Riley: Violence
Jack and I leave the ball just before sunrise. His car is waiting outside, and we soar through the open city. The ride is smooth, unobstructed, and sublime. He takes me to the boat again and we ride down the river to Roosevelt Island and then go up and get into the tram. A sleepy man opens it, just for us, and Jack hands him another generous stack of bills—he restocked from a huge compartment of money in his car.
The little cabin rolls out along the cables and we watch the gleaming moon set over the city as the tram takes us from the island back into Manhattan. It's gorgeous and breathtaking—it's the view of the city and the experience that I'd yearned for during my vacation before all this happened.
We sit next to each other, close, in a comfortable silence, and it just feels so right that it almost hurts. We don’t need anything to happen. We don’t need anything to say. The silence seems to bind and connect us instead of making us uncomfortable. We’re united in both being content to take in the massive skyline before us—this monument to humanity’s accomplishments.
Somehow I feel like Jack gets it. He feels the same thing: the soaring beauty of the city’s architecture inspires us to greater things, grand accomplishments and dreams that seem just possible when we look at the incredible feats of those who have come before us.
My family and Caleb and a lot of my friends would be bored. They would've pulled out their phones and been counting down the minutes to the next stimulation. But in this moment, I feel like Jack and I are the same. It feels like—underneath all the violence and damage and broken pieces of him that I'm slowly starting to perceive—he has the soul of a dreamer, just like me.
The tram finally reaches its destination and we walk west across the city in the early morning light. I’m wearing his enormous shoes, cinched down tight to stay on my feet, and he’s carrying my heels. We’re at that moment when the city almost sleeps. Revelers are gone. The street cleaners and bodegas are just coming out and opening after the night.
Jack’s holding my hand and I don’t try to stop him. I tell myself it’s just to help me balance in his shoes.
“They’re all frauds,” I blurt out.
He understands what I mean; the politicians who all pay service to him. "They're just men. What do you expect them to do? They need money. They're afraid of blackmail and violence. Politicians aren't angels. They're flawed. And the people who go into politics are power hungry to start, anyway. It draws the worst and best of people."
“I expect them to try, I guess.”
“You would do the same if you were in their position.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” Although I’m not as sure about that as I sound.
“I thought that, too, at one point.”
“You really wanted to be a politician?”
“Sure.”
“So, what, politicians are just the biggest gangsters of all, and you wanted to be in on the take?”
“No, the people with the money behind the politicians are the biggest gangsters of all. That’s who I am. Politicians are pawns.”
“Who are you a pawn to? Daemon?”
“Necessity.”
There’s no way I would’ve pushed him with this way even a day ago, but right now I feel brash and vivified from the dancing and the night. The energy between us, for just a little while, is different. I’m not his captive. I’m just the girl he brought to the ball. “So you decided to be the player instead of the pawn?”
“Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“I went to a war, when I was a kid, and hurt a lot of people I shouldn’t have hurt. When I got back I knew it was over for me. If I ever tried to run for anything on public opinion, my history was there to be dug up. Anyone could’ve ruined me.”
"That's what you do in a war, isn't it? You hurt people?"
He grinds his teeth and shakes his head. He’s in pain, talking about this. I’m pressing on a wound still raw after all these years, even though I don’t mean to.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, then?”
Jack looks around the quiet streets and I think he’s going to ignore me—that we’re going to move on. But then he speaks again, slowly, almost like he’s in a trance. His eyes are staring off at something else, in the middle distance, that isn’t actually there.
“We were…it doesn’t matter where we were, I guess. We were somewhere that we thought was dangerous, and isolated. We came up on this little village. We needed water. It felt like there were insurgents everywhere, waiting for our first slip up. We’d been up a long, long time. We started taking fire from the village.”
"We tucked down behind some rocks. We were pinned down and out in the open. We radioed back to our base. Nothing. My CO said to take the village. Said it was a hive of enemy activity. Said it was a training camp. Said no one else was there. I said we didn't know that. Didn't know what was down there. He said to take the village. And I listened. I stopped arguing it.
So we took it. We rained fire down on them. Wiped them out."
“What happened?”
“There weren’t any insurgents. Some kid with an assault rifle had been shooting at us. The rest of them had been tending goats. I think the guy who told us to do it just wanted to kill some people. Or maybe he was just afraid—maybe he really didn’t know what was down there, hiding, waiting for us behind those huts.”
