by Chris Vola
He brushed past the cop, who scrunched his nose and shook his head in revulsion at the odor wafting from Ryan’s soiled clothing and oil-clogged pores, and limped slowly east toward the metallic hum of 10th Avenue’s intermittent late-night traffic, not looking back.
As the adrenaline left his body, it was replaced by a fresh bout of crippling vertigo and muscle tremors, as well as an unshakable brain fog that made it impossible for him to comprehend where he was, where he was going. The buildings he passed became taller, denser, the older rectangular brick façades replaced by glass and chrome behemoths formed in irregular geometric patterns, their spires glimmering in the gathering dawn that seemed to become full-blown sunlight in an instant.
Above him lurked the neon swirl of Midtown advertising, the pixilated billboards featuring airbrushed models, unbeatable cell phone plans, hybrid vehicles, and starving children that swirled interchangeably in a revolving kaleidoscope of commerce. The leering eyes of fresh-out-of-work custodians and sanitation workers were replaced by the disinterested glances of men in suits and women in bland tops and knee-length skirts, entering and exiting the continuous stream of cabs that registered as darting yellow particles on the periphery of his vision.
After what seemed like hours, he felt himself spiraling totally out of control, losing what little balance he had left. At a busy intersection he thought he saw a pulse of white light from a traffic signal and stumbled into the street. He didn’t see the car but he heard the screech of tires and a series of squalling horns and loud curses as someone grabbed him by his backpack and flung him sideways into a halal cart parked next to the sidewalk.
While the hairnet-clad woman manning the cart berated him in what he assumed was Arabic, he focused on the building he’d landed in front of, tried to clear his head enough to read the address plate above the double-door entrance. 469 SEVENTH AVENUE. Something about the address rang a bell, pushed its way through the garbled bits of memory that were reverberating randomly around his brain. He’d seen it on envelopes, letterheads, countless e-mails, bullshit tax statements. But the number he was thinking of was slightly different. 489? 499? 499 7th Avenue, Suite 5B. Van Doren & Associates, Financial Planners.
469 meant he was close. He moved away from the cart, staggered onto the sidewalk, and headed uptown, pushing his way through the rush-hour crowds, ignoring the angry and nauseated stares from the unsuspecting travelers he lumbered into, focusing on the numbers of the restaurants and stores he passed to make sure he was going in the right direction. Two blocks later, on the verge of another collapse, he found himself in front of the building he was looking for, its brown-and-red Art Deco façade looking exactly as it had in the images he’d Googled years ago.
He pushed through the revolving doors and into a sparsely decorated marble-tiled lobby where a bleary-eyed security guard was seated behind a large semicircular desk reading a newspaper and munching on a bagel. Ryan’s knees buckled and he swerved right, then left, slamming into a wall where a directory of the building’s business tenants was posted. His backpack slipped off his shoulders. The security guard snapped to attention, stood up, and rushed out from behind the desk, spilling a large mug of coffee onto the freshly polished floor.
“Hey, buddy, hey, hey!” the portly, balding man stammered in a European accent of unknown origin. “This is no good. You cannot—”
“Van Doren,” Ryan mumbled, cutting him off. “5B.”
The security guard hovered near him for a moment, eyes darting nervously from the building’s entrance to the row of elevators at the back of the lobby, deciding what to do. “You must leave now,” he said finally, “or I call police. Your choice.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his navy sports jacket, took out his phone, and waited to see what Ryan would do.
“No, it’s fine, just call … James,” Ryan croaked before sliding down the wall into a sitting position and out of consciousness.
15
Beyond the open French windows, the waning sunlight drenched the heavily wooded park across the street in a golden glow as a light breeze caused the branches of the tallest trees to sway in an irregular, soothing rhythm. A child’s happy squeal and the chatter of birdsong were the only noises louder than the perpetual buzz of the city that now seemed distant, removed from the calm that was radiating through Ryan.
He stretched his legs that no longer felt like anchors, ran his tongue over lips that were still chapped but no longer raw and peeling. He groggily sat up on the couch where he’d been lying and looked down at the clothes he was wearing: a Grateful Dead 1992 summer tour T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants drenched in blood. A needle was sticking into a vein in his forearm. It was connected to a tube that ran from where he was sitting to a nearby IV bag attached to a hospital-style metal pole and filled with a clear fluid that was being pumped into him.
