Twilight
Georgianna has been in Denver as long as Marcellus. Longer, he knows that much, though back in the early 2000s, she was still sometimes George. Sometime in the mid to late aughts she made the transition totally, added on the -ianna to her name and that was that. She does not hang out with the homeless men in the park by Catholic Charities and tends to avoid the shelters. Few of them will accommodate her anywhere other than the men's dorms and she is not remotely comfortable there.
She has territory of her own, of sorts, though. Near the Red Letter, one of those fading dinosaurs, an independent bookstore, sustained now by sales of expensive coffee drinks and extravagent cupcakes more than the actual books inside - but sustained, nonetheless. Good days and bad, smoke filled or smog filled or brilliant sunshine, through blizzards and torrential rains, Georgianna is nearly always seated against the warm brick storefront as far away from the main doors and the scattered outdoor café seating as is humanly possible, while still remaining in contact with the building itself. The mouth of a narrow alley flanks the bookstore and sometimes Georgianna retreats to the alley , digging out a meal from the remnants of baked goods if she wasn't able to score something from a patron and a regular. Mostly these days there's no need to dig. The baristas at the cafe save her the solid leavings, and supplement them too. She usually has a spare fucking cupcake or three in her larder, and she's usually willing to share.
Always dressed in dark brown tights and a moderately long, rather shapeless skirt of one of those indifferent colors into which other colors are well known to fade, she looks hot in the summer and cold in the winter but doesn't complain. Sits with her spine against the brick, shaggy gray-brown hair long and braided now, pulled forward over her thin shoulders, a notebook usually in one hand and an old dictaphone in the other. Sit down and talk to her and she'll tell you that she's working to get her demo together to send off somewhere. Hollywood or New York. It all seems like the fantasy of a schizophrenic and she does have that energy to her, misplaced and misladen. That sometimes-harried air of someone who sees things that are not there and cannot always stitch through the immediate temporal world and whatever it is that her senses tell her.
Georgianna has a sweet, ragged, masculine voice.
Georgianna has been attacked and beaten badly enough to be hospitalized five or six times in the last half-dozen years.
Georgianna never seems like she's going to live through the winter, but somehow she always does.
Most of the songs are rubbish, but here and there, if you sit and listen to her, a turn of phrase, a movement of melody makes you fucking stop, stark and still, briefly transfixed by the idea that maybe there's something to her madness after all. Some genius hidden beneath the shapeless clothing, and ragged, harried, haggard features.
Most walk over her; around her without ever looking at her.
Some people stop, though.
Some people listen.
Marcellus has been kicking around Denver's streets for more than a decade now, and the years, they've started to fade into each other. Was it 2005 or 2006 that he saw Cheez get shot in the back of the head for preying on one strung out junkie too many? Marcellus doesn't know. When was it that he spent three weeks riding back and forth with a gorgeous friend--what was her name?--down into Utah and back only to find out that the whole time she'd been smuggling bricks of weed in the trunk of his old car? And he'd thought it'd been love. Last he'd heard, she'd moved to LA to be with her dying mom. That was - what? 2009? Places open, places close. People arrive, yell a lot, claim they're the shit, then die or move away. Buildings grow ragged, get torn down. New ones spring up like weeds, but their glass and steel facades grow tarnished all the same. Politicians come and go, speaking of Michelangelo, and in the end, the exact dates don't matter, not really. Ain't many folks that stick around long enough on the scene to reminisce about the past with, not really.
Except George. Georgianna. She been around. He. Singing her songs, sinking deeper into that dark hole of misery and solitude. Except sometimes, sometimes, Marcellus thinks she's onto something. Something. A friend of his--Panic Button--she'd been big into poetry. She'd read him a poem, once, despite his yelling, and it had stuck. One verse. It came back to him every time he turned a corner and saw Georgianna, saw her huddled or limping or stalled out with no gas left on the edge of the sidewalk:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Shee-it.
