Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  03.

  This is hours later, and I’m back in Philly, trying to forget all about the woman on the train and the Czech’s shoes and whatever might have been in the briefcase I delivered. The sun’s been down for hours. The city is dark and cold, and there’s supposed to be snow before the sun comes up again. I’m lying in the bed I share with Eli, just lying there on my right side watching him read. There are things I want to tell him, but I know full fucking well that I won’t. I won’t because some of those things might get him killed if a deal ever goes sideways somewhere down the line (and it’s only a matter of time) or if I should fall from grace with Her Majesty Madam Adrianne and all the powers that be and keep the axles upon which the world spins greased up and relatively friction-free. And other things I will not tell him because maybe it was only the pills, or maybe it’s stress, or maybe I’m losing my goddamn mind, and if it’s the latter, I’d rather keep that morsel to myself as long as possible, pretty please and thank you.

  Eli turns a page and shifts slightly, to better take advantage of the reading lamp on the little table beside the bed. I scan the spine of the hardback, the words printed on the dust jacket, like I don’t already know it by heart. Eli reads books, and I read their dust jackets. Catch me in just the right mood, I might read the flap copy.

  “I thought you were asleep,” Eli says without bothering to look at me.

  “Maybe later, chica,” I reply, and Eli nods the way he does when he’s far more interested in whatever he’s reading than in talking to me. So, I read the spine again, aloud this time, purposefully mispronouncing the Korean author’s name. Which is enough to get Eli to glance my way. Eli’s eyes are emeralds, crossed with some less precious stone. Agate maybe. Eli’s eyes are emerald and agate, cut and polished to precision, flawed in ways that only make them more perfect.

  “Go to sleep,” he tells me, pretending to frown. “You look exhausted.”

  “Yeah, sure, but I got this fucking hard-on like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Last time I checked, you also had two good hands and a more than adequate knowledge of how they work.”

  “That’s cold,” I say. “That is some cold shit to say to someone who had to go spend the day in Jersey.”

  Eli snorts, and his emerald and agate eyes, which might pass for only hazel-green if you haven’t lived with them as long as I have lived with them, they drift back to the printed page.

  “The lube warms up just fine,” he says, “you hold it a minute or so first.” He doesn’t laugh, but I do, and then I roll over to stare at the wall instead of watching Eli read. The wall is flat and dull, and sometimes it makes me sleepy. I’d take something, but after the lucky greens, it’s probably best if I forego the cocktail of pot and prescription benzodiazepines I usually rely on to beat my insomnia into submission. I don’t masturbate, because, boner from hell or not, I’m not in the right frame of mind to give myself a hj. So, I lie and stare at the wall and listen to the soft sounds of Eli reading his biography of South Korean astronaut Yi So-Yeon, whom I do recall, and without having to read the book, was the first Korean in space. She might also have been the second Asian woman to slip the surly fucking bonds of Earth and dance the skies or what the hell ever.

  “Why don’t you take something if you can’t sleep,” Eli says after maybe half an hour of me lying there.

  “I don’t think so, chica. My brain’s still rocking and rolling from the breath mints you been buying off that mick cocksucker you call a dealer. Me, I think he’s using drain cleaner again.”

  “No way,” Eli says, and I can tell from the tone of his voice he’s only half interested, at best, in whether or not the mad chemist holed up in Devil’s Pocket is using Drano to cut his shit. “Donncha’s merchandise is clean.”

  “Maybe Mr. Clean,” I reply, and Eli smacks me lightly on the back of the head with his book. He tells me to jack off and go to sleep. I tell him to blow me. We spar with the age-old poetry of true love’s tin-eared wit. Then he goes back to reading, and I go back to staring at the bedroom wall.