He ripped the needle out of his arm and shot up from the couch. Overcome by a sudden rush of dizziness and nausea, he reached for the pole, grabbing it to support himself, accidentally ripping off the IV bag and spilling its contents onto the dull wooden floor. Trying to regain his balance, he noticed his backpack resting on a cherry-colored leather armchair adjacent to the couch, unopened and still caked in grime from the vacant lot near Nicki’s building. He waited for the spinning in his head to stop, then snatched the backpack up and headed for a narrow hallway at the far end of what he assumed was the apartment’s living room. Feeling a rapid trembling in his chest that he quickly realized was a heartbeat, he shuffled toward the bolted door at the end of the hallway, trying to move as silently as possible. On his right were two doors, each slightly ajar but not enough for him to see what was on the other side. On his left he passed the entrance to a walk-in kitchen that reeked of peanut oil and something older, putrid. Then a bathroom, the door flung open, what was left of the clothes he’d been wearing since leaving Brooklyn spread across the floor, his gun resting on the toilet tank next to a small pipe still smoldering with pungent weed.
A brief rustling came the room adjacent to the bathroom, followed by the creak of metal springs and a grunt. Footsteps.
Ryan grabbed the gun. The magazine clip was gone. He rushed to the door at the end of the hallway, tried to manipulate the deadbolt with fumbling fingers that seemed to have lost all of their previous dexterity.
“The old hit-it-and-quit-it,” a distinctly crackly, familiar voice boomed as the door to the room where the sounds had originated was flung open. “Taking a play out of my book, dude!”
Ryan exhaled deeply, felt his heart rate slow and his shoulders go limp.
* * *
“Where are we?” he asked as he sat back down on the couch and James Van Doren III scrunched the massive ass and gut portion of his six-foot-four frame into the armchair. His financial advisor had always been a big guy, but Ryan found it hard to believe how puffy his face had gotten, his triple chin flecked with gray and black stubble, his pre-happy-hour tremble-fingers roving nervously over his swollen knees. He’d always lived the unapologetically degenerate lifestyle of a spoiled kid who never had to work for anything, who knew that when his old man finally collapsed from a clogged artery, a bum liver, or a diabetic seizure (or, as it turned out, a combination of the three), he would seamlessly take control of the business that was his birthright. Now that he was on the wrong side of forty-five, his exterior had caught up to the internal carnage that had been taking place since he’d been old enough to figure out how to pop the tab on a Budweiser can. He’d partied the shit out of himself.
“Oh,” Ryan added, “sorry about the floor.”
James, wearing baggy mesh shorts and a faded Knicks hoodie, rubbed his bald, sunburned head, squinted his bloodshot eyes, looked at the puddle the IV bag had created, and shrugged. “No worries,” he said, “didn’t even notice. To be honest, the only thing I’m a little pissed about is that I gave you that shirt to wear. It’s pretty rare. Going to run you like three hundred to get a replacement on eBay but I know
you’re good for it.” He chuckled. “To answer your question, we’re at my place. Upper West Side, 87th and Central Park West. Land of the Jewish middle-aged yogi. Make yourself at home.”
“Was your wife at work when you brought me here?” Ryan asked. “I can’t imagine she’ll be too happy to see the bathroom renovations when she gets back.”
James’s eyes grew wide in amused disbelief. “You don’t remember anything from Tuesday, do you? I knew you were out of it, but oh man, wow. And I’ve been divorced since before the previous presidential administration. Did we not ever talk about that?”
“Tuesday,” Ryan repeated, trying to make sense of any hours he might have lost. “What’s today?”
“Thursday.” James checked something on the phone in his lap for a few seconds, then looked back up. “You picked the right time to come all batshit-hobo into the office,” he continued. “Normally I don’t make it in until around ten thirty, but I was feeling ambitious. You should have seen Gustav standing over you, looking like he was about to puke. I couldn’t tell which of you was closer to croaking!”
“Gustav?”
