Lay Saints

by Adam Connell

  Lay Saints

  By Adam Connell

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Adam Connell

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with The Library of Congress

  Cover Art Copyright 2012 Miguel Ibarra

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71: Final chapter

  Appendix: Listing of Summer Canonical Hours

  Brief Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  for Jeannie Connell

  back to top

  ONE

  Call me Ishmael.

  Forget that. Call me Sir.

  Sirs get the top bunk. You just be glad I don’t wet the mattress.

  Lower bunks are for Fish. That’s Fish cause you’re new.

  Come up here to cuddle and I’ll make you squeeze your head through those bars, ask any guard.

  I talk a lot.

  We used to have a window. They bricked it over, not that it makes any difference.

  From our cell on this fine block I can see everything. No, I don’t think I’m God, I have no delusions. It’s what’s kept me alive, no delusions. Well-grounded since I came to terms with it. We have an understanding, me and my wild talents. Just like we’ll have an understanding, you and me.

  I can see things that are far away. There’s a term for people with this kind of vision. I can also hear what people are saying, far away, and also listen in on what they’re thinking. There’s a term for people who can listen to thoughts like I can. But there’s no term for people who can see and hear like I do. I’m unique. Among special people I’m so unusual they haven’t come up with a term for it yet. Maybe they never will, they’ll never have to, won’t be one like me again.

  I often watch the city, but I don’t wish I was there. The asphalt smell, the smell of car exhaust, the look of exhausted people. Its rigid neighborhoods. Way it can change overnight, way sometimes it refuses to change, makes me uneasy.

  The sum of which is disgust.

  Don’t you recognize me?

  But of course you wouldn’t. Faraday wiped you clean. Well, he lamed you. Fish, you had wild talents similar to one of mine, but when Faraday lamed you, unfortunate side effect is your memories are gone, too.

  Faraday asked me to watch over you, make sure there’s no rebound, you getting your talents back. Wiped you so clean there isn’t any slate. To the bedrock.

  In defiance of Faraday, I’ll tell you the why and the how that brought you here. Tell you this specifically — you’re a murderer. You’ve killed. That’s indefensible and undeniable.

  I’ll make it Calder’s story, since in many ways he’s the pivot.

  Don’t go looking for your name. You won’t hear it, the name the lawyers and judges used, guards and all, police, cause that’s not the name we know you by. Lawyers and judges, they used a different name. We all know you as something else.

  So don’t look for it, the name you recently learned.

  Amnesia. Derivative amnesia. By-product amnesia.

  If I gave you your name, it’s probable you’d only focus on yourself. This will work much better you get the whole story, everybody’s actions, repercussions. There were so many ramifications for so many people. Even from what you done, how it affected others in ways you didn’t notice. Or wouldn’t notice, if I only told you the parts you were in.

  Faraday manipulated, yanked strings, got you sent to me, which was convenient for him, I’m already in prison. I’ll tell you the why of that, too.

  Faraday doesn’t want you rebounding, wants to make sure his revenge sticks. I don’t blame him. Nobody could.

  Yeah, Calder as the pivot, that’s how I’ll tell it.

  I didn’t know much about you before. I’m certainly not gonna learn more about you now, the state you’re in.

  I talk a lot.

  What matters is I’m in here before it escalated. I told Faraday, we should be recruiting. He didn’t listen to me about a lot of things.

  You have to listen. You’ve got nothing to do but listen, Fish, isn’t anything else to do in here. Twenty-three hours a day in this cell. Twenty-four if you don’t leave, like myself.

  The toilet’s steel and there isn’t any lid so it’s cold when you sit down to do your business. Don’t be doing any business at night.

  Follow me, Fish?

  back to top

  TWO

  TUESDAY, Terce

  So. Calder got to the clinic ready to converse with the comatose and the mute. He’d been across the country about ten times — east to west and west to east — since being cast off in his late teens. Seeking hospitals, using his raw talents to connect the silent with their desperate families. Asking only a small fee. It’s a service, no matter how fantastic. He deserved payment. Some hospitals, some small towns had banned him as a charlatan.

  This was his first trip to Manhattan. He’d always avoided the city in fear of meeting more like himself. Calder always imagined their talents to be refined, guided by mentors, lessons handed down whereas he was self-taught. Fifteen years an itinerant conduit, he was running out of places to exploit.

  The glass doors facing Park Avenue parted and spoke a recorded greeting. He joined a grieving family as they bypassed reception, pointed at them, the receptionist nodded. He knew a dozen such tricks. Calder also had a scuffed black satchel with heraldic crossed shears in bas-relief on both sides. He left the family at the elevators and proceeded to the stairs. Up to the highest floor, the fifth. He was crazy for stairs over elevators.

