Liturgical Music For Nihilists

Jamey had been missing for nearly a week before anyone much realized, then another few days after that before we learned why. It wasn’t the first time, Jamey off again on another exorcism of the latest future he saw ahead of himself, rather than the one he wanted. Don’t feel like assistant managing a Kinko’s for the next forty years? A few days of going AWOL will bury that particular nightmare.

When the phone rang I stirred first, then Rachel turned over in bed, splaying her warm soft hand over the knobs of my spine.

“Don’t answer it,” she said, and batted hair from her eyes as if hacking at ferns in a jungle. “It’s four in the morning…”

Briefly I considered it might be someone calling about a job and this was their way of deciding who was truly hungry for it, but Rachel thought it more likely a gauge of how much shit you’d swallow, and about had me talked into ignoring it, but the caller was persistent, and the answering machine was still pulped from my throwing it across the room last Easter after listening to some condescending message my mother had left, so I answered, and it was no one hiring, just Andre.

It’s hard to take Andre seriously when he cries because it gives him the hiccups, and he could be pouring his heart out to you for all you know, but you just can’t get past that inverted yelp every time his diaphragm convulses, so instead of empathizing you mostly end up trying not to laugh. When we were in gradeschool other kids, out of boredom, used to pummel on him for no other reason than to get him started.

The phone cold against my ear, I listened to Andre cry, and hiccup, then listened to him tell me about Jamey and the way he’d found him. I’d already said we’d be there as soon as we could before realizing there was nothing we could do, so I hung up and let my ambulatory daze move me over to the window, where I pushed the curtains aside and stood not feeling the chill radiating from the glass and the neighboring buildings.

“Angus?” From behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on.

“Jamey’s dead,” I told her.

Rachel sat in bed, blinking. “What, again?”

“No, I … I think it’s the real thing this time.”

She drew herself up in the sheets and the sweatshirt that she wore to bed, letting the news sink in, and when she asked how, I didn’t know what to tell her, because Andre hadn’t elaborated and I’d not thought to ask, and I couldn’t very well lie because she’d be seeing for herself in an hour or so.

I really hate looking like I don’t know the score.

*

I grew up with an answer for everything, or so my mother told me, plenty of times, and one of the last things she said to me the last time I visited was, “How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?” As if, one, I could summarize, and two, she actually wanted the truth. Her question, I think, her terminology itself, sounded suspiciously like a line from a Soul Asylum song she must’ve overheard my stepbrother playing and probably assumed I related to because everybody her age knows that everybody our age likes all the same things. Homogeneity is very important to her and my stepfather.

When she asked that I remember feeling sorry for her, because unlike now it wasn’t that we never talked, it’s just that we never said anything. If you grew up in our house you could often find yourself in the conversational equivalent of wandering through a museum that had been closed down, all the exhibits gone, so that the only things left to see were the blank walls of empty rooms, and dust. You knew something had been there once, long ago — there had to have been, you could sometimes see outlines where something had stood, where the dust wasn’t as thick — but whatever it was, you could only guess.

So there it hung in the air, her first stab in years at engaging me with something that made me ponder:

“How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?”

While I didn’t even think that the label applied, personally, the fact of her using it at all seemed more an admission of defeat than anything, so I felt obligated to reinforce it.

“What you should be asking instead,” I told her, “is why it took me as long as it did.”

I’d been neutral as far as who or what I was referring to, but my mother decided to take it as a personal affront.

“You can’t hurt me,” she said. “So if that’s what you think you’re doing here, you’re very sadly mistaken. You can’t hurt me at all.”

And when she said this, all I could think of was how true it was, and how that might’ve been the problem, because it was the only thing about her that I’d ever really envied.

*

We drove out of Chicago in the frosty autumn chill that grips hardest in those last few hours before dawn, dropping down to the Eisenhower Expressway and heading for the western ‘burbs. Soon the eastbound lanes would begin filling with morning commuters, like plaque in a hardened artery, while the trains that clattered down the center exchanged their seedy and exotic nocturnal cargo for the indistinguishable hordes who belonged to the sun.

Chicago’s western hinterlands are a patchwork quilt. There are stretches where you think you’ve finally seen the last strip mall, and drive over creeks and rivers, past woodlands that have withstood advance since the days of Marquette and Joliet, but then you’ll find yourself coming to the next tacky outpost of doughnut shops and rent-to-owns, and it seems you can never quite put all that polyurethaned civilization behind you. When I was very young I thought the entire country went on this way, the next McDonald’s never more than a reassuring five minutes ahead.

Those suburban woodlands, as you drive past, seem thick and mysterious, like overlooked tracts of ancient soil where the fleet descendants of pre-Columbian fathers might yet be watching with painted eyes. From the air, though, surrounded by ragged webs of asphalt, they mostly look besieged.

Still, it was in one of those brambled thickets where the old slaughterhouse sat enduring its years of obsolescence and neglect.

We found the convenience store where Andre had said he would wait, out of the chill. Rachel and I collected him to the relief of the cashier whose unfamiliarity with shampoo must’ve consigned her to the graveyard shift. But then she scurried to the sandwich island and plucked one of their wretched hot dogs off the weenie-go-round and slapped it in a bun, shyly giving it to him with a fistful of condiments, then backing away before he could attempt to pay for it.

Ever since we were kids, Andre has had that effect on some people. You just want to throw a blanket around his shoulders and give him soup. Everything about Andre is too near the surface, including his cheekbones.

Rachel and I followed behind his car, although certainly we knew the way to the slaughterhouse. The neighborhood houses all sat where they had for years, maybe with skimpy cosmetic changes, but still the same behind them. It’s only when you return to your old neighborhood that you feel the way houses have lives apart from the people who reside in them.

“The human body’s supposed to replace almost every cell in it every seven years,” I said, because it felt too quiet. “You’ve heard of that, right?”

“Yeah. But not all at once,” Rachel said.

“So I can mean it literally, saying I’m not the same person who grew up here.”

Fingers busy, Rachel made a show of subtracting from seven. “Guess that means I still have four to go.”

In the light from a streetlamp she frowned. Rachel’s was one of those rare faces that are enhanced by a tiny frown, her brown eyes filling with concentration or disdain and over them the thick eyebrows nudging toward each other in a way that made her wise and sensual and imperial.

“There’s something about all at once that’d seem better,” she said. “Like shedding a skin? You call in sick to work one day, and lock yourself in the bathroom, and keep flushing for hours, and when you come back out it’s a whole new you.”

“Imagine the plumbing hazards,” I said, which made us laugh because we needed to, because we’d gotten out of bed to go look at the corpse of a friend and decide, I guess, that it really was him, and he really was dead.

It meant two extra blocks’ walk, but we parked in the lot of a church — Lutheran, I think — so some suburban early riser wouldn’t see us disembarking directly in front of his castle and go making xenophobic calls to the police and the N.R.A.

“So you had to first come out here, when, like three o’clock this morning?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” Andre said, “about then.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I just … just woke up with this awful hunch.” He wasn’t crying anymore. Had gotten out of his car with a smear of mustard on his cheek from the hot dog, for Rachel to wipe away. “I just had this dream that Jamey was…”

We moved down the street, then over a block, following the new one until the street ended in a cul-de-sac and dissolved into several dozen feet of weedy lot. Behind us, lights were beginning to wink on, off, in bathrooms and kitchens, while ahead of us the woods lay cold and dark, unaffected by that workaday world.

We threaded our way through trees, none of which were very big because none were terribly old by tree standards. Our feet tramped over frosty ground untouched by tires for two decades, although time still hadn’t erased every suggestion of the path where the meat trucks used to roll.

It couldn’t have been more than 600 feet back in, but seemed farther, because the woods had slowly closed in as though keeping a secret. Whatever died back here now would die randomly, not systematically, but if it’s true that places soak in memories of the things that happen there, then it’d never been entirely our imagination that around the old slaughterhouse we could sense some wordless animal panic, some imprint left by countless dumb beasts who buckled to their knees as their skulls were crushed by sledgehammers swung with brute factory precision.

It rose out of the trees, pale in the pre-dawn, temple-like but without the carvings and monkeys that could’ve given it true character. Years ago the stoneware and brickwork might have been whitewashed, but had been a colorless gray for so long that I no longer remembered. We followed one of the stark walls back around to a loading bay and through the door that had been sprung for several presidential administrations, and finally had to turn on our flashlights. Wherever the beams fell they landed on peeled paint and abandonment and years of vandalism and heaps of junk so useless it was worthless even as scrap. Step through that door and the aloof vibrancy of the woods fled, to leave you swallowed by silent echoes from some lost decade.

“What a desolate place to die,” Rachel said.

It crossed my mind that Jamey was hardly the first, and that I’d done in my virginity here, too. Atmosphere is a low priority when your hormones are loud and shiny.

Andre led us to him, in one of the middle rooms. As the place had been gutted since its demise, over the years we’d never known exactly what occurred where, but I suspected that the dank sepulchre where Jamey lay with the needle in his vein and rubber tubing loose around his bicep was where saws might’ve whined while tatters of flesh speckled men in slick raincoats.

