The match flares, goes out.
Longer lasting than the flame,
its heat on my cheek–Debisu
Tonight the dingy “Tattoos” sign hangs on the cardboard rib cage of a dancing skeleton with accordioned crepe paper arms and legs. I push through the door and am greeted not by the usual tinkling bell but by a banshee howl, no less eerie for being recorded. Satanic heavy metal music blares and cigarette smoke fogs the air.
“Lix!” I call.
“Who’s that? Is that you, Will?”
I follow the sound of his voice and find him hunkered down on the floor near the corner nook. His pale face is flushed, his eyes squinty.
“I’m glad you’re here, Will. Will, you got to help me. I don’t feel so good.”
He doesn’t sound good, either, his voice hoarse and listless, overpowered by the loud music.
“What’s the matter, Lix?”
“Oh, I’m hurting a little. I need a little something, you know?” He takes short, avid puffs on a cigarette to ease the pain of craving something stronger than nicotine.
I do know, all too well. His nose runs, his eyes tear, his skin crawls, and muscles twitch. He’s tense and achy, nauseated. “Your regular supplier out of business, huh?” I ask.
“Yeah, you know something about that, don’t you?” he says with a feeble giggle. “But you can get some stuff for me, can’t you?”
“Because I was holding once before? You knew I was because you found it on me when I was unconscious behind the Metro, the night Overshort shot at me. You were the one who rolled me.” It was Lix who took the heroin Carlotta had sent me to buy from Shrike. He took my topcoat and my cigarettes, the ones Overshort gave me. That’s why he had an open pack of Verves in his nook, although later he told me they weren’t his brand.
He gives a weak shrug. “You was just a bum then. It was a good score for me, fifteen bills worth of horse. I didn’t know there’d be more to it.”
“More junk? I told you then that was something special. I’m no hophead, Lix.”
“You say. I seen you suck the stuff down.” He shifts nervously and drags long, black-enameled fingernails across his cheek. “Anyhow, that’s not what I meant. I meant about us. Helping each other. I helped you. Now you help me. Will, you got to help me.” His voice is a raspy whisper, his throat rubbed raw by the smoke. He hugs himself to keep his body from shattering.
“Why should I? You lied to me, Lix.”
He looks up at me with bleary eyes. “Huh?”
“About Hector Waltann. You said you didn’t know where he was but you did. The condo at Shays’ Landing. You not only knew it, you had a key for it. You threw the pizza at me. You were Pizza Boy.”
He looks down, his bent knees tick back and forth. “Yeah. There was something of mine at Hector’s. The way you was asking about him, I knew I had to get it back fast. Hell, I knew he’d ditched the place. Shrike was watching it. But I figured nobody’d pay attention to a pizza man showing up.”
“The blue jacket, the cap?”
“Got it from Nikki. Them girls at the Metro always have clothes for dressing up. Like this.” He waves his hand over his costume, a sheer pink blouse with billowing sleeves under yet another vest, this one pink satin; a net skirt over black leggings. “For Halloween. I’m a fairy, see? It’s a joke. I had a crown here, somewhere.” He pats the floor around him.
“The black cape with the hood? You borrowed that from Nikki, too, didn’t you? The night you killed Hector. You were the caped woman at the Jade Pagoda.”
“Aw, Hector was damn near dead already. All he wanted to do was fuck and get high. He was wasted, man.”
“Fuck ... with you?”
“Yeah, with me.” He smiles. “Like I told you, I’m the best. Hector knew it. That’s why he didn’t want me to leave him. But I wanted you.”
“Fresh meat. With a pocket full of smack?”
He presses together lips dark as plums. “It wasn’t just that. I liked you. You liked me, I could tell. When I touched you”
Goosebumps sprout along my back.
“I didn’t set out to kill him,” Lix says. “He said he had a little stuff for me. After I did it, I told him we was through but he didn’t want to hear it. Said he’d do anything to keep me but you know, there wasn’t nothing more he could do for me, see. He was a mess. Broke, strung out, sick.” He pauses to drag on his cigarette. “I did him a favor, really. Put him out of his misery. Now I’m free for you.”
“For me? You got it all wrong, Lix. Get up.”
Lix stands and staggers toward me and I catch the fragrance of patchouli, arresting as incense, seductive as pheromones. The powdery, woody, aromatic scent sparks my recall of rain-soaked semi-consciousness in the alley behind the Metro when Lix rolled me for my stash. It was patchouli I smelled when Lix bent over me to apply my tattoo, which now stings as though infected. I would have made the connection then if I hadn’t been stoned. Damn! Should have recognized it lingering in Room Eight of the Jade Pagoda. Might have noticed it when he visited me in the hospital if my sense of smell hadn’t been crippled by river water and disinfectant.
“I’m arresting you for the murder of Hector Waltann, Lix Gemini.”
He shakes his head sadly. “Nah, I can’t let you do that. It wouldn’t work. See, I’m not like other people.”
