by Reid Astor
He doesn't allow himself to stop moving until he clears at least two blocks between himself and the hotel, clouds of condensation white in the air from his hard breathing. The sound of surf whisks into his ears from both sides, then, and when he crosses the street clear from the alley he finds himself staring into the black glitter of the sea beyond the short drop.
How cold the sea must be at this dead hour, he thinks. It's such a perfect night for a suicide if only I believed in it- the sea is open but none of the churches are.
The thoughts swirl away with a hard, chilly breeze of salty air to his face. Leaning against the balustrade, he wonders where the rest of the world is tonight, oblivious to him, asleep. Lars in some convenience store, irritated at getting ID’d, callous to what he’s just done. Lars, unknowing of how even now Niklas feels the discomfort of his bloodied, violated body aching in the echo of the man.
For a moment he wonders if there is a stranger in the world who would care if he just sat down and closed his eyes right there on the side of the road. His employees would certainly have difficulties, but washing their hands of the shop in the end would be a blessing.
He flips open his phone and goes down the list of his contacts, or what few he has, and finds her name. The calling tone rings once, twice, several times at a point before clicking coolly and, with the sound of breathing in one ear and the ocean in the other, Niklas murmurs, "Germaine?"
PART III
CHAPTER NINE
The ring is bright yellow duct tape, worn down by perspiration caked with dirt and blood. His fists are raised to just below eye level, and he cannot feel anything but the subtle wear of his small bones and the thrum of adrenaline like a low war horn somewhere overheard. Languages are spoken, tips yelled, Go for his head, kick him, kick him- but that all disappears when the other boy throws a blow and he takes it to his forearm and tears it aside. It’s assiduous, it’s a rush, it’s his fist meeting the ridges of ribs, success- coming back for another under punch, gripping the boy in, like a long sigh of the battle coming to an end- only in a series of blows that echo from his bare fists.
Vladimir had said something about buying him hand wraps to mind the damage, but that still hasn’t happened. That hazy thought passes through his mind as the opponent finally gets a blow in, twisting out of the lock and swinging a back fist round to knock him in the head as he throws free. He tastes iron as he stumbles back, pivots, regains stance- takes another blow, is charged, feels the boy’s arms lock his and jolt him backward, backward until balance is lost and they’re on the ground.
He rolls. There’s only one way to regain this- he rolls and grips him again, round the neck and head this time for good measure, and has him face down on the floor.
And then he throws his face into the ground to the uproar of the crowd. Cigarette smoke haze cloud the naked fluorescent lightbulbs luminescence- a tooth comes loose from his front lines, a speckle of white and bright red that sends hands slamming on his back in congratulations. The roar closes around him, and with blue eyes he looks down on his enemy, kneels, and brings a hand over the shoulder of the unmoving figure.
“I’m sorry, Luka,” he says, in a voice that he can’t recognize as his own. Now that he feels them, his lungs are crying for air, for water, for anything. His throat is on fire. He rolls him over, gripping his shoulder-
Lightning flashes, or a lightbulb blows- he can’t say for sure, down there in the darkness- only that there was light, blinding strobes of it, and then there was nothing.
And then it’s a pile of bullet-ridden corpses on the ground, men and women alike. No one in the room is alive anymore.
He shuts his eyes tightly and releases the sigh as the adrenaline comedown sets in. Blood plasters on his knees as he makes to rise, ignores the hands of the dead rising and brushing his knobby knees and tearing at the oversized basketball shorts he’s worn to his match.
Somewhere his mother is waiting, she’ll be angry to see him in this state. But he’s got her a tooth for the tooth fairy.
* * *
They listen to the songs of mass in silence- if he didn't know better he'd have taken her for a stone in his peripheral vision. Kyrie Eleison plunges through the entirety of the church architecture, echoing back and reinforcing itself around him with the sound, but Germaine is perpetually unaffected, the ideal bystander leaving him to his thoughts.
So he falls to his own ideas, into a long line of thought running through his rosary, meditating on the songs and meditating still even as a priest rises to the altar to deliver the sermon. He never cared for this priest- not when he was with his mother and especially not now. This priest delivers words of forgiveness too passionately for a religion wrought by pain and fear for the fires of Hell. But then, the priest isn’t why he came.
The pew digs into his back, which still crooks sorely from his time on her couch the night before, somnolent among the smell of magnolias she must have sprayed her apartment living room with and the faintest odor of a cat. He vaguely remembers turning over every so often to look out the balcony, at the trail of cars glittering along the freeway like a golden stream bright in the pre-twilight hours. He definitely remembers truly waking just a little before seven and seeing a hot cup of tea and a course of antibiotics laid out in packets for him on the coffee table.
He can't remember telling Germaine he preferred tea. Or even what had happened to him the night before. But then it's all a bit of a blur, and he wouldn't put it past the woman to just infer somehow- from the stagger of his gait, from his tone, from the hour.
Mass ticks by quicker than he'd like- he feels the tug of shame on him when he realizes it's over, he got lost in the standing and the singing and the words and didn’t once pay full attention to a moment of it.