Everything he’d needed was still there, if not in his arm, then close at hand. Bent spoon, pinch of cotton; the votive candle had burned down to a ring of wax. He lay turned onto one side, his unstuck arm drawn up to pillow his head, nose ring and half-smile still in place.

“And there was this, too,” Andre said as he handed us a slip of paper. “The spoon was on top of it.”

We read: No, it wasn’t an accident this time. No apologies,  no mewling, which I respected but kept to myself. Andre didn’t look up to hearing that.

“It’s dated eight days ago?” I said. “Who dates his suicide note to begin with?”

“He always was pretty detail-oriented, for a junkie,” Rachel said.

Andre bristled. “He wasn’t a junkie.”

“Sorry, I guess I was confused by the syringe.”

“Angus, tell her he was no junkie.”

“Far as I know, he never shared a needle in his life,” I told her, from the floor. “He was in control.”

“What are you doing down there?” That frown, that beautiful frown. “You don’t think he’s … still…?”

“Eight days?” I was on all fours on the gritty concrete. Had touched his supple cheeks and now hovered in to sniff. “He doesn’t smell bad. Doesn’t even look like he’s started to decompose.”

“Well, it does feel like a meat locker in here … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Now Rachel was being nasty, seeing if she could make Andre flinch. “Probably it hasn’t warmed up much even on the sunny days, the past week.”

“But look at his color,” I argued, too intrigued to feel much grief, which maybe I wouldn’t have felt regardless. I’ve always had this easy take on death, just part of the natural order and sometimes a smart career move, and if I never could believe in Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, I could still believe in System.

Although for being dead, Jamey had a hue that could be called robust. As Andre squirmed, I peeled aside the jacket Jamey was wearing only on one arm, and his flannel, and his T-shirt, to bare the shoulder he’d been lying on. Blood should’ve pooled there, left the skin as dark as an eggplant. I believed in gravity, too, until now.

“Oh, this is creeping me out,” Rachel said, but leaned over my shoulder without apprehension. When a corpse won’t behave like one, it’s easy to overlook a technicality or two.

Andre groaned and told us we were like two six-year-olds with a dead cat, and turned away with his flash and stole half our light. We looked up when he quit shuffling and flapping his long olive green canvas coat, and left his beam on a wall and what had been spray-painted there. All three of us agreed that Jamey had done it, given the presence of both the can and his trademark A’s, with the horizontal extending past the diagonals, like the anarchy symbol without the circle.

“‘Musica mundana’?” Andre read aloud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

We couldn’t decide. Lately Jamey had despaired over his own floundering musical aspirations, whatever talent he had on a fast exile to oblivion. He employed a small arsenal of keyboards and samplers and tape decks, collecting the noises that engulfed the city and combining them with those of his own creation into aural collages that nobody could dance to. It still seemed unlikely that he’d call his own work mundane, then misspell everything to boot.

“Looks Latin,” Rachel finally said.

“Nathan would know,” Andre said. “Nathan should be here, and Mae, Mae should be here too, I should’ve called them,” and he set off again for a phone before Rachel and I could persuade him that a few more hours wasn’t going to make any difference.

That Jamey. When he set his mind to it, he always could throw the most interesting parties.

*

Someday when I have a hundred bucks an hour to blow to hear an informed opinion, I think it could be really fun to go to a psychologist and see the reaction I get, admitting that the one constant in my life, at its various stages, seems to be a derelict slaughterhouse.

Of course I remember it from a time before dereliction, still operating but in the process of being driven under by incorporated abattoirs, tottering on its independent legs like a newborn veal. Although it was years before I realized this, that whoever had worked there would’ve been jettisoned toward the unemployment line within a few months of that magical and terrible winter day.

What I best remember is tramping there through the snow with my father, because it was within walking distance of our house and he’d wanted to order a side of beef to lay in stock in the freezer downstairs and knew he could get it for not much over wholesale cost there. I was six, on Christmas vacation from first grade and already tired of the new toys, maybe, but swept up in drama that afternoon as my father and I bundled against the cold and set out like a pair of trappers for the family meat.

We must’ve talked, but what about I can’t recall, except for him teasing me that I’d better not tell any of the meatmen my name because they might mistake me for a cow. Which utterly perplexed me until he explained that my name, my fine Scottish name that he had given me in a fit of nationalistic fervor for a homeland never seen, was shared by a breed of cattle.

Twenty-one years later I still remember the milky gray of the sky and the icy whisper of snowflakes as we stomped and stamped along; the way my father would grab me by my mittened hands and swing me up and over when the drifts got too deep. I knew that day that I must’ve grown older and more able in his eyes, that this would be the first of countless adventures that he and I would have in the coming years.

While my father was deciding how best to apportion our beef into steaks and roasts and ground, I strayed off out of curiosity and boredom, finding myself behind the slaughterhouse, undetected while I watched some squat, grizzled man gnaw at a wet cigar stub and grumble curses as he shoveled up a spill of what I took to be fat ropes. They slipped and slithered and glistened as he chased them, favoring one leg, and left pink smears in the snow while he slung them into an enormous wheeled pail that must’ve overturned. He noticed me finally, and now I sort of knew what the gray ropes really were, and with one fatty loop draped over the rim of the pail, he leaned on it and grinned around his cigar. His teeth were stained, and one eye covered by a gray film.

“Hey little mister,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”

Angus, I nearly told him, but stopped myself in time, because mistaken identity was sure to get me killed, cut up and shoveled into buckets, so I turned and ran as fast as I could and when my father caught up with me he said we’d better wait a few minutes before going back home, until I quit shivering. From the cold, he thought.

It was the last Christmas our nuclear family would know, and while it probably wasn’t the same evening, in my mind the trip to the slaughterhouse will be forever linked to the shouts between my parents, and later discovering my father behind the house, when I wasn’t supposed to, in his private place inside the tool shed. I watched as he cried and hung his head, and every several moments chopped at wood with a hatchet. There was something so terrible about seeing him in this fallen state that I, while I knew I should’ve, could no more have gone to him than I could’ve run into the arms of that unshaven troll who’d been shoveling guts.

When our beef was ready I went with my father to pick it up, but we took the car this time and it wasn’t the same as on foot, against the elements, and it’s almost the last thing I recall us doing together. He was gone by spring, my stepfather and his own son in place by summer, and by the week I entered second grade I’d already seen my father for the last time, wondering where he’d gone and when he would send for me and clinging to that final Yule as evidence that we’d had one adventure, at least.

It was more than a decade before I did the math, and realized that over that Christmas my mother had been pregnant with Rachel, and must’ve known even then that it wasn’t Dad’s.

Which explains a lot about his mood, as I look back.

*

“‘Music of the world’ is what that means, literally,” Nathan explained. “Symbolically it means ‘music of the spheres.’ Not like harps and organs and trumpets … more the harmony in creation, say, from the planets orbiting. It was part of the medieval world view. To them music theory was like astrophysics.”

We looked at the words again: Musica mundana.

“I told him about it once — say a year ago? — one night when we were stoned, but … are you positive he’s been dead eight days?”

“We’re just taking his word on it,” I said.

“Because not decaying I can see, with it so chilly in here. But it’s the blood not pooling I can’t figure. You know … if I didn’t know better … I’d almost be tempted to say what we have on our hands might be an incorruptible.”

“Isn’t that more in the line of Catholic saints?” Andre had to ask, and Nathan said usually, and we looked at that spike still in Jamey’s arm and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it, even Andre, everybody laughing but Mae.

Of the five of us standing over him, Mae was youngest and had known Jamey the least amount of time, but perhaps felt she owed him her life. She’d been panhandling and dumpster-diving when he spotted her along North Clark, and for runaways that’s often the last step before prostitution. Probably Jamey wouldn’t’ve noticed had Mae Pak not been staring at the violin she’d brought all the way from South Korea, by way of Los Angeles, and ceremoniously snipping its strings with wire cutters.

He’d helped her find a job in a music store, and a roommate, but later told me that he’d misunderstood everything that day he first talked to her, thought the business with the violin wasn’t so much despair as low-rent performance art.

So maybe to Mae, Jamey really had been a benefactor, since two years later she’d reached her nineteenth birthday without ever slipping on the fishnets each dusk and heading out to gobble an assortment of occidental penii.

But maybe Mae didn’t yet understand the way, in any group of friends who have some history, you develop a sound idea who will be the first to do certain things, like marry or sprout a tumor, and naturally first to die. I had a reasonable expectation that Jamey would be head of that particular class the day an old needle grew too dull to pop into his arm, and I watched him sharpen it on the scratch-strip of a book of matches, then have to forcibly yank it from the vein because his subprecision work had left a tiny spur of steel that caught his skin like a fishhook.

So the five of us stood clustered inside the slaughterhouse, admitting the obvious about Jamey and maybe contemplating personal mortality, the escape clause in our fleshly contracts.

We couldn’t decide what to do with him.

While it seemed clear enough on the surface, once extenuating circumstances were considered the issue became murkier, the most persuasive argument for inaction coming from Jamey himself, as he had left a note, if no guarantee we’d be the ones to find it, and he’d gone to the trouble of coming here in the first place. After all, Rachel said, if he’d simply meant to die and be done with it, he could’ve managed as much in his own crusty bathtub, with far less fuss. Clearly, something about this place had called to him as his mausoleum, guiding his hand as he sprayed Musica mundana for an epitaph, and it wasn’t irony: He’d never even considered a vegetarian lifestyle.

