Kevin pushed open a door and ushered Nelson and Javier through. “You gonna be okay?” Nelson thought Kevin was checking on Javier, but then he realized his old friend was looking at him. “You don’t look so hot.”
“Headache,” Nelson said. It wasn’t the only reason he might look like shit, but it was probably at least partially to blame.
Kevin didn’t seem entirely convinced. “Just pretend it’s Advanced Pathology. Old Man Myerson’s telling us about the five top signs of arsenic poisoning while his dentures are slipping around and making that clacky sound.”
Nelson appreciated Kevin’s efforts. He truly did. But the sight of the body on the table, the Asian girl, stopped him where he stood, speechless.
“You’ve seen worse,” Kevin said in his ear. “You’ve stuck your hand in worse.”
But that was different. He’d never shared a bathroom with his cadaver head. Never been told by it to turn his music down. Never seen it cry. Nelson suspected Kevin knew, and was just saying something to try and get him moving again. Nelson attempted to take another step, but couldn’t force himself to do it. He just wanted to take another twenty-two hundred dollar dose of Peritriptan and either wake up once everything was all over…or maybe not wake up at all.
“It’s obvious you assume the worst.” A hand slipped into his, wove their fingers together. Javier. “Look at her, and then you’ll know. Knowing is better than not knowing.” He squeezed Nelson’s fingers. “I’m right here.” When Nelson still didn’t move, Javier stepped forward instead, and pulled him toward the gurney.
“Does she have jeans like this?” Javier asked. His tone was brisk and businesslike, as if he was determined to make Nelson get on with it. “I suppose everyone has jeans like this.” He leaned forward over the body, over the head, and asked Kevin, “Are her ears pierced?”
“We couldn’t find them.”
Nelson moaned. Javier yanked his arm hard. “Stay with me.” Nelson wondered if his knees were going to give way. Kevin was standing by with a barf bucket. It seemed like the Nelson who would have found that uproariously funny had lived a whole lifetime ago, in a much kinder and gentler era that he’d never fully appreciated.
Javier released Nelson’s hand to slide an arm around his waist. “Take a look—or else Tim risked all of this to help you find out, and he did it for nothing.”
Javier was right. Nelson needed to look, to see, because the longer he balked, the longer everyone else was stuck out there in a mob—a mob capable of killing someone, as brutally as this.
Although, it was hard to say exactly how she’d been killed.
Nelson took a deep breath, and he looked.
Blunt trauma to the head. Crushed. Torso, surprisingly intact. But the arms…the arms were torn, with huge hunks of flesh missing. Jeans, bloody. Feet bare.
Feet.
Those weren’t Tuyet’s feet.
Nelson almost laughed, though it came out as more of a sob. Maybe that’s what it had actually been all along. Those feet were not her feet. She’d just painted her toenails bubblegum pink earlier that week, and the toenails of the girl on the slab were plain and a bit unkempt, definitely not the toes of someone who owned over fifty shades of nail polish and wore sandals and flip-flops eight months out of the year.
“My God,” Kevin gasped, and he sounded like maybe he’d been holding the puke pot for himself, “is it?”
“No.” Nelson curled against Javier and pressed his forehead into the curve of Javier’s neck. “Definitely not.”
The plastic vomit-catcher hit the floor with a hollow thud, and it rolled from side to side before it settled in a groove on the floor. When Nelson looked up, Kevin was gone, and the swinging door to the supply room sighed shut behind him.
“Are you going after him?” Javier asked.
“Nah. He’s good. He just needed to know.”
“He needed to know? I thought you did.”
“C’mon, you think he’d risk his job like this if it were all about me? Kev’s a fun guy, but he looks out for himself first. As long as I keep that in mind, I’m never disappointed.”
