A-rab and Baby John
„Blood…there´s blood on my hands", Baby John whispers, holding his trembling hands out to A-rab as if he expects him to do something about it, to make it go away. A-rab grits his teeth, his fear and grief only wanting to come out as anger.
"And ya still ain´t got a hanky!" he cries uselessly, throwing up his hands. For a second he feels like slapping Baby John. He didn`t want to see this, any of this. The blood on the other boy´s hand almost grotesquely incongruous. Baby John shouldn´t have blood on his hands, he´s too young, too soft, too…sweet. A-rab shakes his head and swallows hard.
"C´mere," he picks up an old piece of paper from the sidewalk and angrily wipes Baby John`s hands with it until all the red is gone. They all had blood on their hands, and that wasn´t going to come off so easily, A-rab quashes the thought.
"There, better now?" he asks briskly.
Baby John`s tremulous, grateful smile makes him want to weep.
"Alright, then let´s get the hell outta here."
Without thinking, he shoves the paper in his pocket.
Baby John only nods, apparently not sure of his voice. A-rab puts a hand on his shoulder and they silently wander into the seemingly never-ending night.
Action
The room is hot, oppressively, stiflingly, hot. And Action is drunk, drunker than he´s ever been and yet somehow still not drunk enough. Groaning, he wriggles out of his drenched T- shirt and throws it across the room. He refuses to believe what has happened, it just couldn´t be true. Riff and Tony weren´t dead and anyone who claimed otherwise was just talking bullshit.
"Bullshit!" Action shouts at the ceiling, angrily contradicting the silence of his room.
It´s true, it´s true, it´s true, a voice in his head mocks viciously. He grinds his head into his pillow, trying to shut it up. Going home had been a mistake. He needed someone to talk to, someone who would tell him everything was going to be alright somehow. But everything was not going to be alright. Action sits up abruptly, causing the room to sway dangerously around him. Pressing a hand to his stomach, he fights the urge to throw up.
Air! He needed fresh air, not that you got that in this city. Stumbling over to the window, he rests his arms on the sill and takes a few deep, gulping breaths. When something light and soft suddenly ghosts across his hands, he jumps so hard, he almost falls on his butt. A piece of paper, dancing on the breeze. He bends to pick it up, slow like a sleepwalker. It seems to be a fragment of some kind of map. Indifferently, he lets it float to the floor.
Tottering back to his bed, he kneels to pull an old shoe box from underneath it. Hidden between broken toys and baseball cards, he finds his old rosary, a gift from his Nonna. He needed to talk to someone and maybe, for a change, He would listen.
Snowboy
Leaning against the door of his parents´ apartment, Snowboy feels like what he´d imagine being a ghost would feel like. Very light and insubstantial, with a fine tremor traveling all through his body. Pinching his cheeks as if to remind himself he still has a face, he more floats than walks into the dimly lit kitchen. Something bad has happened tonight, something really bad and yet it all seems oddly vague to him.
"Pull yourself together, dumbass," he scolds himself, balling his hands into tight fists.
His brain refuses to listen. God, what was he going to do? He needed to…he needed to eat something. Yes, that would help ground him again, he is suddenly certain. So he pulls up a chair, opens the fridge and just starts stuffing himself. Cake and apples, jam and bologna, peanut butter and lunch meat and everything else he can get his hands on.
When the fridge is empty save for a few condiments, he rests his head on his arms and cries until he starts hiccoughing. Exhausted, but feeling just a little more human, he is about to finally shut the fridge again when his gaze falls on something like a little parcel in the vegetable crisper.
A chocolate bar maybe? Snowboy feels he might still be able to eat a little chocolate. But it is just a folded piece of paper, a part of a map apparently. Confused, he drops it on the table and shuffles to his room. Slumping onto his bed, he is asleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow.
Tiger
He grinds his teeth so hard he can hear it, as he strides through the deserted streets. Never before has he felt more like living up to his name. Like he could tear the entire world limb from limb. Not that it would help, even if it were possible. Nothing short of raising the dead would help this time.
But he has to do something, he has to find some kind of safety valve for his feelings or he really would explode. And suddenly he knows exactly what that is.
"Why, look what the cat dragged in," Diane says, tapping her bright red fingernails against the doorframe. "And I thought ya´d forgotten all about me."
He doesn´t say anything, just stares at her.
The girl heaves a long-suffering sigh. "Oh, come in then."
Shrugging off his jacket, he heads straight for the bedroom, not feeling like pretending tonight.
