I WENT OVER to the coffee machine to get a better view. The killer had no neck. He was overdeveloped and sloppy. When he turned his head, I could see that his mustache was red and filled with spit. Then I gave him a general once-over with a degree of disbelief because my search for this man had taken me much too far.
I poured a cup of coffee. It was bitter. I added two spoonfuls of nondairy creamer and three sugars. Some guy was hanging out by the coffee machine being quietly but distinctly out of it. He kept talking in low tones with no encouragement from me.
“I’ve smoked some reefer and I got a headache,” he said. “I’ve had a bad one since Saturday. I guess I’m out five dollars. A five-dollar headache.”
I could see Dino checking me out from his seat. He flashed me a big smile, convinced he had done his duty by turning me on to a really good thing.
“I’ve been smoking since 1964 and I ain’t ever had no headache. It’s them Trinidadians messing with the marijuana, putting in birdseed.”
Dino waved at me. I smiled and waved back. David Crosby looked at the clock. His eyes were blue. He was a blue-eyed little boy.
“Used to be when it was in the hands of brothers, everywhere you’d go in Harlem the smoke was the same. No wacky bags then. No headaches.”
Crosby was getting ready to go. He ran his large hands over his greasy hair and was out the door. I was right after him. I didn’t say goodbye to Dino or anything.
Outside the sky was the kind of blue that only comes out when the sun goes down in early summer. There are days, now and then, when you’re standing outside from the moment it starts until hours of beer and summertime conversation have moved the evening into night and that color into a midnight blue. Midnight blue has to be paid attention to softly if you want to see the blue. If you don’t really look, it will seem black.
I followed him for three blocks before I noticed that at night I listen more and I also hear more as a result. During the day, the eyes take priority over the ears for me. Only when it’s dark does the music come through. He walked with his head down. I walked with my ears. We heard a carpet of machine roar, plush in horns. On top were the voices, and in between were radios. Then he got into the driver’s seat of his cab. I walked into the street and flagged down one of my own.
“Excuse me. Do you see that cab in front? Could you follow him wherever he goes? Thank you.”
“Okay,” said the Israeli behind the wheel. He had a Playboy decal on the windshield.
The thing about a cab is that you sit back in the leather like a movie star and instead of being part of the street and the life of the city, you only watch it. You don’t come into contact. The only sounds are the sirens and the shrill whistles that bike riders blow when you’re in their way. Then David Crosby parked in front of his and Charlotte and Beatriz and Daniel’s building and walked into the hall.
What had begun inside me as a private disaster had played itself out so thoroughly that everything around me was also in ruins. Confusion and violence defined the world in which I was living, as well as the world that was living inside of me.
I took the pearl-handed gun out of my pocket and squeezed it between my hands. I pressed it against my heart and over my breasts, hard until my nipple was squashed flat against the bone. I passed it between my legs and in my mouth, in every secret part of me. I rubbed it over my face, pushing its nose into my cheeks, cleaning the trigger with my tongue. Then I was ready. Up the broken stairs, slowly at first, and then fast with no fear, stomping, tripping, flying down the stinking hallway. I slammed against the door with my fists first, with my right hand already gone from Sunshine’s face, then kicking until my feet gave way too. So I threw my entire body against it over and over because I was the only person in this twisted city who wanted justice and was determined to get it.
I was fermenting in my own sweat. I was dancing in my own blood. I was panting, exhausted, looking for a solution in the limitations of my own body, when I saw his blue eye look out at me through the peephole. It was bloodshot and frightened, like he had been crying all the way home from AA. It was one eye with no context and no purpose. I put the nozzle of Priscilla Presley’s pistol up through the eyepiece and then I fired. There was a nauseating whine, like a pig being slaughtered. Then the door began to shake. It began to tremble and I began to tremble from the shots of electric current. I was holding on to the gun. I couldn’t let go. Electricity whipped through it and throughout my body, conquering me, making me part of the gun, part of the door, part of that rotting tenement building. The gun stuck in the door as I rattled and whined like the useless carcass of antiquated machinery. Like junk. That’s when Beatriz came up behind me, pulled me away from the door, and pried my hands off the gun, which clattered, like me, to the floor. I experienced a physical manifestation of who I had spiritually been for the past four months. It started with that snowy night in March when I got a weapon from a girl in drag, and degenerated into this hot vomit called late July when everything is putrid in New York City. It was the numbest pain. It was a dull wound caused by some foreign power stronger than myself, which could dominate me whenever it pleased. I looked at Beatriz but she was watching the first drops of his bloody slime seeping slowly out of the gash in the door and sliding past my face onto the floor.
“I got him,” I said to Beatriz. But I didn’t move form the floor. I was completely exhausted. His blood was on the collar of my shirt. “I got the guy who killed Punkette. I made everything right. I suffered but I never gave up and now I have a victory, do you hear me? I have a goddamn victory. I won.”
“What are you talking about?” Beatriz said. “You weren’t going through all of this to find some man. You are just a lonely person who had absolutely nothing better to do. Don’t fool yourself.”
“Don’t fool myself? You should talk.” Then I remembered what was really important. “Where’s Charlotte?”
“Sleeping.” “Well, Charlotte is a goddamn liar, talking about fooling yourself. Everything she told me about you wasn’t true.”
“She did the right thing,” Beatriz said. “Why should she tell you anything about us? That’s private. Why should I tell you anything? I don’t even know you.”
I snapped my head back like she had kicked me in the face and cracked my head against the bloody base of the door.
“Are you all right?” Beatriz said without thinking.
I didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t even there. I was a floating sensation. A sea.
“Forget it,” Beatriz said, disgusted by her own show of tenderness. “I’m not going to take care of you. Now get out of here before the cops come and it will all be forgotten eventually.” And she went back into her apartment.