Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Little Holocausts BRIAN HODGE

There must’ve been signs first. There always are — subtleties we’re afraid to imagine go any deeper than one day’s mood. So I don’t suppose it was until our latest funeral that I broke down and admitted that something inside Jared was truly changing, and not for the better.

This one had been particularly rough on Jared. Neither of us had been strangers to funerals over the past few years, but this time it was for an earlier lover of Jared’s, amicably parted from after a growing realization that all he and Terry had in them was the honeymoon.

People — lovers, especially — have a million ways of changing on you, most of them bad. Not inherently, maybe, but bad for you. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow along.

You’ll hear people say that only the dead don’t change, but obviously they’ve never thought this through, because to the dead change comes naturally, as they seek their return to earth and air and water, while we survivors who loved them manage to forget all the flaws that kept things interesting. Remake them into idealized versions that we’d never be able to tolerate if they came walking back through the door this way, so perfect we’d eventually want to kill them all over again. You…you’ve changed, we’d accuse them, feeling somehow betrayed.

Terry had died at home — the virus, what else? — his current lover helping the nurses and hospice volunteers care for him. It’s where we gathered after the funeral, his brownstone apartment with vintage wood as solid as a bank vault and laid out shotgun-style, one long chain of rooms full of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Everybody was welcome, except for those righteous fuckers who’d showed up at the cemetery to gloat in the distance, toting picket signs.

SODOMITES REPENT, that was one of the gentler ones. Some of them got almost as ugly as the faces underneath, eyes frightened and angry, prissy mouths crinkled tight like drawstring purses.

“And those are the ones with the nerve to claim they’re made in God’s image?” Jared had whispered hoarsely in the cemetery.

“I’d always pictured God as better looking,” I said. “That doesn’t make much of a case for omnipotence, does it?”

He appeared not to have heard me, staring at this wretched Greek chorus. “But what if they are? What if they really are?”

At Terry’s apartment we threw our coats atop the pile already on the bed, Jared lingering over all the sleeves that seemed caught up in some pointless struggle for supremacy. I wondered if he was remembering being in this same bed three years earlier, maybe recalling a conversation or some good night’s love.

“Déjà vu?” I said.

Or maybe he was thinking that here was where Terry must have died. Jared pushed hair back from his eyes, saying, “It’s felt like déjà vu here all afternoon. I’m just getting way too familiar with days like this.”

“We’re here, we’re queer,” I murmured, “we’re dropping like flies.”

“And you’re not helping any, with your laughter from the gallows,” he said, so I just held him, limp and unresponsive even when I squeezed along the back of his neck, where he liked it, and would ordinarily flex back into my hand like Voodoo, our cat. “Was it this way for you when Serge died?”

I stiffened. “What way?”

“Remember that picture from Vietnam? Of that Buddhist monk? He’d set himself on fire in the middle of a street and just sat there burning. Didn’t move? Well… like I wish I had the kind of control he must’ve had, not to feel the flames,” Jared said into my neck. “That way.”

“Serge was different. You can’t compare the two.”

And Jared knew better. Serge and I weren’t broken up; not exactly. Serge hadn’t been sick. I felt something stir down deep, like the rusty scraping open of a hatch on a ship long sunk, and hurried to slam it shut again. In its saltwatery grave.

“Serge… Serge wasn’t the same at all.”

“This isn’t a good day to split hairs,” Jared said. “Not if they’re both dead when they shouldn’t be.”

We joined the others, who wandered from room to room in a kind of subdued humor, by turns warm, then mordant, everyone here instinctively craving each other’s company and heartbeats. I’d not known Terry, never even met him, and so spent awhile staring at a picture that Jared pointed out, contrasting the vibrant guy on Kodak paper with the one I’d first encountered in his coffin. Had I not had Jared’s word on it, I doubt I’d’ve made any connection.

An hour later I went looking for Jared after I hadn’t seen him for a while, and found him alone in the middle of the kitchen, the final link on the chain of rooms.

“You doing okay?” I said to his back.

When he finally turned, he had a look on his face I wasn’t braced for, a look that balled up its fist and sucker-punched me right in the heart. He pointed across the room, where he must’ve been staring for too long, toward the floor along the back wall, near the door, where you’d probably set something too large to fit in the trash can until you could run it out to the dumpster. It was an unused box of Depends. The way Jared pointed it out, looked at it, the box embodied all the loss and sorrow and indignity that had ever escaped Pandora’s.

“Diapers,” said Jared, like an accusation. Approaching tears. “That’s what it comes down to? Goddamn diapers.”

