Eternal Kiss

by Trisha Telep

  “Are you okay?”

  Golden. That was the word that popped into her mind. With the glow of lower Manhattan shining behind him, he appeared like a golden god, his long pale hair falling in thick waves to his shoulders. “Do you need help? What are you on?”

  “What? N-nothing!” she said in a shaking voice. “There was a guy. He was spray painting something on the fence over there. He took off when you came out.”

  The golden one scanned the empty lot, scowling. “What are you doing out here? It’s not safe after dark, and this is private property.”

  “I came about the assistant’s job,” she said, showing him the ad still clutched tightly in her hand. “I have an appointment for eight-thirty. But nobody answered the buzzer at the front door, so I came back here. I’m Lauren.”

  “Oh. Jeez. Sorry. Sometimes nobody gets to the buzzer. That’s why we need an assistant. Come on in. I’m Johannes.”

  Lauren sat across from Johannes the Golden Boy in a drab chair in a cheerless square of an office with only one dim banker’s lamp for light. He turned a pen end on end while asking her a series of questions: Was she proficient on a Mac? Did she mind answering phones and filing? Would she be willing to run errands during her shift—go for food or supplies that they might need? Did she understand that this was a place for troubled teens and that she might see and hear things that were kind of rough? Was she discreet? Did she spook easily?

  She answered yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no.

  He stared at her. He had deep brown eyes flecked with gold, which seemed to burn in the lamplight. “So tell me what you know about Angelus House?”

  “I know you’re the last hope for the toughest addiction cases. You take in homeless teens, runaways, kids from the projects, the ones everybody else has given up on.”

  He stopped playing with the pen. “Why do you want this job?”

  Lauren stared at the ceiling and wondered how much she should tell him about herself. About the last three years. Her sister Carla.

  “I just graduated from high school. I need a job, and I’d like to give back somehow.”

  He glanced at her flimsy resume that mostly consisted of part-time retail jobs. “No college plans? No rushing off to Gimme Gimme You or something?” She thought she saw a hint of a smirk on his face.

  “No.”

  “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

  Somewhere else. It was uncomfortably cold in the room. The air chilled the sweat on her neck and made her want to go outside into the heat again. “I have no idea.”

  “You’re really honest.” Golden Boy stared at her, and she couldn’t begin to know what he was thinking. Had she blown it? She must have blown it. “Congratulations, Lauren,” he said, giving her a beautiful smile. “You’ve got yourself a job.”

  Johannes insisted on walking her to the subway in the dark. It had begun to rain a little, which only made the humidity worse. “Great. Just what we needed. Our own hater.” Johannes pointed at the wall where the tagger had come back to finish his work. Over the Angelus House insignia of a lone winged knight, the words Los Vampiros had been sprayed in red paint, and the letters dripped like blood.

  Two

  LAUREN WAS STANDING on the mostly empty subway platform when she saw the tagger in the Knicks shirt coming her way. She scanned the few people around her—a homeless guy, an old couple having a fight in Chinese, some oblivious hipsters across the tracks on the Manhattan side.

  “I have 911 on speed dial,” she said, holding out her phone.

  “Yeah? You get reception down here? Who’s your carrier—the Matrix? Look, I’m just trying to warn you, a’ight?” He wasn’t so scary up close. About five-eight with short-cropped dark hair, a face from a Renaissance painting, and a large cross medallion hanging around his slender neck.

  “Warn me about what?” Lauren forced herself to make eye contact.

  “You need to stay away from those Angelus House assholes. They are seriously bad news.”

  “Says the guy who vandalizes buildings and stalks teenage girls,” Lauren said, trying to put some snark into her voice. She hoped he couldn’t tell how uneasy she was. That was the first rule of survival in New York: a shrug and a that-all-you-got attitude.

  “I’m serious, yo. They go into the projects, and they take people.”

  “Yeah. It’s called helping.”

  “They’re not helping. They’re recruiting.”

  “For what?”

  “Something very bad. This guy I know, Isaiah Jones, he told me all about it. He used to roll with them, but he got out. Said they were up to some freaky shit. Now he’s in hiding. Won’t even tell his mom where he’s staying.”

