“I miss you,” Tony said, without any preamble.
“I know. Me too.”
“Should we set up another date?” Tony asked, the hope in his voice apparent.
Carter shook his head, marveling at how fast the darkness had come. “No. I’m through with that.”
“I’m not surprised. You deserve more.”
“I do. And so do you.”
“Me? I made my bed, now I have to lay in it.”
“You don’t have to lay in it alone.”
“I know. Steph’s a good wife.”
Carter laughed. “That’s not what I meant.” Carter drew in a breath. “What are you doing, Tony?”
“What do you mean? Sitting here, drinking a beer, watching some dumb reality shit on the TV, some damn housewives of fuckin’ Poughkeepsie, New York or something like that.” He laughed.
Carter laughed, too, but he grew serious when he repeated the question. “No, I mean what are you doing?”
“I just told you.”
“I know you’re not dense. Quit avoiding the question.”
There was a long silence, and then Tony said, “I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do with the rest of your life, Tony?” Carter said softly. He didn’t want to force the issue, didn’t want to make Tony uncomfortable, but he had to know. He had to at least try, before moving on.
He loved this man.
Carter spoke, partially to fill the silence hanging in the air between them, but mainly because there were things he needed to say. “I won’t do it anymore—hide our love in the dark, like it’s some guilty secret, something dirty. Something we should feel shame for. The only shame we should feel is from the deceit we’re living and letting grow and fester. We need to bring our love, our light, out into the open. That’s the only way it’ll grow.”
Tony didn’t say anything, and as the silence deepened, Carter imagined himself saying something along the lines of, “Well, okay, then. I’ll leave you be. Good-bye, Tony,” and he would hang up and begin the business of healing, start anew the process of looking for a relationship that was true, open, and honest.
“You’re right,” Tony said, at last.
“I am?”
Tony laughed. “You know you are.”
It was Carter’s turn to be silent, and he let it drag on for a while, uncertain of what to say next. “So where does this leave us?”
Tony said, “Meet me?”
“At the Galaxy Gold Motel? Room number nine?” Carter shook his head and slipped inside his car. He knew Tony would take his meaning metaphorically, but he knew the truth when he said, “That place has too many ghosts.”
“Right.” Tony chuckled. “It will always have sweet memories, though. You can’t deny that.”
“No, I can’t.” Carter allowed himself to remember, for a second, the first time they had entered the room, seeing Tony undress, watching, waiting. Sweet was certainly the right word. So was hot.
“But,” Carter went on, “it’s time to come out into the light. Can you come out, Tony?”
“I just told you, we should meet up.”
It was Carter’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, yeah, okay. Where?”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at Golden Gardens, over in Ballard? I’m just sitting in the parking lot right now.”
“Wait for me. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Tony hung up.
The wait, although only about ten or fifteen minutes, seemed to take forever. Carter thought it was because he was waiting to discover how the course of the rest of his life would go. Would he celebrate or despair?
After what seemed like hours and hours, he perked up at the bass sound of Tony’s pickup. He was sure it was Tony. Carter jumped from the car.
The light around them was dim, a silvery opalescence from a night illuminated by clusters of stars and a low-hanging half-moon. Carter could hear the rush of the surf behind them.
Tony didn’t say anything, just moved rapidly toward Carter and, when he was next to him, pulled him into his arms, and kissed him. Deeply. Passionately. A kiss that made Carter’s knees go weak, forcing him to clutch at Tony’s back for support. Clutch to draw him closer, too.
When Tony pulled away, he looked into Carter’s eyes, searching. “I told her,” he whispered.
Carter took a step back. “You did?”
Tony nodded, and Carter could see the glimmer of tears in his eyes. Carter reached up and touched his face. In a strangled voice, he asked, “Oh baby, was it horrible?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. He looked away, breathing hard, and Carter knew to give him space. He was trying to rein in his emotions.
After a while, Carter asked, “Are you sure?”
Tony stared at him for a long time. “You can’t be asking me that.” Tony swallowed, drew in a deep breath. “I never knew what love was until I met you.”
Carter felt like something hot had sliced through him, both delightful and painful all at once. He grabbed hold of Tony’s hand and squeezed it. “You knew. You loved her. Love her.”
Tony nodded. “Yeah, I do. But it’s not the same. I love her like a sister, like a good friend. But with you…” Tony shook his head. “This isn’t gonna be easy, but it’s gonna be right.”
Carter shrugged, smiling. All he could say was, “Right.”
Tony pulled him close again, simply hugging this time. All around them were the sounds of the night: the roar of the surface, the wind whispering in the trees, the call of a night bird. All around them was the night.
And the outside.
Incubus
This story was inspired by the Chicago L and subway system. So much in fact that the Chicago Transit Authority, or CTA, should get a cut from the money I’ve made from it. Joking.
Anyway, I lived in the windy city for a total of more than 20 years. I took the L/subway so often that I knew the stops, especially the north-south Red Line, by heart.
There was always an assortment of strange people on the L, but on one particular morning, there was more than an abundance of them. I won’t go into descriptions here, but as you read about the people my characters encounter in the following story, you may be surprised to know that all of them appeared to me in real life in the space of one single morning.
