The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “If anything, it’s an opportunity,” I said. “It raises the stakes. Jark has a spotlight on him, which means any damage we do to him will be magnified exponentially.”

  Blue corduroy couch. Cinnamon incense. Hammer crossed atop a roll of duct tape on the dining room table. I tried my best to root myself in the here-and-now of Attalah’s apartment, to focus on the banal quotidian details . . . and not the head full of vivid filth that refused to quiet down. Flashes of dreams, so alive they felt like memories.

  Stinking darkness; a rising and falling sensation like we were in a ship at sea. One lone hanging lantern burning clear and bright, its oil smelling like musk and alcohol. A beautiful brutal man doing beautiful brutal things to me. Jug-handled ears and a deep, dark beard visible in the lamplight.

  “Even if we could defeat Jark,” she said, “what’s happening here is so much bigger than any election. So much money is sunk in the transformation of Hudson—so many people stand to benefit from it—that it’s gonna take something really big to turn it around.”

  “We can do big,” I said. “Just watch.”

  In the dream-or-memory I’d asked the beautiful demon man What’s your name? and he’d hissed, Tom. Tom Minniq, before clamping one meaty hand over my mouth to prevent any further conversation.

  Be cool, Ronan. Don’t get an erection in the middle of describing your little plan for Jark Trowse.

  Somehow, I got through it, telling Attalah all the sordid evil little details I’d been assembling for the past twenty-four hours.

  “That’s fucked up,” she said at last, after a long silent time spent looking into my face and wondering what the hell was going on in there. “You might be even more messed up than I originally imagined. How did you get like this?”

  “This town,” I said, smiling—tingling—ecstatic with the high of hate. “It made me the monster that I am. How can I repay the favor, except by saving it from certain destruction?”

  She breathed out, flexed pre-arthritic fingers. Looked into her hands, like she was wondering just how badly she could bloody them. Or like I’d taken something from her and transformed it into something horrifying. It felt good, her fear. It stirred something sweet and sharp inside. Hate was a wonderful weapon. A hell of a drug.

  “Well?” I asked. “I was serious when I told you that I’d break whatever laws I had to, to do this. In the grand scheme of the depths we could descend to, framing someone isn’t really such a big deal.”

  “It is,” she said. “Mind you, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it. I just want you to be real about what you’re saying.”

  “I am super real.”

  I stood and then jumped up and down a couple of times. Something filled me up and overflowed. I felt a giggle coming on and I didn’t even try to stop it, even though I knew it made me sound crazy.

  “We’re dangerous,” she said. “You and me, together.”

  “Damn right,” I said. “I pity the fools who dare to stand against us.” And it was Lilly I pictured, that earnest well-meaning young woman in the vintage rhinestone glasses, who had no idea how much she was blithely accidentally helping to destroy.

  Attalah nodded.

  “All we need to figure out now is—who to use? And what kind of leverage do we have over them?”

  The floor in front of us was spread thick with paperwork. News clippings. Printouts from the internet. Legal documents. Binders of state and local legislation. Precedent projects. All arranged in a jagged spiral. Fifteen years of scrupulous research on her part.

  Attalah said, “I got a list of everyone who’s been evicted in the past few years. So I’ve been able to look up every landlord. And look for who might be susceptible to pressure.”

  We were in the basement of her house. An empty room they’d one day turn into a guest room or man cave. Not a play room. A speaker outside the door played loud music. The foundation made it soundproof; no one could eavesdrop from outside or sneak up and listen at the door. “And there’s no place for Dom to hide a bug,” Attalah had said, pointing to the blank walls and bare floor. She laughed, but I wondered how likely she thought that was. How far would Dom go to uphold the law? Would he entrap his own wife, abet the destruction of his town?

