Sticks sipped his coffee and studied her. “Why me?”
Rain waited until her coffee arrived, and she loaded too much sugar and cream into it before she answered. “I … don’t actually know.”
Sticks waited for more.
“Look, yesterday—” Rain began, faltered, took a breath and a sip, and tried again from a different direction. “What were you doing on that street yesterday? When I came out of that alley, your car was right there. Why?”
Sticks looked down at his cup for a moment, then shrugged as he glanced back up. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
He smiled. “You can run faster than me, so if this freaks you out, you don’t have to worry about me chasing you.”
Rain did not smile.
“Okay, then,” said Sticks, “but it comes with backstory, okay?”
“Most things do.”
“Weird backstory,” he amended.
“Most things do,” she said again. They studied each other for a moment and he nodded.
“Here goes,” said Sticks, blowing out his cheeks. “First, I guess, you got to know something about me. When I was kid, I used to have dreams. Special dreams. My grandma says most people have a little touch of it, but some got more than others. Some people have too much of it, and it messes with their heads. Drives them nuts. I guess if I was a painter or writer, I could work it out better, but I’m not like that. I’m not artistic, so I don’t have a way to—what’s the word? Channel? Yeah, I don’t have any way to channel it.”
Rain cocked her head to appraise him. “Are you talking about visions?”
“Dreams, visions, whatever. Sure. Not useful stuff, like I can’t tell you tonight’s lottery numbers. Wish I could. And I didn’t predict that my Humvee was going to roll over an IED. My grandma—Grammy, we called her—could see things a little better sometimes. She’d always know who in the neighborhood was going to die, who was sleeping with who, who was knocked up. Like that.”
“Was she a voodoo priestess or something?”
Sticks snorted. “Grammy was a Baptist church lady who worked at a box company in Queens.”
“Oh. Sorry. That’s me being stupid.”
He waved it off. “Grammy was different from most folks, though. Not in every way, but in some ways. Like I’m different.” He paused. “Look, two nights ago, I had a dream about driving the Red Rocket in a part of the city where I’d never been before, which is weird because there’s nowhere in the five boroughs I ain’t been. Nowhere. I was hacking before I went into the army, and I took it up right after they cut me loose from the VA hospital. Other than being a soldier and a summer working at Action Burger in senior year of high school, I never had any other job. I love driving, even in city traffic. I been all over the country, and I used to take these long wandering nowhere drives. No map, no GPS, no plan. I’d just get in my car and go and see where the road took me, you dig?”
She nodded. “Sounds scary.”
“It’s not. It’s great. You drive into someplace strange and there’s no one to guide you or make connections for you and you just deal with it.”
“Why?”
Sticks looked surprised. “Why not? Anyway, in the army, I was a driver. Pretty good at it, too, no matter what I was driving. Then I drove over an IED and this happened.” He raised a scarred hand to touch his melted face.
“I lost someone that way,” said Rain softly. “An IED, I mean. In Iraq.”
Shadows passed across Sticks’s face, and he nodded. “Yeah, you couldn’t take two steps over there for a while without tripping one. I lost a bunch of friends, including all the guys in my vehicle. Still feel like it’s maybe my fault for not spotting it. I was behind the wheel. That’s another story, and it’s my shit to process. I don’t blame driving for what happened to me, though. I always feel better behind the wheel. My car, the Red Rocket … it’s like it’s me, you know? When I’m rolling along, I’m not crippled. I’m whole. So when I say that I know every street in New York, I’m not joking. I could win any quiz show on it. In my dream, though, I was in a part of the city that I’d never seen before. No street signs, no nothing. Understand something, though—I knew the names of those streets. The main one, where I guess you ran from when you went through the alley, that’s Boundary Street. The one that I parked the Red Rocket on was Misery Street.”
Rain sat up like she’d been jolted by ten thousand volts. “Wait … what? Go back. Did you say Boundary Street?”
“Yeah.” He studied her with narrowed eyes. “Why?”
