Those That Wake

BRATH

MAL HAD A DREAM that he was in his apartment. Not the Fosters’ apartment, and certainly not the apartment he grew up in, but his own place, which didn’t exist but looked like Tommy’s apartment. There was a pounding on the door, which was more than a pounding. It was really a slamming, something massive flinging itself against the door.

In his dream, Mal stood, watching the door buckle but hold, again and again, each blow shaking the hinges, loosening the entire structure from its frame. Every time another blow landed, something in the apartment broke, mostly mirrors, which there were a lot more of than anyone actually ever had in an apartment. He stood and watched the top hinge snap and hang pitifully. He watched the lock start to twist just a little and the middle hinge start to lose its screws. Through the slim line beneath the door, he could see a shadow, big and shapeless.

The middle hinge ponged off the door, not even managing to maintain the ineffectual grasp of the top one. The door tilted, near to giving up. Mal shouted with sudden, overwhelming anger and fear. He charged, cutting his feet on broken mirrors, and threw himself against the door.

He pushed it back into its frame and leaned against it, baring his teeth and taking the impact with a shout of rage at each blow. His skull rattled. He wondered if parts of him were going to start breaking. But he wasn’t going to let the door come down. No way. It was a fight now.

The bottom hinge gave; the lock cracked and let go. Mal was essentially holding the door in place himself now. Whatever was out there banged, and Mal shouted in response. Keep banging, he thought. He was here for a fight.

The banging stopped. He held the door up, waiting for the attack to renew. When it didn’t, he unclenched his eyes and looked at the door. The hinges were back on, the lock was fine. It was dented, but solid, a fine door. All it needed was someone fighting for it.

He woke up remarkably tense from the dream, his muscles stiff, as though he’d actually struggled with something in his sleep. He got up slowly, stretched himself out, limped to the bathroom, threw water in his face, and rubbed the short bristles of hair on his head. The cracked mirror showed him that sleep hadn’t relaxed him at all.

When he picked up his cell to call Sharon, the night table it sat on promptly collapsed, one of its legs having cracked off for no reason Mal could conjure. Another thing to add to the junk heap when he finally got around to replacing all the stuff that had broken over the last few days. It didn’t even seem weird to him anymore. Or it did, actually, but now it was just some extra weird in a giant field of weird, no more strange than a building that seemed bigger on the inside than out.

He picked his cell up from the floor.

“Hello?” Sharon appeared, her jaw tense. Mal realized with a flash of unwelcome familial insight that this was exactly the same way he carried his own tension.

“It’s Mal. Have you spoken to the police yet?” He could see beyond her, through her window. The dome loomed; the outline of the metal piping that held it up was dimly visible, perched like a giant spider, stalking her from behind.

“Mal,” she said, and then, away from the phone to someone else in the room, “it’s Mal. What’s going on, Mal?” She was back with him. “Did you find Tommy?”

“No. He’s—I didn’t—it’s complicated.” He couldn’t even begin. “Did you speak to the police? I need the name and precinct of the officer in charge.”

“We didn’t call the police. George thinks—”

“George! Are you kidding? Tommy is gone and—”

“Don’t you shout at me,” she interrupted him, not to be outdone. “I spoke with George, and we felt that we didn’t know enough to tell them anything. Who do you think you are, telling me about how I should look after Tommy?”

“You’re his mother. Supposedly,” Mal said quietly.

“You little shit,” she said coldly, and he remembered how her voice rose when she was angry, but when she was furious it became quiet, frigid, and hollow, like a cavern of ice. “Where were you when your father left Tommy and me all alone? Oh, that’s right. You went with him. Well, your example never gained Tommy a single thing except to send him away and land him in this trouble.”

Mal stammered, working his jaw. This was how it was with her. He remembered, but he hadn’t actually felt it in years. If she were before him now, he wasn’t sure that he could have stopped himself from striking her.

“Nothing to say?” Sharon taunted bitterly. “What a surprise. When it comes down to it, you’re just like your father was up to the day he died: a second-rate—”

Her face disappeared and was replaced by another one, a chubby male face with uncomfortable eyes and too much slicked-back hair.

“Mal,” the face said, “this is George.”

Mal slammed the cell into the wall so hard that the room echoed with the impact. He let it fall away, leaving a spider web of cracks in the plaster. The cell, of course, was still intact. It was sure to be the only thing left after this whole flea-bitten apartment came tumbling down around his ears.

