by Brian Hodge
But he knew already. Spend a few weeks anywhere, and whispers inevitably churned like an undertow to draw out seekers of relief from the torments of their existence. They came looking precisely like this Jared: miserable with hope, before the court of last resort.
“I take souls, gentlemen,” he began, sparing himself the need of listening to questions heard a hundred thousand times already. “I’m no devil, I wreak no sulphurous damnation. A humble peddler, am I, a tinker of flesh and spirit. A dying trade, but all I know to practice, and ironically, more needed today than ever before. I take souls. They’re never missed, for with them goes the capacity to miss them. It’s not unlike the snipping of a giant nerve that connects one to a gangrenous appendage. And just as the amputated limb may be burnt without bringing further suffering in the flames, so too will that troublesome soul wither quite on its own, unfelt. I take souls, and give peace in return.”
“And what do you do with them then?” asked the skeptic.
“None of your bloody business.”
Hieronymus Beadle sipped his wine, folded hands over belly, and watched them argue. Once he’d provided his services for kings and princes, sultans and emirs, who’d feared themselves in danger of attack by malign sorcery. They’d paid him fabulous sums for the safekeeping of the stuff of their hearts and dreams, until enemies could be rooted out and destroyed. Quite the comedown, this, for so few believed in true magic anymore, motivated only by hopes of an end to suffering. He refused to blame them. It had been a cruel century, overall.
The argument was over, and Jared unswayed.
“Can you … do it here?” he asked. “Now?”
“Good heavens, no. Don’t be absurd. Souls can’t be handed over like wallets. They can’t be stolen. They must be surrendered willingly, because they cling to the flesh they know, and must be coaxed and bullied into quitting the familiar. Rather exhausting, the process, but then, peace must often be preceded by a war.”
“And is there any other … cost?”
“To you? Oh no. The overhead’s already been paid.” Hieronymus Beadle now regarded the skeptic. “And you, sir? Is there naught I can do for you? Because if you’ll pardon my bluntness, I caught quite the potent whiff of soul’s gangrene from you, as well, a few minutes ago. Serge, was that the name? Indeed it was.”
Mr. Beadle watched him wriggle on temptation’s hook.
Some days he felt there to be no honor left in what he did, what had once been a noble trade, suffering no master but his own soul and the short-term dictates of royalty. Never had he dreamt back then that he would one day dance to corporate tunes played by wealthy pipers in their steel towers, overlooking kingdoms of rust and ruin. Serving the beasts they had created, this new generation of city fathers paid bounties in hopes of cleansing each malignant landscape of those who did not fit its dream of what it should be. Purity had always struck him as such a bland and petty goal, yet they worked so tirelessly to achieve it.
He told himself he was still providing a valuable service. In such an age as this, wasn’t one’s soul a liability, after all?
“Sweet peace, good sir?” he said to the skeptic.
“I don’t suppose you can remove the gangrene, and leave the limb, can you?”
“I fear not. It’s to be all or nothing. Rather like severing one’s spinal cord.”
The man shook his head, as if it took some effort. So close, so very close. Still, Hieronymus Beadle was heartened to see one slip through his grasp. Hope for the future, and all.
“Go to hell,” the man said, then clung to his Jared in final appeal, which fell upon deaf ears and a heart already starting to scale.
The next morning was the first in more than two years that I woke up alone. Voodoo, curled in a black and white ball at the end of the bed, didn’t count. I’ve often envied the way cats can sleep with someone, yet still sleep alone.
I laid my hand on Jared’s side of the bed, then stood before the window, staring out at streets and signs, at other buildings and other people who stared in turn, all of us framed alone and dead-eyed in our windows like portraits left subtly incomplete.
Jared. He was out there somewhere. Or maybe he was now Jared in name only, no longer the real Jared who delighted in obscure movies and liked his chest bitten and drew apocalyptic anti-heroes making their ways through worlds that had been leveled around them by warheads or disease or neglect. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t yet come home, maybe never would. He’d become his own character.
