Personal Effects: Dark Art

6

The Selznick and Sons funeral home, like many in Manhattan, was on the ground floor of a multistoried apartment building. And like many other funeral homes in Manhattan, you’d never know it after stepping past the polished brass-and-glass doors. The interior featured soothing cream-colored walls, a politely ticking grandfather clock, gold-framed paintings of flowers, stained glass windows. The colors in the windows matched the furniture, which matched the drapes, which matched the carpet. They were all muted, reassuring shades, not distinct enough to attract attention. Stately, serene, invisible.

Lucas and I arrived just before 7 p.m. Rachael waited for us in the lobby.

I felt giddy as she walked toward us, then felt guilty for feeling giddy. I should’ve been thinking about Gram, somberly preparing myself for the service. But as those few seconds of her approach stretched into delicious slow motion, as Rachael’s hips rocked, as I gazed at her lips, I simply couldn’t pull my eyes off her. She’s a few inches taller than me, and God, did I like looking up to her.

Rachael. She’s the reason balladeers were born. At least that’s what I’ve told her, a thousand thousand times. She never gets tired of hearing it, though.

She wore an understated black dress and a matching long-sleeved sweater that hid the tattoos racing down her arms. The small tattoos on each of my wrists—the Chinese symbols for “courage” and “faith”—were covered by my dress shirt and jacket.

We clean up well, Lucas, Rachael, and me: today we were Opposite Day impostors, proudly displaying our Clark Kent alter egos for the AARP crowd. Rachael’s magenta hair and the hoops in her nose and eyebrow spoiled the image a bit.

“Hey,” she said, and gave me a quick hug. She kissed my cheek. “Right on time. You doing okay?”

I nodded. She smelled wonderful.

“Yo, Hochrot,” Lucas said, a bit too loudly for my liking. I glanced around the hushed lobby. Solemn newcomers were stepping through the front doors. I gave Lucas a parental shhh. He took the hint.

“So tell me,” he whispered. “Have you fragged your kids today?”

Rachael rolled her eyes.

“They’re not ‘my’ kids, Lucas,” she said, her voice low. “They’re twerps on Xbox Live, screaming at their moms for chocolate milk. These guys, they can’t stand getting beat by a girl.”

“My geek goddess,” I said, sliding my arm around her waist. “Mortals, behold her mad ‘Onyx War 2’ skills.”

“Oh, poor Z,” she said. She glanced up at a magenta sliver of hair that had fallen into her face, and blew it aside with a quick puff. “Onyx War was last week. It’s Bloodwire now. This game’s codemonkeys built it just for me. It’s got the three Fs: First-person… fully destroyable environments… and flame-throwers. That stuff melts my heart every time.”

Her blue eyes glimmered. She bared her teeth, playfully.

“Don’t mess with PixelVixen707,” she whispered diabolically. “Snarl.”

Lucas snickered. “Snarl,” he said.

“Speaking of messing with a good thing,” I said, pulling my cell phone from my slacks pocket. I passed it to Rachael. “Dad’s probably going to be late. Listen to the voice mail he left last night. Dial 212-629-1951, and hit 3017. That’s my password. Unbelievable.”

Rachael dialed in the numbers and pressed the phone to her ear. Lucas leaned in, curious.

The pair listened and exchanged more up-to-the-nanosecond slang. If you’d put a gun to my head at that moment, I still couldn’t tell you what in the hell they were talking about. I think they were dissing Dad, but I wasn’t sure. I needed subtitles when these propeller-heads got together.

At least Rachael had a professional excuse. In addition to being a part-time fact-checker for the New York Journal-Ledger and a freelance technical writer, she was the creator of PixelVixen707.com, a gaming blog bristling with “geek chica snarkitude.” The site had started as a personal weblog, but the gaming-related posts had brought piles of readers—and ad money. I was the guy who’d created the splash artwork for her home page: a cartoonified Rachael in coveralls, welder’s goggles perched atop her head, sleeves rolled high, flexing a tattooed bicep in the classic Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It!” pose. She held a Wii remote in her clenched fist. A mutual friend had introduced us a year ago; my for-the-check freelance gig evolved into a life-changing romance. I couldn’t image my world without this woman now.

