Chapter 3

The next day, Poison brought the radio by. He carried it wrapped up in his coat, as if it were contraband, and only after they were alone did he bring it out and set it on the little shelf beside the bed.

Ghoul managed a smile as he sat up in bed to meet him. "Thanks." His voice was a pitiful rasp; it was too much to hope for that Poison would not take notice.

"Are you all right?" There was a kind of hitch in the words; a slight hesitation after the first two, followed by a rushed exhalation of the last. Ghoul could tell that Poison was not accustomed to saying them, that he was even startled by the feelings implicit behind such simple and unimaginative concern.

But rather than being frustrated, Ghoul found it inexplicably charming. "I'm okay," he whispered. "I just really need to get out of here."

"Why?"

"I'm bored, mostly." Ghoul laughed dryly, like an expulsion of dust from his lungs. "What's wrong? Didn't you miss me?"

Poison did not move at all, but for an instant he seemed to waver before Ghoul's eyes, as if he had become two images of himself, the one that stooped to sit on the edge of Ghoul's bed, and the one that remained behind, aloof and disimpassioned. Then the back of his hand slid, brief and cool, over Ghoul's cheek, and the two images resolved.

"I missed you," he said quietly.

"I know," Ghoul replied. "No matter how many times you try to tell me otherwise, I know."

"Do I tell you otherwise?"

"Yesterday. You said…"

Poison frowned, as if trying to remember, as if it had happened months ago rather than hours. "Oh, right. That. Maybe I didn't mean it quite the way I said it."

Ghoul looked at him for a long time, trying to guess what he might be thinking, but Poison's eyes had taken on the dark cast that they always did when he was holding something back, that look that concealed nothing and everything all at once.

"You should be more careful then," Ghoul said at last.

"I know," Poison whispered.

"If Ray were here, he'd yell at you."

"Ray?" For a moment, Poison honestly didn't seem to recognize the name. Then the dark shadow fell again over his eyes and he said, "Oh, of course. Ray."

"You know, our friend Ray. Kind of acts like he's our dad sometimes. Our dad-friend."

"Yes, I said I remember."

"Did you finally kick him out or something?" Ghoul was joking, but there was a part of him that suspected Poison had done exactly that. He wouldn't exactly be pleased to find out that Poison had made a decision like that on his own, without consulting him first. But to be alone at last, alone with Poison and with no one to answer or justify himself to…

"No," Poison said. "I didn't do that. He's waiting. But his name is Jet Star now."

"Jet what?"

"Star."

"I don't get it," Ghoul said. "Why?"

"Because that's what he has decided it should be."

"He said he didn't like the name thing. He said he didn't get it."

"Yes," Poison said. "I remember."

"So he changed his mind. Or something else. Something else happened, didn't it?"

He felt Poison drawing away from him, back into himself, before he even moved at all. He stood up abruptly, and turned his back to the bed, wiping his palms on his jeans as if he had recently been working hard in the dirt. Ghoul wished that he hadn't said anything, hadn't let on that he was disturbed. Names were just names, after all. Just collections of sounds, with no inherent meaning aside from the one they all, as if it random, agreed upon. Any change should have been merely cosmetic, semantic; and it shouldn't have mattered to Poison, or to Ray, or Jet Star, or to him.

"I suppose we'll have some things to get used to when you get back," Poison said. He was still looking away, but he seemed not to see anything out that direction at all.

"Like what?" Ghoul said. And then, when Poison did not respond he said, "Are you not answering because you can't say, or because you don't want to?" And then, "You must resent coming here a lot, Poison. I don't know what to say to you…"

"I don't resent coming here."

"Then do you resent me?"

"Don't be melodramatic."

"I don't mean to be," Ghoul said. "Look, it embarrasses me when I have to ask you stuff like that. But it's not like you make it easy to talk to you. That's the only thing that gets any reaction from you at all. What am I supposed to do?"

"Can't you just trust me? Just let me take care of things."

"Yes," Ghoul said. "I can. But I don't want that to be all there is. Poison, I don't want that to be all there is of us."

Poison glanced back at him. The all-concealing, all-revealing dark shroud had again fallen over his eyes, but it kept sliding back and then returning. Veiling and unveiling, giving Ghoul brief glimpses of the raw nakedness beneath.

"We don't really know each other that well at all, do we?" Ghoul murmured.

