He could no longer tell his dreams from his waking life. The things around him began to take on the appearance of stage props made from cardboard. Other people—pedestrians—looked like shadow creatures giving off a stinky perfume.
In the basement room where he slept, there was, leaning against the wall, a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, and one night after dark, in a dreamlike hallucinatory fever, he took it across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to a park along the Mississippi, where he hid hotly shivering behind a tree until the right sort of prosperous person walked by. Quinn felt as if he were under orders to do what he was about to do. The man he chose wore a T-shirt and jeans and seemed fit but not so strong as to be dangerous, and after rushing out from the shadows, Quinn hit him with the baseball bat in the back of his legs. He had aimed for the back of the legs so he wouldn’t shatter the guy’s kneecaps. When Quinn’s victim fell down, Quinn reached into the man’s trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet and ran away with it, dropping the Slugger into the river as he crossed the bridge.
Back in his friend’s basement, Quinn examined the wallet’s contents. His hands were trembling again, and he couldn’t see properly, and he wasn’t sure he was awake, but he could make out that the name on the driver’s license was Benjamin Takemitsu. The man didn’t look Japanese in the driver’s license photo, but Quinn didn’t think much about it until he’d finished counting the cash, which amounted to $321, an adequate sum for a few days’ relief. At that point he gazed more closely at the photo and saw that Takemitsu appeared to be intelligently thoughtful. What had he done to this man? Familiar pain flared behind Quinn’s knees and in his neck, punishment he recognized that he deserved, and the pain pushed out everything else.
He called his boyfriend in Seattle. In a panic he told him that he had robbed someone named Benny Takemitsu, that he had used a baseball bat. The boyfriend said, “You’ve had a bad dream, Matty. That didn’t happen. You would never do such a thing. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After that he lay awake wondering what had become of the person he had once been, the one who had gone to Africa. To the ceiling he said, “I am no longer myself.” He did not know who this new person was, the man whom he had become, but when he finally fell asleep, he saw in his dream one of those shabby castoffs with whom you wouldn’t want to have any encounters, any business at all, someone who belonged on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign that read HELP ME. The man was crouched behind a tree in the dark, peering out with feverish eyes. His own face was the face of the castoff.
Somehow he would have to make it up to Benny Takemitsu.
In the Inner Circle, when Quinn entered, Black Bird did not look up. He was seated in his usual place, and once again his finger was traveling down the page. Cymbeline, this time, a play that Quinn had never read.
“It’s you,” Black Bird said.
“Yes,” Quinn said.
“Did you bring a book of your own?”
“No.”
“All right,” Black Bird said. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”
He then issued elaborate instructions to Quinn about where in the men’s room to put the money, and when he, Black Bird, would retrieve it. The entire exchange took over half an hour, though the procedure hardly seemed secret or designed to fool anyone. When Quinn finally returned to his basement room, he had already gulped down two of the pills, and his relief soon grew to a great size. He felt his humanity restored until his mottled face appeared before him in the bathroom mirror, and then he realized belatedly what terrible trouble he was in.
Two days later he disappeared.
2
That was as far as I got whenever I tried to compose an account of what happened to Matty Quinn—my boyfriend, my soulmate, my future life—the man who mistakenly thought I was a tightwad. I was very thrifty in Ethiopia, convinced that Americans should not spend large sums in front of people who owned next to nothing. But to Matty I would have given anything. Upon his return to Minneapolis he had called me up and texted and e-mailed me with these small clues about the medical ordeal he was going through, and I had not understood; then he had called to say that he had robbed this Takemitsu, and I had not believed him. Then he disappeared from the world, from his existence and mine.
Two weeks later the investigating officer in the Minneapolis Police Department (whom I had contacted in my desperation) told me that I could certainly come to survey the city if I wished to. After all, this Officer Erickson said, nothing is stopping you from trying to find your friend, although I understand that your permanent home is in Seattle and you do not know anyone here. It’s a free country, so you’re welcome to try. However, circumstances being what they are, I wouldn’t get your hopes up if I were you. The odds are against it. People go missing, he said. Addicts especially. The street absorbs them. Your friend might be living in a ditch.
