Eternal Kiss

by Trisha Telep

  “It’s okay.” Lauren opened the door to the filing room. She could hear the wail of sirens in the distance. “In here we’ll be safe.”

  She let him go in ahead of her. Quickly, she locked the door behind him, the keys shaking in her hands. He screamed and flung himself against the door. Lauren jumped back.

  “I’m not doing the thirteenth step! You hear me!” He bashed his head into the frosted-glass panel of the door once, twice. The sound of sirens grew closer. Lauren slid down the wall and placed her hands over her ears. The third time he bashed against the panel, a crack appeared in the glass like a flower stem dotted by petals of blood. Someone had gone for Johannes, and he was running down the hall toward her, beautiful and fast.

  “You okay?” he asked, touching her shoulder.

  “Sure,” she said. Then the guy broke through the glass with his head and Lauren blacked out.

  Six

  AFTER THE PARAMEDICS left and Lauren had given a statement, Johannes insisted on taking her for something to eat. They settled on a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop called Lisa’s Pieces where Lauren ordered a bowl of hot broth with noodles that felt slippery and good going down.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked for about the tenth time.

  “Yeah. I’m okay. Who was that guy?”

  “I heard he was in the program a long time ago, before I came in. Sometimes people go back out there—it’s rare, but it happens.” He reached over and rubbed her arm. “I heard you were amazing. How’d you think to do that?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  She stared at her spoon. “My sister Carla used to get like that when she was tweaked out of her head. If she wasn’t giddy and planning to become a famous movie star, she was paranoid and ready to take your head off.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said so sincerely that Lauren blushed a bit. “This job must be hell for you.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s cathartic, you know?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I know. I killed my best friend, driving drunk when I was sixteen. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about that. Not a day that goes by that I don’t pray for forgiveness. But with each person we save, I get a little closer to it.” He looked so sad and helpless then, and Lauren wanted to throw her arms around him, save him with a kiss. “I guess my penance became my calling.”

  Lauren felt a sudden twinge of envy that he seemed to know his place in the world. “I guess I haven’t found my calling yet.”

  “Maybe your calling will find you.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s here at Angelus. Maybe you’ll even run some missions with us. I know I’d love it if you stayed on.”

  He reached past the bowl of untouched fried noodles and took her hand in his. His fingers were long and swallowed hers easily.

  “They found another one,” the waiter said, and somebody turned up the TV mounted over the bar.

  “The decapitated body of sixteen-year-old Shawna Lenore of the Farragut Houses was found down by the Navy Piers,” the lacquered TV reporter said. “Police had no comment about whether this murder is related to a string of brutal killings that have terrified New York for the past several months, and which some are speculating could be part of an escalating gang war.”

  On the flickering TV screen, a crowd of angry residents shouted at police from the sidewalks in front of the Farragut Houses. “How come they don’t do nothing to help us?” a lady holding a baby said to the camera. “They blaming us and we didn’t have nothing to do with it. They just gonna let us die.”

  The report switched to one of the fancy restaurants a few blocks away and a couple enjoying a meal at a table outside. “It’s so scary. Makes us wonder whether we should move to the suburbs.”

  “Hey,” Johannes whispered, stroking his thumb against Lauren’s palm in a way that made her heart beat faster. “You want to get out of here?”

  They walked along the water. Across the river, Manhattan had restructured itself for night as a fractured geometry of light. A homeless couple argued in the street: “You made me do it!” “I didn’t make you do nothing!” “You coulda stopped it.” “It don’t never stop.”

  The woman fell on the pavement and started crying like a child.

  “Should we do something?” Lauren asked.

  “Nothing to be done,” he answered and drew her into the velvet darkness of an alley. He backed her against the brick wall with a mural of two towers under the words “Never Forget,” and then his mouth was on hers, sweet and warm and obliterating.

