The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “Oh my god, my place is such a shithole,” said a boy behind me. The girl he was with smiled understandingly. “The whole building smells like pork fat like all the time, from my neighbor downstairs cooking damn empanadas for the thirty-ish people who seem to live there.”

  “State Street is the Wild West,” the girl said. “The new frontier.”

  “I know,” he said, and here came the punch line, the self-congratulatory point to the story: “And it’s totally worth it, for how much space I get for the money.”

  Unspoken: unlike your place.

  I knew all the beats, because I’d been overhearing this conversation for years. Had had it myself on more than one occasion. But that had been in Brooklyn—Williamsburg, then Bed-Stuy, then Bushwick. That had been someone else’s home being unraveled. Now it was mine.

  State Street had been where the poor people lived, or one of the places, back in the day. Now it was the new frontier, the development that the gentrifiers were just beginning to dismantle.

  I shut my eyes, blocked out everything but the words they said and the taste of my coffee. Hate and caffeine; each one exhilarating in its own way. On the wall beside me, a pig was painted in bright primary colors on a piece of plywood with splintered edges. It could have been the work of a child, except for the eye—which was entirely too human, and deeply disappointed in us.

  Why did this hurt so bad? I hated Hudson. I’d hated everyone in it. For twenty years I’d hid from it.

  But my father loved it. And losing it had broken him.

  When the gentrifier larvae got up to go, I followed them. I barely thought about it. Hate had filled me up, was pressing the buttons that operated the machinery of me. We went down two blocks, then turned west and went one more. At Fourth and Columbia, they entered a long low industrial space that had been inactive for as long as I could recall but was now bustling with light and motion.

  I walked inside and bile flooded my mouth. Light fixtures made of stag horns hung from the ceiling. So did human-size dream catchers. Hundreds of frames filled the walls, old photographs and obscene needlepoints and protest slogans in bright calligraphy. A woodworked banner placard ten feet tall and twenty feet long was behind a desk.

  PENELOPE’S QUILT, it said.

  “Help you?” a woman asked, smiling, because of course I did not look like a local. I had the knitted cap at an insouciant angle, the tight jeans, the short sweater. The beard that was eloquently tapered instead of unruly and lumberjacky. The leather jacket that was black and shiny instead of brown and scuffed from farm or shipping labor.

  She thought I was One of Them.

  And I hated her so much. With those vintage rhinestone cat-eye glasses—which were, admittedly, magnificent—and that proprietary smile.

  “Not just this minute, thanks,” I said, but did not depart immediately.

  “I’m Lilly,” she said. “You tell me if you need anything.”

  Of course I knew what Penelope’s Quilt was. The internet’s largest community of artists and makers. Headed by a quirky gay celebrity billionaire founder CEO, who was apparently running for mayor of Hudson. Hundreds of thousands of new artworks came on the site every week, but none of them could be bought with money. Barter only. Every maker started with a baseline score, and then the community assigned value to each new work, and then you could exchange that work for another artwork of equal or lesser value. Or you could trade twenty-five original lithographs for a fucking hand-sanded Tlingit canoe or whatever. It had been explained to me a hundred times before, by earnest artist friends who adored it, and it had always seemed proudly, unacceptably complicated.

  What the fuck was it doing headquartered in Hudson?

  “Here,” Lilly said, putting a pamphlet in one caffeine-shaking hand. “Come to our potluck!”

  “Thanks,” I said, smiling, drowning, and stumbled out into the bright white day.

  Chapter Nine

  “Service isn’t ’til tomorrow,” says Ossie’s sister Lettie when she comes out of the funeral home and finds Dom waiting.

  “I know,” he says. “Wondered if I could talk to you.”

  “Hope you’re not planning on wearing that,” she says, heading down the walk and past him, tapping his uniform on the way. “Ossie’s friends don’t care much for cops.”

  “I don’t care much for Ossie’s friends,” he says, following her. “But I won’t be wearing it.”

