The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

FROM THE HUDSON GAZETTE:

  Photographic It Boy Ronan Szepessy, long the darling of the darker edge of the New York City editorial scene, has come home. Twenty years ago the Hudson native fled from a very different city, one where being an artist and openly gay were not realistic life choices.

  “Growing up here gave me some pretty deep wounds,” Ronan told me recently. “I dealt with a ton of homophobic violence, both physical and emotional. And I guess you could say that every photo I’ve ever taken has been an attempt to stitch those wounds closed.”

  For all its pain, this healing process has richly rewarded Ronan. He’s shot for some of the biggest new names in fashion, and his work has been in ads and editorials for everything from Vogue to Paper to BuzzFeed. Equal parts crime scene and sex scene, a Ronan Szepessy image oozes a studied, nostalgic sort of sleaze.

  “Coming home to Hudson has taught me so much about who I am as an artist,” Ronan says. “This is the landscape of my dreams—and my photography. All at once I could see that I’d spent the past two decades trying to get back here, reconstruct it out of whatever raw materials were around me.”

  Voluptuous bodies lay sprawled in narrow alleys. Bootlegger molls leer from high windows. Figures grapple in front of a rickety line of buildings, the whole picture so unsaturated it could be in black and white. Some of it is trickery and aftereffects—he didn’t rent Ford Model T’s and artfully arrange them in the background—but it’s a testament to the strength of Ronan’s compelling, incantatory vision (and his skill with Photoshop) that the extraneous elements only enhance the spell these images cast.

  Now Ronan will have his first major gallery exhibition, a retrospective covering his entire career, right here in Hudson.

  “Walker Evans photographed Hudson. Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train passed through Hudson. History is alive here. It’s not some dead thing on a shelf, or under glass in an antique store. That’s what I’ve been trying to capture, in every photo I took. No matter how far I fled, my art kept bringing me back here. In a sense, I never left. In a sense, I’ll never leave.”

  And Ronan believes the time is right for his unique perspective.

  “I hope I can be a bridge,” he says. “Between the old Hudson and the new. With all the animosity bubbling up to the surface lately, I think we need to have a serious conversation about who we are and what this city really is. I hope my art can help that along.”

  “Ghosts of Home” opens December 22nd at the Volker Gallery, 557 Warren Street.

  * * *

  DOM IS AT work; Ronan is otherwise engaged. Attalah opens the bottom drawer of her dresser, pulls out the sketchbook.

  Once upon a time, she went through one of these every six months. Drawings poured from her pen like water from a faucet. Then a pad would last her a year; then two years. This one she hasn’t cracked open in five.

  The pencil stuck between its pages needs no sharpening. She sets it down on the bed, sets herself down beside it. Takes out her phone, summons up a formidable horned tusked warthog demon mask fashioned by the Bamana people of Mali.

  The doorbell rings. Attalah ignores it.

  She deserves a moment to herself. But so much is happening. Just last night she had Rudy Snitko on her doorstep, telling her he’s gotten twenty different Hudson contractors to commit to a nonparticipation pact—carpenters and landscapers and plumbers and painters determined not to do any work for any of the invaders. To her great shock, Ronan even got his shit together enough to set everything up for Ohrena to have her big moment with Jark.

  And the person at the door won’t stop. And really she shouldn’t be ignoring it—for all she knows it could be another aggrieved Hudsonian, with another new wrinkle, another brilliant plan to help fight back.

  Her mother had always said it, remembering her own community organizing glory days, and Attalah had tried hard to believe it but had never quite been able to: people are incredible, once they figure out how powerful they are. Another thing she always said was: This stuff works best when it’s a little bit out of your control. That’s what Dr. King used to say. In the beginning you might need to manipulate people, but once they get going, they’ll start manipulating you.

  So she puts back the sketchbook.

  “Treenie,” she says, when she opens the door, and the smile she’d worked up fades fast.

  Because whatever Treenie came for, it wasn’t to help save Hudson. She’d made too much money helping suck it dry.

