Orientation

by Rick R. Reed

  But not sexy.

  He moved from the window and stood over the phone, which was on an antique secretary near the front door. It rang, and he picked it up, went through the motions of telling Otis, the day doorman, it was okay to send her up.

  He hurried to the kitchen where a pot of tea steeped on the counter—Silver Sprout, a green tea from Fuji. He had always kept some around, since it was the only thing Keith could often keep down near the end. With his mind racing the way it was today, he thought it would be appropriate to serve her some. He had already put cranberry scones from Whole Foods on a Limoges plate. He placed the teapot, cups, sugar bowl, and the scones on a tray and went into the living room, where he set them on the coffee table.

  It seemed to take forever for the elevator to bring her up to his front door. He was too antsy to sit on the couch, so he stood by the door, wringing his hands, and watching for her through the peephole.

  At last, he saw her distant image through the glass. She looked slightly wary as she raised her hand to knock. Before her hand could connect with the door, Robert swung it open.

  “Hi.” He smiled and stepped back to admit her. “It’s good to see you again.”

  She swept by him, and he could smell the faintest trace of patchouli…and something more biting. Cloves, maybe? He shut the door and grinned at her. “I made tea.” He gestured toward the coffee table. “I hope you’ll have some with me. Let’s go sit down.”

  They crossed the room together. Robert let Jess sit on the sofa, while he made himself as comfortable as possible on the chair opposite her. “Shall I be mother?”

  Jess paused in shrugging out of her coat. “Huh?”

  Robert laughed. “Old-fashioned Brit phrase. I’m a bit of an anglophile. Can I pour you a cup?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  Once settled with their tea, both of them fell silent, sipping, and looking anywhere but at each other. Robert felt a nervousness he couldn’t explain, or perhaps it was anticipation, or even fear. Fear that Jess would somehow snatch it all away with a few words, something along the order of “You know, I really just made all that stuff up. It was just a guess and I was lucky.”

  He both did and didn’t want it to be true that he was sitting here with Keith. Finally, he leaned forward and asked, “So? Did it really happen? Your dream, I mean.”

  “I couldn’t make something like that up.” She sat back, sounding a little relieved that Robert had broken the silence. “I wouldn’t, anyway. What kind of ghoul would that make me? I can tell that Keith was very special to you and to play around like that would just be cruel.”

  “You’re right. He was beyond special. And you were also right about the dream. You even got all the details right. It was just before New Year’s Eve, the tail end of 1982. I had never been in a place like Touché before; leather wasn’t my scene back then.” Robert laughed. “I don’t even think I had a scene. I still don’t.”

  Jess put down her cup. “You mean I dreamt about Touché?” She shook her head. “That couldn’t be. I know that place.” She giggled. “Last fall, when I was doing a play in Uptown, one of the guys in the cast took me there after the show. This wasn’t the same place.”

  “You’ve been to the new Touché. This is the one that originally existed; it was over on Lincoln, by Diversey. It burned down.” Robert furrowed his brow. “So that makes the possibility of what your dream might suggest even more real. That Touché burned down, oh, I think, sometime in the early nineties, maybe even before. I don’t keep up with these things much. How you dreamt of a place you’ve never been in and that doesn’t even exist is, well, kind of weird.”

  “And don’t forget the clothes. I knew what you were wearing.”

  “I’ve thought about that. I tried to rationalize and say it was the power of suggestion. You know, by your saying what I was wearing and because I wanted the dream to be true, I remembered it as that. But I don’t think so. I can see my clothes so clearly in my mind’s eye.” He took a sip of tea and again flashed back to getting ready to go out that night and admiring himself in the mirror. His roommate had gone home to Indiana for the holidays, and he had been alone. “Did you know we were never apart after that night? Not really. I got my stuff together and moved in with him right away.”

  Jess cocked her head. “You must have been really sure.”