Then there was his refusal to cooperate with putrefaction.

It was Andre who said that if we were planning to leave him, we should at least make it appear that his presence was intended, rather than him just happening to have died where he did.

Mae knelt to slide the needle from his vein and Rachel untied the tourniquet, and when we took him up from the floor we found that he was still flexible without being mushy. Because it seemed a shame to leave him in total darkness we bore him out of the room he’d died in and through a wide iron door that slid back on shrieking rusty rollers, and then another, to relocate him in the grandest room in the slaughterhouse. I felt reasonably sure that this had been the actual killing floor, where mallets met heads, because the ceiling was much higher, and in one area it opened into a short gabled tower, where windows would’ve let in natural lighting for a nice expansive open-air ambience while the brutes swung their mauls. Although the windows had been boarded over, all the boards had weathered apart so that slatted light filtered in.

His clothing didn’t seem right for him now that Jamey was in his place of final repose, so we stripped him, grateful that upon death he’d been considerate enough not to have soiled himself, or had simply neglected to eat that last day or two, what with bigger things on his mind. His pale body was very thin and slat-ribbed, with concave stomach and long toes with dirty unclipped nails, and a cluster of needle tracks.

Since leaving him on the floor seemed no better here than in the other room, Nathan and I hunted down a bedspring that had been around for fifteen years or more, junked by suburban white trash, and laid him out on that. But this seemed not a very pleasing use of space, given the soaring, vaulted quality beneath that steeple-like tower, so since there were still chains hanging from pulleys up there, we ratcheted them down and hooked them to one end of the springs, and wove Jamey’s limbs in and out of the rusty coils so he’d stay in place. We hoisted him aloft so that the springs stood on end, and Jamey hung serene in the metal, facing the doorway we’d carried him through, so that on walking in you couldn’t help noticing him, arms welcoming, something almost benevolent about him, although his head did tend to droop forward. Rachel took care of that, looping the tourniquet around his brow and tying it back to raise his chin off his chest. Mae wedged the syringe into a spring coil near his head, angling it away from his scalp like an exclamation point, or the first ray of light from a fledgling nimbus, and finished, we all stepped back to admire the effect.

“I wouldn’t’ve anticipated this ten minutes ago, but that’s just about the most holy thing I’ve ever seen,” Nathan said, and coming from him that was high praise.

It occurred to us that since Andre and I had played here as boys, there was no reason to think the place any less irresistible to kids today, so we did need to insure Jamey’s privacy. We were well into morning by now, so Rachel and Mae and I left Nathan and Andre on guard while we drove to a hardware store. I used Visa to buy a screwdriver and the heaviest hasps and padlocks they carried, securing the slaughterhouse doors again after so many years, making sure we’d all jotted the combinations for whenever we got the urge.

We paid our respects one more time, and Mae kissed Jamey’s unspoiled cheek. After she began to cry a little I held her, and her so tiny against me, sniffling with her black black hair in her face, and on the way to our cars Rachel motioned me to fall back a few steps.

“If you want to go spend the rest of the day with her, that’s fine by me,” Rachel said, and I was about to say all right, maybe I should, but Nathan couldn’t give her a ride home because he had a job to hurry to, and Andre lived nowhere near her, so we decided to take her home with us since Mae didn’t want to be alone.

As we were about to leave the Lutheran car lot, Nathan turned his pleasant potato face to gaze in the direction we’d come from.

“You kno-ow,” he said, voice dropping and breaking the know into two syllables, in that analytical Nathan voice of his, “once you start safeguarding something that’s essentially worthless, and making it a group secret and spotting the odd miracle or two, what you’ve got is the basis of a new religion.” He shook his head. “I really should know better than this.”

*

When Jamey brought Mae Pak into the fold, it had only been in the past few years that I’d gained any real experience with anyone of different ethnicity than my own, which is to say extremely white, white nearly to the point of appearing blue from the veins beneath my Protestant-sired skin. Such daily homogeneity wouldn’t have been the case had I grown up in the city, but out in the ‘burbs there are enclaves where the majority clings to its status with tenacity so fierce you’d think the real estate consists of cotton plantations.

Still, I remember Jamaal.

We went to the same junior high and walked the same direction home each afternoon, and weeks went by before I’d first heard the sound of his voice. I remember now his smooth caramel skin and the shiny black curls of his hair, and how mysterious his brown eyes looked, not like anyone else’s. The word wouldn’t have occurred to me then, but now I would have to regard them as stoic.

Jamaal had the sort of build that American mothers describe to their friends as husky, and couldn’t run very fast, in every way a stark contrast to his brother Jameel. Jameel was older by a year, and taller, wiry as an Olympic sprinter. He never smiled and never spoke, suffering each day with a scowl terrifying in its maturity, and whenever he walked through crowded school hallways his passage was as clean as a razor’s. It was this image that dominated when my mother told me to watch myself around them, all of them, both boys and their older sister and their parents, and while my mother and her chatty friends weren’t sure which Middle Eastern country the parents had come from, it was an awful place.

“They hate us, every last one of them,” my mother would warn me. “For no better reason than because we’re American. They aren’t Christian there. They wish us dead.”

So I steered clear, the terrible Khashab brothers going their way, and I mine, until the afternoon I rounded a corner on the way home from school and saw Jamaal’s broad back, thirty feet ahead of me. I dropped my pace so I wouldn’t overtake him, giving him cause to cut my throat, and I was so careful that I stumbled and dropped the big armload of books I was carrying. They scattered across the sidewalk with an unnerving racket and papers burst free, strewn like fall leaves, and he turned around.

Jamaal turned around.

He said nothing, silent as his viciously mum brother, and as I stooped to retrieve everything he backtracked, so I kept my gaze low, the way you do with animals who might take eye contact as a challenge. His shoes came into view and they stopped, planted firm as pedestals, and I saw a knee, then the other knee, and then the rest of him as he knelt to help me pick up the mess.

When it was done, books dusted and papers salvaged, he looked at me with long-lashed brown eyes so shy, and some worse flavor, as though he’d guessed what I’d been thinking, and he said:

“You really should have a backpack.”

So we became friends, and as we were in seventh grade we were too old to play together, so instead we just hung, but never at my house and never at his, because I suppose each of us had things at home we wanted to shield the other from.

It was inevitable that I would show him the slaughterhouse, initiate him into its secrets and decline, and we would prowl its corridors as if searching their shadows for hints of our futures and how to reach them. Or we’d look for valuables left behind and sometimes even find them: the odd dirty magazine, select pages already brittle; warm beer, cached by older kids for later.

Sometimes we would just sit, ignoring the underlying residue of death as we trusted each other with the reasons why neither of us wanted to go home for dinner, me talking about my stepbrother and what a world-class stoolie he was, and Jamaal saying he could never study for all the yelling going on, his sister nineteen, with very definite ideas of what she wanted to do in a day and who she wanted to do it with, and their father not seeing it that way at all. He already had someone in mind he expected her to marry.

“Jameel sees what’s coming for him in a few years,” Jamaal told me. “He’s next. He coughed blood last week. The doctor says it’s an ulcer.”

And when, after the tragedy, no one knew where to look for Jamaal, I was the only one who thought to check the slaughterhouse the next day, but while he’d look at me, he refused to talk, or couldn’t. I could still smell smoke on him. He didn’t resist when, after an hour, I took him by the arm and steered him out of the slaughterhouse and past the thin young trees growing where once had been a drive, and brought him out to civilization and those who said they had his best interests at heart. I was afraid he might stay back in there until he starved.

Their father never denied locking Jamaal’s sister in her room after dousing her with gasoline and setting her ablaze, claiming that where he’d grown up a father had that right, when there was nothing left to be done with a rebellious, disrespectful daughter.

The area Shriners launched a fund drive to help with the skin grafts, but I never heard how she was doing because the rest of the family moved away to live with other relatives.

“Now do you see why I never wanted you exposed to people like that?” my mother said. “Their children are just cattle to them, is all they are. Not precious like you are to us.”

So I never knew what became of Jamaal, although years later, when I was in high school and needed some cash, I was going through my mother’s dresser drawers and beneath a jewelry box found three old letters, unopened, that he’d mailed to me, and only then did I realize I never had gotten around to asking him what country his parents were from.

*

After insuring Jamey’s eternal rest, nothing much else seemed right for the day, so back at our apartment Rachel called in sick to the current temping job she had, and Mae did the same at the music store, although it was late enough by now that both places should’ve already gotten the idea, so we made coffee and drank it, and then a little later on we went to bed.

It’s hard to say why it happened, Mae feeling not much better about things, so I kissed her on the cheek, and she continued to tilt her face up, so I kissed her again but a little lower, and by the third or fourth time I was squarely at her mouth. It was one of her very best features, a size or two too large for her face if you adhered to strict proportional criteria to condone beauty, but perfection is ultimately so boring. Rachel would sometimes remark what a great mouth Mae had, so wide and dazzling when she smiled, neither lip overpowering the other when she didn’t, and always looking so moist, and when I was finding out how true this was, I felt another nose nudging in, so we made room for Rachel.