And Lucas’ excuse? He was just a hardcore gamer. And, well, he’s Lucas. I can’t comprehend half the things he says anyway.

A slender, graceful man stepped toward us, his pleasant face tinged with a hint of generic sorrow.

“Ms. Webster, are these the gentlemen you were waiting for?” he asked.

She nodded, immediately toning down her contagious smile. “Yes, these are Mrs. Taylor’s grandsons, Zach and Lucas.”

The man introduced himself as Mr. Kress, the “evening director” for Selznick and Sons. He efficiently ushered us past the staid, mahogany-accented couches and chairs and out of the lobby. He apologized to Lucas and me for our loss—I nodded blankly, it felt weird receiving such intimate condolences from a stranger—and then encouraged us to sign the guest book and fill out a memorial card before entering Gram’s parlor.

I didn’t know what a memorial card was, but Mr. Kress explained as he walked us to a desk just outside the open doors of the room reserved for us. I looked past him, at the group of silver-haired folks inside. My grandmother’s urn sat on a table by the far wall, placed next to a small wooden box.

I smiled. My high school buddy Ida “Eye” Jean-Phillipe and her father Eustacio were here. As far as I knew, neither of them had known Gram, so I reckoned they were here to support the family. Eustacio was the flint-eyed deputy chief of NYPD’s homicide division, and an old friend of my dad’s. (“From the ramen noodle days,” Dad had once told me.) Ida, an NYPD lab tech, was here for me. I hadn’t known she was coming tonight. Very cool of her to show.

“…so think of a memorial card as a message to your loved one,” Mr. Kress was saying as we reached the desk. He picked up a small envelope and a pre-folded card and handed them to me, gave another to Lucas and one to Rachael. “Feel free to write anything you like—a favorite memory, a prayer, a story. It’s a way to tell her that you’re thinking about her.

“Then place the card in the envelope,” he said, demonstrating. Lucas snorted. I flashed him a half-smirk: We know how frickin’ envelopes work. Jesus Christ.

“…and place it in the box next to your grandmother’s cremains,” Kress concluded. “We hope it will provide some comfort for your family to read these after the service.”

The director thanked us, and softly withdrew. The three of us stood by the desk. We didn’t speak. This was… well, this was it, wasn’t it? I stared at the card, suddenly feeling awkward and clumsy and cold and oh

—be sure to breathe, Mr. Taylor, I heard the reptilian voice of Martin Grace say, be sure to keep breathing while the patient yanks the rug from beneath you—

I shivered, there in the hallway. Rachael noticed, and gave me a concerned look through her black-framed glasses. Lucas, oblivious, bent over the desk and began writing a message to Gram with one of the fountain pens provided.

Rachael reached for my hand, entwined her fingers in mine and gave a supportive squeeze. I smiled. She let go, stepped over to the table and wrote her own message. Finished, they both looked at me.

“Give me a minute,” I said. “Go ahead.” They stepped further into the room.

And then it was me, a fountain pen and my grandmother.

Gram, I wrote, and paused. I watched the ink seep into the thick paper, a black cumulus cloud spreading into a pale sky.

Ink and Gram.

The two words that had carried me through so much of my life came from my grandmother. Courage and faith, little Zachary, she had said to me after my mother died, more than twenty-one years ago. As I stood here in the funeral home, I could remember that night as her hands brushed away my nightmare tears. The veins on her hands. Her palms, smooth and soft. That’s all you need, baby boy. Courage, to face the tough things. Faith, to endure them.

She’d been right. Her words were still in my heart, on my wrists.

Thank you, I wrote finally. I miss you.

I blew gently on the ink, then closed the card.

I stepped into the parlor to join my family and friends.

After I slipped my memorial card into the box by Gram’s urn—brushing off the weirdness of knowing that the woman who’d helped raise me was now reduced to a canful of ashes—I worked my way toward Lucas, Rachael and Eye. The mood in the room wasn’t jovial, but there was a joyfulness. We were here to celebrate Gram’s life, after all.

Gram’s friends all wanted to talk. She always said such nice things about you. Your father was so blessed to have her there, to help. She loved you so much. They were kind strangers, and I thanked them and held their hands and listened to their stories. I’m good at listening to people’s stories.