"Hey, ya wanna drink?" Diane calls from the kitchen.
He nods before realizing she can´t see him.
"Yeah." He flops onto the bed, listening to her putter about.
From the doorway, Diane winks at him across the rum and cokes in her hands.
"Now, let´s see if we can´t make this Tiger purr," she says with rehearsed sultriness, putting the drinks on the little bedside table.
He watches her slither out of her tight, green dress, feeling oddly detached all of a sudden.
She slowly crawls onto the bed and begins to do what, she says, no other girl does better. He closes his eyes and tries to enjoy himself. It doesn´t work.
"What, don´tcha like me no more?" Diane raises an eyebrow at him.
He rolls onto his side with a groan.
"Yeah, I like ya…that ain´t it," he says slowly.
The girl eyes him quizzically. "Then what is it?"
He tells her, everything. By the time he finishes his account, there are tears in her eyes. She looks achingly young all of a sudden and he realizes that he actually does like her, a lot.
"Oh, honey," she just says, wrapping her arms around him.
They just cuddle for a bit, eventually falling asleep holding each other tight.
When he wakes again, Diane is gone, a small note lying on her pillow.
Fresh OJ in the fridge, love, Diane, a bright red lipstick kiss beneath it.
He puts it in his shirt pocket, wondering if he could, if he wanted to, love Diane.
Gee-tar
The park isn`t safe at this time of night, he knows, knows but doesn´t care. Flying across gravel and concrete as fast as his feet will carry him, Gee-tar doesn´t care about anything. He doesn´t want to. He doesn´t want to care, or hear or see or do anything but run. Run until his legs ache and his lungs burn.
Knowing that there is no running away, not in this city, not for the likes of him, only making him run faster. Somewhere ain´t a place, he thinks desperately. He doesn´t want to remember that PR girl´s face or her words.
"I can kill too, because now I have hate."
His blood is thrumming in his ears as he leaps across rocks and puddles. In the end, the girl hadn´t been able to run away from hate either. Here, you didn´t have that chance, no matter what you did or who you were, somebody hated you and you hated somebody.
Here, you were born into hate, it came as easy as breathing. Or maybe even easier, he stops briefly, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath before running on again. If he could, he´d never stop again. But he is running in circles, he´ll just end up exactly where he began. Back to fighting, fighting, fighting…
A small brook cuts through the ground before him like a wound and he jumps knowing he won`t make it. Slipping on the grass, he rolls over rocks and damp earth before barreling into a tree. Dazed, he lies there for a while, just listening to his shuddering breath. Eventually he pushes himself up on his knees. Someone has pinned a piece of paper to the tree´s boll. Gee-tar squints, trying to decipher it. It´s some kind of map and he almost laughs at the irony. There was no map leading him out of here. He tears it off and puts it in his pocket anyway.
Mouthpiece and Joyboy
They choose seats in the back row, far away from the giggling couples. Mouthpiece, for some reason has bought popcorn and now he sits there, hugging the bucket to his chest like a teddy bear, not eating a single kernel. They didn´t care what movie was playing, anything to push away the memory of what they know they´ll never forget.
At first it even works a bit as they try to follow the action, but then the female lead suddenly gets stabbed while showering and Mouthpiece mumbles "Man, I don´t feel good…I don`t feel good at all," and they hastily make their way to the exit.
"Ya gonna puke?" Joyboy asks the green-looking Mouthpiece.
"Yeah…no…I dunno," the boy says, sitting down on the sidewalk.
Joyboy shoves his hands in his pockets and plops himself down beside him.
"Stupid movie," he says, just to say anything at all. "As if ya wouldn´t hear if somebody came into your room to stab ya…"
"Shut the hell up about people gettin´ killed!" Mouthpiece throws up his hands, sending his popcorn flying everywhere.
Joyboy releases a sigh. " Sorry." He´s feeling pretty weird too right now, almost as if he were looking at the back of his own head.
"Gawd."Mouthpiece digs his hands into his hair." What are we gonna do now?"
Joyboy releases a humorless chuckle. "What are we gonna do? Same as always, whaddaya think?"
Mouthpiece swallows hard before looking at him.
"That´s it? Same as always?"
Joyboy shrugs somewhat helplessly.
"What else? What choice do we have if we wanna hold our turf?"
Mouthpiece nods wearily. What choice did they have? He unsteadily climbs to his feet.
"Think I´m headin` home now." He moves to pick up the now mostly empty popcorn bucket.
