by Richard Long
It was more than just music to Michael’s ears—it was a symphony. He wanted it to go on and on and on…until he could actually believe it. Always one to go on and on, Paul was happy to accommodate him—at least until Martin arrived.
“My own dear dad was a very cruel man,” Paul continued, without any emotion that Michael could identify. “I don’t blame him for it. In fact, it turned out to be a gift in its own way, though I certainly didn’t think so at the time. I learned to be tough. Hard. And fight back too. I can safely say that on the day my dear daddy died, he was most assuredly impressed with the progress I’d made. Now I can offer you the same gesture, but without the harshness that marked my father’s teachings. I’ve learned much since then, and while pain is still an indispensable ingredient in claiming your freedom, what’s even more essential for your growth and development is knowing there will always be a firm, strong hand by your side. To help. To guide you. To give you the advice and encouragement you’ve always craved and sadly done without, all these long, lonely years.”
Michael nodded eagerly. The tears were gone and replaced with a look of admiration that could only make sense to someone who suffered from his condition: dadlessness. He would never admit it, but he’d been waiting for this moment all of his life.
Paul saw the change in Michael’s expression and felt the desperate need behind it. Michael didn’t know it, but Paul had been waiting for this moment too, not for all his life—for all of Michael’s. Michael didn’t know that, or a lot of other things. Like why the really tall, really creepy guy that did his scrotum implants told him there was a place to crash in an abandoned building between C and D. Or why he bothered to walk him over and make sure he got settled in. Or why there was already a bed and a dresser inside. Or why he was the only one in the building with a lock on his door. He never questioned the strange twists of fate that were guiding and protecting him. He never questioned why he was never robbed or beaten up by the Puerto Ricans who teased and taunted all the other white kids in the neighborhood, but always looked the other way when he walked by. He never wondered why he’d never seen the man on the floor above him until today. Or why he, of all people, had been singled out for the gift of the big man’s wicked patronage.
Paul, of course, knew exactly what he was doing and why. He congratulated himself on his patience and restraint. He had been saving the boy like a birthday present, to be opened at this precise instant, once all the players had been set in motion. All the pawns. If he had rushed things, if he started too early like he did with Martin, would he be sitting where he was right now, bathed in such complete adulation? No. He had earned this. It was his due. Even more importantly, it was right on schedule.
Everything was going exactly as planned.
Martin walked through the twists and turns of the darkened corridor, guided primarily by his sense of smell. The wafting food aromas grew stronger with each step. Finally, he saw a light ahead and immediately stopped. The light was coming from his left.
Martin had a touch of OCD, fueled in part by genetics and more, in all likelihood, from the years he spent in training with Paul. After his mind and heart had hardened to a certain degree, his remaining instinctive needs for comfort distilled themselves into a craving for particular physical sensations, like his fetish for softness and his affinity for certain habits and routines. Like most obsessive-compulsives, Martin loved his routines. As a hunter, he recognized that his peculiar, ritualized patterns would have to be undetectable to anyone else as routines, so he relegated most of them to his cleaning and bathing habits, or the way he buckled his belt (left-handed for odd days, right for evens).
He was also extremely superstitious. His biggest phobias involved certain rules he’d created for the direction of his movement, usually while walking. Whenever he felt in danger, he hated turning to the left. More than hated it—he physically loathed it. He would go to almost any lengths to avoid left-hand turns, unless his alternative route placed him in even more certain danger.
He looked at the glimmer of light coming from the corridor on his left and pondered his next move. Then he heard the voices. He looked at the light and the left-hand turn and thought about all the good and bad luck he had already experienced today.
“What the fuck,” he said, turning left without another thought. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Rose looked over her shoulder again as she trudged down the sidewalk of Avenue B. Darkness had settled in. Shadows from the glowing streetlights snaked between the trees and crumpled garbage cans like a nest of vipers. She felt a chill of fear and something else (a premonition?) that made her want to run the rest of the way home. She forced her legs to keep walking in a slow, steady gait, but her mind raced ahead, around the next corner, up the stairs and behind the locked door of her apartment.
