The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  And then Dom also does something he did not intend do. Not consciously, anyway, but once it is done he has no desire to take it back.

  With the arm that is around his best friend, he lifts his thumb and presses it to Ronan’s cheek and turns it in his direction. And kisses him, full on the lips. Ronan kisses back, his hunger a perfect match for Dom’s.

  The boat sputters the rest of the way around Middle Ground Flats. Dom only pulls out of the kiss when it is necessary to turn his attention to the piloting of the vehicle, to ensure they do not crash into the boat launch.

  “That was dumb,” Ronan says.

  “I guess it was.”

  “So why’d you do it?”

  Dom shrugs. Ties the knots.

  Ronan lifts Dom’s shirt with his dry hand and presses his wet, frozen one against the warm skin of his friend’s stomach. Dom yelps, and they both laugh.

  “This is a terrible idea,” Ronan says.

  “It is.”

  “Attalah’s your wife—my partner in crime . . .”

  “She is.”

  The boat is fully docked, but still they sit there.

  “I can’t do this to her,” Ronan says.

  “Our marriage is open,” Dom says. “We’re both free to pursue other people. Only rule is, neither one of us ever wants to know anything about it.”

  “Really? That’s the only rule?”

  Dom laughs. “I guess there’s other rules, but that’s the main one.”

  “I’m sure one of them is: not forming emotional attachments.”

  “We’ve never really discussed that.”

  Ronan leans back, looking up at the city climbing uphill ahead of him. The low-income apartments of Hudson Terrace; the bright shadow of Bliss Towers. The statue of Saint Winifred, smiling down from Promenade Hill.

  “This is a terrible idea,” Ronan repeats, and leans over to kiss Dom on the warm throb of his neck.

  Chapter Sixteen

  RONAN

  The morning’s scheming completed, Attalah and I went upstairs for coffee.

  We’d done well. Accomplished a lot. So much that I hadn’t had to struggle to keep my mind free of filthy thoughts, or guilt over what I’d done with her husband the night before.

  “You okay?” I asked, watching her wince as she struggled to climb the steps. “I can make the coffee and bring it down.”

  “I’ll have to come upstairs eventually,” she said, and I could hear the pain in her voice.

  “Why not just set up our dungeon of schemes on the ground floor? We can keep the good stuff locked up . . .”

  “I need this,” she hissed. “I need to challenge myself as much as I can, for as long as I can.”

  For the first time, I wondered what exactly was wrong with her. Hip problem, knee issue? Bad back? The body was so full of pain waiting to inflict itself.

  Skullduggery and shenanigans had no place in her bright beautiful kitchen. We talked about Dom, his job, and what a good man he was. We talked about her mother; how she, too, was gone . . . but not.

  I helped her as much as possible with the making of the coffee. Putting the milk away, a photo on the refrigerator caught my eye. “You know Katch!” I said.

  “From when he was ten,” Attalah said. “Even before he started transitioning.”

  “I had no idea Katch was trans.”

  “Yup. Did not have an easy time of it, here in Hudson, as I know you can imagine. Such a beautiful young man. And so sweet. It’s a fucking shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “I mean, suicide is always a tragedy. But someone so young—someone who had come so far . . .”

  All the blood left my face. All the words left my mouth.

  “You didn’t know he died,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It happened a couple of months ago. Did you meet him in New York City? I know he used to go down there a lot for modeling and stuff . . .”

  I met Katch for the first time two weeks ago, I tried to say. And I just saw him last week. Walking into the goddamn Penelope’s Quilt potluck.

  No words came out, and I was glad of it. If I was fucking nuts, no sense letting Attalah know it. Who’d want to be co-conspirators with a crazy person? A crazy co-conspirator was a liability.

  Her hand found mine, and she made a soothing noise. I had to bite down hard on my lip to keep from laughing. An irrational, full-body laugh, bubbling up from my most twisted hidden place. He was dead the whole time! I reached out to move two magnets and saw that the photo was part of the program from a funeral.

  “I have to go,” I said, startling myself by saying the words out loud.

