Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

He laughs.

– Wow, was I wrong.

He’s in front of me. He looks over at the door. Looks back at me.

– I want to do something for you here, man. But you got to tell me something.

He takes his hands from his pockets.

– Where’s the Count, Joe?

I almost laugh. But it would hurt too much.

– Took you long enough, Terry.

He squats.

– Uh-huh, and now I’m asking. Where is he?

I look around the room.

– Notice you waited till we were alone to get into this.

– Joe.

– Still hiding the delicate inner workings of the ecosystem from your nearest and dearest.

– This is, man, this is very serious. So I’m, you know, clinging to my cool here and asking politely. Where?

– Hey, man, here’s a question for you.

– Not now, man.

– What was it like when you were in the Coalition? What was it like being all cronied up with Dexter Predo, you fucking fraud?

He puts a hand to his temple and rubs.

– I’m wondering, Joe. I’m wondering if you can possibly be as stupid as so many people think you are. I’m wondering if I have been wrong about you all these years and you really are the idiot people talk about you being, you know, behind your back.

He picks me up and throws me across the kitchen and I smash into the cupboards and hit the floor and shattered dishes rain over me.

He comes for me.

– I mean, hey, man, do you really think anyone would give a shit about that crap?

He grabs me by the ankle of my bad leg and swings me around and my back hits the table and it explodes around me and I keep going and I put a dent in the refrigerator door and eight of my ribs break.

He comes for me.

– Think about it, man, you know, the Society, it was created by a revolution against the Coalition. You know who starts revolutions? Citizens! Yes, I was in the Coalition. Everyone was in the Coalition. You think that’s a secret?

He takes me by the hair and punches me in the face twice and shakes his bloody fist.

– It’s not a secret. Yeah, I was an enforcer for the Coalition. I don’t, you know, go advertising it around or anything, but it’s not a secret. How do you think I learned about power, Joe? How do you think I learned about corruption? And when I learned those lessons, know what I did? I, you know, matured and changed. Like a normal fucking person. You think Lydia doesn’t know? She knows. But that’s because she bothered to learn some history. That’s because she knows something about Hegel and revolutionary dynamics. She knows that every thesis has an antithesis and that if you want to get anywhere you have to, man, you have to create a synthesis. And that, you know, that doesn’t just, like, happen. That takes work. And you need tools to get it done. So I’m asking you, Joe, seriously now, to drop the crap before I lose my cool.

He jerks my head from side to side.

– Tell me where the Count is.

Somewhere inside the fridge a bottle broke and OJ is leaking out onto the floor. I watch it drip.

– Yeah. Alright, I get it. I get it. I’ll tell you.

I look at my oldest friend through the blood in my good eye.

– He’s gone Enclave on you, Terry. So, you know, all you got to do is run over there to their turf and grab him.

He lets go of my hair.

He rocks back on his heels and drops to his ass.

He looks at the floor between his legs.

– Joe. Oh, man. Oh, man. Man. Do you?

He looks up.

– Do you not get it at all? Has it all just gone over your head, man?

He waves a hand above his own head.

– Is it all just up here in the ether? Because let me break it down. There’s a war. There’s a war being fought and it’s heating up, man. The new faces from Brooklyn, why are we trying to sort through all those rejects for the ones we can use? Because we’re gonna need them. It’s getting unstable. The Island is getting unstable. And it can’t last like this. We have to have, man, this is the deal, we have to have something new. It can’t go like it has forever. We have to try something new. And we need every resource. We need, God, I wish it were not so, but we need money. We need the Count’s money. And. More than that.

He touches the blood on his knuckles. The Vyrus.

– They are trying to figure this out.

He shoves his hand at me.

– Predo and the Coalition. They are studying this. And they have resources that we don’t have. The Count. We needed him to learn shit. We needed his, you know, expertise. Such as it was. We can’t. If you want synthesis to happen, man, if you truly want two things to become one new stronger thing, the two have to be balanced and equal. Otherwise you just get one thing eating up the other. And shitting it out.

He lowers his hand.

– So please, man, please, tell me, you know, tell me you’re fucking with me.

I look him over. This man. He took me in. He found me dying on the floor of a toilet and took me in and kept me alive. He taught me what I needed to know. Without him, I would have died that first night. Without him, I would have died a hundred times. Without him, I’d have been dead years ago and Evie would be in a hospital bed right now.

Like that’s his fault or something.

I want it to be, but it’s not.

Like it would change something about where we are now.

– I’m not fucking with you, Terry. He’s in the warehouse. He’s Enclave. They got him.

He flops on his back and stares at the ceiling.

– Shit. Shitshitshit.

– And Daniel is dead. So things are likely gonna get much more fucked up over there very soon.

He levers himself up on his elbows. Looks at me. Shakes his head. Gets to his feet and toes some of the wreckage from the table.

– OK, Joe. I guess that covers it.

He bends over and picks up the broken halves of his glasses.

– This, man, this is so perfect.

He drops them.

– Shit. Well. We’re gonna put you in the sun in the morning.

He walks to the door.

– I’ll see you, then.

Alone again. Which is actually nice. Because I am so fucking tired.

Naturally, I dream about Daniel.

Or a thing that used to be Daniel.

A black tendril of it worms from a split in the air and it shivers and peels its way from one world into this.

The old man of the subways points and laughs.

– See, buddy, see? Like I said. Looks like nothing, that rip in the air. Nothing a’tall, huh, buddy?

I study the rip. It’s doesn’t look like nothing. It looks like a rapidly healing scar in the throat of a sick girl.

Evie folds her arms on her chest.

– Why’d you lie to me, Joe? Why’d you lie about everything?

She cries a little and wipes the tears and puts a hand on my face.

– You didn’t have to lie like that.

Purple sores rise across my face and over my scalp and my hair falls out and the Wraith shudders from the scar in Evie’s throat and leaves her empty and it goes through me and freezes my blood and its passing whispers to me.

Be seeing you, Joe.

– You saved my life, you asshole. You saved my life and got me away from those animals and. I would have called it a wash. I would have said, Yeah, the asshole shot me, but he also saved my life. I would have said, Let’s just call it even. Where’s your humanity, Joe? Where is your damn humanity? You had to infect that poor woman? She wasn’t sick enough? You had to try and do that?

I open my eyes and look at Lydia sitting in the dark kitchen on one of the chairs from the ruined table.

– You gave her no chance. No choice. Just made it for her. Just. Look how small it makes us. Look how small our lives are. Look what we’re fighting over. The things we do to one another. You chose this for her? This little life, or an awful death. Awful.