  “Funny,” she says. “Here I thought you were one of her friends.”

  So she knew that they’d been lovers. Of course Ossie would have told her sister. Not because they were close, but because Lettie was born-again now, and Ossie scandalized her whenever she could. Attalah won’t like it, knowing that Lettie knows, but the two haven’t talked since high school so it’s unlikely to come up.

  “I was,” he says. “I am. But I’m not overly concerned about the opinions of her little wannabe gangbanger buddies.”

  “As if you were any better. A married man, stringing her along.”

  Dom frowns. And what about you, Lettie? How good were you to her? How good are you to her now, putting together her funeral when she left a suicide note that explicitly said “No ceremony”? But he bites back those words. He can’t begrudge her her grief, or her anger, or even how she expresses it. To have lost someone she loved so much, to suicide—he feels certain he’d break forever from a pain like that. “That’s not how it was and you know it. Did she or didn’t she have a bunch of other guys to sleep with? Half of them, she was the one doing the stringing along.”

  Lettie nods. Looks at the ground. And just like that he watches her anger at him melt away—a flimsily constructed weapon, like her austere gray dress, against the grief that now rises to take its place. She shuts her eyes. Her cheeks redden.

  “Hey,” he says, reaching out a hand to touch her shoulder. She flinches, and then she hugs him. Her body is so much like Ossie’s it hurts, small against his tall frame.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, the words hitching slightly. “I’m just—I’ve just . . .”

  “Hey,” he says. “Shhh.”

  They stand like that. Thick leaves shade them, but soon they will be falling.

  “Don’t take it personally,” she says. “I’m mad at pretty much everyone in her life. Everybody who failed her. Including myself.”

  “Same,” he says.

  “Why’d you come here, anyway?”

  “To talk to you. About Ossie. Find out if she said anything to you. Anything—” He doesn’t know how to end the sentence—that might explain why her mouth was full of seawater, 114 miles from the sea?—so he just goes with “unusual.”

  “Things were bad,” Lettie says. “Ossie was really messed up in the head, these past few weeks. Like, hearing voices, dreams she thought were going to come true, that kind of thing. She said she felt . . . threatened. Like someone was trying to kill her.”

  Hairs stand along Dom’s spine. “What did she say, exactly?”

  “Kept saying they were trying to silence her. Sounds like standard persecution fantasy stuff, right?”

  “Yeah,” he says. Dom knows that taking a sick person’s fantasies seriously is a dangerous game—but what if they weren’t fantasies? “Did she ever . . . say anything? About who they might be? Why they were trying to silence her?”

  “No, but . . . the reddest red flag of all—she got religion.”

  Dom laughs, but doesn’t say, Ossie would never.

  “Got a kind of spiritual therapist, over at Grace Abounding. She said Pastor Thirza was the only one who could help her.”

  “That’s excellent, Lettie, thanks. I’ll go talk to her. And if someone really was trying to hurt your sister, you can be fucking certain that I’ll make them pay.”

  Lettie smiles at first, and then frowns at the curse word.

  * * *

  SOMETHING’S BEEN BOTHERING ATTALAH ALL DAY, making her jittery and unfocused at work and even afterward, volunteering at UPLIFT Hudson,
and it isn’t until she’s home listening to the radio and Ms. Jackson plays “Happy Together” and she gets a vivid memory of Ronan Szepessy back in ninth-grade homeroom saying, “I love this song because it’s got ‘Happy’ in the title but it’s like the saddest song ever,” that she figures out the source. Ms. Jackson is spooky like that, somehow always able to choose a song that pierces straight to the heart of whatever’s perplexing Attalah.

  So she hauls out her high school yearbook and looks up Ronan.

  His photo is goofy, an idiot smile on his face, but the Ronan she remembers wasn’t goofy. And he never smiled. He’s making fun of the photographer here. Shaved head. Awkward Adam’s apple. Bright eyes and sharp cheekbones, but back then he hadn’t known what to do with them.