As it happened, Mal had not gone to the police himself. After Annie disappeared, he went back the Fosters’ place, thinking she might have gone there, though she’d never been there before. But she knew his name, and his name was on-line along with his address. She might have gone because she got scared, then found his address and been waiting for him. But she hadn’t been there, of course. He’d spent a frustrating half hour with several functions on his cell that he’d never used before. Preposterously, he put the name “Annie” into his cell’s city phone book app and, not surprisingly, found thousands of listings. He fumbled through the profiler app, feeding it a clumsy description of Annie based mainly on guesses: her age, height, weight, hair color, eye color. Again, he built a queue of thousands to look at and finally gave up just short of blasting his cell apart against a wall.

He remembered the sketchbook then, and went back to Tommy’s apartment. Her name wasn’t in the book, though Tommy’s was, the letters adorned with flowers and vines and gargoyles. He searched through the apartment in a maniacal quest for something with her name on it and found nothing.

He almost went to the cops. He didn’t have her last name, but he did have her picture. In the end, he just couldn’t bear giving the picture up. That felt like turning the fight over to someone else, like giving up on Tommy. He could get a copy of it made, but he felt time pressing down on him until it was nearly crushing his brain. The answer wasn’t in the photo, anyway. It was in that building with the doors, maybe on that top floor. Just thinking of it made his stomach flutter.

He could tell the cops about that. Then they’d come with him, raid the place on a charge of too many doors.

But he had one line left: Brath. Brath was the sort you were always afraid to approach but who always came through once you had. But he was an opportunity of last resort, because once he started doing something, he followed it through no matter what crashed and burned around him.

“Everything okay, Mal?” Gil Foster was standing in the doorway, his eyes tracing a line from the new cracks in the wall to the cell on the floor, to Mal, standing dejectedly over it.

Mal looked up at him, searching for words that weren’t angry or aggressive.

“Sorry, Gil,” he managed, barely.

Gil was a short man going thick in the middle, though you could tell from the shoulders and legs that he’d been solid once upon a time. He had a short salt-and-pepper beard and a balding head, and he was dressed in pants and a white undershirt.

“Yeah. We’re going to have to—Jesus! What happened to your face, Mal?”

Mal turned his head back down, trying to obscure his bruises again, though it was too late. At least he’d slept in his T-shirt and the damage to his torso wasn’t visible.

“I tripped going up the subway steps,” Mal nearly mumbled, turning to his bag where he kept all his clothes.

“Subway steps,” Gil said, now standing right next to him. “Look, Mal. Look. I understand we’re just starting to know each other. But you’re going to be with us for a while, I figure. Would you mind a little unsolicited advice?”

Mal did him the respect of turning and facing him, though he remained silent.

“I do know what your life’s been like the last year or so, going from one foster family to another. And I know who your father was, of course. Fighting comes naturally to you, and that’s probably real good in some situations. God knows, I been in construction for thirty-five years, and it’s filled with tough guys. I see men looking for a fight all the time. And I see what they end up with, too, which is nothing. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is let it all go. Just turn around and walk away.”

“Give up,” Mal said, no emotion in his face or voice.

“Be a bigger man.”

“That’s … a lot to think about.”

“Sure. Take your time. I ain’t going anywhere. And neither are you. So maybe after school we could finally get your bag unpacked.”

Mal looked at his bag, which held everything he owned.

“Jan’s got some breakfast going,” Gil said, “or she will once I can get her off the damn cell.”

“I’m sorry, Gil. I have to get to school.”

“No sweat, Mal. You can take it with you.”

Mal’s shoelace snapped when he tried to tie it, and the strap of his bag had come apart sometime during the night. As he headed for the door, Gil handed him eggs crammed between two pieces of toast and Janet looked up from her cell long enough to say goodbye, but her eyes didn’t linger long enough to catch the bruises Mal wore.

He stared suspiciously at people passing him on the street. It was that kind of tension the dream and then the “conversation” with Sharon had left him.

On the subway, a lady limped into the center of the car and announced that she was looking for work right now but couldn’t find any. She was trying to raise two children and none of them had a roof over their heads. The words were misshapen, spoken through a slack jaw. She couldn’t be thinking straight or she wouldn’t be doing this when an MCT officer could come through at any moment, haul her away to one of the homeless camps that everyone talked about but no one ever saw. She asked if anyone could find it in his heart to give her some money. Anything would do, she said, looking up and down the car with one good eye, the other perpetually staring up and to the left. A quarter, a dime, a nickel; anything at all.

No one gave her money. Few even looked up from their cells or away from the HDs. One or two scowled at her as she went by, her slightly trembling hand held out before her.

Mal watched her as she passed, no money coming out of his pocket, either. She went on to the next car, to pastures that promised to be just as dry and unforgiving or worse than that, if she ran afoul of the MCT.

