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He’s a candle burning at both ends. Rising as the sun does, and summer is reaching its apex, now, carding bright fingers through his hair long before the alarm dictates his return to the world. He’s a night-animal, disturbed by the light; once sleep slips through his fingers it’s gone. He can go a very long time without sleep. And so: hunched over his desk, chasing the dying light, words scrawled in smeared ink. This is why you get headaches, Gottlieb told him once, but the lamp is over there, and when the sun gutters out he’ll have no choice, but for now he persists. Squinting, gritty-eyed with insomnia. Parsing each tortuously scrawled word without really understanding it. The work day is long done, and he ought to go home, but home is just the bed he barely sleeps in, a kitchen he never cooks in; Judit has children to care for, and Harry’s workload is strictly rationed –
(he’d personally filed Harry’s breakdown as burnout-related, which is not entirely untrue, if one were to disregard the alcoholism, the narcissism, the monumental fucking selfishness. So far, nobody has asked about any of those things, and so he does not offer them)
– and staring down the barrel of all this fucking paperwork never gets any less daunting, but some fucker has to do it, and what else does he have, anyway? Circadian rhythms out of joint; pills in the morning, pills in the evening, and his intimate familiarity with 4am feels like a condition of living, now, a tax on normality, as much as anything in his life might be considered normal. Gazing into the chasm between each scrawled line in the hope that something might reveal itself, but there is only ink, and paper, and words which stopped making sense a long time ago.
When he burns out – someday soon, perhaps, or years from now, buoyed on an inexorable current, slowly out to sea – he will go alone. Drifting unseen into the dark. And if they ever think to ask about him
(and they won’t, because they’ll know already; Jean-Heron Vicquemare was always destined to wash up in pieces on some distant shore, deep in in the throat of the Pale)
they’ll each swear til their dying breath that nobody saw him go.
#
Sometimes, when he’s given up on sleep and morning feels a long way off, he pads barefoot into the living room, where the sun can’t find him, and he sits in the armchair – long legs drawn to his chest, half-curled, for he has always been awkwardly configured, ill-suited to his own height – and he takes from the side table an old and battered volume, procured from some forgotten secondhand shop because the title had spoken to him, somehow
(chaque fois unique, la fin du monde)
and slips from between the delicate yellow leaves of its pages the photograph he’d never given back. That he’d been permitted, in some tacit, wordless way, to keep. Of course they’d made a copy; he is not the sole keeper of this strange and beautiful secret, if it even is a secret anymore. It feels like something stolen, but when he turns it slowly in his hands – careful, reverent, as though it might dissolve into ashes – he recalls the look of quiet assent in Kim’s eyes, watching him tuck the photo into his inside pocket, and neither of them had said a word, but he understands, in some distant way, that it is a gift.
(light in his eyes, for the first time in years; a strange warmth, like the first breath of summer, and maybe Kim had seen it too. Maybe he’d seen the slow release of Jean’s shoulders, uncoiling vertebra by vertebra; the weight of it all evaporating, if only for a minute, and maybe he’d thought it worth the cost)
When he’d seen it that first time – teetering on the verge of breaking down for good, back teeth ground to powder, and Harry gurning in bloody sportswear, Harry trailing claret in the snow – he’d felt the breath still in his lungs, felt his chest burn with the need to exhale, and he couldn’t, not until he was certain; low evening light, the teeth of the wind at his throat, held breath and slow pulse, willing himself to believe in the creature sketched in perfect relief, the Insulindian miracle in the palm of his hand. He’d emptied his lungs on a sigh, filled them back up with hope, and stilled the impulse to scold the foul-mouthed child in Harry’s ill-advised supervision for stealing Lieutenant Kitsuragi’s camera.
It hadn’t even galled him that Harry had been right. He usually was.
#
Here.
Kim slips like a shadow into his peripheral vision, holding two steaming mugs. He slides one onto Jean’s desk, picking out a clearing in the forest of paperwork. Absurd gratitude warms Jean from the inside. Thank you, he says, wrapping fingers around the cup; too-hot ceramic gnawing at his palms, the rising scent of freshly brewed coffee. He glances up at Kim, this angel of caffeine, and his eyes are dark, half-lidded; thumb smudge of grey in the concavities beneath, half-hidden by glass. I didn’t realise you were still here.
Kim’s mouth twitches, an almost-smile. I’ve got a part-timer for a partner, he says, without malice. And after all, you did promise me a huge case load.
Jean snorts. I will not be held responsible for anything Patrol Officer Minot says, he says, holding up one hand in protest.
Chain of command dictates otherwise, detective. Kim pauses, sipping delicately at his coffee; the steam briefly turns his lenses milky with condensation, which he bears with grace. Do you often stay late?
Not really. It’s not a smooth lie, but Kim just nods his acknowledgment, pries no further. Just, you know. It’s been busy lately. And I don’t mind picking up the slack every now and again.
Mhm. Inscrutable in his neutrality. Sometimes, when he talks to Kim, he feels as though he’s being judged surreptitiously, that he’s been found wanting
(but Vic, Judit had said, when he’d mentioned it in passing, you feel that way about everyone)
though he has presence of mind enough to recognise projection where he sees it, to temper his worst impulses, and Kim is still a blank canvas onto which one might paint anything.
Well, Kim says, after a moment; drumming thoughtful fingers against his cup, and he could sit, if he wanted to. He could perch on the edge of Jean’s desk, push aside the reams of paperwork, but he probably thinks it an imposition. Or perhaps the distance is cultivated. Perhaps this is as friendly as Kim wishes to be. It is nice not to be alone, he says. You begin to feel like a ghost here, sometimes. Haunting these corridors.
Jean takes a tentative sip. No-nonsense, just like Kim; oil black, no sugar, and palpitations guaranteed, but it’ll fuel him for the long walk home. You’re not a ghost, Lieutenant, he says, wry. I was there when you woke up.
Ah, but detective. And he does smile, this time; a softness about the eyes, tired, still, but warm now, as though remembering something beautiful, and Jean swallows down the strange and sudden urge to ask him if he’s had his evening cigarette yet. You never saw me leave.
