Murder of Angels (11 page)

“Don’t you dare do that to me again,” he says and hugs her tighter. “Don’t you dare.”

And she doesn’t tell him that she won’t, and she doesn’t tell him that she will, and in a few minutes he leads her back down Divisadero to the Volkswagen waiting at the corner.

Niki was born two years after the fall of Saigon, twenty-three years after Eisenhower had agreed to fund and train South Vietnamese soldiers to fight the communists. Her parents were among the lucky few, the handful of South Vietnamese evacuated along with American citizens. John and Nancy Ky had become Americans and immigrated to New Orleans, traded in tradition and their Vietnamese names, the horrors of their lives in Tay Ninh and Saigon for citizenship and a small tobacco shop on Magazine Street. They had named their only child Nicolan Jeane, and would have named the son her father had wished for Nicolas. But Niki’s birth left her mother bedridden for more than a month, and the doctors warned that another pregnancy would very likely kill her.

Neither of Niki’s parents ever made a habit of talking about their lives before New Orleans, and they kept themselves apart from the city’s tight-knit Vietnamese community. They seemed always to struggle to answer any questions Niki asked about their lives before America in as few words as possible, as if bad memories and bad days had ears and could be summoned like demons. Occasionally, there were letters, exotic stamps and picture postcards from halfway around the world, messages from faceless relatives written in the mysterious alphabet that she never learned to read. Her mother kept these in some secret place, or maybe she simply threw them away. Niki treasured her rare glimpses of this correspondence, would sometimes hold an envelope to her nose and lips, hoping for some whiff or faint taste of a world that must have been so much more marvelous than their boxy white and avocado green house in the Metairie suburbs.

And when she was ten years old, just a few days past her tenth birthday, there was a terrible Gulf storm. The ghost of a hurricane that had died at sea, slinging its spirit landward, and she awoke in the night or in the morning before dawn, and her mother was sitting at the foot of her bed. Niki lay very still, listening to the rain battering the roof, the wind dragging itself across and through everything. The room smelled like the menthol cigarettes her mother had smoked for as long as Niki could remember, and she watched the glowing orange tip of the Salem, a silent marker for her mother’s dim silhouette.

“Do you hear that, Niki?” her mother asked. “The sky is falling.”

Niki listened, hearing nothing but the storm and a garbage can rattling about noisily somewhere behind the house.

“No, mother. It’s just a storm. It’s only rain and wind.”

“Yes,” her mother replied. “Yes. Of course, Niki.”

The cigarette glowed more intensely in the darkness, but she didn’t hear her mother exhale over the roar and wail of the storm.

“When I was a girl,” her mother said, “when I was only a little older than you, Niki, I saw, with my own eyes, the sky fall down to earth. I saw the stars fall down and burn the world. I saw
children
—”

And then lightning flashed so bright and violent, and her mother seemed to wither in the electric-white glare, hardly alive in her flannel housecoat and the lines on her face drawn deep as wounds. Off towards the river, the thunder rumbled contentedly to itself, and Niki realized how tightly her mother was squeezing her leg through the covers.

“It’s okay, Mother,” Niki whispered, trying to sound like she believed what she was saying, but for the first time she could remember, she was frightened of the night and one of its wild delta storms.

Her mother said nothing else, didn’t move from where she sat at the foot of the bed, and Niki eventually drifted back into uneasy dreams, sleep so shallow that the sound of the thunder and the rain came right through. The next morning, her mother said nothing, never brought it up, that night, the things she’d said, and Niki knew better than to ever mention it. But afterwards, on very stormy nights, she would lie awake, and sometimes she heard her mother moving around in the kitchen, restless utensil sounds, or the dry scuff of her slippers on the hallway floor outside Niki’s door.

And years later, not long before she finally dropped out of high school, she heard a song by R.E.M. on the radio—“Fall on Me”—bought the album even though she’d never particularly liked the band, and played that one track over and over again, thinking of her mother and that night and the storm. By that time, she’d read and seen enough to guess at her mother’s nightmares, had understood enough of jellied gasoline and mortars and hauntings to glimpse the bright edges of that insomnia. Finally, twenty or thirty times through, having picked most of the lyrics from the tangled weave of voice and music, singer and song, she put the record away and never listened to it again.

