The Torch — Monday, 1 January 1990, 1:00 AM

The Torch Gary, Indiana

She could smell the Hennessy before she saw him.

Not literally — not yet, not from the door, not through the wall of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and the particular musk of thirty human bodies generating heat in a room that hadn’t been properly ventilated since the Carter administration. But the memory of Hennessy hit her the same way: a trigger buried so deep in the animal part of her brain that the Embrace hadn’t touched it, hadn’t killed it, had just frozen it in place alongside everything else she’d been at twenty-one. The smell of Hennessy meant Big Six. Big Six meant the front row at The Oasis. The front row meant the weight of eyes that didn’t blink.

She was three steps inside The Torch when her body told her to leave.

The hindbrain — the part that had kept her alive on State Street and in the Robert Taylor stairwells and in the back seats of cars she shouldn’t have gotten into — fired before the conscious mind caught up. A shape in the booth near the runway. The geometry of a man who took up space the way certain men take up space, not with size but with gravity, the legs spread wide, one arm across the back of the seat, the bottle of Hennessy centered on the table like a small golden monument to his own presence. Grey leather jacket. Gold rope chain. Two soldiers flanking him in the booth, younger, harder, wearing their GD affiliation the way cops wear badges — visible, deliberate, a statement of jurisdiction.

Marcus “Big Six” Tillman.

Sable stopped walking. The music was Bobby Brown, tinny through speakers that had been blown out and repaired and blown out again. The runway stripper was working the pole with the mechanical disinterest of a woman counting ceiling tiles. Victor Salonika was behind the bar with his shotgun underneath and his patience on top, polishing a glass that would never be clean. Near the piano, in her yellow lace, Allicia sat perfectly still and watched nothing.

None of them mattered. Big Six was twenty feet from the bar and he was watching the dancer the way he used to watch Sable — with the patience of a man who has already decided what belongs to him and is simply waiting for the formality of possession to catch up with the fact of it.

She turned around and walked out. The door closed behind her and the January air hit her dead skin and she stood in the parking lot under the red neon and felt her heart not beating.

He was here. In Gary. In her club. On New Year’s.

The dead don’t breathe but something in Sable’s chest was doing a convincing imitation.

She drove west because west was away from The Torch and away was the only direction that mattered. Broadway was a strip of sodium light and boarded windows and the occasional drunk weaving between cars, and Sable watched them through the windshield the way a hawk watches field mice from a telephone wire — the elevation not physical but ontological, the distance between her and them no longer measured in feet but in the fundamental difference between things that die and things that don’t.

She parked near Fifth Avenue. The bars were still open, barely, and the sidewalks held the last residue of a celebration that Gary had performed out of obligation rather than joy. New decade. Same city. Same men stumbling out of the same doors with the same empty pockets and the same full grief.

She waited for someone to come to her. Nobody came.

She went inside. A place called Rudy’s that had no sign and no reason to exist except that drinking alone at home was worse. Anita Baker on the jukebox. Six men, a bartender, the dense amber light of a room that had absorbed fifty years of cigarette smoke into its walls and ceiling and would never be any other color.

She sat at the end of the bar in the darkest corner and took out a compact and a lipstick she didn’t need. Did her makeup. Let her hands shake, slightly — enough to be seen, not enough to be obvious. The trembling girl doing her makeup alone at the bar on New Year’s. The lure that looked like vulnerability because vulnerability was what men in bars on Fifth Avenue in Gary, Indiana knew how to respond to. They didn’t know how to respond to beauty. They knew how to respond to need.

A man came over. Denim jacket. Mustache. A tan line where a wedding ring had been.

“You alright?”

Two words and Sable saw everything. The jacket too clean for a working man — unemployed, recent, wearing his self-respect like a costume. The mustache trimmed but the rest of him neglected — he’d cleaned up for tonight because New Year’s demanded it, a ritual observance to the idea that time was still moving forward. The ring gone but the mark fresh. Weeks. Not months. The apartment he’d go home to would have furniture arranged for two people and the silence of one.

He didn’t want sex. He wanted to matter.

“Life just has a way of getting you down and kicking, doesn’t it?” she said, and flickered her lashes at the tan line on his finger just long enough for him to catch it, not long enough for him to know she’d aimed.

His name was Curtis. He told her everything. Bethlehem Steel, the layoffs, the wife, the kids in Merrillville, the picture he’d carried in his head since he was nineteen — the house, the yard, the good schools — and how he’d done everything right and the picture had dissolved anyway, the way pictures dissolve when the light they were projected on goes out.

