by Brian Selfon
“You remind me of a patient I once had.”
Kerasha hates this story already. Whoever this cunty patient was, if she even existed, Kerasha is not like her. And how would Dr. Xu know what Kerasha is like? Before today she’s never given him real answers, just like he’s never asked her real questions. Dogshit for dogshit—that’s their pact.
“And this patient used to take things.” This patient never was, she’s certain now. “She could be visiting her aunt, and she’d take washcloths. She could be at her job—she was a metalworker—and she took tools. She could even be—and this is just another example—at a doctor’s office. And even there she’d find something to take.”
An odd vibration. It comes in at her palms, it fills the room, and then the air is electrified.
No, not the whole room. Just the pocket of her jeans. The marbles are humming. She squeezes them and thinks, He doesn’t know. He can’t. This I-once-had-a-patient is nothing, is a nonperson. Is not Kerasha fucking Brown. And Dr. Xu’s ponytail confirms this.
The little man drums his fingertips, smiling to himself. Relishing a memory, it looks like. Bringing to mind the first innocent, healthy patient he drove to suicide.
Kerasha feels sick. Her hand on the marbles is limp, her skin on the glass tingly.
He doesn’t know. He can’t.
“This patient—let’s call her Kay, though that’s not her real name.” That’s no one’s name, that’s a fucking letter. And it happens to be the first letter of my name, you little bitch. How stupid you must think I am. “Kay once put it like this: I don’t take what I want, I take because I want. Or words to that effect.”
Words to fuck your mother, but Kerasha says nothing.
She keeps her hand in her pocket and the marbles in her hand. She squeezes as if she means to crush them to powder.
Dr. Xu leans forward, separates his fingertips, and holds his hands palms-up toward her. Another studied pose: the humble monk sharing his bowl of rice.
“That’s for you to think on.” He points to his wrist, though there’s no watch. “We’re done for today.”
This is the first time a session ran out without her noticing it, without her counting down the seconds. This is also the first time she walks out with a question fluttering around her head like a dirty bat. And it’s not exactly Dr. Xu’s bat, but it’s one he let in.
She’s never wanted glass marbles in her life; why are two in her pocket?
A terrible awareness cracks open in her. Turning from it, she’s nine years old again, she’s on the rooftop of Tower B of the Moses Houses. Safe at last from Mama and her needles, she watches the sun rise over downtown Brooklyn. The rugged skyline. The red warming to yellow.
part six
Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse.
—WALT WHITMAN
chapter 27
Emil Scott’s art studio is an attic apartment about a block from where he was killed. It is three days after the murder when Henry takes in the canvas-lined walls, the sharply slanted ceiling. Wood boards on cinderblocks serve as shelves for paints, scratch paper, and brushes. The smell here is toxic, the floor a Jackson Pollack. Holy ground, Henry thinks.
Stepping in, he touches the low ceiling. Emil was even taller than Henry, he must have had to squat to work here. Strange, to think of Emil Scott, poised and comfortable wherever Henry saw him, laboring here. Bent over. But Emil was slinging powder when they met, Henry remembers, and running cash when he was killed. Emil’s paintings and murals may have sold, but this converted attic must have been all he could afford.
Henry is still processing this when one of the works catches his breath. Smeared across a three-by-five-foot canvas are two gray-black figures, multi-armed and wretchedly twisted. The figures grapple and yet somehow face away from each other, and the violence of the image brings Henry back to Tiger’s room. He remembers Lipz with her red keys, sawing lines into Tiger’s scalp. And then Henry comes back to what he’s looking at. And it hits him. “Jesus fuck,” he says, “one of those is me.”
Kerasha looks from the canvas to Henry and back again. Her face a question mark.
“Emil’s girlfriend said he was being run,” Henry says. “She talked about ‘shadow twins,’ and she said I was one of them.”
Kerasha looks long at the canvas. “The one on the left has weird hands,” she says quietly. Fingers twisted like corkscrews, and stretched long—Henry sees it now too. “But otherwise…” Kerasha shakes her head and turns back to Henry with an expression of something like pity. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but they could be anyone.”