  “Don’t you touch me! Leave me alone—I never did nothing to you!” the homeless woman half-yelled, half-cried, but they were moving away now, out of sight and caring. Johannes leaned into her and pressed his body against hers. He tilted her head with one hand and sucked down the length of her taut neck until it was almost painful, but Lauren refused to cry out. She never wanted him to stop. Nothing else mattered but this. The sounds of the city—the shouts, the taunts, the threats, the distant cries—faded away, and when the police cars screamed past, red lights flashing a warning on their way to some new horror, Lauren didn’t even flinch.

  Seven

  LAUREN’S FIRST MISSION with Angelus was on a Friday night, second week in August. She, Johannes, Rakim, Alex, and a few others headed down to Admiral’s Row, a length of street marked by dilapidated row houses protected by an iron fence that did nothing to keep them from becoming shooting galleries. The houses were so decayed Lauren could smell the rot. Inside, it reeked of shit and piss and they had to step over the bodies of people half-dressed and barely conscious.

  While the others fanned out trying to see if they could get anybody to come with them, Johannes leaned over a petite blonde girl in an NYU shirt. She looked like she’d been there for days. “Hey, what’s your name?” he asked.

  “Dana,” the girl slurred, her eyelids fluttering.

  “Listen, Dana. We’re with Angelus House, and we can get you a bed for the night. Would you like that?”

  She tried to grab for Johannes’s crotch. “You got any glass? I’ll do whatever you want for it.”

  Lauren imagined Carla like this, offering her body to anybody who could get her high for another hour or two. She wanted to kick the girl, not save her.

  “Come on, Dana. We’re taking you some place where you can get cleaned up,” Johannes said evenly. “You guys get her in the van. I’m gonna see if I can save anyone else.”

  Alex and Rakim draped the girl’s arms across their shoulders and stepped carefully over the shattered bottles and rusted syringes to where they had a van waiting.

  “What was that?” Lauren asked, suddenly startled.

  “What was what?” Alex asked.

  “I heard screaming.”

  Alex craned her neck skyward. “Must’ve been the birds.”

  Lauren saw the birds outlined against the perpetual hazy glow of the New York night. They were enormous with what looked to be six-foot wing spans. That couldn’t be right, she thought, as she watched them dive down and disappear into the dark behind the shadowed, broken houses.

  “Holy shit. Did you see that?”

  “Sorry. Kinda occupied with Dana here,” Alex grunted as she and Rakim eased the girl into the back of the van.

  “Those birds. They were huge!”

  Rakim wiggled his eyebrows. “Must’ve been real New York pigeons then. Okay, we are good to go.”

  “Jesus Christ!” someone screamed in alarm, but Lauren couldn’t be sure where it had come from and Rakim was gunning the motor.

  “Kilimanjaro-n. It’s time to move. You in or out?”

  “In,” she said. She slid the door closed and refused to look back.

  “We’ll take it from here,” Rakim told her, once they’d returned to Angelus. He and Alex half-carried Dana down the stairs into the dark of detox and Lauren started a new file, putting it into Johannes’s inbox for him to fill out later. Then she sat in the common are
a watching a vampire flick with the newbies and fell asleep. She woke two hours later to find herself alone on the couch feeling worried and more than a little annoyed that Johannes hadn’t come for her.

  “Forget this,” she said, and took the stairs down to detox, pushing through the heavy door.

  The hallway was mostly dark, but up ahead, where it curved left and right, she could see dim florescent lights flickering like strobes. There were no inspirational posters with pictures of smiling teens on these walls. It was grim as a Soviet-era apartment building. From behind the doors, she heard odd sounds—growls and gurgles, like animals eating. And something else—a constant buzzing machine whine that didn’t match the sporadic popping of the overhead lights. It made her skin crawl. And then there was a loud, piercing shriek of agony that died into desperate cries. Lauren heard a rumbling noise coming closer. She stood trembling under the flickering lights too terrified to move. A shadow reached across the back wall, growing larger, then smaller, and then a pigtailed girl appeared, dancing to the music blaring from her headphones while pushing a mop and a big yellow bucket on wheels. The water was oddly dark, and the girl’s gloved hands and apron were spattered with splotches.