#
In the end, he couldn’t go back to the hospital.
He’d fabricated all kinds of reasons, but the one he’d settled on was that Kim didn’t need him anymore. That he never had; he’d pinpointed Jean’s guilt with a sniper’s precision, indulged the pretence that he’d sat at his bedside
(day in, day out, like the tide, and it should have ended when Kim woke up, but he’d owed more; a fathomless debt, to Kim, to Harry, to Martinaise itself, bloodred streets, less a few sons, and the bell would toll for them the next day, mourning Revachol’s lost children)
out of sheer formality, because Kim was polite, and Jean persistent. And in any case, there was work to do, he told himself; the precinct was all but paralysed without him and Harry, and Judit was eminently competent but she was also a patrol officer, and a parent, and she’d been carrying the slack for far too long. On, and on, a litany of reasons culled from Jean’s miraculously intact sense of professionalism, but the truth was, he just couldn’t be around Harry anymore. He’d rebuked himself for his selfishness even as he’d compounded that selfishness; palming Kim off on a wounded man, and that too was his shame
(You can’t be anyone’s shadow all the time, Judit said, in that quiet, adamant way of hers. Looking fierce into his eyes, the backbone of the 41st, though nobody ever gave her credit for it. Not even if you want to)
And still the thought of Harry curdled in his stomach like something fatal.
In the end, he couldn’t go back. He didn’t deserve to.
#
If ever he were to be haunted, Jean knows it wouldn’t be Kim. He could never be that fortunate. No, his ghost would be garbed in disco-lurid polyester, mumbling non-sequiturs; his ghost would be the scent of alcohol, a ghost within a ghost, consumed, singular; a ghost that cries Dora at his feet, that howls desperate elegies in the small hours, that professes eternal love and forgets his name in the same breath.
You never saw me leave, Kim had said. But you did leave, Jean thinks, squinting down at the paperwork, which looks now like it’s in a foreign script, inscrutable runes. You did, and now you’re here, and now you have Harry. So you don’t need me. And he doesn’t need me. And still, the world keeps turning.
Detective. Kim, standing in the doorway; backlit, the hazy penumbra of hallway lights. I’m leaving now. You probably should too. It’s getting late.
He glances at his wristwatch. Nine forty-five PM. Long past clocking off time, but not enough. A little more, he thinks, easing his hunched shoulders up, around; the crunch of too-taut muscle as he sits up, and there’s a dull ache in his lower back, strips of molten lead where neck muscles ought to be, and this is fine, it’s always fine. I’ll leave soon, he says. Just. A few more things to finish up.
He feels the weight of Kim’s arched eyebrow for a full five seconds, weathers the atmospheric pressure of his disapproval like a passing storm. It would be better for the precinct if you didn’t work yourself to death, detective, Kim says, dry. We’re already running low on usable bodies.
Don’t worry, Lieutenant. Tired-eyed and wan in the warm glow of the desk lamp. Just prop me up at my desk with a coffee cup. Nobody will know the difference.
Kim nods. Approval, or acceptance, or amusement, or perhaps all three, for reading Kim’s body language is like reading Vaasan, though Jean is beginning to learn, slowly, parsing the strange syllables of him a little at a time. And then, soft: good night, Jean.
Good night, Kim. And then, like a ghost, he is gone.
#
Insomnia, again. Cigarettes smoked to the filter, one after the other; nascent sunrise peeling the shadows away, exposing the soft pink flesh of the city, and Revachol breathes; from Villalobos to Le Jardin, where moneyed men sleep in feather beds; from Boogie Street to Martinaise, faded splendour, like a movie star long past her prime, sadeyed and wheezing, and the rivers and tributaries like veins, ferrying trash, effluvium, dead dogs and gleaming needles; sickness and secrets, spilling into the open mouth of the sea, and when winter comes again there’ll be long dead things trapped in the ice.
Darkness obscures, and sunlight lies, but these are honest hours. Dawn and dusk; the gloaming, a fraying seam at the very edge of the world.
(Trant once told him that people are statistically more likely to die in the small hours. Dawn cannot lie any more than a failing heart can.
He’d sat by Kim’s bedside, waiting, with each rotation of his watch, for his breathing to fail. For the red tag to melt into black, or for morning to come; whichever happened first.
The sun rose, obstinate. Every time.)
The doctors say he’ll always be sad, to some extent or another. The pox that devoured his adolescent skin had set his brain on fire, pressing at the margins of his skull, and the damage, they say, will likely never be repaired; scarred face and scorched brain and withered heart, hairline cracks in a spine tired of carrying his weight, of carrying everyone else’s.
(shrill ring of the phone dragging him from abyssal sleep; four AM, always, in the winter dark, the bloodred glow of summer; ought to have unplugged the fucking thing, thrown it off the balcony, but for the fear parasitic inside of him, chewing at the soft tissue, that this time would be different
dora, baby, i’m so fucking sad, i can’t breathe without you
a hospital, a mortuary, a phone booth at the water’s edge, and blood on the walls, skin bluemarbled and cold. this time. the final time.
this shit again. harry, where the fuck are you?
and he’d never forgive himself, never sleep again, because who else did Harry have but him?
harry? tell me where you are. i’m coming to get you.
four AM, always, and his body remembers, his body keeps score)
He stubs his cigarette out. Steps through the balcony door, back into the warm-dusty apartment, the ghost of a ringing phone, of gone-away sleep. A glass of water. Pills sitting sour in an empty stomach. He doesn’t know what they do, if they do anything at all, but Gottlieb tells him to take them, and so he does, every day, ever-dutiful. Collapsing onto the bed; tired limbs pentacled out, sinking into the mattress, and sleep will not come again, but if he keeps very still, if he breathes in time with the slow pulse of his burnt and aching brain, he can pretend, and it will almost be the same thing.
