The Starving Years (10 page)

“How old is their baby?” Marianne asked. “Why did you pick such spicy flavors? What if the baby can’t eat the—”

“I think he knows what flavors Hispanics like,” Randy said.

“You’re such an assho—ohmigod.”

A head emerged from the neighboring window, then a body, and the pair of arms handing it off.

A baby.

His black hair hung in baby curls on either side of his rounded cheeks, nearly down to his shoulders. Gone were the days of Javier’s youth when boys wore buzz cuts, bow ties and trousers. Children were treated like miniature royalty now, little lords and ladies in curls and lace and fussy shoes with buckles and bows. The neighbor’s child was about two years old; he’d begun shedding some of his baby pudge, and he moved with the confidence and coordination of a toddler who preferred to walk rather than be carried. He squirmed in his father’s arms, though he was being held too tightly to get anywhere. “This is Geraldo,” the neighbor called in Spanish.

Marianne had flung herself against the railing of the fire escape so eagerly Javier worried she might tip over the side. “Look at him. My God. He’s so beautiful.” She waved at the baby. “Hi, Geraldo! Hello! Can you wave?”

Geraldo glanced at the crazy gringa making noises at him for just a moment, then went back to squirming to be put down.

“Gracias,” the neighbor called again, then turned to hand Geraldo back through the window.
 

Although Javier was looking directly at the two-year-old, he had a hard time making sense of the next thing he saw…and he suspected seeing it with two eyes wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference.

“Hijo de puta!”
The neighbor’s arm jerked back. He shook it. And then the blood flowed.

The woman inside started yelling again, panicky questions, in Spanish:
What’s wrong? What did you do to the baby?

“I didn’t do nothing to your fucking kid.”

“Your mark’s on him! He’s
your
baby.”

“Crazy fucking brat bit me.” He looked at his arm. Even with the width of a building between them, Javier could see he was bleeding hard.

“Is he okay?” Marianne called. She turned to Javier. “What happened?”

“The baby’s fine. He bit the guy.”

Randy laughed, a bit forced. “Well, that’s gratitude for you.”

“That’s not funny.” Marianne responded automatically. Most of her attention was focused on the neighbor’s fire escape. The man had handed off Geraldo and climbed back inside, and was now shutting the window, cursing the whole time. The shouting clipped off when the window closed, though the rise and fall of angry voices was still audible, but muffled.

Randy picked up Marianne’s mug and turned toward the window. “We might as well go back inside. The wind’s got a bite to it.”

And, Javier thought, it looked like the show was over.

***

The shivering woke Nelson.

In his woozy, post-medicated state, he drew the simplest conclusions he could draw, given his initial impressions. He was shivering? It must be cold. He was in a strange bed—and not alone? Sweet, he’d gotten lucky. Solution? Share some of that body heat. Now.

When his bedmate let out a less-than-masculine yip, Nelson realized the situation might be a bit more convoluted than he’d originally assumed.

“Stop groping me.”

Nelson went still, and prompted his foggy brain to yield up an extra detail or two. He hadn’t woken up with someone of the female persuasion in years—not without mild alcohol poisoning. So whatever had led him to this juncture at this particular time must have been a hell of a wild ride.

His stomach churned, and he shivered some more. But he didn’t feel hungover. Not exactly. That realization was the keystone that made the structure of the day’s events slip into place, and hold.

Not drinking, not at all. Another fucking migraine. He’d taken his meds in time, at least. Otherwise his head would be a blinding wall of agony. But he had the serotonin-shakes. And he wasn’t alone. Marianne, the redhead from the job fair—she’d taken pity on him and brought him home? He was lucky, damn lucky, and he knew it.

Nelson tucked the corner of the blanket around his shoulder, and a few more details emerged. The T-shirt he was wearing was too big, and the neckline gaped. Not Marianne’s shirt, then. She was a tiny thing. Whose? And the blanket…it smelled like a guy. Not in a funky way. Just that guys’ beds didn’t smell like chicks’ beds.

“Marianne?” he whispered.

“Mm…what?”

“Where are we?”

“G’t’shleep…tell ya in th’ mrn….”