We grieved our way toward the unmade bed and sent our clothes to the floor. Sometimes I was right there and other times felt entirely apart from everything, entranced by the differences in us, in our bodies, even between two of the same gender. Our hands. Six hands hypnotic, gliding like butterflies, and our smells and tastes none the same, whether from outside our bodies or from within, and the hair so varied in color, texture, thickness. I couldn’t think of us configuring as two-and-one, more like three entirely separate creatures belonging to no particular evolution.

Everyone got a turn as the focus of attention, but all things must wind down sometime. Our mènage concluded with Mae straddling my hips, as Rachel laid a cheek against her back, one arm around Mae’s tiny middle while rubbing her other hand, slick and steady, along the place where we joined, and after we’d disengaged and stretched out beneath the covers, Mae lay between us, but scooted a head lower, falling asleep immediately with her mouth at one of Rachel’s breasts.

“I hope she’s not a teeth-grinder,” Rachel said. “She’ll bite my nipple off.”

“Spread your hair across the pillow more,” I told her, and she got a funny look on her face, like the time for that was past, and asked why. “Never mind, just humor me.”

So Rachel arranged, rolling her eyes and trying not to jostle Mae, until her hair fanned in chestnut waves. I repositioned her hand to caress the back of Mae’s head, with fingertips only, and she finally relaxed into the sculpting, and when I got her to give me that tiny frown the look was just so perfect.

“Lady Madonna, baby at your breast,” I said. It was the only Beatles I could remember, too. “This is a whole new image for you. Who would’ve guessed?”

Rachel glared, saying, “I do hope you’re amused,” but started to smile, lying back with her eyes drifting shut and her free hand reaching toward me.

Her hands had always been subtly weird to me, the undersides at least. From fingertips to heel there was hardly any definition, her palms so smooth and flat they looked unfinished. She’d been five weeks premature, and I could imagine some telepathy between her and my mother going on even then, Rachel telling herself in a watery prenatal voice, I have to get out of here, have to put some more distance between us or there can only be trouble.

“Look at her.” Rachel raised the covers and we peered down Mae’s length, between us. “The way her body’s so straight, hardly any curves or angles to it. It’s not unfeminine, but it’s almost like a boy’s.”

“Well, looking at you, that’s all just relative.”

“Maybe she appeals to the latent queer in you, you think?”

“I didn’t realize we’d ever established I have one, did we?”

“If you say so,” Rachel shrugged. “But I’d say this afternoon we established that I sure did.”

“Oh come on. You had to know. You’ve kissed girls before.”

“Kissed, yeah. But this is the first time I’ve ever had one squatting on my face.”

“Well then, progress has been made.”

“I feel so … needed,” Rachel said. “How can I feel so much older than her when we’re just two years apart, that doesn’t make any sense.” She looked down at Mae’s mouth. “Can we keep her?”

I figured Rachel was kidding but gave it some thought the way you’ll preview lives you’ll never live or people you’ll never kill even when they deserve it, then realized she was serious.

“She doesn’t own much,” I said, “so I guess there’d be room.”

Rachel shook Mae’s shoulder, saying, “Okay, come on now, the bar’s closed,” pulling her nipple from Mae’s mouth, and when Mae was awake and smiling with fuck languor, Rachel said, “Um, I need to ask you something, but it’s personal.”

Mae blinked over her shoulder at me. “Okay.”

“What was it you saw in Jamey, mainly?”

Mae wasn’t sure what to make of this.

“Two years ago when we first met you, and you know how much Nathan loves to dissect things, he said he was pretty sure you saw Jamey as some sort of father figure. I’ve always been curious how on target he was, and today … today seems the day to ask.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” said Mae.

Rachel nodded. “I kind of thought so.”

“I mean, he did so much for me, and really I do love him for that. But if I was going to settle on a father figure it’d have to be someone more … stable.”

“Stability? How does stability figure in?” Rachel said, but sounded purely rhetorical, then she pulled Mae’s head down to her breast again, and Mae cuddled closer and reached back to drape one arm over my waist and pull me closer too. I watched the sky in the window like shades of pixel gray, rooting for the sun but it never came, another lesson in misplaced faith.

*

Rachel was a month from premature birth when my stepfamily was forced on me, two of them, a father and a son, who was called Thumper because of something to do with that Disney movie. He was four years shy of my six, and a few days before they were set to invade, my mother called me to the living room and there he was. My mother beamed as though he were the cutest thing since cartoon rabbits, and said, “Meet your new baby brother. I bet you didn’t know you had a baby brother, did you?” Thumper was carrying a toy hammer, and shortly after we were introduced he threw the hammer into my forehead so hard it knocked me down, and as soon as everyone had ascertained I wasn’t bleeding they said how funny it was, because anything a two-year-old does is adorable, especially when done to an over-the-hill six-year-old.

He loved tools. Thumper loved tools and taking things apart, and when he was all of five he dismantled the air compressor of my aquarium while I was at summer camp, and all my fish died. Coming home was like finding one of those mysterious towns you’ll hear about, from years before telecommunications glued us all together, that were found empty but with uneaten meals still on the table, and no one knows what happened. I came home and looked in upon a tankful of still, cloudy water, and nobody was swimming around the castle and the lid to the treasure chest wasn’t slamming up and down in a gush of air bubbles. Only the skeleton looked at home.

“I’m sure he’s sorry,” my mother told me. “But we shouldn’t discourage Thumper’s natural talents. How else will he learn?”

Later, when I told Andre about it at the slaughterhouse, over experimental cigarettes, he just said, “Good thing you don’t live in an iron lung.”

She stood up for Thumper a lot, I was noticing, a habit gotten into early and never broken, to prove to my stepfather that she wasn’t playing favorites. Of course Thumper caught on quick, and now it’s obvious to me why he’d set about trying to dismantle as much of my life as he could get his hands on, if not how he’d gotten the idea I’d even want to steal his father.

“You’re not my father,” I used to tell the guy any chance I got, and he would look expectantly toward the nearest door, saying, “Of course not … I’m here,” until it had become a game and one of us had to wear the other down.

I won, I suppose, one evening in preteen cockiness reminding him who he wasn’t, and he fixed on me with nullified eyes while chewing at the insides of his cheeks, then in a low voice I’d never heard before said, “You know why I’m nothing like your father was? You know what was different about him from me?”

Whatever I’d forced out of him, it had to be big.

“You ever hear the word ‘impotent’ before? Know what it means when a man’s impotent? What that can drive his wife to do?” He nodded with the conviction of natural law. “That was your father for you.” While I wasn’t sure what the word meant, I could read from his face that it was truly terrible, shameful beyond telling, and that the dictionary would back him up.

Thumper watched, and even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant either, still snickered into his hands. Later, after I’d consulted Webster, Rachel brought her stuffed panda into my room to leave it with me, so I let her stay too because I knew she was afraid of Thumper, and that he grew suspicious whenever we got together and looked as though we were talking about him.

It felt weird, none of us a complete sibling to another, steps and halves stitched together into a Frankenstein’s family — how could the usual rules apply? Every time I saw a commercial on TV about needy orphans in faraway lands, I’d pretend that Thumper belonged with them, face streaked with mud and belly swollen from hunger as he stumbled along squalling to the village’s gods at the injustice of it all, wondering how he’d gotten there.

I held onto that dream for years, until I outgrew it, finally able to take pleasure in subtler tortures, Thumper’s father now using me as a motivational weapon he could wield over a son whose brain was ill-motivated or ill-equipped to process math, science, the higher intricacies of his native tongue.

“Why can’t you be more like Angus, why can’t you even try?” he’d challenge. “Those report cards you bring home, they’d shame a village idiot.” Thumper would glare at me with all the resentment his maturing face could muster, while Rachel made sure he didn’t miss her Mona Lisa smile, and knew whom she was siding with and always would.

Came the day, then, fourteen months after he’d been driving, when a drunken Thumper rolled his car. A lumbar vertebra crunched like a hambone in a dog’s jaw, taking the spinal cord with it. After that, he confined his driving to a wheelchair, mostly around the house, but of course I was gone by then, having let Chicago swallow me, make me anonymous, reprogram me with its different rhythms, its harsher harmonies and jagged dissonances.

I can still recall the look on my stepfather’s face in the hospital waiting room, after they’d given us the news on Thumper’s lower extremities, and while I was not without pity, a part of me felt responsible, too, because for over a decade I’d been wishing harm on him, and finally that muscle had flexed.

I looked at my stepfather’s slack face, remembering what it had uttered about my real father, and wondering if I should remind him of that, since impotence had again become a fact of life close to home. But at least my dad could still walk — which, as I quickly realized, had been an option he’d exercised only too well, so I kept silent, my stepfather still holding the means with which to cut the legs from beneath me, too.

*

Days passed and Jamey never would go rank, not even when the city and the ‘burbs broke new sweat in the heat of Indian Summer, his decomposition arrested by a force beyond our reckoning, until it got to the point where I couldn’t think of him as Jamey any more.

I’d make a trip out to the slaughterhouse every several days to check on his progress, or lack of it, and it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one, other recent visits annotated by gifts left in front of the bedsprings, below his cruddy bare feet. Coins and locks of hair and interesting chunks of scrap metal and sticks of incense and shredded audio tape and the odd piece or two of drug paraphernalia — offerings of these and more. He who was no longer Jamey hung above them all, bent-limbed and woven into the rusty springs like a 3-D portrait of a Hindu deity, no more or no less skeletal than he’d been in life, just incredibly resistant to change.