  “What are you doing here?” the girl asked in a thick New York accent that competed with the music blurting from her headphones. “You can’t be here now. I gotta clean.”

  “Sorry,” Lauren said, turning away from the shadows, the sounds, the girl, and the murky water in the bucket, running as fast as she could for the door. She ran smack into Johannes.

  “Lauren? What are you doing? You’re not supposed to go into detox.” His face was grim, even a little angry.

  “I … I was just looking for you.”

  “And I was up there looking for you.” His smile relaxed her.

  “I heard weird noises. And somebody screamed.”

  “That’s why we tell you not to go there. Sometimes during withdrawal it can get really nasty. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Lauren remembered going with Carla to the hospital that first time, how her sister fought and cursed, growled like an angry dog, spat and, yes, screamed. “I guess you’re right.”

  Johannes kissed the top of her head and held her close. “Just looking out for you, babe. Besides,” he licked her neck. “I require your assistance in other matters.”

  It had been a long time since Lauren had felt like someone was looking out for her, and she found herself grateful and hungry for the way Johannes took her hand in his long fingers and led her away from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.

  Eight

  THE DRIVE TO Eagle Feather was pretty if you were on vacation, which Lauren wasn’t, and so it was just trees and cows and more trees and three hours in the car with her parents saying nothing that mattered.

  Carla had put on some weight since the last time they’d seen her, but she’d also taken up smoking, lighting one cigarette after the other during their visit. “Sometimes the patients exchange one addiction for another. We try to get them hooked on something healthier, like exercise or a hobby,” the director, a small man with a wire-thin voice and very little hair told them. “But if there is a stop-gap addiction that is not as immediately detrimental, such as smoking or doughnuts, we allow it.” Her parents ignored the smoking and made overly cheerful conversation about how good Carla looked and how much cooler it was upstate than it was in the city where everyone was just sweltering this summer. Lauren thought about the people at Angelus, about those kids who had nothing, who lived on the street or the projects, who’d overcome the worst possible scenarios to get clean and make something of themselves. And here was Carla—spoiled, entitled Carla, whose selfishness had driven them into a shitty rental and aged her parents by ten years. Carla, who couldn’t get it together despite having everything. Lauren hated her for it.

  “Can you bring me some new clothes next time?” Carla said when they were leaving. “All the candy around here is making my jeans tight.”

  “Of course,” her mother said. “I’ll get Lauren to help me pick something out.”

  “Great. Homeless Chic. Don’t make me look like too much of a dork, okay Squirt?” Carla laughed. Lauren didn’t.

  Lauren slammed the car door hard. “Well, that was fun. What a fucking waste of time.”

  “Lauren! Watch your language,” her mother said, catching her eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, ’cause it’s my language that’s the problem here.” She knew she should give it up—there was no point in having an argument—but she couldn’t stop herself. “When are you going to get it? She’s ruined everything. She’s a loser, and she gets everything.”

  Lauren’s mom blanched. “She’s sick, honey.”

  “She’s not sick. She’s useless! This wouldn’t happen at Angelus House.”

  “That’s enough, Lauren,” her father snapped.

  Yeah, enough, Lauren thought. They didn’t speak for the entire ride back to Brooklyn. The next day, she packed her clothes, her iPod, and some pictures, and moved into Angelus House.