  “The Pequod Arms project is complicated,” she said. “There are five potential scenarios. The first one, the simplest: they could break ground on that tomorrow. A couple of renovations, one new building. No big thing. But Jark wants big. So he’s been talking to tons of property owners, faith leaders, local stakeholders, trying to get them to commit their property or their support. Bribing them with all kinds of things. Getting politicians to issue zoning variances, so he can build bigger than current height restrictions. He wants the fifth level, the biggest and most complex. The one that would transform Hudson completely.”

  I nodded.

  “Remember that we only consult here, in person,” she said. “No phone calls, no fucking text messages. Even when we think we’re being clever. Activists use an app called Signal, for double-encrypted correspondence. I sent you the link. Download it, and we’ll use that.”

  A door creaked open.

  “Hello?” Dom hollered down into the basement.

  “Hey, honey,” Attalah called, her voice suddenly startlingly loud. “Come on down!”

  Dom entered the room, his smile as wide as the Hudson, and then he saw the floor and it slowly shrank down to nothing.

  “What’s going on, guys?”

  “Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,” she said, lurching forward on her cane to embrace him.

  Somehow, it made me smile. The sight of them together. Rarely did two friends I respected and admired so much come together in a couple.

  How many friends do you even have, Ronan? You have strangers you fuck, and strangers you photograph, and clients you schmooze with but don’t respect—

  That wasn’t the point, not really. I was happy for Attalah and Dom. They stood there talking, catching each other up on their days, and something sort of like peace filled me up.

  Even if a little part of me is still in love with Dominick. Will always be in love with him.

  From pure force of habit I took out my phone, opened Grindr, saw the grid of nearby boys and men who had put their faces out in search of sex. Just a thing I did, several thousand times a day. From horniness mostly, but sometimes from boredom. From curiosity. From the little thrill of seeing how much sex surrounded me.

  The night before, I’d replaced my face pic with a torso shot. Changed my profile name. No one would know who I really was. Not the local gays, the married closet cases, and tragic out ones—one of whom actually had the profile name I’m Lonely—and not the invading gays. There were a lot more of the latter. Hipster beards and curled mustaches. Old-timey-style tattoos done by twentysomethings on twentysomethings.

  The idea flashed into my head so fast and fully formed that I wondered if it didn’t come from (the dreamsea) somewhere on high (or down low), like he was already a real person just waiting to be born.

  Ronan Szepessy couldn’t be on Grindr. But someone else could. Someone fictional. Manufactured. Engineered to be absolutely perfect. The broadest shoulders, the smallest waist, the biggest biceps. The biggest (jug-handled ears) dick. Twenty-nine years old—not too young or too old for almost anyone. As much a top as he was a bottom. A man absolutely everyone would tap back, if he tapped them.

  I had all the raw materials already. In my backpack, at my father’s house, was a laptop with hundreds of thousands of pictures of men in all sorts of stages of undress and degrees of flaccidity. Who was better than me at Photoshopping? I could construct a man for all seasons: smiling in full-color flannel squatted on the bed of a pickup truck; pouting in naked black-and-white; awkward-angle Pride parade selfies and hotel-mirror torso shots. Make a consistent face from two or three others. An elaborate catfishing experiment, chatting up dozens of boys and swiftly talking them into sharing their private albums, their most sec
ret desires and fears.

  But why? Just to mess with them? Get their hopes up for a man who never wants to meet?

  Maybe.

  Or maybe there are a thousand uses for (Tom) this guy. Some of them far more exciting and more sinister than others.

  And not just the gay boys, either. It’d be easy, once I had the raw materials, to fashion a slight variant version of my Frankenstein sex bot and let him loose on the lonely Hudson transplant women of Tinder. Learn their wants and needs and weaknesses. Tell them hurtful little lies about each other. Talk them into running little errands. Play little jokes on people.

  Being in Hudson was doing something to me. Feeding my hate. Feeding on my hate.

  “. . . huh, Ronan?”

  Dom was looking at me with deep concern, so I figured whatever he’d said had had something to do with my dad. So I shrugged and said, “Fine, I guess.” And Dom nodded, like that answer worked just fine for what he’d asked, and said, “I’d like to come see him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We should make that happen.”