  Eli is the only guy I’ve ever been with more than a month, and here we are going on two years. I found him waiting tables in a noodle and sushi joint over on Race Street. Most of the waiters in the place were either drag queens or trannies, dressed up like geisha whores from some sort of post-apocalyptic Yakuza flick. He was wearing so much makeup, and I was so drunk on Sapporo Black Label and saki, I didn’t even realize he was every bit gai-ko as me. That first night, back at Eli’s old apartment not far from the noodle shop, we screwed like goddamn bunnies on crank. I must have walked funny for a week.

  I started eating in that place every night, and almost every one of those nights we’d wind up in bed together, and that’s probably the happiest I’ve ever been or ever will be. Sure, the sex was absolute supremo, standout – state of the fucking art of fucking – but it never would have been enough to keep things going after a few weeks. I don’t care how sweet the cock, sooner or later, if that’s all there is interest wanes and I start to drift. I used to think maybe my libido had ADD or something, or I’d convinced myself that commitment meant I might miss out on something better. What matters, though, there was more, and four months later Eli packed up his shit and moved in with me. He never asked what I do to pay the rent, and I’ve never felt compelled to volunteer that piece of intel.

  “You’re still awake,” Eli says, and I hear him toss his book onto the table beside the bed. I hear him reach for a pill bottle.

  “Yeah, I’m still awake.”

  “Good, ’cause there’s something I meant to tell you earlier, and I almost forgot.”

  “And what is that, pray tell?” I ask, listening as he rattles a few milligrams of this or that out into his palm.

  “This woman in the restaurant. It was the weirdest thing. I mean, I’d think maybe I was hallucinating or imagining crap, only Jules saw it, too. Think it scared her, to tell you the truth.”

  Jules is the noodle shop’s post-op hostess, who sometimes comes over to play, when Eli and I find ourselves inclined for takeout of that particular variety. It happens. But, point here is, Eli says these words, words that ought to be nothing more than a passing fleck of conversation peering in on the edge of my not going to sleep, and I get goddamn goose bumps and my stomach does some sort of roll like it just discovered the pommel horse. Because I know what he’s going to say. Not exactly, no, but close enough that I want to tell him to please shut the fuck up and turn off the light and never mind what it is he thinks he saw.

  But I don’t, and he says, “This woman came in alone and so Jules sat her at the bar, right? Total dyke, but she had this whole butch-glam demeanor working for her, like Nicole Kidman with a buzz cut.”

  “You’re right,” I mutter at the wall, as if it’s not too late for intervention. “That’s pretty goddamn weird.”

  “No, you ass. That’s not the weird part. The weird part was when I brought her order out, and I noticed there was this shiny silver stuff dripping out of her left ear. At first, I thought it was only a tragus piercing or something, and I just wasn’t seeing it right. But then…well, I looked again, and it had run down her neck and was soaking into the collar of her blouse. Jules saw it, too. Freaky, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but I don’t say much more, and a few minutes later, Eli finally switches off the lamp, and I can stare at the wall without actually having to see it.

  04.

  It’s two days later, as the crow flies, and I’m waiting on a call from one of Her Majesty’s lieutenants. I’m holed up in the backroom of a meat market in Bella Vista, on a side street just off Washington, me and Joey the Kike. We’re bored and second-guessing our daily marching orders from the pampered, privileged pit bulls those of us so much nearer the bottom of this miscreant food chain refer to as Carrion Dispatch. Not very clever, sure, but all too fucking often, it hits the nail on the proverbial head. I might not like having to ride the Speedline out to Camden for a handoff with
the Czech, but it beats waiting, and it sure as hell beats scraping up someone else’s road kill and seeing to its discrete and final disposition. Which is where I have a feeling today is bound. Joey keeps trying to lure me into a game of whiskey poker, even though he knows I don’t play cards or dice or dominoes or anything else that might lighten my wallet. You work for Madam Adrianne, you already got enough debt stacked up without gambling, even if it’s only penny-ante foolishness to make the time go faster.