As she turned right on Eighth Street, she felt the nagging sensation that someone was following her again.
I smiled and crossed the street behind her, pulling my jacket tighter to brace myself against the chilly evening air, ducking into the shadows of an abandoned storefront as she climbed the stairs of her stoop, opened the door and went inside.
As soon as she entered her apartment, Rose turned on some music to chase away her jitters. When she was calm enough to think, she thought about Martin and how nice it would be to see him again. She almost ran downstairs and ding-donged his bell, then remembered why he gave her all that gold in the first place. “I’ll make some curtains first,” she decided, just to show him how nice everything would look when it was all…finished.
I stared up at her window and watched her dance with a cascade of unrolled fabric bunched around her waist like a party dress. She pranced and reveled like she was the luckiest girl in the world. She looked so ridiculous. All I could think about was how foolish she was to feel even the least bit excited about seeing Martin again and how infinitely better her luck would have been if she never met him in the first place. Or me for that matter.
“Lucky,” I snorted derisively. “The luck of the Irish.”
My suitcase is full of dreams. I take it out whenever I need to go far away. It weighs a lot. I saw it in a thrift store in San Francisco. It was a big, old- fashioned suitcase from the thirties or forties, the kind some dandy would take on a cruise ship, beige and tan with shiny brass hinges. At first, I used it to keep my journals inside. Soon there were so many I had to keep them somewhere else. I needed more room for my other treasures. My collection.
Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I’d never found all that stuff. Or bought it. Or stole it. I guess I’ll never know, because I did. Still, maybe even that wouldn’t have been so bad. Everyone has a hobby. No, like most people, my biggest mistake wasn’t what I’d done. It was telling somebody about it.
“Hi, Rose,” I said to the spiky black hair on the back of her head when I walked into the St. Mark’s Tattoo Parlor. As usual, I was right on time for my appointment, unlike Rose, who was half an hour late for her tarot card reading. Punctuality wasn’t one of her virtues. Neither was facial recognition.
“Heyyyy…” she replied, forgetting my name when she finally turned to look at me. She wiped the blood off the back of some dude who was so skinny his shoulder blades looked like amputated wings. I got so excited watching her that I could barely wait for her to finish and start on me.
“I liked the card reading. It was a little creepy though. What was all that shit with the Wheel of Fortune and The Devil?”
“You might get obsessed with someone who tempts your darker urges.”
“My darker urges. Yeah…now I remember. Is it someone I already know?” she asked, looking at me like I couldn’t possibly be a worthy candidate.
“I don’t think so,” I said, hoping I was wrong. “Remember the man and woman chained to the Devil’s throne? This is someone who knows all your fears and desires. You could become a prisoner of your own compulsions.”
“Sounds kinky…I hope he’s cute,” sh
e said, turning her attention back to her bony customer. She wiped up the last red droplets from his back. He eased off the table and into the changing room/toilet. After he vacated the chair, she adjusted it so I could lean forward with my back exposed.
“Let’s get started,” she announced. It was the same thing I said to her before her card reading, which felt a lot eerier than I let on. The reading took almost as long as our first tattoo session, about an hour and a half. That’s where the similarities ended. When she finished Phase One of her ink work, my teeth hurt from clenching them so much. When I finished her tarot reading, we had a nice glass of Zinfandel on a cozy, overstuffed couch.
During her reading we talked a lot about her work. I saw her poking and drilling into all that voluntarily exposed flesh before I even turned over the first card. I hate to admit it, but I got a huge hard-on almost instantly. Was it because she was so pretty? So sexy? Or was it because my vision of her was so clear, and so clearly a vision of someone at play, not work? She loved it, loved it, loved it! And I loved her, so sadly, at first sight.
