There's Something I Want You to Do

I’m a businessman, very goal- and task-oriented, and I won’t stand for talk like that. “Come on,” I said. “Matty. Enough of this shit. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.” I stood before him and raised him by his shoulders as if he were a huge rag doll, and together, with my arm supporting him, we walked along the river road until by some miracle a taxi approached us. I hailed it, and the man drove us back to my hotel. In the lobby, the sight we presented — of a successful well-groomed gentleman holding up a shambling, smelly wreck — raised an eyebrow at the check-in desk from the night clerk, but eyebrows have never inflicted a moment of pain on me.

I bathed him that night, and I shaved him, and I ordered a cheeseburger from room service, from which he ate two bites fed from my hand to his mouth. I put him to bed in clean sheets, and all night he jabbered and shivered and cried out and tried to fight me and to escape. He actually thought he could defeat me physically, that’s how deluded he was. The next day, after a few phone calls, I checked him in to a rehab facility — they are everywhere in this region, and he was quite willing to go — and I promised to return in ten days for a visit. They don’t want you sooner than that.

Matty Quinn was right: he was now a different man, his soul ruined by his dealings with Black Bird, or Blackburn, or whatever that scholar of Shakespeare was calling himself these days, and I did not love him anymore. I felt fairly certain that I had gone through a one-way gate and would not be able to love him again. I can be fickle, I admit. Yet I would not abandon him until he was ready for it. In the meantime, out of the love I had once felt for him, and which it had been my honor to possess, I resolved to kill his enabler.

—

The next night, I lured Black Bird outside The Lower Depths. I informed him that I had brought with me a bulging packet of cash, and that I would give it to him for the sake of my friend Quinn’s painkilling drugs. But the cash was outside, I said, and only I could show him where. I did my best to look like a sucker.

Once in the shadows, I worked quickly and efficiently on him, and then after some minutes I left Black Bird battered on the brick pavement out of sight of the bar’s alley entryway. The man was a drug dealer, and I had administered to him the hard professional beating I thought he deserved. I would have beaten Matty’s doctor too, the one who first prescribed the painkillers, but they don’t let you do that; you can’t assault our medical professionals. Black Bird had gotten the brunt of it. But the angel of justice calls for retribution in kind, and since Matty Quinn was still alive, so, in his way, was Black Bird.

When Matty was ready to be discharged, I returned to Minneapolis and picked him up. Imagine this: the sun was blazing, and in broad daylight the man I had once loved folded himself up into my slate-gray rental car, and we drove like any old couple to the basement where he had been staying. We picked up his worldly possessions, the ones he wished to keep and to take with him to Seattle. Remnants: a high school yearbook, photographs of the village where he had worked in Ethiopia, a pair of cuff links, a clock radio, a laptop computer, a few books, and clothes, including a dark blue ascot. Not loving him, I helped him pack, and, not loving him, I bought him a ticket back to Seattle.

Saying very little, we sat together on the plane, touching hands occasionally. Not loving him, I moved him temporarily into my condo, and took him around Seattle and showed him how to use its public transportation system, and located a job for him in a deli. Together we found him a twelve-step program for drug addicts in recovery.

He lives nearby in an apartment I hunted down for him, and we have gone on with our lives. I call him almost every night, whether I am here or away on business.

—

Slowly, he is taking charge of his life. It seems a shame to say so, but because the light in his soul is diminished, the one in mine, out of sympathy, is diminished too. I cry occasionally, but unsentimentally, and we still take pleasure in bickering, as we always have. His inflammations still cause him pain, and he moves now with small steps like an old man, but when I am in town I bring him dinners from Trader Joe’s and magazines from the drugstore, and, one night, he brought home a sandwich for me that he himself had made at the deli. As I bit into the rye bread and corned beef, he watched me. “You like it?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” I said, shrugging. “Sauerkraut’s a bit thick.”

“That’s how I do it,” he said crossly, full of rehab righteousness.

“And I like more Russian dressing than this.” I glanced out the window. “Moon’s out,” I said. “Full, I think. Werewolf weather.”