The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

LIGHT AND THE SUFFERER

My brother showed me the gun. I’d never seen one up close before. He kept it in a knapsack under his bed at the Y. He held it out and I looked at the black metal.

“You want me to hold it?” I said.

“What, at the place?”

“No, I mean now. I mean, do you want me to touch it or something. Now. I mean like, get comfortable with it.”

He stared.

“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. What do you want me to do with the gun?”

“Nothing. I’m just showing it to you, like ‘Look, I got it.’ Like, ‘Here’s the gun.’ ”

My brother was two years younger than me. I was just back from dropping out of my junior year of college, at Santa Cruz, and was living, quite unhappily, at my parents’ tiny new house in Plainview, Long Island.

Our parents, Jimmy and Marilla, had kicked Don out for the final time while I was away at school. They hadn’t heard from him for almost a year. I went and hung out at Washington Square and found him within a few hours.

“Okay,” I said. “Right. Nice gun.”

“Don’t get freaked.”

“I’m not freaked, Don.” I paused.

“Then let’s go, right?”

“Let’s go, Don,” I said, and I swear I almost added: This is good, we’re brothers, we still do things together. I almost said: See, Don.

Our parents named my brother Donovan because all their friends had already named their kids Dylan, I guess. It wasn’t important to Don. His only chance of ever hearing Donovan was if MC Death sampled “Season of the Witch” or “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in a rap.

Myself being a bit older, I knew those songs in their original versions, not from the radio, of course, but from the days when our parents still played their records.

I followed my brother downstairs. It was night. We walked the short distance to Washington Square Park but stopped half a block away. I stopped.

“What?” said Don.

“Nothing. Should we call the airport? Find out—”

“Like you said, there’s always gonna be a plane, Paul.”

We went into the park, through the evening throngs, the chessplayers and skatebladers, and I stood on the pathway waiting, shrugging off offers of nickel bags, while Don found his two friends, the ones who were supposed to kill him for stealing drugs.

“—gotta talk to you.”

“Randall sick of yo shit, Light.”

“Can we go up to your apartment, Kaz? Please?”

Don walked them towards me. A fat black man with a gigantic knitted hat: Kaz. Another black man, smaller in every way, with a little beard, and wearing a weirdly glossy, puffed-out gold coat: Drey.

Nobody my brother knew had a regular name. And they all called him “Light,” for his being white, I suppose.

“The fuck is this?” said Drey, looking at me.

“Paul,” Don mumbled.

“Looks like yo fuckin’ brother, man.”

“All us white dudes look like brothers to you, nigger.”

Drey grinned, then tightened his mouth, as though remembering that he was supposed to be angry at Don.

We walked out of the park, east on Third Street. All the way Kaz mumbled at Don: “Can’t believe you, man; you fuckin’ come around here; you took Randall; can’t believe you, man; fuck you think you doin’; look at you stupid face; you think you talk you way out of this; I should be doin’ you; fuckin’ crackhead; can’t believe you man.” Et cetera.

And Don just kept saying, every thirty seconds or so: “Shut up, Kaz, man.” Or: “Gimme a minute, man.”

We went into a door beside a storefront on First Avenue, and up a flight of stairs. Don and I ahead of Kaz and Drey, through the dark.

Kaz stepped around and let us in, and I looked down and saw Don take the gun out of his coat. Don wanted to pull it coming in; he’d said he knew that Kaz kept guns in the house. But not on his person. That was crucial.

We all got inside and Kaz closed the door, and Don turned around. “You’re dead,” said the fat black man the minute he saw the gun.

The place was just about empty: crumbling walls, a bed. And a cheap safe, nailed instead of bolted to the floor, price tag still showing. A safe house, literally. Crash and stash, as Don would say.

Don waved the gun between Kaz and Drey. “You’re dead,” said Kaz again. Drey said: “Shit.”

“Shut up. Paul, take their shit. Clean Drey up, then Kaz. Find the keys on Kaz.”

I stepped up to play my part. Keys on Kaz. I put my hand on Drey, who hissed: “Motherfucker.” It turned out the weird shiny gold coat was on inside out; the gold was the lining of a rabbit-fur fake leopard. Strange. I ran my hands through the fur, searching out Drey’s pockets.

I found a wad, singles on the outside, which I pocketed. Then an Exacto knife, which I tossed on the floor behind me, at Don’s feet. He kicked it to the wall.

When I turned to Kaz he slapped my hands away, a strangely girlish move.

“You a chump, Light,” he said, ignoring me. “Randall shoulda killed your ass already. He gonna now.”

“We’re all Randall’s chumps, Kaz, man. Now I’m taking and you can tell Randall what you want.”

“I ain’t no chump, man, Light. You the chump. Randall tried to treat you right. You fuckin’ smokehead. You could be playing with the cash like me, like Randall says. ’Staid you usin’.” He hurled the word like it was the only real insult he knew.

It was true. Don had used the drugs he was supposed to deal for Randall.

“Playing with the cash now, Kaz.”

I reached for Kaz’s pockets again, and again he slapped me away. “You dead, brother.”

Don stepped up and clapped Kaz’s temple with the side of the gun.

“Ain’t no cash, Light, man,” Kaz whimpered. He looked down. “Ain’t sold it yet, you stupid fuck.”

“Open the safe.”

“What did you mean ‘You dead, brother,’?” I asked. “Don told you I’m not his brother. Or are you just using that as an expression?”

Kaz just shook his head and got out the key to the safe. Drey said: “Fuckin’ idiot.”

Inside the safe was all bottles. Crack. Nothing else. Two big plastic bags full of ten- and five-dollar bottles. I’d never seen that much in one place. Don had, of course; specifically, when Kaz and Randall brought him up here to entrust him with a load of bottles to sell.

That time there had also been a large supply of cash, which was what we were here supposedly to steal.

“Fuck you expected?” said Drey.

“You dead,” said Kaz.

Don didn’t hesitate. He took the two bags of bottles and quickly felt behind them, but there was nothing else in the safe. He slammed the door shut and pushed the gun up at Kaz’s face again. “Your roll, Kaz.”

“You a fuckin’ chump.” Kaz got out his money, another fat wad with ones on the outside. Don took it and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he shook the two bags of bottles into the two big side pockets of his parka, tossing the plastic bags aside when they were empty.

“Fuck you gonna do?” said Drey. “Sell the shit? Randall gun you down.”

“Gimme the keys,” said Don to Kaz. “Sit down. Both of you.”

“Shit.”

Don waved the gun some more, and Kaz and Drey sat down on the floor. Don pushed me back out into the hallway ahead of him, then shut the door and locked it from the outside with Kaz’s key.

That was when we saw the Sufferer. It was sitting on the landing of the stairway above us, looking down. On its haunches in the dark it looked just like a giant panther, eyes shining.

I assumed it was waiting for someone else. I’d only seen the aliens twice before, each time trailing after somebody in trouble. That was what they liked to do.

Don didn’t even glance at it. I guess leading his lifestyle, he passed them pretty often. He put the gun in his belt and ran downstairs, and I followed him. The Sufferer padded down after us.

Don hailed a cab on First Avenue. “La Guardia,” he said, leaning in the window.

“Manhattan only,” said the cabbie. Don pulled out Kaz’s money and began peeling off ones. I looked behind us, thinking of Kaz and Drey and the unlocated guns in the apartment. Had Don really locked them in? Even if he had, they could shoot us from the front windows, or off the fire escape, while we haggled with the cabbie.