I’d come home and tell Rachel and Mae about it, and it was always fun to try and figure out who’d left what.

The signs went up during the third week, scrap lumber shoved horizontally into the springs, slash letters burned into the wood and chipped paint with a soldering iron. The sign at the bottom read Musica mundana; the one over his head, Deus ex nihilo. Given this further Latin I rightly figured it had to be Nathan’s doing.

“Well, what do you think it means?” he asked me on the street the next day.

“Is this from another private confab you had with him?”

Nathan shook his head. “This one I made up for the occasion.”

I resigned myself to puzzling it out since there was little else to do, Nathan and I sixth in line from a theater box office, waiting for tickets to an Andrew Lloyd Webber show to go on sale. It’s what Nathan does for money, making a surprisingly adequate living by standing in lines for people whose time is more valuable than his own and will gladly hire surrogates. Business was in fact good enough that he was ready to subcontract some lines out to me, so I was tagging along to learn the finer points of queuing. With my degree in communications, I felt confident and ready to solo.

“Well, ‘Deus’ would be ‘God,’ obviously,” I said. “Past that I’m rusty when it comes to dead languages.”

“Deus ex nihilo means ‘God out of nothing,’” Nathan told me, then said, “Andre didn’t get it either.”

God out of nothing. So that’s what we’d been doing out there.

“Speaking of Andre, have you talked to him lately?”

I shook my head. “Got his answering machine twice.”

“He’s in a mood. You know how he gets: ‘What do I have to show for my life, it’s one-third gone already, I have so much more potential than this, I can’t sleep.’ Et cetera.”

“I think the slaughterhouse thing’s gotten to him.”

“Could be,” Nathan said. “But you kno-ow … Jamey being an incorruptible like he is, if the Catholic Church heard about it, they’d shit. All of the others, so far as they’re concerned, were these obedient types who traded a lifetime of orgasms for a corpse that wouldn’t rot. Now. My theory is, their perpetual freshness had nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with devotion in the people they left behind. The collective focus of a bunch of hysterics is an amazing thing.”

“Get out.”

“Quantum physics is on my side. Energy, that’s all anything is or will be. Waveforms on different frequencies, when you get to the subatomic level. The only difference between matter and energy is, matter’s congealed. So, with brain activity being electrical, thoughts and the physical world are made of the same stuff — we just don’t have all the cause and effect sorted out yet.”

Which made me view Thumper’s wreck and my malicious fantasies in a new light. “You’re saying we’re keeping him the way he is?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. When’s the last time you had that kind of faith in anything? Except maybe for entropy, but that’s beside the point, since Jamey’s doing a good job of defying it.”

“So how’s it happening, then?”

Nathan looked ashamed. “I’m supposed to know everything?”

Sometimes I took it for granted that he did, Nathan for as long as I’ve known him grasping for every fact he can to reaffirm his militant atheism, to the extent that he could probably debate most theologians to tears. He’d told me that his goal was to feel confident that, if he were only able to travel back in time, he could convince St. Thomas Aquinas that neither of them existed.

I’d never known Nathan before he was like this, so I have a hard time imagining him growing up wanting to be a priest, but he did. Wanted it badly, so he tells it, laughing at the child he used to be as though it wasn’t him, and saying how fortunate he’d changed his mind, because “Father Nathan” sounds like some foreign phrase spoken with a lisp.

His father died before Nathan could know him, so he did a lot of growing up around priests, as his mother felt they’d make the best role models. It was girls that ruined it for him, girls and then the recovered memory of a priest with clammy hands and where he’d put them, although three years after Nathan recalled this in therapy, his counselor was hit with a class-action civil suit for generating false memories, so now he doesn’t know what to think, beyond being convinced there’s no God.

Although maybe he was willing to make an exception, as long as he retained enough control, and now that the right god had come along.

“I’ve started calling him Nihil, thinking of him by that name instead,” Nathan said, then lowered his voice. “I was out there yesterday. I swear his eyes blinked once.”

*

Rachel was eighteen when they kicked her out at home, not as traumatic as it might’ve been since she had someplace to go.

I’d been visiting that afternoon, knowing ahead of time that my mother and stepfather would be away, so Rachel and I had gone to the slaughterhouse to shoot some 35mm film. Lately I’d felt compelled to preserve the place, in case some calamity or zoning change erased it.

When we returned to the house Thumper was still the only one around, with rarely two words to say to either of us anymore, just sitting in his wheelchair watching TV, so Rachel and I were pretty sure we wouldn’t be disturbed back in her room.

We never even heard the squeak of his wheels.

Later we wondered if Thumper hadn’t suspected awhile, picking up on a look or a touch we’d let slip in front of him because he’d gotten to be wallpaper as far as we were concerned. It was the last great snitch of a sterling career, maybe the best night of his life since the accident, kicked back surrounded by his stepmother’s tears and father’s apoplexy, seeing Rachel and me on the brunt of a disowning that would last nearly a year. The man aimed a gun at my head, then lowered it and sank to the floor and pissed his own pants, probably not the climax Thumper was hoping for, but for his sake I was still happy to leave him there with them, alone at last, what he’d always wanted.

And as I drove her to my apartment, her new home, for miles I wondered if the magic would survive, because now we were no longer a secret, and because finally I’d seen on her father’s face the anguish that I had always known this would cause, reveling in it, close enough for him to read my thoughts, You drove my dad away, and now I’m taking your daughter, or at least read it in my eyes.

“They’re not really so bad,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them that an open mind wouldn’t cure.”

She’d been crying, but started laughing, saying that at least she hadn’t been set on fire in her room, like Jamaal’s sister.

“I used to have nightmares about that,” she admitted. “All the time, used to wake up thinking I was burning.”

“You were only, what, six or seven when that happened?”

“Yeah. But I don’t remember anybody ever telling me it couldn’t happen to me.”

As I drove home the city grew around us, denser and taller, and we weren’t heading into it again so much as putting it back on, like armor or a hair-shirt, for protection or abrasion. I’m still not sure what I get out of it.

“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?” she asked, and I could see patterns of light and shadow sliding across her face, and her teeth were chattering because my car’s heater was broken, and her question was so awful in its implications that I didn’t know how to answer, so it hung in the air while I pounded at the thermostat with my fist, thinking I’ve just got to get this thing fixed.

*

I liked the way it felt, coming home to the two of them, or Rachel coming home to me and Mae, or she to us, this entire new extradimensional dynamic generated by Mae’s moving in. I’d heard somewhere, Nathan probably, that the most stable structures in nature revolve around threes.

On the sunnier days, late in the afternoon, if it wasn’t too chilly, Mae would come home from the music store and go up to the roof, near the edge, sitting on a crate turned on end to play her violin. Usually I’d go up after she’d started, sometimes listening from the doorway and sometimes beside her, and some days the notes were slow and mournful, and others lively, but I never knew if it was mood or just repertoire.

This was eight floors up, with a far view of the cityscape, and she would sit in her leather jacket with her hair thrown back, her bowing arm in fluid motion as she swayed against the vistas of brick and steel and bare-branched trees. Most often she faced the west, playing into sunsets as though inviting them to set her on fire, her urban concertos carried away on the currents of traffic, riding them like a feather rides wind.

“Maybe he can hear it, still, somehow,” she said one evening after lowering the violin from her chin. “Maybe it pleases him. Or soothes his torments, if he has any left.”

She played for Nihil, in his dilapidated palace. Nihil in the springs, his mortal coils.

I took it as a matter of course now that the body might be in a slightly different position from one visit to the next; come to expect it, even, Nihil trying to bring us signs and wonders. Not that there was any point to them, ultimately, because Nihil was after all a god about nothing.

“He can hear it, if he wants to,” she said. “That’s the key to this all, I think. His ears were so sensitive maybe death just couldn’t have them. If he was here right now? He could listen to rush hour, and pick out sounds from it like threads in a sweater.”

“Yeah, it’s starting to make sense to me,” I said. “If dead saints could hear prayers, I don’t see why he can’t still hear the things he was most attuned to.”

Mae smiled, that wide lovely mouth going wider. “Like the day in that scrapyard, when the three of us found that big industrial boiler and made a drum out of it? Wasn’t that great?”

We laughed while miming the clumsy, brutal swings we’d taken at the thing with our two-handed cudgels, although I continued to keep to myself what Jamey and I had found inside that she’d never known about, and then Mae reached into the violin case for a soft cloth to wipe her instrument down.

“You know what I like about you and Rachel?” she said. “You never make me practice. You let me find my own pace.”

“Well…” I was demurring, because Rachel and I had talked about such things, and it was embarrassing to me to hear that we’d done something right. “We didn’t feel like imposing someone else’s standards of ambition on you.”

“Jamey, he was always after me to practice more, said how was I going to get anywhere without practicing.”

“Was this before or after he’d shoot up?”

“That Jamey,” she said, not unkindly, “always big on theory, he just couldn’t quite pull the rest of it together. Would’ve made somebody a decent manager, though, maybe.”