  “Attalah.”

  Five silent seconds pass, so Attalah says, “What can I do for you?”

  “Can I come in? It’s cold out.”

  She shrugs and steps inside. Treenie follows. She smells like clean sweat, like she’s been jogging. Her hair is in a ponytail. She’s always been almost a pretty woman. Attalah doesn’t ask her to sit down, offer any hot or cold beverages.

  “Isn’t it crazy?” Treenie says, shutting the front door and leaning her back against it. “What’s happening around town?”

  “What, exactly?”

  “You know. All this new . . . I guess hate is the only word for it. That billboard. The buttons. And now it’s escalated to violence. You heard about Historical Materialism?”

  “Is it new, though? This . . . hate. Or has it always been here? Just . . . under the surface?”

  Treenie folds her arms across her chest. “That’s a fascinating question, Attalah. I wonder.”

  Attalah thinks: Of course she suspects I’m involved. I’ve been the face of the resistance for years now. But she’s just here on a hunch, on a hope. Trying to feel me out, provoke me into revealing something. She can’t possibly have any evidence. I’ve been too careful.

  And then: I’ve been careful. But has everyone?

  “Was that all you came for, Treenie? To talk about buttons?”

  “If it’s been here all along, under the surface, like you say, what do you think could have brought it to the surface?”

  “No idea.”

  “This isn’t accidental. Someone’s behind it.”

  “Interesting theory.”

  Treenie smiles and takes a step forward. Attalah doesn’t like the new look on her face—eager, hungry—but she won’t take a step back.

  “It’s not a theory,” Treenie says. “It’s happening. I know it is. You and Ronan Szepessy. You’re behind it all.”

  Attalah laughs. “You’re an idiot, Treenie. You were in high school, and you are now. Back then you liked to think that getting so many people to fall in line behind you meant you were smart—and now you probably think because you’ve made so much money, that’s just more proof of how smart you are. But any idiot can make a lot of money, if all they want to do in life is to make a lot of money.”

  “Deflect all you want. I know it’s true. I knew he was up to something, even before all this started. Why else would he have come home? Certainly not because he gave a shit about his father. So I’ve been following him. And the other day he came over here and stayed for hours.”

  “So? He and my husband were best friends in high school. They’ve been reconnecting lately. They played fucking Super Mario Bros 3, for Christ’s sake.”

  “But Dom wasn’t home. You were here alone.”

  “He was waiting for Dom, then. And he got tired of waiting. And later he came back, and they played fucking Super Mario Bros 3. I’m sorry I don’t have time-stamped video footage to try to satisfy this grand jury you’ve got going on in your delusional head.”

  Treenie flashes that grin again, the one she’d wanted to punch in high school and wants to punch now. “How are you doing it, exactly? What kind of schemes are you two orchestrating?”

  Attalah grins back. “I didn’t have anything else planned today. Stay as long as you want, and spout whatever crazy bullshit makes you happy.”

  “It’s okay. Of course I know you won’t tell me. That’s not why I came here. I wanted to tell you something, actually.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Ronan Sz
epessy is fucking your husband.”

  Attalah works hard to keep her face from doing anything. “Was there anything else you wanted to share?”

  “No, just that.”

  “Well, it’s been great catching up. Glad to hear you finally developed an imagination. I always like a good story.”

  “Do you want details? I have them. You can ask your husband, if you want. Like I said, I’ve been keeping tabs on Ronan. I followed them to Livingston, after Dom picked Ronan up in his squad car. They drove down a private road, parked near the river, got in the back seat. Etc.”

  Here, anger ekes in. Attalah feels it. Knows it’s wrong to let Treenie get to her. Tries to stop from saying anything. Can’t. “I know this will be difficult for you to understand, Treenie. Because you haven’t had a serious boyfriend since Scott Plass in goddamn tenth grade. You have no idea how marriages work, and you definitely don’t know the first fucking thing about me and my husband.”