I saw the Sufferer push out of the door and settle on the sidewalk to watch us.

“Fifteen dollars before the fare,” said Don. “C’mon.”

The driver popped the locks, and Don and I scooted into the back, Don’s coat-load of bottles clinking against the door.

“La Guardia,” said Don again.

“Take the Manhattan Bridge,” I said. “Canal Street.”

“He knows where the Manhattan Bridge is, Paul.”

“He said Manhattan only.”

“You picking somebody up?” said the driver. “Domestic departures,” I said.

“What airline?”

“Uh, Pan Am.”

“There is no more Pan Am,” said the driver.

“Wow. Okay, uh, Delta?”

“Does it matter?” said Don.

“He has to take us somewhere,” I explained patiently. Sometimes it seemed like Don and I grew up in separate universes. “The airport is big. Delta should have a lot of flights to California. We can start there, anyway.”

The cab went down first to Canal and entered the funnel of traffic leading onto the bridge. I always mention the Manhattan Bridge because a lot of people just reflexively take the Brooklyn, though it isn’t really faster or more convenient. People prefer the Brooklyn Bridge, I guess because it’s prettier, but I like the way you can be driving alongside a subway train on the Manhattan Bridge.

So I looked out the window, and what I saw was the Sufferer, running alongside the cab, keeping time even when the traffic smoothed out and we accelerated across the empty middle of the bridge. It loped along right beside us, almost under my window. Our cabbie was going faster than the other cars, and when we passed one the Sufferer would drop back, trailing us, until the space beside my door was clear again.

Don was in his own world, leafing through the roll he’d stolen and counting the bottles in his pockets by feel. I didn’t draw his attention to the Sufferer. The cabbie hadn’t noticed either.

“You can’t take the gun on the plane,” I said to Don, quietly.

“Big news,” said Don sarcastically.

“It’s okay,” I said, responding to his annoyance as some kind of plea for reassurance, as I always had. “We won’t need it in Cali.”

“Yeah,” he said dreamily.

“We’re really going,” I said. “Things’ll be different there.” I felt it slipping away, the hold my proposal had had on him an hour ago.

“What,” he snorted. “Nobody has guns in California?”

“You’re going to live different, there.” I looked up to see if the cabbie was listening. “So why don’t you leave the gun here in the cab, okay, Don? Just push it under the seat. Because it’s crazy going into the airport with it. Crazy enough just carrying all the drugs.”

“I’ll put it in a locker. Just in case.”

“What? In case of what?”

We pulled off onto the BQE and headed for the airport. I checked the window. There was the Sufferer, rushing along with us, leaping potholes.

“What?” said Don, noticing.

“One of those aliens.”

“The one from Kaz’s?”

I shrugged — a lie, since I knew. “How much money did you get from Kaz?” I said, trying to change the subject.

“Four hundred. Chump change from a chump. Fuck is it doing out there?” He leaned over me to look out the window.

“Hey,” said the cabbie. “You got a Sufferer.”

“Just drive,” said Don.

“I don’t want trouble. Why’s it following you?”

“It’s not following anyone,” I said. “Anyway, they don’t cause trouble. They prevent it. They keep people out of trouble.”

“Right. So if they follow you, you must be trouble.”

Don took the gun out of his belt, but kept it below the level of the Plexiglas barrier above the seat. I tried to scowl at him, but he ignored me.

“You don’t like it, why don’t you try to kill it with the car?” he said to the driver in a low, insinuating voice.

“You’re crazy.”

“Right. So just take us to the airport and shut up.” He looked at me. “How much you get?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars. Sidekick change from a sidekick.” The joke was out before I thought to wonder: but who’s the sidekick here? It was possibly a very important question.

Don snorted. “Barely afford the tickets.” He put the gun back into his belt.

The Sufferer accompanied us through the maze of exits and into the roundabout of the airport. We pulled up in front of Delta. Don paid the cabfare and rolled off twenty extra, then paused, and rolled off another twenty. “Pull up there and wait ten minutes,” he said.

“Don, we’re getting on a plane. Besides, even if we weren’t, it isn’t hard to catch a cab at the airport.”

“Just in case. Me and this dude got an understanding. Right, man?” He cocked his head at the driver.

The cabbie shrugged, then smiled. “Sure. I’ll wait.”

I sighed. Don was always turning passersby into accomplices. Even when it didn’t mean anything. It was a kind of compulsive seduction, like Women Who Love Too Much.

“You’re getting me worried, Don. We’re flying out of here, right?”

“Relax. We’re at the airport, right? Just wait a minute.” He put his mouth at the driver’s little money window. “Pull up over there, man. We’ll walk back, we don’t have bags or anything. Just get out of the light, okay?”

We pulled past the terminal entrance, into a dead zone of baggage carts. The Sufferer trotted alongside, on the pedestrian ramp, weaving around the businessmen and tourists leaking out of the terminal.

Don rolled his window down a couple of inches, then got out a glass pipe and shook out the contents of a five-dollar vial into the bowl.

“Donnie.”

“Hey, not in the cab!”

“Minute, man.” He flicked his lighter and the little rocks flared blue and pink and disappeared. So practiced, so fast.

The Sufferer leaned close in to my window and watched. When Don noticed he said: “Open your door and whack that fuckin’ thing in the face.”

“Don’t smoke that crap in my cab,” said the driver.

“Okay, okay,” said Don, palming the pipe away. He pointed a finger at the cabbie. “You’ll wait, right?”

“I’ll wait, but don’t do that in my cab.”

“Let’s go, Don.”

“Okay.”

I opened my door and the Sufferer stepped aside to let us pass. We got out onto the walkway. Don stopped and shook his head, straightened his parka, which was burdened with the loaded pockets, and pushed the gun out of sight under his sweatshirt. We walked up to the entrance. The doors were operated by electric eye, and they slid open for us, then stayed open as the Sufferer followed.

Don and I both instinctively hurried into a mass of people, but no crowd could have been big enough to keep it from being obvious who the alien was with. A baggage guy stood and watched, his eyes going from the Sufferer to us and back again. He could as easily have been airport security — maybe he was.

“We’ve got a problem here, Don,” I said.

“Yeah.” He made a mugging face, but didn’t meet my eye.

“Let’s — here, you’ve gotta find a place for the gun, anyway.” I steered him out of the flow near the ticket agents, to a relatively empty stretch of terminal: newspaper vending machines, hotel phones, and a shoeshine booth. I didn’t see any lockers, though.

The Sufferer sat and cocked its head at us, waiting.

“What do your friends do when this happens?”

“What?” said Don sarcastically. “You mean when some big black animal from space follows them to the airport after an armed robbery?”

“When these things — when one of these things shows up, Don. I mean, it must happen to people you know.”

“One dude, Rolando. Thing started trailing him. Rolando fell in love, like him and the thing fucking eloped. Last I saw Rolando. Just that one dude, though.”

As people passed us they’d stare first at the Sufferer, then follow its gaze to us.

“Ironic,” I said. “It wants to help you, right? At least, I assume so. But it doesn’t know that you’re planning to go to California to dry out. It probably doesn’t even understand how airports work, how it’s fucking this up for you. How important it is for you to leave the city.”

