Mercy Street(60)

The heater came on with a huff.

“Where to?” said Timmy.

“Anywhere,” Claudia said.

They rolled east, in the vague direction of the expressway. Dorchester slipped past like a film they weren’t watching. The streets were strangely deserted. Claudia remembered that it was two in the morning.

They stopped at a red light just to watch it blink.

The car’s heater smelled like a lawn mower, it smelled of petroleum and burning dust, it smelled like it might cause mesothelioma. They skated along the empty streets, the blinking red lights like leftover Christmas. Timmy drove with great concentration, in some enraptured state. Claudia turned a little to watch him, his hands large and square and strangely young looking, the hands of an overgrown boy.

AS THEY PULLED INTO THE GARAGE, A LIGHT SNOW WAS FALLING. Deliberately, almost reverently, Timmy engaged the parking brake, closed the door and locked it. They stood a long moment looking at the car.

On the sidewalk in front of Timmy’s they said good night. Snow dusted their shoulders, their hair and eyelashes. The snow was an afterthought, light and powdery, a snow of no consequence. It would be gone in the morning, leaving no trace.

Timmy said, “What about your phone?”

Claudia followed him inside. The radiators were hissing. Her head was swimming from the joint, the sheer exhilaration of riding. The overheated air burned her cheeks.

Her phone wasn’t on the couch where she’d left it. Her phone was nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find it. Happens all the time. Jesus Christ, it’s like a sauna in here.” Timmy peeled off his wool sweater and tossed it onto a chair.

He dropped to his knees and dug around in the recesses of the couch. Claudia knelt beside him to help.

“Hang on, I feel something.” He reached in elbow-deep, like a fearless midwife, and pulled out Claudia’s iPhone, still in its orange plastic case.

The relief was intoxicating. To a veteran phone-loser like Claudia, the feeling was familiar. The upside of losing things was the joy of finding them eventually—which may have been (she reflected) the entire reason she lost them in the first place. In her fractured state she saw a perverse logic to this, like wearing uncomfortable shoes for the sheer pleasure of taking them off.

They got to their feet. She noticed, then, a dime-sized spot on the back of Timmy’s T-shirt—one in a larger constellation of rust-colored stains, as though someone had shaken a wet paintbrush in his direction.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

Timmy turned his head to look. “Eh, that’s nothing. The new ones always bleed a little.” Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he peeled off his shirt.

“Whoa,” said Claudia. “That’s a lot of ink.”

What had been done to his back was extraordinary. You couldn’t look at it quickly. There was simply too much to take in: a giant cross, a complicated tapestry of roses and chain mail, an actual wolf howling at the moon. The style was psychedelic, like album cover art from the sixties, Santana or Steppenwolf or King Crimson. In that moment it seemed perfectly reasonable to stand in Timmy’s living room, studying his large naked back—his secret hieroglyphics, an obscure language of his own invention, evidence of some deeply strange inner life.

She would wonder, later, how long they stood there. Time had gotten slippery, expanding and contracting like an accordion.

His skin was warm as bathwater.

“Your hands are freezing,” he said, which was how she knew she’d touched him. Her intentions were scientific. She expected the red roses to feel warmer than the silvery moon, but the temperature was exactly the same.

The bedroom was very cold, as though a window had been left open. It’s possible he carried her there. A streetlamp cast shadows through the paisley curtains. In the half-light his body seemed decorated for battle, streaked with paint or clay.

Sometime later she woke in the dark, her throat aching. She crept into the living room to gather her clothes, dressed silently, and went out into the cold.





13


When Timmy woke she was already gone, the room filled with sunlight. The light was disorienting. He felt that he’d been asleep for days, weeks possibly. He hadn’t slept so deeply in years.

Naked, he wandered into the living room, which looked normal—the usual disaster, ashtrays overflowing. The living room looked exactly the way it always looked, except that one couch cushion was slightly askew. There was no other suggestion that anything extraordinary had happened. He felt a stupid affection for the misplaced cushion. If not for the misplaced cushion, he’d have thought he’d made the whole thing up.

He would have liked to wake up with her, to see her in daylight. He imagined them drinking coffee, eating breakfast, doing the ordinary things people did. He tried to see the apartment through her eyes: the chin-up bar he’d hung in the doorway, the unused weight bench. The plastic milk crates overflowing with clutter: a pair of busted headphones, power cords and remote controls to electronics he no longer owned.

He had never seen her in daylight.

The apartment wasn’t set up for visitors. He had a coffee maker somewhere, an old Mr. Coffee that had once belonged to his parents. His refrigerator contained batteries, a case of beer, and a crusted assortment of aging condiments.

The apartment wasn’t set up for anything but what it was actually used for: the smoking and selling of weed.