“I’m busy, Janine,” Jake yelled across the fray.
“For Chrissakes! We’re being attacked by a wild dog.”
“Kurt’s paying you to handle this shit today. So handle it.”
Janine was bossy and feckless and always hanging around Redemption, keeping a codependent eye on her boyfriend, so Jake had suggested to Kurt that she work a shift that day, helping sort out the holiday chaos, hopefully keeping busy and saving Jake from death by nagging. Kurt was happy to oblige. He loved Jake like a war buddy; theirs was a steadfast friendship free from scrutiny of any kind. For Kurt it was platonic love at first sight. He’d poached Jake from a rival studio after the two men had met at a tattoo convention in Providence over a decade earlier. Jake was the drunkest, meanest guy in the bar. Short and barrel-chested, he’d been trying to bait everyone, including Kurt, into a fistfight. He had a long wiry red beard forever studded with food crumbs and glistening beer foam, and his shaved head was branched with scars. The kid was a mess, and Kurt, who was a bit older and already softened by life’s many defeats, saw Jake instantly as just that—a messy kid searching for direction. Kurt had met a lot of guys like Jake in prison, and it felt like a calling to take him under his wing.
That first night in Providence, Jake had flung every taunt and trap he could at Kurt, who blasted back with unconditional respect and affection. If Jake made a surly claim that the song playing on the stereo was shit, Kurt twisted a lyric of the song into a dirty joke Jake couldn’t help laughing at. When Jake tried to punch the ironic mustache off a scrawny hipster’s face, Kurt convinced him that the same guy had been talking about what amazing work Jake had demonstrated during the convention. And finally, in a last surge of primitive, almost comical jungle dominance, as Kurt helped a stumbling Jake into a cab, Jake accused him of potential faggotry, to which Kurt responded, “Nah, man. I had cancer of the prick a couple years back.”
It was a response that made no logical sense at all, except to the Jakes of the world, drunken Irish pugilists who were eternally chastened by male confessions of cancer. “My uncle had that,” Jake said, his face suddenly lamb-like in the glow of the streetlight. “Great fuckin’ guy, though. Athletic, the whole thing.”
“Good for him,” Kurt said, and Jake slammed his fist into the roof of the cab twice like a judge’s gavel.
Kurt had just signed a lease on the space on Commonwealth Avenue and saw in Jake skills of both muscle and artistry. (He was right; in addition to inking tattoos, Jake had experience in construction, light plumbing and electric, and bar security.) He knew that if he just let Jake be exactly who he was without trying to change him, he would have a friend for life. And as drunk as Jake got every single night, as fucked up on whatever cocktail of chemicals he packed into his bloodstream, the man was never late for work at Redemption. He puked outside in the bushes like a dog, he tortured the other artists, many of whom quit after a couple of months because of Jake’s truculence, he raged about the customers as soon as they had paid and gone, but he never said no to Kurt, who in turn never needed to ask for anything, because Jake always volunteered.
He was thirty-five years old and ate acid, mushrooms, or mescaline almost every weekend. His ears were loaded with metal studs and bolts, and his lobes wrapped around black wooden discs the size of Communion wafers. He wanted to get horns implanted in his skull but his girlfriend, Janine, wouldn’t let him. They were always on the verge of a breakup over this shit; Jake was always threatening to dump her, once and for all, but Janine was so damn shrill and Jake was just too high to argue.
Sarah grabbed the drooling pit bull by his collar as Janine continued to whine from her perch. The dog’s fur was so thin in places that Sarah could see his pink skin scabbing already with sunburn. The muscles beneath his fur stretched and bundled as he prepared to leap over the desk and lick the screaming woman standing on a chair. He wanted her! Her breath had a whiff of bacon and eggs left over from breakfast! He wanted the stapler on the desk! He wanted the red plastic cups sweet with beer! He wanted everything in this new fascinating place! His owner finally made it into the studio and punched the dog’s skull with a closed fist.
