Someone downstairs is screaming. Someone always is, on State Street. Even though it’s only a couple of blocks from Warren Street, where skyrocketing property values have replaced every poor family with a wealthy New York City transplant, State Street has stubbornly refused to be transformed. He knows exactly who is screaming, too. Because of course he does. He knows exactly who everyone is on State Street.
He hadn’t closed Ossie’s eyes, and now he can’t.
Chapter Three
RONAN
What new cage have I awakened in this time?
An old addict’s trick, waking up wondering where you are and why without panicking. Being excited about it, even. Embracing the challenge of the moment.
I wasn’t an addict anymore. I told myself that. Hadn’t been high in a week and a half.
I was on a train, apparently. Engines churning. The wheel-thrum slowing as we drew near to the next stop. Lights arcing overhead—a bridge, an arm extended hopefully into the night. The Rip Van Winkle, to be precise.
So. I was going home. Huh.
Okay, cool, no problem. We can do this. We’re grown-ups now. No one here can hurt us anymore.
“Hudson, sir,” said the lanky child who collected tickets, and didn’t he know that calling a forty-year-old gay man sir was like asking a chubby woman when she’s due? The train smelled of hospital linen and cheap cherry-almond soap and blue gross Porta-Potty water from the open bathroom door at the end of the car and I was not ready to return to Hudson.
Twenty years, since the last time I made this trek up the river to the miserable grounds of my spawning. This shitty city full of terrible people. This place I swore never to see again. But, now, somehow—there I was, whole body aching, on a train I had no memory of boarding, pulling into the station.
It made you a pretty good detective, having a substance abuse problem. Piecing together the fragments of the moment, while trying to smile and look like you know what’s going on. I took out my phone to check my calendar, but Coffee with Katch was the only thing marked down for the day. I smiled, remembering that lovely boy who’d shown up on my doorstep three days back wanting to model for me. I remembered making the appointment but couldn’t recall whether it had happened. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall a goddamn thing, not even opening a bottle or unspooling a bag of crystal. I didn’t feel any of the ordinary bliss or edginess of meth, so I was reasonably certain I hadn’t relapsed. Between my legs lay my fully stocked camera bag, which I only ever trot out for an out-of-town shoot. Or a long trip. So which one was this?
The train blew its whistle. The lights of Hudson were sliding into place, a puzzle assembling itself against my will. Suddenly, I was having a hard time getting any air in my lungs. Suddenly my skin was on fire.
Shouts echoed in my head. Homophobic slurs. Hard fists to the face. Old wounds ached; faded bruises sprang to life. Unhealed scars. Shards of metal still stuck in me.
You can’t be here.
I patted my pockets, plowed through my camera bag. No flask. No glass vial or plastic bag with sweet, sweet escape inside. So I had no choice but to turn to a lesser anesthetic. I switched on my phone, summoned up the soothing blitzkrieg of social media. Surfed the churning sea of my mentions. The fights I picked and the ones that picked me. Fallout from my latest photo shoot, which went live that week, all the predictable buzz and semi-scandal—an ad for some edgy new clothing line, starring that pretty boy from that big new movie, except in my photos he’s naked on his knees surrounded by shadowy shapes, with a look on his face like he’d just been fucked into next Friday.
So I fought trolls for a little while. The guy who said I was an overhyped pornographer, I called him an underdeveloped hyena fetus. Someone called me the six-letter F word and I told him to go suck a big bag of broken glass. And so on.
That got my blood going. Edged out the panic. Hate was reliable like that.
Smart money would have been to stay on the train. Wait one stop, get off at Albany, where there’s an actual fully staffed station with stores and a platform, instead of getting off in Hudson, which is a ghost town after 10:00 P.M. But it was late—this had to be the last train of the day—and I didn’t want to spend the night in any station. Or spring for a hotel. Success and money were still relatively recent developments, and anytime I could avoid spending it I did. My best bet was to disembark in Hudson, crawl home to Daddy no matter how much I was dreading it, sleep there, have a decent breakfast with the man, pat myself on the back for making him happy with a surprise visit, never mind that it was as much a surprise to me as it was to him, and then get the fuck back to Manhattan.
I stood up. Grabbed my stuff. Turned to step into the aisle.
But something was wrong. Hudson is a sleepy tiny town. The kind of stop you might sleep through. It had happened to me more than once, in college: dazed, exhausted, aching from drugs and sex in excess, heading home from my wild grown-up life to the weird mental limbo Hudson always put me in. Before I vowed to never return. Back then, I was usually the only person getting off the train. And now—the aisle was full. A couple dozen people waited up ahead of me. Scruffy hipsters; impatient important women. Abundant piercings. A tiny dog peering out of a purse. A gay couple in pastel polos. Everyone looked expensive. Even the people who were obviously unemployed, who had come from overcrowded Brooklyn basements.
Was there some kind of arts festival that weekend, or secret religious retreat? Could that be why I had come? Was I here to photograph something? But no conceivable thread connected these inexplicable tourists. Only that they were all white, and they were all outsiders. And that an observer could not have known, by looking at us, that I was not one of them. Somehow, I was the last in line. Everyone else had been ready. They knew the stop; knew that when the train passed under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge it was only a matter of minutes before it pulled into the station. They came here often.
What the hell happened to Hudson?
“Hudson,” called the conductor, sounding half asleep himself. Cold wind whipped down the length of the car. Autumn; I’d forgotten that, too. The city had felt like summer. My dizziness doubled. Impossible scenarios swamped me—what if I had been asleep for months? What if I’d been wandering the earth in an Ambien sleep-walk session, committing all kinds of irrational acts, and was only just now waking up?
That’s what you get for trying to get sober, Ronan. Meth might have been a mean-ass bitch to you while you were doing it, but who’s to say how much nastier it’ll get now that you’ve quit cold turkey?
I took out my phone to try to call Katch, but I didn’t have his number. He’d only ever shown up at my studio in person. I clicked onto the calendar event, even though I knew it didn’t have any more information.
Except: now it did. I’d left the location blank, but now there was one: Hudson, New York. How the fuck had that happened?
Since stopping drugs, weirdness had abounded. Radio static when there was no radio around; shadows moving on the wall when there was nothing to cast them. Like the dark side was trying its damnedest to leak into the sunlight. This must just be one of those things. My brain had gone briefly on autopilot and piloted me here.
Just more evidence of how far gone you were—how close you came to destroying yourself—how broken you were, and how brave you are for fixing yourself.