Am I an idiot? A complete and utter idiot? Without a doubt. Has there ever been anyone in the history of creation who claimed to fall in love at first sight that didn’t lay an exponentially greater claim to mental derangement? My tested and frequently retested I.Q. ranges between 162 and 165, depending on my pre-quiz caffeine intake. Yet once Rose Turner walked into my tidy, bookshelf-crammed apartment, I was dumber than a hand puppet.
I justified my lunacy, like any good, non-God-fearing, divination practitioner would. Fate was my profession. Being a big (so big you’d have to call it religious) believer in synchronicity, I absolutely, positively knew Rose had been sent to me and me alone by all the interconnected, romantically scheming powers of the universe. She was an angel, my very own spiky-haired angel. I could hardly wait until I flipped over the last card so I could stop talking about her and tell her how I had been searching high and low for precisely the right person to execute (poor choice of words?) my epic tattoo/body-mod scheme. And gee whiz, guess what? That extra-special, perfectly perfect person simply has to be you, Rose!
Sigh. The wine helped a lot. It calmed me down and loosened me up enough so I was able to behave like a reasonably intelligent person with reasonably interesting things to say. If she sensed my desperate heart-thumping attraction, she didn’t act like it. I’m sure she was used to guys falling head over heels for her. I’m equally certain she was kind enough not to squish my teeny heart like a bug if she caught a whiff of my wafting pheromones. My mind-reading radar dish was tuned to Planck wavelengths, yet the only thing I sensed in the two hours and twenty-two minutes we spent together was that she genuinely, happily enjoyed my company. She liked me. And that, dear reader, was more than enough.
When I told her about the tattoo I designed to cover my entire back, she sat up like a fox sniffing blood. When she saw the sketches I’d made, she was more than enthusiastic. She was blown away. “What is all this stuff? All these lines and slash marks?”
“That’s Ogham,” I said proudly. “This variation is a cipher script I invented, but Ogham was created by the Celts. Irish legends say Fénius Farsaid went to the Tower of Babel and made Ogham from the best of all the confused languages when the tower fell. Personally, I think it was invented by Irish druids trying to keep their secrets hidden from Christian missionaries.”
“Cool,” she said, amazingly not rolling her eyes like I was a pompous, asshole geek. “I’ve got some Celtic tattoos from a book my dad gave me. He said they were the marks of a druid priestess and they would protect me.”
Her mood darkened, but only for a moment. She pulled up her pant legs and showed me the intricate spiral patterns etched into golden bands around both ankles. “See?” she said, her face beaming, clearly delighted to show off her tats. Her legs were fantastic.
“Nice work,” I said, genuinely impressed. “It’s in the La Tene style.”
“That’s right! I learned about that stuff ‘cause so many people want Celtic tattoos now. My mom had them too. I guess that’s how I got into tats in the first place. Hers were amazing. She was doing it years before everyone thought it was cool. Mom was from the O’Neil Clan. They go all the way back to this king called Niall of the Nine Hostages. My dad gave me a book about him. Said he kidnapped Saint Patrick when he was a kid, during a raid he led on Britain. Twenty-six of his descendants were High Kings of Ireland.”
I laughed. Irish people are soooooo into their genealogy. “My mom was Irish too,” I said, flexing my pedigree. “I’m not sure about my dad.”
“You said was,” she pointed out, catching it like I did when she said it.
“Yeah. Is your mom dead too?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. That single syllable hung uncomfortably in the air for a few silent seconds—then she abruptly reached for her coat. “Make sure to bring those drawings when you come by the parlor.”
I came the next day. We worked together for months. Even after we finished, we would still get together, making modifications and additions. Most of that later work was done in my apartment. We’d drink some wine. Talk about Celtic lore. But whenever I spoke too much about the occult, she’d cut me off, saying something like, “My dad was way too into that shit. It freaks me out a little.”