“You quit after that?”
He laughs. "That's not how it works. No. I fought for two more years. I hurt a lot more people. It's hard not to hurt anyone when people are trying to kill you and your friends. You get desperate. You have to make decisions in a moment that there's no right way of making. Some of the people we were fighting were just kids. Some of them were angry fools who didn't belong there. Some of them were innocents caught in the crossfire. And most of my friends were just kids, too—caught there in the crossfire themselves. So I kept shooting, and kept killing.
"And sometimes I made mistakes. And I kept making mistakes. And people suffered and died because of them. I'd thought about making a career out of the military, but by the end of my tour, I knew I'd done too much wrong. They wouldn't let me move up the ranks with what I'd done. And I'd never be able to go into politics. I didn't want to anymore, anyway. I'd seen what I became when the pressure was on. I wasn't the type of man who deserved to lead anyone."
“So you decided to run things from behind the scenes?”
“No, I decided to drink myself to death in Mexico.”
I can’t think of anything to say. He says it all so simply and matter-of-factly that I want to cry, for some reason. All I can manage is, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Why be sorry that politics has one less monster in it?”
"I didn't mean…I don't know." I want to ask him more about what happened in the war, but I can't bring myself to press him, even now. "I always wanted to be a journalist and a writer, but I didn't get to do that," I offer.
“Were you not any good at writing?”
“No, I guess not.”
“How did you know?”
“I don’t know…I could just tell, I guess.”
“If you weren’t a good writer how could you know if you were judging your own writing accurately?”
I twist my brain around his little logic trap.
“I don’t know. Other people told me, I guess.”
“What other people?”
“I don’t know…a professor one time…”
“And?”
“And my mom, I guess. And my brothers and sisters.”
“Your mom sounds like a bitch. So do your siblings.”
“Hey!”
“That was stupid.”
“Thank you.”
“No, that was stupid to not keep writing.”
“You’re telling me to follow my dreams?”
“Sure. Why not? You’re probably a good writer.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because you’re curious about everything.”
We walk in silence for a while.
“I guess my family does kind of make me feel worthless about myself sometimes.”
“I had a dad like that.”
“How did you handle it?”
“I killed him.”
I catch my mouth before it drops open this time, but just barely.
“I’m kidding. Even I can’t realize all my fantasies. Come on, let’s get breakfast.”
I’m expecting some lavish restaurant open just for him, or something equally crazy, but Jack takes me a few streets away from Central Park to a tiny corner bodega with a few little red chairs and tables. I look at him and he shrugs. “They make really good egg sandwiches.”
We sit and eat breakfast, watching the city slowly wake up. The little shop is empty except for a Middle Eastern man sitting at another table reading the paper. I should feel tired, but I’m not. I feel vividly awake.
Three big guys come in and buy coffees.
“So you really read all of those books?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You’re like Jay Gatsby or something, huh?”
“No, Gatsby didn’t read his books—that was the point, remember? The pages in his library were uncut. The books were unread.”
I haven’t read The Great Gatsby since I was a kid, but I’m glad for Jack that he’s found another way to be a know-it-all.
The three guys are saying something to the man reading the paper in the back. I think at first that they’re friends, striking up a conversation. Then I hear what they’re saying to him—slurs and low, teasing curses under their breath.
I’m pretty sure they’ve decided they want to sit at his table, the only other table in the shop. They’re all big—football player big—with buzzcuts and rocky jaws. They have the confidence of all men who’ve grown up stronger and bigger than everyone else.
“You speak English here,” one of them orders him, stupidly, considering the man is reading The Times.
I look at Jack and he looks back, expressionless.
“Jack…”
“It doesn’t matter, Riley.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”
“There’s a thousand assholes, in a thousand coffee shops, harassing people who don’t deserve it. Us doing something about one guy is a drop in the ocean.”
Two of the guys have sat down on either side of the man with the paper, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, but now they have him blocked in and seem to be enjoying themselves. The shopkeeper is looking on nervously. I bite my lip and pause for a moment, then ignore Jack and step up from the table.
I hear him sigh behind me, but I don’t care. My heart’s thundering in my chest. I step up to the table and wedge myself past the men to take the last chair, next to the man with paper. For just a moment, they all look confused.
