The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  I opened Grindr. Sure enough, Tom’s inbox was packed. Pleas for sex. Gratitude from boys and men he’d been with in the last few days. An unceasing line of strangers sharing their secret selves.

  What were the rules of Tom Minniq? Was his physiology human, now that he’d been summoned up into what looked an awful lot like a human body (and was solid enough to satisfy discerning sexual partners)? How long did it take him, after orgasm, to be able to have sex again? He could be a top or a bottom depending on the situation—whatever would make his latest mate happy—but how malleable was he? Did he have a big dick for a size queen and a more modest one for timid virgins? Could he be in more than one place at the same time? Was there a body somewhere—maybe down a well—I could give a decent burial to?

  The more I read of his hundreds of conversations, the more disturbed I was.

  Do you know WB_Uncut? he’d asked HudsonHiker. He’s got some kind of sick STD situation going on. Like, bleeding sores.

  Do you know HudsonHiker? he’d asked WB_Uncut. He’s a fucking asshole. Last night we hooked up, and I made him wear a condom, even though he really didn’t want to . . . and halfway through I noticed something was different. The motherfucker stealthed me, took the condom off and then came in my ass.

  To Antiqueen, he’d said: Do you know SixthAndState? He lives in the apartment below me, and this morning I heard him on the phone, and I swear to god he said “no one knows it was you, I paid the cops to say he saw someone running away from Historical Materialism who matched a completely different description, and you’ll get your cash at the end of the week like we said.”

  To SixthAndState, he’d said: Do you know Antiqueen? I don’t know what you did to piss him off, but he’s telling everyone you showed him a snuff film you had downloaded to your phone. Really disgusting stuff, something to do with a deep fryer.

  It went on like this. Across forty conversations, in the past day alone. Harsh, hateful stuff. Brilliantly orchestrated, too—way better than anything I could have accomplished. Scrolling back through a couple of the conversations, some of them going back weeks now, I could watch in awe as he drew them out. Locals, invaders; he expertly assessed their fears and insecurities and every soft weak spot, and then handed it over on a silver platter to some perfectly matched opposite. Every bit as skillfully as he’d drawn out each one’s filthiest kink. He even leavened out his lies with actual gossip—like how he told everyone about the mayor’s son’s secret boyfriend.

  I opened up Tinder and found more of the same. He told women about men who he professed to be friends with, who’d confessed to all kinds of crimes to him. He provided screencaps of men’s profiles. My brother on the PD told me Sal M got arrested for sexual assault but his dad intimidated the girl until he got the charges dropped. Bobby O. forced my sister to get an abortion. To this day he denies it.

  Whatever he was setting in motion, I wouldn’t be able to control it. These people all knew each other. They’d seen each other’s faces, in person or on the app. They’d run into each other all the time. One woman, he gave her a recipe for a tasteless poison that would induce extreme diarrhea. Sooner or later, something ugly would happen. Probably lots of somethings.

  Why did this scare me so much? Tom was doing what I wanted. So what if he was doing it too well?

  Back in my bedroom, at the bottom of my backpack, where I always kept it in case of an emergency, I found my old phone. Opened it up, and logged in to my own Grindr account. And then I clicked on Browse Nearby.

  Sure enough, the nearest man to me was Tom Minniq. <25—less than twenty-five feet away.

  Horror movie lines flashed through my mind: The calls are coming from inside the house.

  Would he listen to me if I told him to stop? Could I control him? Was he grateful to me for giving him life, bringing him into this world? But since when were sons grateful to their fathers for bringing them into this world? And I wasn’t his father, more like his Dr. Frankenstein—and we all know how well that worked out for the doctor.

  It’s Ronan, I messaged him. We need to meet.

  * * *

  “RONAN!” TREENIE CRIED, waving her arms in the air like somehow I’d miss her.

  “Hi,” I said. A drafty second-story Warren Street studio space, converted into Jark’s campaign headquarters, currently home to seven volunteers doing phone banking. One of whom was Jark himself, making his own calls—ostentatiously egalitarian. “Cool if I help out?”

