The Postmortal (15 page)

One of them spoke. “What’s your birthday, buddy?”

I turned and ran. I made it three steps in my stupor before they dragged me down. There was an alley between two town houses, used to store garbage cans. They pulled me into it, laughing the whole time. One of them held a knife to my throat.

“Pull up his sleeve,” the head troll said. He was the only one of them to speak.

Another one of them sat me up and pushed the sleeve of my shirt up over my shoulder.

“Take my wallet,” I pleaded. “You can have my phone and my tablet too.”

“I don’t want your wallet. I want your birthday.”

“It’s October 1, 2000.”

His smile dissolved. The green on his face grew a shade darker, and his entire head swelled with anger. He pressed his nightmare face into mine. He grimaced. He had long, thin, nasty teeth. The kind that could bite cleanly through an eyeball.

“I said,
what is your fucking birthday
?”

“Please don’t do this. Take anything you want.”

He pressed the knife into my upper arm.

“If you don’t tell us your real birthday,” he said, “we’ll write the whole alphabet on your body.”

I succumbed. “October 1, 1990.”

The head troll began cutting. I started to scream, but they covered my mouth.

“Stop squirming. Don’t make us cross it out and start over.”

I stopped resisting. My system went limp and shock took over as they carved the numbers and slash marks into me. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the blade digging into my arm just below the shoulder. Another knife was coolly introduced to my neck.

“Open your eyes. Look at us.”

I did as I was told. Three hideous green faces were staring at me, still grinning, imprinting themselves into both my flesh and my memory. I was helpless to stop them. I thought about my apartment. I thought about the Texan’s gun I never bothered to donate to the police. I thought about it sitting inconveniently under a pile of shirts on the top shelf of my closet. Useless. Impotent.

“Having fun yet?” the troll asked me. They finished and let me fall to the cracked pavement. “We’ll see you again.”

I saw them turn tail and run west, screaming with highpitched laughter, the backs of their green heads swimming downstream in a river of darkness. I looked at my shoulder and saw blood gushing out. I tried to scream, but my mouth wouldn’t open. A handful of people saw me but assumed I was a homeless person and kept walking right on by. At last I summoned a low groan that was miserable enough to persuade one of them to approach me ever so slightly. They saw the blood, and that was all they needed to know. An hour later I was in the hospital being stitched up. A policeman was asking me to describe my assailants in detail. He told me the trolls who attacked me are part of a larger sect called Bridge606, or “Greenies.” He said there are hundreds of them attacking people in the dead of night. He told me he’d call if they ever arrested some of them. Given the current state of the NYPD, I was less than optimistic.

I’m looking at my arm in the mirror now. The stitches only serve to accentuate the trolls’ good knifesmanship:

That’s my birthday, all right. My real birthday. I used to celebrate that date when I was a kid. Now three monsters will forever mock me with it.

 

At night, when I get up to take a leak, I stand at the toilet and can’t help but imagine three green lunatics stationed right outside my bathroom door, ready with smiles and knives for me when I open it back up. I’ve taken to leaving all the doors in my apartment open, and I sing to myself if I ever get too freaked out. But it’s never long before the trolls rush back to the forefront of my mind, laughing and burrowing under my skin.

In bed I hold my bladder for as long as I can stand it, until the agony of holding it in forces me to confront them again and again and again. I take Vicodin and I drink, because it’s all I can do to try to ignore the fear. And the worst part is that I don’t know when this all goes away. I don’t know when this will stop causing me to wake up in an icy sweat, the pillow flattened by my soaking hair. The fear itself becomes this tangible thing that terrifies me, and on and on it goes. I forget about the butchery on my arm until a chance look in the wrong direction reminds me. Then my heart shrieks. The stitches are supposed to come out next week. After that I’ll see a plastic surgeon, though I doubt he can erase the scar entirely. There’ll always be a reminder.

For an hour I tried sleeping with the Texan’s gun under my pillow. But I’m a restless sleeper, so I spent that hour scared that I’d shoot myself in the head. I get up every hour and turn the TV on and leave it on, to give myself the illusion of safe company. Or I sit here and type. But never without looking over my shoulder. They’re always there before I turn, blades at the ready.

 

They took the stitches out yesterday. I ran my fingers across the numerals on my arm. They were raised, the date now embossed on my skin, like what you would see on a fancy business card. I showed Alison when we got back to my place after dinner.

“Oh Jesus, John.”

“Yeah. Not so pretty.”

She ran her fingers over the cuts. I half expected the scars to disappear the moment she grazed my skin.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Depends on who’s touching it.”

“Does it hurt right now?”

“No. Right now it feels pretty great actually.”

“Are you flexing your bicep?”

“No.”

“You are!”

“I swear to God, I’m not.”

“You are, a little bit.”

She kept rubbing the scar, as if it were her own. “I can’t believe this happened to you right after I saw you. I feel terrible. I feel as if I’m bad luck.”

“You’re not bad luck.”

“Oh, but I am.” I watched her face grow dark as she began rummaging through her saddest memories. “My father left my mother a month after I was born. Did I ever tell you that?”

“You did.”

“And the week after I married my ex-husband, he got into a car accident. It shattered five of his vertebrae. He was in pain twenty-four hours a day after that. No drug helped. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t walk ten steps without collapsing in pain. The pain left him angry all the time. Angry at me. Angry at God. Angry at everything. I know it’s irrational that I feel responsible for that. But the way he would look at me as he writhed around on the bed . . . He needed to blame someone, and I was the one who was there. I got that look enough times to start believing I was the one who’d done it to him. And, justified or not, I haven’t shaken that belief. I’m bad luck, John. I’m terrible, rotten luck.”

“You’re not. I found you again, and I found you when I was ready for you and not a moment sooner, and that is
not
bad luck. Quite the opposite.”

