The Lazarus Heart (11 page)

Michele wakes up in a place that smells like disinfectant and mold and latex. He's lying on a bare metal table and there's insane light, white and blinding light that stabs at his eyes and makes his head hurt even worse. He's dizzy and sick and only wants to go back to sleep. Michele closes his eyes, shuts out the hateful light, and then the voice says, "It's time for us to talk,
Michael"

He's trying to think of what to say, something nasty and appropriate-something Robin would say-when he hears a brittle, snapping noise. Suddenly his sinuses are filled with the scorching reek of ammonia. He coughs and gags as the last merciful shreds of oblivion are driven from his reach and there's nothing left but the light hanging above him and the cold against his bare skin. And the voice.

"There," it says. "You can understand me now?" Michele tries to answer but his mouth and throat are too dry, not a drop of spit, and his tongue feels two times too big to be of any use.

"Just nod if you understand what I'm saying," the voice says, so Michele nods. He has realized that his hands and feet are tied firmly to the table with wide leather straps. Then there is a glass of lukewarm water being pressed to his lips and he swallows a mouthful.

"The sedative does that sometimes. It'll pass soon and you'll be able to speak."

The glass returns and this time Michele takes a deeper drink, notices that the water tastes faintly of chlorine, like swimming pool water. But it feels like heaven going down his aching throat. As soon as the glass is removed he tries to speak, but there's only an unintelligible rasping wheeze where the words should be.

"Like I said, it'll pass," the voice of the man tells him. He can dimly make out the man's form now, glimpsed through the glare of the light and his tearing eyes.

"Where am I?" Michele croaks. The form moves back a little, out of the glare just enough that its face begins to solidify, its features begin swimming slowly into focus. A thin and haggard face, a face of a very tired young man who looks years older than his age. Michele blinks again, then sees the man's eyes, flat blue-gray eyes like a stormy January afternoon sky, eyes at once cold and filled with the threat of violence.

"I ask the questions," the man says matter-of-factly.

"Is this..." Michele begins, but he has to swallow, his tongue working up a few precious drops of spit to wet his throat before he can continue. "Is it a hospital?"

"No," the man says. "But I did say that
I'll
be asking the questions, didn't I? You should save your strength. You're going to need it, Michael."

"Don't... don't call me that." Michele closes his eyes, remembering the face from Père An-toine, the rain-bedraggled hair and the sting in his neck, fear rushing up to overwhelm the confusion. It doesn't matter where he is, he knows. He's somewhere bad, somewhere
very
bad he shouldn't be.

"It
is
your name, isn't it? It is the name your parents gave to you." Now there is a small black flashlight in the man's hands. He uses it to examine Michele's eyes, just like a doctor, but Michele knows now the man isn't a doctor.

"It's not... my name anymore," Michele tells him, and closes his burning eyes when

the probing fingers and black flashlight are taken away. "My name's Michele." "But that's a girl's name, and you're not a girl, are you?" the man asks.

Michele ignores the question, as he has so many times in the past. "What are you going to do to me?" he asks. The man sighs loudly, and

Michele feels the sudden gust of the man's breath blow cool across his bare chest. "I am going to ask you questions."

"Is that all you're going to do? Ask me some questions?"

The man doesn't answer this time. Michele pulls cautiously at the straps at his wrists and ankles. The hard leather cuts into his skin like the blade of a dull knife.

"There's no point in trying to get loose. I'd just tie you down again. You must know that."

Michele stops wrestling with the restraints and moves his tongue across chapped lips that taste like sweat and lipstick. He swallows again, careful to be sure he has control of his voice before he speaks.

"If you weren't afraid of me," he says, "you wouldn't have tied me up in the first place." In response the man makes a sudden, dry sound that's part cough and part angry huff, then slaps Michele hard. Michele's head snaps sideways, smacks roughly against the cold metal tabletop. His mouth fills with the taste of his own blood.

