Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  Syker flips through the book. "I haven't felt good in a long time," he says sadly.

  Wayne chuckles. "Let me tell you a story about the young Siddhartha Guatana. He was walking down a road when he encountered a robber, and the robber gave him a choice: his money or his life. Siddhartha Guatana said and did nothing for a long time, and finally the robber demanded an answer. 'I'm thinking,' said Siddhartha. The robber could not proceed without an answer, and so he went away.

  "Money and life are in opposition," Wayne continues. "Siddhartha learned that. He wound up giving everything away in the Great Renunciation. Remember Christ's dictum about serving two masters—where do you think he heard it?"

  "Thanks for the book," says Syker.

  Wayne issues a warning. "Take these matters seriously. Meditation is powerful. It can change everything—even your physical appearance. I don't look at all how I did ten years ago."

  He shows Syker and Agnes the small portrait he uses as a bookmark. The picture is of a man wearing an oxford shirt over a turtleneck. He has mutton-chop sideburns and a broad, flat, squashed face.

  "That was taken twelve years ago," says Wayne. "I wanted to break into radio."

  Syker snorts. "This isn't you."

  "Of course it is."

  "Wayne, that picture came with your wallet," says Agnes gently.

  Wayne confronts the unbelievers. "My body is lengthening. I'm becoming an ectomorph. I'm starting to look like the human incarnations of all the deities— Christ, Buddha, Vishnu, the Nagas, all of them. All holy men look alike."

  They stand outside a bar with no windows called Pato Sucio. The owner, Pat Summers, is an old friend of Wayne's. They haven't seen each other in years. Wayne worked for Pat as a waiter in the 1970s, when Pato Sucio was one of the great gay bars. It attracted interesting people of substance, says Wayne, but fortunately not too much substance.

  Lights ablaze, camera whirring, Wayne Torrence and company march into Pato Sucio. Pat Summers vaults over the bar. He puts his hand up in that instinctive gesture used both by those being filmed against their will and those about to be shot in the face.

  "It's me," says Wayne.

  The two old friends fall into each other's arms. Wu Heung circles them with the Steadicam, going for that vertiginous background against which old movies loved to play the clinch.

  Pat Summers is tall and stooped, all arms and legs. His parabolic moustache is gray at the tips. Once he recovers from the dual shock of the cameras and Wayne Torrence, his manner is thoughtful, practically ministerial.

  "Patrick, I'm sick," says Wayne.

  "I know," says Pat somberly. "I've never seen you so thin."

  "Or tall," says Agnes.

  Pat is outraged to hear that Wayne is living on the street.

  "You're coming home with me," says Pat.

  Wayne refuses. "I didn't show up here looking for a care partner."

  They exchange names of the dead and dying.

  "Todd Strictland?" says Wayne.

  "Co-op care," says Pat.

  "What a painter."

  Pat takes out a recent photo of Todd. In the photo, Todd holds onto his IV pole for support. He smiles weakly. He weighs about 90 pounds, and wears a Panama hat.

  Pat has to do something for Wayne. He has some friends at the Persons With AIDS Coalition. He wants Wayne to come up with him to the PWAC offices. When Pat goes into the back room for something, Wayne buttonholes Agnes. He is almost in a panic. She must come with them to PWAC. He and Pat haven't fallen into bed together often, but when they have it has tended to me on momentous occasions. Wayne doesn't want it to happen. He doesn't want to jeopardize the progress he has made toward awakening his kundalini.

  Agnes agrees to chaperone. She marvels at Wayne's verve. How many men, dying and homeless, would still feel themselves sexual creatures?

  Probably every last one of them. They are an indefatigable sex.

  Agnes and Wayne and Pat walk to Union Square. The camera crew follows them, Sarah barking orders, Syker in a headset, looking puzzled, working the sound. For reasons of confidentiality, there are no cameras allowed inside the PWAC offices, so only Wayne and Pat go inside. While Wu Heung eats a sandwich, Agnes absently picks up the camera and hoists it up onto her shoulder. It is heavy. She peers through the lens at Union Square; pans to the shuttered hulk of Syker's Department Store. Here is a section of the city that has come full circle. Agnes sees food stands and snack wagons, pushcarts, a jumble of small enterprises—surely it looks much the same as it did in the Twenties and Thirties.

  Through the lens she witnesses a scene of sickening violence. A fat kid hurtles down the street on a bicycle that is too small for him and crashes smack into a fruitstand, sending bananas and melons and apples everywhere. Agnes runs over to help. No wonder such a thing could happen, she thinks in a flash. The urban radar hasn't gotten used to fruitstands again. Here is the history of New York: fruitstands, fruitstands, more fruitstands, hundreds and thousands of fruitstands, then, pow, 1950, no more fruitstands, we can't have fruitstands, eliminate the fruitstands, those fucking fruitstands will never dirty our city again! And now— where are the fruitstands? Gotta have more fruitstands! What's a city without fruitstands?

  Agnes helps the victim to his feet.

  She practically screams. "You!"