Nelson lay as still as he could and considered whether sleep might come, or not. It didn’t feel like it. He had jimmy-legs, and his stomach was roiling. And although he knew full well that he wasn’t shivering from the cold, he felt reluctant to leave the warmth of the bed. Whoever it belonged to.

Still, he’d need to get hydrated. For all that he was grateful that the meds had saved him from a day whimpering in agony and two days recovering, the aftereffects left something to be desired. He peeled back the covers, sternly reminding his quaking muscles that he was not actually cold, and he climbed over Marianne. The bed was smallish, a “full,” but anything larger wouldn’t have fit very well in the room. A quick scan of the things that could be seen by the light of the digital clock showed a few piles of books, a stick of deodorant, a box of tissues and a lamp with a tattered shade. The blinds covering the single window leaked wan streetlight. They were crooked.

Overall impression: the walls were devoid of art and photos, there was no valance over the crooked blinds, and there wasn’t a single decorative item on the nightstand, not even a candle. Definitely not a girl’s bedroom.

He crept to the door, fully expecting it to stick, or at least squeak, but it opened smoothly, dragging only slightly against the carpet. The next room smelled like coffee, and it seemed full of random people, until he slotted each in turn into his newly emerging memories of the end of the job fair. Randy, asleep in the recliner, half his face covered in an enormous, swollen bruise. Two guys hunched over the comput—Javier. He was there. The sexy pirate. Nelson froze for a moment and stared, and wondered at his phenomenal luck.

Javier.

Nelson savored the silhouette of the back of his head.

And that other guy who needed a shave—Tim. He’d been driving the truck.

Tim’s apartment, that must have been where he’d ended up. Because, clearly, Javier would be living in a much sexier apartment. Not that Nelson expected portholes in the walls and gauzy mosquito netting hanging from the ceiling…well, maybe he had. A guy could dream.

The two of them, Javier and Tim, were focused on the computer, which at first looked like some piece-of-crap, patchwork job. At first. But Nelson saw how quickly the page refreshed when Tim hit the enter key. He took in the cluster of cables linking…what? The monitor might be old, but it was functional, and it wasn’t connected to a home PC designed for composing Christmas letters and surfing YouTube. That was a big, fat server. And a redundant server. And another redundant server.

Nelson’s gaze swept back up to the back of Tim’s head. What was his deal? Computer geek, obviously. But charging into the middle of a riot to grab everyone—what was up with that?

“Let me see…” Javier whispered, louder than whatever he’d been saying before, now audible. Tim, seated, shoved the keyboard over and Javier bent and typed. Their upper arms pressed together. Weird—they went together, somehow. A couple, that would’ve been Nelson’s first idea, although Tim didn’t really register on the ol’ gaydar. Maybe they were close friends. But how could that be, if Tim had thought
Nelson
was Javier, back there in the riot?

Unless Nelson had slept a hell of a lot longer than he usually did, and the two of them hooked up while he was out. He touched his chin. Rough, new stubble. No weird sleeping patterns; it was still the same day.

Curious…in the way that Nelson enjoyed. His brain, even as serotonin-saturated and dopamine-deprived as it now was, made a grudging attempt to interpret what he observed, and how it fit with what he remembered. Yellow truck, red bandanna. A visual clue, one they would have needed to arrange beforehand. They
had
known each other. Just not on sight.

Tim bent in to look harder at the screen. Javier shifted his arm, not so that Tim didn’t need to touch it—rather, so that their bodies could fit together more closely. And all Nelson had gotten was a brush of Javier’s fingertips when he tried a similar move, back at the job fair with the puzzle pieces.

Tim whispered something and slipped his hand through Javier’s so he could hit a few function keys. A cascade of stuff flashed on the monitor. Major geekage…and it took one to know one.

“No, no, it’s a video…where’s the volume?” Javier was losing his whisper.

“That’s
print
.”

“Then where…?”

“Stop it, I’ve got it.”

“Wait—not that message.”

The wicked-fast computer lit up with a video on the big dinosaur of a monitor. Bodies. A mob. And the sound of screams and sirens, loud and sudden in the hushed room.

Randy snorted awake. “Shit, I thought I was back there at the…what time is it?”