I said he might’ve at that, and watched as Mae set the violin in its case, and maybe it was the line of her jaw or the fall of her hair or the birdlike bones of her hand, but for a moment I was overcome with a sense of Mae’s fragility, hearing the collision of insanities and rush hour, and imagining all the things that could happen to her down there. Rape and murder and intimate arson. It was too much. Or just plain disappearance, like Andre now, his turn come around, because none of us had heard from him for days, and when for a moment I wondered what it would feel like to fling myself off the roof, I thought I might’ve understood some of the things that had guided that final needle into Jamey’s vein. You can’t protect anyone, really.

Which must be why prayers are needed.

Lately I’d lie awake each night, unable to sleep from the worry of it all, feeling our mingled heat under the covers, Mae between Rachel and me. I’d listen to their breathing, wondering how I’d react if one of them were to stop, or if someone with weapons and cruel intent came through a window or broke the door down, and I’d never tasted all these worries before, didn’t know where they were coming from or why, but by god there they were.

Unable to keep it all inside any longer, one night I crept out of bed and went to the western window in the kitchen to pray, Nihil, keep them safe, but felt no true connection, that it would take more than that to convince him to listen, and I didn’t have the advantage of a violin, or an anvil to drop on a car, a noise that Nihil might’ve liked in his earlier incarnation.

I drove away before anything could happen to them, out to the slaughterhouse, the woods and walls cold around me, until I stood in his chamber looking upon him. His arms were no longer over his shoulders, but lower now, woven into the springs with one thrust forward, fingers clawed as if demanding his due. I trained the flashlight over him, all bones and skinny cock, and when I dropped to my knees I left the light on his face, like an illumination from some medieval painting that Nathan might’ve once admired.

“Nihil,” I whispered, and in that stillness my whisper seemed to roar. “You knew them once, like you knew me, so help me keep them safe, help me protect them, because I need them so much…”

I kept praying, for minutes maybe, and didn’t stop until I saw a flicker behind Nihil’s dead lids, like the languid back and forth rolling of a dreamer’s eyes.

Turn out … the light, I thought I heard, even though no one’s lips had moved, can’t bear the light…

After a moment I obeyed, kneeling before him in darkness that the filtered moonlight from above could barely touch. From around me came the murmur of a relieved sigh, then soon, the erratic creaking of rusty bedsprings.

*

It was Jamey who, between opiate nods, made me consider the vitality of the ear in ways I might never have otherwise. Hearing is the first of our senses to connect us with the world, the only one to bridge that gulf before we’re born. In our envelopes of fluid and meat we see nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, with nothing of the outer world to touch. But we can hear it.

The sounds of the world awaiting us have already imprinted us by the time we’re expelled into their sources, and even then we’ve spent months attuned to the body we’re grafted to, the rushing of blood and bubbling of gasses, the circadian flow of meals through the System. Although on a smaller scale it’s not so different from the music of we who traverse the sphere of the world, shuffling through a city’s bowels with no greater concept of our ends than a crust of bread or chunk of cheese.

So, if we’re prenatally imprinted by the world around us — and matter and energy being the same — who’s to say it can’t shape us somehow? That the neverending urban clatter and crash can’t become as familiar to some as a father’s voice; more, even?

Linking ideas like this was what gave Jamey and Nathan their most fertile common ground, like a pair of alchemists who realize they have the same formula written in different equations, and it was Nathan who provided the offhand historical footnote that may have explained the process of Jamey into Nihil:

The Catholic Mass, of all things.

*

So I spent a few days coming to terms with the fact that a friend of mine, clearly dead if unspoiled, had undergone this reawakening of sorts, and if at first I’d been intrigued and vaguely entertained by the notion, now I wasn’t so sure.

Used to, I’d taken solace in the belief that once I was dead, that’d be it, a total snuffage of my flickering spark, but Nihil had ruined everything. I’d heard the body squirm in its springs, heard it sigh and complain about the light, and coming back like that seemed the worst thing I could imagine. Jamey had only wanted to be dead — was nothing sacred? — and me, I’d spent too much time thinking about all the things I never wanted to be, with anything eternal strictly bottom of the list.

I couldn’t bear to burden Rachel and Mae with this, because Rachel was so happy that the other half of her sexuality was now out of its shell, and Mae saying how wonderfully relaxed things were with us as compared to her family in Los Angeles, all that tradition and old world servitude and everyone’s expectations of her being a world-class soloist if only she’d strive harder, and how everyone out there dumped on Koreans, even in the Asian community, especially the Japanese, because it’s just not life if you can’t lord it over someone. I hated to spoil their honeymoon.

Nathan. Nathan would help me through this crisis.

“Why are you telling me this?” was the first thing he said to me. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“But…” I said, and watched him scowl, something I’d never seen him do, not at me. “You were the one with the theories about this. If it hadn’t been for you, all I’d’ve thought was he’d been in a coma all this time.”

“No, no, no, no, no.” Nathan was shaking his head, the two of us squared off in some bureaucratic line downtown where I’d confronted him, wasting another day outpaced by snails. “Don’t you get it, I was just basically bullshitting when I said that about his eyes, I didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”

“You didn’t see them blink?”

“I figured it was maggots, finally, that his time came,” and when Nathan started twisting and wrapping himself inside his coat and trying not to look around at the faces that were trying not to look at us, I knew what the problem was.

Nihil was okay as long as he was a static concept, a joke, a theatrical prop, a conversation piece, our private urban legend, our scarecrow on the hayride. Let him slip those boundaries, though, start looking us in the eye, and it wasn’t fun anymore.

“It never happened and you know it,” Nathan told me, hooked on dogma as much an opiate as Jamey’s smack and the family values of my mother and stepfather, whichever they’d settled on. “Never.”

Everything Nathan said sounded so much like an order that I didn’t see any point to continuing, so I left him to his denial.

On the bus home, I counted pawn shops and Vienna beef signs as they slid past my window, until a woman near the back wearing purple stretch pants bent her little boy over the seat and started swatting, and as he cried his older sister let a thin stream of drool run from the corner of her mouth, but the only movement she made was to turn her head away and pop a finger in her mouth, and then came my stop, and when I got off and the bus rolled away in its stinking roar, I could still see her empty face against the window and the hammy flailing arm behind her, smaller and smaller down the block, and I just knew that Andre was dead.

*

During the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Mass was assuming the form that came down through the next thousand years or so, it followed the structure of the octave, a succession of steps from one’s state of consciousness on walking into the sanctuary, and on through an escalating series of credos and prayers and music and acts that climaxed in divine union. Peasant or king, whoever participated was tuned by the ceremony, resonating like a string plucked by their one true God.

Now, gods come and gods go, thriving awhile then fading away in favor of new gods or spiffier reconfigurations of the old ones, and I have to wonder if among the newest might not be cities. Not the places so much as simply the idea of them. Say, the concept of Chicago that binds it all together, ‘burbs and downtown, El train and Sears Tower, sewer and gas pump, and those scurrying millions who tend and pay homage, and appease it with murder and babies.

All that energy has to go somewhere, has to, because as any physicist will tell you, energy can never be destroyed…

Only transformed.

*

I figured Andre must be dead because no one had heard from him in so long, which wasn’t at all like Andre, who would call and cling to your ear and in his more insecure moments never speak in periods, only commas and semicolons.

That I’d find him at the slaughterhouse began to make sense. After discovering Jamey there, Andre would regard the symmetry as irresistible; and too, in my experience, whenever life got twisted that’s where people went. How many times might I have been already but overlooked his corpse, in some shadow or musty chamber of its own, empty of life out of envy for the attention given Nihil’s, or because he’d been feeling otherwise impressionable.

It was late afternoon when I arrived, sky spitting the year’s first tiny snowflakes. Then I saw that our padlock had been pried from the door, wrenched into the weedy brown stubble. Surely that hadn’t been Andre’s doing. Discovery by the outside world?

I moved through the slaughterhouse with more care than usual, and the closer I got to that one-time theater of pain where cattle bled and Nihil waited, the more clearly I heard it. The creaking bedsprings were familiar, the choppy but unending moan less so.

I watched from the doorway as they went about their work, and maybe it should’ve occurred to me to get territorial, since no one had said anything about sharing Nihil with anyone, even if he was starting to make me goofy, but they were so diligent in what they were doing that I couldn’t begrudge them. And they were so young, not yet ten years old, boys in that prepubescent state where they could still legitimately be called beautiful, even if they were grubby.

One of them, dark-haired and long-lashed, held his tongue in the corner of his mouth as he knelt with a pair of cutters and snipped the end of another crosslength of wire, drew it back, and began boring its sharp tip through the meat of Nihil’s thigh. His technique must’ve been perfected by now. He’d been working his way down the body, skewering Nihil through each cheek, both arms, and beneath the skin of chest and belly, although it was the scrotum job that really made me wince. Nihil was trembling, clearly of his own volition and rapture, both eyes wide open and rolled back in his head with only the whites showing, and a rusty sound scraping from far down in his throat, a jittery quaver caught between a laugh and a moan, higher in pitch with every inch the wire ran through his thigh.

The other boy was a blond little brute of a kid, frowning in concentration as he sat on the floor with an S.O.S. pad, scouring at something held in his lap, something curved and pale and still greasy with blood. It looked like the dome of a skull.

