Dark Duets Part 29

"Deep in what?"

He flicked the bars of his cell. "Deep in bars. Folks behind bars behind bars behind bars. And that's the only place it lasts, too. Once they get out, poof, it's gone. They forget all about it. Back to their old tricks, y'see." He smiled. "No, these people . . . the ones whose fortunes really turn for the better . . . they find something different."

I glared at him. I wished he was dead. Him, and Marco, and Teddy, and the detectives who'd asked me, seriously, a total of six questions, because they'd known they had me dead to rights. "What is it?" I asked angrily.

"Oh, now hold on there," said the man. "Let's not blow our wad just yet. You don't want to jump into this, now do you?"

"I didn't even know there was a 'this.' "

"Well, there is, and you're trying to jump into it. To get what I'm offering, you have to give something up. You have to give me something. It's an exchange. Get it?"

"If you want my a.s.s, man, you can f.u.c.king forget about it."

He smiled. But I noticed his eyes didn't smile. Most people when they smile, even if they don't mean it, some part of their eyes move. It's just what a human face does. But his . . . didn't. "No," he said. "I want something a little bit more valuable than your a.n.a.l virginity, my boy."

"What?"

He leaned forward, the top of his forehead poking through the bars. "Son . . . do you believe in the soul?"

I stared at him. Then I burst out laughing, just as he had done. "You've got be f.u.c.king kidding me! Oh, man. You seriously had me for a moment!"

He didn't laugh: he just kept smiling through the bars.

I asked, "Are you, like, some drunk that's in here every night, and this is how you get your kicks?"

Still, he did not laugh. But then he said, "You know, I'm not surprised to hear you laugh. Marco laughed too, when he heard my offer."

I stopped. The world went dead. "What?" I asked. "What did you say?"

He kept smiling.

"What the f.u.c.k was that?" I shouted. "What the f.u.c.k did you just say to me?"

"You'll want to keep your voice down," he said. "Otherwise the guards will come, and you'll never hear the rest."

The man leaned against the wall and folded his arms. He half closed his eyes like he was remembering something sweet. "Here's the deal," he said. "Marco took it. And Teddy took it. That's why they're out there and you're in here. But the good news-the real good news, my friend-is that when you take it, you'll be out there, too. It's as simple as it sounds: you give me your soul, and I give you an easy life."

"So, what," I said with a snort, "you're like the devil or something? Like in the stories?"

"Stories are stories," said the man, "because reality is so much more complex. Here's how it works: I'm not going to offer to make you rich, a movie star, or any of that. I won't make you immortal or irresistible to women. All that is c.r.a.p. What I can offer you is an uncomplicated, pleasant life. You won't get sick before your time, you won't end up living on the street. You'll be luckier than most people. The things you shoot for will have a better chance of working out. Hopefully some high flying, but absolutely a lot of smooth sailing."

"Uh-huh," I said. "Okay, that's swell. That's a pretty good pitch. Now, I'm going to get some sleep."

"You want to get some sleep?" he asked. "You'd rather get some sleep than, say, be set up for life? You'd rather get some sleep than get out of jail free?"

"Tell you what," I said. "Get me out of jail free, and I'll listen. Transport me to the VIP room of some club and stick a supermodel on my lap, and we'll talk terms."

"Doesn't work that way. I can get you out of here, but the clubs and the models are up to you. And I can't give you the goods without getting the payment. That would be bad business on my part. I will promise to get you out of jail in exchange for what I'm asking. All you have to do is agree. Even if you don't believe me, then what do you have to lose? And if I'm right, then you've got your proof, plus so much more."

I was awake now, and I was paying attention. The thing was, somewhere along the way, I started to believe this guy. This wasn't just an annoying cell mate, this was a business negotiation. I told myself I was being ridiculous-it was fear and fantasy thinking-but I believed him, not myself. On some level, I understood that his offer was for real.