Though there was that one time. That would have been in 2007. Or early 2008, maybe. Bad winter. He'd gotten into some desperate straits. That was during the time he'd cut himself off from the Full Bloods. Was hustling construction sites, ripping off their copper pipes. He'd made some good money, but finally a bad gamble and resulted in six workers cornering him one night, furious and with the very pipes in hand with which to beat him with. Beat him down cold, and leave him there to freeze. Georgianna had shown up, like out of nowhere. She'd pulled a gun, of all things, right out of her shapeless jacket, and shoved it in the foreman's face.
"Never you blink an eye or I'll drop you like a bat into hell."
Those words. Said low and steady like she was giving him instructions on how to take his medication. Marcellus had stared, unbelieving, as the men had backed off, and then he'd run, pulling Georgianna behind him, and she'd throw the gun in the trash, told him later that it was a dummy, a fake, and had never worked ever since that one time somebody had shot her with it and then dropped it and run. She'd gone back and found it in the gutter, after she was released from the hospital. Kept it close. Said it was her best friend, because they'd shared blood.
Shit.
He'd watched out for her, ever since. Not much he could give, but when he had it, he made a point of stopping by, sharing the wealth. Neither of them mentioned that night. The gun. But there was an understanding there. And as she sank ever deeper into that hole, he did his damned best to reach in after, even if it was just to hand down half a bagel or a toke. Most times, she'd reach up out of the dark, and once in a blue moon, he'd get a glimmer of a smile out of her sad worn eyes.
So. It's one fine morning. Smoke haze thick in the air, but what the hell. Still fine, as fine as fine gets, because Marcellus has a bag filled with donuts and a fifth of whiskey and he's looking to share. Looking to sit down and warm his bones and shoot the shit as he indulges in a fine bout of sugar and alcohol. The Red Letter. His destination. About time he checked in on ol' George. 'Ol Georgianna. She always did like the donut holes.
Twilight
Georgianna always did like donut holes. Georgianna always did like anything anyone ever gave her, more or less. Go ferreting through the nooks and crannies in the brick-lined dead-end alley that she claims as her home territory and you'll find all of them things. There aren't many, once you discount the consumables. The donut holes and half-bagels and whiskey fifths. Somewhere there's a stack of old notebooks covered in crabbed and scrabbled writing that would be indecipherable to anyone but a specialist or a psychiatrist and even then: more notable for the flights of movement, than the shape of the words inside. Among those notebooks, all her old wristbands from all those many hospitalizations. The name they gave her scratched out with a sharpie and her real one written in.
Might've had a guitar once and sometimes if you look closely you can see her touching the pads of her fingers to the tip of her thumb. This rhythm, this sense memory of chords she might've known once, which she's not like to ever play again. Even things that you love run away from you, when life devolves into little more than existence.
Still: here she is. Hazy fucking morning, the smoke pall hanging in the sky, traffic a great and terrible chorus all around, the idling luxury cards coughing out their own sort of smog, adding to the general murk. Some asshole in a three-piece suit leaning out of the driver's window of his BMW just screaming at a harried looking young woman in a rusting old Hyundai that stalled out in the intersection two blocks back, while her kid, strapped firmly into his thrift-store car seat in the backseat, just wails. And she closes her mouth against tears and tries to figure out how the hell she's going to get him to day care and then get to work on time and the man in the BMW screams. Market's gonna open soon. Does she not understand what that means?
Not all the monsters in this world have scales.
Not all the heroes have claws, either.
Marcellus finds Georgianna on the corner where one always finds her. Today her skirt's new enough that there's still some color to it, a fading sky blue, and she is sitting with her legs sticking out and her spine straight and one of her notebooks open on her lap and her dictaphone turning, turning, turning. Gives Marcellus a gap-toothed smile when she seems him coming down the street, and pats the already warming concrete beside her by way of invitation. Pull up a seat.
Oh, she does like donut holes. Donut holes and cheap whiskey and there's a whole red velvet cupcake she's been saving since last night. One of the customers just dropped it in her lap, right in its precious little pink box. All that drama for a cupcake, can you imagine. She shares it back the way he shares the donut holes and there's a new - well, a new energy to her that's notable, almost remarkable given how worn and rundown she's become over the years he's known her. The way she's grown - well, more gray and brown, the color of the stained asphalt and concrete rather than earth and skin and sky.