#
Judit’s visibly stressed when she arrives at her desk the next morning. Lower lip chewed raw, the way she does, unthinking as she worries the skin, and only when she tastes blood does she pause. He doesn’t ask. Marital strife, perhaps, and he knows she’s well served in that arena, the few times she’s deigned to open up about it; always in brief, and apologetic afterwards, like she’s imposing, like he wouldn’t listen to her for hours on end, the least he can do after all the times she’s talked him off the ledge, even in her short tenure.
He likes working with Judit. She’s dogged, and smart, and she never turns up to work at midday stinking of piss and Pilsner, never vomits in his trash can, never fires a carronade of hurtful, petty little things at him for daring to suggest that maybe she might want to drink some water and take a fucking nap in the break room.
(don’t fucking lecture me, you sad streak of piss, you can’t even look after yourself)
She seems to sense when the world overwhelms him, grants him space, though she hovers birdlike on the periphery, asking questions that might feel stifling if it weren’t for the fact that she actually seems to fucking care: have you eaten today? Did you sleep enough? And he always tells her yes, Jude, I’m fine, even when it’s a lie, even when he feels like seventy kilos of shit wrapped in skin; even when he feels like swallowing the barrel of his own Villiers, snuffing out the weak and guttering light inside of him for the final time. Yes, Jude, he says, smiling just enough to reassure her, though she’s smart enough to see through it, kind enough to take it at face value all the same. Everything’s fine.
Hey, he says, when her lunch hour rolls around and she’s still at her desk, her customary walk around the block forgotten. He is acutely aware of how imposing he is, hates looming over her desk like some enormous preybird, dark and hunched and scowling no matter how hard he tries to regulate his expression, as though he emerged from the womb grimacing. Heard Torson got attacked by a goose down at the canal. Want to go thank it in person?
Don’t be an ass, she scolds, with tired affection. And then, brushing her hair from her eyes: I could go for a smoke, though.
That bad, huh? Sweeping aside as she peels out of her seat. It’s just them, for now; Harry and Kim are out investigating a disturbance downtown, which Harry is adamant is actually an occult sex crime, and Trant is at a seminar about radiocomputers – the massive networking potential which, he says, could radically change the face of intra-isolary communication, cutting through the Pale with waveforms; all across Insulinde, people talking to one another in real time, copying images from filament to filament, so that a photograph taken in Revachol could be received in Hsin-Yao and printed in beautiful approximation. Jean understands absolutely none of it, but Trant’s excitement is a force unto itself, and Jean hadn’t had the heart to cut him off mid-flow, though he’d wanted to, had thought of nothing else until he’d finally run out of steam.
It’s only a cigarette, she says, rolling her eyes. If I start dropping pyrholidon you have permission to worry.
It’s your gateway drug to delinquency. Past Harry’s desk; he doesn’t let his gaze linger too long, unnerved by the orderliness of it, the lack of cigarette ash, of finger-smeared papers, and it doesn’t stink of stale alcohol anymore, doesn’t pulsate with morose, funereal energy, like the site of a long-ago tragedy. Next thing you know, it’ll be Boogie Street at two in the morning, doing speed off the pavement with a ninety year old hobo named Baptiste who swears he knows Dolores Dei personally.
She snorts. You’re so dramatic, she says, and he doesn’t tell her that this is an authentic ‘HDB experience’ plucked from the cavernous basement of his memory; she believes wholeheartedly in Harry’s rehabilitation, and he doesn’t want to be the one to pull her back down to earth. Climbing the narrow stairs to the rooftop, barely-lit and structurally dubious, a narrow courtyard hemmed in by whitewashed walls, roof tiles spattered with gull shit; the ripe stink of a city slow-cooking in the sun, and he loves it, still, will always love it, no matter how sickly the rot, how advanced the decay.
He pulls out his cigarettes, lights one for Judit, and she accepts it gratefully, rests it delicately on the shelf of her lip, like she’s not sure she really wants to smoke it. You gonna tell me what’s bothering you, or am I gonna have to pull the Jamrock Shuffle?
Vic, you’re from Faubourg. She sighs. Pushes her hair out of her face, a frustrated sweep of the fingers. Promise me you won’t be angry.
Something brittle inside of him crackles, like spring ice over dark water. Is it the shitkid? he says.
She looks up, sharp. What? No. Not everything is about him. And this time she does take a deep drag, coughing a little on the exhale, too much too quickly. It’s Toussaint.
Toussaint? Slow whirl of overworked brain cells, grey matter groaning in dramatic protest as he flips through a mental stack of still-open cases, a rogue’s gallery of suspects in which all the faces have begun to merge into one. He needs a cigarette, won’t let himself have one; if he can’t keep his cases straight, he doesn’t deserve nicotine. As in, dog-fighting ring Toussaint? What’s that no-neck creep done now?
Silent. Uncertain. Twisting the ring she still wears on her left hand, as though it means anything to her. I think he’s been following me, she says. Home. After work.
That motherfucker... Slamming hands on the balustrade; the tinny reverberation makes her flinch, and he regrets it instantly, tries to stem the flow of anger like blood from a wound, but it seeps through his fingers all the same. How long?
A week. Maybe. Glancing up at him, a hint of reproach in her dark eyes. I knew you’d be angry, she says, fretful.
Not with you, Jude. Soft, now. Peeling his fingers from their chokehold on the balustrade; releasing the tension in his muscles as he lowers his hand, and it engulfs Judit’s shoulder, makes her look terribly small. Never with you.
She relaxes into his touch. They’re safe with each other; they both know this. He would break bones to protect her; she would walk out to the very edge to coax him back. The essence of a good partnership is the willingness to patch over one another’s weak spots, to step in where the other falters.
(to give and give alike until you realise – belatedly, in a pool of one’s own bitterly wasted tears – that you’ve been the only one giving for a long time now, that you’ve stripped yourself down to the bones and still you keep going, will keep going until you’re dust.
He’d do it for her. For anyone who’s ever showed him kindness.)
Judit smokes quietly, eyes trained on the middle distance. Not so far as the horizon, where Martinaise sleeps at the edge of their world, crumbling like rotting teeth into the cold black gullet of the Esperance, but the sun-starved peripheries, the inbetween places where even summer cannot reach.