“Ou byen?” Eye whispered to me as we finally hugged. “You holding up okay?”

“You bet,” I said. “Thanks for coming. It means… it means a helluva lot.” I held her hand for a moment. My artist’s eye took a picosecond of pleasure in the contrast of her black skin against mine. “We knew it was coming. It sucks, but it’s… it’s over, you know?”

I knew she understood. Her mother died when she was young, too.

“And thanks again for the assist with Spindle,” I said. “You did it, Eye.”

“Oh no,” she replied. “You did it, Z. I just helped a little.” She added a quick phrase in Kreyol that I didn’t understand, but her chuckle told me it didn’t matter.

My high school girlfriend had lived in the States since she was ten years old, but she still peppered her conversations with phrases from her native language. I loved listening to her speak. I’ve always thought that if flowers could talk, their voices would sound like Haitian Kreyol, rising and falling, lyrical, like piccolos.

I glanced past Eye’s shoulder at her father. Eustacio Jean-Phillipe was now pacing by the doorway of the parlor. He was talking on his cell phone.

“Is Papa-Jean on it?” I asked.

She grinned and nodded. “Papa-Jean” was our nickname for her dad. “It” was Spindle’s thirty-year-old surprise.

Last week, I’d discovered that the locations of three bodies—and the buried treasure she and her two friends had vowed to hide—had been lurking in plain sight for years, sewn into Gertrude Spindler’s quilt designs. I’d gone on a field trip, traveling to the “X” on the map—a rat-infested kitchen in a long-closed Chinatown restaurant, of all places—pried up some floorboards, and unearthed an arm-length metal tube. Ida Jean-Phillipe had opened the container in the NYPD forensic laboratory and extracted a sword in a stitched cloth scabbard. Her research revealed that the sword had an ancient, blood-soaked—and apparently “mystical”—history.

Ida didn’t care for those silly malchans stories, and I agreed that we needed scientific evidence. Working off the books, Eye confirmed that Spindle’s fingerprints were on the treasure. Using that information last Friday, I’d coaxed the rest of the story from Spindle. NYPD now knew what I’d discovered, including the identity of her dead cohorts, sans Eye’s contributions.

“Papa’s got some people looking into it,” Eye said to me. “I know them. They’re good cops. I think a few of them were a little embarrassed by that write-up in Saturday’s Post, though. ‘30-Year-Old Murders Solved By Brinkvale Therapist. Crazy Quilter In Custody.’”

“Dude, you made the papers?” Lucas asked.

My face flushed red. I changed the subject.

“So yeah, Eye. I owe you some beer for this, next time we’re at Stovie’s.”

“Ohhh, honey. Some? Some beer?” Eye took a quick step away from me, wedged herself between Rachael and Lucas, and playfully tossed her arms around their shoulders. There they were, my little family. I wished I had a camera. “Not some beer, cooyon. ALL the beer.”

Beside her, Rachael giggled. “Girl, you are so my best friend,” she said. She glanced at me, her expression pure, ah, geek chica snarkitude. “That’s right, Z. All the beer.”

I laughed quietly. “Fine, fine. All the beer.”

Lucas beamed. “Katabatic,” he said.

I glanced at my watch. A half-hour had passed since we’d arrived. We had another thirty until the memorial service. I looked back to the doorway, past Eye’s father murmuring into his phone, to the hall. Was Dad really going to be late for this? Was he—

Huh.

A nearly bald man with a long silver ponytail stood next to the memorial cards. In his mid-fifties, he wore jeans, Chuck Taylors, and a photographer’s vest over a black T-shirt.

I squinted. The T-shirt read: Not All Who Wander Are Lost.

As I watched, the man bent down to fill out a card. I saw the reflection of the creamy stationery in his round Lennon-style wire rims. Each wrist sported half a dozen bracelets. The guy was part flower child, part punk rocker. His face was twisted with worry, or dread.

I nudged Lucas.

“You know that guy?” He shook his head. I frowned. “You think Gram would’ve known that guy?”

“Hellzes bellzes,” Lucas said. “No way, bro. Gram was Upper East Side, all the way. You know that. Unless…” He paused. “Unless she was moonlighting at the local Freak Flag Manufacturer’s Union or something.”

“Luc-as,” Rachael hissed. “Shut up. Uncool.”