I was babbling. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hear him say Yes, I mean to get on a plane and change my life in California, Paul. You had a good idea. Instead of his grunting, distracted assent. It didn’t help that his big last farewell heist had netted pockets full of crack instead of cash.

And I didn’t for the life of me know what to do with the Sufferer.

“It doesn’t want to help me,” Don said.

“Yeah, well, in this case, anyway, it isn’t. We’re already gonna fit a bad profile, buying tickets at the last minute with cash. If there’s a Sufferer trailing around they’ll search us for sure.”

“They let it on the plane?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, how could they? So all we have to do is dump the drugs and the gun, then they can search us all they want, doesn’t matter, we’re gone.”

“Uh-uh.”

“What?”

“I’m on parole, Paul. Breaking parole to go. I can’t get checked out.”

“What? You never told me you were in prison!”

“Shut up, Paul. Sentenced to parole, one year. Nothing, man.”

“For what?”

“Nothing, man. Now shut up. What, you think I wasn’t breaking the law?”

“Okay, okay, but listen, we just have to get on a plane. We have to try. So stash the stuff—”

“Nah. This is no good. I got an idea.” He headed back to the terminal exits.

“Don!”

The Sufferer and I followed him out. He jogged back to the cab, hands protectively over the flaps of his coat pockets. We got back in and Don said: “Get us out of here.”

“Back.”

“Yeah, that direction. But get off the fuckin’ freeway.”

“Have to be on the freeway—”

“Yeah, yeah, I mean as soon as you can.”

I actually thought we’d lost the Sufferer when we exited into a blasted neighborhood of boarded-up and gutted storefronts, but by the time we’d driven, at Don’s request, back under the freeway and into a dark, empty cobblestone lot, the alien came loping up behind us.

The freeway roared above us, but the nearby streets were vacant. The people in the cars might as well have been in flying saucers, whistling past stragglers in the desert.

Don gave the cabbie another ten and said: “Get lost for fifteen minutes. Leave us here and circle around, find yourself a cup of coffee or something.” The cabbie and I exchanged a look that said Coffee? Here? but Don was already out of the cab.

I got out and the cab rumbled away over the cobblestones and around a corner. The Sufferer didn’t glance at it, just sat like an obedient dog and watched us.

Don ignored it, or pretended to, and walked over and took a seat on the fender of a wrecked truck. It was getting cold. I thought, stupidly, about the meal we would have been eating, about the movie we would have been watching, on the plane.

Don took out the pipe again and loaded it with a rock of crack. The wind bent the blue column of flame from his lighter one way, then Don sucked it the other, into the pipe. The Sufferer hurried up like a hunting cat to where Don sat. I stepped back.

Don curled his shoulder protectively around the pipe and glared back at the alien. “Fuck you want?”

The Sufferer nudged at his elbow with its hand-like paw.

“Leave me the fuck alone.”

“Don, what are you doing? It can’t help it. What are you trying to do, bait it?”

Don ignored me. He flicked his lighter again, tried to get a hit. The Sufferer jogged his elbow. Don kicked at it. The alien danced back easily out of the way, like a boxer, then stepped back in, trying to square its face with Don’s, trying to look him in the eye.

Don kicked out again, brushing the Sufferer back, then pocketed the pipe and drew out his gun.

The alien cocked his head.

“Hey, Don—”

Don fired the gun straight into the Sufferer’s chest, and the alien jumped back and fell onto the cobblestones, then got back on its feet and walked in a little circle, shaking its head, blinking its eyes.

Don said: “Ow, fuck, I think I sprained my arm.”

“How? What happened?”

“The gun, man. It bucked back on me. Shit.”

“You can’t kill it, Don. Everybody knows that. The shots’ll just bring the police.”

Don looked at me. His expression was dazed and cynical at the same time. “I just wanted to give it a piece of my fuckin’ mind, okay, Paul?”

“Okay, Don. Now what about going back to the airport?”

“Nah. We gotta lose this thing.”

The Sufferer circled back around to where Don sat still holding the gun, kneading his injured forearm with his free hand. The alien sat up like a perky cat and tapped at Don’s jacket pocket, rattling the load of bottles.

“I guess it just wants to see you get clean, Don. If you get rid of the bottles it’ll leave us alone and we can fly to California.”

“You believe that shit, Paul? Where’d you read that, Newsweek?”

“What?”

“That this thing is like some kind of vice cop? That it wants me to kick?”

“Isn’t that the idea?” The stuff I’d read about them wasn’t clear on much except that they followed users around, actually.

“Yeah? Watch this.” Don clicked the safety on the gun and handed it to me, then got out his pipe and loaded it. He braised the rock with flame from the lighter, but this time when he got it glowing he turned it around and offered it to the Sufferer. The alien grasped the pipe in its dexterous paw and stuck the end in its mouth and toked.

“I think I read about that,” I said, lying. “It’s like an empathy thing. They want to earn your trust.”

Don just smirked at me, then snatched his pipe away from the Sufferer, who didn’t protest.

“I’m cold,” I said. “You think that cab is coming back?”

“Fuck yes,” said Don. “You kidding? We’re a fucking gold mine.” He shook out another rock.

The Sufferer and I both watched. Suddenly I wanted some. I’d done a lot of uncooked coke with some of my Upper West Side friends the last year of high school, but I’d only smoked rock twice before, with Don each time.

“Give me a hit, Don,” I said.

He loaded the pipe and handed it and the lighter to me, ungrudgingly.

I drew in a hit, and felt the crazy rush of the crack hit me. Like snorting a line of coke while plummeting over the summit of a roller coaster.

The Sufferer opened its weird, toothless black mouth and leaned towards me, obviously wanting another hit.

“Maybe the idea is to help run through your stash,” I said. “Help use up your stuff, keep you from O.D.ing. Because their bodies can take it, like the bullets. Doesn’t hurt them.”

“Maybe they’re just fucking crackheads, Paul.”

The cab’s reappearance startled me, the sound of its approach masked by the rush of cars overhead. And of course, I was thinking of cops.

Don took his gun back, jammed it in his waistband, and we got into the back. Don held the door open for the Sufferer. “Might as well get it off the freeway,” he said. “Gonna be with us next place we go either way.” The Sufferer didn’t hesitate to clamber in over our feet and settle down on the floor of the back, pretty much filling the space.

“Okay, but we need a plan, Donnie.” I heard myself beginning to whine.

“Where to?” said the cabbie.

“Back to Manhattan,” said Don. “East, uh, 83rd and, uh, Park.” He turned to me. “Chick I know.”

“You can’t go back to the city.”

“Manhattan is a big place, Paul. Ear as Randall and Kaz is concerned, 83rd Street might as well be California.”

“Don’t talk to me about California. Like you know something about California.”

“Paul, man, I didn’t say shit about California. I’m just saying we can hide out uptown, figure some shit out, okay? Take care of the Crackhead from Space here, right?”

“Uptown. New York is a world to you, you don’t know anything but uptown or downtown or Brooklyn. California’s a whole other place, Donnie, you can’t imagine. It’ll be different. The things you’re dealing with here, they don’t have to be — you don’t have to have these issues, Donnie. Randall, uptown, whatever.”

“Okay, Paul. But I just wanna take care of two things, okay, and then we’ll go, let’s just get rid of the Creature and just move this stuff to some people I know, okay? Get cash for this product, then we’ll go.”

