by Brian Selfon
“It was good—for a fucking memorial service,” Imani says. She looks at Henry, tiny and unafraid. “So tell me how you ran him.”
Fuck me. He goes for baffled: “What are you talking about?” Fails.
“You, asshole. You fucking shadow.” Rapid-fire now: “Why is he dead? Why was he killed?” Her finger in his face. “That’s an actual question. And you’re going to answer it right now.”
Henry’s pulse goes from nothing to red. “You don’t know me.”
He backs up, she closes in. There’s a stagger in his step—tequila—and determination in hers. Her voice is low and hoarse: “I’ve seen your face a hundred times.”
She’s coming at him like the wrath of an ancient god, and Henry thinks, Could she have done it? His body tells him yes, she’s capable of anything. His back tells him he’s walked into a wall. She stands before him, her head hardly as high as his chest, but he feels like the smaller one.
“The cops think he was mugged. That’s bullshit. Emil had no business in that building. But you—you know something.” She goes to grab him—he catches her wrists. But she pulls herself free and shoves him, and his shoulders and the back of his head hit the wall. Small person, strong push, and now she’s taking a step back. Pulling out a blade.
Henry changes his angle, makes himself slim, raises his hands. The tequila means nothing, he’s all body now, has been in plenty of fights. Has faced a knife and has the scars to show it. But still, he’s more afraid this time. That other fight with the knife was about money, which meant the other person had a breaking point. This is something else.
“I’m Henry.” He spaces out his words. “Whoever you think I am—”
“You’re not a who, you’re a what.” She spits down at his feet. “You’re a shadow. That’s what he called you two, the shadow twins.”
His body’s ready, his head is spinning, and it’s not the tequila. She’s mistaken, she’s confusing him with someone else. But who? “I’m not two. I don’t have a twin.” He’s sure about this, but something about what she’s saying, and the way she’s saying it—it doesn’t feel like crazy talk. “I’m just me, and I’m just trying to figure it out. What happened.”
“Here’s what didn’t happen.” She stabs the air. “Emil didn’t get mugged. Here’s what did happen: You killed him or you got him killed. You and your twin. And I’d kill you right here, except…” With obvious reluctance, and a shaking hand, she puts her blade away. Backs off. “Except I’m not like you.”
Henry doesn’t move, and still has his back to the wall long after she’s left him, when Kerasha steps out from the darkness. “You did great,” she says. “That could’ve gone a lot of bad ways.” When she gets close, he can smell her lotion, and at that moment it’s like he’s been alone in a dark room, and she just walked in and turned on the light. Here in this alley, he’s home again.
“Found this in her pocket,” Kerasha says, holding up a phone. “There’s something on this we want.”
Henry squats down to keep himself from falling over. “Te-to-the-fucking-quila,” he says, putting his hands to his head. He breathes. He doesn’t throw up. He breathes. He doesn’t throw up some more. He looks up at Kerasha. “Can I ask you something?”
“Take your time.”
“How the fuck do you know everything?” They share a weary smile and Henry asks, “Why do we want this phone?”
chapter 24
Rewind a half hour: back in the bar, Imani is at a table with a short, muscular man. Kerasha is nearby, wrapped in shadows.
Muscle boy: “Just fucking give it to me.”
“Toss your own fucking phone,” Imani says.
“I did. And if the cops take yours, they’ll see what we’ve been writing each other—”
“You’ve been writing me, you fucking stalker. We broke up six months ago. Get the fuck away.”
Ex-boyfriend, for all his muscles and fury, gets the fuck away. Hurrying, like everyone else, right past Bushwick’s invisible spider.
But what is he afraid of? What would the police find—and what does she get first?
Plucking the phone off Imani is easy. It also solves nothing, not right away. Gives Kerasha no lasting satisfaction. A murderer walks among them. A quarter million has vanished. Red Dog will be missing it, and Red Dog is not known for his mercy. Meanwhile, Detective 7229 has eyes on the house, and while her uncle shits himself hourly, Henry wears black, and Kerasha herself—let’s face it—isn’t feeling so safe. Her web is shaking, for fuck’s safe.
