Читать книгу Yield - Lee Houck - Страница 13

Sometimes I can tell what sort of files are going to find their way into my hands, and into my life, before I’m even in the room with them. First I get a feeling, an ominous weight to the morning, perhaps. A drizzle of rain which turns to fog and back to rain again all before I get out of bed. Weather as foreshadowing. And then my MetroCard won’t read properly, and I swipe it ten times before the technology does what it is supposed to do, and I finally get on the train. Sometimes I say a quiet prayer—to nobody really, I don’t actually believe in that stuff—that the day will behave as planned and whatever turbulence arises won’t shake me right out of the sky.

For example, on my way to the basement a janitor accidentally dropped a tray full of silverware on the floor in front of me, forks skewing in every direction, the sound ringing down the corridors, halting movement in every direction. People in the waiting room covered their ears.

I knew right then that something in the files today would be a little too familiar. And now I’ve found it. It’s a gay bashing from a few months ago. I find more and more of them every day—maybe twenty in the last year alone, spreading like a rash. In this case, a fag walking home from the gym decided to take a shortcut through the park and—zap—they got him with a stun gun. For approximately twelve minutes, they got him. So says the police report, which is strangely included, along with other documents and written statements—some of the forms I’ve never come across before. Signatures everywhere.

He was treated for bruises and swelling in his face where they punched him, two broken fingers (left third and fourth), marks on his throat where they strangled him. One of the doctors suspects it was a telephone cord, or something similar. “Shoelace?” says one of the papers. Plus a mysteriously dislocated kneecap. And the place where the stun gun shot him through with electricity was burned and bleeding.

I’m thinking about that spot—the two tiny holes in his side, halfway up his rib cage, the only place where they managed to enter his body. I’m thinking about how that feels, to have your flesh opened up like that, your aura burst like a soap bubble. But he survived.

One of the most difficult parts of my job is not knowing the rest of the story. I process the incidents without having all the details—I only know the beginning and end of the story. I don’t know if a lover came to take him home, if family members rushed to the bedside. If they caught the jerks. There is an old custom of hiring mourners at a funeral, to be sure that the deceased are properly lamented. And that’s sometimes what I feel like: a grief vessel.

I swallow the pain, shove the folder into the rows with all the others, and walk back to the in-box, where I pick up ten or twelve more. And just like that, the day continues.

First thunder. Then the hot metal crack of lightning in the distance. The vein-crackled sky opens, flashing blue-yellow light across Louis’s face. He brushes the hair out of his eyes and stares up into the wind. His cigarette glows brighter as he inhales, and for the haze I can hardly see anything else.

The drops start to fall one at a time on my head; the air turns from moist to wet. The puddles that appear beneath us reflect Louis’s yellow raincoat, my red vinyl. The arms of the storm reach from one end of the city to the other. The night brightens as light from the sky, from the neon, from the blinking walk / don’t walk refracts and throws itself back up at us.

At the opposite end of the street several men are walking toward us in a pack. The smaller ones in front; the heavy strong ones in the middle; the fastest, most agile in the back. It occurs to me that what has been happening all over New York City in the past six, ten, twelve months is about to happen to us. I want to scream out. I want to punch my fists into the sidewalk.

I want to be responsible for my own bruises.

I feel a weight in my stomach and, seeing the world through a fish-eye focus, I move closer to Louis.

Drag queens can tell you what kind of lipstick covers best. They know which earrings hide scars. I thought at the time—you know, that shirt doesn’t look half bad with bloodstains. If only they would run down a little more to the left.

I hear the ribs cracking, caving in. Blood tastes different when it comes up from your guts and not from a pricked finger—when it comes in buckets from the inside out. There’s no sweet tang. It’s bitter and thick, like motor oil.

They hold his head down in a puddle and he gasps for air. Two of them are watching me, threatening to make me next. So I just stand there, turning away, facing the brick wall like they tell me to, waiting for it to end.

Thirty, forty seconds it must have been. It happens so fast that it hardly registers in my mind as a single moment. It’s a string of slow-motion movement, one thing morphing into another. Everything blurs.

A siren wails and the assholes run off.

Then we’re in the hospital and he’s hunched over my lap. He pukes onto the floor and I clean it up. The nurses see how much blood he throws up, but we still have to wait. We have to wait because some Greenwich Village landowner cut his finger on a vegetable peeler and requires six stitches. They give Louis something to stop, or at least calm, the vomiting. They bring a needle full of pinkish liquid and it goes down clean into his arm. I hold the cotton ball onto the drop of blood.

Later they wrap Louis’s body in wide flesh-colored bandages. Broken ribs. Nothing has punctured his lungs and therefore it is not “too serious.” We should simply go home and keep him in bed for several days. He should have lots of liquids. He should not walk or move around much. Yet, he should try to take deep breaths to stretch the muscles in his torso, which in turn will help strengthen his body. The doctors give us a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of ibuprofen. In case either upset his stomach.

Another patient, a sickly guy with white hair and blue tinted glasses, covered his mouth with his hand. “Why on earth would anyone do something like this?” he said.

But I know why they did it. They told us over and over again. They told us every time they shoved his body onto the concrete. They told us each time he vomited. They told us exactly what we had done to deserve this.

At home, he falls asleep. For a few minutes I sit watching him, the sheets lifting up and down with his breathing.

I turn on the shower. The steam billows around the poster tacked up on the ceiling—a Calvin Klein ad from a Manhattan bus stop. It’s Louis in some briefs and a white pocket T. Farmer stole it from somewhere in the South Bronx. When I asked him how he got it out from behind the glass, he said, “I had some tools in my bag.”

I step onto the tile, facing away from the spray. Slowly, I step back, centimeters at a time, until I feel the water rise up my neck and loosen the matted hair on my head. When I’m back far enough so that the water begins to fall over my eyes and across my lips I feel myself getting heavier. The water runs faster and faster, taking away parts of me. I start to slide down the tile and I feel my body weighing hundreds of pounds, thousands of tons, perched in a short, tight stack on my shaking heels. My hand clutches my genitals and the water takes more and more of me away, peeling back the layers, melting the muscle. Dissolving the bone.

I feel buoyant and numb.