Everything begins here. Here is where it all ends.
At home his ghost sits on the stool under the factory windows, watching the ships on the river, looking for my face in the night crowds below.
But he won’t find it.
Because I’m here. And because ghosts never find each other.
I am a ghost now, and The Blues have all of me, when nothing, and no one should ever have all.
All the time you think it’s you that wants the drugs, when really it’s the drugs that want you.
They got me now.
Benji comes in, on break from her case. She dances with herself, in front of the mirror. She sings. “Who do you love?”
“Little Davis,” I say, even though I know it’s just a song she likes. Outside, the streetlight winks red.
Tells me he’s dead.
Benji goes to the fridge, takes out two beers, brings me one. I suck on it, set it down next to the other, stare at the window.
She brings me her kimono, drapes it around my shoulders. “You’ll catch your death,” she says, and I think, no, I can’t, I already caught someone else’s. The kimono is turquoise, with dragons embroidered in silver and gold. Benji is beautifuclass="underline" half black and half Italian. She wears her hair in long dreads; they dance around her thin face like dragons. Her dancing hair makes the room go quiet, all still like before the thunderclap. The stillness wraps around me, a second kimono. In my head I thank her for it.
Out loud I say: “Me and Little was gonna quit this year, give up The Blues for good. I don’t know what to give up now.”
Benji comes over, opens my mouth ever so gently, rests a cigarette between my lips.
I smoke it, thinking it doesn’t matter if you die of cancer when you can’t feel. “I used to be able to feel,” I say to Benji.
“How could you tell?” she asks, dancing.
I remember the last time, but I can’t talk about it to Benji. I couldn’t even talk about it to Little. So I tell her about the time before that. “When Marianne left it felt like I was torn open and my guts pulled out and spread all over the floor and stepped on.”
Benji laughs, and I can’t really blame her.
Marianne is the first lover I ever lived with, and the only one, besides Little. I would say she was my first lover but she wasn’t. She was the first one that counted. “My hands shook all the time. The skin under my eyes went grainy, like a photograph that’s been blown up too much. Like those.”
Wet rings on them now, from my beer bottles. Prints of the body they dragged out of the river. But blown up too much. The eyes look bad.
“Don’t look at those, Ruby. That’s asking for it.”
The cops brought them in for identification purposes. I could identify them, all right. No, officer, that’s not my sweetheart. My sweetie was beautiful, and what you got there is a piece of meat, all swelled up and ugly. Cops got no sense of humour.
Benji fishes around in her stuff piled up in the corner beside the mirror. She makes her piles of stuff wherever she goes, says it makes her feel at home. I wish I could do that. Feel at home. “You got an itch to look at pictures, you look at this one.”
She kneels on the floor beside me, showing me the postcard. I look down at it. It’s a photograph of a lot full of gravel, raked around a pile of rocks.
“So,” I say.
“It’s a garden. Chuckie sent it to me. It’d called Ryonji and it’s in Japan. That’s where he went.”
“It’s a dead quiet kind of place, Benji.”
“Quiet, maybe, but no more dead than you right now.”
“I wish it was me and not him. You know we were going to Japan? Right after we gave up The Blues. His buddy in Kyoto had a place for us to stay. The one who sends him oranges. You know Little was part Japanese.”
“Yeah,” says Benji, dancing. “I know.” She turns around, dances to me now instead of the mirror. “Too bad it wasn’t the right part.”
“Yeah. Too bad.”
I know she is dancing for me. To make me still, like Chuckie’s garden. I wonder whether Benji can still feel, or whether all of her has learned this stillness.
I stare out the window.
It was last Christmas. He was dancing on a table, juggling oranges. He wasn’t wearing anything, and he was covered head to toe in silver body paint. He looked maybe seventeen. Later I learned he was twenty, but it was too late; by then he’d already made me feel old.
It was afternoon, the Ocean Club. I’d gone there to try and shake off this case that had left me more spooked than I’d been in years. Since Marianne. It’s an arty bar—people who go there have weird hair and no money; they sit around a lot, waiting for life to turn dangerous on them. Because I never had that choice, the Ocean is a kind of vacation for me, and last Christmas it was as far away a place as I could think of from where I’d just been, the chamber of horrors that was my jalloo’s mind.
Little ended his song by tossing his oranges into the crowd. There were six of them and the last one he kept for me. When I caught it he smiled. There are smiles, and then there are smiles. Little had the second kind. I got up and followed him into the dressing room. Eyes followed me all the way there, but I didn’t mind; I liked the feel of them, tickling my neck.
He was sitting on a stool at the makeup mirror, just lighting up a joint. I closed the door behind me, sat down on the other one, peeled the orange. It’s a trick I use on my jalloos; nonchalance gives me the upper hand.
“Mandarins,” he said, passing me the number. “From Japan. I got a buddy there sends them to me every Christmas.”
So we both knew the same game. I laughed. It was a beginning.
We smoked, ate mandarins. I wanted to sit there all afternoon, basking in his beauty. He was so beautifuclass="underline" thin, slight even, his body still a boy’s, legs dangling from the stool, graceful and bony. His black hair was cropped close to the skull, showing off his Asian cheekbones. The Ocean is a dive. Its dressing rooms are tatty: torn leopard upholstery with the foam bulging out. At River Street even the walls are broadloomed. It gets stifling. I liked the peeling paint, the bare bulb; they set him off, made me want him more. Made me want his startling blue eyes. More.
His smile made me happy to be alive; after this case, a scarce feeling, hopelessly precious. I wanted so bad to make him feel the same way. I wanted so bad for him to like me, but I didn’t think he could, ever, like someone like me.
So I reached for the only way I knew would work for sure. Unzipped the pouch on my belt, took the little packet out. Poured blue powder out in a little heap onto the shelf under the mirror.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
A jalloo like my father. Like him, a child molester. Like the leftover bits, the ones I couldn’t kill. The bits of memory I couldn’t wipe, no matter how long I worked Clinic, how long I lived The Blues. There’s not many of them left, those daughter fuckers, thanks in part to us, to the Clinics. But the ones that don’t get to us before they go bad, get sent to us after. Except this one just walked in off the street. He headed straight for me, like he was special ordered. They fit me like a glove, all his fuckups.
And so we worked it out.
Like my dad, he’d woken up one day, one eye at least. Taken a look around and realized it was not too cool, what he’d once been up too. Thought he could fix it, and in the worst way. He even found the creep who’d sell him the gun. But on his way home, this wiseacre passes the Clinic, like he does every day of his life. Only this time, something twigs and he comes walking in, straight into my waiting arms. Just lucky, I guess. I was probably the only one in the world who could fix him, aside from his daughter, and you can count her out.