If New Orleans taught Niki Ky nothing else, it taught her the respect due to ghosts, proper respect for pain so deep it transcended flesh and blood, and scarred time.

If her father had bad dreams, they’d never shown.

“Is that the way it was, Nicolan? Are you certain?” and Dr. Dalby watched her, watches her, is always watching her. Looking for the careless expression to expose a lie, the unguarded turn of a hand, flutter of eyelids, her teeth closing tightly on her lower lip. Every uncalculated act become her traitor, all unconscious Judases to give away the things she wants no one else to ever see.

“That’s what I remember.”

“But you understand, those may not be the same thing, what you remember and what actually happened. We’ve talked about that—”

“I just said it’s what I remember.”

“The night of the storm,” he says, not quite changing the subject. “Did you ever tell Spyder about that night? What your mother said to you about the sky falling? The way that song affected you?”

“Spyder hated R.E.M.”

A pause while he scribbles something in his notes, then the psychologist stares at her across the rims of his spectacles.

“Do you realize what you just said, Nicolan?”

“Spyder hated R.E.M.?”

“Yes. Her nightmares, her insomnia, the medication she took so she could sleep—”

“I’m not in the mood for word games today, Dr. Dalby. Can we table that one for next week?” and then she stares at her feet, wondering what meaning he’ll read into the invisible dashed line between her eyes and the tips of her shoes.

“I don’t think of it as a game. There’s meaning in every word we use, whether we choose to acknowledge that meaning, whether or not we intend it, whether or not we’re even aware of it.”

“When I use a word,” Niki said, trying not to sound as angry as she was beginning to feel, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

And Dr. Dalby sits silently a moment, chewing at the eraser tip of his pencil and staring at her, staring at Niki staring at her shoes, the purple paisley Docs that Daria brought her all the way from London.

“Yes, well, the question is,” he said at last, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Niki looks up at him, glaring, wishing her eyes could bleed fire, and “They’ve a temper, some of them,” she says, and then stops herself, because she realizes these aren’t her words, that they aren’t even Dr. Dalby’s words—Alice and Humpty Dumpty, something she read ages ago, lines from a little girl’s nonsense book she thought she’d forgotten.

“There is
always
sense in a thing,” the psychologist says, “whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.”

“Yeah,” Niki replies, looking back down at the toes of her purple boots. “I’ve figured that much out.”

“That puts you well ahead of the curve, Nicolan.”

And she opens her eyes, pulling free of the dream as easily as she slipped into it, slipping away from the pipe-smoke and old-book smells of Dr. Dalby’s office, and the world stinks like Marvin’s musty old Volkswagen again.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks, and she nods her head sleepily.

“I just dozed off. Are we almost there?”

“Yeah, we’re almost there. Kaiser’s just up ahead,” and so Niki shuts her eyes and decides she’ll wait until they’re all the way there to open them again.

Niki Ky met Danny Boudreaux their freshman year of high school, but they didn’t start sleeping together until years later; one summer night after a rave, sweaty warehouse district chaos and both of them fucked up on ecstasy and, finally, there were no inhibitions left to stand in the way. It wasn’t an embarrassment the next morning, but had seemed natural, something that should have happened, even though Danny had always gone mainly for boys. He worked drag at a couple of bars in the Quarter, was good enough that sometimes he talked about going to Vegas and making real money. A tall and pretty boy with only the barest trace of a Cajun accent, and he used a lot of foam rubber padding for his shows so no one would see the way his hip bones jutted beneath the sequins.

And then, late July and she met Danny for a beer at Coop’s after work, early Saturday morning and it was after work for both of them, the bar crammed full of punks and tourists. They went back to his place on the Ursulines because it was closer, raced sunrise together across the cobblestones, racing the stifling heat of morning, running drunk and sleepy, laughing like a couple of tardy vampires. Before bed, they had cold cereal and cartoons. And Danny started talking.