  Light filled the tunnel. Lauren could hear the train scuttling closer.

  “Don’t take that job, yo. You be sorry.”

  “Yeah? Says who?”

  “Just a friend.”

  The train blasted into the station, sending the trash on the platform swirling around Lauren’s feet. The doors opened and she leapt inside, willing them to close again. The guy stood on the platform, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets.

  “I got a name for you to remember: Sabrina Rodriquez. She used to be one of theirs. When the cops found her body, there wasn’t a single drop of blood left in it.”

  The doors closed with a loud ding-dong that made Lauren jump, and then the train hurtled into the darkness.

  Three

  ON MONDAY AT two o’clock, Lauren showed up for her first day at Angelus House. The buzzer let her in, and inside, a girl with a purple-blue Mohawk and heavy eyeliner greeted her. She smelled strongly of patchouli and looked to be about Lauren’s age or a little older. She wore a sleeveless sundress, which showed off her many tattoos, including one on her neck of the Angelus House insignia.

  The Mohawk girl beamed. “Hey, you must be Lauren. Awesome! Welcome to Angelus House. I’m Alex. God! Isn’t it miserably hot out? We’ve got the AC cranked.”

  Alex wore an ankle bracelet heavy with charms that tinkled like bells with every step. “We’re, like, soooo crazy happy you’re here. Seriously? I cannot keep up with the filing and phones and stuff. Don’t get me wrong—it’s all because Angelus House is a successful program, and that is totally cool. But still. There’s only so much we can do without help. Hey Rakim! Come meet Lauren!”

  A tall, skinny guy with an old-school fade and oversized black-frame glasses bounded up, his hand out for a shake. “Nice to meet you, Lauren.” He made up a silly song about her name on the spot, rhyming Lauren with Darwin, Sauron, and Kilimanjaro-n, and Lauren found herself hoping that this was the start of something new and good.

  They showed her around, introducing her to more smiling teens working on posters or playing ping-pong in the rec room. The first floor had been turned into “sharing” rooms and common areas. The second and third floors housed a dormitory that could take as many as thirty teens at a time. The staff lived on the top floor. On the surface, Angelus House was like every other drug rehab center she’d visited in the past three years. There were the ratty, secondhand couches and chairs grouped around a wall-mounted TV. Here were the requisite inspirational posters sharing space with cheaply framed photos of rehabbed teens doing inspirational activities—a dance-off, arts & crafts day, basketball, quilt-making. Captions had been supplied: “Brian shows us his moves!” “Grace for two, nothing but net!” “Amber and Gabby love DDR night!” “Sing it, Rakim!”

  “You know I make that picture look good,” Rakim said with mock seriousness.

  Alex punched him in the arm. “Modest much?”

  “Looks fun,” Lauren offered. She was never very good at small talk.

  They showed her the kitchen area with its chipped cupboards and an old refrigerator marked by a laminated “Newbies” sign. “You’ll need to keep this stocked with healthy foods for the new teens who come in. Juice is great because a lot of the addicts crave sweets. The rest of us can take care of ourselves, so it’s just this
one fridge you have to worry about,” Rakim said, showing off the inside of the fridge with its three juice cartons.

  “Sorry. I know it’s kinda disgusting in here,” Alex said, making a face. “But once we take over the Navy Yards to do some new building, we’re gonna have, like, crazy amazing new facilities—almost a mini-city.”

  “And then we can kiss this shit goodbye,” Rakim said.

  “Is Johannes here?” Lauren asked as they made their way down another long corridor turned faintly green by the bad florescent lighting. She’d looked for the golden one on every stop of the tour but hadn’t seen him.

  “Usually he does a lot of field work,” Rakim answered. “Going into the projects and out on the streets. He helped save my ass for real.”

  “And he is such the hotness,” Alex said, giggling as if she and Lauren were sharing their first girl secret. “Oops, not that way.” She steered Lauren away from a set of stairs leading down into complete darkness.

  “What’s down there?”