The Sufferer shifted, stepping on my foot, and looked up at us.

“Okay.” I was defeated, by the two of them. It was like they were in collusion now. “Just don’t talk about California like it’s Mars, for God’s sake. We’re going there, you’ll see how it is, and then you can tell me what you think. It’ll blow your mind, Donnie, to see how different it can be.”

“Yeah,” he said, far away.

We were silent into Manhattan. At 83rd Street and Park Avenue Don paid the cab fare, and we got out. The three of us. The street was full of cars, mainly cabs, actually — nobody up here owned a car — but the sidewalk was dead, except for doormen. In a way Don was right about New York. This was another place. The thought of him selling crack on Park Avenue gave me a quick laugh.

Don led us into a brightly lit foyer. “Annette Sweeney,” he told the doorman.

The doorman eyed the Sufferer. “Is she expecting visitors?”

“Tell her it’s Light.”

We went up to the ninth floor and found Annette Sweeney’s door. Annette Sweeney lived well — I knew that before we even got inside.

She opened the door before we could knock. “You can’t just always come up here, Light.”

“Annette, chill out. I got some stuff for you. If it’s not a good time—”

Annette baited easily. Don’s hook gave me an idea what they had in common. “No, Light, I’m just saying why don’t you call? Why don’t you ever call me? What do you have?”

“Just some stuff.” He stepped in. “This my brother.”

“Hi.” She was staring at the Sufferer. “Light, look.”

“I know. Forget it.”

I stepped in, and so did the Sufferer. Like it owned the place.

“What do you mean? When did this happen?”

“Shut up, forget it. It’s a temporary thing.”

“What did you do?”

Don went past her, left the rest of us in the doorway, and flopped on her couch. The apartment was big and spare, the architectural detail as lush as the outside of the building, the furniture modern, all aluminum and glass.

“I haven’t seen you for weeks, Annette. What did I do? I did a lot of shit, you want to know it all? I come here and you ask me questions?”

Annette fazed easily. She tilted her head so that her hair fell, then brushed it away and pursed her lips and said: “Sorry, Light.” I saw a rich girl who thought that when she hung out with my brother she was slumming. And I saw my brother twisting her incredible need around his fingers, and hated them both for a second.

Then she turned to me and smiled weakly and said: “Hi. I’m Annette… I didn’t know Light had a brother,” and I felt immediately guilty for judging. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful, really striking, with black hair and big black eyes.

I took her hand. The Sufferer pushed past us, brushing my hip, and leapt onto the couch beside Don. “Yeah, well, he does,” I said. “I’m Paul.”

“It’s funny, ’cause my brother is staying with me right now. That’s why I was so weird about Light just dropping by.”

“You got a brother?” said Don, distractedly. He’d pulled all the little bottles out of his pockets and piled them on her rug. The Sufferer just sat upright on the couch and watched him.

“Yeah. He’s out right now, but he might come back.”

“That’s cool,” said Don. “We’ll party.”

“Um, Douglas might not really wanna… Jesus, Light.”

“What?”

“Well, just — your new friend. And all that stuff.”

“I guess the two kind of go together,” I said.

“Very funny,” said Don. “He’s harmless, he’s our — what, mascot. Like Tony the Tiger. Smoke rock — it’s grrrreat!”

“Doesn’t it freak you out?”

“Nah.” Don chucked the Sufferer on the chin. “You can’t believe all that shit you hear. It just wants to hang. That’s all they want. Came from space to party with me. You should of seen it following the cab, though — it was like a video game.”

Annette shook her head, grinning.

“Hey, Paul, come here for a minute,” said Don, jumping up, nodding his head at the door to the bedroom.

“What?”

“Nothing. Lemme talk to you for a minute though.”

We left Annette and the drugs and the Sufferer in the living room, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t talk about this California thing,” Don said in a low voice. “Don’t let Annette hear about us leaving because she’ll fucking flip out if she hears I’m going away and I don’t need that, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, then: “Don?”

“What?”

“Maybe we should call Jimmy and Marilla. Let them know you’re okay.”

“They kicked me out. They don’t care.”

“Just because they couldn’t let you live there anymore doesn’t mean they don’t worry about you. Just to let them know you’re still alive—”

“Okay, but later, okay?” He had a distracted expression, one I was beginning to recognize: I want a hit.

“Okay.”

Don tapped me on the back and we went back out. The Sufferer had the pipe, but Annette looked like she’d had possession of it recently enough. The room was filled with that sour ozone smell.

She didn’t ask what we’d been talking about in private. Didn’t even seem to wonder. In general, her self-esteem around my brother seemed kind of low.

“Here,” said Don, plucking the pipe away from the alien. I knelt down on the carpet with them and accepted the offer. Between Don and Annette and the Sufferer it was seriously questionable whether any of the drugs would get sold — which was fine with me. Whether or not using up Don’s supply was part of the alien’s strategy — assuming the alien had a strategy — didn’t matter. It could be my strategy.

Annette got up and found her cigarettes and brought one back lit, adding to the haze. Then she brushed her hair back and, seemingly emboldened by the cocaine and nicotine, began talking. “Really, though, Light, you should look out, with this thing hanging around you. I heard about how there are people who’ll beat you up just because you’ve got one of these things following you around. It’s a reactionary thing, like AIDS-bashing, you know, blaming the victim. Also won’t the police, like, search you or something, hassle you, if they see it?”

“The police know me. They already hassle me. I don’t mean shit to the police. Tony the Tiger doesn’t change that.”

“It’s just weird, Light.”

“Of course it’s weird,” said Don. “That’s why we love it, right, Paul? It’s from another dimension, it’s fucking weird, it’s science fiction.” The Sufferer cocked its head at Don as if it was considering his words. Don raised his fists like a boxer. The Sufferer opened its mouth at him, a black O, and its ears, or what I was mistaking for its ears, wrinkled forward. Now that I could see it up close, it really didn’t look so much like a cat. The face was really more human, like the sphinx with a toothless octopus mouth.

Don waved his hands in its face and said: “Dee-nee dee-nee, dee-nee dee-nee”—Twilight Zone Theme.

“Well, when’s it going to leave you alone?” She took another rock of crack and stuffed it into the end of an unlit cigarette.

“I’m gonna lose it,” he said.

“That’s supposed to be pretty hard, Light. I mean, it’s like an obsession for them.”

“Would you stop quoting the, whatever, the Geraldo Rivera version, or wherever you got that crap? I said I’m gonna lose it. You can help. We can trap it in your bedroom and I’ll cut out.”

“I think it can hear you, Don,” I said.

“That’s so fucking stupid, man. It’s from another planet.”

Of course we all turned to look at it now. It stared back and then pawed at the pile of bottles on the carpet.

“Hey, cut it out,” said Don. He reached out to push it away, then winced. “Fuck.”

“What?”

“You think you could rub my arm? I sprained it or something.” He reached under his sweatshirt and freed himself of the gun, dropping it with a clatter on a little table beside the couch.

“Uh, sure, Light,” Annette said absently, goggling at the gun. She put her cigarette in her mouth and scooted up beside Don and took his arm in her lap. The Sufferer went on rattling the bottles.

“What about at the airport?” Don said. “You didn’t think it could understand us then.”

“I’m wrong, it was just a feeling.”

“Why’d you have to say that? You creeped me the fuck out.”

