The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  The internet has made us expect information to be easy, straightforward, accessible. Pull your pocket computer out and ask it any question, and you can find an answer. And if the answer isn’t there—if the question’s never even been asked—we don’t know what to do. But think of how much knowledge human beings carry around in their heads!

  She’d go back to school for it, one of these days. Do a thesis on the memories we cannot share; the knowledge we can never acquire. Or design the app that would make her fucking famous. IceBergTip, or maybe icebergtip? ThePastIsPresent?

  * * *

  PITY POOR BERGEN, SAILOR. He has spent so long staring into his phone. Flicking his thumb downward every ten or twenty seconds, to refresh the grid of men on his sex app. Torsos in various stages of hairiness and decrepitude; a few faces; a few sunsets or farm silos.

  He should be working, but work is slow today. Penelope’s Quilt’s community projects are at an ebb on Wednesdays.

  But then,

  One word: hey

  For a split second he is suspicious. He always is, when somebody above a certain hotness level hollers at him. He could have anyone he wants—any one of these fit muscled bearded gym boys would be happy to get a hey from him, would in fact immediately respond with nude photos of themselves. In his experience, when someone this hot hits him up, it’s because everyone hotter than him has already listened to what the guy wants and said Oh hell no. You want to chain me to a what? Do what on my chest? When someone that hot hits him up, he wants Bergen to do unspeakable things. Someone that hot sees Bergen and thinks, This guy will do anything I ask of him.

  But Bergen lets go of his suspicions immediately, as he always does. Because they’re right, those imaginary guys in his head. He’ll do anything they ask of him.

  This one, for example. Black curly hair, jug-handled ears, a chin you could crack walnuts with. Easily the sexiest thing on offer here—hotter even than that supermodel Quint Whateverhisnameis, who Bergen sees on here all the time and who never returns his taps. Quint is handsome, but this man is dangerous. His scowl sends shivers up Bergen’s back. Why is a scowling man so sexy?

  Username: Tom Minniq. Age: 29. Height: 5’7”. 165 lbs. Body Hair? Hairy. Relationship Status: Single. What I Do: work construction. What I’m Looking For: sex and friends but mostly sex. About me: Hudson native, enjoying all the new fun coming to town. Sex Preferences _______. Safety Practices: _______. Ethnicity: _______.

  Hey, Bergen writes back, and when two minutes and fifty-seven seconds go by without a response, he types, You looking?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  RONAN

  Banal, boring—the brute mechanics of betrayal. Barely worth mentioning. I googled power of attorney, spent some time reading up on the basics. Called my father’s lawyer. His doctor. Had them come over. Carefully structured it around Margie’s work schedule, so she’d never know.

  Effortless, all of it. Heart-hurtingly so. My father stared ahead, unseeing, unresponsive. These men who’d known me all my life said kind, sad words, patted me on the shoulder, signed on all the right dotted lines.

  Photography was the best way to get my mind off things. Not my own. I’d found a box, in my father’s bedroom, while I looked for the deed of sale to the butcher shop. The box was full of postcards, old photos, news clippings, and full-page ads from major papers. Now I sat on the floor at my father’s feet, drinking coffee and letting it rile me up inside.

  Dinosaurs, in the Seventh Street Park.

  A forty-foot-tall T. rex stood in the flatbed of a pickup truck; a brontosaurus sixty feet long was on a trailer attached to the back. Men smiled for photos alongside them.

  HUDSON PREPARES FOR THE WORLD’S FAIR, said the text at the bottom of the postcard. In a tiny oval: Photo by Jerremy.

  The life-size dinosaurs that wowed the world at the fair had been built right here in Hudson. Paid for by Sinclair Oil, constructed by Louis Paul Jonas—who had done some of the most memorable displays at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His studio, long since shuttered, still stood out on Miller Road. A triceratops on the lawn was all that was left. Somewhere there’s a picture of me on it.

  I dressed up as well as I could, including a cardigan I’d bought in the eleventh grade, and headed out. Down Warren Street.

