Marked

ONE

So yet again she’s on the edge of death.

A tumor. A friggin tumor. Why would it be a tumor, for Chrissake? Why can’t it be a headache like any normal person would have? A migraine even. He could cope with her saying it was a migraine. People get migraines all the time. They don’t immediately assume their brains are about to disintegrate.

It was the same when she had those stomach pains last month. Appendicitis, she said. Or maybe even bowel cancer. He told her what it was. It didn’t take no medical expert to work it out. The bananas. Too many friggin bananas. She should be a monkey, the number of those things she eats. A big hairy ape.

He chuckles to himself. I’m married to a gorilla in a dress, he thinks. King Kong in frilly underwear. I better not take her to the Empire State Building anytime soon. Might give her ideas.

Harold Bloor hefts the two large garbage sacks out into the hallway, then closes the door softly behind him. He knows she’ll only complain if he makes the slightest noise. ‘You slammed it,’ she’ll say. ‘My head is pounding like a drum, and you went and slammed the door, you unfeeling bastard.’

He knows this because he’s heard it all before, many times. When she was anemic it was because he’d once talked her into making a blood donation. When she had a stiff neck it was because he’d thoughtlessly opened a window behind her. He’s always the one to blame. If she does have a friggin tumor — which she doesn’t — there’ll be an explanation that involves his inconsiderate behavior. Like not insisting they should move farther away from Japan when those nuclear reactors were hit by a tsunami.

He hitches his pants over his ever-expanding gut, picks up the bags again, and heads out of the building. At the top of the front stoop he pauses and watches a group of young men go past, dressed in T-shirts even though it’s the middle of October and heavy rain is forecast. He inhales a deep lungful of the city air. He smells exotic spicy food from the restaurant next door, mixed with the usual heady aroma of exhaust fumes. It makes him cough. This city, I should wear a face mask, he thinks. Or I could get one for the wife. A full face mask, completely covering every inch of visible flesh from the neck up and suppressing all noise generated in that vicinity. Purely for health reasons, of course. She shouldn’t keep breathing in these nasty city germs.

He chuckles again, then descends the stone steps. When he gets to the sidewalk, he turns and shuffles into the shadows of the stoop. He puts the bags down and removes the lid from the nearest trashcan.

Son of a bitch.

He replaces the lid, then tries the next one. And the next, and the next.

That’s it, thinks Harold Bloor.

This means war.

Two blocks away from the flashpoint of World War Three, Geoffrey Landis stares intently at his caramel torte, his arms and legs tightly crossed and his lips pursed in what he believes to be his most indignant pose.

‘It won’t jump off the plate and into your mouth, you know. You have to make a degree of effort.’

Geoffrey turns his glare on his boyfriend. ‘And what effort did it take to put whatever went into your mouth today? That’s what I want to know.’

‘Oh, puh-lease,’ says Stuart. ‘Don’t tell me we’re back on that again. I told you. It was a drink. One drink. He’s my boss. How could I say no?’

‘You start with an n, and then you put an o after it. It’s not difficult. Just because Antonio is your boss, it doesn’t mean you have to mince after him every time he clicks his fingers. There are limits, you know.’

Stuart gets up from the table and picks up his empty plate. ‘For God’s sake, you can be so childish sometimes. I had a drink with my boss in a public bar. I didn’t go down on him in the back of a taxi. Get it in perspective, Geoffrey. Maybe if you had a job of your own, you’d understand it a little bit more.’

He turns then, heads toward the kitchen area.

Geoffrey pushes back his chair and follows him. ‘I wondered when that would come up. I do work, and you know it. I work on this apartment. I work on doing all your washing and cleaning and ironing. I do all the jobs you hate to do. If it wasn’t for me, this place would be the stinking shithole it was before I moved in. So don’t you tell me-’

‘I’m not denying what you do here, Geoffrey. I’m simply pointing out that you don’t have an employer. You’ve never had an employer. If you did, you would understand that it’s sometimes a wise move to keep on your employer’s good side. And just because Antonio’s a good-looking Mediterranean type-’

‘You think he’s good-looking?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. With those teeth, I think he looks like a horse.’