  It's the fat kid who has been haunting her—the one who tried to steal the car, the one skulking outside the Bloch apartment. Her own personal Bigfoot.

  Sarah comes over for a look. She sees the kid and emits a little yelp of fright.

  The kid smiles dazedly. His lips fissure to reveal a tangle of malocclusion. "That's music to my ears, Sare. I've been longing for the sound of your voice."

  Agnes turns to her roommate. "Sare? You know him?"

  "He wishes," says Sarah. She turns and flounces away.

  "Oh, heaven," says the kid. "I think my arm is broken."

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Sarah drives off with Wu Heung and the other film students. It is left to Agnes to aid her personal Bigfoot. The pain hasn't hit him yet. He is badly shaken up.

  "I'll be all right," he insists. "I've seen her face. That's enough for me."

  Agnes hails and cab, and she and the fat kid drive to St. Luke's-In-The-Bowery Hospital. The emergency room is filled with poor Hispanic families. Boisterous children joust with standing floor lamps. The triage nurse looks at the kid's arm and promises nothing.

  "My name is Ivan Kroger," the kid tells Agnes.

  "We have met, you know."

  "Three times."

  "Three?" says Agnes with some alarm.

  "Outside Pathmark. You saw me in your friend's backyard, and I saw you at your boyfriend's."

  Agnes stiffens.

  "Don't get excited," he says, trying to make his arm comfortable. "I thought you were meeting Sarah there. I went up the fire escape for a look. Nothing I saw interested me particularly. She wasn't there."

  "What are you doing here?" Agnes asks him.

  "Isn't it obvious? I'm following Sarah. I'm passionately, madly, crazily in love with her—we're talking large emotions here."

  An Indian doctor with bags on his shoes examines Ivan's arm. He instructs the nurse to splint it.

  "I've been chasing her for years," says Ivan wistfully. "I've invited her to every Clavelle function you can imagine. She won't even look at me."

  "Shouldn't you be at Clavelle right now?"

  "That phase of my life is over," he says with great solemnity. Agnes nearly laughs in his face. "I watched the two of you drive off and decided that was it. I stuck out my thumb. By the way, I wasn't trying to steal the car. I just wanted something of Sarah's—a candy wrapper, an old Kotex, anything."

  "I don't appreciate being stalked," says Agnes.

  "I don't care for all this sneaking around myself," he says indignantly.

  Agnes looks him over. He is quite fat, and has an unhealthy-seeming pallor. His lank hair, parted in the middle, has been wound ar
ound the stems of his ears.

  The nurse comes over with a problem. Ivan's social security number doesn't match the name showing on the computers. He tells the nurse that Ivan is actually his middle name. His real first name is Clarence.

  He says, "How could my parents have done that to me?"

  Agnes sympathizes. "Agnes is just as bad."

  "It might be worse."

  Ivan disappears with the nurse. Agnes walks around the hospital. She comes upon what looks like a crush of patients waiting to be admitted to rooms. The hallway is choked with beds. Then Agnes realizes that the hallway has been transformed into a temporary ward. Posted above every patient's head is a stern warning about fluid and needle precautions. It is an AIDS overflow ward. Agnes looks at the numbers posted above the beds: H-101, H-102, H-103--H as in hallway.

  When Ivan emerges, winded and unsteady, his arm is in a cast and sling. Agnes asks where he is staying. He doesn't have an acceptable answer. Part of the time he has been staying with his friend Neal, but Neal is out of town. Part of the time he has been at the Spitalfields Hotel, a Times Square hovel. He has also stayed at the St. Basil's rectory.

  "You've heard of Father Matt Clarence?" says Ivan. "He's my uncle."

  "I'll take you there."

  Ivan shakes his head. He rubs his arm. "I only stay there when he's someplace else. I can't stand the cocksucker, but his housekeeper loves me."

  "I can't send you back to the Spitalfields Hotel," says Agnes.

  He looks at her pathetically. His big, moony, patchy eyes are rimmed with mottled purple, as though someone has punched him. "So what's to become of me?"

  "You can stay with me for tonight," says Agnes.

  "You mean stay with us," he says, giggling. "It'll be a regular slumber party. Won't my Sarah be thrilled!"

  Agnes is about to hail a cab when she glimpses someone's passing newspaper. One word jumps out of the headline at her: Minotaur. She and Ivan race frantically to a newsstand.

  According to the Graphic, the Minotaur has struck again, killing two women in the Morris-Jumel Mansion, a historic house in Agnes's neighborhood.

  She sucks in her breath. "I'm a magnet for this psychopath."

  Details are sketchy. There is no word as to how the women were killed, or how the police know this is the Minotaur's doing.

  Agnes will get it from Tommy.

  The story beneath the Minotaur story is actually more interesting. In Aruba, they have reconvened the inquest into the death of Dr. Janice Fedelke. A suicide note, accidentally removed by a housekeeper, has been recovered. The note explains that she took her own life because of a professional error that she was sure would ruin her career. It seems that when she wrote in her report that "the patient John Speer displays no symptoms of violent feeling toward women," she was actually thinking of another patient she was seeing at the same time, Raymond Jon Spire. By the time she realized her mistake, it was too late to correct it.

