“These Arms of Mine.” One of their favorites. Ms. Jackson has a knack for that, like she sees into their heart, and speaks directly to them and them alone. He gets into bed beside her. They cuddle closer, spooning together sexlessly, immaculate.
Chapter Eight
RONAN
I lay in bed with my eyes closed for as long as I could, trying to convince myself I was safe at home in New York City and the night before had all been a dream.
But I knew from the second I woke up where I was. I could tell by the smell that I’d come home—old man and cigarettes, coffee and Stetson cologne and the muck of the river—and by the amber brilliance of the sunlight.
I lay still, taking stock of my body. Searching for the aches and woes of withdrawal, but came up with nothing.
Nothing, except abject emotional misery. And a head full of bizarrely vivid dreams (black water; whales in the sky; drowning in the dreamsea). And whatever the hell had happened to me the night before, to get me to Hudson.
One new piece the morning light illuminated: Katch called me, from a pay phone, and told me to meet him at Penn Station. And when I got to the station he’d called me again, from a different pay phone, telling me he was delayed but to get on the 9:30 train to Hudson, and he’d meet me there.
Why the hell would I have agreed to that?
More pieces were missing. I’d have to wait and hope they resurfaced.
I put clothes on, moved through the house. Taking stock of the situation. The fridge full of mismatched plastic containers; food brought by friends and neighbors. The line of empty beer cans beside the kitchen sink. Pabst Blue Ribbon; Dad hated the stuff. But Marge, the woman who’d worked the butcher shop cash register for as far back as I could remember, had loved it. Funny, how well I still knew the man, how certain I could be about this. That he would never be sleeping with Marge, any more than he would buy Pabst Blue Ribbon even if it was on sale. She was taking care of him. Cooking, cleaning. Wiping his ass for all I knew.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, coming into the living room.
My father frightened me. Sitting in his ancient recliner, still in the same pajamas. Still not hearing me when I spoke. Still not seeing me.
Water dripped into a bucket in the corner. The bucket was overflowing. I picked it up, took it to the bathroom, dumped it into the toilet. Some splashed onto my hand. I lifted it to my face—smelled it—licked it. Sure enough: salt water.
“What’s up with the ceiling, Dad?”
No facial hair. More forehead than I remembered. His curly hair cut shorter.
“Ro,” he said, then opened his mouth, but nothing further emerged—which had always been his way, to say as little as possible, to make his sentences short if they happened at all. Back then I’d felt like it was a choice, a facet of his taciturn masculinity to keep his words mostly to himself. Now it was like there was nothing there, like a lifetime of holding back his words had caused him to lose them altogether.
I went back to my room and got dressed to go out. I had to get the fuck out of there.
Dad was waiting for me when I stepped out of my room. Standing in the hallway, mouth slack, eyes glazed.
“They’ll be so glad you came home,” he whispered.
“Who, Dad?”
He turned and padded softly back to his recliner.
“No one’s happy to see me, Dad. Nobody in Hudson likes me.”
“They finally got you here,” he muttered as he went. “They’ve been trying for so long.”
* * *
IT WAS WORSE BY DAYLIGHT, somehow. The night before it hadn’t felt real, the spectacle of what had happened to Hudson. In the dark it had the same stillness of any normal American city that wasn’t New York. The store signs were all updated, that was all. Now I could see it for the corpse that it was.
But not a corpse, or not just a corpse. The dead city had been infected with something, and reanimated. Doors opened and shut, cash registers clanged, pedestrians smiled; but the soul was gone.
Last night it had felt like the phantom ache of a long-gone tooth. Now each gap felt raw, fresh, like a hard fist to the face had just popped it clear out of my jaw.
A clothing boutique inhabited the body of what had once been Warren Street’s best Italian restaurant, Mama Rosa’s. My favorite toy store was now stocked with antiques. So was the bakery. So was the photography shop.
What did they do to you? I whispered, over and over again.
Barely ten A.M., and there I was. Awake. Dressed. Walking. When was the last time I’d done that?
Historical Materialism, one store was called. I went in looking for Karl Marx references, but of course it was only capitalism being clever—good old-fashioned materialism, the empty pursuit of material objects, as applied to old things—not historical, per se, but old, having been created during history.
“The theme this month is seafaring,” said a sweet young woman with rectangular spectacles who I was probably wrong to instinctively hate. Harpoons hung from the ceiling. She held up a tray in which hooks and blades lay spread.
“That’s so great,” I said, staggering backward, fumbling for the doorknob in a blur of horror. “So great.”
It slammed behind me.
I’d written a note. Left it on the butcher block in the kitchen. Hey Marge! I’m back in town for a bit—give me a call when you get this? Ronan. And I added my cell phone number.
The weirdest part of all: a coffee can ashtray on the front porch. Full of cigarettes. Unfiltered, though, and not Dad’s brand. I’d picked one up, sniffed at it. Cloves. Katch’s brand.
Marge made sense. Her beer cans could fit into a comprehensible narrative. Katch and his cigarette butts popping up on my father’s porch could not.
Was he from Hudson? Was that why he showed up at my studio’s doorstep? Was that why he’d had me come home?
They finally got you here, my father had said. They’ve been trying for so long.
I remembered the big real estate project Dom had mentioned. Maybe the people behind that were the they? But they’d have had a million ways to reach out that didn’t involve a boy like Katch.
The next-best guess I could come up with was a homophobic conspiracy to get me home and murder me . . . but Katch was clearly queer himself, and probably wouldn’t be a part of that . . . and why would my hometown bullies suddenly want me dead?
The familiar sooty chrome exterior of the Columbia Diner caught my eye, sucked me inside by awakened twenty-year-old instinct— an entire childhood’s worth of Saturday-morning breakfasts with my dad, on our walk to work at the butcher shop—remembering the way I always wanted to sit on the stools along the counter, but Dad said those were for people who were by themselves, whereas we got to sit in the booths—and how I’d always imagined the counter to be for grown-ups, and dreamed of the day when I’d walk in the door on my own, miraculously an adult, and sit down on a stool and ask for my regular—
But there were no stools now. No counter. The booths remained, but their shredded pleather had been replaced with something shiny and stylish, in one of those of-the-moment shades I refused to know the name of. Puce, probably, or ecru. And there was no bowl of pee-flecked mints beside the cash register anymore. And there was no cash register. And the massive laminated diner menus I loved so dearly had been replaced by small squares of card stock. And instead of a heavy old Greek there was a young man with rectangular spectacles.