Eternal Kiss (19 page)

“How’s it going in here?”

“Fine,” Lauren would answer, wishing she could think of something clever to say to keep him there.

“Got those supplies for me?”

She would hand over whatever she’d been asked to procure that day—boxes of gauze, economy-sized bottles of hydrogen peroxide, pine floor cleaner, rubber tubing, new sheets and towels.
Once, she’d had to make a run to the home improvement center for long, flat pieces of lumber, nails, and ten-pound bags of mulch. “Might want to do some retaining walls and some plantings in the parks. Good project for the newbies,” Johannes had explained when she and the delivery guy had dropped it all in the freight elevator for Johannes and Rakim to take down to the basement.

Sometimes, Johannes would pop his head into the filing room and ask, “Need anything?”

Yes. I would like you to ravage me here on the floor and swear your undying love to me.
“No. Thanks. I’m good.”

“Keep up the good work,” he’d say, and Lauren would creep to the door to watch him walk away, his beautiful ass perfectly showcased by his Levi’s, as he took the stairs down to detox.

Four

F
RIDAYS WERE RECYCLING
day at home, and since no one else bothered to do it anymore, Lauren hauled the newspapers down to the recycling area behind their new rental with its view of traffic on Fourth Avenue. Their old apartment had windows that looked out onto Prospect Park, but that was before Carla’s medical bills poured in, and they were forced to move down Park Slope into a fourth-floor walk-up in a building with a super who liked to chatter whenever he saw Lauren. She dropped the tightly-bundled papers, the blue bags of spent plastic and metal in the bins and wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm. The super nodded to the day’s paper with its two-inch headline:
B
LOOD
G
ANGS OF
N
EW
Y
ORK
.

“Another body,” he said in his heavily French-inflected English. “That make ten so far. They find this one with her throat ripped out.”

Lauren didn’t want to get drawn in or she’d be late for work. “The police think it’s some gang thing.”

“In Haiti, the Tonton Macoute would come in the night like ghosts. If you spoke out, they would come. If you didn’t, sometimes they still come. Everyone lived in fear then. They would come and come until our spirits were silenced and we all felt dead.”

A loud blast came from Fourth Avenue, and two cabbies cursed each other until a full-scale fight broke out.

“Crazy people,” the super said, dropping the lid on the recycling bin.

When she slipped back into the apartment, the TV was on with the sound muted. Lauren saw garish images of kneeling prisoners in orange jumpsuits, black hoods covering their faces. Lauren’s mom sat in her chair by the window unit wearing her reading glasses as she sorted through a stack of mail that Lauren knew were bills. Her dad was at work. He would stay in the safe bubble of his office, with its office jokes, water cooler, kitchen coffee pot, and shared stories about the “putz” boss, until he was forced to come home.

“I’m off to work, Mom,” Lauren said.

A minute later, as she was closing the door, her mother answered. “Okay. Be careful.”

The day passed slowly. By six o’clock, Lauren had accomplished her to-do list and finished the last forty pages of her book, so she loitered in the hallway outside the sharing room where people did their 12-step work. The voices inside were hushed murmurs. A big guy named Brian stepped out. He had a shaved head that had been tattooed with intricate designs and smack in the middle was the Angelus House insignia. He headed to the men’s room without noticing Lauren. A snippet of confession drifted through the cracked door.

“… it was just the most incredible feeling, and I like feeling powerful now, not like before …”

“… I’m gettin’ my mark at the end of the week …”

“… that’s awesome, bro. Stick with the program. You won’t be sorry …”

“… let’s say the Angelus prayer. ‘We are the fallen angels. We are the shadows in the night. We are the Alpha and the Omega …’”

Lauren pressed closer, trying to hear more. A hand pushed the door closed.

“Sorry. You’re not supposed to listen in. Privacy and all that.” Brian was back. He towered over her, smiling.

“Oh, I-I’m sorry. I was just … sorry.”

“No problem.” He gave her a dazzling smile before slipping inside and shutting the door tightly behind him.

Lauren wandered the halls staring at the photos of those smiling teens, wondering what made them succeed. “Everybody likes a winner,” she whispered to the wall.

A long, chest-rattling moan of pain drifted up from the detox floor, and Lauren found herself taking the stairs down into the shadows, drawn to the sound. It was cooler as she descended and so dark she had to hold fast to the banister to be sure of her steps. She’d reached some sort of wide door, but it was locked. She put her ear to it, hearing nothing but the AC hum. And then came a piercing scream that prickled the hair on her neck and sent her stumbling back up the stairs toward the light. She sat at her desk with her headphones on, blasting her music until it was time to go.

Five

I
T WAS
T
HURSDAY
night, just before the end of her shift, when the guy got inside.

Somebody had accidentally left the back door open, and now he was standing in the common area screaming obscenities, with a wild-eyed look and a knife in one hand.

“What did you do to me!” he shouted. His teeth were a mottled brown; angry sores dotted his face.

“Okay, take it easy, bro.” Six-foot-two Brian tried to take him, but the guy smacked him hard, sending him reeling. The drugs made him fearless, and no one could get close.

“What did you do to me?” he screamed until the tendons of his neck bulged. “I can’t sleep. I see things the way they really are. I know. I know!”

“Calm down. It’s all right,” another staffer said, extending her hand.

He jumped back and jabbed at the air with his knife. “You’re out to get me!”

“They’re out to get me, too,” Lauren said suddenly. He noticed her for the first time.

“You know? You know what I’m talking about?”

She nodded and lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “We’ve got to get away. I’ve got a safe room. I’ll take you there.”

“Okay. Okay,” he said.

Heart thumping, she led him to the filing room.

“The thirteenth step,” he muttered. “I didn’t finish it. Now I hurt so bad—worse than ever, and they’re going to kill me.” He showed her his arm where he’d scratched it to ribbons. Under the blood, she could just make out the ink of a tattoo.

“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

A
FTER 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

L
AUREN’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.