The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  Dedication

  For my sister, Sarah C. Talent.

  First friend; first reader; best critic.

  A true child (and mother) of Hudson.

  Epigraph

  But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part II

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Part III

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sam J. Miller

  Copyright

  Aboout the Publisher

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Welcome to Hudson: a whale of a town.

  Bright raw wintertime, and Warren Street is a swathe of white and red. Blood-soaked men drag strips of whale flesh through the snow. Black smoke billows from man-size iron try-pots. Bones reach for the sky like irrational red fences; rib cages recently flensed. Hooks and knives and blades as long as swords slice and hack the air, a whole weird lexicon of specialized instruments: mincing spade; monkey-belt; fire-pike; throat-chain; fin toggle. The strips are sliced down into blocks; the blocks are fed to the bubbling pots. The whole city smells like blood and wood smoke and the thick meaty mammalian stink of melting blubber—marine and vaguely reminiscent of alcohol.

  Blubber and skin and spermaceti are the engine of industry, the bloody gold that has powered Hudson’s rise to power, boiled down and barreled and shipped off to light lanterns as far away as London—the baleen will become women’s corsets, and the bones will be returned to the river—and the teeth will be scrimshawed and sent home to sweethearts, sold to collectors—but what will be done with the rest of these magnificent monsters, the livers as big as cows, the eyes the size of a human head? Intestines so long they could be stretched off to mark the extent of any one of Hudson’s uphill streets. Brains bigger than any human’s, and wiser, too, with the things they’ve seen, at depths that would crush a man like a baby chick in a fist. Sunken empires, sea monsters believed to be mere myth. The skeletons of a million drowned men and women.

  What will happen to the rest of the whale?

  Some will be fed to dogs and pigs. Some will be cooked and eaten by humans.

  Most will be buried. Long trenches along the waterfront at first, then creeping up the streets as space runs out.

  The hearts and brains of whales will feed Hudson’s soil. Their blood ascends to the sky in oak tree branches, feeds its people in apples and corn. Seeps into the stone and cement of the foundations of its homes.

  The sky darkens. The day’s work is done. Men drink cheap cider. Tomorrow, maybe, more whale carcasses will come. The harbor stretches around into North Bay. You can count a couple dozen tall ship masts.

  In twenty years the railroad will arrive, heading north from New York City, bound for Albany, for Canada, its path perfectly plotted to cut off Hudson’s North Bay. Cripple the city’s shipping trade. Start its slow decline into irrelevance.

  Forty years after that, Hudson will have become the East Coast’s largest center for prostitution, the Diamond Street whorehouses so notorious that they’ll have to change the name of the street to Columbia after the governor personally sends a swarm of state troopers to bust up the brothels that local authorities have coddled—and patronized, and exploited for information—for decades.

  Bootleggers will base their operations out of Hudson. So will crystal meth manufacturers, many years later. Movies will shoot here, ones that want somewhere that still looks like the Great Depression. Ones where Jack Nicholson is an alcoholic or Harry Belafonte is a broken-down gambler.

  Hudson has been many cities, but it has always been this one. The one with soil steeped in blood; with a harbor full of bones.

  Chapter Two

  Easy, sailor—no need to take the stairs two at a time—she’s not gonna get any less dead, no matter how much you hurry.

  Dom slows down. Takes a deep breath.

  These things happen. Town like Hudson, they happen all the time.

  Her neighbor found her. Came by to borrow a cup of sugar, allegedly—more likely dropped by to buy weed—used the key Ossie was entirely too free with giving away copies of—saw her lying on her bed—checked for a pulse—found none—called the police.

  Or, more accurately, called Dom.

  Nothing unusual about that. Small town; she’d gone to school with Dom, same as Ossie, same as everybody. The fact that she and Dom and Ossie had smoked up together in this very same apartment two nights before—the fact that she knew that Ossie and Dom were sleeping together—none of that needed to go in a report. Dom instructed her to call the actual police, who of course sent him. Anything that happened downstreet, they sent him. The lone Black cop on the force.

  And now, here he is. In the sad sooty stairwell of Ossie’s building. Smelling cigarettes and spilled milk and cheap carpet cleaner—but underneath it all, faint random atoms of the scent of some delicious meat dish, something the nice Jewish lady on the second floor cooked every Friday for so many decades that you could still smell it six years after her death. Dom can’t recall her name. Mrs. Kubiak? The ghost of the smell would never leave that building, not entirely.

  That’s all any of us leaves behind, sailor. If we’re lucky. A smell in the air; a bunch of people who can’t quite remember our name.

  Dom stands up straight. Gets himself together. Goes back into the apartment.

