The Blade Between Read online

I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know. All I knew was: this rage, this hate—it felt a hell of a lot better than the hurt of how I failed my father. Hate was a drug, and if there was one skill I’d spent years cultivating, it was the knack for self-medicating.

  “It’s good to be back,” I said. “I think.”

  “We don’t get to choose our cages.” She gave me one last squeeze before releasing me, and it felt so good (so maternal) I could feel my throat tighten. “For better or for worse, this is home.”

  And, yes. I knew. Even then, even there at the very start, I could see that they were a scapegoat, an oversimplification. That I hated the invaders, blamed them for my father’s decline—because if I didn’t have them, there’d be nowhere for this hate to go but back onto me. I’d have nothing to drive this harpoon blade into but my own barren, fucked-up heart. And that was unacceptable.

  * * *

  “I WANT THEM GONE,” I said, without planning to. Two hours had passed, drinking beer and eating cookies Attalah had baked. Talking shit about the new Hudson. Two hours of her anger seeping into me, a contact high that did for my rage what crystal did for lust—magnified, multiplied it; mutated it into something dark and disturbing and dangerous. “I want them all to run screaming from this town and never look back.”

  “Shhh,” Dom said. He took another cookie.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t just want them gone. I want them broken. I want them to hurt like we’ve been hurt. I want them evicted, displaced. I want them to lose everything.”

  Dom started to say something, but Attalah silenced him with one raised hand. “So do lots of us, Ronan. But there’s nothing we can do.”

  I continued, feeling weirdly like I was watching myself from outside my body. I’d finally found a replacement drug, and I was well into the shoulder of the high by now—the sweet spot where you can feel your whole body and brain blossom. “I want to harrow them down to their very souls. I want them to know that they are hated, and to live the rest of their lives with the shadow of that hatred blocking out the sun on even the brightest days.”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” she repeated. Her dreadlocks went halfway down her back. In the time we’d been sitting there I’d fallen maybe a little bit in love with her. Back in high school we’d been buddies, but I’d never had a conversation anywhere near this long with her. She was compelling, dynamic. Enchanting. Sitting there, under her spell, eating her cookies, I could feel the boundaries of the possible begin to shift inside me.

  “We’ve tried,” she said. “For years, we’ve been trying. I’ve talked to every lawyer and community organizer and halfway-human politician I could get on the phone or whose office I could talk my way into, and there’s nothing—”

  “Nothing legal,” I said. The words hung there. They got bigger the longer the silence went. I had never seen Dom so shocked, not even the first time I kissed him. “You’ve been doing, what? Petitions? Meetings with politicians? Church fundraisers? Nonviolent demonstrations? That won’t work here, will it?”

  Attalah’s eyes locked onto mine. I didn’t blink.

  Dom laughed, but it failed to break the tension. “You can’t be serious. What are you—”

  Attalah raised her hand again, without breaking eye contact. Dom fell silent. “What are you saying, Ronan?”

  “I’m saying that I want to destroy them,” I said, and it felt so sweet to say it, like a hit of a drug that peeled back my inhibitions and let me see parts of myself so ugly and beautiful I’d spent a lifetime hiding them from myself. Even sweeter was seeing that it was true. I did want to destroy them. I could do it, too. I could do anything.

  Fuck meth. This feeling was magnificent.

  “I will break every law of man and God to do it,” I said.

  “That’s a bold statement for someone who ran away from here the first chance he got and never looked back,” she said. “Where’s all this town spirit coming from?”

  “I failed my father,” I said. “I abandoned him. All the hate and pain I felt here—I connected it with him. I may be too late to correct the damage that I did, but not to atone for it. And for so long, I was so focused on how much I hated this place that I never saw how much I also loved it. I see it now, though, walking Warren Street, seeing what they’ve done to it. I think we can do this, Attalah. You and me.”

  “Me,” she said. “Why me?”

