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It’s a hardtack night. Rain pelts down in heavy sheets, blanketing the city in the smell of wet garbage, making a mash of everything it touches. The neon signs carve out slivers of light against the grey sky, curls of blue and pink that illuminate the mist. Every streetlight is orange, every rough sleeper wants to go home.
Frank is in Matt’s bed, dead to the world, sleeping off the aftermath of a fight that Matt can smell, blood in his sheets and gunpowder pressed into the whorls of Frank’s fingertips. He sleeps with his mouth open, breaths coming in shallow, wheezing puffs. Matt almost called Claire this time, only stopped because Frank had caught his wrist in a hold he could easily break. Did. One slippery with blood, his body already listing sideways into the plaster of Matt’s wall.
“Don’t,” he said. “No hospitals.”
“Not taking you to the hospital,” Matt muttered.
He pressed the call button, and Frank grabbed his hand again because Frank was stubborn that way. A matching set.
“No doctors.”
Matt stood up because fuck Frank. It was his house, and he’d call a goddamn nurse if he wanted to. The floor was slick, and it was raining cats and dogs out there, but Frank had lost a lot of blood. He could smell it. Brine like the ocean, penny-bright and thick. His finger slipped on the touchscreen, hands tacky with blood.
“Please,” Frank said.
Matt said, “Please what, you asshole,” because he was a little bit scared, maybe.
“Sit down.”
Matt didn’t.
“Hello?” Claire said over the line, tinny but clear even at this distance. The call had connected, anyway. “Matt? Is everything alright?”
“Fine,” Matt said, bringing the phone to his face. “Must have called you by accident. Have a nice night, Claire.”
The line clicked off. The things he does for—
“Have it your way,” he said to Frank, and also, “Don’t die on my floor.”
“Could still kick your ass,” Frank said, and Matt sat down because he didn’t want Frank to try.
“No doctors,” Matt agreed. “You stubborn asshole.”
The wheeze that came out of Frank’s lungs could almost be called a laugh. Was trying to be.
Frank is asleep in his bed, bleeding sluggishly into his sheets. Matt is sitting in the window seat, feeling the cool shift in the air radiate through the glass. The rain taps against the window, and if he focuses, he can make out the pattern. The pattern is nothing. It spells nothing and shapes nothing. If there’s a God up there, he has no signs for two of his battered, wayward children.
Matt is very tired.
Matt doesn’t sleep because Frank’s heart is making patterns that make him terrified, dim beats and beats that tick too slow. Unlike the rain against the glass, which was not a message, this is. It says that death is near. Matt thinks of blood on the lintels and all those dead lambs. He recalls be not afraid, but he thinks how am I not supposed to be afraid, you asshole?
This is why they have the liturgy, so you don’t wind up calling God an asshole to His face. He waits for a few seconds, pausing to see if he’ll be struck down because it seems only polite, but like the garbage-scented downpour, this too is not a message. He is not smote. His bedroom smells like so much blood.
“Asshole,” he mutters under his breath for good measure because at times like these, it never seems like a bad idea to get God’s attention.
Matt had never gone in for all the evangelical stuff. He was aware, in that dim way of second-cousins. The idea of second-cousins. He’d never had any of his own. Our brothers and sisters in Christ, our heretical black sheep relatives who seem to willfully misunderstand Marian devotion. What was up with Sola Scriptura, anyway? What about St. Peter, huh? What about that.
But, you know, for all their batshit ideas, the Protestants do hellfire and damnation better than anyone. Even Matt can admit that. What good Irish Catholic doesn’t go in for some good old-fashioned self-flagellation?
“When God wants to do an impossible task,” Alan Redpath says, “He takes an impossible man and crushes him.”
Christ.
There’s the bastardized Rumi that people like to quote over lattes and rub in like salt in a wound: “Your depression is due to your insolence and your refusal to praise.” Please. He’s always hated that shit. Rumi must be rolling in his Turkish grave.
That doesn’t necessarily mean he can manage to disagree.
The city wakes up slowly, when it does, the streets becoming congested with horn-blowing traffic, people cussing out their fellow man. The CD-slingers and Hare Krishnas and panhandlers come to life in Times Square. Frank hasn’t woken up, but Frank has not died. It feels like something.
His faith feels precarious, cobbled together with stolen coins and glue as if he were still a ward of the Church, still taking what he can get. In some ways, he is. In some ways, he always will be.
Thank you, he says, because praying, too, is a habit. Our Father who art in heaven, he says, because in some ways it always will be. He closes his eyes and waits for dawn.
This, too, is a vigil.
At a quarter past seven, his alarm goes off.
“7:15 a.m.,” it says. “7:15 a.m.,” on endless loop, until he gets up on stiff, numb legs to turn it off.
Frank stirs in a whisper of silk and cloth. He catches Matt’s wrist for the third time, and Matt’s breath catches in his throat. Frank’s thumb traces a line over Matt’s rabbiting pulse, slow and firm and so achingly present.
“Red,” he says, and Matt says—
He says—
Well, and Matt has always been a sinner. For all hath sinned, and all that. And fallen short of the glory of God after all.