How could I not write about it?
* * * *
Chapter 1
They were on their way home from Montreal after combining wedding and honeymoon into one glorious trip. A new life—together—lay before them. But right then, that night, they were tired and wished they didn’t have to rely on public transportation. They wished they could have afforded a taxi, but they had spent nearly all they had saved on the wedding itself and a few heated, happy days enjoying each other as husband and husband in an old Victorian bed-and-breakfast near the Old Quarter.
So now they found themselves taking the train from O’Hare all the way into downtown Chicago, switching from the Blue Line to the Red Line, then heading north to their stop at Granville. It was a long ride made longer by having to lug along their bags. And then there were the people! Oliver usually thought the more colorful passengers charming in their own bizarre slice-of-urban-life way. Tonight they were merely tiresome.
First there was the woman on the Blue Line. Oliver had snuggled against Ryan, his eyes burning with their need for sleep, Ryan’s large bulk a comforting warmth. Ryan had slid his arm around him, and if things could have continued in this vein, the dark pressing in against the windows, the rumble of the train, Oliver might have made the trip contented, might have even actually slept. But somewhere along the way, a woman with a throaty, cigarette-scarred voice had boarded. Oliver had heard her at first only in dim aural periphery; he’d assumed she was talking to a friend.
But the woman’s voice grew louder, and soon other conversations on the train ceased. Passengers turned in their seats to stare. Oliver disengaged himself from the warmth of his new husband (a still new and delightful concept to h
im…a husband), sat up straight, and rubbed his eyes.
He could not wait to get home.
“You with your Swedish Bakery cookies and your Christmas trees. Can’t get a fuckin’ straight answer out of one of ya!” the woman shrieked, standing.
Oliver wondered if the woman was ranting at someone only she could see or if she was directing her tirade at the entire car.
“You’re supporting a hundred of them!” the woman sneered. “And I hope it breaks your goddamn financial back! I sincerely hope so.”
Just before Oliver and Ryan reached their stop, the woman exited. She marched through the subway station, dirty pink down coat and rubber boots, an Aldi shopping bag clutched in one hand. Her face was pinched, of an indeterminate age, framed by a filthy paisley scarf.
Oliver clutched his husband’s arm. “I could be like that someday. You know loonies run in my family. Could you stand it?”
Ryan smirked, lips curling in a lopsided grin. Blue eyes probed, searching, as always, for the glimmer of truth behind Oliver’s warped sense of humor.
He stroked Oliver’s hair. “As long as it didn’t break my goddamn financial back.”
Oliver laughed as the conductor called out the stop where they would switch trains. “Halfway home,” he said.
The subway bustled with people. Years of underground mildew dampened the air. Even the cold air that wafted in above them was wet with snow.
Noise! It surrounded them. Subway buskers, snatches of conversation, laughter. At one end of the station, a black man held a Bible in one hand, gesticulated wildly with the other, and warned that those who hadn’t been saved were “on a journey to a place where you will burn forever and ever.” At the other end of the station, a fat woman at a keyboard sang “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”
They had to go downstairs and through the tunnel that ran beneath Dearborn and State to make the connection that would take them home.
A Rastafarian, with years-old dreadlocks and raggedy clothes, stood midway through the tunnel, pounding out a tribal beat on a bongo drum. He accompanied himself with a high-pitched tuneless whistle that reverberated off the tile walls, like a woman screaming.
Before him a large black woman in a navy blue ski parka shouted, “Yeah!” and danced in front of the man, twirling, arms in the air.
Past the drummer and his ecstatic dancer, a biker jacket-clad man sat Indian style on the floor, arms upraised. “Get close to Lucifer!” he cried, repeating the phrase over and over: a litany.
As Oliver and Ryan hurried by him, he shortened his cries to: “Lucifer! Lucifer! Lucifer!”
“This is a dream, isn’t it?” Oliver nudged Ryan as they neared the steps. “This is just too weird. I’m going to wake up and we’ll be back in Canada, right?”
“I wish.”
At least the ride home was uneventful. Nothing but the late rush hour crowd heading north, bleary-eyed bored faces, staring out of windows as the landscape sped by.
Oliver wondered if he and Ryan would ever look like the other passengers, locked in lives of complacency and routine. And then he glanced over at Ryan, his face a pale profile against a backdrop of lakefront high-rises, shadowed by the brim of his navy blue corduroy baseball cap. How could he ever tire of that childlike face, those blue eyes that were always alive with questions, the full lips so quick to twist into a grin or a pout?
Oliver put his head on Ryan’s shoulder and closed his eyes. No, he would never tire of this man. And Oliver would make sure Ryan would never tire of him.
“Granville. Granville is the next stop on this northbound Howard train.”
Oliver roused himself.
“C’mon,” Ryan whispered. “We better get ourselves up to the door.” They gathered their bags and began to weave through the standing passengers to the doors that would release them into their new—and proper—married life.
* * * *
Night pressed in around them. Their building was just a block to the east and a block to the north, and Oliver couldn’t wait to travel the short distance. A quick dinner, a salad, some soup maybe, and then he and Ryan could light a few candles and crowd into the bathtub together.
