A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (15 page)

He snuck up behind her and took her shoulders and buried his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling deeply. She smelled antiseptic.

She threw her head back to drain her drink, and it made the voice box stick out on her sinewy neck almost like a man’s Adam’s apple. She wore a stretchy knit sweater with a plain round-neck collar. He began kissing her and reached around and slipped his gnarled hand down through the opening, getting just to the top of her bra before she twisted away and slapped at him.

“Not like that!” she said, tossing her glass in the air toward him and making him catch it. She gave a cruel smile when he fumbled it and went and sprawled across the bed.

Manis set down the glass and followed her, aching for her. He lay down beside her, feeling her resistance, unsure what she’d allow him to do. Once he’d been the dominant, controlled the entire transaction. But that was a long time ago.

She had her bony back to him and he spooned with her, burying his face in her hair, rubbing against her, reaching a hand around between her legs. She didn’t push him away for once, but she lay there in her jeans, unmoving and unreceptive.

“I want you so bad,” he admitted.

“Not like this,” she said. “I’m not ready.”

“What do I need to do?”

“You know what.”

Manis sat up, squeezed his eyes shut, and pressed his fingers into his forehead. “Why?”

“Because it turns me on. It turns you on, too.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“You just won’t admit it.”

He wanted to cry, almost felt sick to his stomach. “Which one?”

“Let’s talk about Albie today.”

Albie.
He let out a small sigh of relief. At least Albie was one who could never have her again.

“He was handsome,” she began. “Even when they wheeled him in, pale and unconscious, I could see that.” She stood up abruptly. “Get yourself undressed, Warren. Get yourself undressed and get under the sheets.”

“Okay.” He obeyed. His manhood, ready to burst a minute ago, had shriveled.

As he lay there, covered to the collarbone with nothing but a sheet, she walked to the bed and rested a hand on his chest. She resumed her narration.

“He had curly, kinky chest hair, like all African-Americans. Not much of it, but for weeks as he lay there I ran my fingers through it with no one around, pinched his nipples, pinched my own. Want me to show you?”

Cowed into not speaking, Manis nodded silently.

“Of course you do,” she said. She pulled off her shirt and unhooked her bra.

Manis licked his lips as she toyed with her small breasts.

“Like this,” she said, throwing back her hair, her eyes closed. “And this.” She pinched and prodded with one hand, still resting the other on the sheet over Manis’s chest.

“When he woke up,” she continued, “we got to know each other a little. That’s when I heard that accent, like something from an old longshoreman or something, all wyes, dirty and sensuous like the street.”

Manis flushed. He knew he couldn’t compete with that. Hadn’t he just proved himself an utter failure in the restaurant? He’d lost that which he’d once acquired with no effort. No amount of trying would get that accent back.

“At the beginning,” she continued, “I fed him when he was too weak. Fed him with a spoon, then a fork.” As if she could taste it herself now, she ran her red tongue over her front teeth, then stuck it out, leaned over, and dangled it an inch from Manis’s dry lips. Her breath smelled of alcohol.

“I could tell right then that he wanted me, but he wasn’t ready—too much pain. He would cry at night over the legs, cry when he didn’t think anyone could hear. But one quiet night I went to him and held him. I wiped away his tears with my fingertips”—she ran them now across Manis’s cheeks—“and I licked off the salt like this.” Her tongue lapped up the imaginary tears.

Manis felt the sweat forming in his underarms, beads stippling his forehead. He started to shake his head to stop her, but he felt paralyzed, still would endure anything to have her tonight. So many times he’d ruined it and she’d cut him off, stormed out. After so many days, and all that he’d done for their relationship, he couldn’t face something of that nature just now.

“After two months,” she said, “Albie Horn’s strength began to return. The legs still hurt but the inflammation had gone down and the operations had ceased and they’d started withdrawing more of the morphine. The next time I drew the late shift, I cranked the dose down a little more. I wanted him to feel. Do you know what I wanted him to feel, Warren?”

“N-no.” He stared as she peeled off her jeans. Her panties were white and not at all sexy, which for Manis made them all the hotter. At times like these he perpetually thought of her as a girl.