"I have to take precautions,
boy,
but don't underestimate me, and don't overestimate yourself." The man pauses and Michele can tell that he's panting now, his breath coming out fast and hard, furious staccato gasps and wheezes like a winded animal or a frustrated old woman.

"If I thought you posed
any
immediate threat to me or to anyone else I'd have killed you in that fucking filthy alley. There could have been cyanide in that needle, if that's what I'd wanted, just as easy.
Easier."

The man pauses, gasps and wheezes his exasperation, and because Michele doesn't know anything else to say, because he's already pretty sure there's no way he's going to walk away from this, he says, "You're crazy, aren't you?"

Growling, the man lunges into the glare of the surgical light so that its glow crowns his head like a mad saint's nimbus. He seizes Michele's face in both his huge, clammy hands, one for either side, his thumbs poised above Michele's eyes like snakes readying to strike. The man's face is only inches from Michele's now, muscles straining against the rage inside. The man's breath smells bad, like rotten vegetables and wintergreen mints.

"You're going to have to do a lot better than that," he says, and his words seem to cling wetly to Michele's cheeks in spatters of spittle. "Jesus! Do you really think I haven't
heard
that before? You think that's all it's going to take to mess with my head?"

The man's hold tightens, his hands like a vise, steel jaws winding themselves closed. Michele thinks that maybe they could crush his skull like a punky old melon if that was all the man wanted, if he wanted this to end so soon, so easily. But Michele knows that the man doesn't want it to be over yet, that what the man wants could take a long, long time and be a lot worse than dying.

"It's just that I've known crazy men before," Michele says, having to strain against the grinding force of the man's hands to move his mouth. "They sounded a lot like you."

"July second, 1947,
motherfucker!" the man screams into Michele's face, as if that's supposed to mean something to him, supposed to explain all this away. "July second, 1947, you deviant little son of a bitch! You
tell
me what the fuck fell out of the sky that night if you want to live! If you even want the
chance
to get out of here alive!"

Michele swallows and thinks of his stepfather and his shitty little life in Shreveport, thinks of the freedom he felt stepping off the bus into New Orleans, of Robin and the others. He closes his eyes.

"They have medication for people like you," he whispers. The hand on the right

side of Michele's face releases its grip and there's a brief moment's relief from the pain before the fist smashes down across the bridge of his nose and the world mercifully swirls away again.

The man stares helplessly down at the broken, bleeding thing he's made of the pretty boy's face, the blood oozing bright from the nostrils, spilling to the shiny silver tabletop to make scarlet pools on either side of his head. The unconscious face still painted like a carnival mask, mocking him with its lie of femininity. Mocking his weakness, the sad fact that he could be so easy to manipulate. Even after all his work, all his careful tests and observations, that he could be made to doubt himself so easily. He looks down at the blood smeared across the knuckles of his right hand, his fingers still clenched, his nails digging themselves into his own flesh. The red stain of the boy's tainted blood says,
You are so weak. You are so very, very weak.

The man steps away from the examination table and almost trips over a chair. It was such a risk, taking two in one night, first the transsexual, dead now and awaiting

its burial, and now this molly boy, not even a larva yet, just a fucking child whore playing dress-up. And the man knows he's not
ever
supposed to bring anything back to the house except the ones who have gone across, all the way across. He's broken one of his own most sacred rules because of the dreams and the things he saw from his window, the bird-things in the clouds above the river, above the city. Because he needed answers and he was too afraid to wait.

You get scared and you get sloppy,
he thinks.
You get sloppy and then you get dead.

"July second," he says quietly, and laughs a cold laugh at his own stupidity. His hands rub nervously back and forth across his trousers. "This one doesn't even know who I am, much less does it know July second. It doesn't know
shit!"

