RONAN
“What the hell have you done?”
Katch caught me off guard, sitting in the dark on my pitch-black porch. I stood there, stunned, my postcoital brain too foggy to properly process information, until he sucked smoke from his clove cigarette and the red ember lit his face enough to recognize him.
“Uh . . . nothing,” I said. My skin was still aflame from the joy of pressing against Dom’s, but I would carry that fire like a secret to my grave.
“Think,” Katch said. “Does the name Tom Minniq mean anything to you?”
“Of course,” I said. “Part of our plan, mine and Attalah’s. An imaginary—”
“Look at this,” he said, and held out his cell phone. “Does that look imaginary to you?”
On its screen, footage from a security cam. A man in an alley. Jug-handled ears; lean and hungry and leather-jacketed. A wisp of a hipster twink on his knees in front of him. The man standing turned to look at the camera, locking eyes with Katch and me, and smiled.
No doubt about it, it was Tom Minniq. In the flesh. Somehow.
A shiver climbed slow up my spine.
“I mean, he’s probably like you—right? A ghost? Harmless—”
With supernatural speed, Katch was up and out of his seat and across the porch, and my cheek was stinging from a slap I hadn’t even seen. “Does that feel harmless? Ghostlike?”
“No,” I pouted. “But you and your fucking whale ghosts didn’t exactly give me an operating manual, Katch. How was I supposed to know what I could—”
“Because you shouldn’t have been able to, Ronan. Something’s wrong with you, to be able to do what you’re doing.”
I shut my eyes and wished I had elected to believe that all these impossible things were mere meth withdrawal symptoms, and got the fuck out of Hudson to go get treatment. “Something’s definitely wrong with me.”
“They gave Attalah and me power, too, Ronan, but we’re not like you. We’re not broken inside. We don’t carry the same crippling pain” (blade) “still stuck inside us. Your hate—it’s special. It’s helped so much more anger blossom. All that hate, spreading through the city, it comes from you.”
I thought of the YOU ARE HATED billboard. I remembered being down in Attalah’s dungeon, her eyes wide when I told her my plan: That’s fucked up. I could taste it on my tongue as clearly as I had then: the sweet drug-tang of hatred. Was that you—that plan? I wondered. Were you feeding on me, and feeding me? Taking my anger and magnifying it, filling me up with monstrous ideas?
“They’re getting stronger every day, Ronan. But still, they’re losing. The balance has broken. Which means something way scarier than gentrification could take root.”
“What could be worse than everyone I love losing their homes?”
Katch sighed and stood. “Lots of places are under the sway of supernatural beings, Ronan. Some of them are a lot more savage than Hudson. Human sacrifice, mass murder, I don’t know, Children of the Corn–type shit. ‘The Lottery.’ The Wicker Man. I miss horror movies, dude.”
“They don’t have horror movies on the other side?”
His eyes glazed over briefly, and he grinned. “They have everything. I just . . . I don’t know. Time is weird there.” Katch shook his head. “Anyway. We don’t know what the fuck Tom Minniq is. Not a ghost. Nothing that was ever human. But something that takes on human form, from time to time. And you let it in.”
Wind scoured the screened-in porch. “Is there something we can do?”
Katch shook his head. “This was already a delicate operation before you fucked it up. The people we’re manipulating—”
“Wait. You can control people?”
“We can influence people,” Katch said. “But only people who are from here. Of here. We can whisper in their ears. Plant things in their dreams. Get them to do things. If it’s something they want to do, it’s no problem. If it’s something they don’t want to do, or would never do without our . . . guidance . . . it can get messy. The harder we have to push, the riskier it gets. Sometimes people . . . break.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s different for everyone. Suicide, violent rage, complete personality shift . . . depends on who they are and how badly they break. Some people it’s like a stroke—their brain stops being able to communicate with the rest of their body. That’s why we try very hard not to push people too far.”
“Attalah’s mom had a stroke,” I said. “Did you push her too far?”
Katch frowned. “She was on our side, so we thought there was no risk when we tried to make her destroy Pastor Thirza, to stop the Pequod Arms. But apparently . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Are you . . . pushing me?”
Katch laughed and clapped me on the back. “Don’t think of it like that. Anyway, you’re far too important for us to risk snapping you.”
***
STOPPING AT THE IRON HORSE TAVERN was not a wise decision. Also, it was one I had no memory of making. One minute I was walking away from Katch with my head on fire, and the next I was stuck on a bar stool trying to put it out.
Why shouldn’t I drink? Why not single-malt scotch? I was all of a sudden an obscenely wealthy man. And all I had to do was betray everything my father believed in. And unleash a hideous monster in the shape of a man. I waved my credit card like a sword that could slay the sea serpents encircling me.
Men and women watched with awe, as I guzzled glass after glass of whiskey. As soon as I got up off the stool I could see from how the room spun that it was too late for me.