I moved away from the window and lingered before a cluster of his sketches inspired by the title character of El Topo, the movie that had brought us together. Slim-legged, in black, wearing a rider coat that hit him above the knee, this was your archetypical wandering gunslinger, rendered in sharp, scratchy strokes of Jared’s pencil. Mostly he roamed the starkest deserts and canyons and blasted city streets. But in one he stood contorted in anguish as bullets splattered his blood onto a wall behind him, already shaded with stains from corrosive rain, while the shadow he cast upon it stood in contrast, the essence of balance and calm.
There was nothing like this in the movie, although I could guess what Jared had been drawing inspiration from: the scene in which El Topo has met the first of four Master Gunfighters, a man who can no longer be wounded because he has learned to render his flesh impervious to gunfire.
“I hardly bleed,” he explains. “I do not resist the bullets. I let them pass through the emptiness of my heart.”
When Jared and I watched the movie, I suspect that each of us was too afraid to tell the other how deeply we connected with that line. Wishing we could learn such a trick, and teach it to friends and allies, and others whom we loved, so we could at least sharpen our edge against a city that had decided it could do without us.
Our only regret being that, for some, we’d still be too late.
When Serge died, killing him might not have been the initial intent, but things like that so easily get out of hand, it may as well have been premeditated. He was cornered one evening near the mouth of an alley by some cock fascists, four of them, one for each of the cardinal points, so there was no direction to run. Their fun was strictly casual for the first few minutes, using only their fists. Then they got serious. Started in on him with a length of pipe that turned up in the alley.
Somebody who later watched the police inside the yellow-tape corral said that the homicides stood around with coffee, joking over Serge’s body. They already knew who he was; a couple of the uniforms on the scene had rousted him with some younger guy a few days earlier, after we’d had an argument. They’d been in a car near his favorite coffeehouse. Now one of the homicides squatted down, inspected Serge’s pipe-broken jaw, used a latex-gloved hand to waggle its huge, grotesque skew, and said, “Looks like this cocksucker just didn’t know when to say when.”
Four years later his murder remains unsolved. Infer from that what you will.
When newer friends, people who’d never met him, would chance across a picture of us together and ask whatever became of Serge, I usually said he’d moved back down to Tampa. Couldn’t stand the cold winters here, the way they seem to start in October and end in April. Used to I could tell they knew I was lying, that they’d caught the throb of some raw nerve that had escaped cauterization.
Eventually, while I’d told Jared the truth, no one else suspected otherwise.
Sometimes I go scratching at the wound, to make sure I’ve not forgotten how to feel it. But I have to dig very far down, because only the most deeply concealed nerves still feel flayed and raw, like the tendrils of sea anemones scraped with a wire brush. The rest, my public nerves, must’ve become as encrusted as the city.
I used to think this was something to aspire to.
Used to think it was what I wanted … so that somebody else would be forced to look me in the eye someday, and tell me how I’d changed, except he wouldn’t speak it like an accusation; rather, with admiration, for all I could withstand.
A few afternoons later I came home from the video store, and he was back. I’d had days to anticipate and dread and rehearse the moment, but had wasted them, too fearful of even contemplating it.
He must’ve heard me on the stairs, was there waiting as soon as I came through the door. He hadn’t forgotten how to smile, but it seemed a reflex, as if he might’ve forgotten why he would want to.
“So, it’s … done?” I asked.
He nodded.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s … different. But different isn’t bad.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Hurt … pain … those really aren’t part of my vocabulary now. So I’ll just say no.” Jared seemed profoundly calm and thoughtful, and when I asked how Hieronymus Beadle had done this thing to him, he recounted it as if telling me about something that had happened to someone else that he’d heard about secondhand.
“He took me to a warehouse, I think it must’ve been. All you have to do, really, is look in his eye, but that’s where any sense of time falls apart. I know I walked around some afterward, but I still don’t know how long I’ve been gone.