At least with the phone, she’s ahead of the hunters.
But she can’t get in. The phone is in a slim case that also contains a driver’s license and a credit card. Kerasha makes a mental note to shred these when she’s back at her uncle’s house. The urgency of the moment is the passcode. She has no idea, no guesses, no deduction. This phone will lock long before she can get into it. She brings it to Henry.
A painful admission, but he’s far better with the tele-gizmos. Six years in the cage—prisoners rarely change, but phones never stop. Kerasha owns it: the noiseless spider can’t do everything. And this scares her. She’s barefooting up a staircase with tacks in it, as Mama and Langston liked to say. Boards torn up. Barefooting alone, usually. But tonight she takes Henry by the arm and steadies him.
“Sorry,” Henry says, “tequila fingers. You’ll have to do it.”
“Watch the curb,” she says. Left foot, right foot. If he face-plants, if he goes black, then there’s no getting into the phone tonight.
“We’re almost there,” she says.
“Almost puking.”
Out of the lot, between the brownstones, left on St. Nicholas, left on Troutman, past Smelly Terri—a homeless woman, well known in the neighborhood—and then into Alan’s Happy Falafel. They walk in just like any other pair of biracial criminal cousins. Small-timers. No murder behind them.
The diner smells like cholesterol. They find a four-seater and order fries and coffee. Henry probably has a pill that could help him, but his complexion is already green. Just give him time, she tells herself. A trip to the surprisingly immaculate bathroom, and when she returns, he’s slumped over the table. Kerasha indicates the plate of fries. “If you’re done, we can give them to Smelly Terri.”
He lifts a fry, eyes it skeptically. Lets it drop. “Fucking dog food.”
Smelly Terri probably would eat dog food, Kerasha knows, but since coming out of the cage, Kerasha has felt a strange kinship with this woman. Has left food where Smelly Terri will find it. A blanket, once, another time a bag of clean clothes. A box of wet wipes, a case of mineral water.
Dr. Xu, no doubt, would use all this against her. Patient overidentifies with benign schizophrenic. She can see him jotting down notes with that silver pen, arming himself for yet another report of unsatisfactory progress: “Defective role model a possible factor in, or co-symptom of, intractable recalcitrance.”
Kerasha waves over Bashar, the night waiter.
“Nothing else?” he asks.
“Advil,” Henry says.
“All out. Sorry, boss.” Kerasha asks Bashar to box up the leftovers, and he takes the plate away. Sneaks her a suggestive smile as he goes. She looks away.
Henry now: less obviously drunk. She takes him to Sunset Cinemas, the boarded-up movie theater on Wyckoff Street. A family safe house. The combination lock looks rusty, but the dial spins just fine. Counterclockwise 21, clockwise 8, counterclockwise 31, then the trick: a firm press at the dead center.
Dead center, she thinks. How death frames the language, serves everywhere as a point of reference. Dead reckoning, dead wrong, dead likeness. Death as a completion, as an example of perfection. Dead runner: the only kind you can trust. Dead mama—a fantasy, right? Do they ever go away?
Kerasha leads Henry inside the safe house and sits him on the nappy rug. Their flashlights stand upright on the bare concrete and project pillars of dusty light.
“Are you clear now?” she a
sks.
“As I’ll ever be.” Henry takes the phone and gets to work. This safe house is well-tooled, which is why she chose it. While Henry screen-taps and mumbles, Kerasha sits down. Crosses her legs, feet on thighs—a pose Nicole the yoga embezzler told her would bring “astro-physiological peace.” Dead calm, Kerasha thinks. And Henry is dead tired, whereas Mama is just dead—the air here is thick with bad memories.
A half block from the safe house is the site of the stupidest, most dangerous job Kerasha ever pulled. Mama was sober in a bad way, shaking and sweating, puking until it came out black. Skinny Kerasha ransacked the bodega pharmacies but Mama wouldn’t touch anything but the real stuff. Wouldn’t look at her, which wasn’t unusual, but when her eyes went yellow Kerasha understood what Mama needed. Down Cypress Avenue, left on Johnson, then on to Gardner—across the street and two doors down from Sunset Cinemas—a trio of slinging nobodies sat on lawn chairs passing a bottle. They rated women passersby with handmade scorecards, laughing big with their gold teeth. Not noticing the skinny girl, even as her hands went beneath the center lawn chair.