  “Pills, probably,” Louise says, looking at her with what seems to be anger but could be anything. “I won’t tell anybody about you two.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Dom says. He takes the statement, lets Louise go, and goes in to sit with Ossie while they wait for the coroner.

  She’s on her back, arms crossed across her chest. He doesn’t think he’s eve
r seen her be still. Ossie was a live wire, a constant frenzy. It’s what he’d always loved about her. As far back as middle school, she’d made bad decisions look magnificent. Even getting high couldn’t make her chill—just unleashed a different kind of crazy: kinetic, compelling thoughts from her head, a new set of rambling theories and opinions.

  And of course he’d never spent the night, so he’d never seen her sleep. When their time together was up, Dom went home. Ossie stayed here alone.

  She looks alone, now. Dressed for bed, in a long T-shirt where a white and a black sperm whale made a yin-yang symbol. On top of the cluttered dresser, two empty pill bottles and a very minimalist suicide note. CREMATION, NO CEREMONY. And below that, standing in for a signature, a drawing of a cartoon whale. The one thing Ossie knew how to draw.

  He didn’t love her. They’d been friends. They were good together, in bed.

  He doesn’t feel guilty, either. This hurt is purer, harsher. She is gone. There will be no more late-night theories about Richard Linklater movies, no more of the cookies she was forever baking but never mastering.

  Dom sits down on the bed beside her. He feels so heavy.

  “Ossie,” he says, as close to a good-bye as he can come, and leans over so he can close her eyes. The pressure on the mattress causes her head to turn toward him slightly. Water dribbles out of the side of her mouth. Not spit: water. There is no glass by the bed, nothing nearby that she could have taken a sip from. Unless she swallowed the pills and then took a drink in the bathroom and then got into bed and somehow didn’t swallow it or spit it up in the convulsions that almost certainly would have ensued? But even if that was possible—and it probably wasn’t—why would she go to all that trouble?

  He leans over. Sniffs her mouth. It smells like her—like cinnamon, chocolate—but like something else, too. The sea at night, Dom thinks, and whisks the thought away, and kisses her. The water is salty. Not like table salt. Dom recoils, stands up, suddenly eerily convinced that if he’d looked at her a second longer he’d have seen a hermit crab scuttle up out of her throat.

  Someone downstairs is screaming. Someone always is, on State Street. Even though it’s only a couple of blocks from Warren Street, where skyrocketing property values have replaced every poor family with a wealthy New York City transplant, State Street has stubbornly refused to be transformed. He knows exactly who is screaming, too. Because of course he does. He knows exactly who everyone is on State Street.

  He hadn’t closed Ossie’s eyes, and now he can’t.

  Chapter Three

  RONAN

  What new cage have I awakened in this time?

  An old addict’s trick, waking up wondering where you are and why without panicking. Being excited about it, even. Embracing the challenge of the moment.

  I wasn’t an addict anymore. I told myself that. Hadn’t been high in a week and a half.

  I was on a train, apparently. Engines churning. The wheel-thrum slowing as we drew near to the next stop. Lights arcing overhead—a bridge, an arm extended hopefully into the night. The Rip Van Winkle, to be precise.

  So. I was going home. Huh.

  Okay, cool, no problem. We can do this. We’re grown-ups now. No one here can hurt us anymore.

  “Hudson, sir,” said the lanky child who collected tickets, and didn’t he know that calling a forty-year-old gay man sir was like asking a chubby woman when she’s due? The train smelled of hospital linen and cheap cherry-almond soap and blue gross Porta-Potty water from the open bathroom door at the end of the car and I was not ready to return to Hudson.

  Twenty years, since the last time I made this trek up the river to the miserable grounds of my spawning. This shitty city full of terrible people. This place I swore never to see again. But, now, somehow—there I was, whole body aching, on a train I had no memory of boarding, pulling into the station.

  It made you a pretty good detective, having a substance abuse problem. Piecing together the fragments of the moment, while trying to smile and look like you know what’s going on. I took out my phone to check my calendar, but Coffee with Katch was the only thing marked down for the day. I smiled, remembering that lovely boy who’d shown up on my doorstep three days back wanting to model for me. I remembered making the appointment but couldn’t recall whether it had happened. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall a goddamn thing, not even opening a bottle or unspooling a bag of crystal. I didn’t feel any of the ordinary bliss or edginess of meth, so I was reasonably certain I hadn’t relapsed. Between my legs lay my fully stocked camera bag, which I only ever trot out for an out-of-town shoot. Or a long trip. So which one was this?

  The train blew its whistle. The lights of Hudson were sliding into place, a puzzle assembling itself against my will. Suddenly, I was having a hard time getting any air in my lungs. Suddenly my skin was on fire.

