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Jerry died and everyone started coming to me, asking what designs I had for revenge. Poor boy was found with his eyes taken out of his head, his dream juice siphoned, and his tongue cut loose. Always looked out for me, he did. Made it so I didn’t have to participate, get my hands dirty.
He’d tell people stories about me.
“My brother this—”
“My brother that—”
He made me sound tough and mysterious, totally sick in the head, like I was out on the streets, busy taking flowers from young girls, chewing supply, running wild in dark alleys, taking lives with baton and gun. The boys, well, they didn’t see me in action because their stomachs would turn on them if they did.
Meanwhile, the real me was avoiding it all, spending most nights asleep in some book about lovers or dragons or some mixture of both, my glasses pushed up to my brow. One night, Jerry found me with my pants down, my cock in one hand, a book held in the other. Never made fun of me for that. Could have been relentless. Instead, he just let the awkwardness hang between us, unspoken.
We both knew that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was the big brother. It was my responsibility to keep him safe, not the other way around. There was a time when things were proper. He’d come running into my room, crying because of some dream he’d had, nightflyers hanging on the ceiling above his bed, a hellish mobile. Dad had the equipment in a box under his mattress, syringes and vials, needles so thin they disappeared in bad light, but he was never home, and I didn’t have the steady hand to take the dream out of Jerry’s head. So instead, I would hold him, like the mother we were missing, rocking him slowly, humming some made up tune until his breathing settled.
Not sure when I started coming to him to solve my problems. Maybe after the foxcatchers made a husk and a corpse out of dad’s thick flesh.
Jerry came into the house like a gust of wind, stealing his tie from his throat, kneeling in front of me with a look of great resolve.
“People are asking for me,” I complained through tears, a pathetic shaking in my throat.
“Send them to me,” he said simply. The relief and gratitude that followed was visceral, a full-body, chiropractic looseness.
But that had really been the conclusion, the settling of a shift that had been a long time coming, years in the making. Yes, I felt shame about abandoning my seniority, but I was settled in that too. Now though, with him blown away, everything’s out of balance, and I’m left alone on one side of the scale, suddenly weighing everything down, rigid and tight.
“Boss?” asked Rori. We were standing in what had been Jerry’s office until just a few hours ago. Wide windows overlooked the harbor. Our people, boys and girls raised on our streets, helped unload shipments of supply—the chewy kind that made you see stars, the dead, and the face of your God. Maybe I was tweaking, grief-stricken mad, but I swore I saw them sneaking glances up at me every time they took a break, unanswerable questions in their eyes.
“We need to tell the boys something tonight,” said Rori. This was one of Rori’s many habits, his flattening of everyone and everything to boys.
“Tell them to keep their heads,” I said, chewing, letting the supply into my veins through my gums. I closed my eyes, and I saw Jerry’s face, his wagging head, keep your feet on the ground, not your pie in the sky. “Get them raging against the wall for now, while we think.”
“They’re raring to go,” said Rori. He had this pained expression, didn’t want to be the one to tell the boys we weren’t out for blood.
“Tell them they’ll have it, bones and all. I just can’t have us going swinging for the hills, then come up with nothing,” I said, trying to sound calm, like someone with a plan. I’d always watched the business from over Jerry’s shoulder, knew the shape of it, but not the finer points. Technically, we were equal partners. Not sure why Jerry let me get away with that. Boy had a sense of honor, respected his elders more than they deserved. Or maybe just pitied them.
“You tell them then,” said Rori. The dreaming sky was taking over, dark, briefly filled with color. Rori—that tough, old, broken-nosed brat—might’ve been the only one more scared than I was. Supposedly, whoever killed Jerry had used his baby-brother blood to scrawl Rori’s name into the sidewalk. I say ‘supposedly’ because I didn’t see it with my own eyes. Couldn’t face it, seeing him like that, was scared that it would do my head in, with that image lodged forever into my hippo-c. Some part of me knew that I should be insulted by the painful omission of my own name. Didn’t they see me as a threat? Instead, I’m ashamed to say, I was happy to let Rori carry that particular burden.
“Go home, Rori,” I said with a note of finality.
“So you’ll talk to them?”
“They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. The smart ones will wait for my orders. If I rush it, go out there now and tell them to keep their pants tied tight, they’re just gonna blow smoke in my eyes, and tonight, I can’t have that.”
#
I hadn’t dreamt in years, but only because I took the necessary precautions. Every night, I’d go to the same clinic and they’d run me dream-dry. Paid me a little for my contribution. Was a bit of nothing compared to the money I was getting from Jerry, but at least it was clean. Feels good to have some clean money in the wallet every now and then.
That night—at 8:45pm according to Jerry’s watch—the juice came out red.
“Not sure if we can use this,” said the technician.
“What?”
“It’s tarnished.”
“How can it be tarnished? It’s fresh from the head!”
“We’ll still pay, sir,” said the clinician, who seemed scared of me, my shaved head, and the tattoos Jerry forced me to get—a tiger battling a baboon down my arm.
“This game we play,” Jerry used to say. “It’s all about mystique.”
“I’m not worried about the money. I just don’t get how it can go bad in my head,” I whined to the technician.
“This happens. It’s nothing to be concerned about. Your hippo-c is processing something that we can’t risk giving to our patients. Come back tomorrow. Things might have cleared up by then.”
I left with the image of red juice floating freely in my skull—trauma and grief turned liquid.
#
Rori called me as I was walking out of the clinic’s sliding doors. When I didn’t answer, he sent a text. He wanted me back at the harbor, wanted answers I still didn’t have. Instead, I roamed through enemy territory, among the spike-necks and cattle-brows, risking it all to avoid running into familiar faces. I strobed between the neon lights that scorched dark, rain-splashed streets, trying to come up with a plan. Nothing came.