  “Of course,” she said, hugging me. Smiling. Oblivious.

  This idiot has no idea how close we are to destroying everything she’s built.

  She produced a spreadsheet page. “This is from the county Democratic Party logs—it’s so late in the game at this point that we’re focused on calling our Yeses, to remind them about the election and thank them for their support, and ask for them to commit to call their friends to see if anyone needs help getting to the polls. We’re still leading by a lot, but this whole YOU ARE HATED thing has caused a slight dip at the polls.”

  Such chumps, I thought, to let any stranger with secret hostile motives walk in and get the keys to the campaign car like this. I sat down and read the script and reached for the phone.

  But maybe they weren’t. There wasn’t much harm I could do them, there in that crowded room. Anything off-script, they’d hear. Maybe I could walk out with the page of Yeses, call them all to ask them not to. That was just one of hundreds of pages.

  The worst I could do was drag my feet, and that’s what I did.

  “Hey, Ronan,” Jark said, standing up, giving me a hug. “Thanks so much for helping out.”

  “You know it,” I said. “Although I have to imagine all of this is pro forma at this point. Right? Your lead is so significant . . .”

  He laughed, sage and wise. “Many a political campaign has been lost by a candidate who was so confident of victory that they slacked off while their opponent was pushing themselves full steam ahead.”

  “Good point,” I said, clapping him on the back, sidling into the empty seat next to him. “You must be feeling pretty good, though.”

  “Cautiously optimistic,” he said, his smile appropriately, performatively humble.

  This was a start-up billionaire, a Silicon Valley brigand. Small-town upstate politics was child’s play to him.

  * * *

  THIS DREAM IS NOT A DREAM. It’s a thing that happened. Somehow, I am seeing it. Somehow, I am sitting in Wallace Warsaw’s office down at the Hudson Chamber of Commerce, an unseen observer.

  “Jim doesn’t know I’m here,” my mother says. “You won’t tell him I came by, will you?”

  “Of course,” Wallace says.

  “The bank turned us down for this loan, and there’s no reason for it,” my mother says. “We really need your help, Wallace. If you talk to them . . .”

  By her short spiky haircut I know when this happened. She got it all chopped off, just a couple weeks before she died. The day I came home from school and saw her sitting at the kitchen table I was super excited, seeing its edgy transgressive boyishness as a mark of solidarity with my own secret sexual transgressiveness. But then she died, and I could see it for what it was: someone desperately rattling the bars of her cage, who probably already knew that the only way out was to leap straight to her death.

  Wallace Warsaw says, “I’m so sorry, Hild.”

  “The butcher shop will close without it. You know that. Just like the Jersey Bakery did. Just like—”

  “We have to look toward the future, Hild. Hudson has been dead a long time. Butcher shops and bakeries are not sustainable. The margin of profit is so small. The tax benefit to the town is negligible. We’re working with the banks to come up with better overall portfolio goals. There’s a plan in place.”

  “So it was you,” she says. “You got the bank to turn down our loan.”

  “Not me personally, and not your loan specifically, no. But, yes, the Chamber has been meeting with political and business lead
ers, as well as our local lending institutions, to develop a strategic plan for revitalizing Hudson. And part of that involves setting priorities for how our limited resources can best be leveraged.”

  “Let me guess,” she says. “Those three antique stores that just opened on Warren Street are the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Arts and antiques are a major area of strategic focus, yes.”

  “You fucking son of a bitch,” my mother whispers.

  “That’s totally uncalled for,” he says, as if her vulgarity is the real crime, as if what he’s been doing is merely strategic leveraging. Setting portfolio goals. I find myself immensely frustrated that I am not physically present, and therefore cannot seize one of the antique harpoons off the wall and ram it through his neck.

  “What you’re doing is fucking evil,” she says, getting up. “Who the hell are you to decide whose business lives and dies?”

  He shrugs, looks out the window, like, You just can’t reason with some people.

  “Fuck your plan in place, Wallace, and fuck you, too.”