Whenever he came to the next town, the stout man in the soot-gray top hat spent a few days getting to know it from the inside out before plying his varied trades. By strolling its streets and alleyways, by poking amongst piles of rubble with his lacquered walking stick, by sniffing over puddles of spilt blood, both psychic and sanguine, he made of each town a lover from whom he could ferret out prizes most delicious. In tipping his nose to a breeze he might sort its complex mélange into component threads: here, garlic; there, despair; further along, mingled excrements of men and machines.

Such habits served sentiment more than utility now. The world held no more surprises for him, and frontiers were illusory. Cities all smelled the same, the populace of one burning and burying, pissing and shitting, in equal measures to those of the one before and the one to come. He could expect nothing else so long as they in their millions sucked from the same monstrous tit.

He missed the land’s Byzantine variety of the old days, or as he remembered them to be — time did possess a peculiar gilding. Three hundred years hence, he might very well look back on these present days with nothing but fond nostalgia. Great gods! he would marvel, but back then how they knew how to suffer!

And they did. Boom times, these, everywhere he went.

He’d trod here before, fuzzy on how many decades ago, but enough such that he scarcely recognized it now. How the city had grown; how the city continued to do so, beyond all sensibility, a body sprouting brick and iron tumors in frantic abundance, beyond the needs of healthy expansion. Arteries of thought and commerce met, only to choke one another. Idled factories sat scabbed with corrosion, dead hearts presiding over the decay of a system they’d once nourished, while tenements suppurated, spilling infections into the streets.

As they had sown, so would they reap, and reaping time had come.

The pack which set stealthily upon him one evening he likened to maggots squirming from the fetid cavity that had hatched them. He listened to them jeer him, his appearance, his obvious differences. It was English they spoke, but no English he’d heard the last time he’d walked these lands, a newer dialect sprung up that would set the Queen to spinning in her grave.

That they wanted his money became quite apparent, regardless.

“Don’t be absurd,” he told them. “I’ve very little use for the currency of the realm.”

They glanced at one another, translating.

“Dead man walking,” one decided. “Only he don’t know it yet.”

He counted two guns drawn and another displayed in the waist of one’s baggy trousers before he showed them an avuncular smile, gave his face a half-turn, and lifted his walking stick to tap its pewter head upon the ruddy padding over his cheekbone, below his widening eye.

“Now if you’d take a moment from your busy schedules to look in here, we can wrap this up in a trice.”

His eye continued to bulge, window to the soul flung wide. He thought of all and nothing, the vast repertoire of his days an open book. He bent his soul into a kind of parabola, on which they might focus through pupil and metacosm, and see reflected back at themselves a thousandfold what each had cast toward it — all their loathings and hungers, resentments and fears.

It was absurdly simple. They did most of the work. And God alone knew what each one saw. Mischief-makers such as these were doers, not talkers, wasting no words to tell of terrible wonders.

Two of them soiled trousers and ran. One turned his pistol on his friend a dozen times over, even while the fallen body twitched on asphalt; the final bullet he’d reserved to put through his own mouth. Another fell to the ground screeching, then hooked his long fingernails back to gouge out both offending eyes.

The man in the gray top hat lowered his bulk to his haunches, beside the blind and whimpering brigand. Like Jack Horner seeking plums, he plunged his thumb into the runny well of one ruined eye socket. There he left it, while visions came and went, until he was satisfied: If the dead ones had lives and histories comparable to this one, he clearly had done them a favor.

“Terribly sorry I came too late. Dreadfully sorry,” he said. “But in your case there was really nothing left to save, you see.”

He tidied his thumb on the boy’s jacket, then righted himself and straightened his dingy frock coat. From a breast pocket he produced his card, dropping it onto the writhing boy’s chest. It was color of ivory and, bordered with filigree, read:

HIERONYMUS BEADLE, ESQ.

¤ Conjurer of Visions

¤ Extractor of the Psychometric Arts

¤ Trader in Souls

And so announced to the asphalt harvest, he went upon his way in search of a warm fireside, soft cushions, and whatever passed for mulled wine in this place of ignoble rot.

By the time of Terry’s funeral, Jared and I’d had a couple of good years together. Career waiter and career video store manager; the tail of the world had somehow eluded our grasp. At least Jared was still giving it a good chase. Most of my running now was in circles, five miles each day and ending right where I’d started.

I’d noticed him a half-dozen times in the video store before we’d exchanged any deeper words than when his tape was due back. Midtwenties, a generous handful of years younger than I, and with round-lensed glasses and dark messy hair looking as if he could be equally at home in a law library or aerobics class. Danielle, my favorite co-worker, finally got tired of my doing nothing.

“Let’s take a peek in his subconscious,” she said, and pulled up his rentals on the computer. I was happily intrigued to find mostly Japanese animation, Kurosawa samurai films, and everything we had directed by Ken Russell and Sergio Leone.