The dark-haired boy used a knife to punch an exit on the inside of Nihil’s thigh, the skin now stretching from beneath, and once the wire was all the way through, Nihil rasped with relief or letdown, and when I walked in the blond boy only looked annoyed.

“You two broke in here, you’re the ones who did that?”

He glared, then shrugged me off in favor of scouring.

“Are you…?” started the other, more shy, like my elder status still counted for something with him. “Are you a friend of Andre’s?”

“You know Andre?”

“Sure.” He started to bore the wire into the opposite inner thigh, which triggered the trembling and moaning all over again. “Andre’s the one who brought us out here.”

“When did he do that?”

“I don’t know, like yesterday maybe.”

I walked around keeping mostly within the drab sunlight from above, spotting the remains of a fire to one side, a few sleeping bags around it and balled-up burger wrappers across the concrete.

“Andre gave us the combination before he dropped us off,” the blond kid said, then jerked his head at the slimmer, more delicate boy, “but dumbfuck there lost it.”

“That’s not my name,” he said. “My name’s really Cheyenne.”

“Has he been back since?”

“Who? Andre?” he asked, and I said who else, and he nodded, then must’ve hit Nihil’s femur, because he yanked the wire back and tried again.

“He was here this morning,” the butch kid said, bored with waiting for Cheyenne, holding up the wet skull. “He left me this to do. He was pissed about me busting the lock so he went to get a new one, but he hasn’t been back, that was…”

“Days ago,” said Cheyenne. “Days and days and days.”

So I prowled, and the boys paid little attention, although I learned that the other’s name was Oscar but he would only answer to Axl. Then I found another one flat out on the concrete, and for a moment thought here was the source of that skull, but this one’s was still attached, if no better for it. Thick as mud, dried blood caked the misshapen back of his head and the sledge mallet nearby. I wondered what it had sounded like, if it’d been anything like the skulls of those antecedent cows.

“Who” — I pointed — “did this?”

“We all took a turn,” Axl said. “Andre went first.”

“Nihil heard it loud and clear,” Cheyenne told me. “Andre says he needed it to wake up more, you know, like a clock radio?”

“And that worked?”

“Did it work, shit, look at him,” said Axl. “Now we’re just waiting for him to come around the rest of the way.”

“The rest of the way from where?” I asked, and if the boys couldn’t articulate it, maybe they understood the same way I was beginning to, below the skin in a place where it took more than words to cut to.

Maybe, being so much sooner out of the void than I was, they unconsciously knew that great power flows along the path of least resistance. Paradises demand gods, and gods demand mouths of their own, to eat and to proclaim, and a lost or fallen status changes nothing. Where there might’ve once been glory, hunger will do just fine, and it’s better to be the one doing the serving than one of those being served up.

Trying not to shake so hard, I said to Axl, “What’s with the skull, Andre give you any reason?”

“I hate this blue shit, it gets all over everything.” Axl poured a can of water over the skull and squeezed the S.O.S. pad and wiped away blue and pink suds. “He wants to make something out of it, I don’t remember the name, something weird, he says Nihil told him what it was and how to do it.”

“A damaru,” Cheyenne called over. “That was the word.”

“How’d you remember that?” Axl wondered.

Cheyenne’s shrug was very elaborate as he, almost singing it, said that he didn’t know, he just remembered things, so I asked what a damaru was and got the shrug again, “Something you make out of skulls, I guess,” and then he cut another wire and started on Nihil’s quaking knees.

I waited for Andre, long enough for things to start seeming more normal, not that they were, but you get used to whatever’s around. We were starting to lose the light overhead when he came back, carrying something in a vinyl bag, with another young boy at his side who showed no sign of recognizing the other two, and I thought, What’s he doing, scooping them up one at a time?

“Oh, hey,” Andre said, and he shuffled in his olive canvas coat, with darting eyes. “Been here long?”

I said yes, and Andre gave the vinyl bag to Axl, who looked inside and started going on how it wasn’t fair, it was Cheyenne’s turn to clean one, or get this new geek, or me, so Andre tried to calm him, saying it could wait. Then he had to calm the new boy, who’d winced so hard at being called a geek by someone older that I thought he’d be sick.

“Where’d they come from, Andre?”

“The skulls? Just … around.”

“The kids. These kids…?”

He looked as if I’d asked the too-obvious. “They’re all over, Angus, they’re like puppies, you know. Everywhere you look.”

“Except they don’t have tags, I guess.”

Andre, turning on me, said, “You think I’m kidnapping them, do you? Because I’m not, there’s no need for that,” and he spun the newest arrival around, this thin wisp of a little boy with the cringing eyes under choppy bangs, then he yanked up a sleeve to show me the constellation of crusty pocks along that undersized arm, cigarette burns of varying recent vintage. “You think he does that to himself? You usually have to get a little older than six before you start doing that to yourself.”

I couldn’t react, waiting for something that wasn’t true.

“Believe me, I know,” he went on, then sent the new boy over by the remains of the fire, which Cheyenne was trying to rekindle now that he was finished with Nihil. “I’m just trying to make things better for them, is all, make things better for myself.”

“By bashing in the backs of their heads?”

“Only that one. You can’t save everybody.”

“Yeah, but Andre, they’re kids, you can’t make decisions like this for them. How much did you know when you were eight, nine?”

“Enough to know how much I hated when those assholes would beat on me just to hear me cry. That’s why I’m doing them a favor, either giving them power to survive, or putting the weak ones past all the hurt, forever. Either way it’s done out of concern.” Andre slumped and let his face sag as though he hadn’t slept for days. “You don’t understand, I’m just trying to get the dreams to stop.”

“Dreams?”

“Dreams,” then he pointed to the quieted Nihil, proud and terrible and mighty in that mangle of flesh and metal, and for the first time I realized they’d wired him into his own antenna. “I was the one who dreamed he was dead, wasn’t I, the one he called to first? So I’m only giving him what he wants.”

“And that includes the damaru?”

Andre looked surprised. “You know about that?”

I said only from Cheyenne, and asked what it was.

A damaru is a kind of magical drum, he explained, hourglass-shaped and Tibetan in origin. Right away I knew this was nothing Andre would know about, it sounded more like Jamey talking, Jamey and his lore about things that made noise. Jamey’s incorruptible brains picked by Nihil, the coagulated voice of rust and impulse.

Damarus could be made of wood, but the truly powerful ones were made from two skulls, tops sawn off like bowls, then joined at the crowns, with membranes affixed over the ends. You didn’t beat it as such, but shook it, and two knotted cords whipped back and forth and did the rest.

“Skulls, they’re really resonant,” Andre said. “He told me in one of the dreams that powerful damarus can wake the dead.”

The idea was interesting enough to get me sidetracked, forget the moment and think of what was really going on here. The raising of a new army, maybe, or founding of a new religion of the null and void. Of course it was very Darwinian in nature, you couldn’t deny that, but it had gone this far, so who was I to judge.

Axl was compliant again, scouring the second skull, and I saw that it’d already been peeled and partially cleaned, and so easier to ignore that not all that long ago there had been a face on it, atop someone’s shoulders, someone who’d been laughing or shouting or crying.

I looked up, far above Nihil in that gabled tower, past the pulleys and chains, looked toward the day’s last light, thinking they’d better get the fire going again, or no one would be able to see and maybe they would freeze. Through the broken boards swirled fine snow, and now out of the wind it drifted straight down, and I moved over before Nihil and shared it with him, that first kiss of winter.

The snowflakes melted upon his skin, Nihil warmer than room temperature at least, while behind drooping eyelids the orbs were twittering back and forth again, dreamer’s eyes. I wondered if he was privy to things miles away, in Chicago’s coldest heart. If in his vast expanding mind he saw a canvas of brick and cinderblock, and on it a constantly unfolding mural of slaughter and kickbacks, and if it flowed, a story like in a movie, or if it was just what it was, random and senseless, like coming attractions.

Snowflakes on my face, I remembered being here that winter day with my father, hating how such a simple sensation can take you back so far, so fast, so thoroughly.

And I remembered Jamaal, being with him in this room the day after his sister was burned. Where was he now, anyway, and did he that day wonder where his life would lead, or did he try to shut out all thoughts of the future, suspecting that nothing good could come of it?

Snowflakes running down our faces, Nihil grunted and grinned.

The fire was going by now, smoke rising pale gray, and in the play of flame and shadow, among their four silhouettes, I saw the tallest lift his arm above the smallest, staggering off balance as he swung the sledge mallet. In the meat locker hush came a thud of case-hardened steel against curving bone, occipital I think, and at the instant of impact Nihil twitched and strained and panted and pulled at the wires that traversed his inner realm, as though he’d felt it across the room and all the way down to marrow.

The blow had been glancing, the puny boy screeching as he buckled to his knees, but Cheyenne and Axl caught his shoulders. I was flying across the room without having thought to, Andre braced for another swing, telling the keening boy how sorry he was that he’d messed up, he’d do better this time, and maybe it was true, that if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.

Andre malleted the boy a second time before I could ram into him, and everybody tumbled, and I could hear the excitable squeak of the bedsprings, then I wrested the sledge away from Andre and knocked him on the knee, and when we disentangled he was crying, crying and hiccuping, sounding no different than when we were in third grade, except the spectators weren’t laughing.