“You just look in his eye, and he won’t let you look away, no matter how much you want to. He’s taking everything you hate most about yourself, and that scares you about whatever might be ahead, and turning it right back at you. Taking you through it all, but a hundred times worse than you dreamed it could be, until you just … give up. Then he kisses you, and it feels like he could suck away every breath you ever breathed. And then you sleep. Or I did.
“But I think it’s solved a lot of the problems I was having. I think I’ll be easier to live with now.”
Jared shrugged, turned away to leave me wondering what life with him could possibly be like now. What life might’ve been like elsewhere, in a place that never existed but we’d spoken of just the same, where bigots were few and the diseases all had cures. We used to joke about it, our own private Israel, a queer homeland.
But on second thought, that’d just make it easier for all the righteous assholes, who brought picket signs to funerals, to raise their own air force and deploy bombers.
I followed Jared toward the bedroom, where he’d disappeared, and halfway down the hall I stooped to pick up a pair of feathers. Small and pale gray, they took me back to that day at the beanery when Jared had told me of the man he needed to find, and how he’d fed crumbs to pigeons, asking why they were so hated by so many.
The bedroom floor was dusted with them, so many feathers a pillow might have been ripped open. But pillows don’t bleed. Live birds do. Feathers and tatters of flesh lay clumped about the room. Wet pawprints were tracked everywhere, while here and there larger heaps of meat were still intact enough to recognize, with bent wings and scaly stick legs. The tiny strewn organs glistened bright red, the pocks of shit a chalky white.
Jared was sitting in the middle of the mess, before the open window, through which a cold autumn breeze was blowing, scattering feathers like chaff.
“Look what I can do,” Jared said, as he watched Voodoo burrow his fangs deeper into the cavity of a shredded abdomen. “Nothing. I can do nothing.”
One reason I’ve always enjoyed talking with Danielle at the video store is her accent. She originally came from Alabama, and there’s something about a Southern accent that can infuse sorrow with enough whimsy to make it tolerable. She once told me that lesbians didn’t get beaten up in her town, the same as boys were, because they presented too keen a challenge to most red-blooded hetero guys, who knew they had the proper cure between their legs.
“So I started carrying this big old dildo in my purse, about two sizes past horse,” she’d told me. “And whenever one of these guys’d tell me I didn’t know what I was missing, I’d pull the thing out and tell the guy if he could top this, he was on.”
She was one of the few I’d told the truth about Serge, and so filling her in on Jared made sense to me, and then it made more sense to keep going and tell her that it was a temptation to take to the streets again. Hunt down that peculiar man in his top hat and walking stick, and let him work his anesthetizing magic on me, too. And then it would no longer matter that the flesh I loved and fit best with was now emptied of the stuff that had first made it so appealing. Such terrible temptation.
“I never told you about when I came out to my family, did I?” Danielle asked.
I told her I didn’t think so.
“When he found out about me, my daddy called me an accident of birth,” she said. “Scarcely said a word to me for the next two years. Didn’t even want to look at me, and us in the same room, why, you’d think we were strangers. And I suspect I suddenly was, to him. An accident of birth. Got so I played it for a joke, and I’d stand all quiet-like around a corner, lying in wait for him to come face to face with me, so I could see him squirm, just like a wiggle worm on a hot sidewalk.”
I wondered which was worse: someone who abandons you in the flesh, or one who does it while remaining under the same roof.
“But I see things a little different now,” Danielle admitted. “We’re all accidents of birth, every one of us. Born in the wrong place, or at the wrong time. In the wrong body, or to the wrong set of people. No matter who you are, there’ll be something not right. So that all just becomes part of the game, then. There’s no malice in it. And the rest of the game? It’s putting those things as right as you can.”
She reached down to hold my hand. Lifted it up, kissed it, put it back where she’d found it.
