“This is so fucking not good,” Chief Propst says, when Dom walks into the station. At first he thinks it’s being said to him, but no, the chief’s been saying it over and over again all day.
Word spread through the force fast, about what happened at Historical Materialism. Dom pours himself some coffee, sits down at his desk. Officer Van Vleck is typing under a blue tarp, from where the station ceiling’s leaking.
“The fucking mayor is on his way,” says the chief. The six-foot-six man has never seemed so small. He holds his hat over his stomach like a shield. Freshly shaved cheeks shine.
Dom reads the report. A rock through the window of the Warren Street store, and then a series of big paper bags stapled shut, all of which burst open on impact. Splattering rancid meat all over the walls and floor and countless priceless antiques. In the pictures it looks like more than one murder went down in there. The stink, to hear Chief Propst tell it, made eyes water and stomachs reject their contents.
Rome Byles had been out on patrol that night. He was on the scene within three minutes, drawn by the siren that went off when the window broke, and says he saw someone fleeing the scene. Young, white, male, hooded black sweat suit. A little red wagon was left behind, complete with meat ooze, but there are no fingerprints on it.
“So fucking not good. We got an election coming up, and Winter Fest right after that.”
Dom drinks his coffee, does some paperwork, gracefully exits before Mayor Coffin can arrive.
No wonder the mayor’s taking this seriously, Dom thinks, heading down to Second Street. The new arrivals got spooked bad enough by that billboard; this is going to make them lose their minds. They’ll be seeing hostile natives hiding behind every bush. And calling us about every loiterer and slammed door.
* * *
WHEN THE COPS HAVE GONE, and the CLOSED sign is hung on the door and the door is locked, Rob Creighton is alone inside Historical Materialism with the stink of death and a hundred ruined artifacts. The bottoms of his shoes are gummed with soft rotten fat. Flies buzz. Maggots from the meat already emerged from their pupae. There’s only a quarter of a bottle of bleach left, in the closet in the back of his store. I’ll have to go out and get more. I’ll have to venture into this city that hates me.
Wind whistles through the huge wound in his plate-glass storefront. Locals gawk, across the street. He sees his old tenant Heather, looking meek and helpless as ever. He wishes he had curtains. When he moved in he’d inquired about getting a steel gate installed, but all the other store owners said it would be “an egregious violation of aesthetic norms.”
We’re all undefended, he thinks, looking up and then down Warren Street. Our precious aesthetic norms might just get us all killed.
* * *
HEATHER GETS BACK to the couch she’s crashing on, and sits to savor the throb in her chest. Hate; pride; anger; ecstasy—all given physical form, it feels like, a sweet jagged pleasurable lump (blade) (tumor) of it. The stink of rotting meat is still on her fingertips. It seeped through the work gloves, and she is glad that it did.
I did that.
She shuffles through photos on her phone. Two girls, getting older fast. She has so few pictures of them.
You see, girls? Your grandmother says I’m not strong enough to do what I need to do to get you back, but look how strong I am. Look what I can do. What laws I can break. What fear I can strike in the hearts of evildoers.
She’d stopped by the store that day. So had half of Hudson, seemed like, a whole crowd of them standing on the sidewalk, so she wasn’t worried about showing her face at the scene of her crime. She saw it, the fear on the face of the man who ran it. So much fear, on so many faces.
In her purse is a fake lipstick tube, hollowed out for holding drugs. In the tube is a sweet huge chunk of crystal. Some sexy little Latin or Arab guy with a bad whale tattoo down at the Half Moon had just handed her a baggie of it the night before, said she looked like she could use a pick-me-up.
She pulls out the lipstick, tips the meth out onto the table. Looks at it. Puts it back in the tube. Looks at her photos some more.
* * *
FROM THE HUDSON GAZETTE:
Photographic It Boy Ronan Szepessy, long the darling of the darker edge of the New York City editorial scene, has come home. Twenty years ago the Hudson native fled from a very different city, one where being an artist and openly gay were not realistic life choices.