  “Of course,” Attalah said, rubbing my shoulder. I waited very patiently for my body to be able to move itself toward the door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dom is watching the Bangladeshis play cricket. A cold October Saturday morning, but here they are, and here they’ll be until the snow covers the vacant lot. Mill Street is just a couple of blocks from Warren Street, but it’s at the bottom of a steep hill and the marshy land is ill-suited for anything but shabby multifamily prefab homes. It might as well be on another planet. No one ever comes here who doesn’t have a reason to. Perfect for secret meetings out in the open. Most of the recent transplants aren’t even aware this street exists. Probably the hipsters wonder where they live, the many South Asian immigrants they see on the street every day. Hundreds of them came to Hudson to work at the Emsig Button Factory in the 1980s and ’90s, and they’re still here even if the button factory’s long gone.

  “Officer,” Wick says, sitting down beside him.

  “Hey,” Dom says, and slides the McDonald’s bag in his direction. “Call me Dom.”

  “Oh shit,” Wick says, eyes widening at the smell. He scoops french fries out by the fistful. “Thanks!”

  “Thank you for speaking with me. What did you—”

  “My mom’s a drug addict.”

  “Shit,” Dom says, and suddenly Pastor Thirza’s evasion made a whole lot more sense. “I’m sorry, Wick. That must be hard on you.”

  “She’s fine as long as she can get them. Functions normally.”

  “Painkillers?” Dom asks.

  Wick nods. “Prescription, at first.”

  “Of course,” Dom said. “That’s always how it starts.”

  Still, he’s missing something. Ossie selling drugs to Pastor Thirza supplied a piece of the puzzle, but it wasn’t enough. Ossie was scared of someone, and probably not the pastor.

  What if it wasn’t someone human? he thinks, and bats the idiotic thought away.

  “You eavesdrop on all your mom’s meetings?”

  “Not all of them,” Wick says with a laugh.

  “The other night when I came by, a meeting was just wrapping up. Seemed like people on her board were pretty mad at her. You know what that was about?”

  Wick nodded. “Mom made a deal with Penelope’s Quilt. Sold off a portion of the property for a ton of money, to be part of the Pequod Arms. Couple board members tried to get her fired for it, but they didn’t have the votes.”

  But they would have, if people had known she was an addict.

  And there it is, sailor. A very real (very non-supernatural) reason for powerful people to be after Ossie. For Ossie to be scared.

  But the hairs on the back of his neck won’t go down. Because the Ossie he knew—the Ossie he loved—the Ossie he missed so fucking much—she wouldn’t have been driven to suicide over some damn real estate speculation.

  “You’re sad, too,” Wick says, touching his shoulder softly.

  “I am,” he whispers, gut-punched by the kindness in Wick’s voice.

  “I don’t have a lot of friends,” Wick says. “She saw that, somehow. Went out of her way to be nice to me.”

  “Yeah,” Dom says, and he gets it. Ossie would have taken one look at that awkward, lonely, little gay kid and decided it was her mission in life to love him. For all of Hudson’s sudden status as a gay mecca for artist transp
lants, that wouldn’t have trickled down to the halls of Hudson High.

  Shouts from the cricket field: men hugged, whooped, clapped each other on the back.

  “I’d love for you to meet my friend Ronan. I think the two of you—the three of us—would get along real well together.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  RONAN

  Cold morning; the smell of the sea in the air. I walked all the way home from Attalah’s house, my head on fire from what I’d just learned. And because fire wants nothing but to make more fire, I stole a cigarette from my father and went out onto the porch to smoke it.

  Two fresh clove stubs lay in the coffee can ashtray I’d emptied the day before. Shivers started, and they wouldn’t stop.

  One of two things was true. Either I was completely crazy, or ghosts were real and one was haunting me. Actually both things could have been true.

  But was this such new knowledge? Hadn’t I felt it from the second I stepped off the train? Hadn’t I known it in my heart, in my gut, the whole time I was living here? Something was wrong with Hudson. Always had been. The city was submerged in (the dreamsea) something, caught up in a spiritual membrane that rendered the normal rules of life and death inapplicable.