  Sunday morning; everyone sleeping in. Pretty soon the street would be packed with pedestrians. Loud with the commentary of strangers: Isn’t it so cute; look how quaint; it’s like this whole street has been frozen in time. But for now—if I closed my eyes and breathed deep—it could have been the Hudson of sixty years ago. My father’s city, where dinosaurs stood in the park and trains rode right through the main street in the middle of the day, where crazy people coexisted with the rest of their community, where everyone knew him—the butcher shop prince, who would one day inherit his father’s kingdom.

  When I left, I disrupted the natural order of things. Broke the chain from father to son. And, sure, the business would have failed anyway. Like everything else on Warren Street that wasn’t an antique shop. The few stores that made it through Hudson’s long depression would not survive its renaissance. But it wouldn’t all have been on Dad. We could have shared that burden, and maybe a smaller share of that crushing weight wouldn’t have broken him.

  But I couldn’t have stayed. Not as who I was. I’d have had to keep myself in some kind of horrible closet. How I made it out at all, without being the victim of a homophobic hate crime, is still a mystery to me.

  I had work to do. I was behind schedule with Jark. So far we hadn’t found anything, no gaps in his armor or tragic flaws or fatal weaknesses. There was still so much intel to be gotten. And one very big seed to plant.

  Across the street, a liquor store. Inside was all smiling sommeliers and artisanal tequilas and bourbon made in barrels built from reclaimed wood—a far cry from the bulletproof-glass-and-lottery-tickets liquor store Hudson used to have on Warren Street. While I stood there, basking in my hatred of it all, I did some googling. Read a dozen interviews with Jark Trowse. Apparently everyone cared what a billionaire had to say. It didn’t take me long to see that rye whiskey was his liquor of choice.

  As soon as I reached the shelf with the ryes, a wisp of a man appeared beside me. Unsolicited, he started ticking off the merits of each bottle. “Monongahela-style distillation”; “grassiness and spice that linger deep down”; “fruity fudginess.” Etc. “Chewable, for sure,” he said, discussing one bottle, holding out a hand as if forestalling my inevitable question, like he could see in my eyes how concerned I was about the chewability of my whiskey. I ignored it all and bought the most expensive one, at $215. “Great choice,” he said, but not like it was a great choice, like I had failed some kind of test, like I had revealed my passion for whiskeys to be insufficiently all-consuming. “We do have a WhistlePig Boss Hog Black Prince on order but they’re always backlogged with that one.”

  “I know,” I said. “Why do you think I’m buying this disappointing substitute?”

  And then I headed for Jark’s.

  His house was on Allen Street, a block from the courthouse. Every building on that block looked like something out of Meet Me in St. Louis, great gingerbread monstrosities of nineteenth-century wealth; wide, deep porches and Tiffany glass; porticos and gables and other words I never knew before I started researching Hudson home prices—the better to burn them all down. Metaphorically speaking.

  These were whaling-boom properties. Jark’s house was brick, in a faux-Moorish style with three rounded arches over the entranceway. He’d bought it for four million, five years back.

  I rang the doorbell. I waited. No one answered. On the bag the whiskey came in, I wrote: Jark—came by to see what you were up to, but I guess you were out. Wasn’t so sure about leaving this gift unattended in such a seedy neighborhood (lol) but decided to risk it. Thank you for bringing my town back to life.—Ronan

  It cost me a lot, that last line, but I could do it. I set
the bottle down and turned to go, and only then did the door open.

  “Ronan?” Jark said sleepily.

  Had I ever really seen him before? Really looked? Not the campaign poster version, Obama-confident, and not the Fortune cover story, shrewd and humble in an utterly fraudulent blend. Here, now, hungover, unprepared, I could see him clearly. Brow permanently furrowed. Hairline receding. Arms skinny.