I’ll ask Lieutenant Kitsuragi to drive you home tonight, he says.
She looks startled, like a frightened hare. I couldn’t possibly ask him to do that, she says. Don’t you think he’s got better things to do than ferry me around?
You’re not asking him. I am. Host above, he thinks, she’s stubborn enough to make him look obliging. Trant won’t be back for a few days. You’re a colleague. He’ll understand.
So you’re the Kitsuragi whisperer now? A little terse, but there’s playfulness in it too; a gentle mockery at his hubris, because nobody understands Kim, not even Harry, and they’ve been two peas in a pod since returning from Martinaise, since Kim’s transfer, since Jean silently detached himself from Harry’s partnership, not out of self-preservation or even hatred, but because Kim was there, now.
Fuck off, Jude.
And she smiles then, the tension dissipating from her rigid shoulders, and maybe he’s good for something, he thinks, squinting out at the skyline, brightlit and uneven, divine in its ugliness, the distant thrum of life in unseen streets, in wide-open windows. Maybe there are reasons to exist, still.
#
When Harry first disappeared – unopened mail on the doormat, the stale scent of abandonment, and he’d said nothing, told nobody, but their last
(argument)
conversation still rang in Jean’s ears like the hum of blood, and he’d believed, in some withered little part of himself, that they really would find him dead this time. He’d threatened it before; a fit of histrionics, pure Harry theatre, but Jean had always recognised inside of Harry a cancerous sadness; dead and strangled tissue winding its way inside of him like knotweed, and the fact that Harry had sown the seed himself rankled on Jean far less than the necrotising resentment, the jealousy, that Harry would get to die, and somehow, he would have to keep living.
#
And then Harry forgot him, and death seemed gentle in comparison.
#
Death does not make a ghost. A ghost dwells on the threshold of memory. It persists. In dreams and empty sleep, in the periphery of vision, in the corner of the eye. A living ghost is the worst kind. A presence unaware of its presence, unaware of its history; you can call out to it, insist that it leave, but it no more registers your proximity than it does its own ghostliness. You speak its history in an effort to exorcise, but ghosts do not care to remember. It might as well be someone else’s life, someone else’s mistakes, for time is out of joint, and ghosts are out of time.
He’s tried to explain this to Kim, once or twice. When he skirts Harry in the corridor, passes by with arched spine and averted gaze, catlike and skittish, and Kim’s frown prickles in the guilt centre of his brain. Because Harry is doing his best, isn’t he? Ever since he got back from Martinaise, sober and diligent and bristling with an enthusiasm Jean hasn’t seen in him since the early days of the unit. Kim must think him cruel; carrying his grudge like Sisyphus, and it will never be done, because Harry can scarcely apologise for that which he does not remember, and in any case, Jean would ask for nothing so insincere. It will never be done, and there’s the joke, because for Harry – this other Harry, this uncanny doppelganger, who smiles and moves and sounds just like the man who died in a motel room in Martinaise – it never even began.
(Tabula rasa. All the terrible things he did. Gone now, in the blink of an eye.)
He’s tried to explain it, but how can he? Kim never knew the dead Harry, and Jean can no more conjure him than he can speak with ghosts. And so he stitches up his wounds, and stitches up his mouth, and wonders why they can’t even seem to stay closed; why he wakes up in the night with filaments of thread beneath his fingernails, and blood on the sheets, and Harry’s name on his tongue like a curse he’ll never be rid of.
#
Try me, Kim said, the last time – days after he’d formalised his transfer, and they’d barely spoken since the hospital, but it had seemed like they should start over, the way professionals do, waving those days at his bedside into thin air like vapour – but he’d dismissed it with a shrug, though there’d been no judgement in Kim’s eyes, only a pensive semi-comprehension. And he’d realised, belatedly, that it wasn’t the fear of not being understood, or worse, being condemned in that silent, staring way of his; but that Kim, paradoxically, was the only place that Harry’s ghost could not follow him.
#
A motor carriage coughs to a halt somewhere at the foot of the precinct. He’s not well versed enough in the vagaries of motor vehicles to know by ear the difference between a standard issue police MC and the souped-up, spinner-bearing kind, but Trant isn’t due back for another day yet, and unless Harry has worked his dubious magic with the precinct budget – meagre as it is, and his goodwill with the higher-ups is drained to near depletion – it can only really be Kim, returning though he’d left already, taking Judit home without hesitation, as Jean had known he would.
(criminals must hear him coming from miles away. Perhaps that’s the point; perhaps this ostentatiously noisy, needlessly flashy vehicle is some kind of pre-emptive get your shit together and behave warning beacon preceding the Lieutenant’s arrival. Or perhaps Kim is just odd, as Jean himself is odd, and the MC serves no greater purpose than pleasing Kim in some fundamentally unknowable way.)
He gets up slowly. Thirty-four years old, but his muscles feel like rusted cables, his joints like old hinges, and no amount of powering through it at the precinct gym can undo the accumulative damage of piss-poor posture and crippling tension. Jacket hung over the back of his chair, because it’s too fucking hot, and his sleeves are rolled to the elbows, exposing sun-starved forearms, the shallow scatter of pox scars fading into dark hair. Out onto the fire escape, patting his pockets for a cigarette; Kim’s Kineema, parked and idling, and a familiar flash of orange as he climbs out into the darkened patch of weed-choked concrete that passes for precinct parking.
Forget something?
Kim glances up at him; momentarily surprised, and then slackening in unsurprise, as though Jean Vicquemare smoking on the precinct fire escape at eight in the evening is precisely as he’d expected. Actually, I was on my way home, he says, sliding into the gap at the base of the stairs; surefooted, a light tread, though the shoddy construction shivers beneath his slight weight all the same. I thought I’d pass by to see if you were still here.
Jean spreads his hands, a guilty half-shrug. Where else should I be? he says, lifting a cigarette to his mouth.