He rolled onto all fours, favoring the one knee, and after I stood over him, sledge in hand, he lowered his head and stretched his neck out, body still except for the shudders from his sobbing. When I didn’t move he began begging me to do it, although whether he wanted to sacrifice himself to Nihil or simply end everything wasn’t clear to me. But nothing much ever was.

I dropped the mallet to the killing floor with a clink, and Andre offered no resistance when I stripped the long canvas coat off his back, peeling it away like a skin to drape it around the six-year-old. He was still alive, but silent now, no more wailing left in him as he bled from the back of his head and both ears. He weighed almost nothing in my arms, a scarecrow with pupils fixed and dilated. I wrapped the coat tighter, packing him to travel.

We’d gotten as far as the door when that sound came again, more solid this time, mallet into thicker bone, and when I looked toward the fire and what was going on there I couldn’t make out which was Cheyenne and which Axl, but it didn’t matter, they were taking turns, both silhouettes hopping from foot to foot in their glee, and naturally Nihil loved it, ate it up like ambrosia.

With the boy in my arms I rushed out of the slaughterhouse and through the woods, breath in plumes, the hiss of fresh snow whispering through the trees. In that stillness I was the bull, the violator, shoes mashing layers of dead leaves while I plotted a course to the nearest hospital, Central DuPage probably, I could hand him over at the emergency entrance and fade before anyone could get my license plate, I didn’t even know this boy, how could they connect us?

The lights of the houses grew brighter ahead, and the boy, so weightless before, became heavier with each step. I stopped to adjust and set him down a moment, braced against one bent knee, but in the twilight his face began to streak, blood from both nostrils, and his limbs trembled, weak as a rabbit’s heartbeat, and that was it, he had no more of anything. I watched it leave.

We lay in the leaves and sticks and frost, dusted with snow, then I looked back at the slaughterhouse, where smoke rose from the gabled tower, and I wondered if I shouldn’t see the rest of it through. I’d already amazed myself, taking an actual moral stand on something, so I left the boy on the path for now and went back, back to the killing floor.

Their sledge now still, Cheyenne and Axl were crouched before the fire, wiping their faces clean, while I stood before Nihil. I could cut him into pieces, burn him, stop it here before his dream spread any further. He was as revivified as I’d yet seen, Andre’s skull especially resonant maybe, and his eyes were open, looking, comprehending. They fixed on me with an unblinking struggle to contract his focus to one tiny mite before him.

“I,” he whispered, slow and laborious, “know … you…”

I shriveled. You cannot look upon such a thing, or hear its voice, and feel sure of anything, especially conquering it, except for one: Nothing is as you believed, and is probably worse.

His eyes never left me, two dark malignant stars.

“Ohhhh,” his withered lungs creaked, “negative…”

I’d heard all I wanted, drifting over to sit beside the fire, warming my hands because there was nothing else to do until rush hour traffic thinned. Cheyenne and Axl watched with expectation now that Andre had gone the way of the weak, seeming to expect me to bring them their hamburgers now. Later, when I left, I almost told them to go home until I remembered they were, and the last I saw of them they were tugging on the chains to hoist Nihil and the springs up, up, higher, into the gabled tower and gathering smoke, where he might better see and hear and smell all.

O, he’d said, negative, in recognition, and now I knew what it meant, but could never recall having told Jamey my blood type.

On the path I retrieved the boy, because he deserved better, and carried him to my car, no suburban dweller stopping us because I looked like I knew what I was doing, every wet mile of the way, southeast, into a buffering industrial zone before Chicago peters out into farmland.

No one lived near, and it was too late for blue collars and too cold for gangbangers. We had the wastescape to ourselves, a jagged field of refuse like the worst of Belfast or Beirut, or an elephant graveyard, only for a city, iron bones and entrails everywhere you looked. On clearer days you could look north and see the skyscrapers of downtown.

I could never have left the boy at the slaughterhouse, had no reason to believe he had much of any family who would do right by him and his pock-burned arm, so I carried him into the scrapyard for the most fitting mausoleum I knew: the big boiler that Mae and Jamey and I had turned into a giant drum one Sunday last summer.

This time it was empty, although Mae had never known any different, and it was out of the wind and elements, just a cut-out heart that had long ago ceased thumping. In there I laid him, with his soggy head, wrapped in an olive coat big enough for a shroud, and I wished I’d had a flower or two to leave, but it was the wrong season, and always would be for him.

*

We’d chanced across the boiler while exploring, Jamey always on the lookout for new sound sources, and to him this place was a playground, if one where anyplace you fell you’d contract tetanus. I remember him running both hands over the boiler’s plated hull, asking, “Who could throw away something with this much potential?”

“The world is full of stupid people,” Mae said. “Why not just give up and try to blend?”

At Jamey’s instigation we took bars of scrap metal and began hammering away to see what the thing sounded like, a deep hollow gonging of incredible density. Soon we found our rhythm to work around, something of our individual selves given over to a group mind. It happened naturally, bypassing thought, the reverberations taking us over as we swung and sweated and felt our arms thrumming with each impact, down to the pits of our stomachs, until it felt as though the boiler were playing us instead. We served it, dancing to its massive peal, until we felt we might raise such shockwaves we could collapse the city into piles of rubble, if only we had the stamina to play that long.

And when our arms gave out and echoes rang, Jamey wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “I’ve got to bring my remote DAT down and record this sometime,” then he ran to a port where some intake pipe might’ve once connected, crawling halfway through to listen to the last dying echo.

We asked him what it was like, if he heard God, and moments later he backed out, with a subdued and thoughtful frown. He dug for car keys and handed them to Mae, asking if she’d do him an enormous favor and check his trunk, he might’ve left a tape deck in there after all.

Mae said, “I’m nobody’s coolie, you know,” but went anyway.

“You lied, didn’t you?” I said, because he had, and when Mae was halfway to the car Jamey motioned me to follow his lead and we crawled into the boiler like a giant womb.

We stared at the withering vagrant curled in his rags and filth, features sunken, one desiccated hand atop an empty bottle, and Jamey wondered aloud how long he’d been there, and I said long enough to turn halfway into a mummy, baked inside here.

“Why didn’t you want Mae to know?” I asked.

“I just didn’t,” he said, and shrugged. Then: “She’s seen enough for being nineteen. Her mother quit eating, some reason, disappointed in Mae, like that. Shriveled up and died. She didn’t say much. I thought this guy might…”

No need to finish.

“I didn’t know any of that,” I said.

“Now you do.”

Why I made the connection I don’t know, but under the crud and whiskers and haggard years this vagrant could’ve been fifty, and I said, “For all I know? That could be my father.”

Jamey nodded, understanding everything. “For all I know, a year from now, it could be me.” Then he nudged my arm. “Joke.”

We left the boiler, nothing more to see or say. Back at the car Mae told him thanks for nothing, sending her on a false alarm, but she was quick to forgive. Jamey eased into a big smile, just the most heartening thing, as this time it carried up to his eyes, and it meant different things to each of us, I’m sure, but to both of us he seemed to be saying that everything was going to be okay … and for the rest of that day, at least, it really was.

*

After I’d entombed the boy, with the requisite lack of prayers, I headed for home, although not directly, first stopping by a leather shop on Belmont and buying a pair of handcuffs from their kink counter, and no one remarked on or even paid any particular attention to the smeared blood on my clothing, but it was the kind of thing that wouldn’t go unnoticed at home.

“What happened?” Rachel said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

I assured them I was fine. “I tried to help this puppy, it’d been, you know, been hit,” and shook my head so they understood.

“Oh, why’d you tell us that?” said Mae. “That’s sad, that’s just too sad, I hate even thinking about it, can’t stand it,” and Rachel and I brushed the hair from her face, and she was so very fragile in her way, so delicate, needing more protection than I’d ever imagined.

I took a hot shower and put on fresh clothing, then watched TV with them awhile until deciding to get to work, coming up with a few long nails to permanently seal the windows near the fire escape. A neighbor complained about the hammering, pounding on the wall in counterattack, but it was over soon. I checked the door, all three locks secured, but I could get more.

“Angus?” said Rachel, behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on. “What’s the matter with you?”

“There’s a lot of sick people out there,” I said, as if this were news, then put away the hammer, smiling at Mae and taking her by the hand, gently, so she wouldn’t worry. I led her into the bedroom, had her kneel, and she must’ve thought it was a game of sorts because she grinned with uncertainty and trust, even while I handcuffed her to the radiator and asked, “Would you like anything to read?”

Rachel quit trying for the key eventually, and stayed with Mae the rest of the night, hours I spent sitting before the living room windows, fighting sleep, watching streetlights and skylines.

But mostly I thought of the slaughterhouse and the years, and the interrelationship between them, trying to comprehend all that those walls had witnessed. And I felt that I understood them just a bit better now, those cows with flattened skulls convulsing in the abattoir, this factory designed to mulch them into patties and grease for a city of mouths always hungry for more.

The sun came up, gray skies over fresh snow, but beneath it the same old city, where somewhere even now a line was forming for me to stand in, so I went out to find it, and join the herd.