  I had a choice. I wasn’t helpless. I could choose to believe I was crazy and try to get help accordingly. Head back to Manhattan, check into rehab. Abandon my dad again, and Attalah and all our schemes. And Dom.

  Or: I could proceed like ghosts were real.

  Sometimes accepting the impossible is as easy as preferring it to the alternative.

  I called out, “Katch?” but no one answered me. I went inside and put two hoodies on and walked down Warren Street, to the train tracks that split the city along Sixth Street—past grinning campaign volunteers in bright Jark blue—and took a left to follow the rails south.

  My head still spun. My stomach was sick. But leaving the street behind and walking into the woods felt forbidden, delicious. I’d always imagined cops or wicked brakemen would descend upon me the instant I left behind the safety of the city street grid, but that was absurd. No one could see me. No one cared what I did.

  A culvert ran alongside the rails. Dead blond cattails; a tricycle; standing water; in another week or so it would be edged with ice. Then the woods fell away, and a set of rusted black trestles carried the train tracks over Power Avenue. On my left, a sprawl of low yellow buildings surrounded by fences three stories high, capped with coils of razor wire: Hudson Correctional Facility.

  “Ella Fitzgerald was incarcerated in Hudson,” said Katch, who was squatting on the rails on my right.

  “Shit,” I said, startled.

  “Sorry. I lose track of where and when I am, sometimes. Hudson exists outside of time and space as you understand them. Shit gets confusing. Anyway. She was fifteen. It was 1933. The House of Refuge for Women in Hudson was only the second gender-specific prison in American history.”

  “Hey, Katch.”

  “Hey, Ronan.”

  He got up and walked beside me. His posture was better. His face brighter, skin almost glowing. Hair sculpted, coiffed: spiky sea urchin couture.

  “Are you really him?”

  “I think so,” he said, and looked down at his hands.

  “How . . . why?”

  “They brought me back. So I could bring you back. And we could save the town together.”

  We came around a bend, walking west now. We could see the river glimmer. “They who?”

  “It’s probably easier if I show you.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. Wind hit me, sharp and cold, making me wince, making me blink.

  And—we were on a ship. Standing in the crow’s nest, looking down on slaughter. A whale thrashed. Tiny men shouted, screamed. Brandished blades. Swung ropes. Bright red foam churned. The sun was setting and it was bitter cold and we were thousands of miles and hundreds of years from home and something magnificent was being murdered. Katch took hold of my hand with his, and I was grateful for that human (human?) touch.

  “Take me away,” I whispered. “Please? Take me anywhere, just—”

  Wind again, blistering, scorching my exposed skin until I had to cover my face with my hands to keep it from cracking open. When it died down and I dared to look, we were home. Except, not. Hudson; the waterfront; ages ago. Long wide wooden docks. Tall ships. Barrels and boys and crates and commerce. Still in the crow’s-nest, I could see to the top of Promenade Hill, where no low-income housing or statue of Saint Winifred stood. No streetlights. A whale lashed to the side. Dead, at least. That was something. Its suffering had stopped.

  “That,” Katch said, pointing to the great mammal’s corpse. “That’s who they are.”

  Again his hand on my shoulder; again the icy blast. This time I was ready for it. Tried to keep my eyes open. But the wind kept up and my eyes watered and the world blurred, and when I blinked to clear it we were standing atop Cemetery Hill. Full night. Cloudless sky. So many stars. Because of course there were; because electricity hadn’t been invented yet. The only light that humans could make in the dark was with candle or torch or bonfire, none of which could dent the light of the stars.

  As if in response to my thoughts, stars darkened overhead. A huge patch of the sky went black. The patch moved. Something was flying (swimming) between me and the stars.