“The doorman at the office, older dude, kind of worthless when an actual emergency occurs, as you’ve seen, or sort of saw. His wife makes some amazing pierogis, though, brings them in a couple times a month, otherwise he’d have been canned years ago. Anyway, I finally got him to help me get you in to the car that had brought me in and was still idling outside the building. Peter, the driver—not happy, but he’ll keep his mouth shut. You’re going to be getting a cleaning bill in the next couple days. We brought you here, tried to get you comfortable, figure out what was wrong, what you needed, but you were wired, dude. Kept thrashing around even though you didn’t have the strength to stand up. Telling me you needed to leave, then you needed to eat. Told me you’d sign over all your assets to me if I gave you my blood. Ha! That’s how I knew you were totally off your gourd. You wouldn’t shut up, so I fired up the old collection bag, gave you a vial, and you coughed it back out as soon as it touched your throat. Then I realized, duh, you’re in Manhattan so you must be one of us again, probably forgot that you needed to eat solid food and drink water to, like, survive. My buddy at Mount Sinai gave me a few bags of electrolyte replacement solution for when I overimbibe and need to be semilucid the next morning. I’ve been pumping you full of that shit since yesterday. You’re welcome.”
“Thanks,” Ryan managed, weakly, the reality of how stupid and reckless he’d been finally sinking in.
“Don’t thank me yet,” James said, “until you try the pad thai I got from this place around the corner. Figured your first real meal in however many years should be memorable. Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
James hoisted himself out of the chair with no small amount of effort and disappeared into the kitchen.
Ryan looked around the room at the random assortment of crookedly slung, dust-covered objects hanging from the walls—a wooden fraternity paddle, a heavily scratched acoustic guitar, prints of generic cityscapes, a massive taxidermy of a striped bass—that made it clear that no self-respecting woman had spent any significant time in the apartment for years. At least not during the daylight hours. He noticed a large photograph hanging above the curved-screen, wall-mounted TV: a much younger (and thinner) James, his father and grandfather raising pints and flashing tipsy smiles at the camera.
Ryan had a clear memory of the first time he’d met Jimmy Sr. on a winter night in the early forties. Shitfaced, decked out in a plum-colored hound’s-tooth jacket and matching fedora, weaving his way home from a squalid Brownsville pub, slipping and pinballing between the brown and gray snowdrifts, oblivious to everything, belting out the chorus to Sinatra’s “Pale Moon” in a slurry brogue. Ryan, following him in the shadows of the otherwise empty street, waited until Jimmy slipped on a patch of black ice and landed stomach up in a gutter, still singing. The easiest of meals.
But Jimmy was an incomparable talker, especially after a dozen scotches. Ryan had dragged him onto the sidewalk and pinned him down in a telephone booth that was blocked from the street by a large snowbank and, consumed by his hunger, was ripping through his prey’s scarf to get at the soft veins under the jowls.
Jimmy threw his hands up, not so much in fearful protest as in annoyance.
“Hold on, buddy, what’s going on here?” he asked incredulously. “Let’s talk about this like men and not savages from a John Ford picture. We can make a deal. What do you want from me, my wallet, my watch? They’re yours.”
“Your blood.”
“Okay, that’s a first,” Jimmy replied without skipping a beat. “You some kind of mad scientist? A Bela Lugosi fanatic? But sure, no problem. I got plenty of it. Freshest around, no syphilis, and seven years ago I’m the backup quarterback at Fordham. But you don’t need all of it, do you? How’s about this. I got a nurse friend over in Bay Ridge. She’ll drain a pint, a quart, whatever you need. I’ll get it for you whenever you need it, within reason, of course.”
Even in Ryan’s haste to eat, Jimmy’s alcohol-fueled boldness made him pause. There was something to be said about not having to risk exposing yourself every time you got the urge to feed. And Jimmy’s blood, regardless of how much booze was flowing through it, smelled above average, maybe even great.
“And of course if you aren’t going to change your mind and leach me into an early grave, I’ll need to be properly compensated,” Jimmy continued, speaking like the two of them were old acquaintances, eyeing the mink collar of the jacket Ryan had recently extracted from the still-warm corpse of an anesthesiologist. “I got a feeling you’ve been playing this game for a while, probably collected a few souvenirs in your line of work.”
