Hell's Half Acre

four.

THE KING JAMES HOTEL IS STRICTLY OLD WORLD. I limp into the lobby, still shaken. A silent valet in an elegant green uniform comes forward to take my bag, a shapeless leather pouch that holds my toothbrush and what remains of my wardrobe. I shake my head and mutter that I’m not feeble. The valet tips his cap, flashes me a ghostly smile. I give him five dollars, because I believe in big tips and because I don’t necessarily want him to notice that I’ve just had my ass kicked good and proper.

The valet is young and thin with dark circles under blue eyes.

What’s your name? I say.

Jeremy, sir. I’m here until midnight.

I have a bad hangover, Jeremy. What do you recommend?

He shrugs. Vanilla milkshake with a shot of espresso and splash of brandy.

That sounds perfect.

Your room number, sir?

I glance at the scrap of paper on which I’ve written Jude’s room number.

My name is Poe. I’m in room 1221.

The kid blushes at the mention of this number and I gather he’s met Jude. This makes me smile. Jude was always very sweet to grocery clerks and postmen. I give the kid another five and he says the milkshake is already on its way.

The elevator rises slow and dreamy. I use the time to pull myself together. Take a few deep breaths to slow the pulse, examine the shoes for dog shit. Look in the mirror, check my face for spattered blood. Polish the teeth with my shirtsleeve and hope my breath is not too poisonous. I slap my face for a touch of color. Drag the fingers through my hair and sniff the clothes. Tobacco and vodka and unwashed Phineas. I stare at my hands, which tremble. I tell myself that everything is right as rain. Only now do I allow the video drone in my head to replay the unhappy meeting I just had with Sugar Finch.

On the third floor of the Alamo I had disappeared into the shadows, soft and velvet. A fire alarm sounded, a low-pressure slow burning grind that hit you in the spine and made every molecule in you beg to get the fuck out of there. I waited, though. I was gonna kill this guy. I didn’t know how. I imagined he would be running when he came out of the room and I was going to sweep his legs, take him down the way Jude taught me. Then disable him with a punch to the throat and figure out how to stop his heart beating. Maybe I would ram my thumbs into his eyes and just keep digging until I struck gold, until I scooped out brain matter. But when he came out of room 39, Sugar Finch wasn’t running. He was walking, right at me. Like he knew I was there, like the motherfucker could see me plain as day. I went low and tried to sweep his legs but it was a joke. He was way too fast and he jumped right at me. He was on top of me like a spider on a moth, his hand on my throat.

He leaned close and said, I remember you. You saved my life today. I won’t forget that. But come to my house even once more and you won’t walk again.

He stood up, yanking me to my feet. I could barely breathe.

I remember your girl too, he said. That pussy tasted just like sunshine. He grinned, and licked his teeth. I should have kissed you goodbye that day, you could have tasted her on my mouth.

Then he was gone, blowing away easy as smoke.

Now the elevator groans and the doors open on the twelfth floor of the King James.

The hallway before me is silent. Blue and comforting. The light is soft and there are no shadows. Hum of a faraway ice machine. Lush carpet underfoot, dark as midnight with random flowers and triangles of pink and gold. And so soft that my footsteps are a whisper. I could fall over dead and the carpet would swallow the noise and this is why I love hotels. Two a.m. and two p.m. are interchangeable. The light is ever gentle. There is always ice to be had and a body may hit the floor without disturbing anyone. The room numbers descend to the left and I move along in search of 1221, the fingers of my right hand trailing down the wall behind me. The hall twists and turns and intersects itself more than I feel is necessary, and I wonder if the rooms come in unusual shapes and sizes. I am soon lost down a narrow tributary and the numbers are pissing me off. They irrationally grow larger on one side and smaller on the other. I pass 1217, 1219 and stop. Blue midnight stretches before and behind me. Traces of pink and gold and the underwater light of dreams.

The door to 1221 is cracked open. Not a mistake Jude would generally make, not in this life or the next. I push it open ever so gentle, and still there is a soft hiss of escaping air, as if I have just opened the hatch of a spaceship. The room is five degrees colder than the hallway and completely fucking dark. The door closes softly behind me and I’m blind as an underground beast.

Exhale and wonder.

The brain of your average human male is damp and slippery and the descent into adolescent fantasy is as casual as falling off a log. I turn on the light and Jude is naked and blue on the bathroom floor, a plastic bag over her head. I turn on the light and Jude is lounging on a puffy white bed in black leather pants and nothing else. Tangle of wet black hair on white pillows twisting like snakes and the pants are so tight they will have to be peeled from her skin. I turn on the light and Jude stands an arm’s length away, a straight razor in one hand. She wears dark sunglasses and a glossy red raincoat that won’t show blood.

I turn on the light and the room is empty.

Make a fast sweep through the entire space, which is big enough to house a small army, to be sure. I take a pass through the bathroom. Nightmares and bad blood be damned. Black tile and three walls of mirrors. The shower is a dark chamber behind pale green glass, empty. The tub is sunken into the floor. There is a bidet, which pleases me somehow and I smile into three mirrors at once. There is an antique cosmetics bag on the edge of the marble sink, black leather with silver clasp. The only other sign of her presence is a fine black streak of fecal matter on the slope of the toilet bowl.