My brother shrugged at her innocently. I turned back as the man sealed the envelope and placed it in one of the pockets of his vest. He walked past Papa-Jean into the room, walking toward…

Toward me.

“Are you Zach? Zach Taylor?” His voice was high, almost feminine. I glanced at my friends—they looked just as perplexed as I felt—and back at him. I nodded. He extended his hand.

The glittering charms on his bracelets clinked and chittered as we shook hands. Several crucifixes hung from leather straps. A Star of David. A Buddha. A pentagram. A mandala. The Virgin Mary. Other symbols, so many others that I couldn’t place, including an armor-covered woman cradling an infant. His calloused palm squeezed mine, hard.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. His eyes glimmered with tears. “You’re… you’re grown up. And you”—he was now gazing at my brother—“little Lookie-Luke. Unbelievable.”

The man was now emphatically pumping my hand with both of his. I didn’t like this at all. My shoulders tensed. I tried to pull away. He wasn’t letting go. I opened my mouth to speak.

“Listen,” the man said. “I’m so sorry about your grandmother. You have no idea what she gave up for you two. She really protected—”

A hand slammed onto the stranger’s shoulder from behind. The man did a full-body start as the atonal shink-shink-shink of his bracelets tailed off in a discordant jangle. I yanked away my hand, stepped backward, felt Rachael’s hands steady me.

My father towered behind the stranger. His blue eyes were narrow slits. Eustacio stood beside Dad, like a club bouncer.

“Get out,” Dad said.

The man turned and looked up, up, up at my father’s face.

“Will.” The man’s tone evoked a showdown from a spaghetti Western. “Fancy meeting—”

Eustacio’s dark fingers snatched at the man’s forearm, his thumb digging into the tender meat just below the elbow. The skin went alive there, blossoming red. The stranger sucked in air.

“Take a walk with me,” Papa-Jean said.

The cop didn’t wait for a reply. Eustacio shoved the man away from us, toward the parlor door, his thumb still digging into the man’s flesh. A heartbeat later, they were gone.

I looked at my dad, uncomprehending. I watched the haughty, frigid expression in his blue eyes glimmer, then vanish… and saw the quivering muscles along his lean jaw line smooth as he unclenched his teeth. I knew this version of Dad. He wasn’t merely angry. He was Defcon One, thermonuclearly furious.

“What was—”

“Drop it, Zachary,” Dad said. I must’ve telegraphed that I was going to ask again, because he cut me off again, shaking his head once. I flinched. It was the nonverbal gavel bang. Court was adjourned.

My father has always been emotionally chilly—in fact, he wasn’t present through much of our childhood; Gram did the lion’s share of raising us cubs after Mom died—and he’s never been one to tolerate backtalk. I suspect this hails from his ambition, and being the uberhardass his job demands. A half-decade ago, when things were at their worst for me (giddy-giddy pardner, let’s get the posse and raise some hell), his low threshold for defiance was pushed beyond its limits. He was the one who sent me away. Indirectly, he was the one who introduced me to my passion, my art… and eventually, my career.

I don’t think I could have disappointed him more. He once told me this “art therapy thing” was a phase. He offered me a “more respectable” position at his office, starting as a mail clerk. No disrespect to the profession, but I politely declined.

But this—this haughty, ice-cold snarling Dad—was a more recent development. For the past few years, he’s been mean-spirited, high-strung, obsessed with work. He’s changed. I didn’t care for the man he has become. I guess we’re even in that regard.

I closed my mouth, acquiescing. And with that, my dad became normal again. He hugged Rachael and Eye, tousled Lucas’ hair, commenced with small talk about my girlfriend’s writing and my brother’s film classes and my friend’s gig in the NYPD labs. My tribe wasn’t stupid—they’d been around long enough to know that the wisest thing to do was humor New York County District Attorney William V. Taylor—so they smiled back, and answered his questions. Our eyes flitted to each other’s, though, sending near-telepathic transmissions.

None of us knew what was going on with that stranger, but Dad’s reaction was clearly bullshit. I was suddenly curious, hungry-curious, to learn more.

“—any interesting patients lately?” Dad was asking me.