Jimmy was right. There were piles of cash, jewelry, silverware, and china, as well as dozens of pieces of art that Ryan had taken from his more affluent victims, all hidden in the stash house in Brighton Beach he shared with Frank and Seamus. A hoard that would soon be getting difficult to manage regardless of how much money Ryan spent on clothes and the swanky hotels in Brooklyn Heights, where he’d grown accustomed to staying.
The fifty dollars Jimmy requested for the first quart was a pittance to Ryan, even back then. When he came to collect what he was owed the following afternoon at the address printed on Jimmy’s business card, Jimmy handed him the blood in a glass milk bottle, as well as three hundred dollars in crisp bills. “Had a good day at the market,” Jimmy said nonchalantly. “Doubled what you gave me, plus this.”
Whether or not Jimmy was bullshitting him (which, Ryan thought, now seemed more than likely), the transaction was the start of a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship that saw Ryan not only stop having to kill for his meals but also consolidate and expand his wealth in the most legitimate way possible, and saw Jimmy open a business that had fed his and his descendants’ appetite for irresponsible consumption. Ryan never asked what percentage Jimmy, Jimmy Jr., or James took from him, as long as the numbers that he saw continued to grow. And they always did, through several minor scares and the 2008 bank collapse.
Even though they were no longer Ryan’s donors, it behooved the Van Dorens to make sure their biggest and oldest private client remained happy. Ryan had trusted this family of alcoholic fuck-ups and womanizers for three generations. It had paid off so far, which was why he was here. It wasn’t for the ambiance.
James returned from the kitchen, freshly stoned and giggling in weird triumphant bursts, a forty-seven-year-old child, cradling a plate of noodles, chicken, and tofu, a pint of Belgian chocolate Häagen-Dazs, and a can of barbecue-flavored Pringles. He set them on the scuffed coffee table in front of Ryan and handed him a fork. Ryan breathed in the steam coming off the pad thai, an aroma that would have made him gag a week ago but now smelled irresistible, better than any B-negative blood.
“Breakfast of champions,” James said. He sat down in the armchair and stopped smiling for the first time since Ryan had seen him. “I figure I’ll wait to ask you t
he obvious stuff,” he said, taking a serious, businesslike tone. “Like, why did you show up at my door and almost blow a cover you’ve been maintaining since before my grandfather was born? What fucked-up set of circumstances led you to give up a gift that most people would probably kill to have? How can I get you out of whatever situation you’re in? Just know now that whatever you’re going through, I’ll do anything in my power to help you. You can stay here as long as you want. I owe you that much, and more. Also, you might want to slow down a little there, bud.”
Ryan nodded, even though he wasn’t really listening, his mouth and chin stained with noodle grease and chocolate goo as he tore open the Pringles can, pulled out a fistful of chips, and shoved them down his throat. Everything that touched his tongue was the best thing he’d ever tasted. He could feel his grateful stomach expanding with each swallow, his seldom-used jaw muscles working off their rust, an unfamiliar warmth surging through him.
In spite of all that had happened and the future ugliness that was inevitable, he found himself totally absorbed in the moment, content in a singular, simple purpose. For now, he had everything he needed.
16
“So what you told me yesterday is for real? This whole thing is about a girl? Bro, you’re even more messed up than I thought,” James said, sipping his coffee and staring longingly at a woman smoking a cigarette on the corner of 95th and Broadway, a few yards from the diner where they were sitting in a window booth.
Ryan looked down at the bacon and cheese omelet, hash browns, and sausage links he was in the process of devouring, took a few more bites. “You left Brooklyn for a girl,” he said.
James chuckled dryly. “Just because you leave a place,” he said, “doesn’t mean your personality magically changes. Did you think you were going to suddenly become a personable nonrecluse schooled in manipulating the fickle heartstrings of a member of the Tinder generation? Good luck with that. Oh, and one more small detail. You gave up your immortality! What the fuck, dude? In a hundred years you could probably have custom-ordered a robot that looks and feels exactly like, what’s her name, Jessica? Plus, I was hoping that when I finally beat my insides up to the point of no return you’d be nice enough to bite me or whatever you guys do and let me join the club. Guess I’ll have to settle for becoming a cyborg.”