It wasn't just the sincerity in his voice, the confident ease with which he delivered a sales pitch I knew he'd delivered countless times before. There were other things. The cell was colder than it had been before, and the air felt charged, like just before a storm, and there were pockets of heat. The man was not attractive-he kind of looked like Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill, with his long face and high forehead and dour expression, but that was not it. He looked perfectly normal, yet he was also off-his eyes and nose and mouth sat on his face slightly wrong, like their proportions were mixed up, but just so slightly you couldn't quite say how. The color of his skin seemed strange too. I had never seen a shade precisely like that-no, I decided, not the shade but the color saturation. It made him look like a man out of an old photograph.

"Can you prove all this?" I was interested now for sure. Not interested in the deal precisely, but in the situation. "Can you show me what you're talking about is real?"

He grinned. "You mean like magic?" He waved his hands around, like a magician performing a trick with invisible props. "There's no such thing. There's the reality you know and the reality you don't, but everything follows the same laws of physics. I just might know a few more of those laws than you do. But I can't turn you into a donkey or make vines grow out of the toilet. That sort of thing doesn't happen."

"But the soul is an actual thing?"

"Absolutely. Just like an appendix is an actual thing. That wart on your left big toe is real too, but if I were to remove it, you wouldn't miss having it, and it doesn't do you any good."

"And there's no way to prove you're telling the truth?"

He looked at me, and his eyes glistened strangely. "You know I am."

The thing is, I did. Or at least I thought I did, because when I thought about them, his words had the weight and texture and sound of truth. "Let's say you are telling the truth. Then that means there is such a thing as a soul. If that's true, then all the f.u.c.king bulls.h.i.t we've learned about religion and heaven and h.e.l.l and all that is also true, or could be. Right?"

He didn't nod or shake his head. He just watched me.

I asked, "Wouldn't I be a moron to sell my soul for a shot at a decent life on Earth and then trash my chance for eternal happiness? Who would take such a dumb-a.s.s bargain? If anything, the idea that you're telling the truth would give a person the strength to endure all the s.h.i.t life throws at them because it means that they're safe from h.e.l.l and destined for heaven."

The man thought about this for a second. It looked like no one had ever confronted him with these ideas before, but they seemed obvious to me.

"You're basing your a.s.sumptions on medieval ideas about the soul," he said. "That's very much like basing your flight plan to India on medieval maps. The soul is real, but that doesn't mean it's what priests and philosophers tell you it is. To be blunt, it is a commodity, one I can use and profit from. This isn't about heaven and h.e.l.l. It's about supply and demand. This is the economics of the marketplace, so don't go thinking that just because you have a soul you can use Dante's Inferno as a travel guide."

"But it's a soul," I said. "Isn't it, like, the essence of who I am?"

He waved his hand in the air in a dismissive gesture. "Who says? Listen, if you needed a heart transplant, and I offered to sell you a compatible organ, you wouldn't worry about the love and goodness and hopes contained in the donor's heart, would you? It's a piece of flesh, and it serves a function. The soul is the same thing. It's a part of you, and one you can live without. Giving it up doesn't necessarily mean you are giving up anything else."

"But it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not."

He shrugged. "You want to do business, I'm your man. You want to talk metaphysics, there are some deep-thinking hard timers in maximum security. They'll be happy to discuss this once they've knocked out all your teeth so they can rape your mouth."

I'd had a chance to ease my way by selling out Marco and Teddy, but I hadn't done it. I'd taken the hard way because the hard way felt like the honorable course. So I sure as h.e.l.l wasn't about to take the easy way now. I knew-and you have to understand this-I knew what he was offering me was the real deal. I knew all I had to do was say yes, and I also believed him when he said I wouldn't miss having it. It would be like that wart, useless and there, and then useless and gone.

But f.u.c.k it. I didn't like his att.i.tude. I didn't like the idea of some stranger buying and selling pieces of people, pieces of me. I didn't like that he danced around the details rather than answering my questions. No matter what I got in this bargain, he would always have power over me.

"Not interested," I said.

His smile made me want to punch him in the teeth. So smug and satisfied. "Marco said you might not. He said you were too much of a p.u.s.s.y."

"Oh, then I'll show him and prove he's wrong," I said in a lilting voice. "Did you actually think that was going to work?"

"The thing about Marco and Teddy," he said, "is that by getting out of jail, they created kind of a vacuum in the legal system. They'd been arrested for the crime, and then they were let out. Someone else had to look guilty, and that's where you came in. You're sitting right here because those guys took the deal. And now you're going to do time for them."