“Sit, Marshall. Sit! I said sit, goddammit!” She latched his leash back onto his collar, and Marshall jumped up, placed his paws on her shoulders, and licked her angry face.
“Get that thing out of here,” Janine cried, still standing on her chair.
“My pleasure, you Visigoth slag,” the dog owner yelled. She yanked her happy pup by the throat back onto the street and slammed the door behind her.
“Janine! Are you handling this or what?”
“Jesus,” moaned Janine. “Who’s next?”
“I am,” Sarah said.
“Sign this.” She handed Sarah a waiver. “Whatever the artist wants. No exceptions. Not invalidated by intoxication. Et cetera, et cetera.”
Sarah signed quickly without looking. “I’m only here for Kurt,” Sarah said.
“You get who you get,” Janine snapped back. “Jake, who’s next?” she screamed over the fray.
“How the hell do I know?” Jake answered.
Jake leaned over the body squirming in his chair and continued working. On the back of Jake’s shaved skull was a tattoo of a hand flipping the middle finger. A terrifying man, Sarah thought. In the next stall a man who looked like a movie star Sarah couldn’t remember was inking the chest of another man lying supine on the table, the two of them locked in a state of silent concentration. Sitting in the chair beyond them was a tiny woman with soft, almond-shaped eyes. She watched eagerly as the young tattooer in her stall washed his hands in the sink. He had a nose like an eagle and a goofy smile that seemed kind. Why hadn’t Kurt ever written to her about the characters who worked for him? These were the people he saw every day, with whom he spent the majority of his time. There was so much more she needed to know about him.
“Okay, your wish is being granted today. Kurt’s next,” Janine said, pointing. “All the way in the back.” She placed Sarah’s waiver on the top of a messy stack of papers. “What are you standing there for?” Her skin was very white in the places not covered by tattoos. Sarah saw a vein throbbing minutely at the woman’s temple.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Janine said. “It only hurts like hell.”
THE GENTLE OPIATE high of Mr. Cox’s pills was waning in direct proportion to Karen’s waxing spiritual angst. She held her fingertips to her collarbone and closed her eyes, trying to manifest an early dismissal from her work shift. Not long after, her wish was granted when a surly, self-absorbed member refused to return Karen’s “Happy Last Day” wishes, and she snapped and called the man a cunt. She did this in full view of her manager, Roberto, who had recently arrived. Roberto gaped at her from a stool behind the entrance desk, a glistening slice of pizza resting on his lap.
“Did you just call that guy a cunt?” he cried.
“It was a term of distinction and honor in the Middle Ages,” she said, trying to cover.
Roberto took a big, joyless bite of his pizza. “You’re fired. I mean done. Finito. Life’s too short for me to deal with this crap.”
Karen began to sob. After the library debacle, she had been given one more chance at Heart House. She had tried to bargain for three strikes, but Nora had had to explain, “Not in this economy.”
Karen gathered her meager belongings from her locker and headed to the door. She cried big shuddering sobs all the way to the bus stop. The bus was crowded, and Karen, with her tears, expected someone to give up a seat for her, but no one budged. Last Day was supposed to be a holiday of grand and selfless gestures, but her fellow bus riders refused to acknowledge her, their mouths sealed in acceptance of this grim world. It was what made cities so lonely. So many people to talk to and not a word, not even a hi exchanged with the person who sat so close that her arm skin was sticking to yours.
Karen’s stomach hurt badly. She’d been down this road before. There was a lot of tearing inside her viscera. She did visualization exercises every night to mend them, but it wasn’t enough. The last time she was in the hospital, the doctors had warned her.
“You could die,” one had said, a gastroenterologist. “Do you understand what that means?”
It means a lot of things, she wanted to say to him, depending on your spiritual belief system, but her mind was frothy with all the meds she was on. “Yeah,” was what came out of her mouth.
“I saved your life!” the gastroenterologist cried. He was shorter than she was and had very cold, silky hands.