Nelson would have liked to make the trip back to the elevator unassisted, but his serotonin knees were so wobbly he hit the wall a few times with his shoulder before Javier slung an arm around his waist to drag him along in a straightish line. When the elevator doors opened, a weeping family got out to I.D. one of their loved ones. Normally, Nelson felt bad when that happened, but right now he felt numb to their recent loss. Because at least it wasn’t him.
The elevator doors closed, and he was alone with Javier, whose arm was still around him. “So,” Nelson ventured. “You’re into Tim.”
Javier gave Nelson a brief, “are you seriously bringing this up now?” look, and said nothing.
“Is that why you wouldn’t give me your card at the job fair?”
“I suppose.”
“Then why’d you write your number on me—which, by the way, was totally hot—right in front of him? You met him in person and realized he wasn’t even queer?”
“How could you possibly think he’s straight?”
Wasn’t he? Nelson did his best to reframe Tim in light of the new information. All the social stigmatization of being a homo and none of the fashion sense, though Nelson supposed that with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses or a porkpie hat, he’d look ironic enough to fit right in any of the hipster dives Nelson frequented.
“Besides,” Javier said. “Maybe that’s not really my number.”
Damn. “So I’ve got zero chance with you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The elevator doors opened on a crowd that was even bigger and even uglier than the one they’d struggled through to get there. A couple of guys spiraled into a shouting match that looked like it was just about to come to blows. Javier and Nelson skirted around the back of the crowd, where the people who were too weak to fight to the front but too sick to leave sat slumped against the walls, shaking with withdrawal.
Traveling against the tide was quick, though, as people moved to let them out in the hope that it meant they would eventually get in. Outside, the E.R. was still attempting to triage via bullhorn—and the people with non life-threatening conditions were looking seriously pissed off about being corralled into a roped-off parking space and told to sit tight.
That could have been him, wrangling the crowd that was getting uglier and uglier. Nelson was glad he hadn’t lasted two weeks as a Bellevue intake clerk. At the time, he’d been dismayed at the thought of the steeply discounted Peritriptan slipping through his fingers. But now…well, it just goes to show, he thought. Wait long enough and eventually something will turn out for the best.
***
Randy bore the weight of the five-gallon bottle while Tim guided the neck to the plastic cup they’d spotted in an abandoned planter. None of them mentioned how gross it was to be drinking from something that, for all they knew, a vagrant could have urinated in. Marianne had rinsed it and wiped it out with a spare T-shirt for at least fifteen minutes, and it was as clean as it was going to get without soap or hot water.
Since Tim was holding the cup, he tipped it back first. It smelled like plastic. That was good, considering. He was so thirsty, the tepid water he’d been storing in his truck actually tasted sweet. He drank slowly at first, and then more deeply as his body demanded to slake its thirst.
He finished with a satisfied gasp, then held the cup against the bottle for Randy to refill—and as he did, Tim wondered. Did they need to ration? He had twenty gallons of water. If they each drank a half-gallon of water a day, it would last them for over a week. Surely they wouldn’t need a week’s worth of water.
Water splashed over the side, and he snapped, “Watch it.”
“Hey, I’m the one holding the sixty-pound bottle. Chill out.”
Tim handed the cup to Marianne, who took it and drank deeply. With each swallow, Tim saw his resources eroding. “We could refill these at a drinking
fountain,” he said. “New York’s water is tested every forty minutes, on average. So if we ran out, we could do that….” He noticed Randy was watching him with dismay.
“You’ve got enough to fill a kiddie pool. We’re fine.”
Marianne tipped the cup until it was almost perpendicular, drained it, and handed it back to Tim empty. “That was the best glass of water I’ve ever had.”
Tim held the cup under the huge water jug one more time, and Randy carefully tipped it and poured. “Right,” Tim said, “you’re right. There’s plenty here. It’s just…it’s scary out there…you never know what you’ll need.”
“It’s like that TV show about people who can’t throw anything out,” Randy said.
“I saw that once,” Marianne said. “This one lady had so many cats she ended up with dead cats under her piles of stuff. They were all flat when the cleanup crew pulled ’em out.”