  “It looks like you two have a lot of work to do,” Dom said. “I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to head to Catskill, go bowling.”

  “Take Ronan with you,” Attalah said. “We’re mostly done here. And I get the impression he needs to have a little fun.”

  For the first time, I wondered: Did she know? What we had been to each other? What we had done together?

  Dom looked at me nervously. Like he was afraid I’d say yes. Or worried I wouldn’t. “I couldn’t impose on you like that,” I said. “I should be getting home.”

  “No imposition,” he said. “You should come.”

  I did love bowling. And I did enjoy spending time with Dominick.

  “Okay,” I said. “If that’s okay by you, that sounds like fun.”

  “Excellent,” Attalah said.

  “You don’t get boat sick, do you, Ronan?”

  “Fuck, Dom, I don’t think I’ve even been in a boat since we took your dad’s—” I stopped myself, but the damage was done. I could see the hurt in his face, at the thought of his father.

  “It’s my boat now,” he said, blinking away the pain like it was nothing. “And we’re taking it across the river to Catskill.”

  “That sounds fantastic,” I said, remembering taking that beautiful little slip of a thing out on the river in the middle of the night, without his father’s permission. How many stars were overhead. How good my hand felt in his.

  Dom chuckled. “Work on your elaborate murder plot is done for the day?”

  “Shush, you,” she said. “We’re nowhere near the murder part of the plan. We’re barely to the arson.”

  I followed Dom upstairs. When we got there I was shocked to see bright sunlight streaming in the windows. It felt like hours and hours that Attalah and I had been down there. Like it ought to be night by now. Like the darkness inside us must have swollen to fill the sky.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Hey, Mom,” Attalah says, already regretting having come.

  Hazel makes a noise of greeting. It sounds like a baby gargling. Ever since the stroke, seeing her mother makes her miserable.

  “I’m going to make us some coffee,” Attalah says. Her mother tries to answer, and the sound makes her want to scream in rage at whatever cruel god could do this to her mother. The apartment stinks of burned pork chops, of home. “Why don’t you go sit down and watch the news?”

  Hazel drags herself slowly, ponderously back to her couch.

  The woman weighs well over four hundred pounds. She has lived in the same apartment on the top floor of Bliss Towers for forty-five years. Most of her time is spent in the impressive recliner that Dom and Attalah got her ten years ago. She sits there now, angry at the television and the world. Attalah hands her her coffee, with cream and six sugars, just how she likes it, with the same inward pang at participating in her mother’s slow diet-based suicide. Once a week she comes through to cook something big, a casserole or stew to last the next several days, something the home health aide or her mother’s friends can heat up for her.

  It’s only been a month since the stroke. At first Attalah tried to talk to her, keep up a stream of idle chatter. Problem with that was, her mom kept trying to answer. And then she’d get frustrated. And then she’d get angry. And then she’d start to break things.

  The worst part is, as bad as these visits are, they’re better than they were before the stroke.

  “You’re weak,” Hazel used to hiss, when Attalah told her about UPLIFT Hudson’s latest attempt to fight back against the invaders. “That’s what you are. You and your whole generation. Just look what you’ve let them do to this town.”

  “Mom, I don’t think—”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it was, to protect our community from the Urban Renewal plan that came through here in the sixties?”

  Attalah knew. Her mother had told her, many a time. Most of Black Hudson knows. There’s a chapter in a book about it, naming her mom and everything. Among dozens of others, of course. Hazel never exaggerated her own role or downplayed that of the dozens of other leaders who helped. They’d seen the way Urban Renewal played out everywhere else. Paid attention, when James Baldwin called it a mispronunciation of negro removal. So when HUD came to Hudson, the city’s Black community was not about to let the mostly white city government submit their own proposal. Everywhere else, that meant bulldozed slums and thruways slitting the belly of the South Bronx open.

