Rigo’s already behind him, swatting off a few stray roaches from his coat. They both turn to me.
“You okay?” Gio asks.
I nod but then shake my head, because three more of them round the corner and sprint toward us.
Gio and Rigo follow my gaze, then look at me. “Run,” Gio says. And I do.
• • •
Furman Street runs a long, dusty stretch in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway along the waterside park. We come out somewhere in the middle, not close enough to either end to matter. Gio has retrieved daggers from his jacket and holds one pressed against the inside of each wrist, his eyes behind us as Rigo charges forward, checking the bushes and fenced-in areas beneath the overpass
Up ahead, a Mustang idles halfway on the curb. As we approach, the driver’s-side door swings open. Rigo stops and tenses into a fighting stance. I know the man that emerges—he was there in the park this morning: one of the Survivors. Blaine, they called him. He’s tall with a shaved head and wraparound sunglasses. And of course, he’s grayish. He smiles when he sees us, a little too wide, but I’m relieved, because surely he’s come to whisk us off, away from these fucking monsters, which also means the Survivors have come to their decision and will help us take out Jeremy Fern. And then Blaine raises a pistol at us and smiles even wider, showing his large teeth, his gums.
“The fuck?” Gio says.
The three Blattodeons walk out of the park behind us and just stand there, panting.
“That’s a good question,” Blaine says. I want to knock his teeth out. “I’ll make it simple. Get in the car.”
I’m pretty sure Gio could take him out if he had a chance, but we’re outnumbered and outgunned and I don’t think Gio would risk losing either of us in the fight. Then again . . . we may not have another chance.
“If we don’t?” Gio says.
He’s buying time. I want to burst into tears, but I don’t. I twist up my face into a fuck-you scowl and leave it there.
“I think we both know what’ll happen if you don’t,” Blaine says. His smile’s fading a little. He doesn’t want trouble. Behind him, headlights approach, and he lowers the gun to his side.
“You might get one of us,” Gio says, “but you won’t live long after that.”
Blaine laughs as the car whooshes past and then holds the gun up again. “Funny thing about that. You care about these two, whether they live or die. I don’t give a fuck about these cockroach pieces of shit. They’re just business associates. In fact, I hate them.”
Gio shakes his head. “Then why . . . ?”
“Because we’re partners now, me and these roach motherfuckers, and that’s that,” Blaine says. “So while us killing you all would be a terrible tragedy for you, you killing a few of these freaks but still getting caught in the end is fine with me. Do you understand? You’re not just outnumbered and outflanked: you lose because I don’t give a frosty fuck and you do. Clear? Now get”—he cocks his gun and levels it directly at my face—“the fuck”—I don’t flinch; I just stare him down—“in the car.”
First we hear tires screech, then an old diesel engine revving and the low thrum of some bass and drums beat. It comes from just around the bend. We all turn to look. The three roach guys mutter and click and shift their weight around. Blaine lowers his gun—last thing any of us needs is some asshole calling the cops.
One of those Access-A-Ride vans comes flying into view, brights blaring into all our retinas. It’s painted black, and techno music blasts out, getting louder as it approaches. At first it looks like it’ll just zoom past. Then it swerves onto the sidewalk as it’s passing the Blattodeons. It catches the first one full-on, before he has a chance to run. I see his body somersault through the air as the roaches explode into flight around him. One of his arms detaches, lands with a clutter a few seconds before his shattered body crashes down in a heap. The van doesn’t slow, just screeches slightly to the right so it ends up clipping the other two roach men at the same time. Both collapse under its tires and are pulverized instantly in a flash of tangled limbs and pale fluttering wings.
I’ve been gaping. Everything seemed to freeze the second the Access-A-Ride deathmobile veered off the road. Rigo’s strong, perfect arms wrap around me from behind; he’s screaming in my ear, but I can’t make it out. He pulls me backward. Blaine raises his gun, mouth wide-open. He gets off two shots—both ricochet off the windshield—and then yells as three tons of metal slam into him at thirty miles an hour, throwing him against the back window of the Mustang. The huge black van keeps coming, smashing full force into Blaine and his car, and turning them both into a shattered pile of blood, flesh, broken windows, and twisted metal.
I’m getting to my feet when the Access-A-Ride reverses out of the wreckage. I didn’t even realize I’d been on the ground. The van is barely dented. The crumpled bodies of the roach guys lie perfectly still. Across the road, Gio emerges from the bushes he’d jumped into. Rigo stands beside me, his body tensed for a fight.
The driver’s-side window lowers, and a bald brown guy with a goatee grins out at us. The double-thump clack of a house beat pulses out of the van, punctuated by the coy giggling of party girls.
“We’re with Reza,” he says. “Come with us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Carlos
One night, when I was still in the early throes of Sasha being gone as suddenly as she’d appeared, I was at the Burgundy, guzzling rum and Cokes like water, and I made the mistake of confiding in an old ghost. In living years, he’d probably passed at sixty or so, but he’d been a Council soulcatcher for a few decades and he let every year show.
“I mean,” I said for the eight hundredth time that night, “I don’t even know.”