Henry feels a weight in his chest. She doesn’t get it. And once again within him is a surge of feeling—more than a feeling, it’s an idea, an emanation, an expression of his whole mixed-up truth. He goes to a standing pipe. Leans against it, crosses his arms.
Kerasha, meanwhile, has crossed the room and opened a file cabinet. She didn’t even hesitate, it seems to Henry, before yanking out Emil’s drawers and rummaging through his things. This famous thief, the family natural, is at work here; and okay, fine, she’s doing exactly what they came for. But he wishes she weren’t chewing gum. Fucking disrespectful.
Henry turns away, goes to the opposite wall. Has himself a sulk. The feeling burns off when he discovers more shadow twins. Some of the renderings are mounted canvases, others just sketches laid flat on the floor. In the middle of everything is a stool. Henry wonders if this was part of Emil’s process, to entomb himself in a project. To keep himself from seeing out.
Henry lowers himself onto the stool. He pictures Emil working here, leaning over the canvases. Using sticks of willow charcoal, shading and then scraping and smoothing with a scrap of moist cloth. Henry breathes in primer, waxes, ash. Sees wood shavings from hand-sharpened pencils. Henry puts down the charcoal stick and picks up a spray diffuser. Sniffs it, puts that down, too. And after a quick glance at Kerasha, who thankfully still has her back to him, he closes his eyes. Loses himself in the feeling that Emil is really here—on this stool, alive.
Sometime later, Henry opens his eyes and sees the sketchbook.
It’s sandwiched between two bare canvases, so at first just a corner of the sketchbook protrudes. But Henry recognizes the cover, the distinct teal flower pattern. Emil carried these sketchbooks everywhere, used them for “mathing and trapping,” as he called it: “mathing” problems of perspective; “trapping” faces and other details he spotted throughout the day. Henry picks up the sketchbook and, for a moment, just holds it. Back at the Thirsty Bear is a mural Emil won’t complete; in this sketchbook are works he won’t start. The unfinished life of an artist isn’t in the bones or on the gravestone, Henry thinks, it’s in these pages.
Henry opens the sketchbook, and the first face he sees is a woman’s. A little boyish, the nose somehow off, a long forehead—but while the face could have been sketched by anyone, Emil’s art is unmistakable in the hands. The fingers are bent, the wrists twisted, the effect entirely monstrous and, at the same time, affecting. What happened to those hands, who did this to her, what kind of person is she? But how can Henry guess? The face looks unfinished: tiny lines for eyes and ears, no mouth, nothing else. But is the sketch unfinished, Henry wonders, or was what’s missing—the incompleteness—something Emil saw in the woman? Henry turns more pages.
New faces, many Henry recognizes: Jay Dyer and other Bushwick artists. Imani, the bartender at the Thirsty Bear, Imani again. Smelly Terri, and then a few people who spoke at that impromptu memorial service. Emil always sketched people he actually saw, Henry remembers: “Real places, real people—always start with what you see.” Emil pushed Henry hard this way. Called Henry out—gently but clearly enough—for trying to be imaginative. “You can plan composition, but you can’t plan weird. Just do what you see, and your hand will get weird on its own.”
And Emil’s hand does get weird. Here’s the woman again, only now she casts a shadow, and three sketches later she’s all s
hadow, and then there’s a second shadow, and Henry knows this is him, knows this is what he was to Emil: not a person, not a substance, but an absence.
Henry’s crying when he smells lavender and bubble gum. He looks up. Kerasha is before him with another of Emil’s sketchbooks, turning the pages. Behold the family natural, Henry thinks again, the consummate professional, always working, always finding. No, not another, he realizes—the same sketchbook. His own hands are empty. She swiped it, but when, how the fuck?
“He wrote the date on the first page,” she says. “He started drawing this woman in April.”
The same month he and Emil met. Henry thinks back to that first opening where they sniffed each other out, the criminal artist, the artist criminal. He feels heartsick, he is dizzy, and then a scrap of paper slips out of the sketchbook. It lazes toward the floor; Kerasha plucks it from the air. Studies it, her face thoughtful.