The afternoon he asked if we had a copy of El Topo that we weren’t letting on about, I was smitten. Jodorowsky’s horrifying symbolist western that somehow veers into socioreligious parable-the boy was no fluff-monger. He said he’d looked all over the city for El Topo, and I had to tell him that he’d finally stumped the band, that it wasn’t distributed domestically.

The instant he left the store, I phoned a gray market service in Miami for a rush-order VHS dub off Japanese laserdisc. I had it in hand two days later when he returned his current rental, and invited him to a private screening. If he was interested. Since he was such a good customer, with such commendable taste in film.

Several nights later, atop rumpled bedsheets, with our first taste of each other still on our lips, Jared said it had been the only VCR date he’d had where the other guy hadn’t popped in a Jeff Stryker or Danny Sommers video, something like that.

“When you see Beach Blanket Boner coming on again, it gets a little obvious,” he laughed.

Jared laughed a few weeks later when his lease was up, at my suggestion he move in, saying all I wanted was a cheap way to enliven my apartment’s brick walls. For years he’d been trying to break into comics, with marginal success and rarely better than token payments. Within days of the move I was surrounded by prototypes of brooding existential loners, sketched in shades of gray, who wandered vaguely recognizable wastelands.

He laughed when he showed me all his rejection slips from the better-paying costumed hero markets, saying that the art was only for killing time until he became headwaiter at his restaurant.

He laughed while he told me about being on his own since he was eighteen, when his father kicked him out after finding a porno magazine. “If it’d been hetero,” Jared said, “he probably would’ve taken me out to get drunk instead, maybe even buy me a whore if he could’ve found one cheap enough.”

He laughed when he told me about the former friends in high school who’d beaten him up for being too honest about himself when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

But by this time I was noticing how forced his laughter could sound, a worthy try but no longer good enough to fool me, like the unnerved and tuneless whistling of someone lost in a cemetery.

And that’s the way it sounded, more and more, until the day it stopped altogether.

“There’s this guy…”

No man wants to hear anything starting like this, tiny words that send heart and stomach skittering into sick panic. While you knew all along you were irreplaceable, everyone else knew better.

“There’s, um, this guy…”

Jared pulled it on me at one of the sidewalk tables in front of the beanery where we came for cheap, spicy meals served in crockery that would steam your face and warm both hands. A coterie of pigeons would always gather near occupied tables, to glean crumbs from the crusty bread served here.

“There’s, see, there’s this guy…”

It would be one of the last fine days of autumn before the killing frosts of winter took hold, the late afternoon sunlight golden even when the best it had to shine on looked otherwise run-down and corroded and ready for a renewal that would never come, because those with the power to decide these things knew that such places were easier destroyed than lived with.

“There’s this guy,” Jared tried again, then drew into himself as though he couldn’t bear to say the rest.

I wondered if this wasn’t some rebound thing, triggered by issues we’d gotten into last week, with Jared still smarting over Terry’s funeral and seeking…what? Reassurance in a world that offered him none?

He’d interrupted my daily 200 sit-ups and suggested, since we seemed to be getting along so well, with an eye to far tomorrows, making it as official as we could. A same-sex union ceremony? Lots of couples were doing them, even if they legally wouldn’t hold the breath expended on the vows.

“It’s not the legality of it,” he’d defended. “It’s the thing itself. It’s the ceremony that counts. The statement we’d make.”

I’d thought of when we first realized we had something going. Got ourselves tested for the virus, passed six months of fidelity, then got tested again, praying for a rerun of dual negatives, then putting the condoms away afterward in relief. This was all the ceremony we needed. All the statement. A phony marriage seemed like a hoax to play on ourselves. Why pretend to join some club that wouldn’t have us for members?

And it surprised me how much bitterness I heard in my voice, how much rage I thought I’d sunk to the bottom of my ocean, until it might break itself down into complete apathy over everything I was denied, that so many others took for granted. Say, walking down any street with someone I obviously loved, and not having to care who realized it. I listened to myself, hearing everything I’d never meant Jared to think was directed at him; said I was sorry.

But once you’ve laughed in someone’s face, he’ll remember the sound forever, and only a saint can overlook your best reasons.

“Serge isn’t coming back,” he’d told me. “I’m the one you’re stuck with now. I guess. I’m the one you have to settle for.”

There’s this guy.

My Brazilian black bean soup cooled in its bowl.

“Does he have a name?” I asked.

“Probably.”

“‘Probably.’ Well that’s good. Two years, and you can still surprise me over a bowl of beans. Jesus. I never took you for the toilet tramp sort.”