The glassines were greasy. She would have a hard time soaping that feeling off her skin.
Kerasha had never cooked heroin before. Never loaded a syringe, never fired to a vein. But Mama was too shaky to do it herself, so Kerasha did what she had seen. And from that day, Mama got her daily bag.
Deadfall. Dead end.
“Apple fucking 7,” Henry says. He’s been working at Imani’s phone with a Cellebrite data extractor, a Christmas gift to the family from Fat Boris. “Same shit the cops use,” Henry had told her the first time he showed her the device. “Israeli technology. Unlocks a phone like a motherfucker.” But now he tosses the extractor aside.
“You can’t unlock it?” Kerasha doesn’t even know what’s on the phone. She heard the police would want it, though, and she’s desperate to stay ahead of those fuckers. To be the one in control.
Why? Are you afraid? It’s Dr. Xu-in-her-head, asking stupid questions. Did I hear a break in your voice? It’s okay to be afraid.
She doesn’t answer.
This phone represents something, he says. Hope, maybe? That your little web will hold? But what if this hope is false? What would it mean if the web broke, and you tumbled down alone? Who would you be without your little family—what would you do?
“Let’s go back to the house and get some sleep,” she tells Henry. “You’ll look at it again tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s too late.” Henry lets the phone drop to his lap. “She’ll notice it’s gone, and she’ll wipe it.”
Kerasha’s hope sinks fast. “She can do that remotely?”
“You can do anything remotely.”
Sinking—sinking—sunk. But then an idea comes out before she’s even thought it: “Even if we take out the SIM card?”
Henry sits up. “How the fuck do you know everything?”
Kerasha looks down, unsure what to do with a compliment. “I had good cellies.”
Henry pushes himself to his feet, rummages around the room, and staggers back with a thin nail and an odd-looking pick. A minute later he pops open the phone and pulls out a white chip. “And we’re saved,” he says, but his smile is thin. “We still have to get into her messages?”
Kerasha thinks about the locker room combination locks she’s opened. The doorknob locks, the sturdy deadbolts, the window latches she’s had to cut or punch glass to get at. Even the cheapest locks can take labor, can take time and repeated efforts.
She tips her head to the Cellebrite device. “Try again.”
Two hours later, they’re in.
Girlfriend’s phone, the second it’s unlocked, flashes an unhappy warning: Low Battery. And now Kerasha’s own phone is vibrating. The first message on her new phone is from Uncle Shecky: U OK? Then: LMK.
Am I? She scans the room for trouble. A shabby couch covered with a dusty cloth. Weak orange lights from their flashlights. Henry on his back, hands still on his head.
“Tequila done me dirty,” he says.
Dead to the world, she thinks. Mama might’ve found that funny.
She texts Uncle Shecky: We ok. And though she believes this, a tiny part of her wonders. We ok: this could have been the runner’s last text, his sense of reality right up until someone crushed his head. It’s the nature, it’s in the definition of unknown dangers: they come from everywhere, from nowhere. And the threats you’re ready for never arrive. Let’s not forget the lessons of the Franklin cafeteria, of that fateful spork fight.
Another text from her uncle: DR XU 2PM TOMRW. NO XCUSE.
Fuck. For five happy seconds she’d forgotten all about the little man. And this will be worse than her ordinary visits to Dr. Xu, which are bad enough. This is going to him with her web snapping apart. It’s difficult to see herself surviving the full fifty-five minutes. Not taking him by the ponytail and slamming his face into that coffee table.
More texts from Uncle Shecky: JUST GET THRU IT. He’s psychic, sometimes, but he texts like a twelve-year-old girl: I CLEAN YR ROOM. I WASH YR CLOTHES. Make that a very sweet, very thoughtful twelve-year-old girl.
Stay out, she texts back. Don’t touch my shit. There’s gratitude between these lines. She hopes he can feel it.
Another whimpering beep from girlfriend’s phone. Another groan from Henry.