“Growing up here gave me some pretty deep wounds,” Ronan told me recently. “I dealt with a ton of homophobic violence, both physical and emotional. And I guess you could say that every photo I’ve ever taken has been an attempt to stitch those wounds closed.”
For all its pain, this healing process has richly rewarded Ronan. He’s shot for some of the biggest new names in fashion, and his work has been in ads and editorials for everything from Vogue to Paper to BuzzFeed. Equal parts crime scene and sex scene, a Ronan Szepessy image oozes a studied, nostalgic sort of sleaze.
“Coming home to Hudson has taught me so much about who I am as an artist,” Ronan says. “This is the landscape of my dreams—and my photography. All at once I could see that I’d spent the past two decades trying to get back here, reconstruct it out of whatever raw materials were around me.”
Voluptuous bodies lay sprawled in narrow alleys. Bootlegger molls leer from high windows. Figures grapple in front of a rickety line of buildings, the whole picture so unsaturated it could be in black and white. Some of it is trickery and aftereffects—he didn’t rent Ford Model T’s and artfully arrange them in the background—but it’s a testament to the strength of Ronan’s compelling, incantatory vision (and his skill with Photoshop) that the extraneous elements only enhance the spell these images cast.
Now Ronan will have his first major gallery exhibition, a retrospective covering his entire career, right here in Hudson.
“Walker Evans photographed Hudson. Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train passed through Hudson. History is alive here. It’s not some dead thing on a shelf, or under glass in an antique store. That’s what I’ve been trying to capture, in every photo I took. No matter how far I fled, my art kept bringing me back here. In a sense, I never left. In a sense, I’ll never leave.”
And Ronan believes the time is right for his unique perspective.
“I hope I can be a bridge,” he says. “Between the old Hudson and the new. With all the animosity bubbling up to the surface lately, I think we need to have a serious conversation about who we are and what this city really is. I hope my art can help that along.”
“Ghosts of Home” opens December 22nd at the Volker Gallery, 557 Warren Street.
* * *
DOM IS AT work; Ronan is otherwise engaged. Attalah opens the bottom drawer of her dresser, pulls out the sketchbook.
Once upon a time, she went through one of these every six months. Drawings poured from her pen like water from a faucet. Then a pad would last her a year; then two years. This one she hasn’t cracked open in five.
The pencil stuck between its pages needs no sharpening. She sets it down on the bed, sets herself down beside it. Takes out her phone, summons up a formidable horned tusked warthog demon mask fashioned by the Bamana people of Mali.
The doorbell rings. Attalah ignores it.
She deserves a moment to herself. But so much is happening. Just last night she had Rudy Snitko on her doorstep, telling her he’s gotten twenty different Hudson contractors to commit to a nonparticipation pact—carpenters and landscapers and plumbers and painters determined not to do any work for any of the invaders. To her great shock, Ronan even got his shit together enough to set everything up for Ohrena to have her big moment with Jark.
And the person at the door won’t stop. And really she shouldn’t be ignoring it—for all she knows it could be another aggrieved Hudsonian, with another new wrinkle, another brilliant plan to help fight back.
Her mother had always said it, remembering her own community organizing glory days, and Attalah had tried hard to believe it but had never quite been able to: people are incredible, once they figure out how powerful they are. Another thing she always said was: This stuff works best when it’s a little bit out of your control. That’s what Dr. King used to say. In the beginning you might need to manipulate people, but once they get going, they’ll start manipulating you.
So she puts back the sketchbook.
“Treenie,” she says, when she opens the door, and the smile she’d worked up fades fast.
Because whatever Treenie came for, it wasn’t to help save Hudson. She’d made too much money helping suck it dry.
“Attalah.”
Five silent seconds pass, so Attalah says, “What can I do for you?”
“Can I come in? It’s cold out.”
She shrugs and steps inside. Treenie follows. She smells like clean sweat, like she’s been jogging. Her hair is in a ponytail. She’s always been almost a pretty woman. Attalah doesn’t ask her to sit down, offer any hot or cold beverages.