“Airport?” said Annette.

“Uh, that’s where we had to go to get the stuff,” I said, gesturing at the rug, taking up the burden of covering Don’s slip out of guilt, out of habit.

“You scored at the airport?”

Don shrugged at her, and said: “Sure.”

Annette lit the loaded cigarette. The rock hissed as it hit the flame. “What are you doing with all this?”

“Well, I really gotta sell some,” said Don. “I was wondering if you wanted to call some of your friends. I don’t wanna go downtown now.”

“I don’t know, Light.” She looked at the Sufferer, who was still rattling at the vials. “Won’t it narc on us?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Even if it doesn’t, that’s what everybody’ll think if they see it here.”

“Just set it up, okay? We can arrange something so they don’t have to meet Tony the Tiger.” He lit a rock and toked.

“Well, anyway, my brother is coming back tonight so I don’t think you can deal out of my house, Light.”

“What does that have to do with it? It’s your house, right?”

“Well, I don’t know. He’s my older brother.”

“Paul is my older fucking brother,” Don said. “So what?”

Maybe Annette’s older brother knows how to take care of his sibling, I thought. Like I obviously don’t.

There was a sound of a key fumbling in a lock. “Speak of the devil,” said Annette.

Douglas turned out to be quite a bit older than Annette, or at least the way he dressed and held himself made it seem that way. He came up to where we all were sprawled on the couch and the carpet and said, to me: “Are you Light?”

“No,” said Don, “that’s me.”

Douglas’s eyes played over the scene: the gun, the vials, the alien sitting like a giant snake-skinned cougar on the carpet.

He reached down and picked up the gun.

“Ann, why don’t you go lock yourself in the bedroom,” he said.

“Doug-las,” she whined.

“Do it.”

“Don’t be a chump,” said Don. “This is her place.”

“Shut up. I know all about you. We’re going to have a little talk. Go, Ann.”

“I told you,” Annette said to Don as she got up from the couch. “Uh, nice to meet you, Paul. Sorry.”

As she slouched her way to the bedroom, the Sufferer jumped up and followed her. Douglas took a step back, startled. I watched the gun. Douglas handled it badly, but I was pretty sure the safety was still in place.

The Sufferer was suddenly, inexplicably agitated. It ran ahead of her into the bedroom, looked out the far window at the lights of the building across 83rd Street, and back at us.

“What’s it doing?” said Doug angrily.

Don shrugged. Annette stood waiting at the doorway.

“Get it out of there,” said Doug, gesturing with the gun.

“Hey, that’s not my responsibility,” said Don. “You’re the dude who’s taking charge.”

The Sufferer wrinkled its ears forward and stared glumly at Don. Don glowered at Douglas.

“Here,” I said. I went in and pushed at the Sufferer. Its flesh was like a dense black pudding, and it felt like it weighed about a thousand pounds. I tried to prod it towards the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Annette came into the bedroom and tried to help me push, to no avail.

Don, his movements exaggerated and slow, put a rock of coke into the glass pipe and flicked his lighter enticingly. The Sufferer trotted forward, like it had read the script, and Annette and I almost fell on our faces.

Douglas didn’t find it funny. “Get back out here,” he said to me, and when I obliged he reached over and slammed the door shut with Annette inside. “Sit down,” he told me, and I did it.

The Sufferer, of course, paid him no mind. It went past us all, into the kitchen.

“What’s on your mind?” said Don drawlingly, lighting the pipe.

“I want you and your monster out of Annette’s life, Light,” said Douglas. “She’s told me plenty about you.”

“Why not? I’m her boyfriend.”

“You’re not her boyfriend,” snarled Douglas. “You’re her dealer. Only you’re not even around enough to do a good job of that.” From the kitchen came a crash of breaking glass. Douglas looked in, then turned back to Don. “You get Annette hooked and then she’s gotta go out and find her own because you smoked up your whole shipment. You pathetic piece of human garbage.”

“Fuck told you that shit?”

“What, is it a shock to find out that you’re known, you sleazeball?”

Another crash from the kitchen, and then a sound like chimes: the Sufferer wading through the glass or ceramic it had broken.

“What’s your — monster-thing doing?” said Douglas. I got the feeling that his castigating Don was the fulfillment of a long-standing fantasy, only the Sufferer wasn’t part of the scenario.

“I told you, it’s not my thing, I don’t tell it what to do, man.”

“Is that why you’re trying to unload all this stuff on my sister — the monster won’t let you use it anymore?”

Don just smirked. “The monster’s ‘using it’ with me. I don’t tell it what to do and it don’t tell me what to do.”

“It’s following you because you’re dead, you loser. You’re smoking your life away — it’s like your death angel.”

“That’s not right,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s an empathy thing, it’s responding to the life in Don—”

“Yeah, right. The life. You people are walking corpses.

And I’ll finish you off myself if you don’t leave my sister alone.”

“You wanna kill me, huh?” said Don.

“I will if I have to. Before you destroy my sister’s life like you destroyed your own. Before one of those death creatures comes prowling around for her.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You never met a Sufferer before, you have no idea how they operate.”

“You never met me before, either,” said Don.

“I heard all I need to know from your sleazebag pusher friends,” said Douglas.

“What?” said Don, suddenly attentive.

“When you disappeared, Annette started buying from this black dude who called around for you. Real pimpy type of guy. I had to call the cops on him. I should call the cops on you.”

“Who — Annette!” Don jumped up.

“Randall,” said Douglas. “Randall whose shipment you singlehandedly smoked up. I’m surprised you’re not dead by now.”

Annette looked out of the bedroom. “You gave him my number, Light, remember? He called here looking for you about, I don’t know, four or five days ago—”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Don. “Give me my gun.” He knelt down and began scooping the vials back into his parka.

“Take your crap with you,” said Douglas. “Go get nice and high on it. But I think I’d better keep the gun.”

“Fuck you, man—”

“No, fuck you.” Douglas clicked the safety off. I was surprised he knew how. Then he put his foot on Don’s shoulder and shoved him back on his ass on the carpet. “No more bullshit, Light. You leave Annette alone, no calls, no late-night visits, got it? And I’m keeping the gun. You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.”

“Call the cops, see if I give a damn, man. You don’t have a fucking clue.” Don stood up. He came up to Douglas’s shoulder, but he was crowding the gun, and Douglas took a step back. I thought about trying to step in and realized my whole body was trembling.

The Sufferer came out of the kitchen, pumping forward on its massive black legs, and rushed up to where Douglas stood. It opened its strange black mouth and emitted a sound, something between a howl and a moan. Actually, it sounded like a man bellowing as he fell down a bottomless well, complete with echoes and Doppler effects.

At the same time chunks of broken glass fell out of its mouth at Douglas’s feet, and on his shoes.

Douglas pointed the gun and fired, at almost the exact same spot on the alien’s big bulldog chest. The noise, in the quiet apartment, was deafening. Douglas dropped the weapon and grabbed his hand, wincing.

Don immediately picked it up.

“Go,” he said to me, and nodded at the door. Then he bent back down to collect the last of his vials, sweeping up the empties along with them.

Douglas stood holding his hand, watching the Sufferer. The creature had rolled back on its haunches at the impact of the gunshot, and now it was shaking its head vigorously, and spitting out more shards of glass.

