Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

Being white and gay in Ethiopia is no easy matter, but we managed it by meeting on weekends in the nearest city. We’d go to multinational hotels, the impersonal expense-account Hiltons with which I am familiar and where they don’t care who you are. In those days, before he got sick, Matty Quinn walked around with a lilt, his arm half-raised in a potential greeting, as if he were seeking voters. His good humor and sense made his happiness contagious. A good soul has a certain lightness and lifts up those who surround it. He lifted me. We fucked like champions and then poured wine for each other. I loved him for himself and for how he made me feel. I wonder if Jesus had that effect on people. I think so.

By the time we both came back to the States, however, Quinn was already sick. I said I could fly out to see him, but he asked me not to, given his present condition. He was living in a friend’s basement, he told me, and was looking around for a job, and he didn’t want me to visit until his circumstances had improved. That was untrue, about the job. Instead, he was losing himself. He was breaking down. He was particulating. When he disappeared, I resolved to find him.

—

Entering The Lower Depths, the bar on Hennepin that I finally identified as the place Quinn had described to me, I saw, through the tumult of louts near the entryway, a man sitting at the back of the bar, reading a book. He did not have graying black hair, but he did wear glasses, so I made my way toward him, reflexively curling my fingers into fists. I elbowed into a nearby space and ordered a beer. After waiting for a lull in the background noise and finding none, I shouted, “What’s that you’re reading?”

“Shakespeare!”

“Which play?”

“Not a play! The sonnets.”

“Well, I’ll be! ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes!’ ” I quoted loudly, with a calculating, companionable smile on my face. I extended my hand. “Name’s Albert. Harry Albert.”

The man nodded but did not extend his hand in return. “Two first names? Well, I’m Blackburn.”

“Black Bird?”

“No. Blackburn. Horace Blackburn.”

“Right. My friend told me about you!”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Matt Quinn.”

Blackburn shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

“Okay, you don’t know him. But do you know where I might find him?”

“How could I know where he is if I don’t know him?”

“Just a suspicion!” Doing business in central Africa, I had gotten used to wily characters; I was accustomed to their smug expressions of guarded cunning. They always gave themselves away by their self-amused trickster smirks. I had learned to keep pressing on these characters until they just got irritated with me.

“Come on, Mr. Blackburn,” I said. “Let’s not pretend. Let’s get in the game here and then go to the moon, all right?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Blackburn insisted. I wondered how long this clown had carried on as a pseudo-Indian peddling narcotic painkillers to low-life addicts and to upstanding citizens who then became addicts. Probably for years, maybe since childhood. And the Shakespeare! Just a bogus literary affectation. He smelled of breath mints and had a tattoo on his neck.

“However,” he said slyly, “if I were looking for him, I’d go down to the river and I’d search for him in the shadows by the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.” Blackburn then displayed an unwitting smile. “Guys like that turn into trolls, you know?” His eyes flashed. “Faggot trolls especially.”

Reaching across with guarded delicacy, I spilled the man’s 7UP over his edition of Shakespeare, dropped some money on the bar, and walked out. If this unregistered barroom brave wanted to follow me, I was ready. Every man should know how to throw a good punch, gay men especially. I have a remarkably quick combination of left jabs and a right uppercut, and I can take a punch without crumpling. Mine is not a glass jaw. You hit me, you hit a stone.

Outside the bar, I asked a policeman to point me in the direction of the Mississippi River, which he did with a bored, hostile stare.

—

I searched down there that night for Quinn, and the next night I searched for him again. For a week I patrolled the riverbank, watching the barges pass, observing the joggers, and inhaling the pleasantly fetid river air. I kept his face before me as lovers do, a light to guide me, and like any lover I was single-minded. I spoke his name in prayer. Gradually I widened the arc of my survey to include the areas around the university and the hospitals. Many dubious characters presented themselves to me, but I am a fighter and did not fear them.

One night around one a.m., I was walking through one of the darkest sections along the river, shadowed even during the day by canopies of maple trees, when I saw in the deep obscurity a solitary man sitting on a park bench. I could make him out from the pinpoint reflected light from buildings on the other bank. He was barely discernible there, hardly a man at all, he had grown so thin.

Approaching him, I saw that this wreck was my beloved Matty Quinn, or what remained of him. I called his name. He turned his head toward me, and gave me a look of recognition colored over with indifference. He did not rise to greet me, so I could not hug him. He emanated an odor of the river, as if he had been living in it. After I sat down next to him, I tenderly took him into my arms as if he would break. But he had already been broken. I kissed his cheek. Something terrible had happened to him, but he recognized me; he knew me.

“I was afraid it was you, Harry,” he said. “I was afraid you would find me.”

“Of course I would find you. I went searching.”

He lifted up his head as if listening for something. “Do you think we’re all being watched? Do you think anything is watching us?” At first I thought he meant surveillance cameras, and then I understood that he was referring to the gods.

“No,” I said. “Nothing is ever watching us, Matty. We’re all unwatched.” Then I said, “I want you to come back with me. I have a hotel room. Let me feed you and clean you up and clothe you. I should never have left you alone, goddamn it. I shouldn’t have let you end up back here. Come with me. Look at you. You’re shivering.”

“This is very sweet of you,” he said. “You’re admirable. But the thing is, I keep waiting for him.” He did not elaborate.

“Who?”

“I keep waiting for that boy. Remember? That mother’s boy? And then when he shows up, I always hit him with a baseball bat.” This was pure dissociation.

“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s get you in the shower and wash you down and order a big steak from room service.”

“No, he’s coming,” he insisted. “He’ll be here any minute, propelled by thorns.” And then, out of nowhere, he said, “I love you, but I’m not here now. And I won’t be. Harry, give it up. Let’s say goodbye.”

I’m a businessman, very goal- and task-oriented, and I won’t stand for talk like that. “Come on,” I said. “Matty. Enough of this shit. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.” I stood before him and raised him by his shoulders as if he were a huge rag doll, and together, with my arm supporting him, we walked along the river road until by some miracle a taxi approached us. I hailed it, and the man drove us back to my hotel. In the lobby, the sight we presented — of a successful well-groomed gentleman holding up a shambling, smelly wreck — raised an eyebrow at the check-in desk from the night clerk, but eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.

I bathed him that night, and I shaved him, and I ordered a cheeseburger from room service, from which he ate two bites fed from my hand to his mouth. I put him to bed in clean sheets, and all night he jabbered and shivered and cried out and tried to fight me and to escape. He actually thought he could defeat me physically, that’s how deluded he was. The next day, after a few phone calls, I checked him in to a rehab facility — they are everywhere in this region, and he was quite willing to go — and I promised to return in ten days for a visit. They don’t want you sooner than that.