“Maybe not like other people. Like other murderers, you are.”
“No, Will, you don’t understand. I’m really not. I’ll show you.”
He removes his vest and the sight of him stuns me. Under the veil of the pink blouse, high on his rib cage are breasts, small and neat as a young girl’s. Not mere adipose pouches but true breasts, round and smooth as nectarines.
“You’re . . . a woman?”
He pulls the blouse over his head, which lifts his chest. His nipples are crimson points on those tiny breasts. He runs his hands down his body, over his breasts, his torso, his belly. “Yes. And no.”
What is he—she?—talking about?
His hands move down to skim the skirt and leggings off narrow hips. He steps out of them and stands before me naked and frail. Below a pale flat hairless belly is a penis of sorts, about the size of a thumb, small as a baby’s but tumescent and dark red. “See? Not like other people.”
No. Not like anyone or anything I have ever seen, so aberrant as to seem made, not born. I should be horrified, repelled. Instead I am riveted, not by the sick fascination that draws audiences to side shows and slasher movies, but in awe.
“You can have me, Will,” he says. He holds his hands out. “I can be everything to you. Woman. Man.” His voice is a husky purr. “Both at the same time.”
Both at the same time. Countless permutations.
“You in me. Me in you.”
Both at the same time.
“I am the best. Hector knew it. He gave up everything for it. He begged me not to leave him.” He licks his lips. “You want me, don’t you?”
A woman who is a man. A man who is a woman. Awestruck, I keep forgetting to breathe. Oxygen-deprivation is making me dizzy. I gulp smoky air.
“Think about it, man.”
I can’t. It’s madness. With shaky hands, I hold out a set of restraints. “Put on some clothes, Lix.”
“Put my clothes on?”
“Some street clothes.” I won’t take him down to the station dressed as a fairy. He wouldn’t last five minutes in lock-up. “I want you to come with me.”
“Anywhere, Will. I’ll make you happy. You’ll never need anyone else.” He pads barefoot to a cardboard box.
“Come on now, Lix. It’s time to go.” I try to keep my voice level, to project resolve, authority, but to me I sound pleading, apologetic.
He turns away from me and bends from the hips to rustle in the box, displaying the perfect globes of his buttocks and the dark secret between his thighs. The staggering sight paralyzes my vocal cords but maybe it doesn’t matter. I have said what I came to say, what I had to say, and he is pulling up his jeans. The zipper rasps, his elbows saw back and forth as he works the top button. His shoulders come up and he turns to face me—with the apple-carving knife in his hand, the blade held flat, the better to slip between my ribs.
“Lix,” I say, my voice soft, “do you really want to kill me?”
“I don’t want to but I ain’t going to prison. Can you imagine what that would be like for me?”
Yes, I can. Before they kill him, they’ll toy with him, little boys pulling the wings and legs off a fly. It would be hell. If it were me, I would kill to avoid that. I don’t doubt he will. I could go for my gun but it wouldn’t matter. At this range he can rush me faster than I can draw.
The tape deck howls. Spectral light, herald of a PTSD flashback, begins to strobe. Killing Shrike, solving the mystery of my own shooting, hasn’t cured my fear of death.
No, I will not go spinning off into space! A panic attack has its own weird energy: accelerated pulse, shallow breathing, tense muscles. Relax. Breathe deeply! Be here, now. Be here! Now!
I smell scents—smoke, sweat, patchouli. See flickering lights—not hallucinations but the bright and shadow of the studio. The twisted sylph at its center is not an apparition, it’s Lix, naked from the waist up, his phenomenal chest rising and falling with each breath.
The breath. His attack will come with an exhalation. He’ll take a breath, and then he’ll pounce. Look for it and be ready. Watch his chest rise. Fall.
Rise.
Fall.
Rise—
He lunges. There’s nowhere to run so I don’t back away, I go forward. Head down, I dive under his lancing arm, roll into his legs. He tumbles over my back and into the color cart. Bottles torpedo him and crash to the floor, carpeting it with glass shards. Lix flings the cart at me. Barely on my feet, I catch it to deflect the blow and almost toss it aside. No—I hold it in front of me, an awkward, long-legged aluminum shield. We face off on a floor treacherous with spilled ink and splintered glass. His grinning mouth a dark smudge, his body smeared with ink and striped with bloody scratches, Lix lashes out. I parry with the cart. The knife sings dully on the cart’s top shelf. Lix stumbles with the recoil, giving me just enough time to flip the cart around, top against my chest. With Lix caged in its legs, I can keep him at bay, shield myself from his stabbing arm yet get in close enough to kick out at his knee. I hurt him enough to drive him screaming onto a bed of glass and still he has the knife. He kicks and slashes at my legs. I trap him under the cart and lean on it to keep him pinned while I grab for my gun. The casters betray me. Lix wriggles and squirms, the cart flies out from under me, and I fall on him. He embraces me, his knife arm targets my back. I jam the gun in his side and fire.