  “Oh, I was. I never doubted how much I loved him for a minute. Some people might have called it infatuation, or lust, but I knew it was real love. It was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. That’s why I was so willing to make the leap and move in with him right away, even if I was sticking my roomy with the remainder of a lease. Keith paid it off for me.” His voice caught, and he felt tears prick at his eyes. He took a deep breath. “I had felt lust before, even infatuation. This was nothing like that. It was all-consuming, right from the start.”

  Jess looked, for a moment, as if she were lost in her own thoughts. She nodded and said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “I know what you mean.”

  Robert leaned forward and patted her knee. He realized she was thinking of her girlfriend, the one who had dumped her, the one who had made her think about taking her own life. “I know you do, dear.”

  “It was like that for me and Ramona. She just took my breath away.” She looked up at him. “People say love can grow, but I don’t believe it. Not if there isn’t a seed from the very start. I think the sparks are there from the beginning or they’re never around at all.”

  “You may be right.”

  Jess sat up straighter, as if she had just thought of something. “This is really weird, but I always said that we knew whether we liked or loved someone right away, even if we didn’t have any rational reason to base our feelings on. It was like an instinct.” She paused for a minute, looking out the window, then back at Robert. “You won’t believe this, but I used to say to people I hit it off with right away, that maybe we knew each other in a previous life. How else do you explain knowing right off the bat whether you’ll care for someone or not? I know some would disagree, but this is always the way it worked for me. Always. It’s never failed.”

  Robert leaned back and let his head rest on the cushion behind him, splaying his legs outward. “I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of it that way, but it does seem to be true. I did pretty much know whether a person I met was going to be someone I wanted to stick around, or someone from whom I wanted to run as fast as I could.” He smiled. “Keith? Jesus, I knew the minute our eyes met in that bar, he was the man for me. Sure, there was lust.” He laughed. “And a lot of it, but there was something more. When I tried to tell my parents how I felt about Keith, they attempted to talk me out of moving in with him. I had already come out to them, and they were okay with that, but cohabitating with a man who was so much older after just meeting him a few days before was a bit much for them to take. They thought I was out of my mind. And I was—with love.”

  Robert pushed the palms of his hands against his eyes to staunch the flow of tears he knew was coming. “They didn’t like us moving in together, but when Keith got sick and they saw me stick by him through all the horrors of it, they knew.” Robert gulped in a quivering breath. “Mom even told me, when Keith was near the end, that she was wrong. That I must really love the man if I was able to go through what I had.

  “But you know what? Through it all, through changing the soiled sheets, mopping up vomit, trying to calm him down when his fever was high and he was raving, I never once thought I needed to get away. Oh, I needed a break sometimes. It was rough. But I always thought, ‘this is my place.’ I wouldn’t have traded that place for anything. I didn’t need validation for my early feelings for him, but if I did, nursing him through AIDS would have done it.”

  Jess patted the couch next to her, and Robert thought it was much the same way he had patted the bench next to him the night he met Keith. Her own eyes were shining with tears.

  “Why don’t you come over here and sit by me?”<
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  He did. Jess wrapped both her arms around him. Robert, unused to the feel of a woman’s embrace, thought she felt bony and insubstantial. But the hug was comforting, and the thought of Keith being somewhere inside this young woman even more so.

  He let himself lean against her and cried. “He was taken away too soon.”

  Jess stroked his hair. “I know. I know.”

  Robert sniffled and managed to pull himself together. He sat up straighter and looked at Jess with a sheepish smile. “Sorry. The thought of you being some sort of reincarnation…God, the word even sounds ludicrous! The thought of you being him is both a great comfort and a great disturbance. I don’t know how I feel about that. I mean, I kind of know how I feel, I just don’t know what I want to do with it.”

  Jess leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. After a while, she spoke. “We don’t have to do anything. I can understand how my telling you all this weird stuff might be like ripping the scab off a wound. You may have gotten to the point where you can tolerate your grief. I can see how my being here and what I’m saying would be nice, but not really welcome.” She took Robert’s hand and looked him in the eye. “I can walk out that door. I don’t want to. But I can. If it will make things easier for you.”

