And Jordan, of course, was a “casualty of heroin, that most evil of drugs,” where he left behind a baby girl named…
“My name,” I said, frantically, “the son of a bitch smudged out my name!”
Tommy grabbed the pamphlet and stared intently at the page, before curling his lip. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he snarled. “Well, sweet buttered baby Jesus in the manger, that’s exactly what this cocksucker did. Your name, and your mother’s name too. What the everlasting fuck? Why?”
I shook my head and repeated Jamie’s line. “Just had to erase every trace of Jordan from my life, I suppose,” I remarked sarcastically. “Wasn’t enough that he turned my mother – a gorgeous Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx – into fucking Dictator’s Concubine Barbie. Noooo. Couldn’t stop there. He had to wipe Jordan Barker’s connection to me off the goddamn history books too, because you know, clearly, I look like I could be his kid and I’m too goddamn stupid to ever ask a question about why I look like my mother pre-Emperor ordered plastic surgery and have none of his features, amirite Tommy?” I shoved the pamphlet away and shook my head, disgusted at this hideous rearrangement of reality to feed Emperor’s pathetic ego.
“Well, you know, Evie,” began Tommy, hesitantly, and gingerly collecting the pamphlet, “history is written by the victors, and I think that’s what your step-father’s done here.” He looked at the page again. “Says here that Jamie had a son named Joseph – a son that would be your age today. Do you remember him mentioning anything about a son?”
I shook my head. “No. Not at all. And you’d think he’d mention it, since that’s not something you forget anytime soon. So, something must have happened to him.” I peeked over at the pamphlet Tommy was reading. “I’m afraid to think about what it could be, though. What does it say about Willie and Tom?”
Tommy inhaled deeply, then sighed. “Bit of a mystery, that. Says here that they went somewhere called Ouroboros. Looks like another one of Emperor’s smudge jobs, though – like he deliberately didn’t want people to figure out where they went.”
Ouroboros. What did he mean by that? I thought.
I began thinking out loud, trying to reason out where, exactly, the Ouroboros was. “The ouroboros is a symbol of things coming full circle. It’s a snake eating its tail. Introspection. The eternal return. Magic and symbolism.”
Tommy nodded. “Yes, it’s all of those things. But none of those things tell us where the Ouroboros is.” He got up and began heading toward the geography section of the sanctum. “We need to see some maps.”
I followed, first behind him, then alongside him, continuing to rattle off what I knew about the ouroboros, in the hopes that something would click in our heads. “Right. Maps. But let’s think about all this for a minute – what else does it mean? Ouroboros was Loki’s child, and he grew so large that he could go around the world and grasp his tail with his teeth.”
Tommy raised a skeptical eyebrow and kept walking. “So, you think they went traveling around the world?”
I shrugged. “They were boys of privilege. Isn’t that what the rich do anyway – go traveling the world?”
“Evanora, darling, you’re rich,” Tommy replied, laughing. “Did your step-father ever let you leave New York City?”
I scrunched up my face, hesitant to concede the point, but having no other choice but to do so, since Tommy – snark aside – was right. “Fair enough. So where did they go then?”
We were in the Geography section before we knew it. Tommy tilted his head towards a bookshelf and smirked. “Only one way to find out,” he said. “Let’s start with New York and work our way out.”
He grabbed a rolled-up piece of parchment paper, unrolled it, and laid it flat on the table. The map showed what most people consider – or, considered – New York for as many years as they could remember: New York City, beginning in the Bronx, going through the island of Manhattan, heading down through Staten Island, then turning east through Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island.
I ran my fingers over the part of the map that showed the Bronx, trying to find some connection to my mother in the parchment. My fingers traced some routes along various streets – Jerome Avenue, Arthur Avenue, the Cross-Bronx Expressway – but I realized that all these streets were nothing more than names on a piece of paper, and they meant nothing to me. I didn’t know which of these many streets my mother grew up on – I didn’t know if I had family here, or if they were victims of psi – I didn’t know where my mother went to school, where she would play with her friends, where she got her first kiss, if she crushed on a boy before she met my father; and if she did, where did this boy live, what did he look like, how did they meet, and did she cry herself to sleep at night when they finally broke up?