“There’s a Boundary Street in my dreams, too.”
They sat with that for a long few moments.
Sticks shook his head slowly. “I looked it up on Google Maps, and there’s nothing. I mean … there are Boundary Streets in other cities, but not here in New York. Weird, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “But I’m confused. Is this still your dream or someplace you’ve actually been to?”
He sipped his coffee and set his cup down thoughtfully. “A bit of both. I go there in dreams a lot. More lately, though. Boundary Street and, um, other places. But yesterday I found myself driving—actually driving—on those same streets, and they are not in New York. No goddamn way.”
Rain nodded. She understood that part of it, though she could not begin to explain it.
“So I pull around the corner and stop,” continued Sticks, “because I kind of feel like that’s where I’m supposed to be. Crazy as shit, I know. I was there for five, ten minutes when it starts to rain, and suddenly I get all excited and know that the person I’m waiting for is coming.”
The whole diner felt suddenly very cold. The waitress came with their food and set the plates down without a word, put some silverware setups rolled in cloth napkins down next to each, and went away. Rain almost—almost—used the interruption to bolt and run, because she knew with sudden and absolute certainty what Sticks was going to say next. But she was trapped in the moment, waiting for him to finish it. But he said nothing.
“This is nuts,” said Rain, her mouth completely dry.
“Yeah, it is,” said Sticks. “I wish my Grammy was around so I could tell her, but she’s in a nursing home now. Dementia. Sometimes she knows me, but most times she doesn’t. I wish I could tell her about this, though.” He paused. “Now it’s your turn. You’re not as shocked or freaked out about what I said as anyone else would be. I can see it in your eyes, and I think it’s why we’re both here right now. So … you want to tell me why you called this morning?”
Rain wanted to cry but instead she smiled. “Okay,” she said, “but it comes with backstory.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Gay Bob is awake. The dream won’t let him sleep.
The dream is vivid, as real as if he’d lived it. He waits for it to fade, wanting this one to pale itself into half memory and then dissipate like morning fog. His good dreams always do that, and he wants this one—not good at all—to be equally elusive.
It remains. It refuses to budge. It hovers like a wasp at the front of his mind, threatening to sting. Wasps can sting over and over again and not die.
He laughs out loud, hoping the sound of his laughter will make him feel silly and self-conscious about having a nightmare. Nothing is so potent a weapon as a cynical metropolitan gay man’s dismissive laugh. That is his belief.
Except this morning.
The cynic is powerless in the face of the truly inexplicable. Faithless by experience, Gay Bob nevertheless has faith in this dream, and that makes him sweat. His T-shirt is pasted to his chest and ribs and back. His dark hair is cold rat tails against his neck and forehead.
Around him, like fortress walls, are his precious books. He looks at their darkened shapes, willing Heaney and Joyce and Márquez and Szanto to stand up for him. He reaches out and touches the stack nearest to his bed. Castro and Galeano, Neruda and Matthiessen. But his guardians are still sleeping, none of their
dreams invaded as his had been.
Gay Bob is afraid.
The dream won’t back down. It stands there, grinning at him with its thin red lips and sharp white teeth, and it reaches for him with long and trembling white fingers.
He can’t make it go.
“Fuck!” he snarls at the darkness. His heavy curtains are pulled, and he loathes the lines of sunlight trying to cut their way into the room. He knows he can’t let his day start without doing something about his dreams. That’s how it works. That’s how he keeps balanced. Reaching over, he swats the touchpad on his bedside lamp, and there is a pale pool of yellow light around his head and shoulders. Without knowing why, he gets out of bed, stands up. His hands are in front of him as if he is ready to fight. He is powerful. He’s boxed and wrestled and knows some kung fu. He’s been in a hundred scuffles growing up gay in the inner-city school system, and he’s fought his way through some outright brawls at Pornstash. He’s never lost a fight. Not since he was fifteen, and not even close in his adult life. He breaks people; they don’t break him.