  “Is that—”

  “That’s us,” Katch said, and it came closer, and I could see its shape clearly. Long, streamlined. Massive tail propelling it. A whale, bigger than all the whales that ever were. My heart sang in my chest. My lungs filled up with helium. Knees weakened. I could have dropped down, pressed my face to the cold dirt, groveled, kowtowed, banged my forehead bloody, and it still wouldn’t have been enough to convey the awe and the love and the rapture I felt. The gratitude, to get a glimpse of something like this. What I saw was majesty, power, of a sort I’d never dared hope or dream or believe could be.

  This is what they talk about, the born-agains, the zealots, the faithful. The ones who have a lightbulb come-to-Jesus moment. This is what it’s like to see God.

  This wasn’t God. It was just a god. But it was enough. Whatever Katch was, I believed.

  So I surrendered to the wind. Let it batter me. Blind me. Whisk me from place to place and time to time.

  Bright, cloudy wintertime, and Warren Street was a swathe of white and red. Blood-soaked men dragged strips of whale flesh through the snow. Black smoke billowed.

  “This city was built on their blood,” Katch said. “It’s in the foundations of the buildings. The sap of the trees. The oxygen that mosses excrete.”

  All the ink was gone from his arms. Only one tattoo remained. A strange scribble, like an infinity sign crumpled in on itself.

  More wind, and we were back. Train tracks firm beneath our feet. Much closer to the river now, as if we’d kept walking while we wandered through time. The bliss of what I’d seen remained. I never wanted it to end. Already I could feel that it was diminished, slightly. Already I knew that it could continue to shrink, and knowing it was almost more than I could bear.

  “They made this town theirs. And their magic is powerful. Their wards have held for almost two centuries.”

  “Show me again,” I said. “I want to see it. See you. That” (sky whale) “other you.”

  “No,” Katch said. “Human beings can only stand so much bliss.”

  We walked in silence. I wanted to beg, to argue, but how could you debate a (god) (ghost) (monster) whale?

  “They’ve kept this city safe. Kept its people safe. And now—”

  I laughed out loud. “Safe? Are you serious? Hudson had slavery. Local chapters of the KKK later on. And what about those decades of economic decline? Depression, drug addiction, suicide—hate—Hudson seems to have way more than its fair share of all those things.”

  But it went deeper than that, I could see now. I thought of my father, his mind sucked dry long before its time. My mom, so damaged by dreams or vision
s that they broke her in the end. Was this how it went, here? Was this what it meant to be from Hudson? To never not have nightmares. A lifetime of waking up in cold sweats, weird dreams, voices in our heads—or was someone calling from the street, whispering in the next room? Surely life wounds all of us—surely plenty of people carried broken-off blades between their ribs, no matter where they grew up—but the wounds Hudson left bled a special kind of blood, sweet and rich to the great dead gods who swam through our skies.

  Katch sighed. We crossed the intersection, where the westbound freight train tracks we’d been following bisected the passenger rails that ran north to south. “Humans take such a shortsighted view of things.”

  “Help me understand.”

  “I can’t. For right now, all you need to understand is that they’re losing. Their wards are being broken one by one. The hold they have on Hudson—the bonds they’ve built, between people—they’re shattering. They’re losing control. The tide is rising—the ocean (dreamsea) is intruding into the strangest places. They thought they were immortal—they never imagined anything could hurt them—but as people get pushed out—as buildings get rebuilt—they grow weaker. Smaller. And now they know they’re losing.”

  We were almost to the water’s edge. A willow’s yellow arms were nearly empty.

  “Do you get what I’m saying to you, Ronan?”

  “So, after you died, they—the whales—they saved you? Sent you to bring me back?”

  Katch nodded. “Their power flows through me. And now it flows through you. You can do . . . things.”

  Things. My spine tingled with ill-defined excitement. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. The rules are very unclear, and they are not good communicators. I just know they’ve invested you with power, the same as me.”

  I thought of the feeling I’d gotten, in Attalah’s living room. A replacement drug.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  A train whistle wailed. Katch shrugged. He may have been a ghost, in thrall to gods or monsters, but he was also still a confused kid trying to make sense of a whole ton of confusing, terrifying shit. Which, weren’t we all.