Don pushed the gun back into his belt and hustled me towards the door, and then turned and slapped Douglas ever so lightly on the cheek. Like he wanted to wake him up, not hurt him. “You mess up your hand?” he said. Douglas didn’t say anything.

“Maybe your sister can rub it for you. See ya.”

We ran to the elevator, the Sufferer leaping after us.

Out on the street Don said: “Hell was it doing?”

“It got you your gun back,” I said.

“Yeah, but what was it doing, eating the dishes?” He knelt down and looked in the Sufferer’s mouth. “Jesus.” He reached in and pulled out a chunk of glass that was lodged there. The Sufferer snorted and shook its head.

“It’s like the one soft spot, the whatchacallit, Achilles tendon,” Don said. “I wonder if I could kill it by shooting it in the mouth?”

“Donnie! That’s not cool. It saved you up there. Besides, you can’t kill them, I read it—”

“Okay, shut up.” He tossed the glass out into the street, under a parked car.

“Now what?” I said, and then quickly made my nomination: “The airport? Or Port Authority, catch a Greyhound upstate?”

Don didn’t say anything.

“Upstate, New York State, isn’t breaking parole, right? You can do anything you want, doesn’t matter if the Sufferer’s following you. I bet they’ve never seen one of these guys up there, huh?”

“I gotta sell the shit,” said Don. “The triangle on 72nd and Broadway. I can move it there. C’mon, we can walk across.” He started towards Central Park.

We ran after him, me and the Sufferer. “Don, wait. Why can’t we just go? What are you stalling for?”

“Damn, Paul, you can’t just show up with this idea and rush me out of town. Maybe I don’t want to go to California. Maybe at least you ought to let me clear up my damn business before we go, okay?”

“What? What?” As if the robbery hadn’t happened, or as if it weren’t connected to the plan, a plan he’d already agreed to.

“Relax, okay. Damn. We’ll go. Just let me unload the stuff, okay?”

We walked to the edge of the park on the empty streets, the three of us. In silence, until Don said, without turning: “It’s been a while since we were in touch.”

“What? Yeah, I guess. What do you mean?”

“That’s all, just it’s been a while. We didn’t, like, keep up on each other’s lives or anything.”

“Yeah,” I said, chilled.

Central Park at night made me think of high school, of smoking pot with my Upper West Side friends. White people’s drugs, drugs for the kids who stay in school, go to college. While back in Brooklyn, Don was finding the other kind, the drugs for the black kids, the ones who wouldn’t go to college even if they bluffed it through high school.

Now my West Side friends were all off at college, in various parts of the country, and I was back in town to sell drugs at 72nd and Broadway, under their parents’ windows.

The Sufferer seemed to like the park. Several times it roamed wide of us, disappearing briefly in the trees. When we crossed Central Park West, though, it was back close at our heels.

We set up at the benches on the triangle, along with some sleeping winos. There was a black kid, too, who kept crossing the street to the subway and ducking inside, then crossing back to the triangle. He and the Sufferer exchanged a long look, then the kid went back to his pacing routine, and the Sufferer jumped over the bench, into the little plot of land the pavement and benches encircled. I hoped it would stay there, more or less out of sight from the street.

“This is dead, Don.”

“Relax. It’s where you come, up here. It’s the only place to score.”

“It’s Tuesday night.”

“Junkies don’t know weekends, man.”

“We’re gonna get arrested. This is just like a target, like sitting in the middle of a target.”

“Shut up. You’re being a chump. Forget the cops.”

A chump. The unkindest cut. I shut up. Don got out his pipe and smoked away another rock of the product. I had a hit too. The Sufferer didn’t seem as interested. And we waited.

The traffic on Broadway was all cabs, and — surprise! — two of them pulled over and transacted business with Don. One was slumming West Side yuppies on their way to a club, men overdressed, women waiting in the back of the cab, relieved laughter when the males returned safely. The other was two blacks in the front seat, the cabbie and a pal, with the cab still available. I ached to push Don in the back and take off, but I stayed shut up.

Another customer walked up, from the park side. He caught up with the kid, who shook his head, nodded at us, and made his jog across the street to the subway station again while the street was clear. Don made the sale and the guy headed back the way he’d come.

I was just noticing that this time the kid hadn’t come back to the triangle when the truck pulled up. A van, really, like a UPS delivery truck but covered with layers of graffiti and minor dents, and missing doors on both sides. It pulled around the triangle the wrong way, bringing down a plague of honking from cabs.

Don said: “Oh shit.”

“What?”

“That’s Randall’s truck.” But he didn’t move, or reach for the gun.

The driver kicked the emergency brake down and turned to us holding a toy-like machine gun. I figured it wasn’t a toy. “Is that Randall?” I said.

“Nah. Shut up now.”

The man in the passenger seat came around the front. Well dressed, unarmed. “Light,” he said.

“Yo, Randall.”

“Get in the back. This your man?” He raised his chin at me. His voice had a slight Caribbean lilt.

Don shrugged.

“You took my safe house tonight, my man?” Randall asked me. He was clean and pretty, like some young, unbeaten boxer. But he had a boiled-looking finger-thick scar running all along the right underside of his jaw, and where it would have crossed his ear the lobe was missing.

“That’s me,” I said, dorkily.

“Come along.” He made it sound jolly. He opened the back. Inside were Kaz and Drey, sitting on tires, looking miserable.

I tried to catch Don’s eye, but he just trudged forward and stepped up into the back. I went after him.

I glanced over my shoulder, but didn’t spot the Sufferer. Bandall climbed in behind us, slammed the two doors shut, and went up to the front. There wasn’t any divider, just a big open metal box with two bucket seats in front of the window, and a steering wheel on a post to the floor. The driver handed Randall the little machine gun and took off across Broadway, down 72nd Street.

Don and I leaned against the back. I looked out the back window and just caught sight of the pay phone on the far side of the subway entrance.

We rattled to the end of 72nd, under the West Side Highway and parked out on the stretch of nothing before the water. It’s always amazing to get to the edge of Manhattan and see how much stuff there is between the city — you know, the city that you think of, the city people use — and the real edge of the island. You think of it as being like a raft of skyscrapers, buildings to the edge, and instead there’s the edge of the island. Boathouses, concrete and weeds, places that nobody cares about.

Unfortunately, at the moment.

The driver serving as gunman again, Randall opened the back and steered us out into a dark, empty garage, a sort of cinderblock shell full of rusted iron drums and piles of rotting linoleum tile. The floor was littered with glass and twisted, rusty cable. A seagull squawked out of our path, flapping but not taking off, then refolded its wings and wobbled outside once we were safely past. Kaz and Drey both looked back dubiously, acting more like fellow captives than Randall’s henchmen, but Randall kept nodding us forward, until the moonlight from the garage entrance petered out and we all stood in darkness.

“You messin’ up, Light,” said Randall.

“Here’s your stuff,” said Don, scooping in his parka pockets. He sounded afraid. I wondered where the Sufferer was.

“That’s good. Give it to Drey. You make a little green out there?”

“Yeah.”

“You smoke up a little, there, too?”

Before Don could squeak “Yeah” again Randall stepped forward and smacked him, viciously hard, across the mouth. Don’s foot slipped and skidded through the broken glass, but he kept from falling.