He did not say these words with the distancing sarcasm or condescension that straight men sometimes use on queers. He simply sounded bored and hopeless.
Matthew Quinn. First he was Matt. Then he was Matty. These two syllables formed on my tongue as I spoke his name repeatedly into his ear and then into his mouth. That was before he was gone.
This is how we’d met: I had come by the clinic, the one where he worked, to deliver some medical supplies from the company I was then working for, and I saw him near a window whose slatted light fell across the face of a feverish young woman who lay on a bed under mosquito netting. She was resting quietly with her eyes closed and her hand rising to her forehead in an almost unconscious gesture. She was very thin. You could see it in her skinny veined forearms and her prominent cheekbones. On one cheekbone was a J-shaped scar.
Close by, a boy about nine years old sat on a chair, watching her. I had the impression that they had both been there, mother and son, for a week or so. Four other patients immobilized by illness were in other beds scattered around the room. Outside a dog barked in the local language, Amharic, and the air inside remained motionless except for some random agitation under a rattling ceiling fan. The hour was just past midday, and very hot.
That’s when I noticed Quinn: he was approaching the woman with a cup in his hand, and after getting himself underneath the mosquito netting, he supported her head as he helped her drink the water, or medicine (I couldn’t see what it was), in the cup. Then he turned and, still under the mosquito netting, spoke to the boy in Amharic. His Amharic was better than mine, but I could understand it. He was saying that the boy’s mother would be all right but that her recovery would take some time.
The boy nodded.
It was a small, simple gesture of kindness, his remembering to speak to that child. Not everybody would go to the effort. Even when the woman’s husband arrived—sweaty, gesticulating, his eyes narrowed with irritation and fear—to complain about the conditions, Quinn smiled, sat him down, and calmed him. Soon the three of them were speaking softly, so that I could not hear what they said.
Young white Americans come to Africa all the time, some to make money, as I did, others in the grip of mostly harmless youthful idealistic delusions. Much of the time, they are operating out of the purest postcolonial sentimentality. I was there on business, for which I don’t apologize. But when I saw that this man, Matty Quinn, was indeed doing good works without any hope of reward, it touched me. Compassion was an unthinking habit with him. He was kind by nature, without anyone asking him to be.
Sometimes you arrive at love before going through the first stage of attraction. The light from the window illuminated his body as he helped that sick woman and then squatted to speak to the boy and his father. After that I found myself imprinted with his face; it gazed at me in daydreams. Here it is, or was: slightly narrow, with hooded eyes and thick eyebrows over modestly stubbled cheeks, and sensual lips from which that day came words of solace so tenderhearted that I thought: This isn’t natural; he must be queer. And indeed he was, as I found out, sitting with him in a café a week
later over cups of the local mudlike coffee. He didn’t realize how his kindness and his charity had pierced me until I told him about my own vulnerabilities, and the erotic directions in which I was inclined, whereupon he looked at me with an expression of amused relief. When I confessed how the sight of him had stunned me, he said, very thoughtfully, “I can help you with that,” and then he put his hand on my knee so quickly that even I hardly noticed the gesture.
Being white and gay in Ethiopia is no easy matter, but we managed it by meeting on weekends in the nearest city. We’d go to multinational hotels, the impersonal expense-account Hiltons with which I am familiar and where they don’t care who you are. In those days, before he got sick, Matty Quinn walked around with a lilt, his arm half-raised in a potential greeting, as if he were seeking voters. His good humor and sense made his happiness contagious. A good soul has a certain lightness and lifts up those who surround it. He lifted me. We fucked like champions and then poured wine for each other. I loved him for himself and for how he made me feel. I wonder if Jesus had that effect on people. I think so.