“Yeah, that’s the show.”
“I’m not a hoarder.”
Marianne went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “And it turned out she used to be really normal once, but then she got cancer and her jerk of a husband left her, and pretty soon, all she had left were the cats.”
The cup filled. Randy recapped the five-gallon bottle and stowed it safely in its box. He took the cup from Tim and swallowed a long, satisfying drink. “Ah. You’re right, that’s the best damn water I’ve ever tasted, too.” He cuffed Tim in the shoulder. “Aren’t you glad you’re gay? You don’t have to worry about getting all weird over a divorce and ending up with a hundred cats.”
Marianne rolled her eyes, then said to Tim, “Can I see Nelson’s phone?”
Why, to drain the battery? Tim wanted to act as if the phone didn’t exist. What if he really was some kind of messed-up hoarder? “What do you need it for?”
“I was just going to call my parents—”
“We should probably leave the line open,” Randy said, a lot more kindly now. “You emailed your folks, right? They know you’re okay.”
“I guess…but didn’t it do apps? I saw him get email while he was on the phone. We can check the Voice of Reason and see if it’s updated.”
Tim said, “I really don’t see what good that’ll do.”
“He knows everything. Maybe he knows what started this whole thing by now. Maybe he knows what we can do about it. Maybe he even knows what that Child Killer sign meant.”
“I don’t think he would—”
“You got a crush on this guy or something?” Randy teased.
“How old are you, anyway?” Marianne snapped. “’Cos you’ve got the maturity of an emotionally stunted twelve-year-old.”
“You know who I bet is a twelve-year-old?” Randy was thoroughly enjoying himself. “Your precious Voice of Reason, that’s who.”
“Where is that phone? I want to check!”
Tim said, “We should all just calm down….”
Randy added, “A twelve-year-old girl.”
“You’re such an ass.”
“Have you ever seen a picture of him? Not that it would matter. It could be a picture of anyone.”
And that was one of the reasons Tim hadn’t asked Javier for a photo, though in retrospect, it seemed like it would have been a lot easier to just exchange snapshots and get it over with. Javier might not have known how to introduce the topic of his missing eye, but if Tim had asked for a photo to pick him out of the crowd by, he could hardly have sent an out-of-date shot. Probably not, anyway. Tim supposed the damage was done, and he’d never know now.
“Voice of Reason doesn’t post his photo online,” Marianne said, “what are you, stupid? He’d be in all kinds of trouble if they knew who he was.”
Maybe not irreparable damage, though. Tim could still feel the ghost of Javier’s kiss on his mouth if he thought about it.
“They?” Randy was still in high-taunt mode. “Who are they?”
“Them. Whoever. The corporations he exposes. The corrupt government officials.”
It felt like forever since Tim had last been kissed.
“Really? Which corporate-sponsored government did he topple? I must’ve missed that.”
“Well, there was the time he uncovered the Kraft Manna distributor changing the dates on the packaging and selling old manna for new, and the health inspector was in on it.”
“Oh, whoop-de-doo. Everyone knows if you open a package of manna and it smells like asparagus, it’s too old to eat.”
Tim touched his lips with his fingertips. Had his lips always felt that way? He wasn’t sure. It seemed like everything had turned into some alternate version of itself in the past twenty-four hours, and now nothing was the same.
Chapter 15
Being in a hostile crowd was bad enough for anyone—but enduring it with half his peripheral vision destroyed struck Javier as a particularly cruel, even sadistic, twist of fate. He clasped forearms with Nelson, which kept the poor man upright. More importantly, it stopped them from getting separated, as they had nearly been on the way in. That was nearly an hour ago. The panicky idea that Nelson would be torn from him and he wouldn’t be able to see what had happened was so keen, however, that the emotion’s sickening aftereffects were still churning through Javier’s gut.