  This thing I felt, it wasn’t pity, although it was close. It was kinship. My hairline was receding. My arms were skinny. Two aging gay dudes stood on that porch, slipping into irrelevance. Had been, since we left our twenties. The surface spoiling; a fate worse than death in a community so obsessed with the surface.

  “Hey, sorry to bother you,” I said, snatching up the bottle again. “Is this a bad time?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I just figured you and I never had a chance to really get to know each other. And because my momma raised me right, I never call on anyone without a gift.”

  “Holy shit, a WhistlePig Fifteen Year Straight!” he exclaimed, taking the bottle from my hands. “That’s incredible. Shit, Ronan, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything, just pop it open and get two glasses.”

  “Yes!”

  I followed him in. Through a deep foyer, where firewood was stacked three feet high. And then—I saw.

  In the center of a soaring open reception room, on a parquet-tile floor, beside a wide central staircase, a woolly mammoth. An ancient skeleton, the brown bones demanding total reverence. Her right front leg raised, head tilted to the side, about to swing her glorious tusks and exterminate an enemy.

  It took me a long time to find words. When I did, they were just: “Is that . . .”

  “It’s real,” he said. “I mean, about seventy percent intact. The missing pieces have been filled in with resin composite replicas. Complete skeletons are just not found. I know which bones are replacements, but I don’t think anyone else can tell.”

  It had never even entered my mind that someone could own such a thing. I’d imagined them as something like the Constitution or a national forest—the patrimony of all people, the wellspring of our wonder, something that belonged where anyone could see them.

  “How the hell did you get something like this?”

  “They come on the market from time to time. There are actually more prehistoric remains in private hands than institutional ones these days. Museums can’t compete with oligarchs, I’m afraid. When the Field Museum in Chicago bought Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex at auction, they had to have support from McDonald’s and the Walt Disney Corporation. Way of the world, shitty as it is.”

  “Way of the world,” I whispered. Hating the world. Hating him. Wanting to stand there forever. My attempt to feel like a baller by buying a two-hundred-dollar bottle of whiskey suddenly felt pathetic.

  He led me to a kitchen so wide and bright it hurt my eyes. Pulled out two tumblers that had to be over a hundred years old. Survivors of some Western saloon or seaside sailor’s bar. Everything Jark owned had pedigree, had texture. What a magical life that of the rich must be. To feel oneself immersed in history all the time. Inseparable from it. In possession of it.

  “I always drink the first one neat,” he said, pouring the whiskey. “So you can appreciate it in its purest form.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  Glasses clinked. Hatred had not replaced the surge of kinship I’d felt on the porch. They coexisted, and I decided to ride that contradiction.

  We sipped. It burned. It tasted like whiskey.

  “It’s really chewable,” I said. “And I love how the spice lingers.”

  He nodded gratefully, like a traveler in a foreign land who finally found someone who could speak his language. “People try so many crazy different kinds of barrels these days, but really there’s just no substitute for oak. Sometimes simplicity is best.”

  I left the paper bag on his counter, note side up, where he could find and read it later.

  We went to a tile-floored side room where a fire hummed in the fireplace, and sat in brown leather chairs so worn I worried they’d crumble to dust underneath me. Antique maps and a ship’s wheel hung on the walls. The ceiling was raw scuffed wood, almost certainly reclaimed from a ship, which explained the air’s faint salt tang.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m still so bowled over by your mammoth.”

  “Sometimes I worry it’s far too vulgar a display of power,” his voice lapsing into a demonic croak to complement the Exorcist quote.

  “It is a lot to process.”

  “I’m so glad we’re friends,” Jark said. “I was beginning to be jealous of you. The only person in Hudson with more Instagram followers than me.”

  “Can’t compare our followings,” I said. “You value quality. Occasional posts, of special things, and you rarely engage in dialogue. I emphasize quantity. Tons of posts, even of the stupidest shit, and tons of comments on tons of other people’s posts. People love that shit. You ask me, that’s all anybody wants from social media. A gentle reminder that they do in fact exist.”

  “You’ve been studying up on me.”