Another doctor had started her on a new antipsychotic that made her brain feel like it was blistering under her scalp. She had trouble reading. It was hell. These side effects subsided eventually but she was not willing to go through another adjustment of her meds. Her stomach hurt a lot now, but she was sure she would pass everything and prayed to be relieved of her worst compulsions.
* * *
—
HEART HOUSE WAS a large gray Victorian set back from the main road on top of a high hill. It offered a striking view of the city—the Prudential Building was visible from the window of the third-floor bathroom—though few of the residents had the faculties to appreciate it. A lovely building with ugly, utilitarian modifications for its new purpose as a group home, Heart House was surrounded by a neat, uncultivated yard where awkwardly placed benches green with mold slowly rotted in the damp air. The residents of Heart House were hopeless cases—schizophrenics and mentally disabled adults, unemployable men and women who watched reruns of game shows on a continuous loop all day in the common room. Narrative programming put the residents to sleep, which made them stay up all night, a hassle for the staff. Music triggered all kinds of agitation, fists flying, inconsolable tears, the occasional masturbatory spree. So the staff had compiled a library of game shows. Low stakes and solvable puzzles: it put the residents’ minds at ease.
Karen never watched TV. The light gave her headaches, which she self-diagnosed as an allergy to gamma rays. She had a library card and stacks of books teetering on the sill of her bay window. She loved best thick, hard-covered romance novels with gold lettering embossed on their jackets. All those stories of damaged men and women in love. She had several slim volumes of Rudolf Steiner’s sorcery that she saved for nights when she ran out of sleeping pills. And she had collected most of an incomplete set of outdated children’s encyclopedias culled from the free box at the library. As the only high-functioning resident of Heart House, Karen had certain privileges. The library card and the biggest room with the bay window were two of them, she liked to believe, though the staff said the room was the luck of the lottery, nothing more. But she was certainly the only resident who was allowed a mini-fridge in her room. If she had had family, she would have been allowed to go visit them on her own, without asking for permission, for an entire day if she liked, as long as she was back by 8 P.M. She was not allowed to have a phone, none of the residents were, but she was confident that in time she would find a crack in that prohibitory wall and erode it with her insistent carping.
Buddy and Jon-Jon were hanging streamers in the front lobby when Karen got home from the YMCA. Lexi was frosting a vanilla sheet cake very slowly, her tongue pushed out of the corner of her mouth in deep concentration. Same as last year, Karen thought, almost exactly, this tableau. Lauren, the counselor on duty, sat at the front desk, her face resting on her fist, while the other hand punched out perforated cardboard crowns from a Last Day activity booklet published for institutionalized adults. Lauren was a pretty girl around Karen’s age with a partially shaved head and a tongue ring. She liked to read Christian romance novels, which piqued Karen’s interest: she was curious what nuances Lauren’s savior allowed when it came to things like blowjobs. Karen’s secular romance novels were teeming with them, and she was honestly curious how Christians handled it. For that query Karen had lost library privileges for a week, and Lauren never really forgave her.
“Why is the icing blue?” Karen asked her now. “It’s not appropriate.”
“Didn’t stop you from digging your grimy fingers into the jar. Jeesh.” Lauren took the tub of frosting away from her.
“Purple is the traditional Last Day color. This might very well be the last time we ever make a celebratory sheet cake. It might be the last sheet cake on Earth. We should try to get it right.”
“There wasn’t any purple frosting left at the store. I looked.”
“We could make our own,” Karen suggested, “by mixing blue and red.”
“I don’t get paid enough for that,” was Lauren’s reply. Karen frowned. She liked to think of the Heart House staff as distant cousins whose presence in the house was inspired by love or, in the case of curmudgeons like Lauren, familial loyalty. The fact that they got paid, and were unhappy with their pay, made the whole operation feel mercenary and gross.
Karen picked up the communal phone and ordered herself a large cheese pizza, her voice low so that Lauren couldn’t hear her. She was supposed to get permission before ordering delivery, but Lauren loved to say no without reason. A vice principal in disguise, she always shushed the Heart House residents when they talked in the hallways, as though there were a religious ceremony or standardized test taking place somewhere else in the building. “Come to the back door,” Karen whispered into the phone. The man taking her order said to expect at least a two-hour wait.