  “Because you know this place and all these people. Who has power and who has secrets. And people love you and respect you. They’ll listen to you. But mostly—because you’re as angry as I am. Aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Between the two of us we could probably come up with a pretty solid plan. Couldn’t we?”

  She nodded again.

  “Fuck,” Dom said, standing up. “Y’all are serious. You are, aren’t you? I can’t be here for this. Whatever the hell you’re doing, I don’t want to know about it.”

  “Then go,” Attalah said, scooting her chair closer to me. “And shut the door behind you.”

  Part II

  Chapter Eleven

  “Hey, A,” Zelda Outterson says, sliding into the well-worn seat across from Attalah’s desk. They went to high school together, but the past ten years weigh like twenty on her face.

  “How’ve you been, Zelda?”

  “You know. Getting through it.”

  “That’s all any of us can do.”

  Originally, Attalah had planned to use a client as her proxy. She’d ransacked her files, read deep into sordid stories. Assessing the parents she knows are terrible, versus the ones who ended up under the watchful eye of Child Protective Services only because of a messy divorce or a vengeful ex or a racist neighbor with CPS on speed dial. Attalah has access to so much information. For hundreds of parents, she knows precisely how they had failed their children. All their oversights and errors, whether due to ignorance or malice or addiction or sheer dumb blistering bad luck. And she knows the fault lines of hate and rancor between friends and neighbors—who snitched on who, who phoned in false reports. And she has a lot of leeway in the work she does. A huge amount of power over the outcomes of the cases under her purview.

  In the end, she realized there was no ethical way to use a client.

  And anyway the perfect person has been right under her nose all along.

  Zelda Outterson has worked at CPS for five years. One of five people Attalah supervises. She is quiet, and kind, and hardworking. Attalah remembers hearing that she’d had a bit of a bad reputation back in high school, but who hadn’t? All she needs to know about Zelda is, she loves her town and she’s struggling to make ends meet.

  “How’s your downstairs neighbor been treating you?”

  Zelda rolls her eyes at the perennially sore subject. “That fucking asshole. Every time I fucking watch TV or have one fucking friend over, he’s banging on the ceiling or knocking on my door, asking, Would I please please make less noise? And he’s some rich city fucker, paying three thousand dollars a month, and my rent is a thousand because I been there so long, so you know damn well which one of us the landlord sides with.”

  Shouting, from an adjacent office. Shannon Gallo, probably. One of the hottest of the many hot messes on Attalah’s caseload. Three hours late for her appointment, and pitching a fit because they wouldn’t let her in to see Attalah right away.

  “And your sister? Where’s she these days?”

  “Philmont, like pretty much everybody else who got pushed the fuck out of downstreet.”

  Attalah nods and bites back a smile. She can smell it on Zelda: the hate. The anger. So palpable that she feels comfortable scrapping the long and roundabout map she’d charted, for how to bring the conversation around to the Ask. “What if I told you there was something you could do about them? The people jacking up the rents?”

  “I’d say I’m not trying to go to jail for murder, and I’m not sure what the fuck you can do about it other than that.”

  “I’m working o
n something,” Attalah says, and leaves it there.

  Zelda looks out the window, onto Long Alley. Kids go by on bikes. Someone has spray-painted SATAN’S GOT YOUR NOSE on the door to Mitch Teator’s garage. Eventually she leans forward and says, “‘Something’ sounds a hell of a lot better than the nothing that we’ve been doing.”

  Chapter Twelve

  RONAN

  The Hudson River had risen.

  All the way up Warren Street, to the tippy-top of the hill where our house sat. The whole town was underwater, and little waves lapped at the steps to our front porch. My father sat beside me on the top step, bare feet in the water, looking out at the river-sea that extended to the horizon. We cradled coffee mugs; two cigarettes smoldered in an ashtray between us. We watched whales swim through twilight thunderstorm skies.

  He turned to me and opened his mouth to speak. No sounds came out. He kept trying, making heaving noises, gagging sounds. I scooted closer, leaned my head toward his.

  A hermit crab scuttled up out of his throat.