I didn’t even speak, or understand, Spanish – let alone Taino – and I wasn’t sure if my mother did, either.
I knew nothing – absolutely nothing – about my mother’s life before this bastard Emperor, and I knew even less about my father. I was, for all intents and purposes, a blank slate – and the thought of being a human tabula rasa made me weep, silently, despite myself.
Tommy, again attuned to my feelings, looked over and patted me on the shoulder. “It’s alright,” he insisted. “We’ll figure it out.”
I sighed, shuddered to force back my tears, and moved my hand down the parchment through the island of Manhattan…and it was then that I saw it.
And Tommy, too, saw it at the same time.
It was the words Outer Boroughs underneath the map of Brooklyn and Queens.
“Ouroboros,” we said, at the same time.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, with my heart beating rapidly inside my chest and my mouth suddenly filling with bile and adrenaline, “Willie and Tom – they’re in the Outer Boroughs.”
Chapter Thirteen
Jamie
What I’m about to say is probably the only thing I’ll ever give Emperor credit for, and that’s only because it serves my purposes, at least for this moment.
I’m forever grateful that he decided to keep the trees growing in what was once known as Central Park.
It made it that much easier for me to watch his speech from a distance, hidden in the cover of nature’s bounty, sighing with disgust and going unnoticed as those in attendance were either too wrapped up in pounding their chests – or, in this case, their guns – or too psied to notice anything else but what was little more than five feet in front of them.
More’s the better for me. I needed to see, with my own eyes, what Evanora was talking about, and because I was alone, I didn’t need the Cabal up my ass while I was doing so.
The day before, I woke up in the mid-afternoon with a start – and I realized that, for the first time in a long time, I’d had a good night’s sleep. No visits from a revenant – no replaying of traumatic memories – no cold sweats or clammy hands, and no accompanying migraine headache.
“Did you have fun last night, Sleeping Beauty?” asked Basile from the corner of his room, his sleepy drawl reverberating throughout the apartment but doing nothing to wake Kanoa, who was still snoring as loud as a freight train.
I sat up on my elbows and grimaced at Basile. “Fun? Basile, if Evanora ever says that she slept with me, you’ll realize that all we did was sleep, right?”
Basile rolled his eyes. “I know that, jackass,” he said. “I’m saying – I didn’t hear you screaming in your sleep, and y’know, you actually slept, which tells me that maybe our new friends are good for your mental frame of mind.”
I flopped back onto my pillow and stared at the ceiling, feeling my eyes mist over as I did so. “I can’t believe she’s alive, man,” I said, wistfully. “All these years, I wondered what happened to her – and her mother – and I can’t believe that they’re here, they’re alive, they’re alright…and they’re in the fucking Emperor’s house as his fucking ready-made family.”
“Pretty incredible stuff,” Basile responded, flopping down on his pillow i
n kind, and turning on his side. “So now that you know this, what are you going to do?”
“Well,” I began, “first and foremost, we have to keep our word. We have to find out who caused this explosion, and why.”
“And what?” asked Basile, “you want to turn them over to the Cabal?”
“Hell no,” I retorted, quickly, “not unless I want to die the very same day. Turning the perpetrators over to the Cabal means, inevitably, that we betray where we are and what we’re doing. No – I want them to answer to me. They almost killed my best friend’s kid – my god-daughter – and they’re going to answer for this shit.”
Basile nodded. “Smart. That’s what we’re going to do today, then.”
I sat back up. “No. That’s what you and Kanoa are going to do today. I’m going to make my way up to Emperor’s Park and see if I can get Rosie alone. I want to know what she knows – I want to know who she’s loyal to – and I want to see if I can’t get some information, in secret, from Evanora while I’m up there.”
Basile sat up, as well, and stared at me intently. “You’ve gone nuts, Jamie Ryan – you’ve gone fucking nuts,” he said, emphatically. “You mean to tell me you’re going to Emperor’s Park, by yourself, in the face of the Cabal and the victims of psi, not to mention the goddamn Emperor himself, because you want to see your girlfriend’s best friend, who also happens to be married to the goddamn Emperor? Do I have all this right?”
