His eye continued to bulge, window to the soul flung wide. He thought of all and nothing, the vast repertoire of his days an open book. He bent his soul into a kind of parabola, on which they might focus through pupil and metacosm, and see reflected back at themselves a thousandfold what each had cast toward it — all their loathings and hungers, resentments and fears.
It was absurdly simple. They did most of the work. And God alone knew what each one saw. Mischief-makers such as these were doers, not talkers, wasting no words to tell of terrible wonders.
Two of them soiled trousers and ran. One turned his pistol on his friend a dozen times over, even while the fallen body twitched on asphalt; the final bullet he’d reserved to put through his own mouth. Another fell to the ground screeching, then hooked his long fingernails back to gouge out both offending eyes.
The man in the gray top hat lowered his bulk to his haunches, beside the blind and whimpering brigand. Like Jack Horner seeking plums, he plunged his thumb into the runny well of one ruined eye socket. There he left it, while visions came and went, until he was satisfied: If the dead ones had lives and histories comparable to this one, he clearly had done them a favor.
“Terribly sorry I came too late. Dreadfully sorry,” he said. “But in your case there was really nothing left to save, you see.”
He tidied his thumb on the boy’s jacket, then righted himself and straightened his dingy frock coat. From a breast pocket he produced his card, dropping it onto the writhing boy’s chest. It was color of ivory and, bordered with filigree, read:
HIERONYMUS BEADLE, ESQ.
¤ Conjurer of Visions
¤ Extractor of the Psychometric Arts
¤ Trader in Souls
And so announced to the asphalt harvest, he went upon his way in search of a warm fireside, soft cushions, and whatever passed for mulled wine in this place of ignoble rot.
By the time of Terry’s funeral, Jared and I’d had a couple of good years together. Career waiter and career video store manager; the tail of the world had somehow eluded our grasp. At least Jared was still giving it a good chase. Most of my running now was in circles, five miles each day and ending right where I’d started.
I’d noticed him a half-dozen times in the video store before we’d exchanged any deeper words than when his tape was due back. Midtwenties, a generous handful of years younger than I, and with round-lensed glasses and dark messy hair looking as if he could be equally at home in a law library or aerobics class. Danielle, my favorite co-worker, finally got tired of my doing nothing.
“Let’s take a peek in his subconscious,” she said, and pulled up his rentals on the computer. I was happily intrigued to find mostly Japanese animation, Kurosawa samurai films, and everything we had directed by Ken Russell and Sergio Leone.
The afternoon he asked if we had a copy of El Topo that we weren’t letting on about, I was smitten. Jodorowsky’s horrifying symbolist western that somehow veers into socioreligious parable-the boy was no fluff-monger. He said he’d looked all over the city for El Topo, and I had to tell him that he’d finally stumped the band, that it wasn’t distributed domestically.
The instant he left the store, I phoned a gray market service in Miami for a rush-order VHS dub off Japanese laserdisc. I had it in hand two days later when he returned his current rental, and invited him to a private screening. If he was interested. Since he was such a good customer, with such commendable taste in film.
Several nights later, atop rumpled bedsheets, with our first taste of each other still on our lips, Jared said it had been the only VCR date he’d had where the other guy hadn’t popped in a Jeff Stryker or Danny Sommers video, something like that.
“When you see Beach Blanket Boner coming on again, it gets a little obvious,” he laughed.
Jared laughed a few weeks later when his lease was up, at my suggestion he move in, saying all I wanted was a cheap way to enliven my apartment’s brick walls. For years he’d been trying to break into comics, with marginal success and rarely better than token payments. Within days of the move I was surrounded by prototypes of brooding existential loners, sketched in shades of gray, who wandered vaguely recognizable wastelands.
He laughed when he showed me all his rejection slips from the better-paying costumed hero markets, saying that the art was only for killing time until he became headwaiter at his restaurant.
He laughed while he told me about being on his own since he was eighteen, when his father kicked him out after finding a porno magazine. “If it’d been hetero,” Jared said, “he probably would’ve taken me out to get drunk instead, maybe even buy me a whore if he could’ve found one cheap enough.”
He laughed when he told me about the former friends in high school who’d beaten him up for being too honest about himself when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
But by this time I was noticing how forced his laughter could sound, a worthy try but no longer good enough to fool me, like the unnerved and tuneless whistling of someone lost in a cemetery.
And that’s the way it sounded, more and more, until the day it stopped altogether.
“There’s this guy…”
No man wants to hear anything starting like this, tiny words that send heart and stomach skittering into sick panic. While you knew all along you were irreplaceable, everyone else knew better.
“There’s, um, this guy…”
Jared pulled it on me at one of the sidewalk tables in front of the beanery where we came for cheap, spicy meals served in crockery that would steam your face and warm both hands. A coterie of pigeons would always gather near occupied tables, to glean crumbs from the crusty bread served here.
“There’s, see, there’s this guy…”
It would be one of the last fine days of autumn before the killing frosts of winter took hold, the late afternoon sunlight golden even when the best it had to shine on looked otherwise run-down and corroded and ready for a renewal that would never come, because those with the power to decide these things knew that such places were easier destroyed than lived with.
“There’s this guy,” Jared tried again, then drew into himself as though he couldn’t bear to say the rest.
I wondered if this wasn’t some rebound thing, triggered by issues we’d gotten into last week, with Jared still smarting over Terry’s funeral and seeking…what? Reassurance in a world that offered him none?
He’d interrupted my daily 200 sit-ups and suggested, since we seemed to be getting along so well, with an eye to far tomorrows, making it as official as we could. A same-sex union ceremony? Lots of couples were doing them, even if they legally wouldn’t hold the breath expended on the vows.
“It’s not the legality of it,” he’d defended. “It’s the thing itself. It’s the ceremony that counts. The statement we’d make.”
I’d thought of when we first realized we had something going. Got ourselves tested for the virus, passed six months of fidelity, then got tested again, praying for a rerun of dual negatives, then putting the condoms away afterward in relief. This was all the ceremony we needed. All the statement. A phony marriage seemed like a hoax to play on ourselves. Why pretend to join some club that wouldn’t have us for members?
And it surprised me how much bitterness I heard in my voice, how much rage I thought I’d sunk to the bottom of my ocean, until it might break itself down into complete apathy over everything I was denied, that so many others took for granted. Say, walking down any street with someone I obviously loved, and not having to care who realized it. I listened to myself, hearing everything I’d never meant Jared to think was directed at him; said I was sorry.