The frail, pretty boy dropped the bomb he’d carried all his life, waiting for the right moment or the right ear, or simply the day he couldn’t carry it any longer. More than drag, a
lot
more than that, and she sat still and listened, stared silently down at the Trix going soggy in her bowl while
Scooby Doo
blared from Danny’s little black-and-white television.

“I’ve been seeing a doctor,” he said. “I started taking hormones a couple of months ago, Niki.”

And when he was done there was still nothing for her to say, nothing to make it real enough to answer, and finally he broke the silence for her and asked, “Niki? Are you all right? I’m sorry—”

“No, I’m fine,” she said, not even looking at him, speaking to the safety of the TV instead, its senseless phosphor security, and she smiled and shrugged like it was no big shit, like he’d just asked if she wanted to go to a movie tonight or if she wanted another cup of coffee.

“I’m fucking wasted, Danny,” she said. “We’ll talk about it after I get some sleep, okay?”

“Yeah,” he replied and then offered another apology that she hadn’t asked for before they crawled off to bed.

She lay awake beside him, staring out at the summer day blazing away behind the curtains, only one bright slice getting into the apartment. Concentrating on the clunking, rheumy noises coming from his old air conditioner, the uneven rhythm of his breath, until she was sure he was asleep, and Danny Boudreaux always slept like the dead. She got dressed and wrote a note to leave beside the bed—
Danny, I have to figure this out. I just don’t know. Love, Niki
—before she walked back across the Quarter to her own apartment, sweat-drenched and sun-dazed by the time she reached the other end of Decatur Street.

They’ve been waiting for almost two hours, and Marvin’s throwing angry words at a male nurse with a clipboard and a shaved head; but it’s too late already, too late to make the airport and the nine
P.M
. flight, so she really doesn’t think it matters much whether or not they sit here the rest of the fucking night. Except that her hand has started bleeding again, and the pain is worse, and no one seems to care but Marvin. And the stark fluorescent lights shining down on her from the ceiling are making her nervous, light so empty, so bleak, that she can hardly imagine anything that could seem more unhealthy. Bleached and antiseptic light to forbid even the barest rind of a shadow, to gradually pick her apart, molecule by molecule.

“Do you even know how long she’s been sitting there?”

“Yes sir,” the nurse says, frowning, looking at his clipboard instead of Marvin. “You just told me.”

“She’s fucking
bleeding
all over your goddamn floor.”

“We’ll try to get her in with the next available—”

“You’ll
try
?”

“Sir, we’re doing all we can with what we have,” and then Niki tunes them out again, already enough on her mind, enough to keep her busy—her confusion and the pain and the sound of her blood dripping to the floor—without their bickering.

Part of her is still stuck fast in the dream of Dr. Dalby. Niki hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but she was so exhausted after Marvin led her back down Divisadero Street to the car, promising her that everything would be fine and there were no dragons hiding in the stoplights, no ghosts whispering over her shoulder. She’s trying to remember what he wanted to know about Spyder, why it seems to matter so much now, but the ache in her hand is making it hard to think of anything else. Blue-white fire across her palm, something cold enough or hot enough or corrosive enough to burn straight through to the bone and keep on burning.

They’ve a temper, some of them.

There is always sense in a thing, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.

The blood seeping slowly, steadily, through the gauze bandage Marvin wrapped around her hand is dark, and she wonders if that’s worse than if it wasn’t. Wonders what’s going on beneath the dressing, what the doctors will find when they finally have time for her and one of them unwraps it. Maybe something coiled up snug inside the wound, something the watery color of jellyfish, her medusa hand, and she glances back up at Marvin and the nurse.

“I have to pee,” she says to Marvin, but the nurse answers her.

“Down that hall,” and he points the way. “Just past the water fountain.”

“I really don’t think you should go alone,” Marvin says, and when he turns towards her, the bald nurse takes the opportunity to make his escape, disappearing quickly into one of the examination rooms.