I nodded, biting my lower lip. “There’s more to it than that, Basile. It’s not just about ‘seeing her’ as it is about keeping my word.” I flopped back down onto the pillow, feeling my eyes get heavy as I did so. “I’m going to be alright. Either way, I’m going to be alright.”
The room was slowly fading to black.
“Whatever, Jamie,” Basile said as I began drifting off. “If you die thanks to this dumb shit, don’t get to Hell and bitch about us, that’s all I can say.”
I looked up at the balcony and watched as Evanora and Tommy announced their betrothal for a marriage that will probably never take place.
I saw Evanora, looking prettier than a picture, her lower lip trembling slightly as soft white condensation formed around her mouth, as Tommy held her hand and rubbed it slightly, trying to warm her up.
I saw Tommy in an all-white tuxedo, looking rather handsome for the circumstances, but I couldn’t help but think that he also looked like an old-time ice cream man. The Mister Softee tune popped into my head despite myself, and it was all I could do to keep from bursting out with screaming laughter as I saw Tommy – flame-haired, freckle-skinned Tommy – blend into the background in his Mister Softee tuxedo.
I saw Emperor – looking like a hot air balloon, sounding as ridiculous as ever – blathering on about his personal Reichstag fire, and laying the blame of the explosion squarely at the feet of myself and my brothers-in-arms.
“…and it’s these traitors of the state – the threat to the security of my Empire of the United States of America – the defectors of the Cabal who go by Jamie Ryan and Basile Perrinault and, my greatest betrayal, Supreme Allied Commander Kanoa Shinomura…” he hollered into the microphone, which seemed to reverberate throughout the city.
At the sound of Kanoa’s name, the Cabal members below the balcony slammed the butts of their guns on the floor in rhythm. I knew that rhythm all too well – it was meant to be a war cry for those of us in the rank-and-file of the Cabal – but, to the untrained ear, it sounded like a machine gun going off…which was exactly the point.
But I couldn’t help but sneer at the accusation that the blast that nearly killed Evanora and Tommy was somehow our fault. He’d spent decades trying to catch us and failing miserably, yet in the same breath, believed we were inept enough to set off a blast that took no lives and could be cleaned up during a balmy New York evening. And he managed to sell this ridiculous belief to the crowd, no less.
“Let’s make something clear, asshole,” I muttered, “if it had been me and the boys that lit your shit up, you wouldn’t be standing here today.”
Despite the absurdity of the accusation – and despite the obvious absurdity of the accusation – the victims of psi just grunted along, agreeing with everything and anything that came out of Emperor’s mouth, in part because they didn’t know any better (they were psi victims, after all), and in part because any disagreement with what Emperor had to say was met with a fierce, painful punishment.
“His Word, Before All and Above All,” I muttered. “With liberty and justice for no one, so kiss my peasant Old New York ass and take a breath mint afterward, unless you like that funky aftertaste…”
My voice trailed off as my eyes focused on a strange woman on the balcony.
At first, I couldn’t discern who she was – she looked like someone I’d seen before, yet someone I’d never seen before.
Her hair was a garish white-blonde, stringy and lifeless, and pinned tightly behind her head with a set of black ceramic chopsticks. Her makeup was almost cartoonish – cat-like black eyeliner and matte black lipstick sat atop a ghostly white foundation, making her look like a cross between kabuki theater and Felix The Cat. Even her outfit was a hideously hilarious cultural appropriation – a black silk kimono paired with a set of black stiletto heels. I’d seen Old New York 42nd Street prostitutes, with terrible heroin problems, sell the “pseudo-pan-Asian coquette” look better than what I’d seen before me now.
“Who the actual…” I began, hesitantly, unable to process who I was seeing before me.
And then it hit me, all at once, who she was.
For the first time in a long time, I was literally speechless.
When I could finally find my voice again, it barely came out in a whisper. “Rosie,” I squeaked.
