The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  Me. My father.

  Dom found him in the snow, behind our house, when he went to tell him about my own death.

  I watched them weep. Watched them mourn us. Watched them sit together, hands clasped or hands pressed together in prayer. Trying together to process what had happened to them.

  Margie sat in the front row. Her eyes never left the photo of my father. I’d always imagined maybe she’d been a little bit in love with him, but now I knew that wasn’t true. She admired him, that’s all. She believed he was the only truly good person she knew. Incorrectly, of course. He wasn’t truly good, but neither was anyone else in her life. Humans are so shortsighted while they’re still alive.

  She was a Catholic, but she came anyway. So did the Ukrainian Orthodox and everyone else. In a little while Rabbi Morris Freinberg from Congregation Anshe Emeth would say a few words, followed by an imam from the Islamic Society. With how many faiths and their followers were packed into the relatively close confines of Grace Abounding, the event should have been held at the much larger Episcopal or Lutheran church, or maybe St. Mary’s—but all the other faith leaders deferred to Pastor Thirza in her time of grief.

  “At the beginning,” she said, “all I meant was, love is stronger than hate. Like a diamond is harder than an emerald. There was so much hate in Hudson, so much simmering anger, and I thought that I could remind people that hate was not the answer, that love would triumph.”

  She was a handsome woman, without her wig. Sobriety agreed with her. Wick’s death had helped her kick the habit. The physical pain of going cold turkey had been a welcome distraction from emotional anguish.

  “But now I’m not so sure. I’ve been tested, along with all of you. For the first time, I knew true hate. And what I realized was, hate is easy.”

  “I know that’s right,” said a woman somewhere in the room.

  “Hate is easy. Sounds sinful to say it, doesn’t it? But it is. I know that now, and I suspect that some of you do, too. Am I wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong,” a man said.

  “Bad things happen to us. To people we love. People hurt us, sometimes without meaning to. Cancer hurts us. Evictions hurt us. God hurts us. That’s what we think, isn’t it? That’s what it feels like. God lets terrible things happen. Oh, sure, we try to tell ourselves He must have a good reason—a plan—but we know we’ll never know it. And the knowing it’s part of a plan doesn’t make it hurt any less. So it’s easy to turn to hate, when the rug gets pulled out from under you. When what you love most in the world is taken away. Hate is easy in times like that.”

  Dom and Attalah sat toward the back. Their fingers laced together. Clenched tight. They couldn’t see me, didn’t know I was there.

  “But love? Love is hard.”

  * * *

  “WELCOME,” SHE SAID, ushering the woman in. “I’m so glad you came. My name’s Lilly.”

  “I’m Ohrena,” she said, entering uncertainly. “My friend Lettie did this thing, and she said it helped her out a lot, but she couldn’t explain it super well. Might be I’m just kind of ignorant, though.”

  “It’s a bit of a strange concept,” Lilly said. “Hudson: Past and Present is an interactive experience, a living history machine, an opportunity for people to share their experiences and their knowledge. The idea is, Hudson belongs to all of us, and if we’re going to be able to move forward from all this hell we’ve been through lately, we need to be able to talk about it openly. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea?”

  Ohrena asked for coffee, black. Lilly made two.

  Calling it a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would have been too much. She’d tried, but Attalah shot her down. Let’s try not to make people think too much about genocide or apartheid, okay? But the principle was the same. Both sides of a conflict sat down to engage in open dialogue, so as to better understand what happened and help survivors on both sides move toward healing, and forge a path forward that was just and fair for all sides.

  “I’m going to set you up in this pod here. This tablet will ask you a couple of basic questions, about who you are and what time period you’re talking about, and then you’re good to go. As you talk, the software will recognize key phrases and names and they’ll pop up on the screen. You can reject them if they’re incorrect, or verify them if they’re right, or ignore them altogether. Whatever’s easiest for you. But the more we can make your testimony accessible and cross-connected, the better. So that if people a hundred years from now want to know about the Winter Fest Fire, or the Diamond Street Whorehouses, or Mayor Coffin, or Walker Evans, they can click on it and get all the different stories that people have told about it. Understand?”