  “I figured you probably knew all this already. Once I saw it, I figured, this has to be some freaky open marriage shit she and Dom have got going on. And it’s a shame, because if I’d known he wasn’t fully off the market . . . but then again you and I are apparently not really his type.”

  “You’re a disgusting little troll,” Attalah says, smiling. She won’t tell Treenie to get out. She’ll stand there with a smile on her face for as long as she has to, until Treenie turns tail and flees.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  RONAN

  “Something’s not right,” Dom said.

  “Nothing’s right,” I said. “But what specific not-right thing were you thinking of?”

  He groaned and sat up. There in the dark, on a back road in the back seat of a car again, we weren’t forty-year-old men anymore. We were kids, teenagers, trying our hardest to find a safe place in a world full of monsters. Reveling in the freedom of love and sex, sure, but also: scared shitless. “It sounds crazy, every time I try to say it.”

  “Um . . . have you met me? I’m fucking nuts. Tell me your craziest thought and I’ll show you one crazier.”

  Dom stayed silent. I reached for his hand. He grasped mine gratefully. I pressed the other one against the small of his back.

  “It’s just that . . . things keep happening. That don’t make any sense. People behaving irrationally, even for people. It’s like the whole town’s gone crazy. Like something got into the water supply. Or . . .”

  Or there are whale ghosts in all our heads, whispering in our ears and deforming our dreams until we do terrible things.

  And also I might have accidentally tapped into their power and summoned up a demon who looks like a sexy man and is bent on bloodshed and destruction.

  Dom’s back went goose-bumpy beneath my fingers. Like the thoughts went from my mind to his. His voice was no more than a whisper when he said: “Do you believe in the supernatural?”

  “I do,” I said. “And I think it’s here.”

  Dom looked relieved that I didn’t try to talk him out of it. Like if he had been coughing up blood for weeks, and trying to pretend it was nothing, and he’d idly said Maybe I should see a doctor for this, without knowing whether he wanted to hear Nah, I’m sure it’s nothing, don’t worry or Oh yeah you definitely need to take that seriously. “It’s crazy, though,” he said. “Right? It has to be. I know that. But things have been happening, and there’s just no non-crazy explanation.”

  Dogs barked, somewhere in the distance. I wanted to tell him everything. Katch, the whales, Tom Minniq. How the blade between my ribs had opened up a hole, and my hate and rage had let them all in. But I couldn’t. Dom knew in his cop’s gut that something was rotten, but he’d never follow me down the rabbit hole of whale ghosts I’d fallen into.

  I said: “To me the question isn’t: why is it happening? It’s: what can we do about it?”

  “In the horror movies, you gotta find the body of the girl who fell down the well, or Freddy Krueger, and give it a proper burial or say a prayer or set it on fire or something.”

  “There’s a lot of horror movies. Many of them contradict one another. As monster destruction instruction manuals, I think their helpfulness is minimal.”

  “Plus Freddy Krueger keeps coming back.”

  “Still,” I said, remembering Katch’s words: We’re losing. Our wards are being broken one by one. So, supernatural entities could be destroyed. Time and money had been destroying it, but with everything I’d set in motion I didn’t think we could afford to sit back and wait and hope. “There’s got to be a way to . . . stop it. Whatever the hell it is.”

  “Yeah,” Dom said.

  He lay back down. We spooned together and it didn’t matter if the world outside that car was on fire and ghosts were murdering people.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  RONAN

  “You,” Marge said when I came out of my bedroom in the morning. My mouth was a dry foul ruin, my eyes still sealed with sleep crust—and there she sat, on the couch beside my father, her back to me—smoking.

  She’d been there for more than one cigarette, by the smell of it. Smoke made the air thick, bright with late-morning sun.

  “Marge?” I said, because what else could I say? “Why are you smoking inside? You know my father—”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, standing up, whirling around, and I could see now that not only was she furious—she’d been crying. And I knew exactly what was happening. And there was nothing to do but let it happen. “Now you care about your father’s wishes. Now you worry about what he wants.”