“Carlos, what the hell are you talking about, man?” His name was Barry, but everyone called him Barometer—no idea why. Some inside joke I never cared enough about to know.
Sasha and the Survivors were and will always be public enemies in the eyes of the Council, so I wasn’t telling folks about what happened at that point; still don’t. Instead I’d been repeating “I don’t even know” like a self-destructive mantra, each time the slur enhanced.
“I don’t . . . know,” I said, grasping for some woozy truth amid all the shit I felt but couldn’t say or could say but couldn’t feel. Or something. “. . . I don’t know . . . whether I feel guilty or angry.”
Barometer shrugged. “Why not both?”
And that’s probably where I went wrong. The guy made one little ounce of sense, so like a jackass I opened the flood doors. “And so she walked out,” I muttered twenty minutes later. I’d managed to omit her name and the fact that she was half dead like me, but otherwise, the story spilled out unedited.
Barometer leaned over to sip his gin and tonic throughout, nodding and shaking his head at all the right parts. When I was done, he sighed and said, “Oh, you’re good.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I am?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t love.”
I signaled Quiñones to bring another round. “It wasn’t?”
“Nah, man. You said you only knew her for, like, a few months, right?”
“I mean . . .”
“Right. You can’t love someone in that amount of time. I mean you literally were in her presence for what—eight, nine hours? C’mon, man.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“I mean . . . technically.”
“So how many . . . ?”
“Minimum, and we’re talking bare minimum here, Carlos: eighteen months. Up till that moment, it’s really not love.”
“What is it?”
“It can feel like love, whatever that means—am I right?”
“I don’t . . . know.”
“It can taste like love, if you know what I mean.”
“I really
don’t.”
“But it ain’t love love.”
“What is it?”
“It’s prelove.”
“The fuck is—”
“And prelove ain’t love. Nope.”
“How the fuck—?”
“In fact, even prelove is often not prelove; it’s just mistaken for prelove.”
“So what’s—”
“It’s really that you just love the pussy.”
“Wait . . .”
“And that’s all well and good. I support good sexing and whatever, but just cuz you love the pussy doesn’t mean you love the woman.”
“Can you prelove the pussy?”
“Carlos, I feel like you’re not taking me seriously at this point.”
“No, I’m really just confu—”
“You can prelove the pussy one time; that’s it. After that, you just know and it’s love love.”
I really didn’t have anything to say to that, so we just sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping our drinks and letting that last bit of wisdom resonate. A few hours later, I turned over and over in bed, wrestling with a hundred more questions, wanting to throw on my coat and run across Brooklyn, bust into the Burgundy, and yell, “No, Barometer, this is love. This ache I feel, this need, this fire that stirs every time she crosses my mind, that is love, and more than that, what we felt between us when we walked through the park, when our eyes met, the way we both knew without saying the truth that lay dormant but undeniable on the tips of our tongues, that is love, Barometer, not some x on a calendar or setting on a stopwatch.”
Instead, I rolled over again, cursed the echoes of each unsaid word, and passed out.
• • •
Now I’m standing at the southern gate of Prospect Park, my back against a carved stone pillar, and I still want to yell at Barometer, yell at the sky, yell at myself, yell at Sasha. She’ll be here any minute, and somehow I feel like for all the time I’ve had to process and prepare, it’s not enough; it’s never enough.
The night sky laughs at me. The kids skating past laugh at me. Old drunks laugh at me, swig and then pass the bottle to other old drunks, and they laugh at me too. And why shouldn’t they? For all the grace and ferocity I’ve summoned within myself in the thick of crises, facing down hellfire and tragedy, my stomach still knots at the thought of Sasha strolling through the dim park toward me.
And then Sasha strolls through the dim park toward me.
Our eyes meet and we both smile at the same time. Hers is wide and unafraid; I think even she’s startled by it, and mine matches. She walks right to me, pauses. We size each other up for a half tick—that post-pregnancy weight looks amazing on her—and then fall into a deep embrace. Her smell surrounds me, that Sasha smell, some coconut shampoo she uses and the gentle hint of whatever essence of her seeps through. There’s something long and hard strapped to her back, beneath that jacket—a sword, I’m guessing—but I just ignore it for now. Her face is in my neck, and I feel her lips smiling against my skin, my chilly skin and her chilly skin, and our hands find each other, and the moment when normal hugs cease to be comes and goes and still she smiles into my neck and still my arms wrap around her and still . . .
Now the sky smiles at me, winks even, and the kids skating past snicker and the old drunks shake their heads and remember. Something true has happened, cut through all the fear and overthinking and trying endlessly to decide what is and isn’t, what should and shouldn’t be, and what’s left is just this: the two of us, holding perfectly still, bodies pressed together.
“Did you . . . ?” she says, but her voice trails off and she shakes her head.
We let a few more moments pass.
“Did I what?” I ask.
“Never mind. I don’t even really know what I was going to ask. I was just breaching the silence, but then I changed my mind.”
I nod. She wiggles in my embrace and then takes something out of her pocket. A picture. Two smiling babies.
