It was an opera of anguish sung in screams that went unheard.
It was a music like the blues coming from far beyond a distant past that could not be connected with.
So Null's face constricted to a grin as he breathed out a gout of air like taking a punch.
“Tell me it hurts, Null,” said Missy, compressing a dressing on the wound. “Tell me you feel it.”
“Waste—of—breath,” he replied, lying there on the gurney, his scarred and sinuous chest exposed. He failed to quell a coughing jag, which took him. Missy pushed him back to the gurney, tolerating nothing from Null but his injuries. She cleaned and dressed a succession of wounds, stripping Null completely with the expertise of an experienced triage nurse, barely jostling him. The boy with the knives averted his eyes and turned his back to Null averting shame.
“What's with the kid? He have to be here?”
“He thinks he does.”
“Kid, you should wait outside.”
“I'm not going anywhere.”
“I can have security make you.”
“Let him stay, Missy. He thinks I'm God.”
“From the looks of him, I should book him a room here. Kid, you know you need the cocktail, right? You're full blown and no joke.” She grabbed his face and revealed the white patches of candida on his gums, the Kaposi's sarcomas on his forearms. He pushed her back with surprising force.
“I'm no fucking kid. I'm twenty-two.”
“Relax kid, physiologically you're eighty.”
“I keep forgetting e-room types are only nice to the rich.”
“Missy's nice to exactly no one.”
“It's too late for me. You ask him why I'm here and what I have to do.”
“It's all about lost love,” Null croaked, experiencing stress as Missy scrubbed down gashes and splits in his skin, irrigated the gaping wound that just skirted the carotid directly below the collarbone. “Revenge. Avenge. Something you do when hate is all you have left. Or a memory of hatred.”
“Don't remind me,” she sighed, working Null's wracked body like a cut man working a boxer between rounds.
“Can I remind you about the autopsy you did on the fuck that lost your love for you, then?”
“You don't have to. I know I owe you, Null, which is why you survive all these wounds that should have put you out long ago.” She glared at the boy with a sidelong glance, then went back to suturing up the splits in Null's ashen toned skin. “I just don't owe Blueboy here ice in January.”
“Nobody owes me but Malek The Mallet. And it ain't ice he owes.”
“The kid wants blood.”
And to punctuate that, a small jet of Null's blood splattered Missy on the cheek and she stanched the site hard with pressure from both hands. “Somebody get this fucking kid out of here!”
“I'm not a kid. I'm nineteen!”
No orderly or resident or even security officer came, despite this breach in the general quietude, order and dull intensity of the Mount Auburn Hospital emergency room.
“You don't plan on seeing twenty, do you, Jack?”
“He plans on suicide by killing,” said Null with an airy calm.
“It's hit-‘n'-run. That's what I go by. Not Jack.”
“Kid wants to be a comic book character. Why not call yourself Deadboy, or something? True-to-life, comics. Dyingboy, maybe.”
“Call yourself your mother, why don't you? My name’s Ken. Ken Embers. Don't ever fucking call me Kenny.”
“If you watch the cartoons like I do, you'd know they killed Kenny.”
“Yeah, but he comes back every time.”
Missy screamed it: “Will somebody get this kid out of here so I can treat this man!”
Security constables came and dragged the kid off to a waiting area—two of them—then they rooted themselves standing over him until it was apparent he had no intention of moving and perhaps even a compromised ability to move. His fever was back and his hands trembled. They left, the kid being obviously sick enough to be left alone.
Null lay there on the gurney, breathing evenly. Missy wiped her sweating brow with her bare arm, blood coating the latex glove on her hand.
“What's with the kid?”
“A hanger-on I can't shake at the moment.”
“What are you, a pedophile?”
“I'm a nothing-phile. Literally.”
“I don't believe you don't feel nothing.”
“Me too.”
“Kid should be in a hospice somewhere. He's got less long than you.”
“How long I got?”
“Not long, you keep showing up like this. Keep it up, Null, you'll get necrotic tissue, gangrene. One day, someone will stab or shoot you beyond repair. Then that'll be it.”
“Something to hope for then, if I had hope.”
“You're as pointless as my husband was.”
“Was it pointless when you autopsied Gomez, as he squealed and cried all the while through the duct tape over his mouth?”
“No. It was restitution.”
“Restitution? Did it bring Nat back? Did it restore him?”
“No. It restored me.”
“Good, and now that you've restored me, you can suture up the wounds and let me get the hell out of here so I can do what I have to do.”
She dug in ferociously, pulling lengths of suture material tight in Null's skin as she emitted little grunts. “And what would that be, pray tell?”
“Playing your scenario straight out to the end.”