  Shouts echoed in my head. Homophobic slurs. Hard fists to the face. Old wounds ached; faded bruises sprang to life. Unhealed scars. Shards of metal still stuck in me.

  You can’t be here.

  I patted my pockets, plowed through my camera bag. No flask. No glass vial or plastic bag with sweet, sweet escape inside. So I had no choice but to turn to a lesser anesthetic. I switched on my phone, summoned up the soothing blitzkrieg of social media. Surfed the churning sea of my mentions. The fights I picked and the ones that picked me. Fallout from my latest photo shoot, which went live that week, all the predictable buzz and semi-scandal—an ad for some edgy new clothing line, starring that pretty boy from that big new movie, except in my photos he’s naked on his knees surrounded by shadowy shapes, with a look on his face like he’d just been fucked into next Friday.

  So I fought trolls for a little while. The guy who said I was an overhyped pornographer, I called him an underdeveloped hyena fetus. Someone called me the six-letter F word and I told him to go suck a big bag of broken glass. And so on.

  That got my blood going. Edged out the panic. Hate was reliable like that.

  Smart money would have been to stay on the train. Wait one stop, get off at Albany, where there’s an actual fully staffed station with stores and a platform, instead of getting off in Hudson, which is a ghost town after 10:00 P.M. But it was late—this had to be the last train of the day—and I didn’t want to spend the night in any station. Or spring for a hotel. Success and money were still relatively recent developments, and anytime I could avoid spending it I did. My best bet was to disembark in Hudson, crawl home to Daddy no matter how much I was dreading it, sleep there, have a decent breakfast with the man, pat myself on the back for making him happy with a surprise visit, never mind that it was as much a surprise to me as it was to him, and then get the fuck back to Manhattan.

  I stood up. Grabbed my stuff. Turned to step into the aisle.

  But something was wrong. Hudson is a sleepy tiny town. The kind of stop you might sleep through. It had happened to me more than once, in college: dazed, exhausted, aching from drugs and sex in excess, heading home from my wild grown-up life to the weird mental limbo Hudson always put me in. Before I vowed to never return. Back then, I was usually the only person getting off the train. And now—the aisle was full. A couple dozen people waited up ahead of me. Scruffy hipsters; impatient important women. Abundant piercings. A tiny dog peering out of a purse. A gay couple in pastel polos. Everyone looked expensive. Even the people who were obviously unemployed, who had come from overcrowded Brooklyn basements.

  Was there some kind of arts festival that weekend, or secret religious retreat? Could that be why I had come? Was I here to photograph something? But no conceivable thread connected these inexplicable tourists. Only that they were all white, and they were all outsiders. And that an observer could not have known, by looking at us, that I was not one of them. Somehow, I was the last in line. Everyone else had been ready. They knew the stop; knew that when the train passed under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge it was only a matter of minutes before it pulled into the station. They came here often.

&
nbsp; What the hell happened to Hudson?

  “Hudson,” called the conductor, sounding half asleep himself. Cold wind whipped down the length of the car. Autumn; I’d forgotten that, too. The city had felt like summer. My dizziness doubled. Impossible scenarios swamped me—what if I had been asleep for months? What if I’d been wandering the earth in an Ambien sleep-walk session, committing all kinds of irrational acts, and was only just now waking up?

  That’s what you get for trying to get sober, Ronan. Meth might have been a mean-ass bitch to you while you were doing it, but who’s to say how much nastier it’ll get now that you’ve quit cold turkey?

  I took out my phone to try to call Katch, but I didn’t have his number. He’d only ever shown up at my studio in person. I clicked onto the calendar event, even though I knew it didn’t have any more information.

  Except: now it did. I’d left the location blank, but now there was one: Hudson, New York. How the fuck had that happened?

  Since stopping drugs, weirdness had abounded. Radio static when there was no radio around; shadows moving on the wall when there was nothing to cast them. Like the dark side was trying its damnedest to leak into the sunlight. This must just be one of those things. My brain had gone briefly on autopilot and piloted me here.

  Just more evidence of how far gone you were—how close you came to destroying yourself—how broken you were, and how brave you are for fixing yourself.

  I told myself that.

  We shuffled down the aisle, them to their weekend escape and me to my doom.

  No. You can do this. You’re a big boy. They have no power over you.

  That’s who I was, after all. As an artist. Someone who sublimated his pain into art. Even when I was scared shitless, or shivering with rage, or sick with lust, or inexplicably sad to the point of collapsing to the floor in the fetal position.

  Almost all of which, right then, I was.

  Really? None of them have any power over you? Not even—your father?

  I gulped cold air, my breaths ragged and desperate. There was only one way through this.