Night was falling, New York City opening its foggy heart to the darkness.
Gabriel traced the curve of the scar on his left cheek, where the Trinity Killer’s burning finger had marked him so cruelly. His eyes were a cried-out red in the rear-view mirror. How many times? He asked the small photograph of Francesca half-tucked into the sun visor. How many times am I going to cry over you?
He pushed the sun visor back up. A menagerie of cars slipped by, picking up speed as they merged with the fast flowing traffic of the Expressway. An artery in the city’s motorway of veins, pumping vital blood into the coldly commercial heart.
Gabriel gently swung the Black Hawk back into the traffic, turning onto West 114th beneath the swaying citrus pines at the entrance of the Columbia campus, took a left and eased carefully onto a well lit stretch of Broadway. He offered a thirty foot tall David Letterman a wry smile as he rolled by the Ed Sullivan Theatre.
Before him, the distinct brake-lights of a yellow cab glared briefly. Behind him, the Empire State Building added its own heavy pall to the already gloomy city. People shuffled aimlessly about wasting their aimless lives, crossing and recrossing at the blinking lights, and ducking into and out of closing stores as they chased after rack after rack of needless bargains.
His foot on the brake, Gabriel eased out around the flashing tail lights of a double-parked Camaro, changed down and sat in behind the dull gleam of an old Ford’s lights.
On the radio a gravelly voice spliced Tori Amos into Joan Osborne into Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. Gabriel leaned across to pluck the now heated lighter from the dashboard, lit the straggly licorice paper roll-up dangling between his lips and killed the singer. Alone. Only the sounds of the cars, the streets. A dull monotony of beats and rhythms.
Ashley’s apartment was on the corner of Prospect and Vine, overlooking the red brick gargoyles of the Magdalena Chapel with their hunched backs and leprous eyes blind to the comings and goings of the underlife crawling about on the streets below. The streets around Prospect all looked the same. He pulled in behind a parked station wagon, crimping the tyres against the sidewalk and pushing down on the handbrake.
Gripped the steering wheel hard, knuckles whitening as his fingers clenched.
Outside the five story apartment block the fog had thickened so much so Gabriel found himself staring at the glowing tip of the cigarette, unable to see the Studebaker’s stretched hood beyond it. A siren in the distance seemed to be calling out to him. Ambulance or squad car.
He sat and smoked, concentrating on nothing but inhaling the smoke, trying to taste the tar as it settled in his lungs.
The cigarette dwindled and the thoughts came slipping back like thieves of sanity. Hungry little beggars with dirty fingernails and blackened teeth —
Leaning down, the ugly muzzle of Bill Stern’s gun resting against Culpepper’s forehead, black eye against the bruise and then the blood red rose flowering in the wake of the dead trigger… one shot opening a world of lies behind the miracle… sweet deceits and black lies… in a world of coloured glass…
— that claw and bite away on the thin wall between madness and the miraculous, tearing back the skin of the everyday to expose these raw wounds that cut deeply into his bruised psyche. The magic that shouldn’t, couldn’t, be real.
Gabriel turned the gold ring on his wedding finger, pulling it unconsciously towards the first knuckle as if taking it off. It wasn’t coming off, not so long as her name was still inscribed inside the band: Francesca 02/24/1994.
He sank back into the driver’s seat, his gaze drifting along the rows of dirty windows hiding their dirty lives, living each one of those dirty lives in a few seconds, tasting the sickness behind the glass facade, and able to do so because somehow, somewhere, he’d stopped caring about them and slipped into the past. He knew, deep down where it mattered, he didn’t love her, didn’t love Ashley the way he’d loved Frankie, and that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, love her that way. Just couldn’t.
He wondered what she was doing up there, wondered how he could tell her he didn’t love her? What words could he use to say goodbye to the rest of his life?
He reached inside the glove box for the makings of another cigarette. Remembered watching Francesca sleep. It didn’t feel like that long ago. That long since watching her sleep had been his secret. His way of quietly thanking God. That was in the beginning of his life, when she was this porcelain miracle walking fresh into his world, before Sam, before… and this, this was the end. Sitting there hurt.
It wasn’t like that with Ashley. He didn’t find himself looking at her face, falling into it, they way he had with Frankie.
But how long can you keep making love with yours ghosts?