Jared blinked at me in genuine surprise. “That’s the kind of conversation you think we’re having?” He shook his head. “I haven’t sucked off anybody in a toilet. I haven’t gone cruising the park, I haven’t even gone cruising the Personals.”

“Then what kind of guy am I supposed to think you’re talking about? You’re not the Jehovah Witnesses sort, either.”

He didn’t answer, was somewhere else behind his eyes. Then he leaned back to watch the pigeons strutting on the sidewalk, sleek heads bobbing as they pecked at promising tidbits.

“I’ve never understood why so many people hate these birds,” he said. “Calling them rats with wings, and like that. What aren’t they seeing?”

He was shredding bits of his bread; sowed a generous handful across the concrete. Wary, the pigeons lifted off a moment with a great snapping of wings, then settled back again to feast.

“They’re not just gray,” he went on. “Look at those colors around their heads. All those different purples. Lavender. Greens, on some of them. Those are beautiful colors. So maybe they shit on statues, what’s to hate?”

“Jared,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about pigeons now.”

He nodded, sweeping more crumbs toward the birds. “There,” he told them. “Go shit on a statue for me.” Then it was my turn.

“You know one thing I’ve always envied about you?” he said. “It’s the way you can deal with pain. You lock it up and once it’s in the box, you never open that box again. You must have skin like an alligator inside.”

“Jared…” I said. “You’re giving me way too much credit for something I’m not even sure I’m flattered by.”

“Don’t be ashamed of it. I wish I could cope like you, with all the things that are wrong. I look in your eyes, then I look in the mirror, and I don’t see the same quality. I wish I could, but I don’t.”

“If you’ve got something to tell me,” I said, “quit dancing around the subject and tell it. Who have you met?”

“Aren’t you listening? I haven’t met anybody.”

A pair of sluggish flies buzzed into his bowl of red beans and rice. Impassive, he watched them crawl and feed; seemed capable of watching until their eggs hatched a new generation.

“Everybody has a breaking point,” he murmured.

And when I told him he wasn’t anywhere near his, that he was stronger than this, Jared didn’t even look at me as if to say How would you know? It made me question my credibility. If I conveyed nothing-no confidence, no faith, no belief-because nothing worth conveying was left. If, in experiencing most of the same intimate plagues that life had brought to Jared, the better qualities that were part of my essence hadn’t been burned away. Or worse, by my own hand been locked beyond retrieval.

“I’m tired of hurting,” he said. “Tired of letting everything hurt me, just taking it, because there’s nothing else to do, until I don’t have anything left inside for it to grind down. So…

“There’s this guy that I’ve heard about. Walks around looking like something out of Charles Dickens. I don’t know what he is, or where he comes from…but he’s supposed to make the pain stop.”

I went with Jared as he sought his deliverer, not because I necessarily believed in rumors he’d heard, or because if they were true I believed myself capable of dissuading him from rash acts, but simply because I’d convinced myself that he’d be safer this way. The streets could be dangerous; he shouldn’t walk them alone.

Like Serge had.

Up streets and down alleys, inside bars and outside liquor stores, beneath neon and through shadows…we followed a winding course of anguish the same as we’d follow a stream. Where it was created and where it deepened, where it bottomed out and where it became a roaring cascade that swept everything before it.

We talked to hustlers who leaned against graffiti-thick walls or smoked between tricks under the trestles of the elevated train. Talked to runaways who warmed themselves over fires built in rusty oil drums. To castoffs who made homes in boarded-up warehouses, or factories where smokestacks held their last stale dying breath, beneath a sky that still looked irreparably seared.

“Never heard of him” — this we got most often, a relief to me.

“Oh yeah, I heard of that guy” — this, too, sometimes. And:

“Hey, I think I saw him. He’s a killer.”

“Right. Some kind of saint, right?”

“Fag. Fags.”

“You just missed him, by, like, a day.”

Never enough to discourage Jared from continuing. Just enough to keep me from feeling sure this was mere rumor.

There seemed to be no end of places to look, and if we began to think we must have covered them all, then we’d find more. More sprawl, more shadow, more derelict hulks etched against sooty new horizons. It made me recall something I’d been told by one of the street people I used to see all the time near the video store, for whom Danielle and I would sometimes buy sandwiches.

The city grows at night, he’d told me. On its own. That’s why so many people can pass a spot for the hundredth time and look at some building as if for the first…even if logically they know, from the way it looks, it must’ve stood there crumbling for sixty, eighty, a hundred years. The only thing they can figure is that it has somehow escaped their notice until now.

The city grows at night, and that’s why people can drive past some spot on their way out of the city and think, wait, last week didn’t it all used to end right around here? So they decide their memories must be playing tricks on them again, and knit the changes into the way it’s always been.