  “I think so,” Ohrena said, chewing her lip. Intimidated by all the elaborate tech Penelope’s Quilt paid for.

  “You look like you have questions,” Lilly said, sitting down.

  “My friend, Lettie? She came because her sister committed suicide, because someone was threatening her, because she was an obstacle to something they were trying to do. And she said it was really great to be able to tell that story. But a lot of people, they’re not so innocent. If someone were to confess to a crime here, could they get in trouble for that?”

  “Well, we can’t guarantee immunity or anything like that. And if someone’s actions caused harm or defamation to another individual, they still retain the right to sue. So a civil action is always a possibility. But as for criminal prosecution—we’re working closely with the Hudson Police Department, and their main priority is healing Hudson—not mass arrests that’ll only further traumatize our communities. So for most crimes other than physical assault committed in the process of what some people are calling the Hudson Renaissance Resistance, they’re offering participation in our project as an acceptable pretrial alternative, with immunity from arrest if all sides are satisfied with the results of the dialogue.”

  Ohrena nodded.

  “Here’s a couple you can take a look at,” Lilly said, queueing them up on the tablet.

  Quint, discussing being beaten by Hudson cops. A mom describing the shelter where she went with her kids, after her sister had to kick her out to make room for their mom, whose building got bought and torn down. A high school Italian teacher, talking about the two old ladies who used to live above the Silver Dollar, sisters, wearing filthy fur coats from September to May.

  “Everyone’s story matters,” Lilly said. “Hudson: Past and Present is a way for all of us to tell our stories, and listen to both sides, and get a better understanding of history and how we relate to it. Last week we did an amazing interview between a woman who’d been evicted and the guy who threw her out. Powerful stuff. They were both crying by the end of it, and he signed the Eviction Free Zone pledge the next day. But you can tell a nice happy story about being a kid in Hudson if that’s what you want. You have any other questions?”

  “No, ma’am,” Ohrena said.

  “Just call me Lilly,” she said, clicking their mugs together in a mock toast.

  * * *

  “LOVE IS HARD,” Pastor Thirza repeated. “It’s hard to love someone who is flawed, or sick, or so twisted up inside that they hurt the people they care about. It’s hard to love a God who lets bad things happen to us. It’s hard to love the people who push us out of our homes. Hard to love the people who hate us.”

  Behind her, on the wall, another framed photograph, thirty years old or so. Four little girls, all African American. One of them, the eagle-eyed will observe, is Pastor Thirza herself. Down in the lower-right-hand corner is a tiny oval with the word Jerremy inside it.

  Attalah had been there, the day that Lilly gifted it to her, after finding it in an attic crate somewhere. The pastor had wept. Said, I always felt drawn to his work, I don’t know why. And now I find he took a photograph of me? And the woman had pointed to that younger Thirza, the one smiling suspiciously at the photographer, and asked, Do you remember that day? Do you remember what he looked like? And Pastor Thirza had
paused a moment before shaking her head No, and when she did so she had the strangest secret look on her face, like whatever was making her smile was hers to hold on to.

  Which is what she looked like now, standing at the front of her church, bringing her sermon to a close.

  “But hard as it is, love is the way forward, beloveds. Trust and believe that. When we love, we let God’s light shine through us. We are most fully ourselves when we hold tight to the people who make us who we are. We exist in community. Not E pluribus unum—from many, one—but simply one. We were never many. The divisions between us, they were never real. Illusions, nothing more. I’m here to tell you what God says, and that’s this: love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself.”

  * * *

  AS A VIOLENCE-RACKED TOWN FORGES ITS FUTURE, A PIECE OF ITS PAST RESURFACES—THE NEW YORK TIMES [EXCERPT]

  * * *

  Hudson, NY.—For years, the 1950s-era photographer who signed his work only as ‘Jerremy’ was a subject of much conjecture here in his upstate home. Some say he was nothing more than a small-town studio portraitist, whose struggling business lasted less than a decade and who left behind only a handful of pedestrian images more valuable as history than as art. Others believe he is a forgotten American master, a peer of Dorothea Lange with a splash of Weegee’s lurid DNA and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s knack for catching the decisive moment, whose sympathetic invasive eye prefigured Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin.