A new energy, even, to the pattern of her patter. She doesn't always share out her songs, her demo, the recordings on her dictaphone but this morning she does. Holds them up and plays them back for him and if he can make out more than one word of five for the background noise and white noise in the ruined old tape that's in there he's a better man than most, Marcellus.
But maybe there's something to them this time, because they seem more whole and compact, nearly coherent.
She says, she's gonna finish that up soon. Send it off to Atlantic records.
She says, she's got an in there. Got a feeling this time.
A real good feeling.
--
And when the first edge of hunger is slaked and there's still donut holes left and the whiskey is a warm dark fire in her belly and the morning's warming up and the commute is over and the café's opening up and the morning barista setting out the metal tables and winding open the market umbrellas over them waves a greeting to the pair of them from the storefront, Georgianna opens up to Marcellus about her latest news: she's maybe getting a place. A place of her own.
She's got a line on one.
Transnational housing, that's what she calls it, but Marcellus can likely translate that into the appropriate bureaucratic term. Transitional housing. It's them suits, Georgianna, them Nation of Islam types, though she clarifies that they're not the Islam ones. The other religious suits (oh there are so many religious suits). House of God.
House of the Coverment. Them ones.
With that soup kitchen over on Freemont, them.
They won't make her stay in a men's dorm. They say they've got programs she can do from that time where she was arrested, give her a place to stay and job skills. Job skills, that makes her laugh but hell, four walls: a room of her own. Four walls and a window and a hot plate and a cot. Won't even make her attend services or nothing, not like the ones at the Lighthouse kitchen where you have to pray to their god before you can eat their food.
They're gonna get it ready for her and she's maybe moving in in a few days. The weekend they said but Georgianna's weeks never end so that is meaningless to her until Saturday arrives and the patterns of traffic downtown have changed.
She's almost finished with her demo and she's getting a place and and things are looking up and this morning, full of donut holes and whiskey and slicing her red velvet cupcake in half to share, Georgianna says, things are looking up. They're looking up. They're looking up. She ain't sure yet to whom she might relinquish her place at The Red Letter but its a real good spot and maybe Marcellus wants to take it on. Add it to his routine.
The cupcakes are fuckin' delicious.
And each one they sell gets its own little box.
House of the Coverment? That pulls a sly snort from Marcellus, almost against his will. He's always having to check himself, to not offend, but Georgianna never seems to mind, always smiles blithely when he laughs, as if she's in on the joke, as if she's happy to share, to partake, in any goodwill or positive energy that an interaction might afford. Marcellus leans his head back against that brick wall and closes his eyes and allows the warmth from the rays of the sun to sink in, to penetrate into his depths as if he were a murky pond and the rays of light were shafts of emerald green reaching into his dark depths. From which rises a new warmth, that strange, delirious heat that whiskey always brings him, that sense of deceptive well being that makes him feel young, gives him that reckless sense of youth that he oh-so-rarely touches these days. He raises his face and lets the sun warmth sink down and kiss the whiskey heat, and for a moment, for a singing, clear moment, everything seems fine and well with the world.
It takes a bit of effort to draw his attention back to Georgianna. It's not that he doesn't believe her, in all the particulars--he does. It's that he's been here before, with so many friends. So many buddies who swore with fresh energy and really fervor that this time, oh boy, you just watch me, I'm gonna kick that habit, I ain't never buying smack again, this time for real, my cousin my brother my old best friend has hooked me up with a new line of work with a clean cot with a chance to make it happen and I'm going to ride this one home, boy, I'm going to take this ticket to the promised land of milk and honey. Well, all well and good, but Marcellus has been around the block not just once but twice and maybe on his third lap now and he can't count how many times he's seen these very same friends come crashing down hard but a week or a month or sometimes even a year later, hollow eyed and guttered and stumble stepping as they mutter their way to another flask, another hit, another sweet sweet bite of that needle.
Still.