“The name of the killer?” Henry asks. LMAO, thank you, I’ll be here all night.
But when Kerasha doesn’t immediately answer, Henry—always the fool—begins to hope. “What is it?”
Kerasha turns over the scrap. Studies the back. “Cha-Ching Money Services, receipt for money order, eight hundred cash. Dated”—she turns it back over and reads off the date. “That mean anything to you?”
“That was his last run—the last one he finished. Also…” Thoughts turning, another alarm going off in his head. Cha-Ching is a splotch on New Utrecht Ave. Henry knows it well. It’s a pain to get to, no good trains or buses, but Henry used to be a regular there, bringing bags of cash for his uncle. Now Henry sends his own runners there. “Fuck. That’s where Emil was supposed to make his big drop.”
“But he never got there, right?” Kerasha asks, following Henry out of the studio. “I mean, you found his body in that room.”
“Fuck do I know.” He shakes his head, going down the stairs. “He could have been brought there.”
chapter 28
“You don’t know someone,” Uncle Shecky says, “till get your nose up their money.” Henry is fourteen years old. “Where’s it come from? Who’s paying them to do what they do? To be who they are?” Henry is fifteen, he is eighteen. “Who’s in control?” Henry is twenty-one. “You don’t know anything until you smell that money.”
Three days after the murder, dusk, Henry stands outside Cha-Ching Money Services. He takes in his city. The reek of diesel from the nearby Luk station. A blinking, hissing streetlight, the long shadow from the parked semi and its double trailer. He’s safe out here, where he can’t smell the money. Where he can’t learn, from the records in this building, whether Emil completed his last run, like a good boy. Or whether—
He doesn’t know how to follow his suspicion. Can’t sense the shape of it. But it’s there in him, just beneath the surface, and he’s afraid of what’ll happen if it manifests. Who his friend will turn out to be. So let’s stay out here forever.
And then a dark sedan approaches, slows, and panther-creeps toward him. Is this badge 7229, he wonders, or is this a gun with a clipful of you-owe-me’s from Red Dog? The latter Henry almost wouldn’t mind. To die out here, not knowing the truth about his friend, but also not having given up on his search, is darkly seductive. Then the car passes and Henry lets out his breath.
Sorry, Emil. But you’re gone, I’m here, and privacy is for the living.
He steps to the door.
Inside Cha-Ching the night clerk empties her waste bin into a larger garbage container. “Everything is recorded,” she says. She hasn’t looked up.
Henry looks around. He and the clerk are the only people in the room, but she’s speaking as if they’re in the middle of a conversation. The bluish lights and the muted goth-disco beat add to the sense that he’s on ayahuasca.
“Cameras are everywhere,” she says. “Your face is already on tape.”
“This is a friendly visit,” Henry says.
“The vault has a time lock,” she says. “I couldn’t open it if I wanted to.”
At last, she looks up. He doesn’t recognize her from his drop-off days. She’s sixty-something, got a wattle on her neck. His heart goes out to her. Old lady on a night shift—she doesn’t want to be here either.
Henry approaches, grabs a deposit ticket on his way. There’s a cup of pens—he takes one, sketches Emil, and brings the sketch to the counter. “You seen this guy?”
The woman squints at the picture. There’s a moment of unmistakable recognition—she looks up suddenly at Henry—but then she’s shaking her head. “Sorry. Not ringing any bells.”
“Emil wasn’t a bell,” Henry says. Heat from his fist moves up his arm. From his arm to his shoulder, from his neck to his heart. He catches himself. Lowers his voice and looks down. “He was my friend.”
The woman’s hand drops. “Was?” At last she looks Henry straight in the face. “What happened to him?”
* * *
They’re in the break room, and on the far wall is a vault door. “I wasn’t lying before,” says the clerk. “There’s a time lock.” An ancient percolator shakes and then there’s a pop. The woman, who’s introduced herself as Priscilla, fills two mugs. “Irish or Mexican?”
“Both.”