Sable listened. She was very good at listening. She’d learned it the way she’d learned everything — by survival, by necessity, by the understanding that a woman who listens gets fed and a woman who talks gets hit. She nodded at the right moments. She touched his wrist once, lightly, when he talked about his daughter, and the touch lasted exactly as long as it needed to last and not one heartbeat longer.

Curtis bought her a drink she didn’t touch and didn’t notice she hadn’t touched. He talked for eleven minutes. She counted because counting was something to do with the part of her mind that wasn’t performing, the part that was always counting — exits, threats, angles, the distance between where she sat and the door, the bartender’s eye line, the clock above the register.

“You want to get some air?”

He meant it the way a drowning man means help. Not a proposition. A prayer.

Outside. The cold. Curtis shivered and Sable didn’t and she wrapped her arms around herself because that was what living women did in January. He took off the denim jacket — the clean one, the costume, the last piece of the man he’d been before September — and put it around her shoulders without asking. The inside of it was warm from his body and it smelled like fabric softener and Marlboro Lights and the particular sadness of a man who still does his own laundry because if he stopped he’d have to admit that nobody is coming back.

They walked. Half a block. The streetlights thinned and the storefronts went dark and Gary opened up around them like a mouth with missing teeth.

“You know what gets me?” Curtis said. He stopped walking. Looked up at the sky, which was the color of old rust because the mill fires at the lakefront burned all night, every night, and the light they threw was not light but a reminder that something that used to be alive was still burning. “It’s not the job. Jobs come back. It’s not even Karen leaving. People leave.” He made a gesture with his hand. Fingers opening. Something released. “It’s that I had this picture in my head. Since I was like nineteen. And I did everything right. Everything they told you to do. And the picture just… gone.”

“You’re real easy to talk to. You know that?”

He turned to face her. Under the dead streetlight with the rust-colored sky behind him, his expression was the thing Sable knew best — better than music, better than her mother’s kitchen, better than the geography of the Robert Taylor Homes. The look of a man who has opened himself to a beautiful woman and has no idea what he just let in.

She leaned in. Her lips found the side of his neck where the pulse ran closest to the surface, and Curtis made a sound that wasn’t quite anything — not pain, not pleasure, not the word he’d been about to say — and his knees went soft and she held him up with one hand on his chest and took what she needed, which was so little, just a mouthful, just enough, just one point of blood that tasted like bourbon and laundry detergent and the particular compound of cortisol and serotonin that a human body produces when it is simultaneously grieving and being held.

She pulled back. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Put the denim jacket back on his shoulders. He swayed, caught himself against the wall, and laughed — the baffled, grateful laugh of a man who doesn’t know why he suddenly feels warm in January.

“I… wow.”

Sable stepped back. One step. Two. The distance opened between them and Curtis’s face changed as he realized she was leaving — not panic, not anger, but the slow dawning of a loss he couldn’t locate.

“Hey — wait. I didn’t… what’s your name?”

She was ten feet away. She could have said anything. A lie. A deflection. The smile that closed conversations.

“I don’t have one anymore. Not anymore. I lost it somewhere out past the edge of the light. Out where there’s no house, no painting. Nothing to see at all.”

She walked to the Buick and didn’t look back. Her heels on the cracked sidewalk were the only sound on Fifth Avenue.

The parking garage on Madison had been dead for years. Three levels, the top two open to the sky, the ground level chained shut. Sable snapped the chain-link with one hand — the strength still surprised her, fourteen months later, the casual violence of a body that looked like porcelain and performed like a machine — and pulled the Buick into the basement where the ceiling was solid concrete and the earth was close and the sun could not reach.

She killed the engine. The dashboard clock said 4:17 AM. Dawn was two hours away.

She climbed into the back seat. The fur coat — Sharon’s coat, stolen from the Roselle house the night she left, the last piece of the woman who had shared her and then tried to destroy her — was bundled on the seat. She pulled it over herself and lay in the dark and listened to the Buick’s engine ticking as it cooled, and the sound was the loneliest sound she had ever heard, lonelier than the empty apartment in Robert Taylor after Denise went to work, lonelier than the dressing room at The Oasis after the last customer left, lonelier than the three nights in Michael’s basement when the old life burned out of her and nothing grew in its place.

The coat smelled like Chanel No. 5. Sharon’s perfume. The woman who had kissed her and shared blood with her and looked at her with the appraising calm of a collector evaluating a purchase, and who would kill her if she found her, not out of hatred but out of the principle that broken toys should not be left where other people can find them.

Sable lay in the dark in the basement of a parking garage in Gary, Indiana, on the first day of 1990, and did not cry because crying cost blood and blood was the only currency she had left.

Outside, the city did what it always did. It waited. It decayed. It did not care who slept inside it or what they dreamed of or whether they dreamed at all.