Freight train tracks run right through upper Hudson, along Sixth Street, right below the park. Of course I know this. Everybody knows it. In the middle of the day a train rolls through town, bringing traffic to a halt for all of Hudson. This has probably been true since the nineteenth century.
But I guess I forgot. Because coming out of the Iron Horse, I stepped into the street and stumbled on the rails.
Which is why I’m lying here.
But that’s cool. Sixth Street is super comfortable.
* * *
MY MOTHER IS ONE WEEK DEAD.
The doorbell doesn’t stop ringing. Neighbors come with casseroles. I never thought I could get sick of Dad’s friend Shirl’s feta kalamata concoction, but here we are.
It’s me who answers the door. Sixteen-Year-Old Me, who smiles and thanks them. Invites them inside. Makes coffee. Tells them Dad just went down for a nap and he’s been running himself ragged so I don’t want to wake him up but that he’s gonna be so, so happy to hear you stopped by, and sorry that he missed you.
This nap of Dad’s has been going on for days. He hasn’t left his bedroom since the funeral, except for short trips across the hall to the bathroom. The butcher shop is only open because of the efforts of Marge and Kristof, the old Hungarian man who had been sort of a mentor to my dad and still helped out on weekends. Both stepped up in a major way, but they can’t do this for long. Kristof is funny and has a ton of amazing Old Country stories, but he’s slow as shit now and could barely hold up his end of the work when he had my father standing beside him to do 80 percent of it. Running a business involves making a lot of decision, which is neither of their strong suits. Marge is calling me for advice, so you know we’re fucked.
The butcher shop was already in a bad place financially. At the funeral someone said, You know how stressful it can be, to run a failing business, like no further explanation was needed for why my mom did what she did—
Why she killed herself—
How she could walk three miles down Route 9G and then out onto the Rip Van Winkle Bridge Pedestrian walkway and then—
Why she didn’t leave a note—
I open the door to his bedroom, just a crack. The smell of him is overpowering, like cigarettes and body odor and spilled scotch and Stetson cologne distilled and intensified.
And, underneath all that, faint and dying: her. Clean linen; Jean Naté After Bath Splash.
“Dad?” I say to the darkness.
Only silence answers.
Of course he’s in there, I tell myself. He has to be. Where else could he have gone? But I can’t bring myself to flick the light switch.
There’s a sound that might be breathing but could also be the crashing of distant waves. A restless sea.
(dreamsea)
“Goddammit, Dad.”
Maybe later I’ll be grateful to him for all of this. Maybe the day will come where I’ll think, his breakdown kept me busy. Made me run all the errands. Smile in all the faces. Soak up all the hypocrisy from the people who hated my mother. Gave me something to do with my mind, so I didn’t have time to wonder. So I didn’t lock myself in my room and go fucking nuts like he did.
Maybe. Maybe later. For now I hate him. For now I gather all my grief and loss and any underlying resentment I might have for her, for what she did, for how she left us, for how she left me, and heap it onto the bonfire of my anger at him.
* * *
STILL LYING in the middle of Sixth Street. My too-warm face feels good against the cold steel rail. How have no cars come, in all this time?
A man stands behind me. Or anyway something in the shape of one. He’s been there for a while. He squats down—I smell the sea, I smell rot, like something that clawed its way up out of the muck and took on human form.
“Tom,” I whisper.
“You’re pathetic,” he says, his voice a thrilling, menacing, masculine rumble. Fear and desire harden me, and then—I go away again.
* * *
MIDNIGHT, and I’m floating on an ocean the temperature of blood.
I always imagined death would be white light, but instead it’s black water.
Naked; alone; knowing in my gut that there’s no land for a million miles in any direction. Laughing from a happiness deeper than anything I’ve ever felt before. I’m not afraid. I can tread water forever. All those swimming lessons at Oakdale really did the trick. Overhead the Milky Way arcs at a delirious angle, and the stars are splayed incorrectly across the sky.
Somewhere, I know, I have work to do. Schemes and plans to pull off.
I know all this, but the ache of it is so small it’s pleasant, like when your train leaves the station and you remember you forgot to wash the dishes, and you think, Oh well, I didn’t intentionally fail to do it, I am absolved of blame, nothing matters.
Something massive moves beneath me. I feel it displacing the water, even though it’s far below my slowly moving feet. I’m not afraid of it. Emotion comes off it like a smell. I feel love. I feel belonging. I feel connected.
A dark shape moves through the sky. Too fast and solid to be a cloud. A whale, I realize, without immediately also thinking That’s impossible, whales don’t fly, there’s no such thing as a sky whale because here (on the dreamsea) the boundaries of what’s possible are so much wider. It is the twin of the thing swimming beneath me.
I could stay here. Be part of this. Forever.
Except . . . There are so many people to punish. Everyone who hurt my mom, pushed her to do what she did. Everyone who is trying to destroy my town—
I try to bat these thoughts away, to hold tight to the bliss of belonging. But being who we are is a habit. And routines like that are hard to break out of.