Chicago Noir

Arcadia by Todd Dills

Chicago & Noble

I work the desk at the old folks’ house, though I also live there. People come in, drug dealers, little high school gangbangers trying to score an initiation sale at the place. They figure a captive audience is all they need. I tell Benjamin, the 300-pound security guard, to toss them out on their knees. He’s always happy to oblige. There are junkies in this place who haven’t had a drop of their particular sauce in years, yet they never leave. They need the gatekeeper. They need me.

That’s how I met Tristam, years ago; he turned out differently than many of the little entrepreneurs, though. After some college at the UIC — that’s C Chicago-go, this shithole of a town — he flunked out, addicted to the city’s second letter. He dropped by and was so skinny and haggard I didn’t recognize him at first.

“Goddammit, boy, you look like shit,” I said. “Plastic getting to you?”

We went on, as was our style in the days of old, about the plasticizing of the world around us. Plastic car rims, bumpers, plastic cigarette holders, plastic handles on doors to places like churches, plastic communion wafers (taking the symbolic one level higher) slated for reuse. Suck and spit, back into the offering plate. Then we struck a deal. Included in my diseased old man’s daily dose was a single helping of the vanguard Ajexo painkiller. The combination of a Valium-like synthetic with just the slightest twinge of morphine-derivative punch, these pills were then mythic among the junkie set, regarded as a sort of withdrawal cure-all. I didn’t take them, no way, since I was long off the hard shit and they’d have been the road back to death for me. Besides, pain I could live with.

In the spirit of God’s good grace, I handed them over to the boy. He needed help.

But Tristam didn’t keep his half of the deal: staying off the primary jolt. Time goes by and contracts lose their potency. Occasionally I’d start when on the bus on the way to a checkup, a prescription refill, and realize with the full weight of a catastrophe that the boy had gotten off at the park again to see the man who went by Valentino, recognizable by his perpetual attire: bright-red athletic jumpsuit, sneakers, and a fedora over his pristine afro. The pusher-pimp was known over the blocks for hard shit.

One particularly momentous day, I felt like a martyr, like I wanted to be Joan of Arc or some righteous-ass Palestinian or Iraqi. Tristam and I rode the bus east on Chicago truly without an idea of what would happen. What we wanted was routine, of course, however chaotic our lives might be; we could strive. It was all I could do to resist the urge to burn the whole fucking place down, myself with it. For me, the days start nervous.

I keyed my pilot to search the data bank for the right fit; I call it “pilot”, but really it’s custom, fabricated from the body of an old cell phone. It could get me into any city database long as I had the code. Old girl Jenna Simonsen of the Logan Square halfway house gave it to me in exchange for certain connections that only I can provide. At twenty-seven minutes past the hour, I ran a background check on myself, Mr. John Arcadia, to find I’d escaped from prison for the third time, but way back in 1987. More interestingly, I trashed the greenhouse of a neighbor in Waukegan, ended up in the hospital and with a charge of indecent exposure on top of other vandalism counts, a two-inch gash traveling the length of my buttocks. I got busted with marijuana two years later, and the cops put me in a boarding home with no hope of escape, which is to say without a goddamned chance, much less twelve jurors and a judge.

“There’s my money,” Tristam said.

The flunky pointed to the same park at the corner, by which we were presently passing; we stood each with one hand gripping overhead stabilizing poles like chimpanzees, myself keying the pilot in my other hand. The boy was getting bold. Valentino was there on the steps of the park’s field house in plain view.

“You mean you’re pointing him out to me now?” I said. “What about our deal?”

“Money,” Tristam said.

“That mean he got money, or he gone take your money?” I said, knowing too well the answer. “Boy, I don’t know why you just don’t settle on your fix with me. Settle on safety.”

“Who are you today?” he said, and before I could tell him about John Arcadia the greenhouse torcher, he gestured broadly back west, toward the church. “Meet you there,” he said, and hopped from the bus, his skinny legs forever appearing like they ought to crumple under the weight of his body, however paltry. This time he stayed aloft, floating toward the pusher-pimp. And I may have been shaken, distracted, or angered by this, and maybe it prefigured things to come, but I didn’t get heated just yet over it. I imagine he knew well what he was doing, the fuck, cause I didn’t miss a step, headed downtown for my checkup, preoccupied, scanning the pilot for further details.

In 1990, as it happened, I torched a service station, a blaze that singed the eyebrows of many a bystander when it got to the main gas tanks, and did time for it. In 1995 I got out and lit up the prison itself, which ain’t here in the record, but I did do it. I’m liberal with history, you might say; the details are there to be eaten and spit back out however you like. They run television commercials about people like me, and usually there is some woman whose voice is overrun with that of a man, and she looks very silly sitting in her posh kitchen at a polished-titanium table talking about the booze and whores she’s gonna buy on the vacation she’s gonna take to Tijuana on her stolen credit card. I ain’t in it for cash reasons, though. Money corrupts absolutely, to modify the old phrase. You might ask Tristam about that one. With me it’s more in the blood, you know.

I found a seat finally and just when I got relaxed an old bum strode by and knocked my legs. He was passing out badly reproduced leaflets on which were printed the Lord’s Prayer. The old son of a bitch stopped just by me and wailed on about the anointed cloths he was gonna give out to anyone with any bit of change whatsoever. He yelled through the bus, erupting brash and ugly in the center of this morning commute. Everyone ignored him but me. I could be him too, and was excited at the prospect for the moment, for I knew there would come a day when the pilot stumbled upon the fate of all gadgets of its kind, broke, and left me hanging with a story I couldn’t play for keeps. I needed another option.

I asked the bum his name. He looked a little like me. He stopped his sermon and turned my way, his eyes going wide.

