Precious Blood (22 page)

She drained her glass, then set it on the counter. “Okay, you go do your thing. I’m going to make myself beautiful.”

Jenner got out the yellow pages, opened it to the Pharmacy listings. It would likely be a downtown pharmacy, close to the school. Initials APPDRx.

He found it as soon as he ran his eye down the roster.

Astor Place Pharmacy and Drug Rx. He knew it well, Eighth Street just west of Broadway. He called the number and got a machine; the store was closed, and would open at 8:00 a.m.

Fair enough. It would wait until the morning. He kicked himself for not recognizing it the moment they found the vial in Romen—Rad could have had someone get to the pharmacy before it closed for the night.

When the man was a boy, almost every night, he came home from school in clothes that were bloodied and torn, his lip split or his eye blackened. And every night, Father Martin would set him right back up for another beating, telling him he had to try harder to get along. Father Martin’s exhortations took into account neither the boy’s uniquely flawed personality nor the rapacious cruelty of childhood. His altered physical condition marked him for a life on the outside: the testosterone replacement therapy after the accident seemed more a disease than a treatment, boosting his muscle mass,
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making his body hard and unusually strong, but cursing him with acne so disfiguring that at school he was universally known as the Zombie Prick.

The hormones gradually made him angry and aggressive; unable to deliver snide comebacks to the ceaseless taunts, he resorted to his fists. After nearly beating another student to death, the boy was admitted to the Central Pennsylvania Inpatient Mental Health Center. Father Martin visited him in his little cell; the boy’s ankles and wrists were strapped to the bed with leather restraints. The priest made it clear that if he told the doctors any secrets, Martin would punish Oliver, the smallest of the children who lived with him at the rectory, the little kid who told people the boy was his brother.

He didn’t tell the secrets.

At the center, his teachers encouraged his flair for math.

He clung to the neat, reliable world of numbers and flow charts and symbolic logic the way a recovering alcoholic tethers himself to a higher power as he starts a life of sobri-ety. He was safe there. He never felt wronged by numbers—

how could he? The numbers were what they were, and only what they were, and when they didn’t give him the answer he wanted, it was because he had mistreated them.

Statistics, calculus, linear algebra—everything came to him readily in the unimposing sterility of the special school.

Outside of the classroom, he developed a passion for cryp-tography, spending hours reading about the history of codes.

From codes he moved on to the study of alphabets, and by the time he was sixteen, he was doing phonetic translations into Egyptian hieroglyphics or Japanese
romaji
. At eighteen, he created his own written language, a curious script made of bold uprights and circles divided by radial lines set at different angles, like tentatively sliced pies.

He was allowed to enroll at Joseph Baxter Community College in Berwick. For him, it was like a halfway house before moving on to Deene: a new start where no one knew
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about his past. During his time in the hospital, he had been treated by a kind dermatologist from Beirut, who’d put him on a regimen of antibiotics, gentle scrubs, and sunlight.

When he was released, his complexion, though pocked, was free of the pustules of his youth. To the other students, he was just another farm boy trying to advance himself.

Still, he never mingled. Each night, he’d ride his bike back to the rectory and sit at the drafting table he’d made from an old door, drawing flow diagrams and crafting alphabets.

And while everyone was impressed by his invented alphabet, they’d have felt quite differently had they been able to read it: the upright slashes and hacked circles drawn with soft charcoal pencil hid luxuriantly detailed reveries of torture and murder, the sort of things he’d dreamed about—and, on occasion, enacted—since the third grade.

thursday,

december 12

Ana told Jenner she’d take just a minute to put herself together, but it was almost two hours before she felt ready to go out. All the time—changing, doing her makeup, changing again—she’d been on the phone, talking excitedly with friends, arranging to meet up at the club. He knew it would be well after midnight before they finally left the loft.

She was getting better, feeling braver about things like going out. Earlier in the evening she’d been chatty and wired, more alive than at any time since her arrival in his world.

