Good old Vern. Fighting the little battles even though Geno lost the war.
Police asked again and again if Geno could remember anything, anything about his other attackers. Even the smallest detail could help. If they’d called each other by name. If one of them had an accent. If they wore a class ring, a wedding band, any other kind of jewelry. Tattoos. Piercings. Did he remember a mole? A birthmark? A distinctive scar? Anything?
Mos put his hands around Geno’s throat and squeezed, swearing he’d strangle both of them before he’d let Geno remember or say one word about what did not happen. Geno ripped a sheet off the ever-present pad of paper and wrote, “I was on my face. I didn’t see ANYTHING.”
He practically threw the note at Mackin, then sank back in his pillows and wished he were dead.
I saw nothing.
I never saw it coming.
I never saw this.
Never.
Geno and his stomach reached cordial relations and the feeding tube was removed. The stoma to his colostomy could be capped for short periods of time. After weeks of bedridden sponge baths, he finally got a hot shower.
A private shower.
The nurse gave him soap and a washcloth and he wished it were bleach and steel wool. He felt dirty at a cellular level. Lathering up again and again, he remembered terms from tenth-grade biology and felt their lament in every particle of his body. He was tainted to the mitochondria. His Golgi complex stained. His ribosomes ruined. He once heard that in seven years time, every cell in a human body replaced itself, essentially making you a new person.
In which case, he’d be twenty-five when the last cells of this experience were out of his body.
He leaned a hand against the wall and vomited into the drain. Then he turned the water as hot as he could stand. Eased himself to the cold tile floor, wrapped his arms around his knees and let himself be scoured.
We will address it later, Mos said, taking over all thought and feeling again.
A psychiatrist from Mount Sinai’s adolescent health center started coming to Geno’s room. To talk about things that didn’t happen.
Geno refused to be alone with Dr. Stein. Not because he didn’t like the guy, but Geno had so little control over things. Being able to say who got to be with him was a scrap of dignity he clung to. And Stein respected it. So Vern sat in a chair by the window with his noise-reduction headphones. In view, but out of earshot, he worked on papers while Dr. Stein talked and Geno said nothing.
Stein honored Geno’s right to say nothing. He was a decent guy. Geno overheard him telling Vern bad jokes. Gags so cornball, you had to laugh while you groaned.
Vern laughed hardest when he found out Stein’s first name was Franklin.
“Franklin Stein?”
Stein turned up his palms. “Go ahead. Take the next step.”
“Dr. Frankenstein.”
“My grandfather’s name was Igor. You can’t make this stuff up.”
Stein didn’t joke around with Geno. He was easy and gentle and attentive, even in the silences. He used words like anxiety, depression, anger, flashback, nightmares. He mentioned Prozac, Zoloft and Clonazepam. A word he really liked to throw around was feel.
How are you feeling, what are you feeling, how do you feel about that, how did that make you feel…
Annoyed, Mos waved copies of local ordinance NOS-34726: “Feeling is prohibited by law.”
Leave him alone, Mos thought. Geno was working hard to feel nothing and all this talk wasn’t helping. The poor kid stared at Vern’s headphones like they were the only thing he wanted in the world.
Mos wanted them, too.
So much noise.
He finally understood how sound made Analisa so crazy when she was nearing the end of her life. How the music and talk shows she always loved became a distraction, and finally a torment.
So much to process. So much not to think or feel.
Sometimes it was hard to be a good citizen of Nos.
“It’s exhausting, man, carrying around a secret,” Chris Mudry said the night of the party. Now so long ago, it seemed a past life.
Because it is, Mos said. It’s someone else’s past life.
Sometimes, though, Mos had to let Geno let a few things out.
He told Stein about the notes he found in Carlos’ jeans pocket. How he thought they were from a girl. Until the night of the party, when Chris hit him with a right, then a left hook.
“You must have been stunned,” Stein said.
“I had no idea,” Geno said.