Stuart smiles. ‘Well, he has been compared to a horse before, but not because of his teeth.’

Geoffrey crosses his arms again. He does it so abruptly that he punches himself in the bicep and has to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

‘Oh, so now we’re getting to it,’ he says. ‘The sex angle.’

‘Which angle’s that, Geoffrey? Do we need a protractor?’

Geoffrey has to resist the impulse to stamp his foot. He has done it before, and it only causes Stuart to laugh at him.

‘You know, you’re really starting to infuriate me. This is serious. I’d like to have a proper adult conversation about this, please.’

Stuart throws down his dishcloth and rounds on his partner. ‘Well, we can have an adult conversation when you stop behaving like a child. Now if you don’t mind, I need to clear away all this food you didn’t eat while you were sulking. So go away and come back when you’re in a more civilized frame of mind.’

Right, thinks Geoffrey as Stuart shows him the back of his head again. Right!

He storms toward the apartment door. Thinking, I’m going out. I’m going to find a bar and get drunk and maybe even pick somebody up and go back to their place. I may never even come back here again.

He opens the door, pauses at the threshold while he takes the deep breath he needs for the commencement of this decisive journey.

‘And don’t forget Agamemnon,’ Stuart calls after him.

Geoffrey lets the air out of his lungs again. The dog. It’s time for his walkies.

Not my problem, he thinks. Let Stuart do it for once.

Except that it is my problem. Aggie is my dog. He’ll miss me, even if nobody else in this place will.

Sullenly, Geoffrey heads back into the apartment, the planned demonstration of his independence on indefinite hold.

They’re all smiles when he first walks in. That’s because they figure he’s just another dumb schmuck they can rip off with their overpriced monosodium glutamate crap.

‘You want table?’ the girl asks him.

She’s pretty, thinks Harold. Even if she is a gook.

‘No,’ says Harold. ‘I want manager.’

The girl looks helplessly behind her, and one of her co-workers scurries over. He’s beaming idiotically too.

‘You want table?’

‘No. I want the manager. Are you the manager?’

‘No. No manager.’

‘Then get me the manager.’

‘No manager. Is family business. No manager.’

Harold sighs. ‘Okay, then get your dad.’

‘Dad?’

‘Your father.’

‘He not here. He very busy.’

‘Doing what? Putting out the trash?’

The young waiter simply blinks his lack of comprehension. Around them in the restaurant, the customers sense that something untoward is taking place, and the buzz of conversation fades, to be replaced by a few uneasy whispers.

‘I’m asking you about the trash,’ says Harold. ‘The garbage. Who put the garbage out tonight? Was it you?’

‘Garbage? No garbage.’

Two more male staff members glide silently toward Harold. The smiles have all evaporated now, but Harold isn’t fazed by the pathetic attempts to look stern. These guys have never encountered Mrs Bloor.

‘You don’t have garbage? Of course you have garbage. Everybody has garbage.’

One of the men calls over to the man behind the bar. Gives him some instructions in Chinese. The barman picks up a phone.

Says Harold, ‘You want to know where your garbage is? In my trashcans, that’s where. Your stinking garbage is in my trashcans.’

There is much head-shaking now. A whole row of heads on swivels. ‘No garbage.’

‘Yes garbage. In my trashcans. And it’s not the first time, neither. Every time I go to put out my trash, I can’t because the trashcans are full. They’re full of your shitty Jap food.’

‘Not Jap food. We not Japanese. We Chinese. Is not same.’

‘Whatever. It’s your garbage. From your restaurant. It stinks. It brings rats. Put your crap in your own friggin trashcans.’

He hopes that that will be an end to it. He hopes they will get the message and say sorry, and he can go home, secure in the knowledge that his waste will never again be adulterated by these people.

But no.

‘Maybe. .’ says one of the men. ‘Mmm. . maybe is your people eat Chinese food. Is people in your building trash.’