  Joey the Kike isn’t the absolute last person I’d pick to spend a morning with, but he’s just next door. Back in the Ohs, when he was still just a kid, Joey did a stint in Afghanistan and lost three fingers off his left hand and more than a few of his marbles. He still checks his shoes for scorpions. And most of us, we trust that whatever you hear coming out of his mouth is pure and unadulterated baloney. It’s not that he lies, or even exaggerates to make something more interesting. It’s more like he’s a bottomless well of bullshit, and every conversation with Joey is another tour through the highways and byways of his shattered psyche. For years, we’ve been waiting for the bastard to get yanked off the street and sent away to his own padded rumpus room at Norristown, where he can while away the days trading his crapola with other guys stuck on that same ever-tilting mental plane of existence. Still, I’ll be the first to admit he’s ace on the job, and nobody ever has to clean up after Joey the Kike.

  He lights a cigarette and takes off his left shoe, and his sock, too, because you never can tell where a scorpion might turn up.

  “You didn’t open the case?” he asks, banging the heel of his shoe against the edge of a shipping crate.

  “Hell no, I didn’t open the case. You think we’d be having this delightful conversation today if I’d delivered a violated parcel to the Czech? Or anybody else, for that matter. For pity’s sake, Joey.”

  “You ain’t sleeping,” he says, not a question, just a statement of the obvious.

  “I’m getting very good at lying awake,” I reply. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Sleep deprivation makes people paranoid,” he says, and bangs his loafer against the crate two or three more times. But if he manages to dislodge any scorpions, they’re of the invisible brand. “Makes you prone to erratic behavior.”

  “Joey, please put your damn shoe back on.”

  “Hey, dude, you want to hear about the Trenton drop or not?” he asks, turning his sock wrong-side out for the second time. Ash falls from the cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth.

  I don’t answer the question. Instead, I pick up my phone and stare at the screen, like I can will the thing to ring. All I really want right now is to get on with whatever inconvenience and unpleasantness the day holds in store, because Joey’s a lot easier to take when confined spaces and the odor of raw pork fat aren’t involved.

  “Do you or don’t you?” he prods.

  Not that he needs my permission to keep going. Not that my saying no, I don’t want to hear about the Trenton drop, is going to put an end to it.

  “Well,” he says, lowering his voice like he’s about to spill a state secret, “what we saw when Tony Palamara opened that briefcase – and keep in mind, it was me and Jack on that job, so I’ve got backup corroboration if you need that sort of thing – what we saw was five or six of these silver vials. I’m not sure Tony realized we got a look inside or not, and, actually, it wasn’t much more than a peek. It’s not like either of us was trying to see inside. But, yeah, that’s what we saw, these silver vials lined up neat as houses, each one maybe sixty or seventy milliliters, and they all had a piece of yellow tape or a yellow sticker on them. Jack, he thinks it was some sort of high-tech, next-gen explosive, maybe something you have to mix with something else to get the big bangola, right?”

  And I stare at him for a few seconds, and he stares back at me, that one green-and-black argyle sock drooping from his hand like some giant’s idea of a novelty prophylactic. Whatever he sees in my face, it can’t be good, not if his expression is any indication. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and balances it on the edge of the shipping crate.

  “Joey, were the vials silver, or was the silver what was inside of the vials?”

  And I can tell right away it hasn’t occurred to him to wonder which. Why the hell would it? He asks me what difference it makes, sounding confused and suspicious and wary all at the same time.

  “So you couldn’t tell?”

  “Like I said, it wasn’t much more than a peek. Then Tony Palamara shut the case again. But if I had to speculate, if this was a wager, and there was money on the line? Was that the situation, I’d probably say the silver stuff was inside the vials.”

  “If you had to speculate?” I ask him, and Joey the Kike bobs his head and turns his sock right-side out again.

  “What difference does it make?” he wants to know. “I haven’t even gotten around to the interesting part of the story yet.”

  And then, before I can ask him what the interesting part might be, my phone rings, and it’s dispatch, and I stand there and listen while the dog barks. Straightforward janitorial work, because some asshole decided to use a shotgun when a 9mm would have sufficed. Nothing I haven’t had to deal with a dozen times or more. I tell the dog we’re on our way, and then I tell Joey it’s his balls on the cutting board if we’re late because he can’t keep his shoes and socks on his goddamn feet.

