Bad: Chapter 22
"I'm so tired of being alone
These penitent walls are all I've known
Songbird calling across the water
Inside my silent asylum
Oh, don't leave me on my own"
- Beck
"The days just keep slipping past."
It was one of those decisions you don't even know you're making. Respond and encourage more conversation or feign slumber to facilitate actual sleep.
"Everyone was talking about how their kids are coming home for spring break. I still feel like I'm recovering from Christmas."
It was their nightly ritual. Crawl into bed after a rough day, whisper in the dark, and try to pretend tomorrow would be different.
"Mm." Miles' eyes remained closed.
"I'm sorry. I'm keeping you up."
Both Maddy and Miles had learned to live with their permanent exhaustion, but they had never learned to live with each other's.
"It's not you." He sighed. "It's the job."
"I know."
"I think I fucked up."
"I know." She grasped his hand, pressed her forehead to his. It was an immediate reprieve for both of them.
"I don't know what to do."
"We're always okay. This is no different."
Miles finally opened his eyes as he rolled away. He couldn't look at her. That smile, the one from before when he was sitting in his study. He saw something in it. Two frail old fogies backpacking through the wasteland on Venus. Waking at together at 4am, drinking coffee on their front porch in the dark, dreading the sunrise that would rouse the rest of the world.
Consequences. He never stopped to think anymore. He'd become careless and cruel in his carelessness.
"I think I've put us in danger."
It was childish, really. Some vestige of a recent past, some time he was sure he'd lived in, but could not recall ever being a part of. His misspent youth. A few good parties, and a lot of daydreams.
Maybe that's why it was so jarring to see her sitting across from him now. He used to carve time out of his day to fantasize about her. On his smoke breaks at work, he'd sit out on the back steps, the summer dusk in the full bloom of its melancholy, and listen to his headphones and let his mind wander after her. He'd fly through stretches of fresh full maples and majestic sycamores, hissing in the night, over dusty blue mountains, down into dewy valleys, all the way out to the seaside where he imagined her family had an extravagant summer home and dressed in new white clothes at every meal.
He saw her in his mind, standing in the wet sand, her pale flesh more freckled than tan, braille gooseflesh arising at the wind. He wanted to read it.
But all of those aching fantasies and colorful longings were now dead and flat and ugly as she scribed fluidly on the acid yellow pad. Was this truly the denouement to his decade of yearning?
Her hair wasn't flowing, her skin wasn't glowing. Her face was more angular now, skin a bit sallow, too. Her freshly cleansed locks were smoothed into a tight bun, parted in the middle of her head, little lustre to be found.
"This deal is ludicrous. My client was arrested by a couple of overzealous Keystones who didn't even read him his rights."
It seemed she had been taken on as a junior partner at a new firm. Miles had been a deputy DA for three years, and he'd never even heard her name. Now here she was before him, like a long forgotten bit of shrapnel that had just turned. Her co-counsel, Donnie Reid, was not faring well at the hands of his mentor, the hidebound, muscle-bound Jackson Haremore.
"Look, this is not how this is going to go down."
Miles glanced sideways through his lashes at the saturnine hulk to his left.
"You guys are new in town, so I'll give you the tour right here and now: I don't have a fucking sense of humor."
Maddy halted the movement of her pen.
"My plea offers expire 48 hours after they've hit the table, and I don't offer extensions. I don't bend because I don't need your help, and I never will. We're done here."
Miles looked up at Jackson as he pushed himself up from the oaken table, his wedding band, a tourniquet on his meaty finger, slamming against the lacquered wood. Jack didn't wait for anyone else to rise before exiting the conference room. The rookies continued to sit, stunned into silence by the incivility they'd just witnessed. Miles and Maddy caught each other's eyes.
Finally her co-counsel spoke.
"What a douchebag."
"I can't believe I'm doing this. I could get into so much trouble."
"Grass is legal now. Maybe not socially acceptable, but…"
"No, not that. Jack would piss blood if he knew I was hanging out with you guys."
Life's wonders truly never ceased. After their tense plea meeting, Donnie had asked him out for a drink—no doubt as a means to informally continue negotiations—and pulled Maddy in for the ride. He seemed to know that they had been classmates, but didn't seem to know much else. Not that there was anything else. It was easy for Miles to forget sometimes just how much life he'd lived inside his own head, especially when the agony had felt was most definitely not imagined.