“Relax, relax,” said Randall suddenly, as though some protest had been raised. “We ain’t killing you tonight, Light. But we gotta talk about this funny stuff, you chumps playing with my money. You think you takin’ Kaz but it’s all my money, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s like it’s all a game, like Monopoly money, you and Kaz can just fuckin’ play with it.”

“Kaz didn’t do anything wrong,” said Don.

“Kaz a sucker get taken by a chump like you.” He raised his hand and Kaz flinched. Leaving his hand in the air, he turned to me. “Who’s your man here?”

“Paul.”

“He your brother?”

“Nah.”

Randall looked at Kaz and Drey. “This the dude?”

Kaz nodded.

Randall stared at me, but he was still talking to Don. “You tell him Randall got some easy money, some play money, just laying around? You tell him I’m a fuckin’ chump?”

“Randall, we didn’t even take your money. Just some dope, man. We only took money off Kaz and Drey.”

“My dope is money, stupid. My dope is product. Not for you to fuckin’ smoke. Why you so stupid, crackhead?”

At that moment a shadow slipped in through the moonlit garage entrance, then almost disappeared into the darkness. The Sufferer. I felt relieved, like it was the cavalry. But when it came into the circle it stepped up beside Randall, and then I saw that it wasn’t the same. It was bigger than ours, its eyes were longer, slits instead of ovals, and the strangely human nose was pushed to one side. A scarred Sufferer, for Randall.

“Here’s my thing,” said Randall. “I heard you got a thing, yourself. You been seen around town together.”

“Uh, yeah. So what?”

“So what? That the only reason I came up here to talk to you myself, you think I bother with a fuckin’ chump like you? Only reason my man didn’t do you in a drive-by on Broadway.”

“What, you like them? You can have mine.”

“Naw, why you have to get fresh, Light?” He leaned over and slapped Don again, but lightly. It was the same slap Don had used on Douglas, exactly the same. Don was a reflexive mimic. “You disappoint me.”

Don didn’t speak.

“What does it want?” said Randall.

“I don’t know.”

Randall made a face. “I can’t get rid of the sucker. It wants me to stop — stop livin’ the life?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Because I’m not a user, Light, I’m not like you. What’s it trying to say to me?” Randall lurched forward and Don flinched. Intimidation, I sensed, was a way of life for Randall. It even leaked into interactions where he wanted to propagate trust. He couldn’t help it.

“Nothing,” said Don.

Randall turned and paced in a tight, impatient circle. “I wanna know, Light. Why this thing in my life, what the meaning is. Tell me.”

It occurred to me that Randall thought Don knew because he was white.

“Nothing.”

“Must want something, everybody wants something, Light. It stop you from using?”

“It doesn’t give a shit, Randall. It smokes rock. It’s a party animal, man.”

“Gonna turn me in? Working for the Narcotics?”

“Sure, I don’t know. This is fuckin’ stupid, Randall.”

Randall wheeled. “What you sayin’? It’s gathering evidence, man? Tell me what you know!”

Kaz and Drey shifted nervously. The gun man cleared his throat.

“Nothing, Randall, man. It can’t fuckin’ talk, it’s from another planet, man. Can’t turn you in. Relax. It’s really got you rattled, man.”

“So tell me what it wants.”

“Nothing. It’s just… trying to, you know, get along.” Don sighed. “Really, Randall. Everybody wants it to be about something, or up to something, but it’s just, like… attracted. All the explanations are bullshit.”

“That’s not right,” I blurted. “It’s like a guardian angel. It’s drawn to you because it senses something—”

I hesitated, and saw that I had everyone’s undivided attention.

“—because it feels this sense that you’re, uh, important, your life is important, and so it’s drawn to you.” I was going in circles. “It’s not judging you, it’s not moralistic. That’s why it doesn’t try to stop you, try to change your behavior, why it’ll even share the pipe. Drugs aren’t the point, it’s not some simplistic thing like they make it out to be, it’s more subtle than that. It wants to be around you and protect you because — your life is important. And it’s afraid that you don’t — care enough. So it’s trying to do that, to care—”

I wanted to convince them, somehow, because I wanted to convince myself.

While I was talking, Don’s Sufferer had crept in, like some kind of affirmation of my words. It padded past Don and Randall, stopping a foot or so away from Randall’s Sufferer, I stopped talking. The two aliens stared at each other, and the distance between them suddenly seemed very small.

I thought of the aliens’ incredible strength. I wished Don’s was bigger than Randall’s, instead of the reverse.

“Guardian angel,” mused Randall. “That your guardian angel, Light?” The sneer in his voice made me sorry I’d spoken at all.

“Yeah,” said Don. “It’ll always be with you now, Randall. Gonna live your life with you, see everything you do.”

“Fuck you trying to say?”

“Nothing. Just that you gotta live right, now, Randall. You’re being watched.” Don wasn’t saying it because it meant anything to him. He was just yanking Randall’s chain.

“Huh.” Randall thought this over. “Light, you don’t know shit about shit. You don’t know what I do, how I live.”

“Maybe not, Randall.”

“I gotta get my money back, Light. Drey, take the money off Light.”

Don handed it over, preemptively. I thought of the gun.

“I gotta put a hurt on you, Light, like you put on me. How’m I gonna do that?”

“I dunno.”

“What you got that I can take? You ain’t got nothing.”

The Sufferers suddenly both stood, and I braced for some kind of violence between them. Instead they turned and walked out of the garage together, into the frame of moonlight, and then disappeared around the corner, heading towards the water. To settle their differences?

With them gone I felt naked, doomed.

“Kaz,” said Randall, “you gotta do my hurtin’ for me, my man. For what Light did to you.”

“Naw, Randall,” whined Kaz. “Naw, man.”

“Hit him.”

“Naw. He still got a gun, Randall, anyway. You didn’t take it off him.”

“So take it off him.” Randall pointed at me. “You go, chump. You got lucky. Don’t fuck with me no more. Don’t go around with this dude Light, he’s bad news. Go.”

“What?” I said.

“Get lost. I ain’t gonna fuck with you. You didn’t know what you was doing.”

“We’ll go together,” I said. “He’s, uh, my brother.”

“Go.” Randall pointed, and the driver raised the gun at me.

“Go ahead, Paul,” said Don.

“No, I’m his brother,” I said, getting hysterical. “No.”

Randall shoved me towards the door, and the driver followed. I took a few steps.

“Take him, Kaz,” commanded Randall, done with me. “Take his gun.”

“Naw, don’t make me, Randall.”

“Do it!”

“I’m his brother—”

The driver kicked me, and aimed the gun at my stomach. Inside, Kaz was advancing sheepishly on Don.

I ran, into the glare of moonlight.

Where was the Sufferer? I ran towards the water. Behind me, the clatter of voices: Don, Randall, Kaz. I ran, gasping.

When I found the Sufferers I thought they were killing each other. They were half hidden behind a pile of shredded, stinking tires, in a puddle of stagnant water streaked with oil rainbows. They lay entwined, limbs twisted together, both moaning like echoing wells, their bodies twitching, paws treading air, ears wrinkled back.

Fucking. Making love — the moment it hit me was the moment I heard the shot.

I turned in time to see the four shadows sprinting for the truck. Kaz’s voice: “You made me, you made me, you shouldn’t of fuckin’ made me—”

They’d driven off before I got back to Don.

He was lying on the floor scrabbling in the glass with a hand already sticky with blood. In the dark the blood looked black, and watching it seep out of his stomach was like watching his white sweatshirt disappear into the gloom. It was happening fast.