Taped to the bathroom wall are three photographs, bright color shots taken with a telephoto, blown up to eight by ten. By the angles, I’d guess she shot these from high above. I see Jude on a rooftop, crouched like a sniper and wonder why she didn’t just kill them when she had them in her sights. And a voice in my head says, because that wouldn’t have been so up close and personal as an intimate scalping. I focus on the three faces, three monsters. Two of them are Shane and Sugar Finch. Their names, birthdates, Socials, tattoos, and distinctive marks are written in fine black ink along the borders, like delicate marginalia. The third photo is a guy with dark hair and blue eyes flecked with black, like turquoise in the sun. The name is John Ransom Miller. Five foot nine, one seventy. No Social, no distinguishing marks. D.O.B. is 11.02.59. Blink and I’m back in our flat in the Quarter. I see John Ransom Miller sprawled on the floor. This is the guy I crippled with that toilet tank lid. I wonder if he’s up and walking again. Maybe he’s in a chair.

Scrawled on the mirror above the sink, in brown lipstick, are five words. The velvet warms and binds.

Velvet.

The trouble is I don’t know the frame of reference, the context.

Velvet.

Jude always loved the word. She tossed it around like spare change and it had more than one meaning to her. In friendly conversation, the velvet may simply be defined as twilight. The gloaming. The velvet was telephone code for heroin. I had often heard Jude refer to her pussy as the velvet. And the velvet was used metaphysically to refer to the subconscious, to childhood memories. For Jude, velvet was the lost time of alien abductions. Velvet was euphoria and dread. Velvet was a perfectly good word, but one that always troubled me.

To my mind, the velvet is best translated as the sleep that resembles death. Velvet is the sleep that becomes death.

Outside of the bathroom proper is a vanity area with mirror and sink that serves as the bar. I reach for an open bottle of Jack Daniels and take small contemplative sips from it as I survey the room. The windows are blotted out by heavy curtains the color of smoke that fall from ceiling to floor. The sun may as well not exist. The sun has no hope in this room, and again it could be day or night. The television and refrigerator are tastefully housed inside an armoire. The carpet is the pale fleshy pink of a monster’s tongue and the walls are painted red.

Two queen beds, one of them stripped bare.

The exposed mattress is yellow with pale gray stripes and a bright red bloom near the middle that looks like fresh blood but is actually a pair of red silk underpants and now I feel a faraway surge of nausea tinged with memory. My head is fucking with me. The other bed is covered in a white quilt with splashes of blue flowers and looks as if it has not been touched since the housekeepers left it.

Along the far wall are two Beowulf chairs and a curved glass coffee table the shape of a teardrop, beneath which are two curious blue sneakers with orange stripes. Jude does not wear sneakers, as far as I know. I try to imagine her jogging along a bike path in sweatpants and sports bra and it just doesn’t work for me.

The cracked leather pouch still hangs around my neck as if I’m afraid someone might steal my toothbrush. I shrug it to the floor and kick it into a corner. I lift the bottle to my lips and commence to take another, longer drink of whiskey.

Jude blows softly on the back of my neck as she walks past and I nearly jump out of my skin.

Drinking from the bottle, she says. What would your mother think?

I choke and spit and manage not to bite off a mouthful of glass. I turn around slow as blood clotting, my eyes shut tight. Five years since the attack and in my head her face is still terribly swollen and bruised. The skin is black in some places and her left eye is drifting loose in the socket. I open my eyes and her face is perfect but for the pale narrow scar that nearly blinded her, that left a notch in her right eyebrow and now runs almost parallel with the worry lines in her forehead and disappears into her gold and brown hair.

Jesus, I say. Have a little mercy.

Mercy, she says. Mercy?

Compassion, I say.

Huh, she says. Any relation to the word merchandise?

The same Latin root, I say. I will give you this fine pig and ten sacks of grain if you spare my miserable life.

I thought you liked being miserable, she says.

Her hair is damp and longer than I remember. Her mouth is unchanged, the round lush lips with a tiny scar at one corner, where her boyfriend hit her with a rock as a kid. She wears a tight lime green shirt with no sleeves. The shadow and distraction of ribs and muscle and nipple. She’s had her bellybutton pierced since I last saw her. She wears blue jeans too big for her, that hang well below the hip. Barefoot, she is perhaps two inches shorter than I am but it’s hard to be sure because she rarely stands still. I’m dizzy, looking at her. The air between us is bright with sparks, like there’s static electricity coming from her skin. I have an urge to back away from her and I tell myself not to be silly.

She reaches to touch my face and I flinch away.

There is a brief, heavy silence. Jude stares at me, not smiling.

I open my mouth and she leaps on me like a cat. I drop the bottle and we fall to the bed, struggling. Jude was always very strong and she enjoyed violent foreplay but she’s not laughing, her eyes are shining with something that resembles desire but isn’t and when I try to kiss her, she moves her head and sinks her teeth lightly into my throat. I throw her to the floor and roll away. My hand goes to my neck and I am fairly surprised to see that she has actually drawn blood.

Jude breathes heavily, grinning at me.

What the fuck, Jude?

Her eyes are wild and manic, pupils big as marbles. Jude rarely touched drugs when we were together but I can see she is extremely high, almost vibrating. She shrugs and picks up the fallen bottle of Jack, most of which has seeped into the fleshy carpet. She takes a highball glass from the dresser and empties the bottle into it.

Mind if we share? she says. It’s the only clean glass.