“Isn’t it crazy?” Treenie says, shutting the front door and leaning her back against it. “What’s happening around town?”
“What, exactly?”
“You know. All this new . . . I guess hate is the only word for it. That billboard. The buttons. And now it’s escalated to violence. You heard about Historical Materialism?”
“Is it new, though? This . . . hate. Or has it always been here? Just . . . under the surface?”
Treenie folds her arms across her chest. “That’s a fascinating question, Attalah. I wonder.”
Attalah thinks: Of course she suspects I’m involved. I’ve been the face of the resistance for years now. But she’s just here on a hunch, on a hope. Trying to feel me out, provoke me into revealing something. She can’t possibly have any evidence. I’ve been too careful.
And then: I’ve been careful. But has everyone?
“Was that all you came for, Treenie? To talk about buttons?”
“If it’s been here all along, under the surface, like you say, what do you think could have brought it to the surface?”
“No idea.”
“This isn’t accidental. Someone’s behind it.”
“Interesting theory.”
Treenie smiles and takes a step forward. Attalah doesn’t like the new look on her face—eager, hungry—but she won’t take a step back.
“It’s not a theory,” Treenie says. “It’s happening. I know it is. You and Ronan Szepessy. You’re behind it all.”
Attalah laughs. “You’re an idiot, Treenie. You were in high school, and you are now. Back then you liked to think that getting so many people to fall in line behind you meant you were smart—and now you probably think because you’ve made so much money, that’s just more proof of how smart you are. But any idiot can make a lot of money, if all they want to do in life is to make a lot of money.”
“Deflect all you want. I know it’s true. I knew he was up to something, even before all this started. Why else would he have come home? Certainly not because he gave a shit about his father. So I’ve been following him. And the other day he came over here and stayed for hours.”
“So? He and my husband were best friends in high school. They’ve been reconnecting lately. They played fucking Super Mario Bros 3, for Christ’s sake.”
“But Dom wasn’t home. You were here alone.”
“He was waiting for Dom, then. And he got tired of waiting. And later he came back, and they played fucking Super Mario Bros 3. I’m sorry I don’t have time-stamped video footage to try to satisfy this grand jury you’ve got going on in your delusional head.”
Treenie flashes that grin again, the one she’d wanted to punch in high school and wants to punch now. “How are you doing it, exactly? What kind of schemes are you two orchestrating?”
Attalah grins back. “I didn’t have anything else planned today. Stay as long as you want, and spout whatever crazy bullshit makes you happy.”
“It’s okay. Of course I know you won’t tell me. That’s not why I came here. I wanted to tell you something, actually.”
“Be my guest.”
“Ronan Szepessy is fucking your husband.”
Attalah works hard to keep her face from doing anything. “Was there anything else you wanted to share?”
“No, just that.”
“Well, it’s been great catching up. Glad to hear you finally developed an imagination. I always like a good story.”
“Do you want details? I have them. You can ask your husband, if you want. Like I said, I’ve been keeping tabs on Ronan. I followed them to Livingston, after Dom picked Ronan up in his squad car. They drove down a private road, parked near the river, got in the back seat. Etc.”
Here, anger ekes in. Attalah feels it. Knows it’s wrong to let Treenie get to her. Tries to stop from saying anything. Can’t. “I know this will be difficult for you to understand, Treenie. Because you haven’t had a serious boyfriend since Scott Plass in goddamn tenth grade. You have no idea how marriages work, and you definitely don’t know the first fucking thing about me and my husband.”
“I figured you probably knew all this already. Once I saw it, I figured, this has to be some freaky open marriage shit she and Dom have got going on. And it’s a shame, because if I’d known he wasn’t fully off the market . . . but then again you and I are apparently not really his type.”
“You’re a disgusting little troll,” Attalah says, smiling. She won’t tell Treenie to get out. She’ll stand there with a smile on her face for as long as she has to, until Treenie turns tail and flees.