A night like any night, my bare mattress on the floor, old window glass between me and the street outside. A few bottles on the floor, one filled with piss in the corner—the toilet was three stories down and if there’d ever been a railing, there certainly wasn’t one now and I’d rather piss into a bottle than break my neck drunk in the dark.
Eduard had come and gone and he’d taken the best of me with him in his mouth and I was spent. I might have even been happy. I’d asked him to stay of course. I always asked him to stay.
“These houses freak me out,” he’d said, pulling on his pants both legs at a time with his fat beautiful ass on the edge of my bed.
“Door like mine, cops can’t get in,” I’d told him. “Not without us hearing.”
There was a back way out, too. A window, out onto the neighbor’s roof. You could get across a whole city block on rooftops in the right parts of Baltimore.
“Angels can get into this shit,” Eduard had told me, and then he’d left. The bar had fallen back down across the door and woken the mice in the walls and cupboards. Eduard spoke street American with a middling-thick German accent and his words had a way of staying in the room after he was gone.
He liked everything about me that I didn’t like about myself. He thinks I’m all hardened and shit.
I don’t see myself as a graverobber. It’s not like that.
◆
She’d died in spring like everyone else. Everyone does it in the springtime. Blood makes the flowers bloom and it melts the snow and it wakes the world from winter. She’d hanged herself, which is kind of classy, isn’t it, and there used to be like 600,000 people in this city and now there’s less than half of that, but the flowers know how to bloom.
Death is really simple for the dead but it’s really complicated for everyone else. Ten years now of suicide spring and I’ll tell you one thing: the unemployment rate’s gone down. Plenty of work for anyone who wants it—it’s just that I don’t want it.
So I cut her down, that’s kind of like work I guess, and I buried her in Druid Hill with the rest of everyone else, and that was definitely work because if you want a free house you’d better at least put in the work to bury its tenants. And I had to put in that door to keep out criminals and cops, but I got friends who helped with that because maybe we’re a morbid bunch but at least we help one another out.
It’s not graverobbing though. I didn’t sell much of her stuff. Nothing that looked personal. I left that stuff in case family ever comes, which it never will. That old lady’s gold jewelry haunts me, though, since there’s a compro oro place just down the street next to the beer and wine store—I think one guy owns both places, it’s hard to tell—and I have to see that gold any time I go into her bedroom, which is basically never. That jewelry haunts me almost as much as she does.
No one knows what it is, but all of a sudden, ten years back, about one in seven of us is going to cut themselves or eat glass or jump off of something they shouldn’t. Well, some people say they know what it is. Eduard says he knows what it is. Says his mother told him. She knows it from the old country. I think maybe the old country is Brazil, but maybe it’s Germany. Eduard does a lot of things really well but talking about himself isn’t one of those things.
There are seven angels returned to the world in anger and vengeance, and they fall prey on everyone in the night and they breathe their curses into our lungs. They fight over every soul. They fight over which of us gets what curse.
But I don’t have a soul and neither does anyone I’ve ever met because the world is full of horror but it’s not angelic horror, it’s just regular horror, the kind you don’t need gods or souls or angels to drum up. Like the look on that woman’s face when I cut her down. That’s the horror in this world, something that was in her eyes and in her mind that’s gone now because she’s gone, gone to rot, gone to dust and shadows.
◆
A night like any night, my solar LED lamp spitting out its cum-colored glow on the water-damaged fake wood floor. Some books I’d never read were sitting in a milk crate and the two or three books I read again and again were stacked up near my couch-cushion pillow.
If I got drunk enough, I wouldn’t dream about her.
I wouldn’t see that face swinging back and forth with the wind of a summer storm coming in through her open window. I wouldn’t hear those voices, the conspiratorial whispers, quiet like whispers and mice. I wouldn’t hear the rustle of bird wings and or catch the glint of feathers and flesh just past as far as I could see in the dark.
I reached for a bottle. It was empty.
I reached for another. It was empty.
I could stay up till dawn, I decided. But I was at the wrong stage of drunk for that to be true.
You’re not supposed to sell beer after midnight in Maryland, but the liquor control board has been hit just as hard by this whole “everyone’s dead so no one’s working” bit as everywhere else and I was pretty sure the white guy who owned the compro oro was going to sell to me, or at least the guys he exploited who would be working at that hour might.
I scrambled for my phone and checked my balance. My bank account was as empty as the bottles around me.
I’m not a graverobber but I didn’t want to see that lady while I was sleeping so I got up and crept down to the second floor, one hand on the wall because I’m not one-in-seven and I didn’t have the slightest desire to teeter off the side of those stairs and land on the floor thirty feet down.