“Hey, good to see you. Sorry for the delay,” I say to the man with the paper.
He looks back at me baffled.
The biggest of the guys looks like he wants to eat me like an ice cream cone. I remember, self consciously, what I’m wearing. He says, “Hey, baby, what are you doing with a—” and I stop listening as he spits out a slur.
“Just having coffee, buddy.”
“Why don’t you go back to your boyfriend over there.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my bodyguard. He knows krav maga, and he’s going to break your fucking bones if you don’t fuck off.”
They’re a little taken back by that, but I guess they figure three of them against one bodyguard is good odds.
But I’ve distracted them long enough; the man with the paper suddenly slips past them and out the door. “Come on, baby, just having a little fun,” one chides me for my interruption. They’re focused on me now, looming over me. I suddenly realize that even Jack probably can’t take three guys this size, and my heart rate ratchets up even higher.
The biggest one reaches out towards me and I freeze, for just a moment.
And then Jack’s low voice cuts the room.
“Hey champ, why don’t you scramble out of here. You’re ruining my breakfast.”
The biggest one turns and says, “Relax, man, we’re just having a little fun.”
“No one’s having fun but you assholes, and that’s because you’re a bunch of dumb cunts.”
The guy tries to laugh and shrug, but the way Jack’s looking at them makes him flinch. They don’t have the guts to call his bluff—to see if the potential violence stretching out between them could turn real. “Come on,” he says, and they head out onto the street. I’m so strung out and raw from the confrontation that I feel like I want to cry.
Jack offers his hand, leaves an enormous tip, and leads me out of the shop.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Helped an innocent man? Stood up for something?”
“Those three guys are idiots, right?”
“Yes.”
“Every time you engage with idiots who have any power—even them, with their size —-you’re rolling the dice. And they don’t even need to be big — . What if one of them had a knife or a gun? What if I’d tripped or once in my life fucked something up before I could get to you? What if one of them just got lucky? Each time you put yourself against someone you gamble. And if it’s a physical fight, you’re putting everything you have against everything someone else has. People get desperate. Anything can happen.”
“Sorry,” I say sullenly. “It wasn’t fair to bring you up against three guys.”
“I don’t care about me, I…” I care about you, was what he was going to say. I’m sure of it. Instead, he says, "You're my property now. I don't want you damaged for stupid reasons."
“Doing the right thing isn’t stupid!”
“Sure it is. It’s playing pretend in the real world.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means we’re just animals, Riley. Right and wrong are things we made up. They’re pretend things made up by clever animals! They don’t have anything to do with the actual world. In the real world it’s just…who eats and who gets eaten.”
I’m trying to think of a response when I realize something’s wrong. The three guys left just before us, but I don’t see them at either end of the street we’re on. I stop walking and listen for a moment and then I hear it: faint scuffling, grunting. Men quietly straining against each other. I look around and spot an alley a little down the street from us.
Jack had already heard. He’d been hoping I wouldn’t notice. “Riley…”
"Fine," I snap and turn to go with him. "How can you have the power to do something and not do it?"
"It's easy. See? I'm doing it right now. You can't set the world right. It'll be wrong as long as there are still men in it. It's hopeless. You want to fight a hopeless war." He keeps going in the other direction from the alley and I follow him for a few more steps. When he glances away from me I turn and run back.
“Riley!” My heart is thundering in my chest and I’m around the corner before I can even think of what to do.
The three them are standing over the man with the paper. He’s on the ground and tries to get up, but one of them kicks him into the wall, hard, and he falls back, gasping.
“Hey!” I scream, and they turn.
"Wrong alley, baby," the big one says. He seems excited by this—a half-naked girl all alone with them. My instinct is to apologize and turn and run, but I keep walking down the alley towards them.
“I called the police!” I threaten. “Get the fuck out of here!”
He grins. "No, you didn't." His skin is pale, his hair blond. He seems like the quintessential all-American boy from a distance. A lot of girls would probably like him. But up close he looks reptilian—beady eyes and hungry, wormy lips. I don't have any plan now that my bluff about the police failed, but the other two are still hitting the man, and for some reason, I'm more afraid that they'll actually kill him—even accidentally—than hurt me. If I can just get to him, maybe I can put myself between them, and maybe they'll stop.