By the time we both came back to the States, however, Quinn was already sick. I said I could fly out to see him, but he asked me not to, given his present condition. He was living in a friend’s basement, he told me, and was looking around for a job, and he didn’t want me to visit until his circumstances had improved. That was untrue, about the job. Instead, he was losing himself. He was breaking down. He was particulating. When he disappeared, I resolved to find him.
Entering the Inner Circle, the bar on Hennepin that I finally identified as the place that Quinn had described to me, I saw, through the tumult of louts near the entryway, a man sitting at the back of the bar, reading a book. He did not have graying black hair, but he did wear glasses, so I made my way toward him, reflexively curling my fingers into fists. I elbowed into a nearby space and ordered a beer. After waiting for a lull in the background noise and finding none, I shouted, “What’s that you’re reading?”
“Shakespeare!”
“Which play?”
“Not a play! The sonnets.”
“Well, I’ll be! When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes!” I quoted loudly, with a calculating, companionable smile on my face. I extended my hand. “Name’s Albert. Harry Albert.”
The man nodded but did not extend his hand in return. “Two first names? Well, I’m Blackburn.”
“Black Bird?”
“No. Blackburn. Horace Blackburn.”
“Right. My friend told me about you!”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Matt Quinn.”
Blackburn shook his head. “Don’t know him.”
“OK, you don’t know him. But do you know where I might find him?”
“How could I know where he is if I don’t know him?”
“Just a suspicion!” Doing business in central Africa, I had gotten used to wily characters; I was accustomed to their smug expressions of guarded cunning. They always gave themselves away by their self-amused trickster smirks. I had learned to keep pressing on these characters until they just got irritated with me.
“Come on, Mr. Blackburn,” I said. “Let’s not pretend. Let’s get in the game here and then go to the moon, all right?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Blackburn insisted. I wondered how long this clown had carried on as a pseudo-Indian peddling narcotic painkillers to lowlife addicts and to upstanding citizens who then became addicts. Probably for years, maybe since childhood. And the Shakespeare! Just a bogus literary affectation. He smelled of breath mints and had a tattoo on his neck.
“However,” he said slyly, “if I were looking for him, I’d go down to the river and I’d search for him in the shadows by the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.” Blackburn then displayed an unwitting smile. “Guys like that turn into trolls, you know?” His eyes flashed. “Faggot trolls especially.”
Reaching over with profound deliberation, I spilled the man’s 7 Up over his edition of Shakespeare, dropped some money on the bar, and walked out. If this unregistered barroom brave wanted to follow me, I was ready. Every man should know how to throw a good punch, gay men especially. I have a remarkably quick combination of left jabs and a right uppercut, and I can take a punch without crumpling. Mine is not a glass jaw. You hit me, you hit a stone.
Outside the bar, I asked a policeman to point me in the direction of the Mississippi River, which he did with a bored, hostile stare.
I searched down there that night for Quinn, and the next night I searched for him again. For a week, I patrolled the riverbank, watching the barges pass, observing the joggers, and inhaling the pleasantly fetid river air. I kept his face before me as lovers do, a light to guide me, and like any lover I was single-minded. I spoke his name in prayer. Gradually I widened the arc of my survey to include the areas around the university and the hospitals. Many dubious characters presented themselves to me, but I am a fighter and did not fear them.
One night around 1 A.M., I was walking through one of the darkest sections along the river, shadowed even during the day by canopies of maple trees, when I saw in the deep obscurity a solitary man sitting on a park bench. I could make him out from the pinpoint reflected light from buildings on the other bank. He was barely discernible there, hardly a man at all, he had grown so thin.
Approaching him, I saw that this wreck was my beloved Matty Quinn, or what remained of him. I called his name. He turned his head toward me and gave me a look of recognition colored over with indifference. He did not rise to greet me, so I could not hug him. He emanated an odor of the river, as if he had been living in it. After I sat down next to him, I tenderly took him into my arms as if he would break. But he had already been broken. I kissed his cheek. Something terrible had happened to him, but he recognized me; he knew me.