Stein looked down at his hands, twisting his wedding band around his fourth finger. “Carlos never hinted anything?”
Geno shook his head.
It is not our concern, Mos wrote on his clipboard, but not with his usual strictness. He was tired. Even Stein seemed tense and drained, at a loss for words. Unusually, it was Geno who filled the silence this time.
“I don’t know why he didn’t tell me,” he said. “We told each other everything. Well. We used to. Things changed after my mother died.”
“Can you talk about that?”
Geno’s chest expanded as he filled his lungs with air and courage. “It was hard,” he said. “Everything hurt.”
Stein slowly nodded. “I was sixteen when my father died. I remember feeling like I had the flu for about a year.”
For the first time, Geno met the doctor’s eyes and held on. “It was like getting beat up every day. It was hard. For all of us. We kind of…drifted. I don’t know how else to say it.”
We don’t like to speak of it.
What else could be said? Their little red hen died. Life got hard. Nathan was broken-hearted and distracted. He buried himself in work and emerged blinking and squinting, as if expecting to get mowed down in the glare of headlights. Geno was broken-hearted, but he picked up his common sense and figured out how to cook, clean, shop and keep order in the nest Analisa left behind.
Carlos took his broken heart where he wasn’t supposed to be. He walked out of the henhouse and left the door wide open, letting the Fox in. Giving him access to little chicks.
I said I wanted you and your brother brought you to me.
Mos cleared his throat. We know nothing and feel nothing about this. It is inconsequential to the case at hand.
“Do you think your brother had an idea what Anthony was planning?” Dr. Stein asked.
Geno’s fists clenched and his anger splashed against the walls of the hospital room.
Feeling is against the rules, Mos reminded everyone. Feeling is illegal in Nos.
“I know he did,” Geno said.
“How?”
“Because Anthony told me. I was a fucking present. Carlito lured me into an ambush. He fucking sold me.”
Stein only nodded, his face haggard. He and Geno fell silent. Frankenstein and his broken, wretched creature. The unspoken questions circling between them.
Why? Why’d he do it? How could he do it? What made him do it? What drove him to do it?
Geno didn’t know.
Only Carlos knew.
And Carlos would never say.
Despite the laws of the land, Mos felt terrible. This job was exhausting. Geno was vomiting again. Would it ever end?
Mos let his clipboard fall to the charred, smoking ground of Nos. He waited until the bed linens were changed and morphine was starting to close like a loose fist around Geno’s mind. He crept to the bed and got in. He snugged up against Geno’s back. Close. Closer. Pressing and easing. Until finally, he slid past the boundary and dissolved, oozing through the fingers of the morphine fist, floating away like fog.
Geronimo Caan slipped between the stars of Nos and back inside himself.
And slept.
The battery charged on vacation never lasted long. The laptop was still booting
up and Steffen Finch hadn’t yet swallowed the first sip of coffee when his boss, Ronnie Danvers, put her head in his office.
“Need you,” she said.
“I missed you, too.”
“I’m sorry, welcome back. You look well-rested, well-fed and well-laid.”
Stef laughed. “You don’t get laid at an ashram.”
“Sorry, I meant well-prayed, not laid.”
“I did pray a lot, yes.”
“I’m glad you’re back. And we need you.”
Stef made a futile gesture to his laptop with one hand, a more urgent gesture to his foil-wrapped breakfast sandwich with the other. “It’ll get cold.”
“I’ll buy you another.”
Stef slapped both palms on his desk and got up. “I take it back. I didn’t miss you.”
He followed Ronnie out of his office and down the open stairwell. The Coalition for Creative Therapy occupied one half of a sprawling brick building on Eleventh Avenue. Once, during the gritty, dirty and bloody reign of Manhattan’s meatpacking industry, this was the slaughterhouse and packing plant of Kraus & Brothers. Family-owned for three generations, Kraus eventually migrated from Chelsea to the new Hunt’s Point Market in the Bronx, leaving a void in New York’s west side that 1960s gay culture rushed to fill. The plant became a club called Manhunt, packing a different kind of meat in an era that was a different kind of gritty, dirty and bloody.