"I don't know who you were," Poison corrected. "But I know who you are. And I will know who you will be. But I don't know why you can't let that be enough for you."

"No. It's enough." Ghoul regretted having said anything. Poison did not understand him, and he never would, and he seemed to have not even the slightest interest in trying. The truth was, Ghoul did not fully understand himself what it was he wanted Poison to figure out. A part of him had hoped that they might stumble on it together, a complete accident, but every word he said to try to guide them towards it and every moment they spent together only seemed to drive them further from the truth, further from each other. Deeper into the strained, artificially-constructed un-reality they now shared.

He had wanted to tell Poison the one thing that he was certain of: That, beyond all logic and reason, he had fallen in love with him. But he knew that he couldn't. The moment for that had passed a long time ago.

"You'll be out of here soon," Poison said. "The doctor told me she only wants to keep you for a few more days. She said the fever still comes back in the evenings…"

"I tried not to let them know about that." Ghoul laughed weakly. "But they found out anyway."

"You're out of danger," Poison said briskly. He talked more freely now that the conversation had passed into the cold, hard facts of medical science. "Though upon your release you'll be very weak. It will take time to rebuild the muscle mass you lost while you were in the coma. But the money we have ought to hold out a little longer."

"The money…" Ghoul echoed. "You know, you never told me where the money came from."

"It's easier to show you," Poison said. "When you're out."

"Right, of course. You know, if I didn't know better I'd say you were deliberately keeping something from me."

"I am."

Ghoul laughed again, this time with genuine humor. "I hate to tell you this, but you're not doing a great job of it."

"I'm sorry." Poison lowered his eyes. A hint of color flooded his cheeks, and then faded so quickly that it seemed like nothing more than a mirage.

"At least come here and give me a kiss before you leave," Ghoul said. He knew that Poison wouldn't object, but he still felt bold demanding it from him, as if they had never touched each other before.

Poison bent over him, a gallant sweeping gesture, like, Ghoul imagined, a prince or an old movie star. Ghoul felt all his muscles winding up tight, straining into the kiss. His fingers curled as Poison pulled away.

"Still pretty good at that," Ghoul said.

Poison's lips did not move, but a smile seemed to form in the dark depths of his eyes. "I'm good at a lot of things. I'll remind you some day."

"Soon, I hope."

"Yes, soon," Poison said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Then he was gone, and Ghoul was alone. He knew that he had been angry with Poison earlier, even remembering the vague outline of the shape the emotion had made inside of him, but he could no longer explain exactly why. There was a lack now that Poison had left, but it was not the huge and uncertain loneliness that had engulfed him before he had come. He didn't like to think that the only choices left to him now were Poison, or that loneliness. That he could find no middle ground in between them where he – as Frank or as Fun Ghoul – might exist undisturbed.

No, he wouldn't think about it, not now. He wouldn't allow himself to worry. It was unfair to both of them to define what they had together in terms of what they did not, to determine the mass of what they shared only by what it displaced.

Ghoul took the radio from the shelf next to the bed and switched it on. He spun the dial, past an opera, and a melancholy corrido. Past a great gulf of static, on the other side of which was a border preacher talking salvation. And just beyond that, almost at the end of the dial, he tuned in the familiar cadences of Dr. Death's voice, coming to him from across a great distance.

"…you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time…"

And Ghoul's thoughts turned abruptly, violently, to the last time he had been in a hospital, and how it had not been a clean, well-maintained clinic like this one, but rather the dusty and windowless basement of a dead department store. Before the old business had moved out, they had tossed a bunch of junk into the corners, where now piles of broken shelving and broken TVs and broken mannequins twisted and crouched.

It was no place to be hurt, no place to be sick in, and Frank was relieved that he was not. There had been twenty of the Manskinner's soldiers in the convoy that had driven out early that morning to intercept the prison transport headed for Alameda Street Jail. There were sixteen of them now – soon to be fifteen, or maybe fifteen already, for the sounds from that makeshift pallet in that corner of the basement, the sounds Frank had been trying so hard not to hear, had by now dried up entirely. Frank alone had escaped the ambush uninjured. He did not think of it as a miracle, or as a reward for a fight well fought, or even as stroke of dumb luck. All he thought was that he was glad he was on his feet, distributing morphine where he could, and out from under the dull, imprecise knives of the PUF medics.

He found the Manskinner against the far wall, looking as if he had nothing better to do than wait for something to happen. His left arm was in a sling, and there was a gash with seven stark black sutures that ran from the corner of his mouth down towards his chin.