  As she wrote in the note:

  Yes, it's the coward's way out. But I couldn't wait with dread any longer for the sight of the morning paper. I put someone dangerous out on the street. When he was picked up, my stomach dropped about ten feet.

  John Speer needed a lot more help than he got. Let's hope he didn't commit that atrocity in Brooklyn. he is an angry man, and capable of almost anything.

  John Speer, reached for comment, laughs the whole thing off.

  "I don't know what that babe was talking about," he says. "I'm a lot saner than she ever was, that's for shit sure."

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Agnes is dimly aware of a pounding. Someone is at the door. She throws on a robe and goes groggily to investigate. It is just after four in the morning.

  It's Tommy.

  "Did you see the paper?" he says, coming inside. "The maniac did it again. I've been up all night. This sucks. I don't want to do this. I don't want to play anymore."

  He puts on some coffee. He turns and looks at the sleepy Agnes. "I've been thinking about you all night. I wanted you with me at the scene."

  "Togetherness has its limits," says Agnes.

  "This time he got a mother and daughter. I've got my own sick fantasies, but they really don't match his."

  Tommy takes his coffee out to the couch. Agnes curls up with her head in his lap. She puts her hand under his shirt, and rubs her hand on the feathery hair that covers his chest and tapers down his belly. She presses herself into him, content.

  "I don't know what you're so happy about," says Tommy.

  "You make me happy."

  "He wants to kill you too. You and Sarah—together."

  "New York is a tough town," says Agnes. "You'll protect me, won't you?"

  "It may come down to that," says Tommy. "The Minotaur and I are locked in a deadly battle of wits. He knows I'm on the trail, and he's worried. He can't keep slaughtering pairs of women at random forever. Five or six years of this and I'm bound to catch him."

  Agnes rubs her finger up and down Tommy's rib cage. She drifts in and out of sleep. When she wakes up, she is alone. The sun is up. Tommy and Sarah are talking at the kitchen table. Agnes pads out to join them.

  "You're up early," she says to Sarah.

  "We're filming Wayne's appointment with Dr. Maurtio. Isn't it just awful?"

  "What?"

  "The Minotaur. The murders."

  "Terrible," says Agnes.

  "I just don't understand that sort of violence," says Sarah.

  "Who does?" says Agnes.

  "I don't want to film today," says Sarah. "This is a terrible day to be a woman. Agnes, you had the right idea. I should learn Tae Kwon Do."

  "I didn't stop there," says Agnes. "I'm seeing a cop."

  Agnes feels ridiculously happy: imbued with the spirit of good fellowship and master of everyone she knows. She delights in Sarah's youthful sense of outrage; she takes comfort in Tommy's stability and self-deprecation. Tommy and Sarah seem at that moment like marvelously decent people; Agnes wants to hug them or take them to an amusement park or buy them ice cream sodas—anything!

  "I didn't hear you come home last night," says Sarah. "What kept you?"

  "I went to the emergency room with—"

  She doesn't finish the sentence. Agnes is aware of his footsteps an instant before he comes dazedly into the room. His eyes are barely open. His hair pokes out stiffly and skewedly.

  "What's going on?" he says like a kid invading a grownups' party.

  Sarah screams. Tommy burns himself on his coffee.

  Ivan is wearing nothing but his cast and sling and a pair of gray jockey shorts partially hidden by his stomach.

  "What is this weirdo doing here?" Sarah demands.

  "I take exception to that," says Ivan.

  "He had no place else to go," says Agnes.

  "I can't believe you brought him here," Sarah moans. "This really is a terrible day to be a woman."

  "It is still my apartment."

  "Don't blame Agnes, sweetheart," says Ivan. "She was just being charitable. I'd break my arm again just to spend a few minutes with you, and it's not exactly quality time."

  "See what I mean?" says Sarah frantically. "He's a psycho. I won't stay in the same room with him."

  Agnes taps Ivan on the shoulder. "Don't you think you should go back to bed? Or put some clothes on? Or something?"

  "I couldn't sleep now," he says.

  "Then go put something on."

  "For you, Agnes, I will."

  He lumbers back to his room. He walks stiffly, head held erect. Agnes recognizes the walk of the childhood misfit, who has learned not so see or hear—or in any event, not to acknowledge—the hailstorm of abuse through which he continually passes.

  Sarah has retreated to the bathroom. She pokes out her head. "Is he gone?"

  "For the time being."

  "He watches me," says Sarah, dread in her voice. "He used to follow me around the campus. He tries taking the same classes as me—fortunately, he's not as bright, s
o he couldn't get into any advanced seminars. It's truly creepy."

  "There's something not right about him," says Tommy.

  "Something not right?" says Sarah. "Talk about understatement! I think he's the Minotaur. If he's not the Minotaur he's something."

  Ivan goes into the bathroom. Soon he is bellowing "If I Were A Rich Man" in the shower.