Then most of them don’t give it another thought, he told me. But a few can still feel the city’s growth pains in the deepest places inside their dreams, and even those who don’t remember on awakening, at least awaken with a growing dread of the city and its demands, realizing that it’ll never be satisfied until it’s consumed everything there is to be had, making slaves of all who live there. Feeders, and those fed into the maw.

He told me these things one day on my lunch break, then lived another month. Died of acute alcohol poisoning two blocks over, in the alley behind a Thai restaurant. But his face was gone, I heard. Rats. And maybe it’s only creative hindsight, but now I swear he told me these things like a man who’d already heard his death searching for him, stalked for dreaming too deeply and brushing dust from the wrong secrets.

He’d said the city had sorted out long ago who it could use to maintain itself, and who would taste best between its teeth.

But why listen to paranoid drunks, anyway?

Hieronymus Beadle recognized intent as soon as he saw them coming, moving with trepidation through the musty Welsh pub until they could see him near the back, sunk comfortably into his chair and drowsing by the fire. During his sumptuous weeks in the city, his waistcoat had grown frightfully snug, buttons a-popping and threads a-straining.

“Sit! Sit!” he bid them. “Been expecting you, I have.”

“How’s that?” asked the older of the pair, the more prickly; clearly the skeptic, the sniffer out of charlatans.

Mr. Beadle gestured toward the fire. “I’ve been watching the news, of course.”

He could unfailingly spot those who’d made a concerted effort to find him, and such was this pair, if the elder against what he thought to be better judgment. But if that wasn’t love, Hieronymus Beadle didn’t know what was. Always most touching, when they came two by two.

“Wine?” he offered, showing them the stemmed glasses ranked before the fire, glowing like purplish orbs. “There’s no place left to serve it mulled. Criminal, that. I’m forced to do it myself, but if you’ll look ‘round at the sad state of disrepair here, you’ll understand why they’re only too happy to allow me the indulgence. Cloves and cardamom, cardamom and cloves. They smooth and mellow, they round off the bite.”

“Jared,” said the skeptic. “The man’s an escapee.”

“Perhaps. But is it a true escape after the jail’s fallen to ruin? Of course not — it’s opportunity seized. Now. Seize some chairs, why don’t you? They’re not half uncomfortable.”

When they moved to sit, he leaned forward as if to shake the skeptic’s hand, catching him by surprise and clenching tight.

“Don’t mind me, just browsing,” he told the man, whose lean and startled face had begun to show the true lines of age and of character, and harder times in sorrow’s forge. “You’re possessed of a fitness mania to prolong the illusion of youth. You’ve a cat named…Voodoo, is it? whom you feel you’ve quite ignored as of late. Your favorite sexual act is mutual oral, but you’ve never bothered to dig deep enough to understand why. Shall I tell you?”

Always a treat, shocking doubters into silence.

“I’ll take that as a tacit affirmative. Somewhere very, very deep within you, the act you call sixty-nine satisfies a yearning for wholeness in creation. Reminds you of the uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. Much more apropos, I say, betwixt two men than man and woman. You’re each half the world to the other then, yes?”

“It’s like that, yeah,” he said, dry-throated, and yanked his hand free.

“How…?” said the one in need. Jared.

“Psychometry, plain and simple. A gaudy parlor trick, though, telling present and past. But the future, now, if I could only have managed that one, why, the world would’ve come to me instead of the other way around.” Hieronymus Beadle smiled, eyes crinkling above plump cheeks. “Still, here you are. You’ve met me halfway, at least. Tell me what carries you through yonder door.”

But he knew already. Spend a few weeks anywhere, and whispers inevitably churned like an undertow to draw out seekers of relief from the torments of existence. They came looking precisely like this Jared: miserable with hope, before the court of last resort.

“I take souls, gentlemen,” he began, sparing himself the need of listening to questions heard a hundred thousand times already. “I’m no devil, I wreak no sulphurous damnation. A humble peddler, am I, a tinker of flesh and spirit. A dying trade, but all I know to practice, and ironically, more needed today than ever before. I take souls. They’re never missed, for with them goes the capacity to miss them. It’s not unlike the snipping of a giant nerve that connects one to a gangrenous appendage. And just as the amputated limb may be burnt without bringing further suffering in the flames, so too will that troublesome soul wither quite on its own, unfelt. I take souls, and give peace in return.”

“And what do you do with them then?” asked the skeptic.

“None of your bloody business.”

Hieronymus Beadle sipped his wine, folded hands over belly, and watched them argue. Once he’d provided his services for kings and princes, sultans and emirs, who’d feared themselves in danger of attack by malign sorcery. They’d paid him fabulous sums for the safekeeping of the stuff of their hearts and dreams, until enemies could be rooted out and destroyed. Quite the comedown, this, for so few believed in true magic anymore, motivated only by hopes of an end to suffering. He refused to blame them. It had been a cruel century, overall.