  My own screaming woke me up. Or anyway—brought me back to the here and now, the safe Hudson whose sloping main street wasn’t underwater. Whose river glimmered safely in the distance. Whose sky was bright with sun coming through gray morning clouds. I was still sitting on the front porch. My father was asleep inside.

  I looked in my lap: same mug, but full of water.

  I took a sip. Salt. But not sterile like table salt mixed with tap water. Brackish and murky and full of flecks of things, like someone had scooped it out of the sea a moment before. I poured it out into the grass, and a little trail of sand was left along the inside of the cup.

  I remembered now. This had been normal, once. This . . . bleed-through. All through my childhood, all through my adolescence. Dream leaking into reality; nightmare seizing hold of you in the middle of the street. Passing people in the high school hallway or the McDonald’s parking lot who maybe weren’t real, or maybe died a long time ago. As soon as I moved away I stopped thinking about it, the way you don’t reflect on a headache when it’s gone, but it occurred to me in that moment that I must have been craving unreality pretty hard. Because right around then was when I started indulging in illicit substances to excess.

  I started to text Dom, but what would I even say? We need to talk about whatever fucking supernatural miasma hangs over this city? I finally figured out why I became a drug addict?

  I put my phone away. There was too much work to do.

  * * *

  THREE TRIES WAS ALL IT TOOK to catch Treenie Lazzarra’s eye and have it seem like happenstance. Twice I walked up to her storefront window and pretended to peruse the FOR SALE AND RENT postings, but both times the space was empty and I had to walk down the block and wait five minutes before attempting it again. According to Attalah, the girl we’d gone to high school with ran the city’s busiest realty office. And according to her ads, which were up all over town, the New York Times had called her “one of the prime architects of Hudson’s renaissance.”

  The third time I went by, she was sitting at her desk facing out. I saw her see me, out of the corner of my eye, saw her jump up out of her seat waving frantically while I fronted like I couldn’t see her.

  “Ronan?” she called, opening the door, her voice every bit as too-loud as it had been in high school. “Ronan Szepessy?!?”

  “Treenie?!” I exclaimed, mock-shocked. “It is you! I saw your name on the sign and I just didn’t believe it. ‘Must be another Treenie Lazzarra,’ I told myself, but of course there could only be one.”

  We hugged. I held on extra tight for extra long. Like I was just that happy to see her.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, ushering me over the threshold into a spare wide space that held only images. Giant flat-screen televisions. Picture frames for slideshows shuffling through images of houses. Silvery black and white; bright, clean, muted color. Hudson’s history; Hudson’s new moment. Her desk was tiny, minimalist; a white shelf built into a white wall. The place smelled like money, like a bank.

  “Wow,” I said, meaning it. “This is something.”

  “Isn’t it though?” Her hair, wild and big and curly in high school, had been straightened into lifeless drapes down the side of her head. She looked older, in spite of the makeup. “Who would have thought shitty little Hudson would become such a happening place?”

  “Not by accident, I’m sure,” I said. “We owe all this to a small handful of hardworking people who made it happen. People like you.”

  “Oh, stop,” she said. “There’s just something about this place, you know? Something magical. Like Bruges. Have you ever been to Bruges?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It feels frozen in time. Old buildings, untouched by modern development. I wanted to share Hudson with the rest of the world, but so did plenty of others. Have you seen Dom since you’ve been back? You two were inseparable. Made the oddest pair”—she paused, thought about how that sounded, then added—“Because he was so much taller than you.”

  “Right,” I said, smiling, remembering how we must have looked when we left the potluck together: the tall, well-groomed cop beginning to fill out his uniform and the short skinny, scruffy haggard addict. We’d looked different back in high school, yes, but now we were worlds apart. “Yeah, I’ve seen him.”