  And now, with hundreds of his photographs suddenly coming to light, the latter camp appears to have triumphed.

  Little is known about Jerremy—that he was a man, and that he was black, are long-held assumptions with no real evidence behind them. And while these new images shine a dazzling light on his incredible artistic genius (which can be seen in great detail in this weekend’s Arts and Leisure section, and on our website), they cast little illumination on the man behind them.

  Still, they are a welcome discovery for a town struggling to reconnect with its illustrious history after a period of unrest that culminated in mass arson and mass murder a month ago. With alleged ringleader Zelda Outterson awaiting trial for two dozen charges ranging from manslaughter to kidnapping to conspiracy to commit arson—but resolutely refusing to name any of her co-conspirators . . . [ . . . ]

  * * *

  DOM AND ATTALAH STAYED, long after the service was finished. Through interminable remarks from well over a dozen different speakers. Through the long shuffle out. The sound of a hundred different good-byes: high fives and handshakes and hugs and cheek kisses echoing around them. Until no one else was left.

  “Hey, honey,” Hazel said, emerging from the back a half hour later. “Thanks for waiting. That was a tough one, for Thirza, and she needed some talking-to after it was over. Sort of an informal prayer circle. Or NA meeting.”

  Laughing, Attalah rose to embrace her mother. They spent a long time hugging. Attalah was loath to let her mother go, lately. She’d spent so long thinking she’d lost her, she was still suspicious of the good right feeling of having her back.

  “She okay?” Dom asked.

  “She is now. Amazing what a little prayer can do.”

  Anyone with eyes could look at Attalah as she stared at her mother and know what she is thinking. It’s a miracle. They told me she’d never move or speak again, and here she is acting like she never had a stroke.

  Dom’s face was harder to read, but I know how to do it.

  Ronan did this. I don’t know how it works, but I know that when he died, he broke the hold that thing had on Hazel. Her and half the town, practically.

  Arm in arm in arm, they walked out into the sunlight. Laughed, as one, at how it hurt their eyes.

  “Hey, Heather,” Attalah said, seeing Heather Scutt standing around on the sidewalk. Puffy-eyed from crying, but who wasn’t today? “Where are you off to?”

  She shrugged. “No particular place to be.”

  “You want to come with me and my mom? We’re going to a meeting of Our Future. Have you heard about that?”

  Heather shook her head, looking vaguely alarmed.

  “It’s a bunch of different people who have a stake in Hudson’s future, trying to work together to make sure that no one gets left behind.”

  “Oh,” Heather said, frowning deeper, “that doesn’t really sound like my kind of scene. I don’t think I’d have much to offer in the way of . . .” She trailed off, but of course Attalah would not let her off so easily.

  “You have as much a right as anyone to decide what our future looks like. Your family’s scrapyard was an important part of this city’s economy for, what, thirty years?”

  “Thirty-seven it was open.”

  “Exactly. But more important, you were born here and raised here. Hudson is yours. Ours. Just come to the meeting, okay? Maybe you’ll find it boring as hell, or hate having to talk to a bunch of businessmen and gentrifiers, and run screaming out the door halfway through. If that urge hits you, go right ahead. I wouldn’t be one bit mad at you. I get the urge myself, several times a meeting.”

  Heather smirked but then frowned again.

  “There’s free coffee and cookies,” Attalah said, hoping to seal the deal.

  Dom said, “I’d go, just for the coffee, if I didn’t have somewhere else to be.”

  Everyone laughed. Finally, Heather nodded. Smiled. Said, “Okay. Let’s do it. Where are we going?”

  * * *

  “I DON’T KNOW why you insist on coming here,” Dom said, sitting down on a stool at the counter.

  “I like the ambience,” I said.