  “And you on me.”

  He raised his glass in acknowledgment. “But you’ve been quiet lately. No posts at all. Someone like you, with such a big influencer score—if you started hyping up this place, you could really help get Hudson on the map even more.”

  “It’s been a difficult time,” I said. “My dad . . .”

  I let that sentence expire. But with the whiskey already warming me up inside, and the fire working on the outside, I decided to jump right in. Sincerity was best, when building a bond. “I can’t tell you what it’s like for me. Coming back here, now. Seeing how much it’s changed. Growing up here was so, so hard.” I let myself remember bloodied noses, bullies slinging slurs at me. Steve “Stubb” Coffin, the mayor’s son, his bizarre obsession with causing me harm. I heard my voice falter. “I never in a million years could have imagined that Hudson would become a safe place for gay people.”

  “How’d you get out?”

  “Very boring, very standard story. Became obsessed with photography. It was my safe space, my only way of asserting control over the world I found so menacing. I coedited a zine with my best friend, actually, and I think that got me into SVA, which was a real long shot application. Moved to New York City. Flunked out, but not because I was fucking around—I was doing actual work, I interned with a photographer and then got hired as her assistant, she liked my stuff and let me use her studio and other resources—helped get my work in front of her clients, who started hiring me for the jobs she couldn’t take on—pretty soon I was doing okay for myself.” Here I paused, poured myself more whiskey. Wondered how honest I should be. Decided to go all in. The better to wholly hook him. “The fucking around came later. Like apparently every other gay guy in New York City, I started doing a lot of Tina. And fucking a lot of other boys who were into it. Which I guess brings us to the present day.”

  “You have a bit of a reputation,” he said, apologetically. “I guess you know that already. But that’s good. Only people who are talked about have reputations. Everyone else is just a hot mess in the privacy of their own irrelevance.”

  I laughed, sincerely. “Such a poet, Jark. What about you? Any addiction issues, hot-mess skeletons?”

  He swirled the last sip of rye around in his glass. “This is going to sound like a cop-out, but my addiction is work. And it’s a really dangerous one. Not in the same way as crystal, but still. Dangerous to my health—I get maybe five hours of sleep a night and never remember to drink enough water, and my stress levels would probably kill a man twice my size—and definitely dangerous to my social life. I haven’t had a boyfriend in . . . fucking . . . three years? And then it was just a bunch of short-term things.”

  “That sucks,” I said. “I mean, neither have I, but I still have tons of sex. What about you?�
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  Jark didn’t answer right away. I had never seen him on any of the apps. Of course I understood the need to not put all your business out there. No sense saying in a semipublic forum that you preferred getting fucked to fucking, or refused to wear condoms, or what your racial hang-ups were. Especially if you were running for public office. Was there a separate app for superstars and billionaires? If there was, it couldn’t have too many offerings in Hudson. “My sex life is another casualty of my work addiction.”

  Probably he paid for it. Might that be the weak spot I was in search of?

  “That’s a shame,” I said, mock-jocular. Proceeding with extreme caution. “There’s no rent boys in Hudson? I wouldn’t even know where to look for something like that.”

  He laughed. “I’m sure there are.”

  Somehow, we emptied that bottle. Talking about bullshit. Getting drunk; getting ridiculous. No helpful intel emerged, but that was fine. I’d come to deepen my relationship with him, trick him into thinking we were friends, and in that respect the visit was a smash hit.

  But here’s the thing: I liked talking to him. Even if I hated myself for it. That tiny kinship flame kept burning. He and I had so much more in common than me and Attalah, me and Dom, me and Marge or Treenie or my poor half-brain-dead dad. It didn’t mean I cared about him.

  “I saw in your dossier that Ohrena Shaw is a tenant of yours.”

  “Yeah,” he said, picking up the empty bottle and reading the label. A slight guarded edge to his voice.

  “I went to high school with her. We’re old friends.”

  “That’s cool,” he said, setting it down, along with his guard.