The argument was over, and Jared unswayed.

“Can you…do it here?” he asked. “Now?”

“Good heavens, no. Don’t be absurd. Souls can’t be handed over like wallets. They can’t be stolen. They must be surrendered willingly, because they cling to the flesh they know, and must be coaxed and bullied into quitting the familiar. Rather exhausting, the process, but then, peace must often be preceded by a war.”

“And is there any other…cost?”

“To you? Oh no. The overhead’s already been paid.” Hieronymus Beadle now regarded the skeptic. “And you, sir? Is there naught I can do for you? Because if you’ll pardon my bluntness, I caught quite the potent whiff of soul’s gangrene from you, as well, a few minutes ago. Serge, was that the name? Indeed it was.”

Mr. Beadle watched him wriggle on temptation’s hook.

Some days he felt there to be no honor left in what he did, what had once been a noble trade, suffering no master but his own soul and the short-term dictates of royalty. Never had he dreamt back then that he would one day dance to corporate tunes played by wealthy pipers in their steel towers, overlooking kingdoms of rust and ruin. Serving the beasts they had created, this new generation of city fathers paid bounties in hopes of cleansing each malignant landscape of those who did not fit its dream of what it should be. Purity had always struck him as such a bland and petty goal, yet they worked so tirelessly to achieve it.

He told himself he was still providing a valuable service. In such an age as this, wasn’t one’s soul a liability, after all?

“Sweet peace, good sir?” he said to the skeptic.

“I don’t suppose you can…remove the gangrene, and leave the limb, can you?”

“I fear not. It’s to be all or nothing. Rather like severing one’s spinal cord.”

The man shook his head, as if it took some effort. So close; so very close. Still, Hieronymus Beadle was heartened to see one slip through his grasp. Hope for the future, and all.

“Go to hell,” the man said, then clung to his Jared in final appeal, which fell upon deaf ears and a heart already starting to scale.

The next morning was the first in more than two years that I woke up alone. Voodoo, curled in a black and white ball at the end of the bed, didn’t count. I’ve often envied the way cats can sleep with someone, yet still sleep alone.

I laid my hand on Jared’s side of the bed, then stood before the window, staring out at streets and signs, at other buildings and other people who stared in turn, all of us framed alone and dead-eyed in our windows like portraits left subtly incomplete.

Jared. He was out there somewhere. Or maybe he was now Jared in name only, no longer the real Jared who delighted in obscure movies and liked his chest bitten and drew apocalyptic anti-heroes making their ways through worlds that had been leveled around them by warheads or disease or neglect. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t yet come home, maybe never would. He’d become his own character.

I moved away from the window and lingered before a cluster of his sketches inspired by the title character of El Topo, the movie that had brought us together. Slim-legged, in black, wearing a rider coat that hit him above the knee, this was your archetypical wandering gunslinger, rendered in sharp, scratchy strokes of Jared’s pencil. Mostly he roamed the starkest deserts and canyons and blasted city streets. But in one he stood contorted in anguish as bullets splattered his blood onto a wall behind him, already shaded with stains from corrosive rain, while the shadow he cast upon it stood in contrast, the essence of balance and calm.

There was nothing like this in the movie, although I could guess what Jared had been drawing inspiration from: the scene in which El Topo has met the first of four Master Gunfighters, a man who can no longer be wounded because he’s learned to render his flesh impervious to gunfire.

“I hardly bleed,” he explains. “I do not resist the bullets. I let them pass through the emptiness of my heart.”

When Jared and I watched the movie, I suspect that each of us was too afraid to tell the other how deeply we connected with that line. Wishing we could learn such a trick, and teach it to friends and allies, and others whom we loved, so we could at least sharpen our edge against a city that had decided it could do without us.

Our only regret being that, for some, we’d still be too late.

When Serge died, killing him might not have been the initial intent, but things like that so easily get out of hand, it may as well have been premeditated. He was cornered one evening near the mouth of an alley by some cock fascists, four of them, one for each of the cardinal points, so there was no direction to run. Their fun was strictly casual for the first few minutes, using only their fists. Then they got serious. Started in on him with a length of pipe that turned up in the alley.

Somebody who later watched the police inside the yellow-tape corral said that the homicides stood around with coffee, joking over Serge’s body. They already knew who he was; a couple of the uniforms on the scene had rousted him with some younger guy a few days earlier, after we’d had an argument. They’d been in a car near his favorite coffeehouse. Now one of the homicides squatted down, inspected Serge’s pipe-broken jaw, used a latex-gloved hand to waggle its huge, grotesque skew, and said, “Looks like this cocksucker just didn’t know when to say when.”