He wasn't going to force me into making a decision I didn't want to make, but I needed to know if this was for real. "When they made the bargain, did they know this would happen?"

He shrugged. "They knew it might. But they also thought you would get out of it, just like they did. Teddy was sure you'd say yes. Everyone says yes. Just about."

"Not me."

"I won't come back," he said. "There are perfect moments for trading, and this is yours. If you say no, you're saying no forever."

"Fine by me," I said.

He coughed out a mocking laugh. "When you're s.h.i.tting on that public toilet tomorrow morning, and you're struck by the realization of what your life is going to be for a very long time, you'll be sorry. And then it'll be too late."

I looked over at the toilet, and it did seem a pretty good metaphor for what was coming, but I wasn't about to let him talk me into it.

I turned back to say that, but he was gone. Vanished. Just bars and darkness across the hall. Any doubts I had about the truth of what he'd been saying were gone. I'd been offered a deal, and I'd said no. And now I had a long time to think about whether or not it had been the right call. And I knew something else. Whatever the world was, and however it worked, it wasn't like I'd always thought. It wasn't like how any of us had always thought. But the real deal-that was a big f.u.c.king question mark.

NOW THAT I knew there were others, I started walking the city, more and more. I watched the crowds in the street, watched how they looked at the world, how they interacted with it: stabbing at the b.u.t.tons of cell phones, dancing around little dogs on leashes, haltingly raising their arms for a cab.

And the way they watched things. The way they looked at one another, and the way they looked inward. Lots of people look inward when they walk, but maybe sometimes they looked inward at what wasn't there.

I saw it more. Flashes of it. People with dead, painted-on eyes, people who I knew without a doubt were hollow and empty and drifting, like something had just fallen out of them as they walked down the sidewalk.

So many of them were . . . well, not rich, but healthy, whole: they looked like Gap models, like bit players in a commercial, not the image of howling rock star success, but the image of comfort, of contentment, of having bought something and found genuine fulfillment in it.

I hated them. I hated them and the cold and the snow, and I hated how it made me feel colder on the inside. They'd said yes, and I hadn't, and I hated myself for it.

It took weeks for me to notice the next big thing, though, weeks of roving and walking in circles. And when I first saw it, it took me a while to realize what I was seeing was true.

There was one block where I saw more of them than anywhere else. Not just the random outliers, drifting down the pavement. Flocks of them. Gangs of them. Dozens and dozens of them.

This was where they lived. This was where they congregated, all the ones who said yes.

I felt like I'd penetrated some foreign territory, like a spy on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Were they watching me? Would they suddenly turn hostile, now that I'd found their big secret?

As I huddled in a doorway, I realized they wouldn't. In fact, they didn't give a s.h.i.t. It took me a minute to realize that to them, to these gleaming, effervescent, happy people with empty eyes, I was probably just some homeless guy. I looked the part, at least. I was scruffy, beat-up. I was someone who'd seen a lot of things and been changed by it. I was not like them, but neither was I anything to care about.

I kept coming back to that block, not sure what I was looking for. Somewhere behind the cold stone walls of that city block was the truth, the thing that had been hiding from me all along, and I had to find it.

Or him, actually.

It was sheer random chance that I saw him. The door of a very upscale apartment building opened, and I expected to see, well, anyone walk out. At first, I couldn't even really tell it was him, since it was so dark at the door's threshold.

When he took a few steps out, I realized I knew that walk. That swinging-d.i.c.k swagger . . . It was unmistakable.

"Marco," I said softly.

He was dressed in a cream-white jacket and corduroy pants, and he wore his beard trimmed so neat and clean it might have been cut by a surgeon. As he walked out, he flipped out a pair of sleek little sungla.s.ses, and he slipped them on with the air of a man confident that he's the protagonist in the movie of his life.

Marco turned back to the door and said something. I saw a shadow at the threshold, and a gorgeous woman in a faux-fur jacket and stripper stiletto heels came clip-clopping out. Usually these ornamentations would make any woman look ridiculous, but she was the sort who used and worked them effortlessly, so that you didn't even notice how impractical they were.