"You okay?" Frank said.

"Fine," the Manskinner replied.

"Are you sure? I saw you go down. I saw—" Frank stopped taking, but the Manskinner watched him with dark, patient eyes, waiting for him to continue. "I saw a lot of blood," he whispered at last.

"I'm sure it wasn't mine," the Manskinner said. "If that's what you're implying."

"Maybe…"

"That's nice of you to say, but I doubt you actually give a shit what happens to me, Frank." The Manskinner sighed. "Don't cringe like that. Whatever you think your secrets are, you can keep them. I don't care about your tiny passions, or your minor vengeances, as long as you do your job when the time comes."

"I do," Frank said. "I always do. I did today, didn't I?"

The look the Manskinner gave him then reminded Frank of the way he sized someone up at a glance before a fight. But rather then be intimidated by it, Frank felt a kind of serene reassurance, as if the Manskinner were at last accepting him as, if not an equal, than at least a grown man.

"You did fine," the Manskinner said. "And you were very lucky. And that's all. Four of my people died, and you aren't better than them because you lived. Frank, sometimes I think that this – all of this - Better Living and all of their promises and the people who want so desperately to believe them, are just a reaction against war. War, and the way it refuses to be beautiful like we had all heard it would be."

"I don't know…" Frank whispered. And he didn't care. And, more than anything, he resented the Manskinner for bringing it up now, when he had just begun to forget all the terrible frozen tableaus of battle. The moments that his memory extracted, frozen, and pasted upon the screen of his mind. Each upon the next until all he had left was a collage of blood and smoke and limbs and eyes forever wide in horror. In his mind, he did not see himself above it, looking down, or even outside, looking in. He was within it, and it all radiated out from him, as if he were the axis around which all the carnage revolved, or the epicenter from which it had all spewed.

He glared at the Manskinner savagely, as if he hated him. "If you don't need anything, then I'm going to go," he bit out.

"No, I don't need anything."

Frank really had intended to leave then, but he was surprised to find himself rooted to the spot. Still more surprised when he heard his own voice say, "Aren't you hurt? Doesn't it hurt at all?"

"It doesn't hurt," the Manskinner sighed. "Nothing much hurts anymore. The part of the brain that knows what pain is, it's actually very small. All it took was a sympathetic doctor with a needle charged with electricity to burn it out forever."

"I never knew that about you…" Frank said. The Manskinner almost never talked about himself, but to have him start now, on a subject like this, was somehow vulgar and revolting.

"It was during the Occupy Riots, when every day we were on the steps of the Capitol Building, under their batons, or soaking up the rubber bullets from their riot guns, or getting showered with pepper spray. Back then, it wasn't like it is now. Events were not decided in sporadic bursts of swift and sure action. It was just the same thing, over and over again, day after day, like dragging yourself to a job that you hate, but that you know that you must do or else starve…"

"Still," Frank said. "Still, it couldn't really have been that easy."

"No, it wasn't easy. And it wasn't perfect. I still feel the old scars, the old breaks, the ones from before I had the procedure done. It's purely psychological. No more real than dreaming."

He took in Frank's silence, and his eyes narrowed. "We all must be prepared to sacrifice for the cause. We must give what we are called upon to give. I wouldn't demand it of all of you if I didn't already know what I was asking."

"You don't have to try to convince me," Frank said. "It's not what you think. I'm not afraid of dying. It's something else. I could give my life, but I couldn't give up who I am."

"Unlike Better Living, I would never ask that of you."

"That's good to hear," Frank murmured. But he knew that the Manskinner was lying. Lying, without even knowing that he wasn't telling the complete and objective truth. And Frank let him.

Dr. Death's voice came out from the other side of a haze of static like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Saying, "…one time we were talking about the Great War. I told my students that after that, words were poisoned. Words like "courage" like "valor" like "glory" and "sacred" and "duty" and "honor" were poisoned by hollowness. Obscene beside the concrete names of villages and battles and dead men's names. And my students said, Yes, but that's just a question for writers. That's only literature, not real life. And I told them, Why was literature invented at all, if not as a howl of protest against the refusal of suffering to be beautiful? That's what I said to them then. That's what I said to them. That's what I said. That's what…"

The voice vanished, and it did not return again. Ghoul did not miss it at all. In fact, he was relieved.