“Ooh,” she moaned. “It was time for me to show Albie that he was still a man. I still had my uniform on—you can use your imagination for that, can’t you, Warren?”

He shook his head, but not to deny it. He was aroused again.

She touched him through the sheets. “Before I even got my undies off he was hard, just like you now. I turned away from him, pretending like I was shy, and slipped them off just like this.”

He watched her do it, using both hands, the white undies around her ankles, that small tight ass finally exposed. But the story—it was getting to the point where he could no longer stand it. He knew that was what she wanted—for him to live on that cusp of desiring and not desiring.

She turned around and came to him, slipping her hand under the sheet for the first time. “Ooh, he was so hard. Imagine that, Warren, all the trauma, no sex for months. All his hopes dashed and now to know he was alive again, not fully mutilated.”

Without warning she slipped two fingers into the crotch of Manis’s damaged hand, rubbing back and forth. It made him tingle in places that shouldn’t be connected at all to that scar.

“In spite of everything that happened, he was still a beautiful, strong black man. I went and locked the door—you can imagine that part, Warren. Then I pulled down his sheets and his stumps were there, bandaged but clean. His thighs with those curly little hairs. I slipped onto his rod like this.”

She straddled him and slid him inside her. “Ooh, his cock was on fire.”

“Shut up,” Manis said, though he couldn’t help pumping.

“It was harder and hotter than any cock I’ve ever had.”

“Shut up!” Manis screamed. He began to writhe. She was holding his arms down at the wrists, but she was a wisp of a thing, shouldn’t be able to control him physically.

“So big and strong he still was, Warren. His thick, hot—”

“No, you bitch!” Manis broke free and reared up and threw the back of his hand across her mouth, feeling her teeth caught by his knuckles. He flipped her over and began beating at her as he exploded inside her and she moaned in pain and pleasure.

When he’d finished she used the sheet to dab at the blood of her split lip.

Manis went to the freezer and got an icepack for the cheekbone, which already had begun turning black and blue under her left eye.

“See what you made me do,” he said.

She laughed like the devil at that, dabbed at her lip and looked at the blood on the white sheets. “Oh, what will the girls say when they see me like this? Understand why we have to keep our distance from each other most of the time?”

“You’re not normal,” he said.

She arched an eyebrow, reached out, and pulled hard on the beard of his chin. “Oh, and you
are
normal, Warren,” she mocked.
“You
are.”

TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK
 

7.

DAY FOUR—Light

SALINOWSKY AWOKE ON HIS COT
in the big church shelter room feeling achy and twitchy. His nose was running and tears filled his eyes. Like an allergic reaction, he thought, though he knew this was no allergic reaction. He fetched the artificial leg from beneath his cot and grabbed the soap from his locker and hobbled to the communal showers, placing the leg on a bench in the anteroom and using a plastic stool that Father Igor had provided to assist him.

As the warm water ran over him, Salinowsky ignored the others who were showering near him and thought about all that he needed to do. The symptoms meant he’d require a fix in the next twelve hours or things would start to get ugly. But he was out of heroin again—in truth had no idea what had happened to his bundle from two days ago. Wasn’t that supposed to last the better part of a week? Maybe the girl who cooked up his last trip had stolen the rest. Or maybe the dealer had. You couldn’t trust those people, but then again Salinowsky couldn’t even trust his own memory.

He yawned and a shiver ran through him. It didn’t really matter what happened—the bundle was gone. He was twelve hours from the cramps and pukes, and he’d promised Father Igor that he’d break the cycle and hit the methadone clinic within a week. He had the card in his pants pocket and everything, the place run by some Catholic nun lady.

That clinic beckoned but so did the street. Father Igor said it would be a nice day today: sunny and around fifty. Salinowsky’s grandfather always advised him to make hay while the sun is shining, and no matter what path he took Salinowsky knew he was nearly out of money again and still days away from cashing his next benefits check. As the soup kitchen wasn’t open on weekends, he’d have to starve or beg for the next forty-eight hours just to get by, and he couldn’t very well ask Father Igor for extra food after all he’d already received. At some point, a man must make his own way in the world. Fortunately, Lewis Salinowsky had a plan to start saving his benefits checks instead of squandering them, and to use his experience helping in the shelter kitchen to land a real kitchen job in some restaurant, maybe as a dishwasher, maybe something better if he could talk them into it. The main thing was that after all these lost years he’d begun to see a way forward. Even if, as usual, the path ran through a thicket.