  “Detox,” Alex said, grimacing. “Not pretty. Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to deal with that.”

  “Don’t get freaked out if you hear weird noises and shit coming from there. Just turn up the radio and learn to block it out,” Rakim said. “You get used to it after a while.”

  Lauren stared down into the darkness. She heard nothing but the asthmatic hum of the overburdened air-conditioning. “What happened to the last girl who worked here—Sabrina?”

  Alex looked confused. “We’ve had a Lisa and now we’ve got a Lauren. No Sabrina. Besides, you’re the first assistant we’ve ever had.”

  “And not a minute too soon, ’cause I cannot file another thing,” Rakim said, palms up in surrender. “I just remembered: We’ve got kick-ass brownies in one of the sharing rooms. You like brownies?”

  Alex offered her arm and Lauren took hold.

  “Who doesn’t?” she said.

  Lauren worked at Angelus House Monday through Friday from three o’clock until eight. The job was fairly easy, she discovered. As none of the teens were allowed off the grounds and the staff was needed to look after the place, Lauren was often sent outside to do the grocery shopping or pick up medical supplies. There was plenty of time to read. And everybody made her feel like she was wanted, like she was contributing to something important. No one was really around to miss her at home, anyway. Since her sister Carla had been court-ordered to the Eagle Feather Center for Hope and Healing, her parents made the drive upstate every weekend for visiting hours. Sunday nights, they’d come back looking gray, their words of parental encouragement scooped out of them. The TV was on a lot.

  Lauren was glad to have somewhere to be with people who might possibly become friends—or more. And there was Johannes. Whenever he swept through, the air in the room felt different to Lauren, charged with possibility. She watched him—leaning one arm against the door frame, lean and long in a worn-thin Vampire Weekend T-shirt that showed the outline of muscle across his broad back, his deep-set eyes taking everything in, that lazy smile showing up along with a pair of dimples and a low growl of a laugh that did things to her stomach. She’d seen the way he was with the teens who came through the doors, how he calmed them, took in their stories, nodding. It was hard to believe he was only twenty-two. Sometimes he’d drop by her desk or pop into the long, musty filing room where she sat sorting through manila folders with badly-typed patient names on the tabs, putting them in alphabetical order.

  “How’s it going in here?”

  “Fine,” Lauren would answer, wishing she could think of something clever to say to keep him there.

  “Got those supplies for me?”

  She would hand over whatever she’d been asked to procure that day—boxes of gauze, economy-sized bottles of hydrogen peroxide, pine floor cleaner, rubber tubing, new sheets and towels. Once, she’d had to make a run to the home improvement center for long, flat pieces of lumber, nails, and ten-pound bags of mulch. “Might want to do some retaining walls and some plantings in the parks. Good project for the newbies,” Johannes had explained when she and the delivery guy had dropped it all in the freight elevator for Johannes and Rakim to take down to the basement.

  Sometimes, Johannes would pop his head into the filing room and ask, “Need anything?”

  Yes. I would like you to ravage me here on the floor and swear your undying love to me. “No. Thanks. I’m good.”

  “Keep up the good work,” he’d say, and Lauren would creep to the door to watch him walk away, his beautiful ass perfectly showcased by his Levi’s, as he took the stairs down to detox.

  Four

  FRIDAYS WERE RECYCLING day at home, and since no one else bothered to do it anymore, Lauren hauled the newspapers down to the recycling area behind their new rental with its view of traffic on Fourth Avenue. Their old apartment had windows that looked out onto Prospect Park, but that was before Carla’s medical bills poured in, and they were forced to move down Park Slope into a fourth-floor walk-up in a building with a super who liked to chatter whenever he saw Lauren. She dropped the tightly-bundled papers, the blue bags of spent plastic and metal in the bins and wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm. The super nodded to the day’s paper with its two-inch headline: BLOOD GANGS OF NEW YORK.

  “Another body,” he said in his heavily French-inflected English. “That make ten so far. They find this one with her throat ripped out.”

  Lauren didn’t want to get drawn in or she’d be late for work. “The police think it’s some gang thing.”

