“JB,” Jude had said. “Listen to me. Go to that café on Clinton, okay? Take your sketch pad. Get yourself something to eat. I’m coming down as soon as I can, as soon as this meeting’s over. And then I’ll text you when I’m done and you can come home, all right?”
“Okay,” he’d said. And he’d stood up, and taken a very long shower, hardly scrubbing himself, just standing under the water, and then had done exactly what Jude had instructed: He picked up his sketch pad and pencils. He went to the café. He ate some of a chicken club sandwich and drank some coffee. And he waited.
And while he was waiting, he saw, passing the window like a bipedal mongoose, with his dirty hair and delicate chin, Jackson. He watched Jackson walk by, his self-satisfied, rich-boy lope, that pleased half smile on his face that made JB want to hit him, as detached as if Jackson was just someone ugly he saw on the street, not someone ugly he saw almost every day. And then, just before he passed out of sight, Jackson turned, and looked in the window, directly at him, and smiled his ugly smile, and reversed direction and walked back toward the café and through the door, as if he had known all along that JB was there, as if he had materialized only to remind JB that JB was his now, that there would be no escaping from him, that JB was there to do what Jackson wanted him to do when Jackson wanted him to do it, and that his life would never be his own again. For the first time, he had been scared of Jackson, and panicked. What has happened? he wondered. He was Jean-Baptiste Marion, he made the plans, people followed him, not the other way around. Jackson would never let him go, he realized, and he was frightened. He was someone else’s; he was owned now. How would he ever become un-owned? How could he ever return to who he was?
“ ’Sup,” said Jackson, unsurprised to see him, as unsurprised as if he had willed JB into being.
What could he say? “ ’Sup,” he said.
Then his phone rang: Jude, telling him that all was safe, and he could come back. “I’ve got to go,” he said, standing, and as he left, Jackson followed him.
He watched Jude’s expression change as he saw Jackson by his side. “JB,” he said, calmly, “I’m glad to see you. Are you ready to go?”
“Go where?” he asked, stupidly.
“Back to my place,” said Jude. “You said you’d help me reach that box I can’t get?”
But he was so confused, still so muddled, that he hadn’t understood. “What box?”
“The box on the closet shelf that I can’t reach,” Jude said, still ignoring Jackson. “I need your help; it’s too difficult for me to climb the ladder on my own.”
He should’ve known, then; Jude never made references to what he couldn’t do. He was offering him a way out, and he was too stupid to recognize it.
But Jackson did. “I think your friend wants to get you away from me,” he told JB, smirking. That was what Jackson always called them, even though he had met them all before: Your friends. JB’s friends.
Jude looked at him. “You’re right,” he said, still in that calm, steady voice. “I do.” And then, turning back to him, “JB—won’t you come with me?”
Oh, he wanted to. But in that moment, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t know why, not ever, but he couldn’t. He was powerless, so powerless that he couldn’t even pretend otherwise. “I can’t,” he whispered to Jude.
“JB,” said Jude, and took his arm and pulled him toward the curb, as Jackson watched them with his stupid, mocking smile. “Come with me. You don’t have to stay here. Come with me, JB.”
He had started crying then, not loudly, not steadily, but crying nonetheless. “JB,” Jude said again, his voice low. “Come with me. You don’t have to go back there.”
But “I can’t,” he heard himself saying. “I can’t. I want to go upstairs. I want to go home.”
“Then I’ll come in with you.”
“No. No, Jude. I want to be alone. Thank you. But go home.”
“JB,” Jude began, but he turned from him and ran, jamming the key into the front door and running up the stairs, knowing Jude wouldn’t be capable of following him, but with Jackson right behind him, laughing his mean laugh, while Jude’s calls—“JB! JB!”—trailed after him, until he was inside his apartment (Jude had cleaned while he was here: the sink was empty; the dishes were stacked in the rack, drying) and couldn’t hear him any longer. He turned off his phone, on which Jude was calling him, and muted the front-door buzzer’s intercom, on which Jude was ringing and ringing him.
And then Jackson had cut the lines of coke he had brought and they had snorted them, and the night had become the same night he’d had hundreds of times before: the same rhythms, the same despair, the same awful feeling of suspension.
“He is pretty, your friend,” he heard Jackson say at some point late that evening. “But too bad about—” And he stood and did an imitation of Jude’s walk, a lurching grotesquerie that looked nothing like it, his mouth slack like a cretin’s, his hands bobbling in front of him. He had been too high to protest, too high to say anything at all, and so he had only blinked and watched Jackson hobble around the room, trying to speak words in Jude’s defense, his eyes prickling with tears.