"Alright." Joyboy rises slowly, his knees cracking.
Mouthpiece takes a few steps.
"Ya can crash on the couch if ya wanna," he says.
Good old Mouthpiece, Joyboy would never have admitted it, but the thought of being alone tonight scares the bejesus out of him.
" Thanks." He pats the other boy`s shoulder.
They trudge off in silence, sharing the rest of the popcorn until Mouthpiece suddenly stops dead in his tracks.
"What the hell? There´s a…a map in my popcorn!" he says unbelieving.
Big Deal
Where troubles melt like lemon drops, way above the chimney tops, that´s where you´ll find me. Big-Deal´s mother had sometimes sung "Over the Rainbow" to him when he was a little kid, and even though he had long lost any illusions about the existence of such a place, he´d still escape to where the chimney tops sent plumes of black smoke into the skies whenever his troubles seemed to great for walls to contain them.
Sitting down in the shadow of the parapet, he pulls a small, battered notebook from his pocket. Nobody knew he owned such a book, not even the Jets. He opens it and stares at the blank page for a long time. How could he put into words what he felt right now? It seemed too big, too terrifying, as if any moment his thoughts were going to claw their way out through his skull.
But he had to write something. Wiping the sweat from his face with his sleeve, he gazes across the maze of chimneys and TV antennas.
In the sky, skeletal hands
Ants without hive hurry in solitary swarms
Fingers break before they touch.
Big Deal angrily crosses out the words again, they were trite, meaningless, pointless. Snapping the book shut, he rests his elbows on his knees. He wouldn´t find the words, not tonight, maybe never. Maybe they would be forever lodged in his throat like a poison dart. The thought frightens him.
Rising to his feet with a muffled groan, he gazes into the dark maze of streets below. In a city of over sixteen million, blood was spilled every day and every night. Every day and every night people lived and died in fear and pain, two more or less hardly mattered.
Big Deal grits his teeth, maybe this was the crux, they didn´t matter and they never would, neither dead nor alive. He takes out his notebook again and writes a single word, help. Tearing out the page he watches it float down into the abyss of the city. When a sudden breeze carries it up again and into his face, he actually grins at the bitter irony.
He is about to crumple the paper up in his hand, when he realizes that it isn´t the page from his notebook at all but a frayed and creased fragment of some kind of map. Big Deal shrugs a shoulder and puts it in his pocket.
Ice
Velma had left without him, that´s all he can think as he gazes at her standing there, whispering to Graziella, gently patting the other girl´s hair.
"Ya comin´ , Vel?" he asks, extending his hand to her.
She doesn´t meet his gaze. "I don`t think Graziella oughtta be alone tonight," she says softly.
She´s right of course, he can see the girl is trying to be strong, but it´s obvious she´s barely keeping it together.
"Okay…see ya tomorrow then," he just says, watching them walk away, arm in arm. Only Anybodys is still standing in the shadow of the wall, the look in her eyes as troubled as he feels. For a split second he has the absurd idea of asking her to come with him. She looks at him, then looks away again and he thinks she is going to say something, but she just turns around and darts past him, running into the night.
Wandering through the silent streets, Ice wonders if she too will be alone tonight. Solitude has never bothered him, sometimes he actually rather enjoyed being alone. But tonight…
He quietly climbs the stairs to his apartment. Maybe Velma had changed her mind, maybe she´d be waiting for him behind that door he thinks, knowing that she hadn´t and she wasn´t. Shrugging off his jacket, he makes a bee-line for his tiny living room.
There is an old photo album on the shelf above the TV. One of the very few things his mother had failed to take with her when she left. He picks it up and plonks himself onto a chair. Resting his chin in his hand, he slowly leafs through the album.
There are mostly pictures of his parents when they were young, smiling faces in black and white, hardly older than he is now. There are also a few of him as a child, and he watches himself grow from an infant into a boy of maybe seven. The photos stop shortly after that and Ice isn´t even sure why he wanted to look at them in the first place. They seem to depict strangers, living strange lives. Maybe he´d just wanted to remind himself that there had been a time when he hadn´t been alone.
But he also needed to remind himself of everything that hadn´t made it into the album and that, sometimes, it was better to be alone. Sighing, he is about to return the album to its shelf, when a small piece of paper flutters from between its pages. He picks it up and turns it over. A fragment of a map, it doesn´t depict any place he recognizes. He slides it under the cover again and turns on the radio, the muted cool jazz of late-night radio and nicotine once again his only companions to get him through the night.