After a handful of drinks, the party was on. The life of a young lawyer was a long and unending series of bitchslaps that tended to leave the demographic rather dazed. Massive school loan debt, the constant reminders of the humanity's savagery, someone's life always hanging in the balance—it was all too much for most of the tenderfoots to take. Alcohol and drugs were the simplest and cleanest solutions.
The three had ended up in a stairwell, passing a respectable-size joint, rolled in blueberry-flavored paper, between them.
"Why doesn't he like us? I mean, he probably shouldn't, but that's not a reason to act like it."
Miles took a heavy hit. "He thinks you rep too many syndicate thugs."
"Well, shit, we'd go broke if we didn't. 'Sides. It's not like we're talking about real players. Just the hoods mostly."
"Some of those kids were raised to be thugs." Maddy had been cautiously restrained throughout the night, but her tone now had an edge of indignance. "They're a product of their upbringing—even strong people have trouble breaking the cycle."
The sound of her voice, speaking her own words—not the ones he'd imagined for her—his heart was breaking all over again. He turned his eyes down to the leather of her nude pumps. Elegant as always. But sadder, he noticed. She seemed a little lost in this big ugly downtown world. Uptown was where she belonged. But here she was again, just like that night in that shitty diner, eight years gone.
"Maybe so. But you can't give someone a pass once they've chosen to do wrong. They'll just keep at it. It's called easy money for reason."
"In my experience, there's no such thing."
Her stare was a thousand yards long, and, interwoven between the oscillating penumbra of drug haze and the banality of their privileged philosophical musings, Miles was able to perceive something like shame leveling down on her. He knew then that he still loved her. She was not an illusion, and his pain was not a fabrication propagated by youthful melodrama.
He smiled up at her. She smiled back, relieved.
The three of them stumbled through the misty night, linked together into one form, Donnie in the middle, one arm slung over both Maddy and Miles, too wasted to move on his own two feet. To an abstract observer, their massive silhouette might have seemed monstrous, their long trench coats flapping after them as they lurched down the empty streets.
After dropping Donnie off at his townhouse, Miles walked Maddy home. They talked about the years gone by, both truly amazed by the phenomenon of passing time. She told him he should be careful about making the syndicate such a singular focus of his efforts. She didn't want to see him get hurt.
He watched her entered her brownstone, made sure she was safe. As he passed back through the city toward his own borough, he noticed a single red rose wilting in a puddle on the cobblestone street.
On Monday, Miles called her office at 8:07 am. He'd waited eight years too long already. On their first date, he brought her red roses.
It was the seat in his car that had done it.
He sat down and something felt different. The seatback felt a little straighter. It pressed against his shoulder blades. He didn't remember it doing that before.
The stiff rigor of fear bore down on his body, and he pitched himself outward from the vehicle, slamming onto the concrete. He felt his flesh grow tight from the heat of the blast, heard the ripping boom, smelt the chemicals stinging the air. He saw the hideous monster he would become—hairless, shiny, and viscera red.
He lifted his eyes from behind the visor of his forearm.
Nothing.
He lifted his head, holding his pulsing hot ear, stretching out his abraded fingers. His left fibula ached hollowly, and he rolled up his pant leg to discover a pulpous, wet bruise, more red than purple.
The car's door-ajar alarm continued to chime.
Jet's senses began to overload as a loud ring pealed out at his side.
Moments ago, the communication portal had collapsed without warning, and his thin composure just as quickly disintegrated into full-blown hysteria. His ears began to ring and his face grew hot, and for a split second he thought he might black out. He took deep breaths, feeling the ache go straight to his chest.
Spike's hand was on his shoulder.
"Jet. What happened?"
"I—"
The chime of his communicator seemed to slice through every particle in the room.
His steel hand grasped at it, his thumb immediately tapping Accept. It had to be her.
There was no video, and the audio was nothing but static.
"Edward? Can you hear me?"
The static continued. Jet shook his communicator, pressed it to his ear.
A bark. He'd heard it. Spike made a noise. He'd heard it, too.
A craggy smile came across his face, and if such a thing were an option, he thought he might be compelled to cry.
"Jet-person… Edward Wong…Pepelu Tivrus…for duty."