“But you don’t go throwing away what’s not broken,” she said, “not unless you got something better to take its place. Nature does abhor a vacuum, you know.”
I told her I’d try to remember that.
Danielle liked the fit of her own body just fine, so there’d been no accidents there.
But sometimes I still wished she was a guy.
I don’t see Jared anymore.
He left a couple of days after the thing with the pigeons. If it hurt to see him go, it was only because it was a physical echo of what had already happened. Jared was gone before he ever walked out the door, maybe even before he’d heard of the strange man who traversed the worst streets and called to those in pain, offering them an easy way out. Maybe he was gone long before any of it, part of him beaten to death as surely as Serge had been.
So I don’t see Jared anymore.
A few nights after he left, I went to sleep wondering what Hieronymus Beadle did with the souls he collected, and in a dream I saw him strolling ponderously away from the city, bloated almost to the point of bursting with his cargo. He walked and sweated blood and walked and mopped his brow and walked until the city lay far behind. At a copse of trees, he stopped, stripped the clothes from his swollen body, and strained and shuddered. They poured from within him like a sickness, those souls, something between liquid and vapor, seeking safety in the ground below; some anchor to cling to. Then, much slimmer, his reservoirs depleted, he put his clothes back on and strolled onward, with purpose, while from the ground on which he’d voided grew rose bushes. The petals were so perfect they nearly resembled faces, and seemed to scream when another man came along, with white hair and a leathery patrician face, and snipped each bud from its stem. He would toss each one over his shoulder, or drop them to the ground, and when he was done and the bushes were bare, he smiled while a herd of coarse-bristled, tusked pigs burst from deeper within the trees. They squealed and rooted and stamped and slashed, until every last blossom had been devoured, and then, grunting, they lumbered back into the shadows while the white-haired autocrat patted their crusty dark hides.
I was shaking when I woke up, as though I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to. It was a long time before I could get back to sleep, or even wanted to, afraid I might see Jared on hands and knees, fueled by regret and emptiness, rooting in the piles of pigshit, saying, “I know it’s here. I know it’s here someplace.”
But I don’t see Jared anymore.
/> He’s around, though. I’ve seen the writing on the wall.
It was weeks before I made the connection, entertaining the notion that the painted silhouettes that had begun appearing on building walls had come from Jared’s hand. No two were the same, black silhouettes as crisp as shadows thrown by someone who could have been standing right next to you, but wasn’t. Each one looked tensed, as if startled by the coming of something that cast no shadow of its own. There was one on our building, one on Terry’s. One inside the alley where Serge had been murdered. Others, and I wondered if they’d been chosen at random, or if they too had some special significance.
Now and then I’d hear people talk about them, wherever people lingered, and the silhouettes were spoken of with great curiosity. Where they’d come from, what they meant. Everyone loves a mystery.
But no one else had been privy to the things that Jared found most significant when he looked at the world. No one else had sat with him one evening while he paged through a book, horrified and fascinated by photos shot fifty years earlier in the wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the silhouettes of human beings that had been seared onto walls at the instant of the bomb blasts.
What if those were their souls, he’d wondered, souls yearning in that instant of sublime and blinding violence for some record of their passing, even as their bodies were vaporized.
It gave us something to think about.
And now, every day, I look at the silhouette he painted on the side of our building, hoping I’ll find it gone. Hoping against all rationality that in the night it will have peeled itself free of the bricks, and gone seeking the flesh where it rightfully belongs.
But even if I get my wish, what a long search it has ahead.
The city grows at night, and I don’t see Jared anymore.
Dead Giveaway
Every night, without fail, it began like this:
MUSIC: Opening of Gustav Holst’s “Mars, Bringer of War”
As dark and brooding a piece of music as ever there was. Next came the announcer, cheerful, bouncy as a beachball. Monty didn’t know where they’d found the guy, but he was the best Don Pardo soundalike he’d ever heard.