  “In Haiti, the Tonton Macoute would come in the night like ghosts. If you spoke out, they would come. If you didn’t, sometimes they still come. Everyone lived in fear then. They would come and come until our spirits were silenced and we all felt dead.”

  A loud blast came from Fourth Avenue, and two cabbies cursed each other until a full-scale fight broke out.

  “Crazy people,” the super said, dropping the lid on the recycling bin.

  When she slipped back into the apartment, the TV was on with the sound muted. Lauren saw garish images of kneeling prisoners in orange jumpsuits, black hoods covering their faces. Lauren’s mom sat in her chair by the window unit wearing her reading glasses as she sorted through a stack of mail that Lauren knew were bills. Her dad was at work. He would stay in the safe bubble of his office, with its office jokes, water cooler, kitchen coffee pot, and shared stories about the “putz” boss, until he was forced to come home.

  “I’m off to work, Mom,” Lauren said.

  A minute later, as she was closing the door, her mother answered. “Okay. Be careful.”

  The day passed slowly. By six o’clock, Lauren had accomplished her to-do list and finished the last forty pages of her book, so she loitered in the hallway outside the sharing room where people did their 12-step work. The voices inside were hushed murmurs. A big guy named Brian stepped out. He had a shaved head that had been tattooed with intricate designs and smack in the middle was the Angelus House insignia. He headed to the men’s room without noticing Lauren. A snippet of confession drifted through the cracked door.

  “… it was just the most incredible feeling, and I like feeling powerful now, not like before …”

  “… I’m gettin’ my mark at the end of the week …”

  “… that’s awesome, bro. Stick with the program. You won’t be sorry …”

  “… let’s say the Angelus prayer. ‘We are the fallen angels. We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega …’”

  Lauren pressed closer, trying to hear more. A hand pushed the door closed.

  “Sorry. You’re not supposed to listen in. Privacy and all that.” Brian was back. He towered over her, smiling.

  “Oh, I-I’m sorry. I was just … sorry.”

  “No problem.” He gave her a dazzling smile before slipping inside and shutting the door tightly behind him.

  Lauren wandered the halls staring at the photos of those smiling teens, wonderi
ng what made them succeed. “Everybody likes a winner,” she whispered to the wall.

  A long, chest-rattling moan of pain drifted up from the detox floor, and Lauren found herself taking the stairs down into the shadows, drawn to the sound. It was cooler as she descended and so dark she had to hold fast to the banister to be sure of her steps. She’d reached some sort of wide door, but it was locked. She put her ear to it, hearing nothing but the AC hum. And then came a piercing scream that prickled the hair on her neck and sent her stumbling back up the stairs toward the light. She sat at her desk with her headphones on, blasting her music until it was time to go.

  Five

  IT WAS THURSDAY night, just before the end of her shift, when the guy got inside.

  Somebody had accidentally left the back door open, and now he was standing in the common area screaming obscenities, with a wild-eyed look and a knife in one hand.

  “What did you do to me!” he shouted. His teeth were a mottled brown; angry sores dotted his face.

  “Okay, take it easy, bro.” Six-foot-two Brian tried to take him, but the guy smacked him hard, sending him reeling. The drugs made him fearless, and no one could get close.

  “What did you do to me?” he screamed until the tendons of his neck bulged. “I can’t sleep. I see things the way they really are. I know. I know!”

  “Calm down. It’s all right,” another staffer said, extending her hand.

  He jumped back and jabbed at the air with his knife. “You’re out to get me!”

  “They’re out to get me, too,” Lauren said suddenly. He noticed her for the first time.

  “You know? You know what I’m talking about?”

  She nodded and lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “We’ve got to get away. I’ve got a safe room. I’ll take you there.”

  “Okay. Okay,” he said.

  Heart thumping, she led him to the filing room.

  “The thirteenth step,” he muttered. “I didn’t finish it. Now I hurt so bad—worse than ever, and they’re going to kill me.” He showed her his arm where he’d scratched it to ribbons. Under the blood, she could just make out the ink of a tattoo.