Their honeymoon wasn’t officially over until tomorrow.
They rounded the corner off Granville and started up Kenmore. Ryan must have seen him first. Oliver, intent on getting to the red brick six-flat on the corner of Rosemont, had become oblivious to his surroundings. Because he was holding onto Ryan’s arm, Oliver felt him stiffen.
Ryan stopped.
“Up there,” he said softly, not moving his lips.
Oliver looked north, where Ryan had indicated. All he saw was a campus building of Loyola University at the end of the street and apartment buildings, lined in orderly rows, on either side of Kenmore. Later, Oliver would admit to himself that he was in a hurry and, in his haste, didn’t want to see anything other than their front door.
Later, he would wish he had listened to Ryan and not talked him out of his sudden apprehension.
In fact, he would go over the next few minutes again and again, in detail, wishing they had done something as simple as crossing the street or walking up Sheridan and coming east on Rosemont, arriving at their building with only a few minutes lost.
But no matter how often Oliver replayed events, there was nothing he could ever do to change them.
Oliver looked again. The shadows grew dimmer, and he saw, a couple of buildings ahead, the cause of his husband’s fear.
Near the opening of a parking garage, a man stood perfectly still. He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t en route to another destination. He was not smoking a cigarette. He was not staring up at the night sky, searching in vain for a star not obliterated by the lights of the city.
It was his stillness that was, at first, the most disconcerting. January in Chicago was not a time to be standing about outdoors. With the wind off Lake Michigan, just two blocks away, the temperature was well below zero.
But the man didn’t move. His arms hung at his sides. He stared forward.
And then Oliver realized the second disturbing thing about the stranger…he was wearing a mask. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness and the figure before him, he realized he wasn’t wearing a ski mask, which would have been unusual but ordinary. This man wore some sort of leather hood. Even from where Oliver stood, he could discern the jagged leather zipper across the mouth.
The stranger was creepy…but they were almost home and Oliver had seen his share of weirdos that evening. And all of those bizarre people had had one trait in common: they were harmless.
“C’mon.” Oliver took a step forward and tugged on Ryan’s hand. “We’re almost home.”
Ryan didn’t move. “Let’s just go around the block. I don’t like that guy.”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “Ryan! You’re a big guy. I’m a big guy. He’s just another nutcase. If you were going to be afraid of someone, you should have been afraid of that ‘Lucifer’ character in the subway tunnel.”
“Just around the block. Just to be safe.” Ryan’s blue eyes probed Oliver’s, pleading.
A gust of wind blew up, whistling across the tops of the buildings, chilling them with its painful frigidity. A few more steps, really, just a few more and they would be in the vestibule of their building. Warmth, light.
“Look. I’ll protect you.” Oliver squeezed Ryan’s arm and smiled, trying to display a confidence he did not feel.
Ryan shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He hoisted the bigger of their two suitcases up on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
Why hadn’t they gone around the block? Why?
As they passed the man with the mask, he was silent. If he had bayed at the moon or shouted something, it would have been more comforting. But he said nothing, remaining motionless. A black wraith, with hardly any difference between him and the darkness surrounding him.
Why hadn’t they gone around the block? Why?
The stranger�
��s eyes, the only exposed part of him, watched as they passed.
And then—suddenly—he was behind them. It was as if he hadn’t moved. He was simply in one place and then another…impossible.
Oliver’s throat suddenly constricted. He wanted to drop the bag he carried and run, heading for the safety of their building, protected behind a locked door. He longed to look out at this masked man from behind the comfort of a locked and reinforced glass door.
But he couldn’t run. That would be panic. He would look preposterous. Nothing bad could happen to them. Not tonight. Not when they had just gotten married.
But Oliver and Ryan did quicken their pace, even if they didn’t break into a run. Oliver glanced over at Ryan, looking out of the corner of his eye for reassurance.
But he got none. Naked fear spread across Ryan’s face; his eyes glistened and he breathed quickly through his mouth, panting. In spite of the cold, his face glistened with a sheen of sweat.
Oliver tried to swallow, but there was no spit left to summon.
Why was it everything seemed to slow down? Why did everything suddenly become cloaked in the leaden movement of nightmare?
The whole ordeal took only seconds, and yet it seemed they couldn’t move, as if their veins were filled with a substance heavier than blood.
The stranger moved behind Oliver. He didn’t have a chance to scream. The masked man’s arm slithered around Oliver’s neck, yanking hard enough to make him gasp for the cold air, which suddenly vanished.
His other arm extended toward Ryan, glint of the switchblade blue/silver in the moonlight.
Oliver’s feet, kicking, scraped along the pavement as the stranger dragged him into the parking garage.
Ryan stood helpless and confused for only a second. Then he dropped the suitcase and hurried after them, dancing away from the knife, pleading. “Hey, man, you’ve got to let him go. Don’t do this.”
Ryan turned his head, bleating into the darkness. “Help! Somebody please!”
And then the shadows gathered around Oliver. The parking garage smelled of stale air and exhaust fumes. The man’s weight was an unbearable warmth at his back.
Unhinged Page 18