  She storms out. I have enough presence of mind to briefly wonder, Is this real? Can I trust this? Am I being pushed? And then that presence of mind is washed away in a flood of sweet cold blue hate.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Someone is whispering, in the hallway behind Attalah’s office.

  CPS is an old building, built as a school before the fifties. Weird tiles—smooth and brown, not stone, not marble—conduct sound strangely. Strange echoes are not unusual. Words get crumpled, twisted—impossible to make out what’s being said—but tone of voice always comes through loud and clear, and whoever is speaking, hers is hushed and urgent and a little bit angry. CPS has seen more than its share of angry parents exploding after a meeting did not go so well, so Attalah gets up and goes in that direction almost without thinking about it. In her hand, she carries the small air horn they all have in their desks.

  “No, you listen,” the woman is saying. “I already told you what to use, and I told you how to make it. I’d fucking make it myself if I didn’t have a fucking job over here.”

  Silence. Whoever she is, she’s on a cell phone.

  “We already had this conversation, Paula. I told you, I chose this for a reason. It won’t kill anyone. It’ll give them the shits, and that’s all. And if you can’t do it I’ll find someone else who can, and the deal is off, and your sister will have custody of your kids until they’re not fucking kids anymore.”

  Attalah doesn’t need to stick her head around the corner now to know that it’s Zelda. And that she’s talking to Paula Dinehart, a woman on her caseload who should under no circumstances be allowed to reunite with her children until she’s completed six months of addiction treatment, including a minimum of two weeks inpatient, all of which she has steadfastly refused to do.

  “I don’t want any goddamn excuses. Just get it done.”

  There’s a curse, and then a long measured exhale. Attalah debates scurrying off. Not because she’s scared, but because she’s baffled. The pieces of what she’s just heard: they refuse to come together in her mind. Mercifully, the full magnitude of what is happening escapes her for a few more sweet moments. And then, in her instant of indecision, Zelda comes around the corner.

  Neither one of them says anything, not for a while.

  “Hey, Attalah,” Zelda finally says, rubbing at the bottom of her nose. “What’s up?”

  And Attalah gets it. Not only what she’s just overheard, but the bigger picture. Something is very wrong with Zelda Outterson. Her eyes twitch. Her lips are ragged.

  “What was that all about?” Attalah asks.

  “That?” Zelda looked behind her, like that was something physical, like the empty hallway was proof of her innocence. “Nothing.”

  “To me, it sounded like you were having a conversation with one of our clients, on your personal cell phone, in the hallway, so no one could hear you.”

  “No,” Zelda said.

  “That wasn’t Paula Dinehart?”

  “It was, but—it wasn’t about anything CPS related.”

  Attalah looks her up and down. Zelda is on drugs. That much is clear from the look of her. And it’s not the harmless bloodshot eye of someone who smokes a joint to help them get through the day. Zelda is strung out in a serious way. And that makes her a liability. Only Attalah’s own myopic focus on the schemes at hand—and her anxiety over the revelation about Dom and Ronan—and her anger at herself, for not seeing it herself, for giving that asshole Treenie Lazzarra the satisfaction of telling her—could possibly explain how she missed it until this moment. “A personal call.”

  “Yeah,” Zelda says, nodding too fast; she’s an utter amateur at all of this.

  A terrifying dilemma, how to proceed from here. What she should do is check it now, nip it in the bud, curse Zelda out and make it excruciatingly clear that she needs to get her shit together or get the fuck fired.

  But Zelda has something on her. It isn’t much—that she asked Zelda to participate in some very low-level illegal activity—but if Zelda got mad at her, and if Zelda felt like she had nothing to lose, she could make some noise about it and get Attalah investigated by internal affairs. It might be enough to get her fired. And even if it wasn’t, it’d establish a paper trail pointing back to her. Documentation that she helped orchestrate at least part of what was unfolding in Hudson. And depending on how the next few weeks went down, that might be enough to get her locked up.

  So, instead, Attalah takes a gentle approach. Even though it makes her deeply uncomfortable. “Are you okay, Zelda? You look tired.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Are you up to something? With the YOU ARE HATED stuff?”