He's got a soft spot for Georgianna. So he rouses himself from the drowsy pleasure of sublimating warmth and cocks a china blue eye at her and forces himself to listen, to pay attention. To not just blow her off as he might another soon to be ex-junkie friend. He listens, and nods when he should, and when she's finished, he rubs at his stubbled chin and purses his lips like a chimpanzee. He sighs, and then turns back to his friend. Looks at her worn face, the lines etched deep, the planes burned by the sun and the edges ground down by a life hard lived. He reaches out and squeezes her shoulder, a gentle compression, and then drops his hand back in his lap. Something. Something there. Or not there, something missing.
See, you spend enough time on the street, you learn one thing and you learn it good: there ain't no such thing like a free meal. Even the folks working at the Red Letter expect something back in return for their cast off goods, be it a servile nod of gratitude or for you to make them feel good about themselves for this gesture of caritas. Most people, they want something. Especially the religious types. Forget what Jesus said, in Marcellus' experience it's the religious types that want the most: they want to save you, raise you up on high and bathe you in the glory glory of their hallelujah amen. They want you to toe the line, walk it just right, to shave and shower and shake hands firmly and pray and smile and feel blessed in the light of the Lord.
So when Georgianna says there are no strings attached, well. Marcellus shifts his weight and forces his thoughts to focus, to marshall them despite the whiskey and the sun. You sure, he asks, you sure there's no small print? No expectations, no down the road expectations? Georgianna's got all the soul and warmth of a sunbathed city block, but astute she ain't been in over five years, and this last year's been the worst. There may be some catch, and she just ain't picked up on it yet. Some requirement these House of the Coverment folks glossed over, and there's Georgianna, signing her soul away to the devil. Last thing he wants is Georgianna to get herself locked up in some place where they don't let you out no matter what you say. He's heard of places that'll do that. Keep you prisoner. Rehab clinics, psychiatric wards. For your own good and all.
He doesn't say none of this to her, though. Let her ride this good way. But. He asks when she's next going to roll on down to their place, and offers to go with her. To escort her, if you will, take her in on his arm so that they see she ain't alone in the world and that there are folks that know and care about her. And if doing so affords him the chance of checking them out for himself? Well. That couldn't hurt.
That couldn't hurt at all.
Twilight
The House of the Covenant has been a fixture in East Colfax as long as Marcellus has been in Denver. Just another storefront church: red and black, these bleak black crosses carved into the red-painted plywood front. A fixture but hardly a noticeable fixture for most of those years. They've gone through a few name changes but have always been on the fringe of the fringe: folding metal chairs inside instead of carved wooden pews, the sort of holy-rolling apocalyptic visions you expect maybe in the deep south and Appalachian backwaters and poorest neighborhoods of the largest urban centers.
Oh, nice enough people. Sometimes they host a rummage sale for the members, a diverse lot cemented together by this core of women with helmet hair and blue eyeshadow and tenty housedresses that come to mid-calf whose rogue detritus consists primarily of praying hands and old clothes and cheap plaques with encouraging bible verses printed thereon, and prairie style Christian romance novels, well-thumbed and worn.
Working While It's Day.
That's their motto, spray-painted onto the original storefront, with its HOUSE OF GOD lettering and its implacable façade. The congregation has operated a soup kitchen of sorts the whole Marcellus has been in Denver: of sorts being the operative word. Cheap dry peanut butter sandwiches, sometimes. Sometimes nothing but pimento cheese (and these, to be fair, were delicious. Someone's homemade southern specialty, imported to Denver from a childhood a lifetime and a world away) on day-old Wonder Bread and carrot sticks. Sometimes actual Victorian-style soup, thinned and thinned and thinned to insubstantiality, but soup none the less.
The past two-three years, though, the place has been growing. They are on an upward trajectory, the congregation expanding, new adherents and new converts, a storefront added to the first, and on through the block they inhabit, cannibalizing the check cashing place and the cheap, seedy laundromat on the corner. The new adherents are younger and more diverse than the old crowd, and the expanded congregation is growing into a new host of services: transitional housing, job training, rehabilitation for ex-cons just getting out of prison. There are signs around the neighborhood advertising something called The Healing Place - a drug treatment and sober living facility the church has been working to build over the past year, just catty-corner from the rambling block of original storefronts.