“You’re a bold one.” She tops off his mug with whiskey and tequila, hers with just whiskey. “Your friend was a sweetie,” she says. “The winos, the heads, they all knew he was soft. They saw him coming up, and they’d all gather around. He had a dollar for everyone. Or a smile if he didn’t have anything. Wasn’t afraid to say hello or shake a hand. And some of those guys…” She shudders. “I wouldn’t touch them. But your friend was kind.”
“Did he ever come here with anyone?” Henry asks. “Maybe a woman with messed-up hands?”
Priscilla shakes her head. “Just himself.” They’re quiet together until at last the vault door lets out a thunk. Priscilla looks up at the clock. “Unlocked,” she says. “We have a half hour.”
A key, a combination, a press of her palm against a scanner. The door opens. Inside are files, loose and in boxes. She seems to know her way, so Henry lets her disappear into the stacks. His eyes wander. He scans the labels. AARON to ARONSON. KESSLER to KOSARIN. And how many of these are runners, Henry wonders, moving money for others, helping them stay hidden? And were any of them run so badly—that they got killed?
“Found him,” Priscilla says. She opens a folder as she approaches and takes out a thin stack of transaction slips. “What date are you looking for?”
Henry takes out his wallet. “How much for the whole file?”
In the break room, Henry spreads out the transaction slips. Puts them in chronological order, then flips through them, creating in his mind a partial history. April 15: $1,500 went into a Chase account belonging to an imaginary nonprofit. On April 22, $500 became a money order payable to Furnace Maintenance LLC—a shell company Henry knows well, because he set it up himself. And everything flows as it should by the system Uncle Shecky designed years ago—until late June. This was Emil’s last completed run, and on this slip is a big red X.
Henry stares at the red slashes. Holds it up for the clerk: “What happened here?”
Priscilla walks over, squints as she puts on her glasses. She flips it over and looks at its backside. “The transfer got returned.”
“What?”
“They sent the money back.”
“Who the fuck returns money?”
She takes the slip into the vault. Comes back a minute later with a folded letter. “It went through, initially,” she says. “So there weren’t any problems with the routing number, or the account. Then a week or two go by, and we get this.”
She hands him the letter. Henry reads: “We regret to inform you that your account with Capital One is closed effective immediately due to receipt of subpoena(s) and/or suspension warrant(s) from law enforcement.”
Henry folds up the letter, nods his thanks to Priscilla, and calmly walks the fuck out. He can already hear hi
s uncle’s reaction: Come on, Hen—law enforcement? (Told you your boy wasn’t cut out for this shit. An artist, for fuck’s sake, what were you thinking? Of course he screwed something up. And the bank noticed, and they shut down our pass-through, but fuck the pass-through. Do you know who else noticed? The street. Bet your life on it, kid, the street smelled weakness—smelled the big money bag you put on him—and hunted him down.)
Uncle Shecky won’t have to say these words. A look and everything will be understood between them. Just one look, and Henry will be nothing. He can’t face his uncle like this. He thinks about his Cobra, and how easy it would be to take it in his hand, and put the barrel into his mouth.
But will he have to?
There’s no dishonor in having a problem. No dishonor even in making a mistake, not if you own it. The way out, the way to survive this fucking summer, is to go to his uncle with everything worked out.
And I will work this out.
Only right now Henry doesn’t want to be alone.
* * *
He’s with Lipz in the basement, passing time like an old married couple—apart together. Lipz is on his bed, reading, while Henry sits at his draftsman’s desk. There’s a 2B pencil in his hand, but it hasn’t moved in some time. Henry is in a memory.
A month earlier, Henry showed Emil a painting he’d made in high school. It was of Lipz, and one of his last completed works, the centerpiece of the portfolio that brought in those rejection letters. “Give it to me real,” Henry said. “What do you think?” Emil looked long at the painting, brought his big nose right up against the canvas. Henry’s breath was shallow, his ears warm, the taste of salt on his tongue. And even before Emil turned to him, Henry knew it was hopeless. He was a fixer’s muscle, nothing more.