  Robert closed his eyes, so he could think and to break the connection Jess had made with her gaze. It was still disturbing to him that if Keith’s soul (or whatever it was) was somewhere inside her, why couldn’t he see some trace of it in her eyes?

  “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you out of my life.”

  Jess nodded. “I don’t either,” she whispered, but there was force behind her breathless declaration.

  “Meeting you on Christmas was like meeting Keith, in an odd way. Regardless, that doesn’t matter so much as me knowing you were not just someone I wanted to help, but someone I wanted to know.” He took her hand again. “I’d like to explore this. See where it goes.”

  Jess grinned. “Me too.”

  Robert leaned over, head in hands, knowing he was the picture of despair. He sat up suddenly and smiled at Jess. “God! I’m courting a woman!”

  They both laughed. They stopped abruptly when Jess asked, “You know the one strange thing about that night?”

  “What night?”

  “You know, the night we met.”

  Robert nodded.

  “I don’t know why I went where I did. I mean, the same lake is there, farther north, at the end of my street, in fact.” Jess stood and walked over to the window, looking outside at the cold waters of Lake Michigan, restlessly churning. She turned back to Robert and asked, “Why did I get on the train? And then I got off at Belmont and must have walked more than a mile. All just so I could be near your building. Don’t you wonder why I went to all that trouble?”

  Robert nodded, as if in agreement. But he didn’t really wonder why. Not really.

  Chapter 12

  For the first time, Tony considered getting into his own stash. He knew he really wouldn’t, but the thought of a couple of burning snorts bringing automatic oblivion had its appeal. And forgetting is what he wanted to do. He had even gone into the bedroom, to the drawer with its box of neatly organized rows of tiny baggies, color coordinated by amount. He briefly fingered them, knowing that to take a little out of a couple of them would make no difference to anyone. And all he needed was a little. Being a Tina virgin, he was well acquainted with the fact that just one or two of snorts would keep him flying for days.

  The phone was ringing. His breakfast had gone cold, sodden and congealed from when he had left it on his table to answer Ethan’s insistent buzzing on his intercom. Tony thought about answering the phone, dumping the unappealing food into the trash, but felt a curious kind of paralysis.

  My God, what have I agreed to? Is there a price high enough that I could actually kill an innocent man? Tony put his head into his hands and slumped down on a chair at his table. The scent of scallions wafted from his plate, and he feared he might vomit.

  Tony had to get outside. The cold air would clear his head, and walking would energize him, give him something to do other than dwell upon the fact that he had taken a few tentative steps along a path that would make him a murderer.

  He pulled his red Columbia jacket out of the closet, yanked a red stocking cap over his head, and put on a pair of leather gloves. He rummaged around in his desk for a pair of sunglasses. He felt like a celebrity going into hiding, but to walk around, recognizable, in his own neighborhood was an invitation to get hassled. There were too many of his clients who could also be wandering the streets (like zombies, Tony thought), or on their way to see him.

  He dumped his breakfast in the garbage and turned off the lights.

  Outside, the day was cold, but the sun was bright, having that curious crystalline shine that only came on the clearest and coldest days of winter. The hushed air, almost eerie, planted seeds of impending disaster in Tony’s mind. He started north on Broadway and decided he would walk until his legs gave out, he got too cold to go on, or, preferably, he had arrived at some sort of understanding of why he had agreed to take another human life.

  Lots of other people were out on the street and braving the cold. Tony supposed many were on holiday this week between Christmas and New Year’s when much of the world shut down (except for the drug dealing business that, pardon the expression, amped up). None looked like they had murder on their minds. He saw couples with babies, single gay men, and lots of kids free from school for the Christmas holiday, their voices raucous and loud.

  Celebration was in the air. Tony remembered how free it felt to be on Christmas vacation, flush from getting a whole new cache of toys on Christmas morn. He recalled the feeling of freedom, as if those two weeks off from school would stretch forever.