It didn’t freak her out so much that she didn’t want more card readings. Every time she came over she’d ask for one. I always put a positive spin on the gloomy stuff. There was lot to hide. There was a lot of incredible stuff too—so incredible I thought she must be either the luckiest or unluckiest person in the universe. It would shift back and forth between positive and negative poles almost every reading, like God kept flipping a coin that landed heads one day, tails the next. I began to think I was losing my touch, or that she had some really weird surprises in store. Looking back, I’m still shocked by how lightly I took it.
When she told me she did palm readings, I wasn’t very surprised. “But never for money,” she added. Was that a dig at me? If it was, she didn’t keep digging.
“Wow!” she shouted, gaping at my left palm.
“Good wow or bad wow?” I asked, wondering if she was going to give me the censored version like I’d been giving her.
“It’s your lifeline…”
“If it’s short, don’t tell me,” I interrupted.
“No, it’s the longest one I’ve ever seen. I guess you’re going to live for a very long time.”
“Great. Does it say if I ever get happy?”
She laughed. I laughed. We had fun. Strangely, I never had a single vision when I was with her, like that part of me was sealed inside a genie bottle. I didn’t care, hardly noticed. It was so nice just to be in the same room with her and bask in the pleasure of her company. I’d never been with anyone else who really got me like she did. I even thought we might have ended up in bed together, if only I hadn’t grown so trusting.
Trust? How could trust be my downfall?
It happened one night after too many glasses of wine. I knew this was going to be the night something happened between us. Too bad I didn’t see what. She’d always been enthralled by my book collection, at least the parts of it on display. The more it felt okay to show her, the more I wanted her to see. So I showed her one of my “skin books”—the trial transcript of a hanged horse thief covered with his skin.
She thought it was cool. Said she loved that morbid side of me. Said she had her own dark side. Sure she did. She was a Goth chick. Anyway, I was drunk and a voice in my head that didn’t even sound like mine kept nagging me to go all the way, telling me I was really safe with her, saying I could completely open up and show her who I was.
So I asked: “Want to see something really cool?”
“Sure,” she said, a little drunk too.
Then I made the biggest mistake of my life. I took out the suitcase and showed her. She didn’t run, or curse me or call the police. But she gave me that look. And she never came back, or even talked to me
again.
Yes, I was in love. I guess I still am. So you can understand how I felt when I saw her and Martin together. When I thought about Paul and what he wanted me to do. I know you’re not going to like it, but I’ll tell you anyway. I had some very mixed feelings. Part of me wanted to help her. And part of me wanted to end all that pain.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Paul said, ushering Michael to a large oak chair at the end of a long table that consisted of two sheets of raw plywood supported by sawhorses.
Michael stared at the two half-globes of roasted meat in the middle of the table and the paper plates and long bowie knives sitting in front of the four big chairs and realized how loudly his stomach was grumbling. He looked from his plate to Paul, wondering how he could broach the topic of his vegetarianism.
Paul was staring coldly at the doorway. Michael followed Paul’s stare. A tall figure stood motionless in the shadows. Paul said nothing, but the look he gave Michael made him want to run away again.
“You’re late,” said Paul.
“Who’s he?” asked Martin.
“This is Michael Bean,” Paul said casually, directing his statement more to the roast than Martin. He then began carving it up with all the agility and speed of a surgeon trying to squeak in the front nine at the country club before rush hour. Martin said nothing, sizing up the kid with a single, sidelong, top-to-bottom glance. He summarized his findings with one unspoken word: Chump.
“Michael, this is Martin,” Paul said, mildly irritated. Martin remained silent, taking a chair at the opposite end of the table, glaring at the interloper as Paul plopped a slab of mystery meat onto his reused paper plate.
Paul returned to his chair in the middle of the table and kept carving. “I would apologize for Martin’s lack of table manners, but I never apologize. Though he lacks in the social graces, he more than compensates for those shortcomings in other areas.”