A minute quirk of the head; genuine puzzlement, or perhaps light judgement, he isn’t sure. Home, detective, Kim says, flat. I believe that’s generally where people go once they’re done with work.
Ah, you see, that’s the thing. Stepping aside; granting Kim scant space on this tiny balcony, and for a fraction of a moment they’re back at the hospital, surreptitiously smoking in the winter cold, and Kim’s gown flutters pale in the dark. I’m not done yet.
Kim settles in beside him. Bare arms resting on rust-flecked balustrade; he never takes that damn jacket off, even when the residual heat of the day rises from sunbaked concrete, the damp warmth of Revacholian summer night, which sets Jean’s brain pulsing in his skull more often than not. He holds out his lighter, and Kim regards it for a long, thoughtful moment, as though weighing the pros and cons between smoking now and smoking later.
I prefer not to pull rank, Kim begins, which Jean knows is utterly untrue, but he lets it slide, lifts the warm glow of the lighter to the cigarette Kim presents, but if you insist on maintaining this kind of schedule, I may be forced to.
Perhaps you ought to lead by example, Jean replies, and Kim’s gaze flits sharply up to meet his, poised over the newly-lit end of his cigarette; scouring his expression for an indication of animosity, or judgement, but Jean’s eyes hold no such emotion. You’re back here, aren’t you?
Yes, Kim says. You live on Perdition, as I recall? My intention was to attempt to deliver you there.
A long moment passes before Jean fully comprehends his meaning. Ahh, he says, and the imposition is not his idea, but he feels faintly embarrassed all the same. I wouldn’t want you to go out of your way, he says, waving a dismissive hand; you already did me a favour, dropping Jude home.
They smoke in unresolved silence. If it were Judit, Jean thinks, she’d be fiercely insistent: let people do nice things for you, she’d say, or you deserve kindness too, or some other deeply-felt platitude to which Jean is too awkward to respond. But Kim just watches him quietly from the corner of his eye, pretending he isn’t watching, and Jean pretends he hasn’t noticed, and they stay like this until Jean has smoked his cigarette down to the filter, ground it beneath his heel.
You aren’t going to let me say ‘no’, are you? he says, exhaling the last dregs of smoke.
If it helps, Kim says, with practised nonchalance, I really enjoy driving.
It does, a little. But beneath the well-worn guilt at his own perceived nuisance lies the simple fact that he doesn’t really want to go home. His apartment feels like a trap, sometimes, and the only escape is to chew through his own foot. Nothing good has ever happened between those walls, and his memories
(Harry, drunk and sobbing on the kitchen floor; locking all dangerous objects somewhere out of reach, and nobody had ever done the same for him; phone calls in the dead of night, arguments on the doorstep, and he’d screamed his throat raw but Harry had ended up on his couch all the same; no sleep, and no sleep, and no sleep)
sit sour in the meat of his brain like an aneurysm, ripe and waiting to burst.
You don’t have to drive me home. Letting the words spill like smoke from his open mouth, because if he hesitates even for a split second he’ll clamp shut, choke on his own audacity. We should grab a drink. There’s uh. There’s a bar nearby. Decent. And then he does clamp shut, because he’s about to ramble, and he can feel Kim’s eyes on him, keen and curious, like the edge of a scalpel.
A bar? Kim repeats.
(but it isn’t no)
Yes, Lieutenant. Feigning casualness, though his heart rate has suddenly accelerated, and he doesn’t know why. It’s only Kim, he reminds himself; he doesn’t bite. Sometimes, when colleagues get along, they go to bars after work. At least, so I’m told.
The corners of Kim’s mouth tilt upwards. Are we colleagues who get along?
He shrugs. Well, you haven’t told me to fuck off yet.
I suppose that’s true. And when he finally looks up, taking in Kim’s face in its wan entirety, he’s relieved at the benign curiosity in his eyes, the soft set of his jaw. It is not the expression of someone calculating the kindest way to say no –
(though even that would be an upgrade)
– and Kim pinches the end of his half-smoked cigarette with gloved fingers, stifling the flame. I suppose it would be good, he says, contemplative, as though justifying this further indulgence to himself to get to know people outside of work, sometimes.
Sometimes, he agrees. He’s an acquired taste; he knows that, and Host knows the rest of the precinct do too, but they tolerate him, mostly, and sometimes they even seem to like him. Sometimes. Come on, he says, starting down the stairs. First round is on me.
And, miracle of miracles, Kim actually follows.
#
He tends to think of those days in the hospital as a strange dream, only real in passing; in the corner of his eye, when he allows himself to look, though it was real. And he’s ashamed to admit that those few days – devoid of Harry and his black hole heart, around which the entire world seemed to revolve, dragged helplessly into his selfish continuum – were as close to good as Jean has experienced in a very long time.
It isn’t like he’s earned good. And Kim – recovering from a bullet wound that was three-fifths Jean’s fault in the first fucking place – owes Jean no sympathy, no friendship. So he tucks the memory away, calls it half-real, and that almost salves his guilt; this good thing, those moments in which the white noise of his own unbearable sadness had receded, briefly, like an outward tide. Kim’s tired kindness, given without condition, without cruel return. Peace, for a time.
He doesn’t dare hope he might ever feel it again.
#
They’re almost at the Kineema when everything unravels.
The corner of his eye betrays him. He’s always been sharp, observant; spotting strange anomalies at crime scenes, suspects hiding in plain sight. Host knows it’s the only talent he really has.
(we can’t all be fuckin’ hawkeye over there. McLaine, jabbing a thumb in his direction, and he’d meant it as a compliment, but god forbid he should ever be straightforward about it)
If it hadn’t been for Judit, he might have brushed the whole thing off as an odd coincidence. Remy Toussaint, on the corner of Mill Street, gazing up at the precinct with wet-pale eyes. If it hadn’t been for Judit he might not have cared at all, but he does, and he’s on Toussaint before he can stop himself; scaling the fence with a speed and agility that surprises him even as he vaults over, landing on hands and knees; the jolt of impact shimmering along the taut cord of his spine, caging long fingers around the stub of Toussaint’s neck before he can bolt like one of his fucking dogs.