  “Marge,” I said.

  She waited. I had no more.

  “You thought no one would find out? You thought no one would fight you on this?”

  “My father’s not getting any better,” I said. “And he has expenses and obligations that you know nothing about. Decisions need to be made, Marge, and I’m sorry you can’t see that.”

  She laughed. “You stupid little shit. You should be ashamed to come up in this house and try to play the dutiful son. With me, of all people, who’s been wiping his fucking ass for you for years.”

  “You know how much I appreciate you,” I said. “Me and him both. It’s just—”

  “It’s just that all that money was too good to keep turning down. So you had to get a power of attorney so you could seize control of everything he owns and sell the building against his wishes. Are you going to try and deny it?”

  My father sat there, watching the dead television. What channel is it tuned to—what long-canceled or still-to-be-developed show is he watching? I wondered, idly, sloppily staving off panic with non sequiturs.

  “You’re taking advantage of a sick man, and he still has a lot of friends in this town. We might not win, but you can bet your fucking ass we’re going to fight you.”

  “Marge,” I said.

  You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not on their side. I’m not trying to get rich by helping them out. I’m trying to destroy them. We’re on the same side here.

  But I couldn’t say any of that. Because Marge had a big mouth and liked to drink and had tons of friends, and I couldn’t trust her to keep it secret. Within a day the town would be abuzz with rumors of what I was up to.

  And anyway, a very public fight with them will only increase my standing with Jark and the other invaders.

  So I didn’t say anything at all.

  Anger had been the only thing keeping her hurt at bay, and now that she could see I wouldn’t be baited into a battle, the sadness came crashing in. “Your father”—and her voice broke—“your father is a fucking saint, and I have worried myself sick trying to take care of him. While you’ve been off god knows where doing god knows what with—”

  She stopped that sentence, but I knew where it had been going. Would have been easy enough to pick up on it, draw out the homophobia she was clearly holding back, get her to say something awful, use it to discredit her in the ugly fight that was coming. But I loved her too much, for how much s
he loved my father. For everything she’d done for him. She was human—she was a Hudsonian—and so there was hate inextricably woven into her DNA, homophobia and racism, and I wished I didn’t but I did still love her. I wouldn’t hurt her any more than I had to. Marge was not my enemy, even if she believed she was.

  “All these years, he’s defended you. Told us we were all wrong about you, that you were a good boy who loved him and this town and that you’d find your way back one of these days. And now—this is how you repay him?”

  All I wanted to do was brush my teeth and wash my face and get back into bed and die. But I couldn’t do any of those things. I had to stand there and take it.

  “I’ve been blinded, too,” she said. “That’s my fault. I’ve still seen you as that little boy who used to come into the meat market and who thought his father was great God almighty. Do you remember how you used to climb up on the conveyor belt at the cash register, and even though your mother had told me a thousand times not to, I turned it on so you could run in place?” Before I could comment, commiserate, come in for a hug, she continued: “That’s the Ronan I’ve wanted to believe in. But you’re not that little boy anymore. You’re something else. Something awful.”

  She heaved herself up from the couch. The door slammed.

  Cold wind brushed my bare feet, slit my femoral arteries open. Blood rushed out of me like a stuck sink suddenly unclogged. In seconds, I was empty.

  She was wrong about me. But she also wasn’t wrong. That’s why it hurt so bad.

  One lesson I could learn from Katch, or the thing that wore Katch’s body now. Act like a person, and it’s easy to convince people that you are one. Including maybe hopefully myself. So I took out my phone and started doing dumb shit on it, just like real people did.

  It had been a while. I’d been so busy with our monstrous machinations, I’d almost forgotten the sweet bliss of social media shit-talking. Shouting at strangers. Sending ambiguous GIFs. Heaping praise on people I had no real respect for.

  Automation took over, tapping from Twitter to Facebook to email to texts, the complex incantation rituals we use to summon up ourselves. Before long I remembered precisely who I was and what I was doing.