There's Something I Want You to Do

“No. Blackburn. Horace Blackburn.”

“Right. My friend told me about you!”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Matt Quinn.”

Blackburn shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

“Okay, you don’t know him. But do you know where I might find him?”

“How could I know where he is if I don’t know him?”

“Just a suspicion!” Doing business in central Africa, I had gotten used to wily characters; I was accustomed to their smug expressions of guarded cunning. They always gave themselves away by their self-amused trickster smirks. I had learned to keep pressing on these characters until they just got irritated with me.

“Come on, Mr. Blackburn,” I said. “Let’s not pretend. Let’s get in the game here and then go to the moon, all right?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Blackburn insisted. I wondered how long this clown had carried on as a pseudo-Indian peddling narcotic painkillers to low-life addicts and to upstanding citizens who then became addicts. Probably for years, maybe since childhood. And the Shakespeare! Just a bogus literary affectation. He smelled of breath mints and had a tattoo on his neck.

“However,” he said slyly, “if I were looking for him, I’d go down to the river and I’d search for him in the shadows by the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.” Blackburn then displayed an unwitting smile. “Guys like that turn into trolls, you know?” His eyes flashed. “Faggot trolls especially.”

Reaching across with guarded delicacy, I spilled the man’s 7UP over his edition of Shakespeare, dropped some money on the bar, and walked out. If this unregistered barroom brave wanted to follow me, I was ready. Every man should know how to throw a good punch, gay men especially. I have a remarkably quick combination of left jabs and a right uppercut, and I can take a punch without crumpling. Mine is not a glass jaw. You hit me, you hit a stone.

Outside the bar, I asked a policeman to point me in the direction of the Mississippi River, which he did with a bored, hostile stare.

—

I searched down there that night for Quinn, and the next night I searched for him again. For a week I patrolled the riverbank, watching the barges pass, observing the joggers, and inhaling the pleasantly fetid river air. I kept his face before me as lovers do, a light to guide me, and like any lover I was single-minded. I spoke his name in prayer. Gradually I widened the arc of my survey to include the areas around the university and the hospitals. Many dubious characters presented themselves to me, but I am a fighter and did not fear them.

One night around one a.m., I was walking through one of the darkest sections along the river, shadowed even during the day by canopies of maple trees, when I saw in the deep obscurity a solitary man sitting on a park bench. I could make him out from the pinpoint reflected light from buildings on the other bank. He was barely discernible there, hardly a man at all, he had grown so thin.

Approaching him, I saw that this wreck was my beloved Matty Quinn, or what remained of him. I called his name. He turned his head toward me, and gave me a look of recognition colored over with indifference. He did not rise to greet me, so I could not hug him. He emanated an odor of the river, as if he had been living in it. After I sat down next to him, I tenderly took him into my arms as if he would break. But he had already been broken. I kissed his cheek. Something terrible had happened to him, but he recognized me; he knew me.

“I was afraid it was you, Harry,” he said. “I was afraid you would find me.”

“Of course I would find you. I went searching.”

He lifted up his head as if listening for something. “Do you think we’re all being watched? Do you think anything is watching us?” At first I thought he meant surveillance cameras, and then I understood that he was referring to the gods.

“No,” I said. “Nothing is ever watching us, Matty. We’re all unwatched.” Then I said, “I want you to come back with me. I have a hotel room. Let me feed you and clean you up and clothe you. I should never have left you alone, goddamn it. I shouldn’t have let you end up back here. Come with me. Look at you. You’re shivering.”

“This is very sweet of you,” he said. “You’re admirable. But the thing is, I keep waiting for him.” He did not elaborate.

“Who?”

“I keep waiting for that boy. Remember? That mother’s boy? And then when he shows up, I always hit him with a baseball bat.” This was pure dissociation.

“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s get you in the shower and wash you down and order a big steak from room service.”

“No, he’s coming,” he insisted. “He’ll be here any minute, propelled by thorns.” And then, out of nowhere, he said, “I love you, but I’m not here now. And I won’t be. Harry, give it up. Let’s say goodbye.”