by Adam Connell
Calder sat up. “There was no boring through him, or getting around him. We even tried digging underneath.”
“You and Rook.” Sotto was leaning against the door, a backward hand on the knob. “So Adelard votes our way, this is fine.”
“Unless someone starts pulling rugs,” Calder said. “Lundin? Briggs?”
“Not Briggs,” Sotto said.
“The other one,” Calder said, “begins with a K.”
“Kinkaid I could see pulling rugs,” Sotto said. “But Adelard made his announcement.”
“Hasn’t voted yet,” Calder said.
“He’s got influence, Adelard. He’d tell you himself.”
“I’d like to make sure that influence is immune from his co-Council Members. And from Kinkaid.”
“Then you and Rook have two days? One day?”
“Coming Tuesday,” Calder said. “I haven’t seen you since Friday last.” He was sitting on his hands, had been for a few minutes.
Sotto relinquished his hold on the doorknob, took a few steps into the room. “I’ve been around, looking.”
“Find anyone?”
“I did,” Sotto said. “Young girl. Disturbed. Do you like the city, Calder? I’m not talking abstracts, I mean what you’ve seen of it.”
“I haven’t decided.”
Sotto’s somber face reflected Calder’s honesty.
“Everybody asks me, do I like it,” Calder said. “As if you’ve either got the constitution to live here or you don’t. There’s no middle Yes about it. I find there’s a lot not to like and it comes out to greet you the moment you hit the street, that stuff that’s noxious.”
“Don’t decide,” Sotto said. “I haven’t decided and I been here decades. Long enough that it makes me a native many times over. But. But. It can nurture. It heals immigrants. The museums are a balm. Hospitals everywhere. Good Samaritans who don’t know it of themselves till a crisis. It’s a palliative place, because we’re dying in pain. It can be a mother. You’re not gonna stay, are you.”
“When I decide about the city,” Calder said, “it won’t take me decades.”
“She can be a whore, but she’s also divine,” Sotto said.
“Have to finish the assignment first,” Calder said.
“Adelard’s not gonna change his mind. What’d you think of Faraday?”
“What did Rook say?”
“I’m asking a simple question, Calder. There’s no subtext.”
“He offered me work. Well, it was Lundin.”
Sotto made no indication whether or not this was news. “They had to. It’s a difficult thing, finding us. We’re out there but, with no registry, where do you look?”
“Where’d you find this disturbed girl?”
“Where they keep disturbed people, unfortunately.”
“I could work for you, I wouldn’t work for him.”
“Could,” Sotto said.
“Like you told me, this assignment’s conditional.”
“And when the conditions are met?” Sotto said.
“Like I told you, this city will make peace with me or it won’t.”
“You should stay here at the bar,” Sotto said.
“Because you’re short on our kind?” Calder made a gesture supposed to indicate the whole dormitory.
Sotto walked out.
Calder waited a few minutes for twins who never showed, then had himself a shower. Dressed, left The Gossamer, and went to find Tamm.
It was four a.m. The Witching Hour? Hour of the Wolf? I forget the difference. Do you know, Fish? No? Me either.
A cab brought him to Tattletail, but it was closed. There was light coming from the second floor but nobody downstairs at the door.
So Calder walked to her building, walked past the sleeping doorman, walked up the stairs.
I lost him in the stairs, but I’ll tell you what was on his mind in the taxi. How much he was looking forward to seeing her, more than he thought healthy. He was also concerned with how Piker and Attila had stormed in after he and Tamm had made love. He’d wanted to seek her out sooner but thought it wise to meet her at a simmer.
On her landing I found him again. He approached her door and knocked lightly. No one answered. He knocked louder, more appropriate given the early hour and her heavy sleeping.
There was crying from inside. Having heard her cry, enough and recently, Calder knew it wasn’t Tamm.
He swung his arms out and — in one motion — both leaned back and kicked the door above the latch. The frame buckled but the door remained shut. He kicked it again, again, again, the imprint of his sole embedded in the paint above the knob.