(starving beasts in stinking cages, dull-eyed and wary; tattered ears and raw skin, and it’s only the fact that dogfighting is somehow legal in Revachol that stands between Remy Toussaint and the prison cell he deserves)
Man, what the fuck? breathless, spluttered; eyes pink with broken capillaries, and Jean had always been faintly disgusted by him but had pushed it down, reasoned that you couldn’t hate someone just for resembling sentient gutter mulch.
Don’t ‘what the fuck’ me, asshole. Half-snarled, his voice alien to his own ears; it carries a long way along the empty street, in the hot, still air. You think you’re a big brave boy, following women home?
I don’t know what you’re–
Slamming Toussaint against the fence; the pink flesh of his face puckered between the bars, raining powdered rust like old, dry blood, and Jean’s forearm trembles with impact. Shut the fuck up. Listen to me, Remy, and listen good, because I don’t care to repeat myself. If I catch you so much as breathing in Patrol Officer Minot’s direction, I will ram your teeth so far down your throat you’ll be able to chew with your colon. Am I making myself clear?
Yeah. Yeah, man, whatever, just. Fuckin’. Let me go, yeah? His frantic pulse hammers against Jean’s tight-clenched fingers. He could dismantle Toussaint, if he wanted to; he could drag him face first along the pavement, reduce him to a smear, but he would have to answer for it, and the law, in its infinite wisdom, would gaze upon Toussaint with sympathy. All he has is Judit’s word, and in Revachol, a woman’s word is worth less than dogshit.
Jean. Kim’s voice, somewhere behind him. Is everything all right?
Jean loosens his grip. Toussaint squirms, insectile; the angry red shape of the fence etched into his face in bold relief, marinating in sweat and embarrassment and petty anger, and he should see it coming, but he doesn’t, somehow, fails to anticipate the switchblade which arcs upward the moment he turns a fraction of attention towards Kim. Skimming the meat of his palm, sweeping upwards; his knuckles sing with bright, glassy pain. He hisses, drawing his hand to his chest, and Toussaint skips out of range, waving his shitty little knife, glossy now with Jean’s blood. Self-defence! he crows, triumphant; churchyard grin and sharp little eyes. Self-defence. That’s police brutality, that is. You got nothing to pin on me. You ain’t got shit and you know it.
He looks down. Fingers streaming dark blood; his shirt is spattered with blooming poppies, and it’ll never come out in the wash, he laments, as his expression darkens; he hasn’t got money to burn on more fucking dress shirts. Do you see RCM insignia on me right now? he says. Indicating, with a sweep of bloody fingers, the plain shirt, the tie, the nondescript black trousers. This isn’t police business, Remy. This is a warning, civilian to civilian. And when I feed you to your fucking dogs, that’ll be a civilian act too. Understand?
He lets Toussaint go. Scurrying insectile, knife still clutched tight in his palm, as though anticipating a chase, though Jean’s anger is ebbing, now; the searing pain of his knuckles tempering his rage, and Kim beside him, observing him with that neutral gaze. Has he gone down in the Lieutenant’s estimation, he wonders, turning sheepishly to face him; is Kim appalled by his hair-trigger temper, his propensity to snap without warning? He’s shown too much of himself. He let his guard slip, and now Kim has seen beneath his respectable carapace, glimpsed the truth of his rottenness. But all Kim says is you’re bleeding.
Jean snorts. You should’ve seen the other guy, he says, and regrets it immediately; compounding a shitty situation with a terrible joke, and his wrist runs hot with blood, his hand slit and gaping. He deserves this, he thinks; a stupid end to a stupid act. Ahh. Yeah. Not my best moment. Sorry you had to see that.
Kim shifts in his peripheral vision; a flash of orange, moving closer, and the hands that gently turn his knuckles to the light are bare, ungloved; he’s unfazed by the blood, gazing with almost clinical dispassion at the puckered mouth of his wound. It’s a clean cut at least, he says, pulling a carefully folded handkerchief from his inside pocket. But it needs disinfecting. Host only knows where that knife has been. Jean watches, dry-mouthed and mesmerised, as Kim tidily wraps his fingers in the handkerchief. The neat, precise motion, like a tailor measuring seams, except the seams are sliced into his skin; appraising his hands with such care and attention that Jean is somehow certain that this too is a test he is about to fail.
There’s a first aid kit in the office, Jean manages, and for the first time Kim looks truly, irretrievably appalled.
Absolutely not. Tucking the edges of the handkerchief into the folds. He’s already turned the fabric scarlet, but Kim pulls out a second identical handkerchief without comment, delicately wipes his bloody fingers. With respect to the 41st, you’d be better off cleaning that off in the Esperance than what you so optimistically call a ‘first aid kit’. No, I think you should come back with me. I have the proper equipment, particularly if you need stitches.
With you, Jean repeats, slowly.
Yes, detective. The dark of his eyes dancing under streetlight; amusement, beneath the seriousness, and something else, strange and enigmatic and unknowable. Sometimes, when colleagues care about one another’s wellbeing, they perform basic medical procedures in their kitchens. At least, so I’m told. And, before Jean can shove his foot even further into his mouth, Kim nods in the Kineema’s direction. Come on. The bar can wait for another night.
#
Do you enjoy this job? Judit asked him once – on a stakeout, pounding the pavements of Grand Couron dressed as census-takers; impossibly tall, beautiful buildings like hands reaching to heaven, and only a handful of residents walking those grand and empty halls, prohibitive in their luxury. Vacant apartments decaying slowly in sterile emptiness; the blank, unseeing eyes of a hundred rain-streaked windows gazing down onto the churning Esperance.
He’d paused. Turned the idea of enjoyment around in his mind like an unfamiliar puzzle. I don’t know, he’d said, after a while. Fiddling with the latch on his clipboard so as to avoid eye contact; it wasn’t that he’d resented Jude for asking, but deep and meaningful conversation had never been his forte. Are you supposed to enjoy it?