The door to her bedroom was ajar because it was always ajar. If I left it closed the mice would scratch their claws into the wood and by consequence into my eardrums and I didn’t like that, so better to just grant them free passage. Most of them live in her bedroom. I think they go out to hunt. I don’t want to know what they hunt, but I honestly think its cats. Which is almost too fucked up to think about, a swarm of those little mice getting some stray cornered in the alley, driving it back, one brave mouse leading the charge and ending up dead but its comrades marching on, pouring over the concrete to sink their teeth into mangy flesh. Brave little shits, those mice.
I had my LED lantern in hand. You can’t hold it in front of you like a flashlight, you have to hold it back behind your field of vision like a torch. The mice scattered before I could see them as more than just a writhing mat on the floor, and I found her dresser. I just took a pair of earrings. That’s all, just a pair of earrings. She didn’t need them, she was dead. I needed them, because I didn’t want to see her while I was sleeping.
I locked up behind me, three keys for three locks and then hit the app on my phone that dropped the bar inside. You can’t be too careful—gotta mix hi-tech and low-tech if you want to stay safe. The only light on the street was the blue glow of the cop camera. “We’re still here,” it’s like it was saying. “Everyone you care about is dead and this city is a shell but don’t worry, the police are still here. We might help you and we might kill you and you’ll never know which it is. But we’re here and we can see you.”
Some nights I’d talk back to the thing, answer its wordless taunts with wild strings of obscenities. No one can string together obscenities like a street punk faggot, you’ve got to understand. To half the world, I was an obscenity myself.
But no invectives came to me so I just flashed the cops my cock and kept walking. The compro oro was closed and the beer and wine was closed. I was going to keep going, but the thing about flashing a snitch-ass blue light lamppost is that it snitched on me and the cops were coming and I ran the whole way home and got that big beautiful door slammed shut before the cops decided it wasn’t even worth leaving their cruiser.
I climbed the stairs by the light of my phone. Even put the earrings back.
◆
Eduard says there are seven angels and they’ve each got a curse. They can look like anything they want, which usually means they look like anything we want, he says. You grow up in America, you’re probably going to see them as angels with wings and all that shit. It’s what most of us want, I guess. It’s like, the American Dream of cursed seraphim.
Eduard said his moms got kissed by the Angel of Longing and she’s never been the same and never will be, that for the rest of her life she’s going to be missing her sister. But of course she’s going to be missing her sister. Her sister is dead now six years, cut up by thugs in the countryside. That wasn’t a curse; that was just the shit luck of life.
His grandpa got kissed by the Angel of Sorrow, he says, and the old man spends half his day weeping. There’s an Angel of Passion who lets your heart consume itself in the fire of feeling until you’ve got nothing left and there’s an Angel of Harm who obviously got to the lady I buried in the park. There’s four others besides, but I’d stopped listening because you can only hear so much of that shit before it starts to get at you.
◆
A night like any night and I lay awake growing more sober by the minute. “Go to sleep,” I kept saying, but that’s kind of a fuck off bad way to make yourself fall asleep, so it didn’t work. I watched headlights drive their way across my wall in big waves of light that crashed into the corners and disappeared faster than they’d come on. There was a lot of traffic at night and sometimes I wondered who was driving and where were they going so late and maybe I wondered what angel had gotten to them or was going to.
Was there an angel of car accidents? It seemed like a lot of people went down in car accidents. But maybe that had always been the case.
There must have been an angel of “you basically won’t ever manage to fall asleep after you sober up” because that one had kissed me a long time ago. But there were only seven. Eduard was certain. And if there were only seven angels, their curses were probably a bit less specific or at least a bit more dramatic. I mean, I cut that lady down. She’d hanged herself by the neck and her hands had just been in the pockets of her dress like there was nothing the matter in the world. Like she was out for a Sunday stroll, just walking on air.
Me, if I was hanging from an exposed ceiling beam I’d be clutching and ripping at the rope until my hands were a mess of blood. Maybe that’s just me though.
That’s how I fell asleep, too, thinking about that lady. Fucking sobriety.
◆
She didn’t come into my dreams. Oh, how I wish it’d been her who’d come into my dreams.
He looked something like Eduard. Husky, hairy. He was a bear of an angel. No wings. I guess I believe in sexy men more than I believe in some heavenly host.
I heard him come in and I knew he was there. By the door. Just standing there at my door, watching me. I couldn’t see him, not at first. Then a car started past, then it stopped on my street, and in the headlights through my window I could see his thick black beard and the sunken pits that served as his eyes. He was nude, his flaccid cock uncut. He took a step toward me, watching me.
He craned his head to the side like a dog might. He was curious.
Then he smiled, and my body locked up under the power of his gaze.
He walked toward me, his head still cocked. Three purposeful strides and he loomed into the whole of my field of vision. I heard a car door somewhere. The light stayed on my angel.
