I’d finagled my way out of having my face shown on the nightly news, claiming trauma and shyness. In truth, I didn’t want my family tuning in for the weather only to find that a vicious murder had taken place in my living room.
My lack of communication with the parental units wasn’t right. I thought of calling them but I panicked after thinking about how the conversation would go. Dad would answer the phone with a hearty, “Ye-ello!” His greetings always crescendo to a sharp point, letting you know he’s excited to hear from you. At that point, I’d choke. I wouldn’t be able to tell him. My mother would cry too hard to even bother. To drop such a catastrophic bomb would ruin everyone’s day. They’d whisk me home faster than Garth had come barreling through my window. I’d need accompaniment from the National Guard to take a simple trip to the grocery store.
Hiding the attack from my friends was going to be the greater challenge. The fates already allowed me to keep them in the dark about getting hate-crimed on New Year’s Eve, thrown into the subway track a few days later, and continuously rendezvousing with Quasimodo’s best friend. I’d reached the total allotment of secrets a person is allowed in one lifetime. Everything after that, including a vigilante rocketing through my window and murdering a person in my living room, would be forced into the open. Meg’s witnessing of the post-Garth scene didn’t help either. As good as I was about sealing my lips, she was equally good at letting hers fly. I asked for discretion but she was in therapy and believed that communication was the solution to all of life’s problems.
Our temporary homelessness during the cleanup process added to my difficulties with staying on the down low. The following week turned into a tour de New York as I slept on couches all over the city. I was surprised at how little time I’d spent at my friends’ various apartments prior to the break in, especially the ones in far off lands like Brooklyn and Queens. We watched movies and ate popcorn and rotted in front of reality television. Luckily, most everyone tiptoed around the events that had made me their guest. I was happy to play dumb. Conversations tended to wander into the typical, “So, how are thiiings?” to which I’d reply, “Same ol’, same ol’.” That answer was both lighthearted and vague, tricking the asker into believing my life, well my life outside of the murder investigation, was just as boring, uninteresting, and depressing as always.
The only people who didn’t let me off the hook were Asher and Robbie. Asher possessed a large Jewish nose (by his own confession) that loved being in other people’s business. Because he was my best friend, he was under the impression that he had permission to be direct with me about the whole ordeal.
Robbie was doing this faux-boyfriend thing that I found incredibly irritating. My near death experience was his “wake up call,” as he put it. Since he could potentially lose me at any minute, he wanted to spend every single one of them in my presence. Obviously that was taxing, especially with the new resentments that I harbored toward him. I hated that I had to be on the brink of death in order to gain some attention. Would future advancement in our relationship require events as major to prompt them? If I wanted us to move in together, would I have to walk into a day care wearing a vest made of dynamite?
Still, he was being sincere. He seemed genuinely sorry about the course that we’d had to take in order to get where we were. His interest in my well-being had spiked, too. Robbie felt entitled to real answers. For a split second I contemplated telling him some version of the truth (with the omission of the supernatural, of course), but then I remembered it had taken him months to become truthful with me. He’d have to earn that information out of me.
“There were two break-ins and a murder,” I said, not technically lying.
“Yes, we gathered that,” Robbie said, exchanging a look with Asher. Dinner had been cleared, leaving my mouth completely available to talk instead of chew. I contemplated dessert.
“Person number one broke into my room. Person number two noticed and bashed through my window to save me from person number one. Then person number two broke person number one into many pieces. Police came.” That was my story and I was sticking to it. Asher looked at me, waiting for me to say what he already knew. I half-heartedly reported, “And based on person number two’s killing style, authorities believe that he is the same person who dumped bodies in a Chelsea sewer on New Year’s Day.”
“I told you he knew,” Asher said to Robbie.
“So you know the other part, right?” Robbie tentatively asked.
“The guy…the guy all over my living room, had a record for assaulting some gay men last year,” I said, defeated by what was apparently public knowledge. “A detective told me the other day at my one-millionth interrogation. How do you know this stuff?”
“Blogs,” Asher said. “That’s all I do at work.”
Well apparently his blogs (as well as the NYPD) failed to realize the connection to the fried man on the Eighth Street subway track. I suppose if Garth had taken the time to pulverize that body in the same way, it’d be added to his growing list of accomplishments. Thankfully he just left that victim where he’d died, framing bashed basher number two as a suicide jumper. I sighed with relief.
“You have a gay superhero looking out for you,” Robbie sang as he tickled my stomach. I quickly swatted him away out of irritation and because I feared puking in public, yet again.
Asher was pleased as punch. “Maybe we should scrap this Hans musical altogether and write that vigilante movie. You actually had an encounter. There’s no way it wouldn’t sell,” he said.
“I’m too close to the events.”
“Fine, we’ll give it some time. Since you have no feelings, you’ll be over it by Friday. It’s really a no-brainer.”
“It’s not a bad idea. You could use the money, Jerm,” Robbie chimed in. “You should at least sell your story to a magazine.”