I do, she’d said, soft. There’d been a pained look on her face when he’d glanced at her, briefly, and he’d turned away again, embarrassed by the stupidity of his answer. Okay, so it’s not an easy job. Sometimes it’s downright exhausting. But I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. I mean, where would I go? She’d laughed, and there’d been a sadness about it, somehow. Stacking shelves at Frittte, I suppose.
He’d looked up, appalled. Fuck off, he’d said, without cruelty. You’re stuck with a unit full of sociopaths, shitsacks and losers five days a damn week, and you’ve never once complained, or lost your shit, or…or gone on a three-day bender and lost your fucking memory. If you can cope with that, you can do damn well anything.
She’d smiled at his bluster, waited for him to lower his hands, windmilling in his state of outraged animation. Above them, a thin seam of cloud opened up, scattering the last snow of late spring onto buildings too sunwarm to welcome it. So, why do you do it? she’d asked, if not enjoyment?
Snow landing cold on the exposed nape of his neck. He’d turned up his collar, hunched deeper into the shield of his coat. Because it gets me out of bed in the morning, he’d said. Gazing up at the sky. At the buildings, grand in their folly; a handful of lit windows against the encroaching dark, while down in Faubourg people slept in doorways, on park benches, shivering and alone.
Oh, Vic. She’d patted his arm, affectionate and sorrowful, and he’d felt the warmth of her smile like a small and radiant sun. We’ve got to find you something better to get out of bed for.
#
They drive in comfortable silence. He doesn’t feel the weight of quiet with Kim, the way he does with other people; the compulsion to speak, to fill the void, even though he doesn’t want to, and maybe that’s a side effect of too much Harry, because to him silence was an invitation to spill whatever thoughts happened to be floating around in that immense but diseased brain of his, and Jean had never quite known how to deal with him when he grew maudlin. It’s not like that with Kim. They can simply exist in the same space, at the same time, and somehow it’s enough.
He cradles his injured hand carefully in his lap, not wanting to bleed on Kim’s seats. Once or twice, Kim reaches instinctively toward the radio dial, pulls back again when he remembers he’s not alone. And Jean smiles, reassuring: It’s all right, Lieutenant. Harry used to blast Sad FM when we were out on patrol. Your music taste can’t possibly be any worse.
Kim gives him a wry half-smile. I’m not so sure, he says, and leaves the radio dial untouched, but it’s a start, Jean thinks. Learning anything at all about Kim is like prying mussels from a shell; better to go gently than to wield a sledgehammer. And besides. Jean doesn’t know shit about music anyway.
The streets of Jamrock give way to the outskirts of Grand Couron. The Kineema stops short of the towering developments on the river’s edge; the uniform grey concrete of Kim’s apartment block has a distinct post-war stink about it. Those oppressive slabs hastily constructed in the wake of Revachol’s destruction, before the bombsmoke had even fully cleared; foundations steeped in blood, but it’s not as though anyone in Revachol can afford to be picky.
You’ve got a garage? Jean asks, as Kim reverses the Kineema into a concrete lock-up at the back of the apartments.
I pay extra. A little sheepish, as though it’s a grand extravagance, which it would be were the roof not pockmarked with holes, the unlit expanse littered with rat traps and other pest control paraphernalia. It’s either that or have my wheels stolen four days a week. Frankly, the garage was the cheaper option.
I’ll bet. Climbing carefully out of the Kineema. His hand aches like a rotten socket, and the handkerchief is soaked and scarlet, but it’s not even in the top five worst injuries he’s obtained on the job to date. Gazing up at the apartment blocks like a row of decaying teeth; the lingering summer heat baked into the concrete, leaching like a fever out into the blue-grey dusk. Somewhere, someone is cooking salt fish. He realises he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast.
An ancient paternoster lift sits on the ground floor, open and uninviting. Handwritten signs in Suresne, Mesque and what might be Seraise warn unwary visitors not to use the lift due to ‘dangger of life’; cracked tiles and peeling paint and pointillist spatters of black mould on the ceiling, the scent of damp rising from the floor. The building has skipped ‘tired’ and gone straight for ‘exhausted’. Jean sympathises.
Go sit down, Kim says, as Jean follows him into the narrow hallway; closing the front door behind him, and Jean can’t help the feeling that he’s trespassing, somehow, despite Kim’s own invitation. That this is part of Kim he shouldn’t be seeing. I just need to get the first aid kit from the kitchen.
He sits down. The couch sags under his weight, the way ancient furniture does; holding his wrist awkward, suspended above the upholstery, immaculate despite its age. He’d imagined that Kim might live sparsely, a minimalist existence; spartan room with basic furniture, a dearth of possessions, of frivolous things. But Kim’s living room is a kind of ordered chaos, filled floor to ceiling with things of all kinds, and Jean recognises in the compulsion to collect, to retain – radio components and sewing supplies in labelled plastic boxes, spare MC parts, stacks of old TipTop magazines piled neatly – the marks of one who grew up with very little. For whom owning anything at all is still, somehow, a great novelty.
All right, Kim says, brandishing another plastic box, this time with the blue ‘X’ of the Interisolary Star of Life neatly daubed on the lid. He sits beside Jean on the sofa, balancing the box on one knee; holding out both hands, and so Jean slowly lowers his wrist into the waiting space, certain he’s misinterpreted, that Kim will shoot him a withering eyebrow, but Kim just takes his hand, peels back the bloodwet folds of the handkerchief with care. He doesn’t flinch at the sight of Jean’s gouged knuckles, at the bloody meat glistening in the valley of his lacerated skin. I don’t think you need stitches, he says, soaking a swab in iodine. Though you should probably speak to the lazareth about a tetanus vaccine, if he can get his hands on one. I don’t suppose that knife was sterile.
You sound like you’ve done this before. Wincing as Kim dabs gently at the wound; yellowish iodine and fresh blood, the stark white of the swab, and he can’t look away even as Kim pulls apart the edges of the wound with the pads of his fingers, thorough in his work.
