Page 32 of Antihero

Too great to comprehend, too great to mourn, too great even to feel.

She summoned scripture on suffering, James 1: 2–4 and a favorite, Romans 8:18, but they didn’t speak to her. They lay flat, words on an imagined page. Eyes clenched, arms hugging her stomach, she reached for the small, still voice instead and it came as it always did.

It’s okay, daughter. Be here now. And I will be with you. And we shall bear this together.

On her feet, staggering to the door, scruffy with flakes of red paint, the inset pane security-barred and smudged to opaqueness. It scraped open. Wet stairs rose to the sidewalk—a basement apartment. Smoggy daylight above, late afternoon tilting to dusk. She staggered up from the underworld, the reek of sewage and rotten vegetables pressing in at her. Her tattered dress flapped, caught on the rusted handrail, tugged free. An immense moving truck blotted out the sky. Wind gusted in her face. The city screamed and rattled as it did.

Stumbling up the block, her dress slapping at the back of her thigh. Her iPhone, miraculously still in the patch pocket. She reached around to the dress front, lifted the device before her, but her face was so battered the phone didn’t recognize her. She couldn’t summon the six-digit code. Her legs buckled and she gripped a metal rail.

A construction worker looked up from a jackhammer with a gapped domino smile. “Rough night, honey?”

When he met her wounded human gaze, chagrin rippled his features, transforming him again to a son, a husband, a father. How thin the line was between the sacred and the profane.

“Want me to call someone?” He set down the jackhammer and moved toward her, rough hands swinging on burly arms.

Fear spiked through her. She backed away and hustled off. Burning intensified with each step, hydrogen peroxide against worn-raw flesh, a chemical intrusion atop the others. She tumbled into a Pret a Manger, the door jangling loudly. A long line, folks replenishing for the commute home, tapping at phones, earpieces screwed into their skulls, separate from her, one another, the world.

She bumped into someone. “Sorry, I’m—”

Voices of the displeased and inconvenienced crowded her ears.

“Quit fucking cutting.”

“Hello! Hello! Is there a manager? Can someone handle this please?”

“Jesus Christ, this migrant city’s gone Third World.”

A kind-faced young woman, maybe Puerto Rican, came around the counter, her skin makeup-commercial dewy. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you can’t be in here. There’s a drop-in center on One Twenty-Fifth—”

“I’m … not homeless…” Anca’s voice, so small and meek. “I’m just … Will you help me?”

She lost time for a moment. And then her biceps was clenched roughly, a burly dishwasher at her side, and she was moved outside, the doors jangling with her expulsion. She tripped, skinned a knee and the heel of her hand.

She sat on the curb, feet in the gutter. Pedestrians swept behind her, a never-ending current, buzzing with conversations real and virtual. Taxis honked and vendors hawked and overhead a plane made screaming progress across the gray sky.

Fallen, she thought. We are all so fallen.

“… someone please help…” Her plea, lost in the wash.

She still couldn’t remember her phone code, tapping in familiar patterns and numbers, her shaking hands getting it wrong, wrong, wrong.

Realizing she could use the lock screen shortcut, she brought up her camera, swooped it around. Her left eyelid looked like a cockroach, the flesh of her chin abraded. Scrawled across her cheek in permanent marker, a single word.

WHORE.

Self-pity bloomed in her chest. She felt deeply sorry for herself and what she’d endured, and with that came overpowering sympathy for her broken self.

A bus roared past. Pulling her feet back from the commercial tires, drawing her legs close, she set her shuddering chin atop her knees. “… someone … please help…”

There were people all around.

But no one to hear.

16The Brain

When Luke rose, he stood unsteadily, as if on new legs. Evan ground out his cigar and moved to his side, not offering his arm but not not offering it either. Luke reached over and gripped Evan’s biceps to steady himself, the clasp of his fingers almost frail. It might have been the first time they ever touched.

They started out, Joey drawing into place behind them.