On his fifth kick the door warped around the Medeco and on the sixth it gave way.
Calder found her in the bedroom. The lamps on either side of her bed showed him more than he wanted to see. Her sheets were bloody and dull to the light. Tamm was on her back, head rolled to one side, nude except for the T-shirt wrinkled with blood. She was mottled and streaked in blood. There were black slits where she’d been, he guessed, stabbed and stabbed deeply.
He threw up. It was bile from an empty stomach. Fell to his hands and knees and threw up more, the juice stinging his mouth.
Someone was in the bathroom, talking to himself. Whimpering. Saying the same things over and over, like reciting a devotional prayer. Rosary.
Water was running in the sink. The light in there was off.
Calder stood, knee to foot, other knee to other foot, hands on the bed pushing him upright. He reached the bathroom with the grace of a spinning top that’s lost its momentum. He put his hand inside, flat against the wall, moving around for the switch.
Briggs didn’t at first realize the overhead light had been turned on. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. His left hand, twisted and thin as if crushed, was resting on the sink’s lip, palm up. His right hand was scrubbing blood from the right side of his face. The left side had divots from small circular burns; one had seared an eye, which was no longer functioning. His albe and clerical collar were scratched or torn like he’d been fighting some beast with talons.
The sink was plugged up with clots; pink water was cascading onto the floor. There was a dirty knife by his feet.
Whimpering. Halfway through “Glory Be to the Father” he looked up and noticed that the light was on, and he could see himself and Calder in the mirror.
Briggs lurched at Calder, leading with his good hand. Calder grabbed Briggs’ arm like it was thick boating rope and used it to sling the man out of the bathroom and across the floor. Before Briggs came to a stop, Calder — balance regained by adrenaline — had his foot on Briggs’ bad hand and was crushing it further. Briggs tried to scramble away but he was nailed to this pivot. They could both hear the last few bones breaking, but only Briggs could feel them piercing his skin.
Calder didn’t care why this had happened. What had prompted Briggs. How hard did Tamm fight. Did her neighbors hear and ignore it. Kitty Genovese. How long ago was the attack. How long did it last.
Calder voided Briggs’ mind but not like pulling on handkerchiefs. He ripped and heaved and jerked like emptying a closet in marital fury. Getting every shirt, every hanger, every bit of knowledge, every past and pending desire, every morsel of Briggs’ identity.
Briggs convulsed. Calder left him stripped, without even the ability to speak or hold his bowels.
Calder looked over through the bedroom at Tamm. Miraculously, she was breathing; he hadn’t been optimistic enough to check. There was a slight wet rasp to her exhales.
He couldn’t do anything for her, he had no training. He was too apprehensive to move her. He ran into the hall and down the stairs and onto the street to a pay phone (which must’ve been the only surviving pay phone in the city). Called 911, gave them Tamm’s address, conveyed her bleak condition and hung up as they were asking who he was.
Minutes later, not even three, an orange ambulance with St. Luke’s Roosevelt written on the side arrived sc
reeching and two paramedics rushed into the building.
Calder watched from behind the pay phone as all her lights came on, so bright on the black street sleeping through the tragedy. He was waiting for them to bring her down when a second ambulance arrived. For Briggs, Calder thought. Bastards called one for Briggs.
Tamm came through the door, her gurney flying across the asphalt but deftly controlled by her paramedics. She was strapped down with blue belts, her legs and arms and forehead. Some sort of plastic contraption was on her face.
A police car appeared, its sirens off. One officer jogged into the building. His partner saw Calder and yelled out, “You phone this in? Hey!”
An SUV struck him and bounced the cop off its windshield as the officer crossed against the traffic light in the dark. The SUV swerved to an uneasy stop, and sideways.
Calder fled, unseen by anyone else, thinking that Sotto was wrong about this city.
back to top
FIFTY-EIGHT
Sunday, early Lauds
“I wish I could say he lived a full life,” said Faraday’s brother. “We both know he didn’t, cause of us.”