Death tenement squalor in Grove Hall, Mattapan, smack in Police Area B—ancient projects like red brick bunkers hunkered down from the days of the Great Society and the War on Poverty both lost long ago. Street-lamps pricking up from garbage-strewn wide concrete and broken hilly weeded tarmac streets like hypos, the tips of which appeared sharp and threatening but which had turned blunt and useless against the skin of the low sunset sky. Huddled figures overdressed in good weather and bad. Bashed-in, busted, rotted out, weather-beaten clapboard three- four- and five family houses littered with filthy laundry, rent garbage bags like piñatas from purgatory, mangled plastic toys obsolete from Holiday charity toy drives from days of yore, all shaded the gray streets with hopeless populace and gave the smooth new thoroughfares and the ancient pot-holed cow paths slathered with cheap tar, a sense of being central to a village of a kind.
A primitive village of the remnant welfare food-stamp issued crack-pipe doomed.
This was where Null lived.
It was in the basement of the Fidelis projects, a bombed-out post war experiment in enlightened New England social integration run amok. Decades ago, corrupt maintenance men and superintendents lived there, trading inattention and exploitation for rent and making heating and basic decency of accommodation a side business. Null and the kid went through the cabbage, feces and urine acrid smelling lobby by the elevator-turned-fireplace and the graffiti paeans to Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent. Li’l’ Wayne and the rest of the pop cultural droppings of anger and impotency masked as swagger.
Neither Null nor the boy gagged at the thick scent.
When they negotiated the black, dust caked, cobweb-mossed dingy gray once white oil-based pint sheathed steel spiral staircase down to the dark fetid basement foyer whose elevator bank had long ago become a crack hole and unisex bathroom, it gave the boy an incongruous jolt. After Null spun down through several locks, including one old style New York police buttress and swung back the seamy brown painted steel-faced security door back, it revealed a space that was bright white, immaculate and nearly empty.
There was a cot, pulled neat and tight with hospital corners on the blankets and sheets, halogen lighting bolted in from the ceiling smoothly plastered white, stereo speakers hooked up to a turntable, CD changer and amplifier perched on a low glass coffee table spotlessly clean, a refrigerator, sink, television, all of it not more than five years old. All of it on the winning side of the battle against a persistent collection of urban dust. It looked like the quarters of a military prisoner quarantined for debriefing. It looked like the place had been burnished clean with toothbrushes, painted down to the finest crevasse between molding and wall with Popsicle sticks and fine attention, scrubbed, mopped, wiped down, dusted and purged for thousands of hours.
That was because it had.
“Better than I thought,” said the kid.
“It's ethical,” said Null. “An approximation, like most of what I do.”
“You can't take the cot this time. I need to lie flat and recover.”
“The floor is fine.”
“It's clean,” said Null. “No rats.”
He pointed a remote and too-loud blues abruptly filled the room, moaning, old, lonesome, crackling with antiquity, channeled rage and hopelessness. Real blues, delta blues, Charley Patton's original guttural conviction in the solidity of strife.
“What the fuck is that?” the kid, Ken Embers, asked.
“God's music,” said Null, lowering the sound to a level less able to give the sense of penetrating the stony tomb chambers of his new self to permit some depth of raw human feeling to at least have a presence there. Like always, it was a splendid imitation that climaxed in failure.
“It's a wailing death chant! It's fucking painful!”
“Exactly.”
He shut out the lights.
Null didn't sleep the way other men slept, but then Null did very little that was like other men.
The kid slept, though, soundly through a delirium of sometimes violent reenactment.
Null, blank of mind and heart, empty and serene in an oblivion of human will, having forsaken now the sound of the iPod MP3 screaming blues, field hollers, work songs and moans of Leadbelly for the urban bleat of street crime in the air and the old forgotten crimes of another dispatched and ruined adolescent's life. Ken Embers was a talker in his sleep, and he went on and on in the flat and half-swallowed tones of the somnolent confessional like he was struggling to get it all in at once.
He was just another mechanical pipe-fitter's son from Billerica, not a garden spot to begin with, a post industrialized rural sink hole of urban sleaze with a long criminal tradition of cozened New England secrecy. There was no unburied truth in Billerica, just a sanctimonious outward shell of half-garbled fact. But Kenny spoke of his past with barely any garble at all in febrile sleep.
His father, a distant disciplinarian whose only closeness to him was his hands on him, started visiting him at night after his thirteenth birthday in order to further put his hands on him. The kid was his by rights after all, as chattels, to do with as he pleased when he pleased until he could make a man out of him. It was the safest way to keep the family together, without the outside risk of pursuing the blasphemy of his need more directly in the taboo open Boston gay scene. And for it to be with his own blood, kept it feeling natural and not at all as sick as it had felt when he was in the army.
To make a man out a boy, you first have to make a punk out of him so he understands just what a man is from what he is not.