  “I am such a fan of yours,” she said. “I’m sorry, I know I come across like a total stalker with how I use that GIF of Michael Jackson eating popcorn every time you’re tearing some new asshole a new . . . well, asshole.” I smiled. I hadn’t noticed. I had set my Twitter so I only ever saw notifications from blue-check accounts—famous people, fellow “influencers,” whatever the fuck that meant on any given day. Small-town real estate agents didn’t cut it, no matter what the New York Times said about them. “How long are you in town for?”

  She sat. Treenie had always been formidable, a bundle of energy and enthusiasm that was unstoppable once she set her mind to something. In high school the something had always been related to cheerleading or the yearbook or something else I had no emotional stake in. But now, mere feet away from her, I could feel the radioactive intensity of her determination. Idle, now—a down moment—but a deadly engine once cranked up all the way. What a foe she would be, when she knew what I was up to. Why I was there.

  “You here for your dad?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, and didn’t fight the sudden rush of sadness that bowed my head. Emotion was good. People understood emotion.

  “We’re all so sad for him,” she said. “And for you. He was an amazing man, your dad. Is an amazing man.”

  Except that we’re all salivating over the prospect of his death because he’s the only thing standing in the way of our plan to transform this city into a playground for the very rich.

  “Yeah,” I said, and decided not to ask about the Pequod Arms just then. I knew she was involved—Attalah had said so, and there were images of the expensive artist renderings mixed in with the slideshows on her wall—but better to make it seem like I was clueless for as long as possible. “Such a different world now, it seems like. A whole different crowd of people.”

  “Oh my God, Ronan, you’d fucking love it here now. There’s so much cool stuff happening! So many gay people, so many artists . . . you had a rough time of it in high school, but you wouldn’t recognize the place now.”

  “I hear that guy—what’s his name? The tech superstar?” And I pretended to wonder. “Jark Trowse? I hear he walks around town like it’s nothing. Like he’s not worth more than God.” So casual.

  Treenie laughed. “You have got to meet him. He is such a character. We’ve become quite close. Obsessed with this town. You know he’s going to be our next mayor, right?”

  Yes, I thought, pocketing the TROWSE FOR MAYOR button she handed me. I have got to meet him.

  Word was, he’d offered my father five million, six times the building’s assessed value. You couldn’t stand long, against money like
that. Sooner or later he’d take it off the table, offer it somewhere else. Bribe a mayor to engage eminent domain; launch a smear campaign. Hire a hit man.

  “Let’s set it up,” I said, refraining from licking my lips. “The three of us, let’s get drinks.”

  This, I could do. This was my skill set.

  I was a photographer, sure, but the photo itself was only the icing on the cake of my art, the tip of the iceberg of me. My vision, my concepts—they took work to make real. They took plotting, and scheming, and manipulation. Finding bizarre locations; sweet-talking owners into offering them up for free or cheap. Reaching out to hungry Instagram thirst-traps, pretty tatted unemployed gym boys who would work dirt cheap for someone with a six-figure follower count. Props; stylists; catering; costuming. To say nothing of the concepts themselves, the smutty or gory story lines that got me called a fucking sicko on the regular, like the one I did for PETA where the reality-star-child-turned-clothing-empire-maven of the moment stood naked and blood-drenched over a very realistic-looking CGI skinned human corpse with a sign in her hands that said: FUR: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT?

  “I’ll text him right now,” she said, and then her phone rang and she excused herself.

  There were no documents to root through, and the computer on her desk was showing a password-locked log-in screen. But this was just a scouting run. An attempt to make contact. Form a relationship. Work a source. Already I’d wrangled an invite to hang out with a billionaire mastermind. I’d work my way into the inner circle of whatever the fuck this was in no time.

  “Business calls,” she said after hanging up. “Sorry to cut this reunion short, though, Ronan.”

  “No, no, do what you have to do,” I said, and handed her a business card. “That’s my cell phone number. Let’s set something up with Jark.”

  “Will do,” she said, and hugged me again. This time it was she who held on tight.

  I followed her out onto the sidewalk, and she locked the door behind her.

  “You don’t want to turn off the screens?”