  Nine

  THERE HAD BEEN a few brownouts due to the heat’s demands on the city’s ancient grid, and the mayor was telling everyone to cut back on their electricity. But inside Angelus House, the AC was working fine, keeping everything freezing cold. Now that Lauren was living there full time, she had to adjust to the chilliness of the place. No one else seemed to mind it, but Lauren found herself wearing a sweatshirt during the day and sleeping in flannels at night. There were other oddities. No one ever used the vending machine in the rec room. In fact, a fine layer of dust lay on the keys, and she realized that in her six weeks on the job, she’d never seen anyone come to refill it. Once, she hit the button for a package of M&Ms, and when she opened it, the candy was so old, the chocolates crumbled in her hand like pastel dirt. Only the fridge marked “Newbies” ever needed restocking. And sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, distant cries, shrieks, and moans cut through the stillness. The desperation of those sounds filled her with a dread she couldn’t name, and so she pulled the pillow over her head, listening to her heartbeat until she managed to sleep and forget. And by noon, with everyone up and laughing, going about their work, offering hugs or back rubs or jokes, Lauren felt safe again. People looked out for each other here. Her family had imploded, but now she’d found a new family to take her in, and that was enough.

  On a Friday, one week after Lauren had come to live at Angelus House, she found all the residents huddled together in one of the sharing rooms, speaking in hushed tones.

  “… What was he doing out at that hour?”

  “… He knew better than that …”

  “… burned to a crisp …”

  “What’s going on?” Lauren asked.

  Alex looked up, her face registering surprise. Her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. “It’s Brian.”

  “Those bastards in the projects, they torched Brian,” Rakim said, his nostrils flaring in anger. “He went in to help them, and they paid him back by setting him on fire.”

  Just then Johannes walked in. “If we get caught up in anger, we lose. Come on. Let’s remember Brian as he’d want us to.”

  They formed a sharing circle, hands clasped. Lauren stood on the outside, watching. “We are the fallen angels,” they intoned. “We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega. Unto us is given this charge. Unto us will be the glory.”

  They hugged and comforted one another, especially the newbies who had come to see Brian as their protector.

  “We remember and go on,” Johannes said.

  “Amen,” the others answered.

  Brian’s death was front-page news. FALLEN ANGEL, the headline in the Daily News trumpeted, and there was a picture of Brian smiling out from under that shaved head full of tattoos. Everyone at the Farragut swore they’d had nothing to do with it, that nobody had even seen him around there and that it was all a setup by the cops or the real-estate develo
pers or Angelus House itself. One anonymous source claimed that he’d seen Brian simply walk out into the daylight muttering “For the greater good,” before bursting into flame.

  They held a candlelight vigil for Brian that evening, marching from Angelus House through Vinegar Hill to the Navy Yards, where the mayor spoke and promised that those who were guilty would be brought to justice. The cops hit the city hard, taking people in for any and everything they could. After Brian’s death, the tide of public opinion turned in favor of Angelus House taking over the empty warehouses along the waterfront.

  “He sacrificed himself for us,” Lauren overheard Rakim saying a few days later. He said it to Dana, who had cleaned up nicely and was attending meetings every day. “That’s the Angelus commitment. That’s the extra step.” He broke off when he saw Lauren. “Hey Lauren Sauron. You mind going for some groceries? I think the newbies need more juice.”

  “Sure.”

  He smiled, but something in his eyes made her uneasy, and she found herself wanting to escape the too-cold recycled air. “Hey, who’s better than Kiliamanjaran?”

  “Nobody,” she said and went outside.

  In the grocery cart, Lauren found an envelope with her name on it shoved under the bags she kept there. Inside was the day’s paper with the headline: ANOTHER ONE BITES THE

  DUST. Lauren scanned the story. The body, drained of blood, had been discovered in a dumpster behind a Burger King in downtown Brooklyn, the head missing. Another victim in an escalating gang war. The victim’s name was Isaiah Jones of the Farragut Houses.

  Isaiah Jones.

  A note had been scrawled at the bottom of the page: I need to talk to you. You can find me today on the boardwalk at Coney, in front of Deno’s. Tell nobody. A friend.

  That afternoon, Lauren pretended she had a dentist’s appointment and biked down to Coney Island where she found the tagger on the boardwalk painting caricatures of tourists for extra cash. He looked up, shielding his eyes from the relentless sun. “Hey. What do you want—a drawing of you as Princess Leia or Barbarella? Personally, I think you would look hot as Wonder Woman.”