He’d thought of himself as looking after her, but now he accepted that it had been a two-way street, that she’d also been fixing him. Her problems—her
real
problems—had overwhelmed his, nudging him out of his little cell and pushing him back into the world, armed with a purpose.

Now she was feeling free, and happy, and it was mostly because of him. She was calling up her own friends again, making plans, getting ready to move on, ready to leave him behind.

From the bathroom, he heard her laugh. He imagined her stretched languidly in the vast tub, her lithe body hidden under a heavy blanket of bubbles, holding the phone with her right hand while she shaved her legs with his razor.

Her laugh, which he’d always liked, now sounded sharp and unreasonable. He felt he barely knew her, that it had all been some kind of front. That she’d been playing the victim to please him, to finesse a place to stay, someone to care about her.

The bathroom door opened in a billow of settling steam, and she breezed past him wrapped in a thick white bath sheet, yakking on her cell, barely noticing him.

Later, impatient with his frustration, she sent him down to grab a taxi, promising to follow in a second. He waited
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in the back of the chilly cab; when she hadn’t appeared after fifteen minutes, he paid the driver and went back up to his loft, furious.

She was sprawled on the floor by the bed, surrounded by her clothes, crying.

He knelt beside her. “What happened? What’s the matter?”

She sobbed, “Joey brought me my suitcase, but half of the clothes are Andie’s . . .”

He didn’t get it. “Can’t you wear some of the clothes you have?”

“No! No. It’s not that . . . We always shared clothes—that’s why they were in my bag.” She sat up, wiping her eyes with her shirtsleeve. “It’s just that I can’t believe she’s never going to wear that ugly Beck T-shirt ever again.”

He put an arm around her and stroked her hair. “I’m sorry, Ana.”

She stood quickly, gathering herself. “No, I’m sorry for making a scene.” She took his hand as he stood. “I won’t be long now, I just have to fix my face.”

“I like your face the way it is. But I’ll wait here for you.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “I won’t be long.” She headed for the bathroom, then turned. “I think I’m a little drunk.”

“No hurry, Ana. Take your time.”

She slid in next to him, and told the driver to take Houston all the way to Avenue D, take the left on D, then drop them on the corner of Eighth.

He slipped his arm around her shoulders and held on to her as she chattered in his ear, his pleasure in the moment dreamlike. He let the words melt together, and savored the pressure of her shoulder against his chest, the sweet, slightly childish smell of her perfume, a smell of mango and lime and incense.

She kissed his neck.

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At least for now, she was with him. The world outside the taxi seemed a thousand miles away, all those people not even real.

It was nearing 1 a.m., but the streets and sidewalks were jammed. People spilled out of bars and restaurants, forming into little knots to make where-next plans. They caught a red light at Ludlow, and he watched the trickle of the young and hip into and out of Bereket Turkish Kebab House, a late-night downtown staple.

To his right was the true Lower East Side, with its old tenements and immigrants and wholesale fabrics, to his left, the East Village, their destination. Specifically, the far East Village, Alphabet City, Avenues A to D, gentrification to poverty, renovated town houses to run-down high-rise projects.

He realized then that Ana had chosen the route to avoid her apartment. When he reached to stroke her hair, she turned and smiled brightly, brushing his hand away.

“Almost there!”

He nodded.

“C’mon, Jenner. It’ll be fun! You’ll see.” She rubbed his shoulder, then leaned into the bulletproof Lucite taxi partition. “Avenue
D
, driver! Take the left—c’mon, you can make the light!”

They got out in front of a bodega on the corner of Eighth.

Despite the hour and the cold, there were two old men in front of the store sipping from bottles in brown paper bags, watching the flow of kids out clubbing.

Industrial Crisis was a retrofitted supermarket with frosted glass windows painted with a 1950s realist graphic, a large black wrench that stretched across the entire glass front. The club was in the middle of the block; he wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the glowing column of white light over the entrance. In front of the door, a small blond girl perched on a high stool next to a muscular black man in a bulky black coat, behind them a couple of smokers exiled
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into the cold. Ana grabbed his arm and dragged him faster.