A few burly cops waded through the crowd, attempting to somehow group them. The bullhorn crackled. “Children, there by the tree—children will be seen first. Anyone under eighteen, line up by the tree. One parent per child only. Anyone older than eighteen who tries to sneak in line will be fined….”
People broke from the crowd, carrying or dragging their sons and daughters. Broken bones, fevers, Javier expected issues like that. But none of the children seemed incapacitated. In fact, they were all screaming or struggling. And there was blood—lots of blood. Its source…Javier couldn’t see. It was on his blind side, and he needed to watch where he was going, and especially, to keep Nelson from keeling over.
He guided Nelson to a pocket of space among the surging people, and pulled him closer. “You’re trembling.”
“It’s just my meds. Don’t worry. Mentally, I’m unshakable. A pillar. A rock.”
A likely story, given the way he’d nearly lost it in the morgue. Javier put an arm around his waist. Nelson mirrored the move, and slipped his hand into Javier’s back pocket.
Javier rolled his eyes. Exasperating. Cute…but exasperating. “You’ve obviously mistaken this whole fiasco for a singles bar.”
“I wouldn’t know—don’t really go for the whole disco-glitter-dance party scene.” He gave a tentative squeeze. “Something tells me you don’t, either.”
A woman rushed by, clasping a toddler to her chest. She knocked Nelson into Javier, and Javier into the side of the building, and she ricocheted off them and kept on running like she hadn’t even felt it. She probably hadn’t. Nelson pressed his back into the side of the building and looked both ways to wait for another clear shot that would take them closer to the truck, and he slipped his hand into Javier’s. Javier squeezed back. “The phone number’s real,” Javier said.
Nelson squeezed harder and smiled to himself.
“What will you do now?” Javier asked.
“Go back downtown with Tim and get myself home from there. Get some sleep. Drink lots of water. Try to get my brain chemistry back to normal. Distract Bobby and his grandmother with a few hands of gin rummy while we’re waiting for Tuyet to come home.”
Javier recalled the wedding ring on Kevin’s finger. “Bobby’s biological father…is it Kevin?”
“I see you’ve been paying attention.”
“You all go back that far?”
“And farther. Kev and I enrolled in a summer grad school exchange that took us all through Asia—but we’d known each other forever. Grew up down the street from each other. Same class from kindergarten on, all the way through Post-Bacc. But that summer…that’s where we met Tuyet.”
“And Kevin couldn’t put his mark on Bobby, because he already had a child.”
>
Nelson tore his eyes off the crowd and regarded Javier with some surprise. “Extra credit for you.”
“You gave your mark to someone you just met who was carrying another man’s child?”
“What else was I gonna do with the damn thing? Besides, she needed it way more than I did. She was even poorer than me, so she couldn’t afford to have a bastard. Especially over there—not only heavy fines, but social stigma like you wouldn’t believe. She would’ve spent the rest of her life as a two-dollar whore. All ’cos Kevin conveniently left his wedding band in his suitcase, and one of Tuyet’s pals told her American women were all sterilized, the men all wanted babies, and all of us were filthy rich.” Nelson pulled Javier into a thin spot in the crowd, and together they gained a few hundred yards toward the place where their friends were hopefully still waiting.
They backed against a wall to let an ambulance scream by. “Turned out to be a win-win,” Nelson said. “My mother thinks I’m a big failure—all that education and a shit job to show for it—my dad ditched us when I was twelve. Huh. Bobby’s age. So the Phams are my family now. A pretty weird family…but what’s life without a little variety?”
He slipped his hand into Javier’s again and squeezed his fingers. “So. What’s your story?”
Javier scanned the crowd for a gap, then dragged Nelson into it without answering. His story? He hardly knew where to begin. If he could encapsulate his life into a few pithy phrases, he’d probably say he had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that would have made it sound as if he felt sorry for himself when, in fact, he was certain that every last hardship he’d faced, he’d managed to bring onto himself.
The Starving Years Page 12