Tim turned to look at Randy while Javier jabbed at the keyboard. The video went mute. The churning mass of bodies was even weirder without volume. Tim spotted Nelson and jumped away from Javier as if they’d been caught surfing porn at the office. Nelson shifted and felt the big sweatpants he was wearing slip down over his hip. He caught them by the waistband and hiked them up, but the elastic was stretched out, and they drooped again the second he let go.

“Hello?” Randy said. “What time is it?”

“Three,” Javier snapped. He was pounding windows closed for all he was worth.

“You’re awake,” Tim said to Nelson.

Nelson hiked up the sweatpants again, then folded the waistband in a few inches and rolled it a couple of times to encourage them to stay put. The pants rode low on his hips now, but they’d hold as long as he managed to keep from stepping on the cuffs and pulling them down. “Can I get some water?”

“Yeah. Sure. Here, let me—” Tim jumped up and rounded the kitchen island. “I’ll wash out a mug. They’re both dirty.”

Nervous, or just twitchy? Nelson couldn’t tell, not yet. He didn’t know Tim well enough. Javier—now he was definitely acting shifty. It wouldn’t do any good to make him feel cornered, so Nelson sidled up next to the hulking behemoth of a twenty-year-old laser printer and made it clear he was not looking at the monitor. Because who gave two shits what was on the screen when he could be checking out Javier instead?

Javier’s jet black hair had a messy, windswept look to it, his tie was gone, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. No undershirt. Chest hair. Nelson allowed himself to gawk, since Javier’s eye was fixed on the screen. “So, anything fun happen while I was tripping?” Nelson ventured.

“You seem awfully laissez-faire.” Javier glanced at Nelson briefly while he spoke, then focused again on the computer.

“But I’m crying on the inside.” Damn. Another dollar for the cliché jar. “Really, though, what happened? Why are we all camped out here?”

Randy answered. “No phone service, no news coverage, and the lower east side’s gone all Lord of the Flies. That’s what.”

Tim handed Nelson a mug of water. He was a close-stander. Nelson backed up a step and drained the mug. The water was cold and tasted like the inside of a refrigerator, though Tim didn’t strike Nelson as the type of guy to be into the whole fancy water filter craze. He looked more like the type of guy who’d stick his head in the sink and drink straight from the faucet to avoid getting a glass dirty. If he bothered with filtration, it was probably because the plumbing in his old building made the water taste funky.
 

Nelson tipped the last few drops into his mouth. Still dehydrated. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Javier hit a final key, then relax…until Javier noticed an orange light flashing on the printer. “What’s that?”

Tim took the empty mug from Nelson, big-handed, clumsy. Practically groping it out of his grasp. “More?”

“Yeah, thanks.” Nelson had worked with a similar printer model before, in a lab with no money, testing residual levels of DDT on alfalfa. He scanned the buttons and lights, letting the configuration ease its way through his hazy post-pill head.

All at once, he remembered. “It’s just on bypass,” he said, and flicked a lever in back.

The machine clunked and shuddered, and made a sound like a jet engine preparing for takeoff as the rollers heated up. Javier shot out of his seat and spread his hands to catch the print—but the machine had been set for outputting labels on a straight path, and a cascade of paper shot from the back instead. The sheets fluttered, and fanned out to cover a daisy chain of patched-together power strips.

“That’s a fire hazard waiting to happen,” Randy said. He grabbed a handful of papers that had landed within arms’ reach of the recliner.

“Give that to me,” Javier said, and Randy automatically shifted it farther away, to his opposite hand, and peered down the length of his arm to get a look at it before Javier had a chance to grab it from him.

Nelson couldn’t resist, either. He snagged the final page as it slid from the back of the laser printer. Whatever the big secret was, Tim didn’t seem to be in on it. He stood there with a mug of water in his hand, blinking at the confusion.

Nelson glanced down at the page he’d caught.

-6-

to the nape of your neck. I press my teeth against it.

VoR: Yeah.

J: Should I bite you? You like that?

VoR: Yeah.

J: You feel my teeth, hard against your skin. I hold them there while I’m pumping your cock. Do it. Good and hard. That’s my hand. And press your neck into the back of your chair so you can feel my teeth on you while I bite you. Stroke it fast.

VoR: Yeah.

J: You’re doing it fast? I have no mercy—I want you so hard you BEG me to bury my cock in your ass.