  He saw an expensive Hudson Renaissance restaurant: square card-stock menus, and ten-dollar milkshakes. Obscenely costly reproduction wallpaper. I saw the gritty fluorescent-lit Columbia Diner my father and I used to come to, on the way down to work at the butcher shop. A heavy old Greek behind the cash register, instead of a bearded young thing with rectangular spectacles. Crow Man perched on a stool nearby, making cawing noises. Bowl of pee-flecked mints at the counter. Factory workers coming off a twelve-hour shift. Filthy mirror across from me, giving me back myself.

  “Two coffees,” Dom told the counter man. To me, he said, “Where’s Wick?”

  “Last I checked he was in the 1930s, going through film from a shoot he did, of bootleggers’ molls getting dressed up before a movie premiere. Before that he did some great shots at this creepy children’s masquerade on ice from the winter of 1957, down at Oakdale Pond. Kids bundled up but wearing homemade monster masks. Real nightmare fuel.”

  “I’m still not sure I understand how y’all are time travelers now.”

  “We’re not time travelers. It’s just . . .” Katch’s words seemed best to describe the indescribable. So I repeated them: “Time is weird here. We exist outside of time as you know it, so we hop around. We can’t always control where . . . I mean, when, we end up.” I elected not to tell him that this was part of the supernatural caul that cloaked Hudson. He’d figure it out soon enough, when he died and ended up with us. “Tell Lilly to check a filing cabinet in the fourth-floor storage of the Child Protective Services.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “You hear Aperture’s looking at doing a monograph? Getting included in that MoMA show really put him on the map. Kid’s making a real name for himself. Shame he had to be dead to do it. You done good, Ronan.”

  “I haven’t done much. Kid has an incredible eye and a hell of a heart. I’m just trying to help him trust them. You’re the one helping his work be ‘discovered.’”

  “Don’t think I didn’t notice that extra R in his name. That’s you, isn’t it?”

  “His idea,” I said. “An homage, he says. I’m not completely comfortable with it.” I sipped my coffee, cheap old grounds the way I remembered them. A pyramid of tiny cereal boxes stood beside the coffeepot, just like I remembered. “How are you, Dom? Things seem good around town. Never would have imagined I’d see the day when Attalah voluntarily sat down to a meeting
with Treenie Lazzarra and Pastor Thirza and some woman from Penelope’s Quilt who looks like she still gets carded at bars. Let alone meeting with them once a week for months.”

  He exhaled, heavily. “Things are okay. A damn sight better than they were a little while ago, but still pretty fucked. Not everybody’s all peace-and-love-and-kumbaya-and-let’s-come-together-to-build-a-future-for-all-of-us. A lot of greedy bastards are . . . still greedy bastards. There’s lawsuits, and we’re still seeing fights break out over all the shit that went down. Last week a wife shot her husband because of a photo of him fucking her sister, which both swear wasn’t real. He’ll be fine. She said she knew how to shoot to wound, so the first one was a warning. Dude didn’t want an order of protection, if you can believe that.”

  “Don’t forget all that priceless architecture Zelda and Co knocked over,” I said. “Eleven buildings total, homes and businesses. ‘An inestimable loss,’ according to the New York Times.”

  “How could I forget.”

  I put my hand on his. I could feel his heat, but I knew he could not feel mine.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  “I’m right here,” he said, eyes electric on mine.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  Dom nodded, turned away. I’d seen the way his eyes got wet, though. “I wish you were, though.”

  “It’s fascinating, where I am,” I said. “And there’s some good people, who I enjoy talking to. People like your dad. And also I’ve been carrying on a very scandalous affair with a notorious and flamboyant gangster in 1927. I’m serious about the scandal part—there’s an oblique reference to it in the New York Post society pages for October second of that year. Look it up.”

  I wondered how much longer he’d be able to see me for. He couldn’t see Wick, who was scrutinizing negatives at the booth at the end, looking up occasionally to smile at us. Would the day come when all of these conversations would come to seem like weird dreams to Dom?