  Here, Zelda smiles. “Some exciting things are happening, that’s all. People are talking. Stuff is in the works.”

  “And you’ve been . . .” blackmailing our vulnerable, damaged clients into doing terrible things in exchange for access to children they shouldn’t be anywhere near?

  “Talking to people,” Zelda says. “That’s all. Lots of people are talking to each other, finally. For years we’ve all pretended nothing’s happening, or there’s nothing we can do about it, and those days are over.”

  She stares at Attalah, a hard square look like Thanks to you.

  “I’m happy about that,” Attalah says. “You know I want them out as bad as anyone. But there are limits, Zelda. Putting up billboards and wearing buttons is one thing, but we can’t break the law in serious—”

  “Fuck the law,” Zelda snaps. Finger joints pop as her hands make fists. “Who is the law there to protect? Why does the law say that I’m not allowed to write GO HOME YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE on the side of my new landlord’s car, but he’s allowed to evict my downstairs neighbors? Which one is worse, Attalah? Which act is more violent? Any set of laws that says it’s okay to throw a family with kids out into the street in the middle of winter is not worth my respect. Or my obedience.”

  “I agree,” Attalah says, because of course she does.

  “I should probably get back to work,” Zelda says, her voice dismissive, as if already the power dynamic has shifted, as if Attalah is no longer the supervisor here. “Heather is my next client, and if she shows up on time for once, and I’m not there, she’ll storm out of here and it’ll be a miracle if we see her again before Thanksgiving.”

  “Of course,” Attalah says. “But you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If anything big was going to pop off? After all . . .”

  . . . I started it

  . . . It was all my idea

  . . . Whatever happens, it’s all on me

  But Attalah can’t find a safe way to end the sentence.

  “Of course,” Zelda says, and hurries out of the hallway.

  * * *

  “I’M SORRY, ATTALAH, but I think you know that’s way above my pay grade.”

  The Columbia County Board of Elections has its office in the same building as Child
Protective Services, so Attalah doesn’t even need to put her coat on to go file a formal request for a postponement of the election.

  “People are scared,” she says. “Someone drove a truck into someone’s house and then stabbed them to death. We’ve got a murderer on the loose, and I’ve got people saying they’re afraid to go outside. Talking about going to stay with family until they catch the guy.”

  Susan Greckle frowns in feigned frustration. “I hear that, Attalah, I really do. But it’s not my call to make. Only the Common Council can decide to postpone an election, and good luck getting those assholes to agree on anything.” She hands her a flyer. “Are you coming to Winter Fest?”

  Everyone on the Common Council is in Jark’s pocket in one way or another—either they’re partnering with him on real estate deals or they got donations from him for their own election campaigns . . . With him ahead in the polls—but the YOU ARE HATED shit starting to chip away at his lead—a delay would only help his opponent, so they’d never do it.

  “Will you at least file the paperwork?” Attalah asks. “There’s gotta be a form I can fill out, something you can submit to them.”

  “Of course,” Susan says, relieved to have it out of her hands. She opens a filing cabinet drawer and roots around for the forms at the back that hardly anyone ever asks for.

  Attalah takes it to the end of the counter and starts to fill it out. She knew it’d be a long shot. But their situation is too precarious, their larger victory too uncertain, to keep from taking a single shot.

  * * *

  THE FRIDAY 9:05 P.M. train from New York Penn Station had been sold out, and it’s a weirdly warm night, and no taxis are in sight, so the scene at the station is a big, happy, milling crowd. They are weekenders, after all, with a whole weekend ahead of them! What brunches they will have; what antiquing they will engage in! The world is their oyster.

  Several people see the naked man and don’t bat an eyelash. Same way they do when they see someone eating out of the trash, or beating their kid, or puking. They are New Yorkers, after all. Public nudity is unusual but not inconceivable. And anyway, some of them have been warned. This place has so much character; These people are real characters; You definitely see some characters up in Hudson! Et cetera. Here is real life, which is what they’d come for.