George slowly descended the stairs, and pausing on the last step, called 911 while looking straight out the window. The pounding continued, but it was a solid door, well-fitted to its frame, and it showed no sign of giving way.
He finished with,“There’s a very intoxicated and belligerent man at the most easterly door, where the patient is, so advise responders to go to the other entrance, where the buzzer is.”
He slowly put the phone away. “I have not tasted that knowledge yet,” George said, looking down at Drew, “that allows me to hope they’ll take my advice. And, really, since I caused this injury I should at least try to prevent the first responders from getting a tire iron in the face when they arrive.”
Hearing no sentient creature disagree, George performed minimal first aid (simultaneously moving Drew away from the sweep of the door), and with a deeply theatrical sigh, flung the door outward.
The young man he almost knocked over sprang up, drug-fuelled and hot-tempered, but found himself pinned before his rage could accomplish anything. George was as benignly gentle as an indulgent auntie collecting a toddler.
In a conversational tone (he had a hand over the young man’s mouth) he said, “Your liver and kidneys will be shot within a matter of years if you keep this up,” he said as he directed him back to the truck. “If unsafe sex for drug money is your idea of a career path you’re gonna die young and high. Along the way you’ll be a danger to others and a sad reflection on your kin, some of whom would welcome you back if you made the effort to get in right relation with them. Drew is a user, and not just of drugs; he thinks nothing of a nice middle class boy like Chris and you’ll be less than nothing to him when he’s done with you because he knows he can treat you worse.”
George took off the hand, and braced himself.
“He’s mine,” the young man said.
George made a sound. It could have been a bark, or a cough, or perhaps a suppressed laugh. “No friend of yours would ever say ‘you’re welcome to him’. He’s whipping you up to kill Chris! You’ll be tried in adult court this time, you’re over eighteen aren’t you?”
The planes of his face shifted from defiant to surly. “I turned eighteen last week.”
“I bet the two of you celebrated by spending the evening threatening Chris.”
“Fuck you, he’s mine.”
George stopped arguing with himself. “Since we appear to have come to the end of what generously may be termed our civil intercourse, I must with sadness inform you that our recent cooperation in the unfolding of this evening’s events is now at an end.”
He had lifted the truck keys from Drew. Now he felt uneasy about busting him up so bad, but it had seemed like the best outcome, to have Drew at least sedated for the next little while, to be out of the hair of both of these poor men.
“I’m sorry. These are cop-grade zip ties, so good luck getting free on your own. Maybe you’ll get lucky, maybe the cops will free you, but if you’re still sitting here in the morning I’ll bring you two McDonalds breakfasts and two cups of coffee.”
George tied him to the steering column. He had stopped resisting, which George really appreciated.
“Good thing I took a shit first,” the young man said. Then, with more emotion, “Is Drew dead? He didn’t look very alive.”
“He was alive with a steady pulse and only a very small bump on his head when I left him,” George said truthfully. “I have to go and meet the firetruck. Please don’t scream.”
“I won’t, man, I fucking hate being gagged.”
“Good to know.”
Now, how to reduce the size and scale of the mess. If he was coaching a human, he’d say, “Deep breaths,” but there wasn’t really an equivalent for him. Nor did a pulse have much pull as a metaphor, since he had nothing like it. Humans can be seen pulsing and breathing at quite a distance. His own people often remarked on it, making much of their capacity for stillness.
Tingling, by comparison, he could identify with. The sensation of being awestruck and speechless before something beautiful, or deadly, that some call transcendent wonder. To feel a cuff as a friendly blow exchanged between equals, or close to it. To be so attracted to a lover that your ability to move through the world as a seamless whole is fractured; there is only the world she is in, and everything else, which is a ludicrous, lonely journey through desperate spaces constructed of aching absence.
He didn’t want to compare Drew and his poor dupe here to himself and Kima. Perhaps that had been the point of the evening. He halted as he crossed the parking lot, even as the ambulance’s faint wail grew louder. He walked back to the truck, freed the man, gave him twenty dollars for breakfast and said, “If I was really compassionate I’d try to find you a hostel.”
“Was I in the apartment earlier?”
“Upstairs? There? Yes,” George said, pointing. George had perfect autobiographical memory, or allowed himself that illusion as it was close to being true, and could not understand how this man could just plain forget something that had happened literally minutes earlier. He had seen many, many examples of such lapses, and it always left him feeling shaky and incredulous, everybody off in their own reality, and terrible things happening when those realities touched.
“We did a line in the truck, I remember that,” he said. He slid out of the truck and said, “Peace, out.”
George went upstairs and was thrilled to see a note on the door from Jesse :
Boss, taking the truck back and Chris far far away to an inn. Door’s locked, key’s with me, we’ll come back tomorrow night.
And so it transpired. Drew was four weeks in hospital longer than he was supposed to be because he re-broke his leg. Chris moved to Mission and threw his obsessive temperament into helping his best friend from high school start a restaurant. The street kid they never saw again, although George always looked for him and eventually, as he built up his network of contacts, learned his name.