  05.

  Some nights, mostly in the summer, Eli and me, we climb the rickety fire escape onto the roof to try to see the stars. There are a couple of injection-molded plastic lawn chairs up there, left behind by a former tenant, someone who moved out years before I moved into the building. We sit in those chairs that have come all the way from some East Asian factory shithole in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and we drink beer and smoke weed and stare up at the night spread out above Philly, trying to see anything at all. Mostly, it’s a white-orange sky-glow haze, the opaque murk of photopollution, and I suspect we imagine far more stars than we actually see. I tell him that some night or another we’ll drive way the hell out to the middle of nowhere, someplace where the sky is still mostly dark. He humors me, but Eli is a city kid, born and bred, and I think his idea of a pastoral landscape is Marconi Plaza. We might sit there and wax poetic about planets and nebulas and shit, but I have a feeling that if he ever found himself standing beneath the real deal, with all those twinkling pinpricks scattered overhead and maybe a full moon to boot, it’d probably freak him right the fuck on out.

  One night he said to me, “Maybe this is preferable,” and I had to ask what he meant.

  “I just mean, maybe it’s better this way, not being able to see the sky. Maybe, all this light, it’s sort of like camouflage.”

  I squinted back at Eli through a cloud of fresh ganja smoke, and when he reached for the pipe I passed it to him.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told him, and Eli shrugged and took a big hit of the 990 Master Kush I get from a grower whose well aware how much time I’ve spent in Amsterdam and Nepal, so she knows better than to sell me dirt grass. Eli exhaled and passed the pipe back to me.

  “Maybe I don’t mean anything at all,” he said and gave me half a smile. “Maybe I’m just stoned and tired and talking out my ass.”

  I think that was the same night we might have seen a falling star, though Eli was of the opinion it wasn’t anything but a pile of space junk burning up as it tumbled back to earth.

  06.

  I’ve been handling the consequences of other people’s half-assed mokroye delo since I was sixteen going on forty-five. So, yeah, takes an awfully bad scene to get me to so much as flinch, which is not to say I enjoy the shit. Truth of it, nothing pisses me off worse or quicker than some bastard spinning off the rails, running around with that first-person shooter mentality that, more often than not, turns a simple, straight-up hit into a bloodbath. And that is precisely the brand of unnecessary sangre pageantry that me and Joey the Kike ha
ve just spent the last three hours mopping up. What’s left of the recently deceased, along with a bin of crimson rags and sponges and the latex gloves and coveralls we wore, is stowed snugly in the trunk of the car. Another ten minutes, it won’t be our problem anymore, soon as we make the scheduled meet and greet with one of Madam Adrianne’s garbage men.

  So, it’s hardly business as usual that Joey’s behind the wheel because my hands won’t stop shaking enough that I can drive. They won’t stop shaking long enough for me to even light a cigarette.

  “You really aren’t gonna tell me what it was happened back there?” he asks for, I don’t know, the hundredth time in the last thirty or forty minutes. I glance at my watch, then the speedometer, making sure we’re not late and he’s not speeding. At least I have that much presence of mind left to me.

  “Never yet known you to be the squeamish type with wet work,” he says and stops for a red light.

  Most of the snow from Tuesday night has melted, but there are still plenty of off-white scabs hiding in the shadows, and there’s also the filthy mix of ice and sand and anonymous schmutz heaped at either side of the street. There are people out there shivering at a bus stop, people rushing along the icy sidewalk, a homeless guy huddled in the doorway of an abandoned office building. Every last bit of that tableau is as ordinary as it gets, the humdrum day to day of the ineptly named City of Brotherly Love, and that ought to help, but it doesn’t. All of it comes across as window dressing, meticulously crafted misdirection meant to keep me from getting a good look at what’s really going down.