As they got closer, he heard the muffled, repetitive thud of a kick-drum beat.

“Oh, my God!
Katie!
” Ana threw her arms around the girl, pulling her off her stool.

“Oh, my God! Ana!” There were kisses and a long hug, and under the factory light fixture, Jenner saw they were both crying. Ana closed her eyes and rocked her friend from side to side as she held her tight.

Smiling, the black guy said, “Hey, Ana, welcome back.”

His accent was English, South London maybe.

Ana turned and hugged him with one arm, murmuring, “
Winston
!” Then, seeing Katie’s smeared mascara, she pulled away, opened her purse, and began to wipe her friend’s face.

“Awww, honey. I’ve spoiled your makeup.” Katie began to wipe Ana’s face, too, the two now laughing. Katie glanced over at Jenner, looking him up and down. “You must be Jenner.”

He nodded. The girl came over, stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek, then hugged him.

“Thanks for looking after Ana. She’s told us all about you.”

He flushed as he shook hands with Winston, then Katie took his arm.

“Let’s go inside.”

Couples and small groups packed the dimly lit lounge just inside the door; beyond the lounge an archway led to the dance floor.

When Ana went to say hi to the bartenders, Katie grabbed Jenner’s arm and held him back.

“Jenner, there’s something I think you should know.

There’s a friend of Ana’s here tonight who isn’t good for her.

They have a kind of fucked-up history, and she hasn’t seen him for a while, and I think it would be better if she didn’t hang out with him right now.”

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“What does he look like?”

“Tall guy, hair cropped short, black eyelets in both his ears, a black labret.”

“A labret—a pierced lip, you mean?”

“Yeah, just below the lip. The eyelets are those washer things people use to stretch big holes in their earlobes. You’ll recognize him.”

“Okay. I don’t know how much I can say or do about who she speaks with.”

“She likes you a lot. Respects you. I mean, look, it’s a pretty small club, they’re going to see each other, and it’ll be weird. Just don’t let her stay talking with Perry for long. Get her to dance with you or something.”

Ana came back from the bar, happy. “Timmy’s not spinning tonight?”

“Nope. Some guy from Philly, Little Daddy Cane. He’s been playing strictly old-school breakbeat—it’s been like 1998 in there all night.”

She watched Ana take Jenner’s hand by the wrist, then said,

“You guys go for it. I’ve got to get back to the door before someone undesirable sneaks past Winston. We’ll catch up.”

Ana blew her a kiss, then started leading Jenner toward the archway. Behind her back, Katie nodded at Jenner and mouthed, “Thank you.”

It was hot and dark inside; it took Jenner a few moments to orient himself. The dance floor was packed and the music was roaring, impossibly fast beats skittering through the air, wind-up monkey drumming, buzzing snare rolls, and whomping bass that sounded like a hovercraft colliding with a Mack truck.

The banquettes against the walls were piled with coats and bags and the occasional person too intoxicated to dance.

At the far end there were three table booths, a little elevated above the dance floor, with a DJ podium and bar along the wall to Jenner’s right.

Ana, still tugging on his wrist, led Jenner through the
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club, scanning the room for friends.

Jenner spotted Perry immediately. He was holding court in the largest booth, wedged snugly between two pretty blondes and a pale redhead. He was sallow and wiry, with flushed cheeks and expensively unkempt lank black hair, his gaze casual and amused. It was obvious to Jenner that Ana and Perry had been lovers—how could they not have been?

They seemed almost crafted for one another. He was maybe twenty-five—pretty much perfect for her.

Jenner watched as a boy in a black hoodie with red hook across the back approached the table and tried to engage Perry in conversation; Perry just kept watching the crowd, as if looking for someone more interesting, eventually dismissing the kid with a glance and a flick of his wrist.

Jenner saw him catch sight of Ana, then Ana saw Perry, and looked away a little too quickly. When she looked back, their eyes met, and this time she didn’t look away.