The girl put her arm in his, and they walked off into the city, she with the pristine, pneumatic efficiency of practiced beauty, he with the relaxed contentment of a man freshly scrubbed and refreshed after a long bout of athletic s.e.x.

I stood there in silence for a long time. It started snowing again. When the snow covered the toes of my shoes, I left.

THE NEXT TIME I came back I brought a knife.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it. I mean, I vaguely knew. I knew that I wanted to see Marco die, and if that meant I had to do it myself then, well . . . that would need to happen.

Everything had a faint unreality to it as I huddled in an alley outside of his building. I was aware how all this should go-I follow him, wait until he's alone, then confront him, cut his throat-but it felt like I was trying to live someone else's story. I had never killed anyone, even in prison. I'd been in fights in prison, but I hadn't much enjoyed them. I'd seen men die, and I hated seeing that.

I wanted Marco to die. I never ratted him out. I took his years, gave him my own. But I'd never realized how different my life could have been.

He was so happy. Even though his eyes were as empty as all the other hollow people's, he just . . . he just looked like someone everyone wanted to be.

I stood and watched as his apartment door opened. Two young girls came out, trotted down the street. I relaxed. I realized that I'd actually been dreading it: if it was Marco, then I'd have to do what I set out to do.

Then the door opened again, and out he came.

My whole body went rigid. Again, he composed himself on the sidewalk, before setting off with his confident swagger.

I knew that if I took one step after him, I'd have to follow him the whole way, and the more I looked at him, the more I'd want to do it.

My body quivered, frozen. I watched impotently as Marco blithely strolled down the street, turned the corner, and was gone.

Coward, coward. Always such a coward.

I WANDERED THEN. I think I wept. I wasn't sure.

The buzz of yellow sodium lights. The endless tumble of snow. Hallways of towering granite cliffs, riddled with dead little windows. Not unlike the hallways I'd left mere weeks ago. Was this place not unlike a prison? Faceless, miserable people bundled in bright clothing, shuffling along empty stretches, returning to their cells.

I walked down, down into the subway, found some miserable little line hidden in the exposed guts of the city, and sat there listening to the trains, thinking, alone except for a homeless man slouched in the corner.

I looked at my face in the reflection of the knife's blade. The bright, happy young man who'd dabbled in crime had long been erased by sunless years and unspeakable abuse.

How I wished I'd said yes. The h.e.l.l with all the spiritual navel-gazing. There could be no worse punishment than this, to be alive, and powerless, and empty, and forced to see people living lives that could never be yours.

There was a voice in the subway station. "You look," it said, "like someone in a world of hurt."

I turned my head. The homeless man in the corner raised a hand and pulled his hood back. A familiar face, as familiar as the twenty-dollar bill, smiled out at me as it emerged from shadow.

"h.e.l.lo again," he said.

"YOU'VE SEEN MARCO," he said. He had the same odd, off-color skin, the same weirdly placed features, but he was older and certainly more haggard, even more like an old photograph than before. "Don't tell me you haven't. That could be you, my friend. The deal's a better bargain if you make it before you waste your youth in prison, but that doesn't mean there isn't value to be had. You've got many fine years before you-or, shall we say, they could be fine. That's option number one. Number two is that hepat.i.tis C drags you down any day, any minute, poisoned blood washing into your body . . ."

He knew about the hep C. I hated his advantage over me, but whoever this guy was, he wasn't Satan. At least I didn't think so. There was something about him this time that smacked of desperation, like a salesman down on his luck. He had the same jolly, confident tone, but I'd picked up a few skills in prison, and one of them was learning to tell when a guy was talking out of his a.s.s. This guy wasn't just making me an offer, he was trying to save his own bacon. Maybe he had a quota to make. Maybe it had cost him something when he'd let me slide the first time. Who the h.e.l.l knows how it works in the soul-selling business? Whatever it was, I wanted to find some way to work it.

"I thought it was a one-time offer," I said.

"It was," he said with an easy grin. "And now it is again."

I thought about what he was offering, and what it might mean. I thought about Marco and that woman and all those people in that neighborhood who didn't seem to know or care that they'd lost something. If you don't know or care, how important could losing it be?

"Let's talk," I said.