“That’s Mom’s fault, not ours,” Faraday said.
“We’re at it again, blaming her,” the brother said. Jace, the brother.
A tugboat was gliding down the Hudson, quiet as if sleepwalking. The wheelman was the only one aboard who could be seen. The boat wore its mandatory necklace of tires, sized largest to smallest from bow to stern.
The sun was only just crowning.
“Don’t blame Ma,” Jace said. “It’s not how I remember it.”
“Blaming her is justified,” Faraday said. “How she treated her body, it couldn’t have ended any other way.”
“You have this habit of painting the past black,” Jace said. “Gallons of paint. She wasn’t always drunk.”
“You’re too young to remember. All you remember is getting on the bus that first time with me and Dad.”
“I think about her,” Jace said. “I’ve got pictures he gave me, and I got little films of her in my head.”
They were sitting among a row of benches in the 70s, facing the greenish Hudson, facing New Jersey. Though not out of sentimentality. Their father never came here, and he hated Jersey.
Faraday grabbed a bottle of meperidine from his suit’s inner pocket.
“Give me some,” Jace said.
They swallowed them at the same time, washed them down with a shared coffee from Starbucks.
“They cure bloodshot eyes?” Jace said.
Faraday laughed.
“Least you can laugh without wincing,” Jace said. “You’re healing.”
“Fuck no I’m not healing. It’s the pills I took hours ago.”
“What they can’t do,” Jace said, “is grow back them missing teeth. Makes you look like a Little Rascal. Which one had no teeth?”
“Didn’t all of them?” Faraday said.
Jace lit up a Lucky Strike.
“Put that out,” Faraday said. He gave the ceramic urn a gentle shake.
(To ask if there is some mistake?)
“I like a cigarette at sunrise,” Jace said. “How many you ever seen? Sunrises? I try for a few each year.”
Faraday glared at him. Jace tossed the cigarette at the river but missed. It laid on the concrete, burning.
“It’s this nurse I’m thinking about,” Faraday said.
“Let me hold the urn,” Jace said.
Faraday passed it to him.
“Where you plan to empty it?” Jace said.
“I haven’t decided, someplace that’d honor his life. That’s customary, right?”
“This nurse,” Jace said.
“Her first day he’s dead. I’ve no choice but to be harsh with her, find out was she liable.”
“You gonna sue?”
“A nurse? And you ever know me to sue?” Faraday said.
“He’s dead. Leave him in the urn. Forget the nurse. It was those nurses kept him around.”
“I had a reason keeping him around.”
“So you won’t forgive Ma?” Jace said.
“I’m old enough that I recollect,” Faraday said.
“We’re both adults. This is urn is heavy. Five years’ difference at forty means nothing. We’re basically the same age.”
“Five years at ten, eleven, that’s a millennium,” Faraday said. “She have brown hair or black?”
“It was thick,” Jace said. “It smelled like rosewater. I forgive her.”
“When you’re the only one in the house making money, when there’s two kids in that house, you don’t spend your nights in bars. You don’t forgive her.”
“She had stress,” Jace said. “Two untamable boys we were. I drink when things are tough.”
“Tough for you?” Faraday said.
“So does half the world.”
“I never had a drink in my life. Because of the way she lived hers.”
“Some people it kills,” Jace said. “Drinking’s a disease.”
“Addiction’s not a disease,” Faraday said. “Lupus. Cystic fibrosis. These are diseases. Addiction’s a character flaw.”
“She was sick, people get sick,” Jace said.
“Drinking wasn’t the disease that killed her. Wandering drunk, falling in the snow, freezing to death, that’s what killed her. It wasn’t the cirrhosis.”
“As a kid I blamed the snow.”
They laughed again, lightly.
“Sorry as it was the way she went,” Faraday said, “no, I do not forgive her.”
Another tugboat swept by, this one louder and larger than the first.