That kind and pretty nurse at the rehabilitation hospital...hadn’t she told him when he said he couldn’t go on that everyone in life had the same challenge—just to put one foot in front of the other? And it didn’t matter if they were your own two feet or someone else’s because it was just an expression. He and the nurse had laughed about that together.

It had been a long time since Salinowsky shared a good laugh with anyone. As he dressed he thought back to his days growing up in the Bronx, playing softball and roller hockey on fenced blacktop. He knew himself to be an impressive specimen back then, off to college on a baseball scholarship, entering the army after ROTC as a second lieutenant. He loved the physical challenge of the army, would willingly take extra weight in his pack just to motivate his platoon. In the beginning, it wasn’t physical pain that he used drugs to escape from—wasn’t pain at all, truth be told.

They’d raised a camp on a barren hill overlooking a small village on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush, human beings clinging to the crags like ants in a hailstorm. They felt like sitting ducks at first, holding the hill every night, calling in Apaches, then waking up to count the dead enemy through their binoculars. But after a while a fragile equilibrium had established itself. The attacks didn’t stop, but they became fewer. The Americans began taking patrols out to the enemy, but only on a selective basis, not every night. So fear-driven adrenaline often gave way to utter boredom. How much time could you spend digging latrines and trenches?

It was one of the soldiers in his platoon who turned Salinowsky on to black tar. When your whole world was the top of a barren hill, when you lost four men in three months to ambush, when you got tired of playing video games on a television wired to Humvee batteries, when a change in the wind made the whole place stink like piss, a snort now and then seemed like a reasonable indulgence. Later, of course, it was a different calculus. When you’d had your limb blown off by an IED and only morphine or similar could dull the excruciating pain in your leg and your heart, a needle every day became your savior.

By the time he landed at St. Euphrosyne Church, he knew he’d been saved more times than he could count, and yet he still needed saving. Salinowsky knew he couldn’t—or shouldn’t—go on like this. But when he thought what life would be like without those moments of ecstasy that the heroin gave him he could picture nothing but unbroken misery. The highs were not everything but they counted for something. The streets were mean and cold and empty of love. You needed to take flight from that now and then just to keep your sanity. Had he kept his sanity?

Oh, it was a squirrel cage, he knew, round and round. He just couldn’t decide how or when to climb down from it.

Salinowsky made sure the lady’s card from the methadone clinic was still in his pocket as he got dressed and strapped on his leg. He stowed the remainder of his things in the pantry cabinet that Father Igor had ceded to him and walked out into the winter sunshine.

In a public trash bin on the corner Salinowsky found a paper coffee cup. He pried off the travel lid and—finding it one-third full—sniffed the contents.
Still fresh enough.
He drank it down in two gulps, working his tongue across his palate to make the sweetness linger.

In a cold puddle by the curb he washed his cup, then walked with it upside down to dry. He found a piece of cardboard soon enough in a space between buildings, used his Sharpie to scrawl a message:
HOMELESS DISABLED VETERAN PLEASE HELP.
You’d hardly know he was college educated, he thought, but what else was there to say? These guys who wrote essays on their signs...they didn’t pull in any more than the ones who cut to the chase—sometimes less. Because the details creeped some people out. The average pedestrian didn’t really want to know how human you were. It only reminded them that the space between you and them was narrower than they ever hoped to believe.

With his sign and his cup in hand, Salinowsky limped down Mulberry Street to Columbus Park. He eased to the sidewalk and propped himself in the sun against the bubbling paint of a wrought iron fence. Finding a bottle of Thunderbird in his coat pocket, he took a couple of swigs and screwed up his courage. Three years on the street and he still had to settle that pit in his stomach before holding out his cup. In many ways, the barren hill in Afghanistan had been easier.