“Uhhh… “Great. Frying pan to fire. I couldn’t get into this particular subject with my father right now, considering I was assigned to Martin’s Grace case and Dad was on a mission to personally crucify the man. To me, Grace was already “a shit-storm onion”—a Lucasism, meaning layers and layers of trouble—without locking horns with Dad over the guy.

More importantly, I needed to know what had just happened here.

“…yeah, Dad. Settled something on Friday, in fact.” I faked a grimace, then checked my watch. “Lucas and Rachael can tell you a little about it. I need to hit the head before the service starts.” I passed Eustacio as I left the parlor; we exchanged a nod.

And then I was off, trotting down the hallway, heading out of the lobby.

I caught up with the stranger a half-block down East 77th Street. Despite the autumn chill in the air, I was sweating from the run.

“Hey!” I hollered. The stranger turned, spotted me, and made to bolt across the street.

A taxi nearly clipped the man as he stepped onto the asphalt. He leaped back to the sidewalk, swaying wildly. In classic New York style, the cabbie screamed “fuck you” and then the car screeched off, leaving me alone with the man, both of us still panting.

“Look, I just want to know what the hell that was about,” I said. The fellow shook his head, eying traffic for another opportunity to cross. He clutched his bruised forearm. I waved my hands in front of him to get his attention.

“I swear to God, man, my dad doesn’t know I’m here. I just need to know. Who are you?”

The man barked a panicked laugh. “I’m nobody, Zach,” he said. His spectacles reflected the passing headlights. “I’m the invisible man, the Ghost of Christmas Past, I’m an afterthought, a vapor”—and now his face twisted into a sneer as he spat out the words—“vaporized by your father, edited out of the history books, just like him.”

I blinked. “Edited what? Who?”

“My God!” the man yelped. “It’s all new to you—they never told you, did they? Of course you don’t know. Gone, poof, a whole life ruined and erased. Your grandmother listened to Will—always the one with the answers, the one with the plans, the angles, the power—and she agreed! Decided it was for the best, to protect you. How could Will do that? Henry was a good man!”

“Who?” I asked. This was insane, The Brink brought topside, lunatic times, lunatic talk, shink-shink-shink jingle-jangle craziness.

“HENRY!” the stranger bellowed. “Will’s brother. His own brother!”

Something small broke inside my head, like a cog popping loose. I cocked my head to the side, trying desperately to understand.

“My father doesn’t have a brother,” I whispered.

The Invisible Man was nodding now, his hand sliding up to his photographer’s vest.

“Oh, yes he did,” the man said. “Yes he does. Still alive, worse than dead. I came here tonight…”

His voice trailed off. The man stared up into the night sky for a moment. A tear slid down his face. He looked back to me.

“I came here to finally tell her I was sorry, so sorry for not telling her Will was wrong, for not speaking out, for not standing up for your uncle—”

“I don’t have an uncle,” I said. That gear in my head was still rolling around loose.

“You do, Zach.” The stranger’s expression was pitying, sympathetic. He fished the memorial card envelope from his pocket and pressed it into my sweating palms. “You do. Hidden away, buried by your dad. But it didn’t—”

He was looking over my shoulder now, the panic surging over his face again.

“Fuck.”

I turned and saw—and now heard—my father as he ran up the street toward us, shouting as he came. Damn it. Either Dad hadn’t fallen for my “gotta whiz” sham, or good ole Papa-Jean had been suspicious and followed me. It didn’t matter.

“Who are you?”

The Invisible Man shook his head again. He glanced into the traffic, then to me.

“I’m nobody, Zach. And so’s Henry, right now. But know this: It didn’t happen the way they said it did. It’s all lies.”

My father was screaming. The Invisible Man and I stared into each other’s eyes for a heartbeat. He smiled and dashed across the street. The cars braked and honked, roaring around him. He made it to the other side.

And then, he disappeared into the darkness.

I gazed down at the crumpled envelope in my hand, a thing that—if this man was telling the truth—was a message from an alternate reality, a parallel universe. An uncle? Lucas and I… had an uncle?

I pocketed the envelope. And then William Taylor, in all his Defcon-One glory, was upon me.