“Blame Dad for anything?” Jace said. “Driving a bus up and down the Northeast, I still don’t think that’s the only job he could get. I know that’s what he said, but he was always a martyr.”
“Gimme back the urn.”
Jace did.
“Clubfoot’s not a disadvantage when you’re a driver,” Faraday said. “That boot he had to wear.”
“Remember how all the passengers called it a lead foot? That was funny. We were robbed.”
“Of a mother?” Faraday said.
“An education. Who spends their school years on a bus? Schooled by someone didn’t graduate tenth grade? Peter Pan,” he said.
“The Peter Pan Line,” Faraday said. “Peter Pan didn’t mind. Dad wasn’t our only teacher,” he said, twisting the urn in his hands to hear the ashes as they shifted inside.
Jace said, “Freaks who take long bus rides, those aren’t trustworthy tutors. And what they taught us shouldn’t be learned. Not by kids.”
“I’m not crying about it. The man did his best and I came out all right.”
“I didn’t,” Jace said. “I was deprived. In every way deprived.”
“How many times’re we gonna have this argument?”
“Well this’ll be the last one since the responsible party has been charred up and is sitting in your hands.”
Faraday slapped him. A slap like a rifle going off that made two of the tugboat crewmen look over.
“Did I find the bus?” Faraday said.
“You were old enough to leave. And what did you make of yourself with all you learned? You’re a vagabond, an unwashed vagrant, you meet Noaks. This mystical Noaks. Lurking your Myrtle Beaches and bilking gullible fools with your sleight of hand. Sleight of mind, your voodoo games.”
“I was five years on that bus,” Faraday said. “Back and forth, back and forth, north south, north south. I earned my leave.”
“I was ten years on that bus waiting for you! You leave me in the care of Dad, and more time at the mercy of shoddy souls who can’t afford the train. With their backwards wisdom and unhelpful attention. These were my tutors.”
“Did I find the bus?” Faraday said. He was squeezing the urn too tightly. “Did I bring the two of you to the city with me? Did I get you a good fucking job?”
“Too late. I spoiled. He got sicker and si
cker and I was the luckless beneficiary of grade school, middle school, and high school on ten, twelve wheels above a luggage hold. It ruined me.”
“You don’t know how to appreciate,” Faraday said.
“Appreciate,” Jace said as if the word had been cooked from a recipe of brine and lemons. “Appreciate, to grow in value? How come whenever we talk we talk about this.”
“Dad’s dead,” Faraday said. “This argument dies with him.” He got up with the urn and walked east from the river.
He took more meperidine but the pains in his mouth and ribs were still sharp.
It wasn’t very long before he was home. As he turned the corner onto his block, five men came out of his brownstone and watched Faraday from the stoop.
Five of.
Faraday went up the first step, then the second. The five walked down two steps, then a third step.
“Are you gonna get out of my way so I can sleep? I been up all night while you all were probably napping on my sofa. Or on my dead father’s bed.”
“Go home,” one of them said. They weren’t wearing the same clothes, but they had the same mien to their eyes.
“This is home,” Faraday said.
“No longer. You’ll have to find another.”
“Another what? Another brownstone?”
“Somewhere else,” said a different five.
“The fuck is this?” Faraday said. “The fuck are you to tell me? I’m the man put you nine — ”
“You’re a man let himself get bullied,” said a different five. He was the weakest, but the tallest. “We can’t indulge someone gets knocked around like a kickball. It’s not the order of things.”
“Order — ” Faraday said and got down off the stoop. In the large window right of the door, in the hallway, were standing Kinkaid and Emmie. She was in a pink tank top and shorts. Kinkaid was wearing Faraday’s clothes: jeans that were too long and a shirt too large. His left hand was on the nape of Emmie’s neck, in the way that some men enjoy that’s supposed to be affectionate but makes the woman seem like property.
Faraday had all the cliched reactions. His eyes did go wide, his mouth did go slack, he shook his head, he craned his neck. There was, yes, a meek growl in his throat. There was, also, a step backwards.