My babies. Our babies.
They’re fat and brown and almost identical.
They’re ours.
I don’t cry. I think I’m all dried out from earlier anyway, but I do gulp and gasp a few times. I step back from her, just to take them both in, and there they are. Little chubby cheeks and three chins each and those weensy-ass little fingers. Jesus. I hand her the picture back, and she shakes her head.
“Keep it. I wanted to bring them, but what with everything going on . . .”
“I understand. It’s better.” I stare at the picture some more and then slide it into the inside pocket of my jacket. Then I look back up at Sasha. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You and me both. Look . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I know I said it before, but that was . . . before. In the midst of everything.” The trees shush and tremble around us—it’s a chilly night, and that breeze doesn’t help. It’s a night that we should be under covers, fogging up windows. “And of course I was sorry then, but it might’ve sounded like I was just saying it to . . . to keep you, and yes, I wanted you to stay, with all of me, I did, but . . . and, I know these words can’t change what I did or bring him back, but the truth is that doing what I did . . .” I pause because I know I have to say it, but I don’t want to. I can’t. I won’t. “Killing Trevor has haunted me since I did it, not just because of what it did to you but because of what it did to me and . . .”
She silences me with a finger to her lips. “I know.”
“You do?”
“I assumed. And . . . even though I had every cause in the world to walk out on you, I’m still sorry I did. I’m sorry I hurt you. I know that I hurt you. I wish I could’ve stayed.”
The wind in the trees is a song. It’s the theme song to my heart waking back up. The world it wakes to is cold, cruel even, but it is awake, my heart. And somehow, smiling.
“But I also know that if I’d stayed then, I would have resented you. And maybe never . . . forgiven you.” She shakes her head. “Not that I have, necessarily, forgiven you. Or ever will. But I knew if I was to ever see you again, I needed to first get away.”
I nod. It all makes sense. It did then too, in a horrible way, but it makes much more sense now. “The babies are . . . ?”
“They’re fully alive and healthy.”
I exhale.
The wind in the trees is a song. All those leaves shuddering and shushing against each other on this cool night; one falls and slow dances through the breeze, touching gently down on the pavement. The song is about my life and the lives that came from me. I am a father. We have made life, these two half wraiths, these impossible children of death, have come together, and from two halves came not one whole but two.
I want to run. I’m sure I could lap the park in seconds if I took off right now, laughing the whole way, but instead I smile.
“Come,” Sasha says. “We need to see about something.”
We head out of the park, past her looming prewar apartment building on Ocean Avenue, and deeper into Flatbush. “Kia’s note said one of the Survivors found a way to tap into our lives?”
She nods. “Who woulda thought, of all the things Ol’ Ginny can’t do for shit, hypnosis is one she rules at.”
“Say what?”
I hadn’t even realized where we’d walked to. Large purple letters announce GINNY’S FORTUNE-TELLINGS AND SPIRITUAL READINGS in some Wizard of Oz font across a storefront. I haven’t talked to Ol’ Ginny in months; in fact, the last time I saw her was the night Sasha and I finished off Sarco on the roof of the Grand Army Plaza.
“Well, if it isn’t the dude that’s always about to die!” Ginny cackles when we walk in. She tells me I’m going to die every time I see her. She sucks at fortune-telling, but I guess she picked up on the fact that I already did die. I’m somehow overjoyed to see her; chal
k it up to the fact that I have two beautiful babies and they’re okay and this beautiful woman is beside me.
“How are you, Ginny? It’s been a minute.”
“Minute and a half!” she crows. “And how are you Miss Brass?”
“Good, Ginny. I hear you met my friend Francine the other day.”
Ginny’s face grows long and sullen. “Ay.”
“She said you had quite a conversation.”
Ginny nods.
“We . . . well, I want to go under. I want to know what’s back there . . . before.”
Ginny nods again. She’s a whole other person now, her eyebrows furrowed and tight. “Once you know, you can’t unknow.”
“I know,” Sasha says, eyes narrowed.
Ginny looks up at me. “And you?”
Sasha and I exchange a glance. Of course I want to know. The only moments of my past I have are from my murder: I’m fighting, then looking up at masked faces. I know I’ve lost, that it’s over. The certainty of my impending death sweeps over me. Then there’s nothing. I managed to ignore the questions for the first three years of my new life. They nagged—who was I? What led me to that final desperate struggle at Grand Army Plaza?—but I shrugged them off and they stayed at bay. Then I met Sarco, who had somehow orchestrated the whole event, and Sasha, who had died beside me along with her brother, Trevor, who I’d then killed a second time. And the questions returned, and this time they lingered. Was I married? In love? Did I have parents, children?
I needed to know. I’d been a living question mark for too long.
“Yes,” I say to Ginny. “I’ll go after Sasha.”
Sasha smiles, kisses me on the cheek, and then disappears behind the curtain into Ginny’s reading room.
I plant my ass on the love seat and lose myself in fantasies about what might have been.
• • •
Sasha steps out from behind the curtain. She looks grayer than usual. Her eyes wander the room, unresting.
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