pieces crowded the walls. Some abstract and some of figures but all distinguished by their shocks of unreal color. Harrison had felt better whenever he was around any of his friend’s paintings.
Emmanuel came in from the kitchen island with a pair of plated joints and matches. He set the plate on the coffee table and dropped into a recliner directly across from the couch where Harrison sat, kicked one leg over the other and posed himself there like a woman in a tight cocktail dress, the kimono drawn open well up his thigh.
“I see you’ve added a few pictures since the last time I saw you,” Harrison said to him. “You haven’t lost the touch.”
Emmanuel grinned, said, “That would be about as hard as forgetting how to draw a breath, I’m afraid. Either way, not breathing or not painting, it would end up with the same result for dear little Emmanuel. But that’s not what we’re going to sit here and do, talk about how your poor nigger love is pining his time away. We’re going to talk about big ole Jay Harrison and how his body and soul is mending. But first, first, we have to get all of our equipment in working order.”
He leaned forward, took one of the joints and struck a match. Once the weed was going, he took a big hit and motioned for Harrison to do the same. Harrison picked up the joint and did what made him feel right. That was what he was after anyhow. That was why he’d come.
“This is some of my finer accomplishments, if you can forgive my bragging. I call it Black Lace. That’s a pretty good sense of it, don’t you think?”
“It is. I’ll have to say that it is.”
So much of the weight he carried in his body began to slide free. He could feel it coming off him like pieces of something that didn’t belong. He had been under this weight for so long. It had been why he’d begun to develop and build his body in the gym as a teenager. He thought it might make the pressure become more bearable. But through the years, though the body shaped itself as he pressed bars over his head and chest, the body could not rid him of this strange and vague and impossible weight. But that first touch of weed convinced him that somewhere he might find just the slightest ease.
It allowed him distance too. The distance to consider what had brought him back here. There was always something that seemed original and safe when it concerned Emmanuel. So different from the life he had led when he’d been released from prison and slid into the easy arms of someone like Delilah and the kind of solace she had to offer. What had been the necessity of survival with the other whites on the inside had ceded to some kind of odd and confusing comfort once he was back in the world. Strange to think of the violence she carried inside her as a kind of comfort, but Harrison knew no other word for it. The habit of conflict, of being pushed up hard against something that threatened you, made a difference in someone over a period of time. It built a room inside you that held a version of what seemed important, even if that importance was impossible to articulate. The question was how could you ever find a way to escape that room. How could you ever manage a way back to who you were?
WHEN HE woke the sun had gone down and Emmanuel’s head was on his shoulder, one limp arm stretched across his chest. He saw the discoloration there on the inside of his right forearm, the raised bumps from where the scars had risen over the old wound from when Emmanuel had put his fist through a window as a teenager. Not for any reason other than he was young and gay and wanted to shore himself up with an intense moment of pain.
He gazed up at the ceiling for a long time, tried to force the edges of reality through his eyes despite the soft light of the hour. The bitter but necessary process that would take him back to where he belonged rather than this dream of what he desired. Emmanuel gently breathed in a deep sleep that promised to remain steady. Carefully, Harrison extracted himself, laid Emmanuel’s head back in the deep cushions of the couch where he covered him with a light wool throw. He wrote a short note and left with as little noise as he could.
It was late by the time he made it back to Elizabethton and then out past to the hollow that hid the asylum grounds. He parked beside a stand of quince, sat and smoked another small joint while listening to the night. He bundled the drugs he’d bought off Emanuel in a couple of plastic grocery sacks and locked them inside a hard-cased Samsonite. He hefted the suitcase and walked through the front and directly up the stairs to Gavin’s room. A pale quiver of lamp light played at the door sill and when he glanced in he could see Gavin at his desk, his ghostly face illumined by the blue cast of his laptop. Harrison tapped at the door before putting his head in.
“Ah, glad to see you’re back,” Gavin said, glanced up as he closed the computer. “I knew it would take some time, but I was beginning to become concerned. Is that the product you have with you there?”
“It is. Do you want me to have you check it?”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary. I’m confident in your professionalism. How long before you think you can begin your operation?”
“Shouldn’t be long. I know how the business works. We’ll start bringing in a regular income. What’s in the case here should pay for the outlay by the end of the week. We’ll be making money from there on out. Plenty to keep things going. Plenty to have the cash to get the renovations done.”
“Excellent. I knew I was bringing on the right man for the job. Is there anything else then?”
Harrison paused.
“You mind if I clean up in your shower? The one down where Delilah and me are is busted.”
“Of course. Help yourself. There are some towels in there too.”
He set the case in the corner of the room and went back to the bathroom, shut and locked the door before he turned the taps wide open. Only a weak arc of rusted water that did not strengthen nor warm as a minute passed. He undressed and stepped under the gelid splash. He washed between his legs, rid himself of the smell Delilah might detect, then stood there for a long time until he was numb and able to go on where he knew he must.
He walked down the back stairs wearing the towel around his waist. In one hand he held his clothes and in the other the suitcase. He eased his bedroom door open and quietly put his things away in one empty corner. Though there was little light in the room he could see that Delilah was awake and sitting up in bed watching him.
“I heard you when you drove in,” she told him. “That was half a hour ago.”
“Yeah, I had to talk to Gavin.”
“You and him must have been talking in the shower then.”
“He let me use his bathroom.”
“That’s mighty fucking white of him.”
He crossed the space of the room and settled onto the edge of the squeaking bed, put his hand over her thigh. He could tell that beneath the sheet she wore nothing.
“You need to ease off him. He might not be what you want him to be, but he’s given us a place to stay. A place to get a start. We need that.”
“We don’t need him. We need a place with people who care about something bigger than their own comforts. Gavin’s a pussy. He plays at being something he’s not fit for. He’s weak. This is supposed to be about the strong. That’s what I want to be a part of. Something strong, something independent. Let the rest of the world burn and I’ll take care of mine.”
He let her speak, didn’t try to counter any of it. He knew she meant these things, meant them with a conviction that would never exhaust itself, but he knew too that such belief had a way of settling down for a time after it had been spoken. He wanted to think that he could make her come back around to the easy habit of themselves outside of being among Gavin and his men. But he knew how hard that would be now that she had a taste for this world and what it promised.
Harrison had met Delilah through letters. His cellmate, a skinny boy named Cole, had shown him her picture while they’d sat together in those long formless hours together and they’d exchanged pieces of their life as a kind of defense against becoming the less than human things that walked the prison halls. He wasn’t sure why he asked