  On the right, two sentinel nurses were mired in busywork at a wooden desk that matched the wooden decor. Nurses in navy blue who’d become alert the moment Calder invaded their sphere of responsibility. He didn’t want to waste energy coercing them — there were no families on the floor anyhow — so he walked down to the third. Stayed inside the door, watching the hallway through a small rectangular window. Safer there.

  Who uses stairs when there’s elevators?

  He ignored the rooms with relatives milling outside. Experience told him they wouldn’t be interested in what he was selling. Otherwise, they’d be in the room, rarely leaving. When a loved one can’t speak, it’s normal to stay anchored, try and coax a word or two. No, those milling, their mothers or wives or daughters or nieces were just transients here.

&nbs
p; Calder leaned against the door, knowing what to watch for and finding it twice.

  The first was a husband who left room 302 every twenty-five minutes for a cone of cold water from the upended plastic blue drum. Calder caught the words bastard, accident, drunk from him.

  Too angry.

  The second was a woman. Left room 306 only once, to stand outside and take hefty breaths as if her lungs were porous.

  Calder left the stairwell and knocked lightly on her door. “Hollan,” he said.

  She jumped from her chair, eyes red from a recent cry.

  “My name’s Calder,” he said while calming her mind with soft soothing phrases. “If you like” — he gestured towards the bed — “I can help.”

  “You’re not wearing the clinic’s blue,” Hollan said. She was holding her blouse at the collar. “You aren’t any doctor.”

  “What I do they wouldn’t believe me.” He closed the door behind him. He put his satchel on an empty chair. “But you can believe me, it’s real. What I do is talk to your husband, tell you what he’s saying but can’t say. What he’s thinking.”

  “Not thinking anything. He’s gone from me.”

  Calder shook his head.

  The husband was in what’s known as a coma vigil. Not a vigil vigil, you got twenty people with candles standing about. Vigil’s a type of coma where the eyes are open but nothing moves except for blinking. Calder had seen too many like this to be disturbed.

  “Okay,” Hollan said. “Then tell him how mad I am he fell off the beam like that.”

  Calder stared at the husband and began the process. There were some disjointed words as they translated each other, Calder and the husband. Next came an admission of adultery. Confessions like this are common, plus they helped prove Calder’s abilities.

  Calder diluted it for Hollan. “He says one time he kissed Gwendolyn behind your back, and he’s sorry for it.”

  Hollan smeared her tears with a thumb.

  It went on like that for twenty solid minutes. Relaying. Tempering hurtful truths. Assuaging the grieved and the grieving.

  Shouting outside in the hallway broke the triangular connection.

  Calder said, “I have to go before someone sees.”

  “Come back tomorrow?” Hollan said.

  “I’ll try.”

  Not a lie, not a promise.

  “How much do I — ”

  “Whatever you can,” Calder said. What he always said. Made him feel less a thief.

  Hollan gave him all she had in her purse — $122. “I can bring more.”

  He moved towards a stealthy leave when she said, holding his black bag, “Forgot this?”

  He thanked her.

  I have trouble seeing in deep stairwells, and in elevators or underground. I also can’t see two places at once. My gifts don’t work that way, Fish. Ultimately, it’s one room at a time, so I don’t always get all the story. Or to the good parts while they’re happening.

  I do try. I’ve got a feel for it, especially after following the same people around for awhile. A knack, you get a sense.

  Being in this cell, that helps, too.

  I can read simultaneous thoughts, and that helps most of all. Give me a room — even the backseat of a car — and I’ll give you its guts.

  So I apologize. I do the best with how God’s blessed me.

  But you understand, Fish. You were a good reader. But you could never, like me, see into places.

  When Calder was coming off the curved stairs into the lobby, someone grabbed his arm from behind and wouldn’t let go. Calder swiveled and threw a blind punch.

  The man ducked before the punch was thrown. “Whoa, whoa, that’s no way to treat your new boss.”

  Calder wrenched his arm free. “I have no boss, you prick.”

  “As of now, yes you do. Otherwise I’ll make your time in New York painful and memorable both. Don’t have to like me but I’m betting you will. Why don’t we break bread together. There’s a mediocre coffee shop on the corner.”

  He was shorter than Calder, who wasn’t ridiculously tall. Graying, in the process of getting fat. A visitor’s sticker had been slapped to his shirt pocket. He led Calder outside and to the corner.

  They sat at a table for four and ordered sandwiches. Calder put his satchel down.

  “You’re not the first,” the man said.

  “Tell me your name,” Calder said.

  “You’re not the first, Calder. Just like you already know my name. Sotto. Not the first to make a living in and out of hospitals. It’s how I found some of my crew.”