She squeezed my arm. I took her opposite arm and leaned in. Every atom in my body split in two. There was no hiding the fact that I loved her again. She smelled it on me.

“Have you thought about me this whole time?”

“No,” I said. “Wouldn’t have done me any good.”

She drew closer. The thirteen-year-old boy in me curled into a squash ball as I awaited her. “Are you thinking about me now?”

“I’m not thinking.”

For twenty-seven years, I had waited. I didn’t wait a second longer. For the first night in a very long time, no green men with knives were waiting outside my door.

 

Yesterday morning I received a call from a police precinct in Midtown. I initially assumed they were calling to see if I could donate to their benevolent association, which they do about once a week. You can be rude to every telemarketer and feed spammer in the world, except the ones working for the NYPD. They know this. It’s very sneaky on their part.

“I told you last week,” I said. “I love you guys but I’m not interested.”

“Sir, I’m not calling to solicit donations. You were attacked in the West Village on the night of October 29, correct?”

I stared at my arm. “Yes.”

“We’ve arrested a Greenie here in Midtown, on an unrelated charge, and we want to know if he’s one of your assailants. Would you be willing to try to identify him in a lineup?”

“Yes, I would.”

I got out of bed, put on my clothes, and hustled out of the apartment. I left the Texan’s gun at home, to avoid setting off the metal detector. At some point I should stop referring to it as the Texan’s gun. It’s my gun now. I bring it almost everywhere I go. I only refer to it as his because it makes me feel like a less-aggressive person.

I got down to the precinct, which was as crowded as Penn Station. The temperature inside was, by my estimation, a balmy ninety-five degrees, and about as humid as the bottom of a tar pit. Everything in the station looked like it was made in 1977 and left that way, right down to the coffee mugs and mustaches. Herds of homeless people were being corralled through the halls and into holding pens. Desk cops with too much to do scurried about trying to put out administrative fires. The blotter feed scrolled along at light speed on a monitor above us. I checked in at the main desk.

“I’m here to see a lineup.”

The clerk didn’t even look up. She just pointed to a bench over on the side, which was fully occupied by ten homeless men and a man in a suit with a broken arm. I stood. I took out my tablet and diddled. Two hours later, they called me in.

An older officer took me through the bowels of the precinct, which looked modest on the outside but magically grew into the size of the Pentagon once I entered. He escorted me into a tiny black slot of a room. Two other officers were waiting for me, standing in front of a shaded window.

“Are you ready, Mr. Farrell?” one of them asked me.

“Yes.”

“Before we begin, please note that your assailant may not be among the men we show you today.”

“Okay.”

He threw a switch and the shade opened. Five men stood before me. Only one of them was a Greenie. Second from the left. He was small. Bald. His entire head was painted green. He had short, Chiclet teeth. I didn’t recognize him at all. None of my trolls were in the lineup.

“Sir, do you recognize any of these men?”

The Greenie smiled in our general direction. He wasn’t one of the guys who cut me. I didn’t care. The fact that he smiled was enough. I turned to the officer and lied.

“Yeah, that’s one of them. The Greenie. He’s one of the guys that knifed me.”

They let me go, and I walked home. I regret nothing.

I didn’t tell my dad about the attack. Not a single detail of it—the scar, the lineup, nothing. Thanks to the chilly weather, long sleeves have made the birth brand relatively easy to hide. I didn’t want to distress him. He’s living out the rest of his life in peace and quiet. I didn’t want that tranquility marred with visions of his son being accosted and left for dead in an alley. Since David was born, I’ve known that feeling of worry Dad has always talked about. It doesn’t matter where your child is in life or how he’s doing. You always worry about him. I didn’t want it to consume my dad, so I was determined to leave the incident unmentioned. Turns out it hardly mattered. When I got to his house, he told me the news.

“I have cancer,” he said.

“What? Where?”

“In my pancreas. Worst of the worst.”

“Jesus. Does Polly know?”

“I told her last week when she visited.”

“When did this happen?”

“I got the diagnosis last month.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I wanted to tell you in person. This is the only time we were going to be together.”

“How bad is it?”

“Well, they also found it in my lymph nodes. So it’s spread, which is obviously not good.”

I had kept a positive attitude during the entirety of my mother’s illness, right up until the day she passed away. I vowed to do the same again. “Okay, so what now? How can I help? What’s the treatment?”

“There is no treatment.”

“No chemo? No radiation? They didn’t offer you anything?”

“Eh. They offered chemo. I don’t want it.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want it.”

“But you could beat this. At the very least, you could buy more time.”

“Why would I want that? I saw your mom go through it. I’ll pass.” He took my hand. “This is good, John. This is good. I want this. Hell, I even planned it. For the past three months, I’ve had a slab of bacon and a pint of chocolate ice cream for dinner. I even tried taking up smoking, which is disgusting, by the way. Did you know that cigarettes have almond oil in them? I think that’s just bizarre. You’d think you were puffing on a macaroon.”

“You’re killing yourself?”

“I’m not killing myself. This doesn’t count as suicide. Suicide is when you stick a gun to your head. I’d never dream of doing that. You have to understand: I made a mistake getting this cure. I don’t want it. It’s not that I want to die. It’s that I’m at peace with the idea of it. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve had a good life. I saw my children grow. I saw my grandchildren born, including your son. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And then some! For God’s sake, they found a cure for aging! Isn’t that stunning? I can’t believe I lived to see it. There’s just no way the world is gonna progress much further than that. This is the top, as far as I’m concerned. No, I’ve had a good life, and I’ve had more than my fair share of it. I’m not some depressed old man trying to hang himself. I’m just looking for a gracious exit. A way back to your mom. And here it is. A tumor. A big, fat, lovely tumor. I could kiss the damn thing.”