Karen went to her room and retrieved her safe from where she hid it under her laundry bag. Inside she discovered there was not enough money for even one slice of pizza. She’d saved over a hundred dollars since Christmas, but she’d forgotten that she’d spent it all on her donation to Save the Tigers. She had been promised a plush toy Bengal as a thank-you gift, but it turned out to be one of those cheap carnival versions, stuffed with Styrofoam beads that spilled out from rips in the stitching when she hugged it too hard.
How long would it take before Heart House found out she’d been fired and made her leave? At least a week, she figured. What would happen then? Nora’s sphere of influence had been maxed out, and she had many times explained to Karen the boundary between therapist and client, that she would not be able to adopt her or even house her for one night.
That’s okay, Karen thought. That was not her destiny.
“I have choices!” Karen said to the stuffed animals resting beneath the covers of her unmade bed. She packed a plastic grocery bag with essentials, filled her pockets with all the loose change she could find strewn about the floor, and left this lovely bedroom for the last time.
In the foyer of Heart House was a thick, leather-bound logbook where residents and their nonexistent guests were supposed to sign in and out. It sat regally on a podium, lit by an imitation Tiffany lamp, giving the whole Heart House operation the impression of a quaint New England bed-and-breakfast. Karen’s name was the only one listed in the logbook. Line after line, page after page, her loopy script detailed every trip she had taken to work and the library for the calendar year so far. The constancy of her own life struck her as both gratifying and pointless. Surely she must have been other places, Karen thought as she flipped through the pages. She could only remember an apple-picking excursion with Nora, but that was last fall, recorded in last year’s logbook.
Today she wrote out in her fat, bubbly cursive:
May 27—Karen Donovan—3:20 P.M.—Library (Allston Branch)—Home by 8 P.M.
In the TV lounge the cheers of a once-live studio audience intensified and the voice of a game-show host strained amiably to rise above it. Sadie sat on the pillows of the bay window seat, pressing her hand up against the glass, then removing it. “Hello, brother bear,” she said to the sky.
One story up was Karen’s room, empty of her. Sometimes, when she entered her room after a prolonged absence, like when she’d had a lo
ng workday followed by a therapy session, she heard a sudden hush before entering, as though her clothes and stuffed animals and library books were leading a fantastic life that all jolted to a collective halt as soon as she unlocked the door.
What would happen to them, to all her things?
Lauren was scolding Gregory in the kitchen for eating an extra pudding cup. They were his pudding cups, Karen wanted to argue; Gregory’s social worker bought them for him as a special treat. If he wanted to eat an extra one, who was Lauren to tell him no? But if she didn’t leave right now, Karen knew, she never would, and with uncharacteristic quiet, she slipped out the door.
THE MORE KURT thought about the day ahead, the more he felt trapped. This feeling—even if it was an illusion, a recognizable haunting from his months in prison—was now worse than any possible outcome. But understanding things and believing they were true were not the work of the same organ, and so every attempt Kurt made to console himself only impounded him more.
He needed to stop mixing prescription sleeping pills with beer. That had for the last twelve years been both the solution and the source of pretty much all his problems. He loved the feeling—as if someone had pulled the plug on his consciousness—but he would wake up just refreshed enough to puzzle over what the hell he might have done during the previous night’s blackout. In the past he had ordered and paid for an antique trumpet as well as four different books on falconry, made reservations at a bed-and-breakfast in Spain (impressive, he admitted to himself, as Kurt did not speak a word of Spanish), and, more than once, eaten a whole pizza and possibly some of its box. He drank every night, so if he didn’t take pills when he was drinking, he couldn’t take them at all. Maybe he should hide his computer earlier in the evening to prevent these fugue-state sprees. Or just disable his email account. If he could commit to that last option alone, it would cut his usual trouble down by about a third. But how many times before had he come to this precise realization and continued to do the same thing?
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