“I was afraid it was you, Harry,” he said. “I was afraid you would find me.”
“Of course I would find you. I went searching.”
He lifted up his head as if listening for something. “Do you think we’re all being watched? Do you think anything is watching us?”
At first I thought he meant surveillance cameras, and then I understood that he was referring to the gods. “No,” I said. “Nothing is ever watching us, Matty. We’re all unwatched.” Then I said, “I want you to come back with me. I have a hotel room. Let me feed you and clean you up and clothe you. I should never have left you alone, goddamn it. I shouldn’t have let you end up back here. Come with me. Look at you. You’re shivering.”
“This is very sweet of you,” he said. “You’re admirable. But the thing is, I keep waiting for him.” He did not elaborate.
“Who?”
“I keep waiting for that boy. Remember? That mother’s boy? And then when he shows up, I always hit him with a baseball bat.” This was pure dissociation.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s get you in the shower and wash you down and order a big steak from room service.”
“No, he’s coming,” he insisted. “He’ll be here any minute.” And then, out of nowhere, he said, “I love you, but I’m not here now. And I won’t be. Harry, give it up. Let’s say goodbye.”
I’m a businessman, very goal- and task-oriented, and I won’t stand for talk like that. “Come on,” I said. “Matty. Enough of this shit. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.” I stood before him and raised him by his shoulders as if he were a huge rag doll, and together, with my arm supporting him, we walked along the river road until by some miracle a taxi approached us. I hailed it, and the man drove us back to my hotel. In the lobby, the sight we presented—of a successful well-groomed gentleman holding up a shambling, smelly wreck—raised an eyebrow at the check-in desk from the night clerk, but eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.
I bathed him that night, and I shaved him, and I ordered a cheeseburger from room service, from which he ate two bites fed from my hand to his mouth. I put him to bed in clean sheets
, and all night he jabbered and shivered and cried out and tried to fight me and to escape. He actually thought he could defeat me physically, that’s how deluded he was. The next day, after a few phone calls, I checked him into a rehab facility—they are everywhere in this region, and he was quite willing to go—and I promised to return in ten days for a visit. They don’t want you sooner than that.
Matty Quinn was right: he was now a different man, his soul ruined by his dealings with Black Bird, or Blackburn, or whatever that scholar of Shakespeare was calling himself these days, and I did not love him anymore. I felt fairly certain that I had gone through a one-way gate and would not be able to love him again. I can be fickle, I admit. Yet I would not abandon him until he was ready for it. In the meantime, out of the love I had once felt for him, and which it had been my honor to possess, I resolved to kill his enabler.
The next night I lured Black Bird outside the Inner Circle. I informed him that I had brought with me a bulging packet of cash and that I would give it to him for the sake of my friend Quinn’s painkilling drugs. But the cash was outside, I said, and only I could show him where. I did my best to look like a sucker.
Once in the shadows, I worked quickly and efficiently on him, and then after some minutes I left Black Bird battered on the brick pavement out of sight of the bar’s alley entryway. The man was a drug dealer, and I had administered to him the beating I thought he deserved. I would have beaten Matty’s doctor too, the one who first prescribed the painkillers, but they don’t let you do that; you can’t assault our medical professionals. Black Bird had gotten the brunt of it. But the angel of justice calls for retribution in kind, and since Matty Quinn was still alive, so, in his way, was Black Bird.
When Matty was ready to be discharged, I returned to Minneapolis and picked him up. Imagine this: the sun was blazing, and in broad daylight the man I had once loved folded himself up into my slate-gray rental car, and we drove like any old couple to the basement where he had been staying. We picked up his worldly possessions, the ones he wished to keep and to take with him to Seattle. Remnants: a high school yearbook, photographs of the village where he had worked in Ethiopia, a pair of cuff links, a clock radio, a laptop computer, a few books, and clothes, including a dark blue ascot. Not loving him, I helped him pack, and, not loving him, I bought him a ticket back to Seattle.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 3