I walked into the Ludlow Street apartment I shared with Angelique and was instantly greeted with the smell of a meat dish that, I would later learn, was called carne asada.
“Angelique!” I called out over the loud sizzling of steak as I kicked off my black Frye boots and set my matching acoustic guitar down. “Where are you, my love?”
“In here!” she called, out of sight, from the kitchen, where more clanging and banging sounds echoed over her voice.
I began walking through the apartment, shedding layers as I went along until I reached the kitchen wearing nothing but my black leather pants and a mischievous smile. I was hoping to have a little appetizer of crème d’Angelique before dinner, but when I reached the kitchen, I realized – much to my chagrin – that we weren’t alone.
Angelique, her hair tied back into a messy ponytail, was wearing a tight, white, see-through shorts jumper and a matching white apron. She was standing next to an unfamiliar-looking woman with a matching messy ponytail, but whose thick chocolate brown hair stood in sharp contrast to Angelique’s thin flaxen locks. The rest of her, too, was in stark contrast to Angelique, but not in a bad way – she was olive-skinned, in contrast to Angelique’s pale white skin; she was curvy, in contrast to Angelique’s ectomorphic figure; she was fiery, in contrast to Angelique’s ethereal nature.
They were standing side by side, working on something that smelled simply delicious. Angelique was mixing flour, sugar, and garlic powder, and her friend was adding melted butter and salted water to the resultant powder, then kneading it until it formed a dough.
“Am I interrupting something?” I asked as I walked behind Angelique, wrapped my arms around her waist, and kissed her neck, breathing in her scent of lilacs as I did so.
She smiled, then took her index finger and bopped the tip of my nose with the flour mixture. “Hey handsome,” she said, beatifically. “We’re making something special for you for dinner. We’ve got carne asada in the pan over there – we’ve got some arroz con gandules in the rice cooker – and we’re making…wait, girl, what’s this called?”
“Arepas,” her friend said, smiling as she continued to knead the dough between her hands, her silver thumb ring glistening in the light of the dusk as s
he did so.
“Right, arepas,” Angelique repeated. “Ramira here is teaching me all her magic ways – she says this is the exact dinner I need to make if I want my man to marry me.” She giggled, then elbowed Ramira, who giggled along with Angelique.
I couldn’t help but giggle, as well, as I unentwined myself from Angelique and walked over to Ramira to properly introduce myself. “I’m going to be stuffed for days with all this delicious food, so it’s only right that we become friends,” I began, extending my hand. “Hi there. I’m James Randall Ryan IV, I somehow lucked out enough to convince this lovely lady Angelique to be my girlfriend, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. You can call me Jamie.”
Ramira smiled, then shook my hand with two of her fingers, taking care not to smear the wet dough across my palm. “Well, my name is Ramira Diaz, Angelique is my best friend, and it’s a pleasure to meet you too. You can call me Rosie, though. Everyone else does.”
I sat under a wilting star magnolia tree and stared, intently, through the open window of a room that had to be Rosie’s dressing room. She peeled her black silk kimono off and turned her back to the frameless window, exposing her prominent ribs and shoulder blades as she did so. The sight of her suddenly-bare, emaciated frame shocked me, especially given how pronounced her curves were in our younger years, and tears welled up in my eyes yet again.
In the decades since Angelique and my son had died, I could count the number of times I’d cried on one hand. In the past 72 hours, though – as I realized that my best friend’s kid, and my best friend’s girlfriend, were alive and well, and that the Uprising was bigger than I’d ever imagined – the tears came quickly and flowed easily, and I couldn’t decide if this was a sign of strength or weakness on my part.
Rosie slipped a shimmering white camisole over her emaciated frame, which she then tucked into a pair of white linen slacks. I couldn’t get over how thin she’d gotten, then wondered if this was by her own design, or if she was under orders from that evil husband of hers. No way would Jordan be cool with this, I thought to myself. On his fucking grave would this go on. On his fucking grave. And wouldn’t you know it – here we are, on his fucking grave.
The Gathering: Book One of The Uprising Series Page 13