But once you’ve laughed in someone’s face, he’ll remember the sound forever, and only a saint can overlook your best reasons.
“Serge isn’t coming back,” he’d told me. “I’m the one you’re stuck with now. I guess. I’m the one you have to settle for.”
There’s this guy.
My Brazilian black bean soup cooled in its bowl.
“Does he have a name?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“‘Probably.’ Well that’s good. Two years, and you can still surprise me over a bowl of beans. Jesus. I never took you for the toilet tramp sort.”
Jared blinked at me in genuine surprise. “That’s the kind of conversation you think we’re having?” He shook his head. “I haven’t sucked off anybody in a toilet. I haven’t gone cruising the park, I haven’t even gone cruising the Personals.”
“Then what kind of guy am I supposed to think you’re talking about? You’re not the Jehovah Witnesses sort, either.”
He didn’t answer, was somewhere else behind his eyes. Then he leaned back to watch the pigeons strutting on the sidewalk, sleek heads bobbing as they pecked at promising tidbits.
“I’ve never understood why so many people hate these birds,” he said. “Calling them rats with wings, and like that. What aren’t they seeing?”
He was shredding bits of his bread; sowed a generous handful across the concrete. Wary, the pigeons lifted off a moment with a great snapping of wings, then settled back again to feast.
“They’re not just gray,” he went on. “Look at those colors around their heads. All those different purples. Lavender. Greens, on some of them. Those are beautiful colors. So maybe they shit on statues, what’s to hate?”
“Jared,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about pigeons now.”
He nodded, sweeping more crumbs toward the birds. “There,” he told them. “Go shit on a statue for me.” Then it was my turn.
“You know one thing I’ve always envied about you?” he said. “It’s the way you can deal with pain. You lock it up and once it’s in the box, you never open that box again. You must have skin like an alligator inside.”
“Jared…” I said. “You’re giving me way too much credit for something I’m not even sure I’m flattered by.”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. I wish I could cope like you, with all the things that are wrong. I look in your eyes, then I look in the mirror, and I don’t see the same quality. I wish I could, but I don’t.”
“If you’ve got something to tell me,” I said, “quit dancing around the subject and tell it. Who have you met?”
“Aren’t you listening? I haven’t met anybody.”
A pair of sluggish flies buzzed into his bowl of red beans and rice. Impassive, he watched them crawl and feed; seemed capable of watching until their eggs hatched a new generation.
“Everybody has a breaking point,” he murmured.
And when I told him he wasn’t anywhere near his, that he was stronger than this, Jared didn’t even look at me as if to say How would you know? It made me question my credibility. If I conveyed nothing-no confidence, no faith, no belief-because nothing worth conveying was left. If, in experiencing most of the same intimate plagues that life had brought to Jared, the better qualities that were part of my essence hadn’t been burned away. Or worse, by my own hand been locked beyond retrieval.
“I’m tired of hurting,” he said. “Tired of letting everything hurt me, just taking it, because there’s nothing else to do, until I don’t have anything left inside for it to grind down. So…
“There’s this guy that I’ve heard about. Walks around looking like something out of Charles Dickens. I don’t know what he is, or where he comes from…but he’s supposed to make the pain stop.”
I went with Jared as he sought his deliverer, not because I necessarily believed in rumors he’d heard, or because if they were true I believed myself capable of dissuading him from rash acts, but simply because I’d convinced myself that he’d be safer this way. The streets could be dangerous; he shouldn’t walk them alone.
Like Serge had.
Up streets and down alleys, inside bars and outside liquor stores, beneath neon and through shadows…we followed a winding course of anguish the same as we’d follow a stream. Where it was created and where it deepened, where it bottomed out and where it became a roaring cascade that swept everything before it.
We talked to hustlers who leaned against graffiti-thick walls or smoked between tricks under the trestles of the elevated train. Talked to runaways who warmed themselves over fires built in rusty oil drums. To castoffs who made homes in boarded-up warehouses, or factories where smokestacks held their last stale dying breath, beneath a sky that still looked irreparably seared.
“Never heard of him” — this we got most often, a relief to me.
“Oh yeah, I heard of that guy” — this, too, sometimes. And:
“Hey, I think I saw him. He’s a killer.”
“Right. Some kind of saint, right?”
“Fag. Fags.”
“You just missed him, by, like, a day.”
Never enough to discourage Jared from continuing. Just enough to keep me from feeling sure this was mere rumor.
There seemed to be no end of places to look, and if we began to think we must have covered them all, then we’d find more. More sprawl, more shadow, more derelict hulks etched against sooty new horizons. It made me recall something I’d been told by one of the street people I used to see all the time near the video store, for whom Danielle and I would sometimes buy sandwiches.
The city grows at night, he’d told me. On its own. That’s why so many people can pass a spot for the hundredth time and look at some building as if for the first…even if logically they know, from the way it looks, it must’ve stood there crumbling for sixty, eighty, a hundred years. The only thing they can figure is that it has somehow escaped their notice until now.
The city grows at night, and that’s why people can drive past some spot on their way out of the city and think, wait, last week didn’t it all used to end right around here? So they decide their memories must be playing tricks on them again, and knit the changes into the way it’s always been.
Then most of them don’t give it another thought, he told me. But a few can still feel the city’s growth pains in the deepest places inside their dreams, and even those who don’t remember on awakening, at least awaken with a growing dread of the city and its demands, realizing that it’ll never be satisfied until it’s consumed everything there is to be had, making slaves of all who live there. Feeders, and those fed into the maw.
He told me these things one day on my lunch break, then lived another month. Died of acute alcohol poisoning two blocks over, in the alley behind a Thai restaurant. But his face was gone, I heard. Rats. And maybe it’s only creative hindsight, but now I swear he told me these things like a man who’d already heard his death searching for him, stalked for dreaming too deeply and brushing dust from the wrong secrets.
He’d said the city had sorted out long ago who it could use to maintain itself, and who would taste best between its teeth.
But why listen to paranoid drunks, anyway?
Hieronymus Beadle recognized intent as soon as he saw them coming, moving with trepidation through the musty Welsh pub until they could see him near the back, sunk comfortably into his chair and drowsing by the fire. During his sumptuous weeks in the city, his waistcoat had grown frightfully snug, buttons a-popping and threads a-straining.
“Sit! Sit!” he bid them. “Been expecting you, I have.”
“How’s that?” asked the older of the pair, the more prickly; clearly the skeptic, the sniffer out of charlatans.
Mr. Beadle gestured toward the fire. “I’ve been watching the news, of course.”