“Fuck, Paul,” he said, when he saw me.

“I’m going to get help,” I said.

“Wait, don’t leave me—”

“I’ll be back—”

I ran out, back under the freeway, and found a woman walking her dog in the park. “For God’s sake, my brother got shot, down in the old garage down there, please can you call an ambulance, please—” I fumbled it out between gasps, repeated everything, pointing, and when she agreed I turned and ran back, clutching a knot in my side; a cramp from running, but it felt like a sympathetic wound.

Moving too fast, I slid in his blood, and my knees buckled at seeing how little of the white of the sweatshirt was left. I sat down, in blood and glass, and held his hand.

His gun lay to one side, and I felt suddenly sure that he’d been shot with his own gun, Kaz trying to take it from him. The gun we could have left behind so many times in so many different places.

“I can’t see you, man,” said Don.

“Your eyes?” My voice was trembling, on the verge of sobs.

“No, stupid, I mean move around here, don’t sit behind me.”

I shifted. “An ambulance is coming, okay, Donnie? So just hang on. Guess you’ll have to talk to the police or something, huh?”

An hour ago I was still picturing Don in California. Now the dream of seeing him in a hospital bed seemed maybe too much to dare hope for.

“You’re so stupid about the cops, Paul.” His voice was husky, and as he went on, it got rougher and softer. “I don’t care about the cops. When they arrested me before I told the guy ‘Thank you, you saved me.’ ’Cause I was a skeleton, I weighed about ninety pounds, and I knew I would dry out, get healthy in jail. That’s all jail is, man, guys gettin’ fed, getting healthy again, doing pushups, so they can go out and do it again. Shit, if they’d given me time instead of parole I might be off rock now.”

I started weeping.

“C’mon, Paul, relax.”

“We could be on a plane right now,” I said. “We were right there, we were at the airport. The Sufferer, the Sufferer ruined everything.”

“Nah, man, I didn’t want to go. Tony the Tiger didn’t blow it.”

“Why? Why couldn’t we just go?”

“I was all freaked out. I mean, it sounds great, right? Start over, cut out, leave all the shit behind. But I wasn’t ready. I was just going along, I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If California is my big second chance, Paul, I don’t wanna go fuck it up with my pockets full of rock. I wanted it to be like you said, but I wasn’t ready, I was afraid. If I went and I was still all fucked up there — I didn’t want to disappoint you, Paul. At least if we didn’t go I hadn’t fucked up California. It was still there, like this beautiful picture you were painting, you know—”

His voice was trailing off, and I could barely hear him for my own sobbing.

“It was sort of hard for me to think about California or whatever, anything else, with all that rock in my coat, Paul. When we took Kaz for rock instead of cash… I had to get rid of it, and if I had to get rid of it, why not get high, you know? You don’t know… you don’t know how much I… like to get high, Paul. You haven’t been around me that much. We haven’t been in touch. I’m not just, like, the little kid you knew. I been… doing stuff—”

“My fault, the whole thing about robbing Kaz. You did that because of my stupid idea, to get cash for the tickets.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s blame it all on you and the monster. Whatever. But the California thing… wasn’t stupid. It was a good idea, so relax now, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Shut up now and stop making me talk so much, right?”

“Okay.”

“We’ll go… we’ll still go to California.”

I didn’t say anything, and Don closed his eyes, and we were quiet. The pace of blood leaking through his shirt slowed down. Time seemed to slow with it.

“I’m gonna pass out now,” he said.

“Okay,” I managed.

“I’m just… passing out, right, I’m not dying.”

He couldn’t see his sweatshirt. “Right,” I said.

He was dead for almost five minutes before I finally heard sirens, and they weren’t even close yet.

I made a quick calculation about talking to a long series of people about what happened, starting with the ambulance people and the police and ending with our parents, versus getting the hell out of there, ft wasn’t a hard call.

I took Don’s pipe and lighter and put them in my pocket and ran, south under the highway, and circled around a couple of blocks back to Broadway.

I hopped the turnstile and took the IRT downtown, to the Village, then walked across West 3rd Street to Washington Square Park, where life went on as usual, all night every night, every night for the last thirty years, probably. I sat on the same bench I’d been on at noon, waiting for Don to turn up, finding him after so long. Now I had to share it with a guy who was sleeping, but his smell and my stare kept anyone else away.

I wondered if I was waiting for Kaz. I couldn’t think of what I would do or say if he showed, so I guessed I wasn’t.

I started feeling sleepy about the same time the sky began to lighten up. The deadest hour in the park, when the night is officially over. A few businessmen walked across, and joggers. It was their park now, for a few short hours.

I got off my bench and managed to find someone dealing. There’s always someone dealing. If I’d said to him: “You seen Kaz?” or “You seen Light?” he probably would have said: “Naw, man. But he be around later. What you want him for?”

Instead I just scored a five-dollar vial and went back to my bench.

I put it into Don’s pipe and flickered the lighter over it and drew a hit, and at that moment the Sufferer walked up. It sat down in front of me and cocked its head.

I tried to ignore it, which worked for about five seconds. Then, riding the rush from the crack, I jumped on it and started beating its face with my fists. “You didn’t do anything!” I screamed. The Sufferer just twisted slowly away from my blows, squinting its big eyes, shifting its feet to accommodate my assault. “You didn’t help him at all! You didn’t change anything!”

A crowd began to gather around us. “You were fucking, you were fucking when they killed him!” My voice cracked with rage, and I tasted my snot and tears as they ran down my face. I beat at it, my fists aching, then tried to reach for its mouth, its “Achilles tendon,” but it just butted me away with its cheek. “You didn’t help him at all!”

A couple of Rastafarians came forward out of the crowd and plucked me away. “Easy there, little man, come on. It didn’t hurt you now, you just hurting you-self. Easy up.”

I squirmed out of their grasp and fell to the pavement in front of the Sufferer. The alien opened its mouth and moaned silently at me, then took a step away from me. The crowd ducked quickly out of its way, though it hadn’t made a sudden or violent movement yet.

Sickened, trembling, I crawled off the pavement, into the grassy section behind the benches.

Soon enough the little knot of attention that had gathered around us was dissolved back into the park. The Sufferer wandered away too.

When the trembling passed I got up and staggered out of the park, half blind with hunger and exhaustion. The Village swirled around me, oblivious. I thought about Don weighing ninety pounds, reaching the end of his run, thanking the cops for taking him off the street, for noticing him at all.

I don’t know how long I walked before I passed out on the bench on Sixth Avenue, in front of the basketball courts, but when I woke again, the sun was low. People were going home from work. I was freezing. The Sufferer was staring at me, its face inches from mine.

I reached out, weak, wanting to hit it or twist its ears and to take its warmth at the same time.

It pulled away, and turned and trotted down Sixth. “You fucker,” I said. “It would have been better if you’d never come at all.”

I could have been talking to myself. Maybe I was.

I watched the Sufferer turn the comer, and I never saw it again after that.

The Brooklyn Bridge has a walkway. The Manhattan used to, but doesn’t anymore. I crossed the bridge under an orange sky. I walked through downtown Brooklyn to Flatbush Avenue, and took the Long Island Railroad to Plainview, to tell Jimmy and Marilla that I knew what had happened to Don, to Donovan, to Light.