  He knows now. A short precise beard; professional haircuts. Practiced, skin-deep smile. In magazine pieces and glossy website profiles he looks stunning and sophisticated, in that way only gay men ever seem to be. She’s watched his rise, taken pride in it. When New York magazine named him one of the ten top photographers under forty, she’d posted the link to the ‘You Know You’re From Hudson When’ group on Facebook . . . but then had to delete it when the Hometown boy makes good! comments got drowned out by a hundred variations of Fuck that faggot.

  Remembering the slur twists tiny blades between her ribs. So many people she’s loved have had it leveled against them. Katch’s photo still hangs on her fridge: the program from his memorial service. Six months ago, now, but the hurt still so sharp. Such a radiant, special smile. The kind that went all the way to the core of who he was.

  Unlike adolescent Ronan, teenage Katch had known exactly what to do with his beauty. He’d taken it to the streets, let it open doors for him, even if some of those doors opened onto exploitation. With his sights set on a modeling career, and a pretty shallow pool of self-esteem to draw on, damaged as he was by growing up trans and of color in a racist transphobic place like Hudson—like America—he’d trusted a whole lot of untrustworthy people and engaged in a whole lot of sketchy activities. Which had led him to heroin, and an overdose.

  With difficulty, she snaps her focus away from grief.

  Ronan’s return could mean defeat. That’s the most likely scenario. That’s why she’s been anxious all day. He gets hold of his father’s building and sells it to Jark Trowse’s Pequod Arms project.

  But Ronan’s return could also mean victory. It all depends on how she plays it.

  Hudson had not been kind to Ronan. He’d talked a lot about how much he hated the town back in high school. But so had she. And here she was, still, trying to save it.

  Because here’s the thing she learned along the way—hate is a kind of attachment. To hate something is to cleave your soul to it. And sometimes love is the root of hate. Sometimes you say you hate something because you love it, love what it could be, but hate what it is, how flawed and broken. She feels that way about her country. Hates it, because of how much she loves it, and how much awful stuff it does, how far short it falls of its own professed ideals.

  She texts Dom for Ronan’s phone number, and when she gets it she texts him: A little bird told me you’re back in town! Want to come catch up over cookies? I remember how much you liked my mom’s peanut butter chocolate—I finally mastered the recipe. Let me know when works for you.—Attalah

  She thinks a second, before sending another one:

  Dom is so happy you’re home, and so am I

  Chapter Ten

  RONAN

  Pure masochism brought me to the potluck dance party.

  Masochism, and Katch. I’d been way up Columbia Street when I saw him in the distance. Tiny in the twilight that smelled like the sea, even though we were a hundred miles upriver from it. Beautiful—proud posture, inked arms, clove smoke clouding the air behind him—but stunted somehow, like the weight of Hudson threatened to break him.

  Sunset had made the sky spectacular, deep dark blue in contrast to the amber cast the streetlights gave the city. The Catskill Mountains were black in the distance. Clouds shaped like whales drifted high overhead. My breath caught, the scene was so lovely. Something throbbed through me. A feeling, for this place. This city. This fucking city. Something a lot like love.

  How the fuck is that possible?

  I took out my camera.

  But when I looked through my lens? They weren’t clouds that looked like whales. They were whales. Blue whales and black sperm whales, big as zeppelins, swimming through the sky in hyper-slow motion.

  Good news, Ronan! You’re going crazy!

  Bile flooded my mouth. I stopped and spat it into the street; tried to shake off the shivers.

  According to the internet—where I’d spent entirely too much time that morning—the most dangerous symptoms associated with methamphetamine withdrawal are severe depression and the potential to develop psychosis.

  A laugh or a shriek tried to climb my throat, but I bit it back. I had the strangest feeling that if I laughed out loud I’d break every window on Warren Street.

  I followed Katch down, too far away to call his name without sounding like a crazy person—but when he turned into the Penelope’s Quilt warehouse I figured I’d have ample time to corner him in there.