“Which one are you?” I asked. I couldn’t look away, and he straddled my chest. His head shot to attention and I could just barely see his white-blue eyes deep and buried in the darkness cast by his brow.
“No matter where you go,” he said, in my voice, “they or someone else will be after you.” He leaned down and kissed me, full on the mouth, his tongue caressing my teeth, blood running down from his gums, into my throat.
Then he was gone and I was awake and a police battering ram hit the door. My wondrous door.
I’d bitten deep into my lip and I sat up and wiped blood from my maw. I stared dumbfounded at where he’d been, all the while the battering ram beat out a failed rhythm like some shitty drummer.
I spent a couple breaths pretending like I didn’t believe what he’d told me. I mean, it was a dream. I’d been asleep. Real things don’t happen when you’re asleep, except like pissing your bed or something. But by the time I heard them crash through the door and into the front hall, I knew he’d been telling the truth. They were going to come for me, always.
I scrambled around my room to pack my shit, because I was going to escape, because the only thing worse than running is getting caught. Toothbrush, phone, pants, a book I’d like to say I’ve read. That’s all you need in this world.
I kept a length of rebar by the door to my room. Not in case cops come in. As much as you might want to, you can’t hit cops in the face with rebar. I kept it just for, you know, people. In case people came in. I kind of lost some time standing around with that rebar in my hand, trying to figure out if I should take it.
I heard them on the steps. I threw my backpack on and looked in the corner of my room, saw those pee bottles. They were capped. I hoped one of those cops was going to drink my piss. I hoped one of them was going to be like, “Fuck, he got away, let’s search his shit.”
Then his buddy would say, “Well he’s got a couple 40s of Steel—you want one?” and they would toast and drink that shit. And they’d probably spit it out, right, but what if they didn’t?
You’ve gotta hold onto hope that good things are going to happen in this world.
Instead of finding me gone, though, they found me still there, daydreaming about them drinking my piss. One cop came in, she had a fucking SWAT shield, and then her buddy came in looking like he owned the place. None of us owned the place.
Then the Angel of Persecution came in behind them, just as naked as he’d been in my dream, and he pointed at me, and he said in my own fucking voice, “There he is.”
And that’s just not fair, if you ask me, because I was awake.
So I grabbed that rebar and I smashed in that angel’s face—or tried to. I got his mouth even bloodier than he’d gotten mine, and I looked again and it wasn’t my angel, it was just a uniformed cop. I didn’t suppose I’d be able to explain that I hadn’t meant to break part of his face with a length of steel rod. I ran.
“Get him!” he yelled, in his own voice, which wasn’t anything like my voice. I’ve got a nice voice. To be fair, he might have had a nice voice before I’d staved in his teeth.
I got a taser barb in my back for my troubles but only one of them so it didn’t complete the circuit and I just kept running and it ripped out of me, I think, and then I was out the window, on the neighbor’s roof. I turned around just in time to see a gloved hand on the sill. I brought my bare foot down on it, but that didn’t do any good, so I slammed the window shut. That did some good.
People say you can run to fend off panic but it turns out that’s not true when you’re running across rooftops with three cops behind you firing their handguns—thank fucking God they were mediocre shots or I’d be dead. When I hit the end of the block I failed at some parkour shit I’d seen on YouTube, and it’s a good thing no one’s picked up the trash in a year because otherwise I’d also be dead. Instead, I broke some ribs and the garbage bags broke my fall.
The cops fired a few rounds into the sea of rats and rot around me before they gave up and fucked off. A clean getaway. Nothing to worry about.
Except fingerprints and DNA and that fucking monographed pillow that Eduard had made me back when we were first courting and did nice shit like that for each other. The cops were going to know who I was. That was something to worry about, something I was never going to stop worrying about. Cops are like elephants—they never forget a grudge. Or maybe that’s crows.
Cops are worse than crows because they’re everywhere, even still.
◆
People say you can run to fend off panic but it’s not true when you never stop running.
I see that face everywhere. I’ve seen him driving a commercial van, and he turned to look at me and waved. He rang me up at the deli once. He’s in the background of my selfies, indistinct and leering. He’s at shows and bars and he’s out of the corner of my eye and sometimes he just straight up attacks me in alleys or shows up with cops and tries to bust me, and he laughs my laugh when I run in fear. It’s been two years and I’ll never be the same again and I’ll never trust anyone because anyone might be him.
I hear him every time I speak. It’s no longer him who talks in my voice, it’s me who talks in his.
I wish I had guts like that old lady did, but I don’t, because here I am on the end of my proverbial rope and I’m scrabbling and ripping at it and my hands are bloody and raw and I’m still breathing.
I’m still breathing, but I’m not sure why.