Squeezed between the bars and the strip clubs and the dream arcades was a steepled church with the face of a crying stained-glass woman in its window. The building had a quiet look about it—no lights flickering behind the glass—just a woman in black, passed out on its front steps, asleep in her own sick. It was an ungodly hour—2:55 AM said Jerry’s watch—Morpheus’s white speckled sky out in full view, but I went inside anyway, pushing open the large double doors with loud, reckless abandon. What are you doing in a place like this?
Jerry was still talking to me, asking me questions from beyond the grave.
I ignored him, as best as anyone can ignore the voice of their dead brother, walked up and down the aisles, shouting for the vicar or priest or whatever kind of person serves this denomination.
Eventually a woman in a dress gown came out from a back room, rubbing her eyes with a clenched fist.
“You’ll take your eye out that way,” I said.
“Oh, people say that about everything. Rubber bands, knuckles, spitballs… And yet, there are very few one-eyed people out there.”
“A good deal in my line of work.”
“Really? What kind of work is that?”
“Sorry—it was a joke.”
“So you pulled me out of my dreams to test out some material? Jokes?”
“No, I—Sorry, can I ask, what kind of church is this?”
She laughed, a childish giggle, with a bashful hand placed over her mouth. She must have been in her forties, but for a moment, I was certain I knew what she had looked like thirty years ago.
“This is a church of rain.”
“Yes, I think I’ve heard of that one.”
“I suppose you’re not one of our usual parishioners.”
“No. Do I have to be?”
“Rain does not discriminate, so neither do we.”
“I came here because—if I’m honest, I was just walking by. Dumb luck I guess. Because I do need some advice and a church is the kind of place people go for that sort of thing.”
She paused, with a waiting look in her eye.
“Jerry’s dead…”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, sitting down in a pew. “And Jerry is?”
“My baby brother.”
#
I left the church filled with notions of love and mercy. Walking in a daze, I wasn’t immediately aware that the woman in black who had been dreaming on the church steps had followed me out, and was now midway through a conversation of which I was a part of.
“So what do you think?” she asked. Despite having slept in a pillow of her own vomit, her face was clean. Of course, the smell lingered.
I blinked at her, dumb and thoughtless.
“I’m saying this could be a good thing for both of us. I can’t be on the streets, just walking, not working. Or I’m gonna get the beating of a life. And you, it looks like you need a good time coming.”
I could feel the bags under my eyes drooping, filling up like a balloon with water.
“Ok,” I said, mad compliant. From there, she led me down a dark alley, up precarious stairs that creaked like a baby’s scream, and into the saddest room I’d ever seen. A mattress without coverings, a curtain, ripped, pocked, and scarred, and that’s it. She convinced me towards the bed with practiced talk and all the right touches. Our clothes came off, she nibbled at my neck, but I felt very far away. My body responded in all the right ways—which wasn’t always a given for me—but, the whole time, I was just waiting for it to end, hoping that Jerry would storm in, coitus interruptus, say nothing, just take me home.
Afterwards, as we lay in bed, her hands dancing across my quilted chest, she asked me for the money, quiet like, almost friendly.
“I thought we were doing each other a favor?” I said, flushed, trying to remember how much cash I’d received from the clinic.
“Favors aren’t free.”
“I saved you from a beating.”
“A beating from who?” she said, grinning mischievously. “I’m freelance. If you don’t have enough, I can take some of your dreams. A vial or two and we’ll be even.” She crawled out of bed, her back muscles churning, a demon in the dim light, and pulled a syringe out from her pants pocket.
“Fresh out of dreams,” I sighed.
I gave her my wallet and everything inside it. When that wasn’t enough, I unclasped my watch—the one Jerry gave me, which read 4:00 AM on the dot. As I handed it over, this last bit of Jerry, my knuckles felt harder than they had in years, calloused, hungry for bruises.
I was supposed to be the one giving him little trinkets that he would keep safe after I hit the grave. That was the proper order of things—a cascade of items going from older to younger and younger hands. Meanwhile, I hadn’t managed on keeping his watch on my person for 24 hours. It was pathetic. Unacceptable. Not right.
#
I left that horrible room with an angry dirge ringing in my head.
Jerry’s dead. Jerry’s dead. Jerry’s dead.
When the priest had talked about love and mercy, in that childish voice of hers, it sounded like the best idea on earth. But the streets, its women and muck, vomit, spilled dream juice, and blood, reminded me that love and mercy would be no use for me, would provide no satisfaction.
I stormed back to our hood, my home, where tattoos raged across every bit of exposed skin. Familiar faces tried to stop me as I went by, grabbing me by the shoulder, spinning me around when I didn’t reply.
“We’ve been waiting for news.”
“We’re hungry man!
“Jerry deserves a reckoning.”
I met them all with a stone-faced expression, and they quieted, finally embodying the reputation Jerry had built for me, that psycho mystique. They seemed to like that.
I was suddenly determined to make something of Jerry’s death—build it out of ripped skin, blood, and bone—and keep it with me in the stream of my mind and the wars of my dreams, always.
#
Rori was still in Jerry’s office, looking out over the harbor, sipping on a glass of white dreams.
“Rori,” I said, announcing myself.
He turned to look at me, with a doped-up, serene look.
“Get yourself sober,” I commanded. The red juice, the kind the technician had rejected, was flowing freely through my veins.
“You okay?” Rori asked.
“Put the glass down and get your gun,” I said. “We’re going for blood.”