But he is alone now, and it isn’t that kind of fight.
He looks around the room. Looking for the enemy. Looking also for a weapon—a club, a sword.
He sees his weapon of choice. His face accepts the smallest of feral smiles. In three long strides, he’s at the desk and punches the button to fire up his laptop. The screen light glows icy blue, and he is still smiling, although tightly.
Gay Bob has strength he doesn’t know he has, and it has nothing to do with the moves he learned in all those sweaty gyms and dojos. He has other kinds of strength, unknown and largely untapped.
He sits down at the computer, and as he does so, he’s aware of turning his back on the darkness. Not for a moment does he believe that the dream was only that. Gay Bob isn’t stupid, and he isn’t naive enough to accept that reality is the only truth. His cynicism is of another species altogether.
The computer finishes loading, and he caresses the surface of the track pad to put the cursor on the icon for Microsoft Word. A blank page opens, white and pure and sympathetic.
He writes.
Gay Bob always dreams in text. Even when there are visuals, some part of his mind is describing them. He’s always been like that. His is the mind of a natural writer, born to no other destiny. He has scores of discs of dreams and fragments of dreams. It doesn’t matter that no one else likes what he’s written. He loves it all because writing is what makes him feel alive. It’s what keeps the demons at bay.
Nothing that he’s written before, though, is like this.
As he begins typing, the dream takes a new form, a new style. And he knows that he has crossed a line, crashed through some kind of ceiling, become—somehow—a different kind of writer. This story is proof of that unexpected and powerful evolution. It is the firstborn of a clutch of new stories that he knows, without doubt, that he will write. It isn’t magic realism or literary fiction or social drama.
He writes a horror story.
It’s a true nightmare, too, of the old kind before TV and movies told us what to dream. It is a nightmare of primal fears, of elemental forces.
Gay Bob knows that if he can write it out then he can trap some of its essence on the page, reducing it, diminishing it. He hopes.
And so he writes …
They blew into town on a Halloween wind. The Mulatto drove the big roadster, and the nurse sat in the back next to Doctor Nine. The glittering towers of a great city rose like spikes of diamond in the evening gloom. Flocks of nightbirds troubled the air above the car, following where the doctor went. Always following. Always hungry.
A green sign above the road announced the exit to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Doctor Nine’s smile was a cold knife slash across his pale face. Without haste he reached forward and touched the Mulatto’s shoulder.
“Take that exit.”
The Mulatto nodded and crossed the lines toward Brooklyn.
“Something…?” asked the nurse.
“Oh, yes,” said Doctor Nine. “We need to make a house call.”
The Cadillac drifted down the exit ramp, silent as the wind. The night followed like a hungry pack of dogs.
Gay Bob stares at the screen, his eyes red with exhaustion and still troubled by the dream. Writing it out should have defused it, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he is afraid that writing had struck a match and held it to the wick.
He clicks on the option to file and it presses Save As. It asks him for a file name. He types: Fire Zone.
He sits for a long time and stares at the name.
Gay Bob turns off the computer and crawls back into bed, pulls the blankets high and tight. In three minutes, he is asleep.
He wakes nine minutes later.
He stands on the sill of the open sixth-floor window of his apartment building. He is naked, cold, shivering, dripping with sweat. His cry is small, lost in the night. He shifts, and his bare foot crunches on something. He looks down.
There, on the sill and on the floor behind him, are round pills. OxyContin in all its varied colors and strengths. White tens, gray fifteens, pink twenties, all the way up to the glorious, delicious green eighties. Hundreds of them. A lifetime’s worth of them.
Enough of them.
Too much of them.
There for him.
Gay Bob screams. Trying so hard to wake up. But he is already awake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“I was raised in the city,” Rain said. “In a big apartment on Central Park West. My dad’s a financial advisor, but he wasn’t much a part of my life. You know the expression ‘married to his job’? That’s him. Not sure if he actually loves my mother, and I’m not sure why they stay married. It’s not like they fight or anything. They don’t do much of anything, at least not together. Dad spends most of his time at work, and Mom is always out running some kind of celebrity event. She’s a fund-raiser for all these worthy causes—saving this old theater, saving that historic house, saving after-school music programs. Important stuff, I guess, but she didn’t do much to save me.” Rain stopped and cocked her head, listening to that. “God, how whiny was that?”