Harold wonders how these people get by on such piss-poor English. Well, I ain’t got all night to teach ’em how to talk good, he thinks.

He wags a finger at them. ‘No you don’t. I know my tenants. They haven’t changed for the past five years. I know their trash. This is restaurant garbage we’re talking about here. Your garbage.’

But the waiter is undeterred. ‘Yes, I think so. Is your people trash. Not restaurant.’

Harold looks each of them in the eye. He sees no sign of contrition, and every sign that they are going to continue to act dumb when it suits them. This softly-softly approach isn’t even scratching the surface.

Time to break out the big guns.

‘I’ll be back,’ he says, thinking they must have heard of Arnie. Everybody’s seen the Terminator movies. Even the Japs.

Tell someone you have a dog called Agamemnon, and they’ll assume you have a Rottweiler or a bull mastiff or some other nasty-ass monster just looking for the next limb to tear off. Geoffrey Landis’s Agamemnon is a tiny West Highland terrier. The only chance it has of killing something is to get it stuck in its throat. He’s had it for five years now — two years longer than he’s lived with Stuart. Probably have it a lot longer after his relationship with Stuart too, the way things are going.

He is ambling along East Sixth Street, heading in the direction of Tompkins Square Park. Aggie is on one of those extensible leashes that allows him to have a good roam and to investigate all those aromas that assail his doggy senses.

Stuart should be on a leash too. I mean, why does he think it’s perfectly okay to entertain other men in bars without even telling me? What if I did the same? What would he say about that?

Ahead, a burly man turns the corner of the block and starts coming toward Geoffrey. Although not as the crow flies. He weaves along the sidewalk as though he’s aboard a ship in a storm.

Geoffrey pauses. Winds in the leash a little. Wonders whether to cross the street. The man looks far too inebriated to be capable of putting up much of a fight, but Geoffrey’s maxim has always been that discretion is the better part of valor.

The man continues his serpentine meandering, but then lurches to his right and trips over his own feet. He crashes into an array of trashcans outside a drugstore, knocking a couple of them over and causing their contents to spill out onto the sidewalk.

The drunk struggles to his feet again, but then seems confused as to where he was going. Seemingly at random, he selects a bearing and follows it, apparently oblivious to the fact that he’s going back the way he came.

When the man has disappeared around the corner, Geoffrey resumes both his walk and his train of thought. He gets to the corner of the block, still seething over Stuart’s actions, and tries to decide which way to go next. It doesn’t seem sensible to follow the path of the drunk — Geoffrey’s other maxim being that it is better to be safe than sorry — so he could either continue along Sixth or take a left onto Second Avenue. Whichever direction he chooses, he thinks he should take his time about it. Give Stuart something to worry about. And if he phones me I’ll just ignore it. Maybe then he’ll realize just what-

He sees them then. Seated at the table in the window of that nice Italian restaurant across the street.

Antonio.

Or, to be precise, Antonio plus one. The plus one being a male friend. Although ‘friend’ seems a somewhat weak description, given that he has just twirled something onto his fork and pushed it into the mouth of Antonio.

Geoffrey’s evening suddenly seems a whole lot brighter.

It’s like disturbing a hornet’s nest.

When he walks back in carrying all those garbage sacks, the staff go crazy. All running around like headless chickens, yelling and jabbering.

Harold can’t stop a smile of satisfaction creeping into his jowly face. This is what you call an entrance.

When they descend on him, he holds his ground. He notices that they seem to have a leader now, an old guy with wild eyes and wild gray hair that looks to have been cut by its owner.

‘What you do?’ cries the old man.

‘Your garbage,’ says Harold, dropping the bags onto the floor. ‘I’m bringing it back to you.’

‘No. Not our garbage. We tell you before. Not garbage from here. You take back.’

The man picks up one of the sacks and pushes it into the arms of Harold, then bends to retrieve another one.

‘Not yours, huh? Okay, let’s see.’