He paces around the table, circling the boy like a hungry but indecisive shark, wondering how he ever thought this child could be of even the slightest use to him, knowing that it was a choice made from necessity, from blind desperation. If only he could drive the awful dream images away long enough to think more clearly or if he could figure out why it feels like something has changed tonight. Why after so many years of careful, painstaking planning and plotting the rhythm of Their movements, rhythms as predictable as tides or seasons or the phases of the moon, why suddenly
everything
seems so utterly changed. He cannot even remember precisely when he was first cognizant of this new sense of urgency, sometime after he brought the transsexual into his house, sometime after the tests and questions began.

Something from the sky, perhaps.
The thunder?
he thinks, trying to remember what he'd asked the child on the table about the thunder and if it might have been important. The man glances at the clock on the wall and realizes that fully three quarters of an hour have passed since he knocked the boy unconscious.
How? How could it have been that fucking long?
He checks his watch to be sure.

The man stops circling and stands very still. He closes his eyes, concentrating on a calm, small place he keeps hidden deep in his soul, a spot so deep They could never find it.
Something for a rainy day
he always thinks whenever he needs to remember that part of himself, and right now the rain is drumming hard and icy against the window of the room. There's peace in that space inside him, or as close as he will ever get to peace again. If he can have only a shred of that peace, he can get this shit under control again. And control is all that matters.

The man stretches the calm into something bigger and wraps that thing about him. He stands and listens to his heart and the clock on the wall, the rain coming down outside and the wet, uneasy breathing of the boy on the table. And slowly, but as

steadily as the ticking cadence of the sounds filling his ears, he begins to see the simple solution written in the incontestable language of his resolve.

The man first saw Jared Poe two weeks after he'd killed the female-to-male transsexual who'd been interviewed on television. He'd always believed in providence, or something that might as well be providence, so he understood when he saw the flier thumbtacked to a bulletin board in the French Quarter coffeehouse. He was having a cup of black and bitter African coffee at his usual spot in Kaldi's when he noticed the piece of paper, black ink photocopied onto marigold yellow paper and stuck up alongside a dozen other fliers advertising rock bands and lost cats. He pulled the piece of paper off the wall and read it while his coffee cooled enough that he could drink it. pained EXPRESSION was printed large across the top in a severe Gothic script. Beneath that was a photograph, poorly reproduced, of a figure on its knees, head bowed.

Someone else stood above with a bullwhip. The man was unable to identify the gender of either person.

He smoothed the flier out flat on the top of his table and read it carefully, repeatedly, so he would be sure not to miss anything important. Besides the heading and the photograph, there were a couple of paragraphs clipped from a review in the
Village Voice
announcing the discovery of "the worthy successor to Robert Mapplethorpe, Jared Poe of New Orleans." The article went on to describe the photographer's work as "sublimely twisted" and "derived but certainly not derivative... [Poe] understands the subtleties to be mastered in the complete deconstruction of gender and gender roles." There was a Warehouse District address printed below the photograph, a gallery called PaperCut, dates and times. The man, who was still calling himself Joseph Lethe then, folded the flier neatly and slipped it into the front pocket of his shirt.

The next Saturday he took a cab to the opening of Jared Poe's exhibition. PaperCut wasn't a
real
gallery, of course, just an empty old warehouse with a little (and
only
a little) of the grime scraped away, a sign hung discreetly out front. Inside were maybe fifty or sixty people and a maze of pegboards on which Jared Poe's sepia-toned photographs were displayed, each matted on brown paper and framed in rusty steel or shiny chrome.

Joseph Lethe stuffed a five into the Lucite donation box by the door and kept to the fringe of the scattered clots of people milling through the exhibition. His heart had started beating fast when the taxi driver had turned off Felicity onto Market Street, and

now he was drunk on the adrenaline and his racing pulse. Here he was, walking among Them and Their acolytes, androgynous bodies in latex and leather and fishnet stockings. Faces painted white as skulls, eyes as dark as empty sockets. Bits of metal and bone protruding from lips and eyebrows, jewelry like the debris of an industrial accident. They took no notice of him, the assassin in Their midst, just carried on with Their preening and posing. He had never felt half so powerful as he did at that moment, surrounded by the enemy and so clearly invisible to Them.