Germaine raises at his side, her voluminous brown hair catching the light pouring through the stained glass. She's reticent, really, and quite plain- but there's something in her self-possession and the quiet intelligence set in her brows and her placidity that reminds him just who she is. She still looks to the altar as he rises, and only seems to come back to him enough for them to walk out side by side, clearing from the crowd of familiar faces without so much as a word.
He's not here to talk today. Most of these faces he grew up with, and most of them have seen him on days when his mother dragged him in with crusted bruises on his face and knuckles, and alcohol still on his breath, tattoos showing through the starchy cotton shirts Anna threw on him at last minute. He still remembered the almost routine barrage of questions- ‘Has your son confessed? Is his soul ready for communion?’ that Anna would gracefully smile past with a hard look in her eye.
Most won't even make eye contact now as he clears a line through with this strange woman.
It's a chilly day outside, a promise of the gloomy turn of the season in the puddles beset on the pavement reflecting the angry, cloud-strewn sky. Germaine's hair tufts to the side away from the gust that blows them, and without thinking, he slips off his blue suit jacket to place on her shoulders. She lowers her head, brown eyes falling on the wide shoulders of the coat, and says, "Too starchy."
"I know. This jacket is the bane of my life, but it can keep you warm," he says as they stand there together on the stairs. "Did you enjoy mass?"
She tucks the coat a little over her chest to shield from the wind, and looks to the stretch of upper-class houses and fences arrayed before them in the neighborhood. Never once did she comment on the fact that his church was several blocks away from where he lived or grew up, and he’s thankful for that. "Mass was divine. Thank you for suggesting it. Sometimes you do just need a moment like that to commune with something higher on this kind of earth." She smiles, sweetly. There's no peach lipstick, today, just the plain pink of her lips turned upward. "Shall we go? You can't run from your own store forever."
He coughs, uncomfortably, and walks with her down the stairs. She's considerate in walking slowly, in pretending to appreciate the church facade, but he k
nows she's just permitting him to move with dignity even in pain. The gratefulness surges in him like something he's forgotten. "About the cafe," he says, taking a hand to the railing and trying not to seem like he's depending on it. "I need to talk to you."
Germaine looks to him, the smile not leaving her face. "I'm no good with finances, Niklas. You know that."
"Not about money," he says. "About my situation." He roves his mind, trying to remember what he's told her so far- that he suspects- no, he knows Svetlana has been manipulating him, what Lars has been doing for him. He wonders what Germaine's filled in by assumption from there at this point. "In the car," he says at last, as a family brushes by him, children casting looks over their shoulders. Whispered questions. He's familiar with it, it barely touches him anymore, even on these church stairs where his mother always insisted they were equal in the eyes of God.
She nods, and they walk the rest of the way in idle talk, her doing him the kindness of acting warmly before the suspicious eyes of the surrounding crowd, even touching his hand once or twice along the way. When they reach her car and step inside, she starts it immediately, letting the heat run and the engine warm up.
"Do you want to tell me about it?" she finally asks, an echo of her call the night before. She'd stayed on the line with him the entire time while she drove to found him. Even if it was just breathing. As if she'd sensed the grip of anxiety on his heart, as if she'd known he was checking over his shoulder every three minutes to see if Lars was to appear on that street.
Does he want to tell her about it? Where would he start? The flicker of a memory sparks in his head, a blink of a second back to the time when Lars was inside him and he was face-down in the bed, sweating, moaning. Something stirs in him at the memory- he puts it down to too many nights alone.
"Not really," he admits. "But I've had about as much as I can take."
"From what?"
"Everything."
"You don't strike me as the type to be done, just like that," Germaine comments, following his gaze to look out at the parking lot, at the good people coming and going with their families, talking, sharing stories and laughing together out of earshot. "You're feeling out of control."
He sighs, putting his head down and reaching for his seatbelt. "You think too highly of me. Svetlana Morris has fucked me, Lars has..."
"Fucked you," she says, calmly, neutrally. He looks away. "And you want my help." There's a cold pause between them, filled only by the purr of the engine and the air system, blowing soft waves of gradually warming heat into the car. "You don't know anything about me or what I do, Niklas. I can't just go into charity and help the first broken soul on my footstep."
That does it for him. He reaches to unlatch his seatbelt and for the door, turning himself out of the car. "I can make my own way home. Thank you," he says, as cordially as he can when there's a whole other part of him rending at his guts for violence- anyone's violence. It's not a part of him he wants to show her, this anger and despair. "For all this. For letting me stay over. Thank you."
Germaine eyes him coolly. "I'm not finished. I can't just involve my job in this- it's too political for that. But I can still help you, Niklas. Please," she says, and something breaks to tenderness in her expression and tone, "just get inside."
He hesitates, one hand ready to close the car door, but eventually complies. He's been putting doors on people all his life, for better or worse, but disobeying Germaine could cut her out forever from him when she's already only loosely there. When it's been the best luck he's had all year to just have this woman's time and attention now. "I'm sorry."