“There is no story,” I assured them. “It all went down in like fifteen seconds. The fact that it happened to me is completely random. It would be like a unicorn walking through the front door and licking your face with its magic sparkle-tongue. People would ask why it chose you and you’d have absolutely nothing to say.” Weird analogy, I know. And with my recent experiences, a unicorn would just be the norm.
“Actually, I’d have to tell the truth and say that I wash my face exclusively in milk and honey, which is a unicorn’s favorite,” Robbie said.
He was really cute sometimes.
“I hope they can identify him. The superman’s blood has to be somewhere, right? He busted through a freaking window,” Asher said, getting louder and louder with each word for emphasis. “It’s impossible that he got through a pane of glass without a scratch.”
I found it strangely charming, how little they really knew.
“What would that do? DNA doesn’t prove anything if it isn’t catalogued someplace. If Supergay has a clean slate, he’s not going to show up anywhere,” Robbie said. He’d argue with Asher about the color of table salt just to annoy him.
“Maybe it will match the random blood from the scene in Chelsea. There was third-party DNA there, remember?” Asher smartly replied.
“That doesn’t give you a name. It just confirms what everyone already believes: that the same guy is smashing gay bashers to smithereens all over the city.”
As they fought over the discovery of Garth’s non-existent blood, I began to break down. The mystery blood in Chelsea was mine…so was the yet-to-be-detected blood in my apartment. My feet were still wrapped in bandages from all the glass on the floor. I was present at both crime scenes despite my best efforts to pretend that none of it had ever happened. It was only a matter of time before I would be called in for blood samples and get linked to both crimes and arrested as a serial killer and put on trial and sent to jail and raped in the shower and murdered for coke and I couldn’t do anything to help myself because I was trapped at dinner with fucking Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
I needed Garth.
With my
vagabond status, my routine was upset. I hadn’t seen him in days. We didn’t even know where to find each other.
“Damn, I have a voicemail,” I said as I pulled out my phone. My screen said absolutely nothing but I pretended to access a message anyway. I had twenty seconds to come up with an excuse. “That play I auditioned for is having a last minute callback tonight and they want me to come in.”
“It’s eight o’clock,” Asher said.
“It’s some off-off-Broadway thing, they don’t keep industry hours,” I said, which was actually true in some cases.
“Do you want us to come?” asked Robbie.
“No, no…finish up here. I’ll meet you in like an hour or so.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Listen,” I said, “if I’m constantly monitored, how will I ever re-adjust? I’ll just be a bit, promise.” I smiled and rubbed the back of his neck in an attempt to reassure him.
“Okay. Be careful. And call me,” he said before a quick hug.
“Just don’t get killed, homo,” barked Asher, in his backward way of showing concern.
Even after multiple attempts on my life and coming face to face with a serial-killing-demon-statue, I’d managed to keep my eyes relatively dry. But as I walked out the door of that restaurant I had a Meryl Streep-in-The Hours-style break down. For the first time in days, I was alone. I’d been escorted from restaurant, to bar, to apartment, to subway, to other apartment, to lunch, to everywhere, every minute of the day. Now, I felt too vulnerable. All the progress I’d made shattered, like the shards of glass connecting me to Garth’s crimes. Yet that grotesque was still the only thing that made me feel safe. Would I ever be able to function without his constant watch? Maybe it was entirely my fault. The law of attraction would have agreed that, because trouble was constantly on my mind, it was bound to follow me. I was so scared of evil, evil would present itself whenever it could. Garth would be stuck with me because I’d never stop needing his assistance. My paranoia was ruining both of our lives.
I walked through Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood where gays should definitely not show emotion, with tears streaming down my face. I walked west without dignity, without care, and without cruising. I was a magnet for danger and I secretly hoped it would finally succeed at what it’d been trying to do since New Year’s.
The West Side Highway’s lights flashed nearby. Beyond that, the river sat darker than the night sky. Warehouses and glass condos towered over me. I was at the crossroads of the wealthy and the destitute. Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues were infested with the city’s underbelly. My head crowded with thoughts of hobos and crackheads lurking in the nooks and crannies of abandoned lofts and half-finished luxuries. Even if they weren’t there, I saw them lumbering for me. They asked for coins and called me names and touched me with their dirty, crusted fingers—a stylized version of regular homelessness. The people in my mind were better suited for a Dickens novel. They had blackened teeth, knitted shawls, and quivering voices. Their hands wore fingerless gloves and tried to reach for my shoulder and pulled me off the sidewalk and into their shanty village under the street.
I was relieved to feel Garth’s strong hand pull me aside. My face lit up before I fell to pieces on his freezing shoulder. His hand clumsily ran through my hair as I sobbed. His touch was too heavy to be comforting, but I pressed myself into it just to ensure myself of his presence.
*
Garth feverishly looked through the garden for the Queen. Any judgment he’d passed on her gruesome actions had disappeared. Now that he’d lost a friend, he understood her anger. He reached the pond and found the courtyard demolished, her throne in ruins. Even the twisted willows had been torn from overhead and bobbed sadly in the murky water. He searched through the rubble hoping that he wouldn’t find a piece of her.
“Guardian!” cried a voice from within the woods. The Queen pounded over the broken stones and wrapped him in her arms. The impact of their two bodies shook the ground. Garth stood in her entwinement, unable to recall what to do in an embrace.
