wings and scaly stick legs. The tiny strewn organs glistened bright red, the pocks of shit a chalky white.
Jared was sitting in the middle of the mess, before the open window, through which a cold autumn breeze was blowing, scattering feathers like chaff.
“Look what I can do,” Jared said, as he watched Voodoo burrow his fangs deeper into the cavity of a shredded abdomen. “Nothing. I can do nothing.”
One reason I’ve always enjoyed talking with Danielle at the video store is her accent. She originally came from Alabama, and there’s something about a Southern accent that can infuse sorrow with enough whimsy to make it tolerable. She once told me that lesbians didn’t get beaten up in her town, the same as boys were, because they presented too keen a challenge to most red-blooded hetero guys, who knew they had the proper cure between their legs.
“So I started carrying this big old dildo in my purse, about two sizes past horse,” she’d told me. “And whenever one of these guys’d tell me I didn’t know what I was missing, I’d pull out Mr. Ed and tell the guy if he could top this, he was on.”
She was one of the few I’d told the truth about Serge, and so filling her in on Jared made sense to me, and then it made more sense to keep going and tell her that it was a temptation to take to the streets again. Hunt down that peculiar man in his top hat and walking stick, and let him work his anesthetizing magic on me, too. And then it would no longer matter that the flesh I loved and fit best with was now emptied of the stuff that had first made it so appealing. Such terrible temptation.
“I never told you about when I came out to my family, did I?” Danielle asked.
I told her I didn’t think so.
“When he found out about me, my daddy called me an accident of birth,” she said. “Scarcely said a word to me for the next two years. Didn’t even want to look at me, and us in the same room, why, you’d think we were strangers. And I suspect I suddenly was, to him. An accident of birth. Got so I played it for a joke, and I’d stand all quiet-like around a corner, lying in wait for him to come face to face with me, so I could see him squirm, just like a wiggle worm on a hot sidewalk.”
I wondered which was worse: someone who abandons you in the flesh, or one who does it while remaining under the same roof.
“But I see things a little different now,” Danielle admitted. “We’re all accidents of birth, every one of us. Born in the wrong place, or at the wrong time. In the wrong body, or to the wrong set of people. No matter who you are, there’ll be something not right. So that all just becomes part of the game, then — there’s no malice in it. And the rest of the game? It’s putting those things as right as you can.”
She reached down to hold my hand. Lifted it up, kissed it, put it back where she’d found it.
“But you don’t go throwing away what’s not broken,” she said, “not unless you got something better to take its place. Nature does abhor a vacuum, you know.”
I told her I’d try to remember that.
Danielle liked the fit of her own body just fine, so there’d been no accidents there.
But sometimes I still wished she was a guy.
I don’t see Jared anymore.
He left a couple of days after the thing with the pigeons. If it hurt to see him go, it was only because it was a physical echo of what had already happened. Jared was gone before he ever walked out the door, maybe even before he’d heard of the strange man who traversed the worst streets and called to those in pain, offering them an easy way out. Maybe he was gone long before any of it, part of him beaten to death as surely as Serge had been.
So I don’t see Jared anymore.
A few nights after he left, I went to sleep wondering what Hieronymus Beadle did with the souls he collected, and in a dream I saw him strolling ponderously away from the city, bloated almost to the point of bursting with his cargo. He walked and sweated blood and walked and mopped his brow and walked until the city lay far behind. At a copse of trees, he stopped, stripped the clothes from his swollen body, and strained and shuddered. They poured from within him like a sickness, those souls, something between liquid and vapor, seeking safety in the ground below; some anchor to cling to. Then, much slimmer, his reservoirs depleted, he put his clothes back on and strolled onward, with purpose, while from the ground on which he’d voided grew rose bushes. The petals were so perfect they nearly resembled faces, and seemed to scream when another man came along, with white hair and a leathery patrician face, and snipped each bud from its stem. He’d toss each one over his shoulder, or drop them to the ground, and when he was done and the bushes were bare, he smiled while a herd of coarse-bristled, tusked pigs burst from deeper within the trees. They squealed and rooted and stamped and slashed, until every last blossom had been devoured, and then, grunting, they lumbered back into the shadows while the white-haired autocrat patted their crusty dark hides.
I was shaking when I woke up, as though I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to. It was a long time before I could get back to sleep, or even wanted to, afraid I might see Jared on hands and knees, fueled by regret and emptiness, rooting in the piles of pigshit, saying, “I know it’s here. I know it’s here someplace.”
But I don’t see Jared anymore.
He’s around, though. I’ve seen the writing on the wall.
It was weeks before I made the connection, entertaining the notion that the painted silhouettes which had begun appearing on building walls had come from Jared’s hand. No two were the same, black silhouettes as crisp as shadows thrown by someone who could have been standing right next to you, but wasn’t. Each one looked tensed, as if startled by the coming of something that cast no shadow of its own. There was one on our building, one on Terry’s. One inside the alley where Serge had been murdered. Others, and I wondered if they’d been chosen at random, or if they too had some special significance.
Now and then I’d hear people talk about them, wherever people lingered, and the silhouettes were spoken of with great curiosity. Where they’d come from, what they meant. Everyone loves a mystery.
But no one else had been privy to the things that Jared found most significant when he looked at the world. No one else had sat with him one evening while he paged through a book, horrified and fascinated by photos shot fifty years earlier in the wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the silhouettes of human beings that had been seared onto walls at the instant of the bomb blasts.
What if those were their souls, he’d wondered, souls yearning in that instant of sublime and blinding violence for some record of their passing, even as their bodies were vaporized.
It gave us something to think about.
And now, every day, I look at the silhouette he painted on the side of our building, hoping I’ll find it gone. Hoping against all rationality that in the night it will have peeled itself free of the bricks, and gone seeking the flesh where it so rightfully belongs.
But even if I get my wish, what a long search it has ahead.
The city grows at night, and I don’t see Jared anymore.
Brian Hodge has published six novels,