Harold digs the fingers of both hands into the bag he’s holding. The flimsy plastic gives way easily, and he rips the whole thing open in one movement. As its contents hit the floor, a brown wet sludge splashes onto the old man’s shoes, and he jumps back in horror. Harold hears gasps from the customers, and even some laughter. They seem to be enjoying the show. The staff, on the other hand, are yammering furiously again and looking to each other to decide who’s going to do something about this refuse-slinging lunatic.

‘Well, what do we have here?’ says Harold. ‘Looks like gook food to me. And if my eyes don’t deceive me, I’d say those are napkins just like the ones you got on your tables here. Let’s try another one, why don’t we?’

He doesn’t wait for an answer. Just picks up another bag and tears it wide open, enabling it to disgorge its stinking sodden payload onto the intricately patterned Chinese carpet.

The staff are working themselves up into a frenzy now. They’re jostling each other and pointing at Harold and barking commands, but nobody seems to know what to do. It’s left to the old man to take action. He grabs at the third bag as Harold lifts it. Tries to yank it away from him. For a few seconds the pair form an absurd sight as they tug back and forth. It’s East versus West in a wrestling match for a prize that is literally garbage.

The inevitable occurs when the bag splits, and once again a pile of detritus cascades to the floor.

And that’s when time freezes.

This isn’t Chinese food, or Japanese food, or any kind of food for that matter.

It’s paper, mostly. Newspapers and magazines.

But there’s something else too.

It hits the floor hard and rolls across the carpet, stopping when it bumps up against the soiled shoes of the elderly restaurant owner. Everyone looks down at it. Customers seated at the nearest tables get to their feet for a clearer view. The yelling stops. The warring factions are on the same side now, united against whatever may have brought about the incredible apparition that has landed in their midst.

Harold stares at the object in disbelief. Is it really what it looks like?

When the place erupts again — the screams of horror, the yells of fear and confusion, the sounds of people retching and vomiting — Harold knows he is not mistaken. Everybody else has seen the item for what it is.

A human head.

Geoffrey doesn’t move for several minutes. He remains on the street corner, a huge smile on his face as he dreams about how he is going to break his news to Stuart.

That boss of yours? Antonio? The one who took you for a drink? The one you think is so good-looking? Wanna know something about him?

And then it hits him. How bitchy his imagined words sound. His smile drops away, to be replaced by immense sadness at his planned cruelty to the most important person in his life.

Because what he realizes then is that Stuart was being honest with him all along. There was nothing to it. A harmless drink with the boss — that’s all it was.

I need to make it up to him, he thinks. I should go back there right now and tell him how sorry I am for jumping to conclusions and being spiteful. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

He almost wants to run across the street and knock on the restaurant window and blow Antonio a kiss for his unwitting part in all this. But he doesn’t. Instead, he turns away, feeling that he is a happier and wiser man.

Agamemnon seems happy too, although maybe not so wise, buried as he is in the trash that the drunk spilled onto the ground. Geoffrey tightens the leash and tries to yank him away, but the dog continues with its burrowing into the mound.

‘Aggie, come on! What the hell have you got there?’

Geoffrey takes a few steps closer. He sees that Agamemnon is concentrating on one particular garbage bag, ripping at it with his front paws and teeth.

‘Aggie!’

He heaves on the leash, dragging the dog backwards as its claws scrabble on the sidewalk for purchase. It’s only once Aggie is out of the way that Geoffrey gets a good look at the item of interest now exposed to the air.

It looks like. .

Geoffrey brings a hand to his mouth as he utters a high-pitched giggle.

Well, it looks like. . An ass. A tush. A pair of buttocks. All by themselves.

It has to be something else. A part of a store mannequin, maybe. Something like that. It can’t just be-

But when he steps closer and sees the tattoo of the angel at the base of the spine, its wings unfurled over the wound-ridden globes of flesh, when the aroma hits him and he is instantly transported into a butcher’s store, when his dog continues to strain to get back to its feast of raw meat — that’s when he knows this is no dummy.

And that’s when he scurries to the curb to empty his stomach.