This was taught to Daddy Embers in the communal tile shower stall of the bivouac on Parris Island.
Domestic tranquility was assured, but for a dog.
The dog in question was no mutt, but a pure-bred, a boxer named Goldie, who bonded close with Kenny. When the dog grew big enough, it tried to protect him. Daddy Embers was on him one night, making him scream and cry, to which his mother turned a deaf ear sunk deep into her pillows. Goldie, in turn, sunk her teeth deep into Daddy Embers right thigh and stopped him cold while raping Kenny, making him run madly after her, pants around his ankles, drunk and falling over. That was the first time.
The next time, Daddy was ready for the dog, when he pounced on Kenny, kept him pinned under the blankets and this time didn't enter him with bloody abandon. He waited there, making mock noises just as if he were at his son in the usual day.
Goldie came fiercely bounding.
She landed hard on Daddy, receiving for her trouble the flat bottom of a metal pot swung full in the face.
Daddy beat her with it, full in the face, as she went at him, still trying to save the unsalvageable Kenny. It ended after her skull was fractured and her left eye was gone.
The noise was so bad the police visited, found the boy cradling his lolling dog in a puddle of blood, Daddy and mother screaming, caught in a volley of a hollering frenzy. The police didn't guess—they knew, told Daddy in no uncertain terms, they knew, which only made him laugh, so they shrugged him off a warning and did nothing. Goldie recovered and kept watch over Kenny with even more ferocity, right up until the day she disappeared.
According to Daddy, some mean kids in the area—neo-Nazis, he had said—found her, tortured her with a knife and killed her by forcing her to swallow a lit cherry bomb, then tacked up what was left of her to the side of the house as a warning to Kenny, who was already showing signs of being as queer as a three-dollar bill, as Daddy liked to say. Kenny took her down from the side of the house in a fog of adoring love, regret and frustrated tears.
Kenny buried her hide alone.
Then he belonged to Daddy all the way, that is until he was too old, used, drugged up, dragged out and shattered to be cute anymore. As worthless as his fucking half-blind boxer dog. Then when Kenny was diagnosed with a prolapsed anus and had to eat up the health insurance deductible with emergency surgery, well, that was the last straw. Sixteen was the age Daddy had to make it when he was a kid, and his own father drove him off in the station wagon and deposited him in downtown Boston with five bucks in his pockets and a warning not to call home. Sixteen would do for Sunny Boy too, who was queer as a three-dollar bill, anyway.
After booting Kenny out, Daddy told everybody in the Taverns on Main Street that he was a runaway, then pulled up stakes with his generally half-in-the-bag wife and went to live in New Smyrna Beach Florida, where the local of the pipe-fitters union had purchased blocks of favorably priced properties for cronies of a particular type. And Daddy had done his time as a sidelines head-breaker, when government contracts were lean, before the sinking of the Central Artery's Big Dig made everybody fat again.
Kenny was the original dispose-a-kid. Trick him out, suck him dry and dump him into an emptiness of helpless consent.
After the usual suburban tour of the chicken hawk circuit that started off in Chinatown and wound up somewhere on Pleasant Street in Belmont, Kenny was rescued by fellow chicken and sometime bagman, lookout and distributor for Malek the Mallet's crystal meth' and Ice line, Jimmy “Blue Eyes” Swain. Though the rest of him was as near to black as it could be, the eyes were cerulean—heartbreak summer's day. It wasn't long before the two boys as lovers pulled a railroad flat together in Quincy, distributing Malek's produce all over the south shore out of Blue Eyes’ wounded used Fiat.
They found Jimmy in the crushed-up Fiat in a gully out in Mishawum, fingers, toes, nose, legs and elbows broken. Paranoid Malek had decided that ol' Blue Eyes had gone into business for himself, which although untrue, explained as much absence, irresponsibility and missing product as Malek needed to have explained. Blue Eyes had explained that he was HIV positive, but Kenny didn't care. His life in his eyes was over, but for shared moments of intimacy between them.
Malek paid for the funeral, gave Kenny a spouse's stipend for a few months, albeit grudgingly. He was sentimental about such needless death of the young, even when doomed, gay, drug and disease-ridden as was Blue Eyes. A stone punk, who didn't last more than a few hours down at Gary Lee Obidowski's Garage.
Ken Embers recited all of this in disconnected, free-form fragments which Null pieced together with penetratory focus in the darkness. He had the shakes and night sweats, calling for the dog, the lover, the help of god.
Null said one thing, having analyzed the kid's life for possible value and use and finding none—two words:
“Balance due.”
And he restored balance of a kind from out of the intermittent quiet by loudly blasting the blues.
The kid woke up screaming and Null, feeling nothing at all, nevertheless screamed with him.