  And say what? What are you doing in my hometown? Did you show up for the photo shoot I had you scheduled for yesterday? And did you have anything to do with my ending up here? Did you smoke some cigarettes on my father’s porch?

  Anyway, the vast place was so packed I couldn’t find him, with the lights down low and the music up high, and strobes and screens turning every person’s face into a dozen different faces. So while I waited for him to emerge from the crowd, I indulged in masochism. The pain of looking at these laughing hipsters. Maggots consuming the corpse of my town. Filthy hyenas savaging the body of a magnificent elephant. Pretty much all I’d been doing, in the days since my arrival. Reveling in agony; hiding from my broken father.

  Jark Trowse smiled down at us from a dozen giant campaign posters. Lilly stood beneath him, rhinestone glasses and all, handing out buttons and big sincere smiles.

  I didn’t venture far from the door. Katch might slip out once he’d had something to eat—and anyway I wanted an easy escape route myself, for the inevitable moment where I gripped the knife blade of my own hatred a little too hard and started bleeding. I wasn’t standing there very long, but I was able to snag and drain champagne flutes off the trays of three separate waiters.

  Cold wind caressed my face, but I didn’t look at the opened door right away.

  “Ronan,” Dom said, startling me, and I turned to take him in. In uniform, gun at his hip, he looked like the latest avatar of some magnificent warrior god.

  “Dom,” I said, throat dry, struggling to clear my head of how the sight of him still hit me. So tall, so clean-shaven. “Don’t tell me you’re part of this scene.”

  “You blend in better than me,” he said, but then grinned.

  Attalah had texted me earlier in the day, and I’d meant to write her back. Now I felt guilty for ignoring her message, on top of my guilt for feeling such lust for her husband.

  Thirty seconds of silence later, Dom asked, “Wanna get the fuck out of here?”

  “Hell yeah, I do,” I said. “But we didn’t eat anything. Allegedly they spend a ton of money—”

  “Don’t you read? If you eat the food of the underworld, you’re condemned to stay there.”

  “Of course,” I said. “How silly of me to forget that.”

  Once we got outside I leaned against him as we walked. He let me.

  “Those fucking assholes,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You eat anything today?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you sound like maybe you’re a little drunk.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I had a lot of coffee, which is a stimulant, and a lot of alcohol, which is a depressant. So they cancel each other out.”

  “Come to my place,” he said, and my hear
t leapt, and then quickly crashed down: “Attalah will get you fed.”

  “Sure,” I said, because what was the alternative? Wandering the streets in a panic of hatred? Heading home to be swallowed up again by the sadness of my father’s fallen state? To drown in the sea of words we’d never get to say to each other? So I went, to the home of the first man (the only man) I’d ever loved, to be fed by his wife.

  “You moved out of the Towers,” I said, when he steered us away from State Street.

  “Yup. Bought our own place.”

  “I’m so happy for you guys,” I said, dishonestly. Or rather—I was happy for them, but I was also desperately unhappy.

  So maybe I was kind of a little drunk.

  “Kids?” I asked, as we walked up to the front door.

  “No kids,” he said, ushering us in, and there had to be a story there.

  Attalah was seated in a recliner, reading a book. I’d forgotten how impressive she was, how regal. How big, in so many senses of the word.

  “Hello, Ronan,” she said, smiling. “Welcome back to our fucked city.”

  She got up. It took her a minute.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your text,” I said. “Figured showing up in person would be even better.”

  “You figured right,” she said, and hugged me. And I felt so held. So found.

  Our eyes locked. I could see it there, somehow. Her hate. Her anger. It mirrored mine. And I smiled, and so did she.

  Where had it come from, this anger? This town hated me. My life in Hudson had been miserable. I still carried the scars. The broken-off blade between my ribs.

  So why was I so angry? Why did I want to murder them all, these innocent, wide-eyed hipsters who were killing the thing I spent years dreaming of killing? Why save Hudson at all?