“My name is your name, Jehovah,” he said, which I promptly keyed into the pilot. “Jehovah,” the old bum repeated.

The bus slammed to a hard stop, the vagrant swaying with the tide. Yeah, I could be this guy.

“Last name, social security,” I said.

The bum’s eyes shot wider still, and he broke into the prayer on his mangled photocopied leaflets, holding one up close to his farsighted eyes and shuttling out the rear door in the same motion, midsentence, at Larrabee. On his way out he dropped one of those “anointed cloths” he was talking about. It was bright-blue, a pretty picture against the ribbed black rubber of the floor. Before anyone else could get his or her hands on it, I jumped. It’s a holy day, I figured. I remained standing in honor.

They were gutting the old Montgomery Ward building at the time, turning the commercial space into luxury condos. I looked out the bus windows from my spot and saw straight through the twenty-and-some floors of the monstrosity. Can’t break a structure that solid, been standing much too long now, and the developers figured it to go the route of the rest of the neighborhood south of Chicago this far east since the retailer shut down, absolutely fucking filthy rich. It wouldn’t necessarily work out: On the north side of the street of course sat the outer edge of Cabrini-Green, the miniscule streets dead-ending before Chicago Avenue in cul-de-sacs, the single-story brick boxes reminding me of projects in cities much smaller. Say Charlotte, Atlanta. Long time since I’d seen those places.

I could be Jehovah or any other body. Not like there was someone to tell me different. I got off the bus at State and trekked it two blocks south to the clinic for my checkup, then down to the old-school pharmacy on Superior to refill my many prescriptions. I left feeling truly like a savior in spite of the name on my health card. Arcadia I am not. I pulled the blue cloth from my pocket and brought it to my nose. It smelled like the bum, stale and musty, slightly sour with sweat and urban rot. But hidden deep in that stink was a sweet flower blossoming.

My prescriptions took up a ten-page stack of printouts from the doctor’s computer. The pills came prepared in a plastic, everything plastic, slotted box, one small compartment to correspond to each day of the coming month. I don’t know how I managed to keep up with them, Jehovah the meek, the persecuted, the resolute, the vigilant. I gazed up at the time on a digital display clock outside the Holy Name Cathedral, then at my plastic, everything plastic, watch and made my way to the next meeting, muscling to the back of the bus, pilot switched off in my little drug bag. Today, I would need it no more. My name was secure.

I was spot on time to the abandoned church, where I used to spend my nights and many days before the old folks’ home took me, the state footing the bill. Tristam wasn’t there. I took my day’s meds sitting on the concrete steps before the boarded-up former door. I’d been waiting for the kid for nearly an hour when the nausea and pain kicked in, so I crept through the space between the half-kicked-through boards over the church’s front door. I laid down in the dark of the vestibule in communion with the Saints, the wind and whine of the expressway now a fading memory, nothing present but the pain; I concentrated, pinpointed all my holy energy on a flash behind my eyelids and soon enough fell fast asleep.

When I woke the nausea was still present but the pain had subsided. “Tristam,” I called out, expecting the kid to be conked out there somewhere near me in the dark. There was no answer, but I listened and could hear above the low outer din of his breath coming in long, slow gasps.

“Motherfucker,” I said, crawling dazed toward the sound. Nothing. I punched what I took to be his leg, and a voice I didn’t know boomed calmly through the cavernous dark.

“Who are you now?” it said. I got to my feet.

“Jehovah?”

Then a scrambling broke out and I was forced down onto my back, tackled. Tristam laughed through the darkness.

“Gotcha,” he said.

“Goddammit, boy,” I said. Tristam giggled and giggled on, and when finally I got a look at him, when he turned the flashlight on and I could see, I divined from the glare in his eyes and his slurry voice that he was fucked.

“I was just kidding, old man,” he said. “Don’t look so damn mad. You got the shit?”

“I’m holding,” I said.

“Oh ho ho. Well, hand it over.”

“I mean, you ain’t getting anything until you hold to your side of things.”

He sorta held there, held the flashlight pointed upward, held his body tensed in that brief attempt at comprehension of my words. And then when he fished through the muddled bank of connotations and meanings in his head, when he got what I was saying, I guess, he lunged at me, raising the flashlight high in the same motion as if to bring it down on my head. I caught his hand, and any fear the young man may have mustered in my head quickly turned to righteous rage. I wheeled out the only thing of particular strength I had anywhere near, the pilot, and in the gloom wheeled it around and caught Tristam on the side of his head. He fell hard to the ground, the flashlight rolling from his hand and coming to rest with its beam shining right in my face.

“You never wait for me to answer,” I said. “What’s my name, motherfucker? What is it?” He didn’t answer. “You call me Jehovah, you hear? Jehovah.”

I crawled over him and brought the pilot down on his head again and again and again. Tristam didn’t move. I may have hit him ten times, twenty times, but I know I stopped, the pilot now an unrecognizable mass of cracked plastic, everything plastic, and other parts. I crawled from the vestibule and into the sanctuary, where the light penetrated the empty window spaces above, stripped as the place was of its old stained-glass windows, lighting on the old wooden altar, where I knelt and prayed for the first time in years, through it all the murmur in my head telling me that the fraud of the act was just that, a fraud, that I was praying to myself, that I alone would determine the route to salvation.

A week or so after I killed the boy I stepped up on the bus, strident in my conviction, noble as the street itself as I paid the bus driver, murmuring “God bless,” and turned to face the crowded interior.

“I am Jehovah!” I hollered.

I opened my bag, bowed, and flung a handful of baby-blue towels into the crowd. I pulled a flyer up to my eyes and began to read, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name...”