Page 5 of Graceless

His arm under that good wool. Grabbing something you were never supposed to touch.

I thought about it the whole way to Sal's. I thought about it on the train home, the angel delivered, the check coming, the D swaying through Brooklyn in the dark.

I thought about his face in the bad light of the vestibule while Donnie said something I didn't hear and the saints watched from the walls I couldn't afford to paint.

I went to bed in my grandmother's basement apartment and I lay there in the dark with his hand closing and opening at his side, once, like he was deciding something, and I did not know what he'd decided but I knew — the way you know a thing in your body before your mind gets there — that it had something to do with me.

The arm where he'd held me still tingled. It tingled for a long time.

I didn't sleep.

CHAPTER 2

RAQ

Not yet.

Two words. I had said perhaps four hundred words aloud in the last decade, and I had chosen every one of them the way you choose footing on ice, and then a woman with paint on her hands had held my sleeve on Fifty-First Street and I had handed her two words I had no authority to give.

Not yet implies yet. Yet implies a future with her in it. A future with her in it implied that somewhere in the ruin I use for a mind, a decision had been made — and I had not been present for it. I have been present for every decision I have made in ten thousand years. Presence is what I am instead of alive.

So, I went back over it, the way she'd gone back over my sleeve. Not the bus. The other thing.

I was three blocks south when it hit me. I want to be precise, because precision is the only prayer I have left: three blocks south, on an errand I'll come to, and something went through me that had not gone through me since before this city, before most cities. A reaching. Wordless. Blind. Thrown out into the dark like a hand off a cliff face, no name on it, no address, nothing so organized as hope.

Nobody asks us. Understand that. Orders come down. Bargains come up. Prayer goes past us entirely, addressed to the management, and the management does not forward it. A fallen thing hears commands, and terms, and — on rare, unpleasant occasions — its own name in the mouth of something that wants to collect. It does not get asked. Asking is what you do to a thing that might choose.

She asked. Some woman on a Midtown corner threw herself open to the empty air in front of eleven tons of bus, and the empty air was me, and I was moving before I knew I had weight. Whatever Heaven forgot to take when it took everything else answered yes — before I could review the question.

The facts, then. I collect facts the way she collects broken saints. It is the only hobby they left me.

Fact: paint under her nails, ochre and a white, worked in deep. The hands of someone whose work does not come off.

Fact: she pointed at that intersection like a prosecutor entering it into evidence. Shaking. Furious. Functioning. I have watched soldiers with better training do worse with less.

Fact: her last operating limb, and she spent it holding on to the most dangerous thing on that street, demanding an explanation.

And the sound — before all of that, the small animal sound she made against the granite, the one she bit off short, jaw tight, like she'd rather have died than let me hear it. I have heard the last sound of a great many peoples. I had never once carried one home. I carried that one up four flights, and it sat with me all evening in a room with nothing in it, playing on a loop, and I made no move to stop it.

The errand still wanted finishing. Hell's hierarchy does not note your absence because it never noted your presence; things end up where they end up, and something at the bottom signs for it.

A collection, this time. Sunset Park, under the expressway, a warehouse that handled fish at the front and worse at the loading dock. The debtor was wearing a dockworker — big man, gone soft at the eyes the way they go when the tenant has been in too long — and he owed the broker I answer to a marker he had decided not to honor.

He saw the sleeves, the coat, the famous ruin come to run an errand, and he decided something else, too. They always do. The wing joke, or the courier joke. He got as far as "they clipped you and now they send you for⁠—"

I am going to tell this part briefly, because it was brief. I took his wrist and I folded the thing inside him back against its own grain until it came loose of the body, and I held it there, in the cold air over the fish pallets, while it screamed on a frequency the dockworkers upstairs would take home in their teeth without knowing why. Then I put it out. Not with anger. Anger is a young man's instrument, and it dulls. What I used was ten thousand years of practice at watching things end — turned, for four seconds, from watching to ending.

The dock went very quiet. Along the back wall, what passed for muscle in that room had stopped passing for anything; one of them was pressed into the racking with its eyes down, and I heard my name move through them — the whole name, the old one, the one from the book they buried — in the tone people reserve for weather sirens.

The man sat down on the concrete, alone in his body for the first time in a year and wept. I took the marker from his coat pocket. I left him the weeping.

At the cage upstairs the broker counted the marker twice, because pretending not to be afraid of me is the local currency, and slid across my fee, which is nothing, formalized. "The Watcher," he said, to the room, not to me. "They had you carrying now."

"It's carried," I said, and left.

That is my standing, so you have it: they send a name out of scripture to collect fish-market debts and pay it in the pleasure of being feared by things not worth frightening. It had not bothered me in centuries. Bother requires a self to insult, and I had economized that away.

It bothered me tonight. All of it bothered me tonight — the dock, the fee, the tenant's screaming, my four seconds of ending — because somewhere across the river was a woman who had asked the empty air for help, and the empty air had spent the evening doing this with its hands.