Manhunt was forcibly shut down in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS scare. For two decades it crouched like a haunted misfit at the river’s edge, occasionally rising up in the hands of new renters with new ventures and new money, only to be abandoned again.
Optimism moved out and the wretches of Manhattan’s underworld moved back in. When the Whitney Museum of Art began scoping Chelsea for a new location, it seemed the slaughterhouse’s sordid days were numbered.
Salvation came in the form of a Hollywood actor, a native New Yorker who went public with a shocking story of how he was raped by his agent. Crediting art therapy as being key to his recovery, he bought the Kraus plant with the intention of creating a residential and therapeutic facility for male survivors like himself.
The residential side of the building was called the Exodus Project. It provided housing and inpatient mental health services for up to thirty men. The Coalition for Creative Therapy provided outpatient rehab for sexual assault survivors of all ages and genders.
“Max Springer,” Ronnie said, reading from a file. “Six years old. Born Upper East Side. Biological father died when he was three, his mother remarried a year later. She’s active army, deployed to Iraq seven months ago. As far as we can tell, the abuse started shortly thereafter.”
“The stepfather?”
Ronnie nodded. “Max’s teacher noticed behavioral issues. Coupled with stomach pains and bathroom troubles. He fainted after passing blood in his stool and enough of the story came out that the school called CPS. Temporary foster care until grandparents could get here from Florida and the mother could get discharged. He’s living with her now.”
“Jesus.”
“He was treated at Mount Sinai. Your esteemed mentor Franklin Stein referred Max here, just after you left for vacation. He made a point of putting your name in the write-up.”
“Dr. Frankenstein likes to overestimate me.”
“Well, his estimate of Max was spot-on. Nobody can do a thing with this child.”
“No?”
“The mother, God bless her, has brought him here every day. First few sessions, he screamed and wouldn’t leave her side. Next few he cried and wouldn’t leave her side.”
“Skip ahead a little.”
“Two accomplishments. He let his mother out of his sight for an hour. And he’s stopped screaming.”
“Good. Is he verbal?”
“He talks mostly to himself,” Ronnie said. “Bare minimum to the staff. Hello. Goodbye.”
“Does he say no?”
She shook her head. “He hasn’t gotten his no back.”
Sexual assault robbed a child of the power of no, a power they were only just beginning to understand. Getting their no back was one of the first milestones of recovery.
“Who’s been working with him?” Stef asked.
“Being that he was abused by the stepfather, we started with the obvious and had both Aedith and Katie try.”
Stef nodded. It was logical to have the juvenile victim of a male abuser work with a female therapist. But this kind of trauma had no logic. It never liked to do what you expected. “No go?”
“Wanted nothing to do with either of them. So we tried Beau, but one look and Max was out the door. Nothing wrong with his motor skills, I’ll tell you. We found him under a bed over on the residential side.”
Stef found himself smiling. Good for you, kid. You couldn’t escape before, so run like hell now.
“Poor Beau,” he said. Beau deBrueil was a gifted therapist, but some clients couldn’t get past his six-six, three-hundred-pound presence. Many who did found they never wanted to leave it.
“So as usual,” Ronnie said, pausing outside the main art room door. “You’re my only hope, Obi-Wan.”
As usual, when she said this, Stef felt a blend of pride and apprehension. While his reputation for cracking tough cases preceded him like a showy parade horse, the fear of failing was hitched behind like a rusty trailer. It dragged hard today, when half his game was still meditating in California, and the other half sulked in his rumbling stomach. He was pretty useless when he was hungry.
“Do what you can,” Ronnie said. “And welcome back. I mean it.”
