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I saw you set the candle in water, watched it burn until it went out. Were you thinking of me?
Gabriel saw the eyes he longed for, bursts of memory seen through a gauzy curtain where gray silhouettes moved at random and the room was alive with whispers.
Sometimes he heard the sounds of crying, sometimes screams. Then silence as the night began to talk to him, all within a tangle of nightmares. He remembered the friends who shared this hell, friends marked with the same broken presence he knew so well. Friends who had passed on and left him abandoned and alone. Why did they have to do that?
He saw it in detail now, the chairs, the tables, the hierarchy of the place. Her hierarchy. He didn’t belong, she’d made that clear enough.
He couldn’t decide what was worse. Girls being teased and humiliated in the locker rooms with cruel words that made no sense, or boys doing the macho thing, trying to get noticed, trying to keep their egos intact. Boys who hid behind a blank, indifferent mask, saying few words but just enough to get them by. And they say a man is only as good as his word.
He wondered how he could do better, make better, see better. It wasn’t like he didn’t know. There were classmates, teachers, friends who could attest to a strong religious stance at school. Not like he hadn’t heard it all before and wondered.
He just didn’t want it rammed down his throat, that was all.
There was a pastor on 19th Street who came to the school to counsel and read scripture. What was his name? A man you warmed to because he had a sense of understanding hopelessness. He’d told Gabriel once that if a man claims to be in the light and hates someone, he is still in the dark.
The dark was a cold, lonely place where people go to die. Trouble was, Gabriel was very much alive and it all seemed wrong somehow. He was done kidding himself. Whenever he heard the distant sound of an airplane in the sky he thought of home. Bright sunny days as a child with a swollen diaper between his knees, looking up into the clouds to see where that sound was coming from.
His gut turned with the thought and his nostrils filled with the smells of childhood. Freshly mown grass, a girl’s laughter, his mother’s voice. What had gone wrong?
Then a new thought. If he turned himself in to the police, the screeching, the needling and the pain would stop. The shakes would stop. The vomiting, the sweats... Anything was better than this.
There was another way, and that was take his own life. The longer he waited, the more he wondered.
Demon never once portrayed himself as anything other than powerful and killing Paddy Brody had been a Herculean job. It didn’t seem possible for one man. Quick as a flash Gabriel’s whole world went muddy, with slashes of red and gray, and the scent of rust. The hatred seemed to accelerate one minute and dissipate the next, and he was never sure how to draw back the curtain to let in the light. He’d tried often enough and kept seeing things, orange eyes and dark shapes. It was starting to get to him.
Only a man knows how another man feels, the despair, the degradation, the panic. And the punch, when it came, hurt Gabriel right down to his secret place.
Change is good, so they say.
Shards of memories meant only one thing. His past was broken, swept up and thrown away. Today was new. It felt different, as if something vital was missing, and it wasn’t until he talked himself into drawing back the curtains of the room, squinting through a shaft of sunlight that he realized what it was.
He wasn’t sad any more.