Kim smiles. You pick things up, he says, plucking a fresh swab. The sting is excruciating, but Jean bears it with as much stoicism as he can muster. First aid in the field can be the difference between life or death. Though I’m sure you already know that.
Jean thinks of all the times he’s slipped Harry into the recovery position after too many drinks. Checking and re-checking; blue-tinted lips or too-slow pulse, holding a spoon up to his fucking mouth to be sure there’s still breath in those stinking lungs, and it’s not nearly the same, but he’s ashamed, a little, to be in need of Kim’s care, had always assured himself he wouldn’t be the same kind of burden. I’m sorry, he says, in a low voice. About…all of this. I lost my temper. It was unprofessional of me.
Pain flares deep in his hand; he hisses, draws back, an automatic response, but Kim’s grip is firm, keeping Jean’s wrist in place. Lowering it to the shelf of Kim’s knee where it rests, pulsing with fresh injury, but subsiding now, returning to baseline. I would tend to agree, he says, turning Jean’s hand to address the shallower cut on the heel of his palm. Had you been in uniform. But since it was a civilian matter… He trails off. Stops short of voicing approval, but the sentiment is clear, and Jean feels an absurd surge of gratitude, as though he’d been defending himself and not the honour of a colleague who’d been miles away, safe in her home.
(he hadn’t hesitated to drive Jude home, had expressed quiet horror when Jean explained everything; had he objected to Toussaint’s treatment he would have intervened. Jean’s dearth of RCM insignia had been a convenient and flimsy excuse; he and Kim both know it, and their shared ignorance of the fact is a conspiracy neither of them will ever voice.
Even Kim makes exceptions, sometimes.)
Patrol Officer Minot… Kim begins, and then pauses. Gazing down at Jean’s hand; broad fingers curled gingerly in the shell of Kim’s conjoined palms, dark-rimmed fingernails, the heat of his hands slowly warming Jean’s shock-chilled skin. It’s hard, Kim says, after a moment. For her. She has to work twice as hard for half the recognition. Most people in her position would have quit by now.
Jude’s stubborn, Jean says.
Yes, Kim says. Amusement illuminates his eyes as he reaches for a pad of gauze. That’s why you two get along.
Jean gives a huff of dry laughter. I’m not stubborn, he says, flexing his fingers at Kim’s command; the sharp tug of skin just beginning to scab, and it’ll scar, but what’s another among many? I’m just an idiot who doesn’t know when to quit.
Is there a difference?
He watches Kim work. Lining the ridge of his knuckles with clean gauze, a neat and perfect bulwark. Strips of surgical tape torn methodically from the roll, spaced out evenly; piecing him back together the way one might repair a machine. Perhaps there isn’t a difference, he thinks; Judit perseveres, and Jean endures, has always endured, even when it would have made more sense to burn it all to ashes. And Kim…
(doesn’t have to endure, has only ever heard of the bad old Harry in stories; secrets told in hushed whispers, like something forbidden, or else brayed across the precinct on a peal of laughter, tales of Tequila Sunset recounted as though they were urban legends, except Jean had lived every single one, lives them still, sometimes, in his dreams
chaque fois unique, la fin du monde)
…Jean doesn’t need Kim’s life story to know that his empathy for Judit is far less rooted in theory than Jean’s own.
No, Jean concedes. I suppose not.
There. Kim sits back, admiring his handiwork. That should keep you at least a few steps ahead of gangrene.
Thank you, Jean says. Really. You didn’t have to go to so much trouble.
I know. He looks up. Glasses halfway down his nose; the faint dishevelment of his hair after a long, hot day in the precinct sweatbox, and it looks good on him, Jean thinks, with a faint sense of alarm. His hand still rests on Kim’s knee, caught in the loose cage of his fingers; in this room, in this apartment, and it’s been a long time since anyone touched him this gently, for this long. Don’t worry, Kim says. These things have a way of paying themselves back. That’s the nature of what we do.
(hands still clasped around Jean’s, and Host, why is it always older men…?)
You have Harry, he doesn’t say; there’s nothing I can do for you that he can’t do better. But he just smiles, apologetic; looks over at the wall clock, occupying the few square inches not taken up by shelves or windows, and says it’s getting late. I should let you get some sleep.
Kim shrugs. Far be it for me to tell you what to do, he says, but it’ll take you well over an hour to walk home from here, won’t it? Tilt of the head, imperious in his curiosity. And then, with a blitheness that must surely be deliberate: I have it on good authority that my couch is very comfortable.
(What? his eyes seem to say, defiant in the face of assumption; you think Harry sleeps in my bed?)
And Jean is so tired, now. Drained of adrenaline; days of poor sleep, of overthinking every last thing, of living and breathing the precinct, because there’s precious little else to breathe for. He’s tired, and too weak to fight himself over this; one small concession, something so innocuous he can’t possibly read anything into it, though he wants to, would like for Kim to stay here while he falls asleep, cradling his injured hand with this same care, this same kindness. We’ve got to find you something better to get out of bed for, Judit had said, and it can’t be Kim, that would be insane, but this, maybe. This fragment. The promise of something kinder. Of gauze and iodine, old springs sinking beneath his weight. Photographs tucked into old books.
You know, he says, in wry warning. Torson and McLaine will give us both hell if they catch us arriving at the precinct together. Trant gave me a lift to work once and they called me ‘Mikael’s Second Daddy’ for six months solid.
Kim laughs. Letting go of his hand, and Jean’s skin sings with disappointment, but he lets Kim go, watches him stand up, shrug off his jacket; examining his hands, tacky with Jean’s blood. It’s all right, Jean, he says, and he sounds almost fond. People have been giving me hell for twenty years.
#
In a dust-smelling blanket, on a shabby couch; in sleep so deep and so dreamless that no ghosts can find him here; no phantom phone calls, no strange nightmares which feel, in their sharpness, like memories. And when Kim walks in the next morning, he looks for a long moment at the perfect stillness of him, the slack tangle of his limbs; at the soft line of his mouth, relaxed for the first time in Kim’s memory, and he smiles, and thinks let him sleep a little longer.