When the doors opened at his stop, he went out with a few others. One of them, a middle-aged man, seemed to go out of his way to exit through the scanner a young lady was about to enter, thus keeping her from getting to the train before the doors clunked shut.

“F*ck you, you f*ckin’ bastard,” the young lady whipped over her shoulder as she ran for the train anyway.

“Bite me,” he said with a dead expression as he disappeared up the stairs.

Mal came up more than half a city away from school. He went the block and a half to the old building that was adorned with a sign that showed his last name, JERICHO’S, in letters so faded that you could only tell what they were if you already knew what it said. He went up the dirty stairway and into the gym with the big ring in the center with the stained canvas and fraying ropes. He passed between a big lumpy bag suspended from the ceiling by a chain and a man spinning through a jump-rope set. He stopped at the display case against the back wall. The glass over his father’s old, worn boxing gloves had fissured down the center. He watched it, daring it to crack further while he stood there and watched, challenging it to drive him right over the precipice.

“Mal.” A stubby man with a cigar chomped in his jaws leaned out of a smoke-filled office. “No school today?”

“Brath in yet?” he called over.

The man answered with a blunt finger, pointing toward the showers, the only good news Mal had gotten his hands on in a while. He went into the shower room, humid and steamed up from guys done with their morning workout, soon to head over to the docks or the meatpacking district or a construction site.

Nikolai Brath looked like a human sports car: sleek and powerful. His slim body was ridged with tight cords of muscle beneath lacquered skin, up his arms, down his torso, along his legs. His dark blond hair was slicked back, a tight cap on his head. Razor-blade lines—high cheekbones, aquiline nose, sharp chin—made his young face dangerous, and dark blue, ice-chip eyes had frozen opponents in the ring often. He was pulling on his shirt when he saw Mal and reverse nodded at him.

“Brath.”

It was just one word, but the sound of it, something in Mal’s voice, brought the sharp profile up in a look of concern.

“What is it, Mal?”

“My brother’s missing. I need help.”

“Sit down.” Brath put a strong hand on Mal and pressed him down to a bench. “Say it slow.” There was the whisper of an accent on some of his words.

Mal’s caution died immediately. Brath was young, only two years older than Mal himself, but his quiet assurance made it seem as if he already knew everything. It was this calm, invincible confidence that Mal always found himself trying to master in his own moments of desperation. So Mal told him: Tommy’s call, Annie, the building, maybe drug dealers, but what the hell were the doors? The top-floor button, that was the only thing he didn’t mention.

Other people came and went through the locker room, catching only snatches of the story, making of it what they would and clearing out.

Brath shook his head when it was over.

“You did the right thing, Mal. Cops would have done jack.” Brath had dealings with cops sometimes. To hear him speak of it, they were either hassling him for no reason, or laying off because he gave them what they liked. The only things he liked less than cops were MCT officers and punks who couldn’t control themselves in the ring.

Brath had been among the groups of kids sent in here by city agencies, by parole officers: juveniles edging up on their eighteenth and in danger of doing some real hard time. Work off your steam in here, or end up back in jail. Most of those kids had come and gone. Brath stuck around, got better and better, acquired skill and speed. Mal could never figure why Brath was among those other hotheads sent in here; he was always calm, his vaguely accented voice barely more than a whisper. He had money, too. Not gobs of it, but enough to pay his gym dues, always in cash and always on time; enough to entertain as many girls as he wanted, all without having to negotiate any of it out of the slightly psychotic uncle he lived with. The older brother Tommy never was.

Brath finished dressing. He turned to his locker and pulled a slim, black automatic out of it. It was Brath himself in the form of a weapon: perfectly compact, not a single wasted inch of machinery. The grip was ergonomically curved, the body sleek, all high-impact plastic and feather-light super alloys; the whole thing no bigger than the palm of a large hand. He touched a button, and the clip hissed from the butt. The first time Mal had ever seen it, also in the locker room, he had looked up at Brath and found the ice-chip eyes studying him in return.

“There’s more than one kind of fight, Mal,” he had said quietly.

Now Mal watched him check the load and snap the clip home, then attach it to the back of his belt along a magnetic strip.

“Why don’t you and me go have another look at this building?” he said to Mal.

“You mean you’re coming with me?” Mal asked, nearly breathless with relief.

“Yeah, Mal, yeah.” He threw a leather jacket on and made the weapon disappear.

“Brath. I really…”

Brath nodded, squeezing Mal’s shoulder once, hard, to get past the sloppy stuff.

“Sure, sure. Let’s get going.”