“What are you doing back here?” she asked, finally letting go.
“I needed to find you. I knew you’d be in danger.”
“I sensed that, too. I’ve been hiding elsewhere.”
“I believe you. I believe everything you said.”
The Queen smiled and touched his face. He flinched.
“Everything was plotted,” he continued. “I told Brogan about the Prince’s murder. He wouldn’t hear it. He said you made it up. He was protecting someone. I think it was the King.”
“I saw the twins kill the Prince! It couldn’t have been the King,” she insisted.
“But it was. Behind the twins, it was. There was a plan to change succession. I know too much so he tried to destroy me,” Garth’s train of thought wandered but he found it again. “He failed. He assassinated another instead, a friend of mine.”
She stared out at the water, her lip quivering with the beginnings of what seemed like an uneasy emotion. Garth waited for a reply but she instead bolted towards the palace. Before she was out of sight, she turned to him and said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”
Garth called after her but his voice was muffled by the denseness of the woods, which swallowed her in one dark gulp.
Like the night they’d met, Garth pursued her through the garden. “What will you do? Kill the King? He’s heavily guarded! He’s powerful!”
“I won’t rest until I find vengeance, Guardian,” she barked.
“Wait!” He caught up, reached for her arm, and swung her backwards. “My name is Garth. I guard no man. Not anymore. Especially not the King.” The proclamation seemed to lift a million pounds from his shoulders. For the first time in years, he stood a little taller. “But he will destroy you. I can’t let you do that to yourself.”
She turned to him. “Then help me.”
The weight came back. He hunched again. “No. Absolutely not. I told you, I—”
“You are a Guardian of justice now.” She stared at him to make sure he absorbed what she’d said. “The King has ruined you, has he not?”
Garth was silent. He looked at his feet—his stone, misshapen feet. “He trapped me in this form,” he quietly said.
“He what?”
“He did this to me.”
“What else?”
“Tore me from my family.”
“Yes, yes…”
“Enslaved me and…”
“Say it Garth. What else did the King do to you?”
“He killed my best friend!” he roared. “He killed my only friend.”
She grabbed his hand. “Now I am your friend. Together, we will end his reign of terror. You will be free.”
A mixture of inspiration and fury filled the crevice where Garth’s heart used to be. It coursed through cracks like blood through veins until it reached his head and blinded him to nothing but her calling. The King needed to die.
They raced through the palace, demolishing everything in their path. Nothing could stop them on their blood mission. Garth was the first to meet interference: a guard. Before the ironclad man could raise his sword, he was trampled. The sounds of cracking skulls and breaking doors soon filled the sleepy halls. Stone proved more destructive than metal that night.
The Queen arrived at the revered bedchamber before Garth. When he entered, he discovered her standing over the King’s bed, staring down at him as if he was a baby in a crib.
“What are you waiting for? Do it, already!” Garth cried.
She didn’t move.
A newfound fury sent Garth towards her. “If you don’t, I will!” he screamed.
“The old fool,” she said, her voice full of sick. “Passed out on spirits. Sleeping through everything, even his own death.” Her speech was faint, lost somewhere beyond the large room. Her sentiment didn’t last long. Her fists raised and fell upon the old King’s head, bursting his brain like a ripe cherry. “Come, Garth. There’s still more
life in him. We will do this together.”
Garth approached the bed-turned-altar. Their brand of holy wine spouted towards the ceiling, granting them the same solace the King had pretended to find in god. His menacing eyes stared up at them, registering their faces. The stone ones were gladdened by it. It would have been a shame for him to die while sleeping. Such a luxury is not afforded to men like that.
The palace soon fell silent and they sauntered back through its halls, drunk on retribution. The Queen’s marble was stained with nearly the whole royal family: father, son, and cousins. The statues adorned that war paint as a constant reminder of what they’d done and for whom they’d done it.
“What are you thinking?” asked the Queen.
“I’ve never killed anything before,” he said.
“Never? But you were a warrior.”
“I couldn’t even kill a bird for dinner, let alone a person. I was terrible in battle.”
She laughed softly. “It’s not over, I’m afraid.”
Garth quickened his pace.
“Where are you going? It’s not safe in the tower. You’ll be smashed to pieces come daylight,” the Queen said, still strolling behind him.
“I need to get Francis. I won’t let him be swept away with the morning trash. There must be a way to help him pass on.”
She came to his side. “What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t always like this. I was human once, with a human soul…but this is an Immortal form.”
The Queen looked confused.
“As Immortals, we don’t have souls because we don’t need them. We don’t grow old and die. When an Immortal is killed, it just ceases to exist. That’s what happened to Francis. I need to help him. This can’t be the end. He deserves to be…” Garth’s voice cracked. Hopelessness began to take over. “He deserves to pass on. The dead need to be…wherever they need to be.” He sobered up then broke down again.
The Queen caught his fall and cradled him until his heaving lulled. “I know how to help,” she whispered. “The Prince died in my arms. I saw the Angel visit him.”
In Stone: A Grotesque Faerie Tale Page 11