  The backs of Sotto’s hands were splotched pale pink, like he’d been burned as a child.

  “How did you find me so fast?” Calder said.

  “How’d you find out about the clinic?” Sotto said.

  The silence grew until Sotto broke it with: “Same way I knew your name.”

  “How many more?”

  “A crew,” Sotto said. He ate a few soggy fries off Calder’s plate when the food arrived.

  “City like this, I thought there’d be more than a crew.”

  “There’s others,” Sotto said. “We’ll talk about them later.”

  “But you represent the noble ones,” Calder said.

  “Slightly noble.”

  “And me being pure of heart — ”

  “We shouldn’t play absolutes.”

  “I should warm to your advances,” Calder said.

  “You’re needed, and you might be strong.” Sotto put his hands out as if conjuring a spell. “It’s good to be with your own. On some level you want that. We all want that at some point, and at some point we need it.”

  “So you think I need it,” Calder said.

  “Don’t you?” Sotto said.

  THREE

  Tuesday, Sext

  The Gossamer’s Veil was Downtown on Second Avenue between 5th and 6th. An unremarkable bar. Kind of place you go into for a burger and a beer, once. Walking by, because you’re hungry. Not the best bar in all Manhattan, and that on purpose.

  Outside the place, Sotto told Calder, “She’s been here near on eighty-one years.”

  Inside, four men and a woman were sitting on the left at a dark wood bar stitched with darker grooves. The bartender was reading the Daily Racing Form with pen in mouth. The television bolted to the ceiling above him had the volume on low and was tuned to Time Warner Cable’s NY1 News.

  The booths on the right were almost empty. It was that vague time between lunch and dinner.

  Sotto went up to the first man — balding, mid-fifties, hard and mean jaw. He was a good boxer. Not great, not good enough he could’ve made a go of it pro, but good enough the other amateurs at his gym were afraid to spar with him. Sotto said, “Rook, this is Calder. He’s joining us just after I roll out the rules.”

  Rook stood up and gave Calder a knuckle-crushing handshake. “What’s your background?”

  “Background?” Calder said.

  “What you been doing most.”

  “Intermediary,” Calder said.

  “Hospitals,” Rook said, back on his stool. “Another coma junkie.”

  The woman had less to say. She tried to be attractive but her features were at odds. To combat this she wore too much makeup, her hair was too styled, she had on too much perfume. That earnestness made her very pretty. I always thought so.

  The next two men were the twins: Attila (yes, he’d had it legally changed from his given name) and Piker (not his given name but a nickname given to him). They only worked together and spent the rest of the day talking silently to each other. Attila was darker than his brother; he dyed his hair, and he liked tanning salons. Sotto made introductions. They nodded their disinterest and didn’t look up.

  The last man at the bar was a patron. Sotto didn’t introduce Calder to him, naturally.

  At the booths. Sotto sat first, facing the door. “You’ll be inclined to what I say. It’s about your future.”

  “All this foresha
dowing,” Calder said, taking the opposite bench. “What about the bartender?”

  “Pal? What about him, nothing,” Sotto said. “Just a barkeep. He knows, but he just keeps the bar. There’s a kitchen back behind there, a cook you’ll never see.”

  “Only half this place is real. I’m sitting here, I don’t know why, I still have no idea what you do.”

  “You aren’t so naive as that. This defensiveness, it isn’t coming from fear. Be better if you relaxed.”

  “Why you need me, then.”

  “Most of what we do, it isn’t done here.” Sotto was looking past Calder, through the windows onto the street. “We help people, locals mostly.”

  “A charity.”

  “Well, for profit. But we help them in a way they can’t find anywhere else. And we do turn some people away, don’t call me a whore.”

  “Help them.”

  “Get attention, get a lover back, get a promotion, get distance from problems.”

  “Peddling gets.”

  “We sell influence to people who want their lives interfered with,” Sotto said.

  Calder sat back. The bench creaked. “Invasive influence.”

  “You’ve done it. Might find gratification here. People in this neighborhood, most this part of Downtown, they aren’t wealthy. Aren’t demanding. They have simple needs and we meet them. The well-to-do, the Uptowners, they go to Faraday.” Sotto rested the edges of his palms on the table, like he was gonna push it away from him. He was always moving his hands around, always, since I’ve known him. It’s infuriating.

  “We rarely have much contact with Faraday and his. We stay close to our building here, safer for everybody.”

  Calder, still full of questions, didn’t voice any.

  Realizing Calder wasn’t going to fill the pause, Sotto went on: “We’ve had a request come in, and the request demands somebody fresh. Someone’ll be hard to recognize.”

  “I’m supposed to want to work for you, I don’t know the fuck who you are.”