"Your kind of life seems to keep you on edge," she says as an acceptance of his apology, and pulls out of the parking lot. "But what makes you think that's the answer? Acting like an animal all the time?"
That hits deep. He wants to refute her, tell her he's gotten better and justify himself to her in a million different ways and explanations and examples. But in part she's right, when he isn't acting like an animal he's holding himself back from it. He closes his eye and runs his mind through the notes of mass music. As if that's any help. "It's intuition," he admits.
Germaine isn't impressed by this. He can feel that in the silence. "It's short-sighted, Niklas. Put an animal in a trap and it'll do the first thing that occurs to it to get away, even if it means chewing off it's own leg. Put a smarter soul in a trap and there's a chance they can fashion something to dismantle it and limp away. Take any set of problems and if you pull the right thread, every single one of them will trail after. It's the heart you need to go for, not the many heads- if you forgive my crass reference."
He wants to tell her references to mythology is anything but crass, but maybe, to her, it is still. So he silences himself on that.
"Lars did overstep. But he is still a piece playing for you- or he was."
"There's a certain amount of human dignity people should be allowed to have," Niklas hears himself growl, and doesn't allow himself to regret it. He's not shouting. He's just talking, telling the truth. "And he overstepped that."
Germaine gives him a look that silences him immediately. "He’s an animal too. And what ever made you think you were in a game where people were concerned with basic human dignity?" she says. And it's nothing in her tone, or the way she looks, because at the very first impression and for every impression afterward she is plainly beautiful- it's just her words alone that chill him. "There's more to this than just a procession of individuals hurting each other and hurting you. If you can figure that out, maybe you can stop being a victim."
"I've been living these years trying to make peace with myself and God," he speaks weakly. He hasn't told anyone this, but to Germaine, it comes naturally, as if it's been waiting to be told to her alone all this time. Stirring in his head every time he laid eyes on her and she came to his shop. "To prove something to those who thought I was just immigrant filth. To clean my hands. Are you telling me I should let myself be part of their..."
"Their game. Yes, I am. If you want to be above it, stop acting like a pawn," she interrupts. "People with power don't just react and lash out with no consideration or foreseeable idea of larger, longer-term consequences. They're not so base to just concern themselves with the problems of the moment alone."
She brings silence over him with those words.
"Your God," she says, "probably thinks you a poor servant for letting this get so bad."
They don’t speak for a long time afterward. When she drops him off in front of the Ishmael, the thanks he gives is soft, noncommittal, and Germaine doesn’t deign to give any words in return. She pulls away, leaving him with his bag in the makings of a storm sweeping down the street and sending the odd flyer or trash bag through the air.
* * *
He finds Viola in his bed- or rather, sitting on it, wrapped up in a large scarf and completely absorbed in one of his few English books- a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In her over-large glasses, it’s easy to remember she’s a college girl outside of her existence in the Ishmael, with her own serving of side concerns and problems and classes and homework.
He coughs a little at the door to alert her of his presence. She’s so shocked the book nearly falls out of her hands- she just barely catches it by its upper spine, eyes wide as billiards as she looks at him. “I- Oh God,” she whimpers, “I’m sorry, I was passing through and I saw your bookshelf- I- ah-” she looks left and right, gesturing wildly, “I didn’t touch anything else, you can check, I-” and stops herself short, catching view of him. “Are... are you okay?”
Niklas blinks, looks around himself to follow her hands, then to himself. “I’m fine,” he says, dropping his bag and carrying himself, slowly, to the bed. He feels Viola watch him the entire time, chewing on her lip, but she doesn’t move when he drops down on the mattress beside her and into the pillow. “We’re shutting down for renovation next week.” He takes the pillow and drops it over his eyes, feeling the latent exhausting
take hold and letting himself relax, finally. At least for a moment. “Do you think you find somewhere to stay before then?”
Viola doesn't say anything for a while, but he does hear the errant clopping of his book shutting, and imagines her hands delicately setting it down on the bed to the side of her. "I could find somewhere, y-yeah." She sounds like she's sucking on the dense pre-storm air. "C-can… If I may ask, can you? Find somewhere to stay? I just… I never see you, um… Sorry, I don't know what I was saying-"
He knows exactly what she was saying and it makes sense. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Huh?"
"I'm staying here," he says, lackadaisically. "Renovation or not. It's my damn store." If he lays here long enough, he may just fall asleep-so he jerks upright, eliciting a small squeak from Viola and dropping the pillow into his lap.
When he looks at Viola, though, her mossy green eyes are full of something else- something he's rarely seen on her save for when they had very few, very specific customers. It's a reserved, tight expression- it's the closest thing, he thinks, that Viola has as a precursor to anger. "Your face-" she starts- "on your... your other side."
He raises his hand to touch the area her eyes seem so fixated on, and blinks as the dull pain greets him. His fringe was knocked away, it seemed, exposing the bruise Lars left on his temple the night before. He tenses, feeling it. "Happens all the time," he says. He hopes he sounds convincing but at this point he doesn't really care. He has an idea of the kind of home Viola grew up in. Convincing sometimes just won't be good enough for her. "Check to see if the shop got any mail."