  He watched as a boy of about ten or twelve glided along Broadway on a brand new, metallic blue Trek mountain bike. The bike glinted in the sun—obviously just out from under the tree. The boy looked so innocent and carefree, even as he maneuvered his way north up Broadway, alert for passing traffic and parked car doors swinging open. His bright yellow Giro helmet was like a beacon, drawing Tony’s eye. The boy’s cheeks were reddened from the cold, and his eyes—dark brown—looked clean, sparkling. He looked too healthy to have ever touched drugs. In short, he appeared as though his biggest high came from riding his new bike.

  It made Tony’s stomach churn, seeing this boy, seeing this happiness coming from a simple thing like a bicycle. When had he last experienced such happiness? He had locked himself away in the company of addicts, people who had lost touch with life’s simple pleasures, who were sacrificing everything to chase an elusive high that even Tony knew—and suspected many of his customers did, as well—could never be captured. He wondered if he could ever recapture the simple happiness he saw on the boy’s face, the sense of sheer delight in something as simple as the sun on one’s face.

  He was just about to turn away from the boy and head east on Irving Park Road to get out to the lakefront path when he heard the car. He turned to see the white Escalade vibrate from the bass of the hip-hop music blaring from its stereo, even with its windows shut. Tony rolled his eyes.

  It all happened so fast. The boy looked behind him for a second as someone, a friend maybe, called out to him. “Hey, Dickweed! Nice wheels!” And then brakes screeched as the boy and the Escalade rolled into the intersection of Broadway and Irving Park Road at the exact same moment.

  The vehicle’s tires screamed, smoking, as its grille made contact with the boy on the bike, sending him flying into the air, onto the hood, and then, with a sickening thud, onto the pavement. The mangled bike wedged under the front wheels of the suddenly stalled Escalade.

  A pool of blood spread out behind the boy’s head. Already, people shouted, ran, and whipped out cell phones. A man in a stocking cap climbed out of the Escalade, looking confused. A crowd gathered around the boy as Tony shrunk back, leaning against a building, and stuffed his fist into
his mouth. He wanted to cry, or scream. The bike and the boy—so happy—now broken. All in an instant.

  Then, an incredible thing happened. The guy in the stocking cap climbed back into his oversized SUV, threw it in reverse to free it from the bicycle underneath, and peeled out, tires shrieking off the pavement.

  “Oh my God!” one woman in a plaid coat screamed.

  Another person, a man in a Cubs cap and shearling coat, yelled, “Someone get the license plate number!”

  A kid, also on a bike, called out, “What an asshole.”

  Everyone started talking at once. And Tony prayed the guy in the suit with the Blackberry was entering the Escalade’s plate number into the device.

  In the distance, wailing sirens grew louder. Tony’s heart thudded.

  He crept closer, hoping he wasn’t about to see a dead boy. A woman was kneeling beside the child. She had taken off her blue down parka and had covered him. She seemed oblivious of the blood staining the knees of her jeans and her coat as she stroked the boy’s forehead and leaned close, making comforting noises.

  Tony peered over the shoulder of a man to see the boy’s eyelids flutter and his gaze make woozy contact with the woman above him.

  Tony closed his eyes. Thank God.

  The ambulance was just pulling up, followed by two police cruisers, and already the officers and paramedics were taking charge of the scene, moving the crowd back and away from the boy, the paramedics pulling out and readying a gurney.

  Tony turned to start back home.

  He didn’t get very far before thoughts of the boy and his despicable hit-and-run driver caused him to realize that he might be a drug dealer—which put him pretty low on the morality scale—but he was not a murderer, and didn’t think he ever could be. Not for a million bucks, nor even half a million. The money had seemed a temptation, with its promise of escape from a questionable life, but there were other outs for him. For God’s sake, I have a family downstate that loves me. I have a college degree. It’s not like there are no other alternatives. Sure, making half a million dollars for one swift act is probably not going to be possible. But a respectable life is…