Call me the perpetual Young Man. I was a “young man” when I was six and accidentally dropped a jar of Skippy peanut butter on my kid brother’s toes. I was a “young man” when I was ten and got caught watching a scrambled adult cable channel in our living room, well past my bedtime. (If you crossed your eyes just right, you could make out flashbulb pops of naked flesh through the snow.) And I was a “young man” when I was actually a young man: doing the Anti-Zach thing, breaking into high school lockers, acquiring mad skills with slim jims and stealing cars, getting stoned, picking locks, swiping merchandise, losing cops in alleyways and street crowds. And then the sin I committed, the unforgivable one that forced my father’s hand and swept me away to a New Hampshire facility for “evaluation.” I’m better for it. I hold back because of it. I’m no longer giddy to get giddy-giddy.

I’m sure I’ll also be a “young man” when I’m fifty and my father is on his death bed.

“Young man, I want to know exactly what you’re doing here,” Dad growled now. Neither Lucas nor I had inherited our father’s height, which was something he used expertly in times like this. He stepped toward me, looming like a thundercloud. He was far too close now, invading my personal space. I felt a desperate pang of claustrophobia; the tie around my neck felt like a noose.

Dad’s blue eyes flared.

“Put some words into the air, son. Answer me.”

I stammered and took a step backward, but he persisted, matching me footstep for footstep.

“Ah…” I heard myself say. “Dad, I just…”

“Just,” he said. “What.”

“Jesus! It was fucking weird, Dad!” I cried. I’d never seen him like this, this ferociously intent on getting answers. “What you and Papa-Jean did back there. Don’t look at me and say that it wasn’t! Can you honestly—”

“I’m asking the questions, Zachary.” I heard his teeth click together on that last syllable. He took another half-step toward me. He was a playground bully, a junkyard Rottweiler, a lawyer vivisecting the accused on the witness stand. This was something he was dangerously good at. I realized then this was something he’d spent the past thirty years perfecting.

He huffed an exhale through his nostrils.

“I said. Tell. Me.”

“I was curious,” I replied. My shoulders jigged, shrugging madly. “I couldn’t not be curious. You get all mafioso on some poor scrub, somebody who knew us—”

“He knows us because he’s a criminal, Zachary,” Dad hissed. “I helped send him up to Clinton twenty years ago, twenty-to-life. Must be out on good behavior… and let me tell you that’s a joke, young man, because there was nothing good about his behavior, not back then. Veterinarian. He had a clinic, clinic had a basement. He took his wife there, skinned her alive, kept her alive, and ate her skin. Cooked it like strips of bacon. He had enough training to know where to cut, how to cut, and how to stop the blood before she could die.”

I shuddered, shaking my head. Breathing was very difficult right now.

“He did keep the blood that spilled, though,” Dad said. “Kept every drop. And when she finally went, he went too, went out in the streets, naked, covered in buckets of her blood. God almighty. I had no idea he was out. Means he’s been watching me—us—for a while.”

The granite sternness in my dad’s face ebbed, just a bit.

“You’ve always been like your mother, Zachary,” he said. “You’re caring and, yes, curious to a fault. And like her, you’ve always rushed into the fray, buying what people are selling, asking questions only after the damage is done. You needed history here, son. Context. You should have talked to me.”

I didn’t know what to say. Dad filled the silence.

“What did he tell you?” he asked. My father’s eyes narrowed, predatory once more.

My reeling mind reeled itself in. I snagged on that question, coaxed my perspective into something more critical and defensive. Was Dad asking this because he was protecting me from a lunatic ex-con? Or was he asking because he was lying, lying right now, lying through his serrated lawyer teeth?

I thought of the card in my pocket, and what I’d been told. It didn’t happen the way they said it did. It’s all lies.

Fold, or call?

I lied back.

“Nothing. He kept saying he was the Invisible Man. Just said it over and over, Invisible Man, Invisible Man.”

My father harrumphed.

“Yeah. That’s what he said back then, too. That’s why he bathed in his wife’s blood. To finally become ‘visible.’ Now do you understand why I did what I did? Why I wanted to protect you?”

I nodded. The traffic on East 77th Street rushed past.

“All right, Zach,” Dad said. “Let’s put this to bed and get back to Gram.” He smiled. “Cool?”

The wind gusted, chilly and unfriendly. He nodded.

The two of us walked back to the funeral home. I shivered the whole way.