Or maybe they’re going to rip this little dress off and do something terrible to me. Or maybe they’ll beat me, too.
“Men are monsters,” Jack’s voice says in my head. “They’re capable of anything.”
The biggest one raises a fist. He’s grinning with anticipation and hunger for violence, hunger to destroy something. Hunger to destroy me. He drives his toward my face.
And it freezes in the air. Jack’s there. He catches the blow before it can touch me, and the guy’s mouth drops open. Relief and fear surge through me in tandem. What have I done? He’s going to try to fight all three of them. I have to get him help.
Jack's grinning and his eyes are on fire. The guy brings up another fist and Jack hits him so hard that he lifts off the ground and flies back across the alley. His body collides with the brick wall with a sickening crunch. I didn't know it was possible for a person to hit that hard.
"Motherfucker!" one of the others shouts, and they both come at Jack. The fight's so fast that I can barely track what happens. Jack puts himself in front of me and doesn't move. They both reach him at once. One swings at his head and the other drives a fist into his stomach. Jack blocks the head blow and doesn't seem to notice the body shot. He hits one in the face. The other swings again and suddenly his arm is in Jack's hands. It snaps with a crunch like an overripe melon. The guy drops to the ground screaming, Jack kicks him in the face, and he's out. The last one stumbles back, finds a pipe in the alley, and comes at Jack swinging. Jack catches the metal, kicks the man's legs out, and swings it into his skull.
He checks all three then turns to me. His eyes are furious, but aside from that, he's as calm as any man out for his morning stroll. He didn't even break a sweat. I think he's going to yell at me or storm off, but he only scans me with his eyes, looking for injuries.
"Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Did they touch you?" The pipe is still clenched in his hand. His knuckles are white around it.
“No, I’m fine. They didn’t get the chance.”
He considers the crumpled figures and then drops the pipe.
The man with the paper is shakily getting to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He doesn’t even seem upset or shocked—his voice is sad.
His face is bleeding, and Jack offers him a handkerchief. “It’s not your fault.”
"I just wanted to walk away. They caught up with me. I should've called the police, I was just…"
“It’s alright. I get it. I know. I’ll take care of it; I know people on the force.”
Jack looks at the man and his eyes soften just a little bit.
"You were in the war, weren't you?" he says.
The man looks back at him, surprised. “Yes.”
“Were you a translator?”
“Yes.”
How the fuck did he know that?
Jack’s face changes. He pauses for a long time, struggling to speak. There’s a tightness in his voice when he finally does. “I uh…I knew a guy like you,” he says. “He, uh, he helped me and my friends out a lot.”
Jack calls the police—his police—and they come over, take a report, and shove the guys into a car. Ariadne’s there, too, in a suit and trench coat now. “I’m not here to do your busywork,” she tells Jack. “I’m only arresting these guys because they’re shitheads and they actually committed a crime.”
Jack smiles. “That’s why I called you.”
This will be a new experience for them, I think, relishing the thought of these guys having a record now, and a night, at least, in prison. Jack talks to the man off to the side while the police work. He presses a card and another huge pile of bills into the man’s hands.
When we’re finally done it’s still mostly dark out. The rising light just barely trickles through the city. Jack comes back to me and we walk for the San Sorreno. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.
“You did something good,” I say.
“I did something necessary. It was still stupid—stupid to try to go against that many men on your own.”
“You took them apart, though!”
“It was luck. Do you want to trust your life to luck and chance?”
“A knight would call that having faith. Don Quixote was one of the books piled in your room, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not a knight, Riley.”
But for a moment, in the sun, he doesn’t look like an evil man. He looks like a hero, and I feel like a princess, escorted back to her castle after a marvelous quest. His hand is on my lower back, guiding me, as if he doesn’t want to give me a chance to get away again.
I see Jack standing in front of me, shielding me from those men. I smile. He is like a knight out of a fairytale. Just maybe a fairytale darker than most. And then my mind drifts back farther, to him touching me in the dark of the ball. We walk up the steps of the San Sorreno; his hand on my back is sending fire through my body, and I don’t feel fatigue or anything else but unbearable want and unbearable need.
I slip my heels back on and follow him into the tower. His rooms are dark. He leaves the lights off. I turn to head for my room—I think maybe, just maybe, I can somehow relieve this throbbing need before he catches me and locks me up again—and he stops me.