. Please. Have the last fucking word. You obviously need it more than I do.”
Then the doors closed behind him, unseen, on Andy Bauer, unseen, and he descended blind in the gleaming, seamless box all the way back down into the dirt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NOTHING’S SO
bad that a drink won’t make it worse.
Ruben woke up on the filthy tiles of the Port Authority bus terminal with a mouth full of decomposing mice and a head like an infected molar.
He hadn’t had a blackout or a hangover in, well, a year come to think of it. Funny too, how in all the no-drinking he’d developed complete amnesia about the ruinous downside of sleeping in a gutter, and this time he’d done it without the booze.
Score one for AA.
At least he made it to the bus station john before he yacked. He tried not to leave anything horrific behind for the maintenance crew. He stumbled out into the blinding light and waved down a gypsy cab. “Hundred and Ninth. East side. Off Lex.”
He hoped he had money to pay but couldn’t bring himself to check. He pressed his pounding skull into the shitty upholstery without opening his eyes.
Stroke of luck: he had fifty-seven bucks in his wallet, so the driver didn’t have to kill him.
Second stroke, his keys were still at the bottom of his pocket, and he didn’t puke on the stairs. He did, however, have to pause on the fourth floor landing so his stomach didn’t come out of his nostrils.
His first indication that something was wrong sat in the hall flicking its tail on the doormat: his brother’s tortoiseshell tabby, pawing at the apartment.
“How did you get….” He stopped when he saw the yellow police tape stretched across the door. “Out?”
The cat stood and arched as Ruben reached the end of the hallway, then stalked around itself in an irritated circle, mewing to be let inside the crime scene.
How had they found this apartment? Nothing connected Andy to this place.
Gouges at the locks and door frame painted a pretty clear picture. He hadn’t slept here in three weeks, and Charles was at his girlfriend’s, so who knew when it had happened or been reported?
Without stopping to think or check inside, Ruben scooped up the cat, jogged downstairs, and hailed a yellow cab. Holding the freaked animal on his lap, he dialed his brother’s phone. No answer.
The detector.
He’d installed the rescued CO unit from the penthouse in his brother’s place. He needed to warn someone.
On a hunch he went to Daria’s place. She buzzed him up way too fast to be safe, but when he got upstairs she was crying and panicky. She took the cat without question before Ruben asked, “Have you seen him?”
“Office.” She spoke into the cat’s motley fur. “They hit the office.”
Ruben nodded, but his feet were already in motion.
Another taxi. His brother’s phone still went to voice mail. He wanted to call Peach, but no phone reached that far.
The afterlife has the worst cell reception.
He kicked himself for not finding a new sponsor when he needed one so badly. At this hour, the traffic alternated between caterpillar crawls and breakneck progress, making Ruben straight-up nauseated by the time he paid the twenty-dollar fare and emerged onto the curb in front of Empire Security.
Ruben climbed the creaking stairs, wishing for the hundredth time that he had some kind of weapon. Some bodyguard.
The bright nail salon looked empty: a couple girls gossiping at the back. As he passed they turned to eye him suspiciously. Whatever had happened wasn’t any secret in the building.
Empire Security had been disemboweled with a crowbar, the guts of its little office exposed to view. The hollow door had been split and pushed in, cracking the rickety frame. Inside, the receptionist’s area had been pulverized into a jumble of papers, splintered electronics, and cracked particle board. One of the chairs was stuck in the sheetrock wall near the ceiling.
Ruben tried to close the door, but only the lower hinge was still attached. “Oh.” He propped it shut.
“Rube.” Charles’s weary voice came from the little inner office. “Yeah. Not so good.”
Ruben leaned and saw him back there. Charles sat in the wreckage with the stunned annoyance of a dropped infant. Today’s shirt was tangerine, short-sleeved and covered in dolphins. He had a black eye and his fingers were taped.
Ruben waited. “I called.”
“My cellphone’s dead. It’s in here somewhere, busted, and I need to get a replacement, but I been too busy getting assaulted.”
“You’re okay?” Ruben pointed at the purple eye.
Charles chuckled with grim finality. “Not so bad. You kept saying there was something weird about Bauer.”
“Andy didn’t do this.”
Did he?
Ruben hated himself for even thinking it.
“Someone did. Someone wants to have a messy conversation with that asshole.”
Carefully as he could, Ruben picked his way across the rubble. Andy might be in serious danger. He hated himself for worrying. For a lot of things.
“S’my fault. I saw the money is all. You warned me, but I kept thinking you were paranoid. Divorce. Drinking. I figured at this point, your instincts were shot. I didn’t pay attention.” Charles opened and shut his mouth, sad fish.
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re not amateurs, these guys, I can tell you that. And not any kind of figment of Bauer’s imagination.” Charles pointed at his swollen eye socket.