Four years later his murder remains unsolved. Infer from that what you will.

When newer friends, people who’d never met him, would chance across a picture of us together and ask whatever became of Serge, I usually said he’d moved back down to Tampa. Couldn’t stand the cold winters here, the way they seem to start in October and end in April. Used to be I could tell they knew I was lying, that they’d caught the throb of some raw nerve that had escaped cauterization.

Eventually, while I’d told Jared the truth, no one else suspected otherwise.

Sometimes I go scratching at the wound, to make sure I’ve not forgotten how to feel it. But I have to dig very far down, because only the most deeply concealed nerves still feel flayed and raw, like the tendrils of sea anemones scraped with a wire brush.

The rest, my public nerves, must’ve become as encrusted as the city.

I used to think this was something to aspire to.

Used to think it was what I wanted…so that somebody else would be forced to look me in the eye someday, and tell me how I’d changed, except he wouldn’t speak it like an accusation; rather, with admiration, for all I could withstand.

A few afternoons later I came home from the video store, and he was back. I’d had days to anticipate and dread and rehearse the moment, but had wasted them, too fearful of even contemplating it.

He must’ve heard me on the stairs, was there waiting as soon as I came through the door. He hadn’t forgotten how to smile, but it seemed a reflex, as if he might’ve forgotten why he’d want to.

“So, it’s…done?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What’s it like?”

“It’s…different. But different isn’t bad.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Hurt…pain…those really aren’t part of my vocabulary now. So I’ll just say no.” Jared seemed profoundly calm and thoughtful, and when I asked how Hieronymus Beadle had done this thing to him, he recounted it as if telling me about something that had happened to someone else that he’d heard about secondhand.

“He took me to a warehouse, I think it must’ve been. All you have to do, really, is look in his eye, but that’s where any sense of time falls apart. I know I walked around some afterward, but I still don’t know how long I’ve been gone.

“You just look in his eye, and he won’t let you look away, no matter how much you want to. He’s taking everything you hate most about yourself, and that scares you about whatever might be ahead, and turning it right back at you. Taking you through it all, but a hundred times worse than you dreamed it could be…until you just…give up. Then he kisses you, and it feels like he could suck away every breath you ever breathed. And then you sleep. Or I did.

“But I think it’s solved a lot of the problems I was having. I think I’ll be easier to live with now.”

Jared shrugged, turned away to leave me wondering what life with him could possibly be like now. What life might’ve been like elsewhere, in a place that never existed but we’d spoken of just the same, where bigots were few and the diseases all had cures.

We used to joke about it, our own private Israel, a queer homeland.

But on second thought, that’d just make it easier for all the righteous fuckers, who brought picket signs to funerals, to raise their own air force and deploy bombers.

I followed Jared toward the bedroom, where he’d disappeared, and halfway down the hall I stooped to pick up a pair of feathers. Small and pale gray, they took me back to that day at the beanery when Jared had told me of the man he needed to find, and how he’d fed crumbs to pigeons, asking why they were so hated by so many.

The bedroom floor was dusted with them, so many feathers a pillow might have been ripped open. But pillows don’t bleed. Live birds do. Feathers and tatters of flesh lay clumped about the room. Wet pawprints were tracked everywhere, while here and there larger heaps of meat were still intact enough to recognize, with bent wings and scaly stick legs. The tiny strewn organs glistened bright red, the pocks of shit a chalky white.

Jared was sitting in the middle of the mess, before the open window, through which a cold autumn breeze was blowing, scattering feathers like chaff.

“Look what I can do,” Jared said, as he watched Voodoo burrow his fangs deeper into the cavity of a shredded abdomen. “Nothing. I can do nothing.”

One reason I’ve always enjoyed talking with Danielle at the video store is her accent. She originally came from Alabama, and there’s something about a Southern accent that can infuse sorrow with enough whimsy to make it tolerable. She once told me that lesbians didn’t get beaten up in her town, the same as boys were, because they presented too keen a challenge to most red-blooded hetero guys, who knew they had the proper cure between their legs.

“So I started carrying this big old dildo in my purse, about two sizes past horse,” she’d told me. “And whenever one of these guys’d tell me I didn’t know what I was missing, I’d pull out Mr. Ed and tell the guy if he could top this, he was on.”

She was one of the few I’d told the truth about Serge, and so filling her in on Jared made sense to me, and then it made more sense to keep going and tell her that it was a temptation to take to the streets again. Hunt down that peculiar man in his top hat and walking stick, and let him work his anesthetizing magic on me, too. And then it would no longer matter that the flesh I loved and fit best with was now emptied of the stuff that had first made it so appealing. Such terrible temptation.