Cuz needs a bed, she thinks. A snap decision: family first. She powers down the phone so it can’t be traced or wiped remotely. She hopes. She brings Henry home and waits at the top of the basement stairs, watching him stumble down to his room. He makes it without falling. An inspirational metaphor, she thinks. Wonder what Mama could do with it.
Cook it and shoot it, she thinks. Needle to vein, vein to heart. Sorry, Mama, bad joke.
In her own room, alone with girlfriend’s unlocked phone, she hits the power button. Dead black. Dead nothing. Dead battery, she remembers. Tomorrow, she thinks, and she takes a book off the shelf Henry built for her. Gets into bed with it. Sometime later, book down, lights out, she’s drifting off, with Mama in her head.
Goodnight balloon. In the not-yet-terrible days Mama used to read this to her. Goodnight, Detective 7229. Goodnight, Smelly Terri.
The sheets are soft and the scent is gentle lavender. Uncle Shecky did her right.
Goodnight, almost, kind-of family. Goodnight, not-Franklin.
More improvisations wear her out, but she goes down with a line from the actual book. Goodnight nobody.
City full of strangers, Kerasha falls into an uneasy sleep.
chapter 25
When Shecky Keenan was eight years old, his uncle Tomas went into the cage, which meant Shecky had to move back in with uncle Samuel. His only sober uncle, Samuel believed Shecky was half devil, and for transgressions such as slowness, falling and crying, looking funny, or looking crooked, Shecky was put in the wicked box, which was a closet that smelled of mildew and scat. The length of Shecky’s sentence ranged from one to ten minutes, depending on the severity of his sin. But the sentence had little to do with the amount of time Shecky actually spent locked in that closet, because Uncle Samuel couldn’t stay off his phone, and he would go through his parish directory (he was an angry churchgoer), and he would shout Jesus fire at whoever answered, shout till he lost all sense of time, shout till he didn’t know whom he was shouting at or whether they were still on the line. And Shecky would remain in that wicked box until Dannie came for him. And she always, always came for him.
Three days after the murder, Shecky can’t stop thinking about his sister.
He puts coffees, plates of toast and eggs and beans, a huge fruit bowl, a tub of honey butter, a jar of pickles, and a bottle of Tabasco on the table. He surveys the assembled with some astonishment and discomfort. Kerasha sits apart with her book, her mouth set against what he suspects is a nascent smile. Then there’s his Henry with a rag-wrapped ice pack against his head. There’s no telling what, if anything, he can hear through that hangover. And last,
in the guest seat, there’s Henry’s girl, the one who sneaks in through the basement window. She has no business even being near his house, but here she is at his dining room table, half naked to show off her tattoos. Shecky doesn’t like her here, doesn’t like her here like this. But he can’t kick her out. One of the tattoos is the same Japanese script that was inked on his sister. Shecky has forgotten a lot about Dannie, which shames him, but he’s held on to the translation of this script: The world is but a drop of dew, a drop of dew and yet—
“And yet it means something to us,” Dannie explained to him.
It was one of the tattoos the police used to identify her body.
This girl with Dannie’s tattoo is “Lipz” to Henry, but Shecky remembers her real name is Nadina Villa Lobos. Lipz smokes at his table. No one else smokes at his table. Her whole disposition is shabby-joyous, though, and she’s got more charm than you’d expect from a shelter girl with a murder rap. Killed her stepdad, Shecky remembers. Beating on her mom, so the girl just brained him. And here she is, smiling at his Henry. Looking very at home. He’s never noticed this before, the ways she’s like Dannie: the sense of humor, the manic energy. And he wonders how many chances she gets to sit down like this and enjoy a proper meal.
“Thank you for being here,” Shecky says, sitting down. “Thank you for being my family.” After the tiniest hesitation, he turns to Lipz: “Thanks for joining us.” He puts on a smile.
* * *
Breakfast is over. Cigarette in her mouth, a phone in her hand, Lipz talks with her eyes on Henry: “Fuck am I looking for?” This phone was swiped off the dead runner’s girlfriend and can supposedly identify or confirm who the murderer is. Shecky keeps his doubts to himself.