“It’s all good,” said Sticks. “Let it come out the way it wants to come out.”
She thought about that, nodded, continued. “I used to write in my diary that I lived in a haunted house, except that it was me who was haunting it. I was the ghost. I didn’t say much because no one seemed to want me to. We lived in a big apartment with more rooms than we needed. We had a cleaning lady in three times a week, but she only spoke Russian and never said enough for me to pick up much. Hello, goodbye, like that. Or she’d hold up something off the floor and shake it at me and growl, ‘Yours?’ Like that. There were no other kids in our building, and I went to one of those private schools where we had to wear stupid plaid skirts and sweater uniforms and they called us Miss. Not even Ms. I was Miss Thomas to all the teachers and just Thomas to the other girls. No boys at all. Not after sixth grade. Girls. Most of them were from families a lot richer than ours. And that’s weird, being the poorest rich girl in a school where there are daughters of millionaires and, I think, a couple of billionaires. Only two of us took public transportation to school. The rest had drivers.”
“Sounds rough,” said Sticks, and she gave him a sharp look.
“Don’t make fun.”
“I’m not, actually,” he said. “Sounds like you spent a lot of your time being ignored. That can’t feel good.”
“I guess,” said Rain. “Anyway, so there’s me, Little Miss Nobody mousing my way through a life even I didn’t care about. Then I met Noah. He was working at a Starbucks, and we started talking, you know, the way people do. Talking about nothing just to talk. The weather, movies. Like that. He was funny, though, and smart. He smiled a lot. He had a good face, if you know what I mean?”
“Good outside or good inside?” asked Sticks.
“Both,” said Rain quickly
, then paused and thought more about the question. “Mostly inside. I mean, sure, he was nice looking, but that isn’t what made me start liking him. He wasn’t fake.”
“Nice.”
“Noah was a few years older than me,” said Rain, “and he thought I was eighteen. I didn’t tell him how old I really was until once when we ran into each other by accident on the subway and I was in my school uniform. He kind of freaked because I was fifteen and he was eighteen. But by then, it was pretty clear that we both felt something. I know I did. Big-time, too. First love. Cue all the Disney cartoon animals and corny music.”
“Don’t do that,” said Sticks, and she cut him a quick look.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t take something big and make it small. This Noah sounds like he was a good guy.”
They studied each other for a long moment, and then Rain nodded. “That’s the sort of thing Noah would have said. So, yeah, Noah and me … we started going out. I convinced him that it was cool, that he wasn’t doing anything wrong by going out with me. After all, he was only three years older. He had some issues with it for a while, and when we, y’know, made out for the first time he was really awkward about it. But according to the law, we were totally legal. Hell, with most guys I’d have had to beat them away with a baseball bat, but Noah was so proper. He wasn’t ever just trying to get laid. He didn’t try to pressure me into anything, not hand jobs or blow jobs or anything.” She paused. “I’m being crude.”
“You’re telling the truth, and I’m a grown-up, Rain. We’re cool.”
She nodded. “There was another complication, though, and it kind of accelerated things for us. Noah told me that he had enlisted in the army right before he met me and now he had to report. His Starbucks gig was him making money before he had to head off to basic training. We had that clock ticking all the time. The night before he left … I told him I was in love with him. I expected him to push me away, but he said he loved me, too. That he had for a while but didn’t have the nerve to say it. That was a rough night. I mean, it was beautiful because I’d never been in love before, but we both knew he was leaving the next day. We held each other, and kissed and … well…” She shrugged. “He was very gentle about it. Very loving. It was really beautiful. It was an act of love, not us just having sex. Does that make sense?”
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