“I never told you about when I came out to my family, did I?” Danielle asked.

I told her I didn’t think so.

“When he found out about me, my daddy called me an accident of birth,” she said. “Scarcely said a word to me for the next two years. Didn’t even want to look at me, and us in the same room, why, you’d think we were strangers. And I suspect I suddenly was, to him. An accident of birth. Got so I played it for a joke, and I’d stand all quiet-like around a corner, lying in wait for him to come face to face with me, so I could see him squirm, just like a wiggle worm on a hot sidewalk.”

I wondered which was worse: someone who abandons you in the flesh, or one who does it while remaining under the same roof.

“But I see things a little different now,” Danielle admitted. “We’re all accidents of birth, every one of us. Born in the wrong place, or at the wrong time. In the wrong body, or to the wrong set of people. No matter who you are, there’ll be something not right. So that all just becomes part of the game, then — there’s no malice in it. And the rest of the game? It’s putting those things as right as you can.”

She reached down to hold my hand. Lifted it up, kissed it, put it back where she’d found it.

“But you don’t go throwing away what’s not broken,” she said, “not unless you got something better to take its place. Nature does abhor a vacuum, you know.”

I told her I’d try to remember that.

Danielle liked the fit of her own body just fine, so there’d been no accidents there.

But sometimes I still wished she was a guy.

I don’t see Jared anymore.

He left a couple of days after the thing with the pigeons. If it hurt to see him go, it was only because it was a physical echo of what had already happened. Jared was gone before he ever walked out the door, maybe even before he’d heard of the strange man who traversed the worst streets and called to those in pain, offering them an easy way out. Maybe he was gone long before any of it, part of him beaten to death as surely as Serge had been.

So I don’t see Jared anymore.

A few nights after he left, I went to sleep wondering what Hieronymus Beadle did with the souls he collected, and in a dream I saw him strolling ponderously away from the city, bloated almost to the point of bursting with his cargo. He walked and sweated blood and walked and mopped his brow and walked until the city lay far behind. At a copse of trees, he stopped, stripped the clothes from his swollen body, and strained and shuddered. They poured from within him like a sickness, those souls, something between liquid and vapor, seeking safety in the ground below; some anchor to cling to. Then, much slimmer, his reservoirs depleted, he put his clothes back on and strolled onward, with purpose, while from the ground on which he’d voided grew rose bushes. The petals were so perfect they nearly resembled faces, and seemed to scream when another man came along, with white hair and a leathery patrician face, and snipped each bud from its stem. He’d toss each one over his shoulder, or drop them to the ground, and when he was done and the bushes were bare, he smiled while a herd of coarse-bristled, tusked pigs burst from deeper within the trees. They squealed and rooted and stamped and slashed, until every last blossom had been devoured, and then, grunting, they lumbered back into the shadows while the white-haired autocrat patted their crusty dark hides.

I was shaking when I woke up, as though I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to. It was a long time before I could get back to sleep, or even wanted to, afraid I might see Jared on hands and knees, fueled by regret and emptiness, rooting in the piles of pigshit, saying, “I know it’s here. I know it’s here someplace.”

But I don’t see Jared anymore.

He’s around, though. I’ve seen the writing on the wall.

It was weeks before I made the connection, entertaining the notion that the painted silhouettes which had begun appearing on building walls had come from Jared’s hand. No two were the same, black silhouettes as crisp as shadows thrown by someone who could have been standing right next to you, but wasn’t. Each one looked tensed, as if startled by the coming of something that cast no shadow of its own. There was one on our building, one on Terry’s. One inside the alley where Serge had been murdered. Others, and I wondered if they’d been chosen at random, or if they too had some special significance.

Now and then I’d hear people talk about them, wherever people lingered, and the silhouettes were spoken of with great curiosity. Where they’d come from, what they meant. Everyone loves a mystery.

But no one else had been privy to the things that Jared found most significant when he looked at the world. No one else had sat with him one evening while he paged through a book, horrified and fascinated by photos shot fifty years earlier in the wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the silhouettes of human beings that had been seared onto walls at the instant of the bomb blasts.

What if those were their souls, he’d wondered, souls yearning in that instant of sublime and blinding violence for some record of their passing, even as their bodies were vaporized.

It gave us something to think about.

And now, every day, I look at the silhouette he painted on the side of our building, hoping I’ll find it gone. Hoping against all rationality that in the night it will have peeled itself free of the bricks, and gone seeking the flesh where it so rightfully belongs.

But even if I get my wish, what a long search it has ahead.

The city grows at night, and I don’t see Jared anymore.