  Hazel went to a million meetings. She collected a thousand signatures. Made hundreds of phone calls. And, Attalah suspected, did a whole lot more besides.

  Compared to all that, of course Attalah’s own efforts look paltry.

  Hazel is watching a PBS documentary, longtime Harlem residents discussing the destruction of their community by mass displacement. “Our big mistake was, when the white people started moving in, we treated them okay. Not all of us, of course, but by and large we treated them like we wanted to be treated. That was the problem. They got so comfortable. We should have let them know, right off the bat, how hard they were hated.”

  Disappointment used to roll off her mother like the smell of too-strong perfume. Attalah tried not to take it too personally. It was life that had disappointed Hazel Draven. Attalah was just one small piece of the massive machinery, made up of economics and racism and misogyny and geography and biology and God Himself.

  But now, since the stroke, there’s no disappointment. Or at least—she can’t voice it anymore. And Attalah is happy about that, even if she also hates herself for being happy.

  * * *

  “HOLY SHIT, THAT was fun,” Ronan says, stumbling as he steps back onboard the boat.

  He’s had a few beers, Dominick thinks, but then again so have I. Not so many I can’t get the boat back across to Hudson.

  “You don’t go bowling in the city?” Dom asks, untying the knots that hold them to the dock.

  “Everywhere you go it’s expensive and fancy,” Ronan says. “Disco lights and fifteen-dollar fucking truffle fries. And bachelorette parties shrieking at like half the lanes.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  There is so little space to sit in the boat. And they are bigger now than they had been when they last sat there. Their shoulders press together.

  Ronan asks, “What’s it like, being a cop in Hudson now?”

  “It’s fine,” Dom says. “I mean, it fucking sucks, but not in a way that I can’t handle. Most of what we do is about drugs. Opioids are really fucking people up. Since fentanyl started getting cut into the supply, overdoses have skyrocketed. Meth is still a huge problem. There’s this new stuff, spiderwebbing or whatever, coming up from the city. Domestic calls have been going up.”

  “Domestic calls, like, domestic violence?”

  “Yeah,” Dom says. “Fights, screaming matches, neighbors calling the cops or Child Protective Services on each other. Times are really tough, and people are s
tressed. The real test of any relationship, whether it’s with your partner or a sibling or a parent or whoever, is how you act when you’re two months behind on paying the rent.”

  “That’s what happens when your town gets taken over,” Ronan says.

  “You’re already sounding like Attalah,” Dom says, with a laugh.

  “You must see people at their worst,” Ronan says. He lets one hand dip into the water of the Hudson. “That must take a toll on you.”

  “It does.”

  In the pregnant pause that follows, and perhaps abetted by the alcohol in his system, Ronan says, “Attalah told me about your father. I’m so sorry—I didn’t know. I would have come to the funeral. I would have—”

  “It’s okay. He had a lot of respect for you, and I know you did for him.”

  “What’s it . . . like? Losing your dad?” When Dom doesn’t answer right away, he adds, “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. It’s just—I’m just . . .”

  “I know, Ronan,” Dom says softly, his voice as warm and kind as he can make it. “I wish I could tell you something other than . . . nothing in my life ever hurt like that.”

  Dom puts his arm around Ronan. Ronan leans gratefully into his heat. The engine chugs them slowly eastward, across the wide choppy river to the town that took its name.

  * * *

  AHEAD OF THEM, the lights of Hudson are looming larger. Ronan doesn’t want to arrive at their destination. He never wants to get out of the boat, or for Dom to lift his arm from around him. His hand feels frozen all the way through, from dragging in the cold water most of the way across the river. The wind whips right through them, stirs up the water in startlingly high waves.

  “I never in my whole life felt safe the way I did in your arms,” Ronan says, without intending to.

  “Yeah,” Dom says, and thinks—but does not say—no one in my life ever needed me the way you did. Not Attalah, who is a thousand times stronger than me, and not my father, not even at the end, when he was so sick he—“Yeah.”