Stef drew a resigned breath and went into the art room. It stretched along the building’s west side. High ceilings exposed vents and duct work. Tall windows overlooked the ongoing construction of the new elevated High Line park. A handful of men occupied the long wooden work tables. Aedith Johnson supervised a group of young girls at a round table in the corner. In one of the partitioned private spaces, Katie Bernstein worked one-on-one.
“What’s up, my man,” Beau said, striding over to give Stef a rib-crunching hug. “Glad to be back?”
“No,” Stef said to the wall of Beau’s chest.
“I missed your stupid face. How was the monastery?”
“Ashram.”
“God bless you.”
Stef managed to turn his face free. “I can’t breathe.”
Like a loving python, Beau gave a last squeeze and released his coils. “Ronnie tell you about Max?”
“Where is he?”
Beau pointed to an empty table at the room’s far end. “Under there.”
Stef regarded the boy through narrowed eyes. Someone had put a Do Not Disturb placard on the tabletop. Common practice for a new client whose primary goal was getting used to the space and the staff and feeling safe. The people who came here for therapy were not amenable to closed doors or situations where they felt penned in. By design, the art room’s partitions were only six feet high and open at the bottom. More improvised constructs of privacy—a folding screen, a wall of chairs, a Do Not Disturb sign—were held sacrosanct.
Max lay beneath his empty table. Plaid pajama pants and a baseball T-shirt. Brown hair, cut short. He curled on one side, a hand reaching toward the underside of the table.
“He talks to himself,” Beau said. “Constantly. But yesterday as he was leaving, he said goodbye. Unprompted. Today he made a little eye contact. I see him peeking out from underneath the table every now and then, looking curious. He’s definitely more here than he was two weeks ago.”
“Mm.”
“Good luck,” Beau said. “Everyone’s glad to see you back.”
“Thanks,” Stef said absently, his focus drawing in tight.
He circled the room a few times, weaving around the tables, saying hello to residents and giv
ing a few highlights of his retreat in California. He walked by Max’s table a few times, letting the boy notice him from the knees down. He crouched in eyesight, letting the rest of him be seen as he collected some scrap paper, a book of mosaic designs and a pack of washable magic markers. He whistled as he roamed. Finally, he put another Do Not Disturb sign on the table next to Max’s. Without making eye contact, he crawled beneath, stretching out on his stomach.
Still whistling, he began to color. He resisted the urge to look Max’s way. Instead he listened.
Beneath the table, Max nattered away to himself. Total gibberish, yet the sounds had pattern and inflection. Strings of chatter rose up at the end, asking a question. He paused between babbles, as if waiting for an answer. It was definitely a conversation.
Who are you talking to, Stef jotted on a scrap of paper. Imaginary friend? Hero? Mom?
Secret language. Nobody else can know. Nobody understands.
Private universe. Private language.
Real privacy taken away. Construct it however you can.
Max lay on his back now, soles of his feet pressed to the tabletop. Over and over, he sang a two-note warning. Like “Uh-oh” but with different syllables.
From beneath his table, Stef whistled the same tones, mimicking the high-low.
Max sang again, sounding like, “Ear cook.”
Stef whistled. High-low.
“Ear cook,” Max said.
They went back and forth a few times. When it came to his turn, Stef inverted the notes, low to high.
A long pause.
Stef whistled low-high again, slower.
“Bye gee,” the boy said, copying.
Low-high whistle.
“Bye gee.”
High-low whistle.
“Ear cook.”
They went on chatting this way, each under a table, barricaded behind chair legs. Stef whistling. Max singing. He followed Stef’s tones, but never changed the words.
Ear cook? Stef wrote. Bye gee? Mean anything or nonsense?
On one of his whistled replies, Stef sent a marker rolling across the floor, aiming between chair legs and under Max’s table. He didn’t follow it with his eyes. He kept his gaze on his work and kept coloring. The small of his back was starting to howl. Drawing prone was hard on a grown man’s body. He’d have to move soon.
A Charm of Finches Page 6