--
Georgianna does not know exactly when she's gonna roll on down to the House of the Coverment, because time and Georgianna have an inexact and inequitable relationship. Time passes and she doesn't much notice. Then it keeps on moving, faster than she can ever get a handle on, but she's glad to have company and says she'll come to find him when its time. Soon is what she says and soon is what she means because soon it is that Marcellus gets word through the underground network of schizophrenics and alcoholics and down-on-their-luck housepainters and prostitutes and petty thieves and junkies and the like that serve people like Marcellus and Georgianna as well as any cell phone service that she's been down to Catholic Charities and Five Points looking for him.
It's a Tuesday morning, mid-way between breakfast and lunch. They're ambling and Georgianna has her bags all packed. Two old-fashioned plastic bags from a long-defunct Denver clothing store with her notebooks and a stack of colorless skirts, her dictaphone and her tapes. No: her tape. She just has one, so she's constantly recording and erasing, erasing and recording that demo she's so constantly proud of. Has a rhubarb-ginger cupcake for Marcellus' delectation, two-thirds of one anyway, just one bite out the icing before it was abandoned and she snagged it and it's not bad, really. Bit spicy.
They walk past those storefronts churches, the soup kitchen and the thrift store that's been added on as the place has grown the way cancer grows: lumpen and hungry and ever-which-consuming-way. Keeping going down the block and to the next, and Georgianna rings the bell beside an otherwise unassuming glass-fronted door:
rEEntry
the place is called, and there's nothing else written on the door to identify it and the door's locked until they're identified through the intercom and buzzed in. In and up a flight of dingy stairs to the second level, where another door opens into a waiting room full of folding metal chairs and beaten up old magazines and dust-covered plastic plants and a grim-looking cheap old fluorescent fixture on the wall, and a reception desk behind impact resistant plastic like the dispensing wing of a Methadone clinic, but they don't have long to wait because as soon Marcellus pulls open the second-floor door for Georgianna to shuffle in ahead of him the door beside the reception desk sighs open too and a dark-haired young woman in a second-hand (somewhat mismatched) pantsuit with a neck tattoo and the sallow skin of a recovering junkie and the earnest directness of a new convert.
She has a clipboard in hand and is walking across the cheap old tile floor with her free hand extended to Georgianna but she's looking at Marcellus. "Georgianna! You were supposed to come in yesterday, I almost gave up home for you. But you're here and we saved your slot. And you brought a friend."
Marcellus
These kinds of outfits give Marcellus the willies, and he'll use that term out loud, because, well, they just reek of reality. This is the way charity works, real charity, the kind that's not content to let you be but actually wants to grab you by the nape of your dirty neck and give you practical steps to get yourself together. In a way, Marcellus prefers the naive kids, the dreamers, the rich volunteers who never last the summer, because hell, they're nice, they're bright eyed, and they're easy to con. The kind of people that work these places though, grim and solid and saving their cash for real purposes and not just making putting up a nice facade -- these places are rough. Cause they're run by folks who have seen it all, and then some, and they won't buy the line you're selling, not even if you're an old pro like Marcellus.
So he follows Georgianna along, and as they hit the block with the storefronts, he finishes the last of the muffin and wads up the greasy crenelated wrapping paper and tosses it over his shoulder. Then he frowns, because though he knew what he was getting into, this is gonna be like sticking your arm into a clogged toilet. Still, Georgianna seems happy, and that's enough for Marcellus. So he trails along, dragging his feet and trying not to look like he swallowed something sour. Preparing himself. For the steely eyes that he'll no doubt run into, appraising and assessing even as the person smiles and welcomes him to whatever do-good place they're running. Ready to look right through his flim-flam and razzle dazzle and ask him just exactly what he's doing with his life, and why he doesn't want to clean up, go straight, get himself a little corner he can call his own, a door he can lock with his very own key, and hell, why not, a little part time job bagging groceries to give him some regular income?
Questions to which he's never been able to provide a satisfactory answer, because those practical, cheerful, severe, righteous types just don't understand his world view. There's no appeal. They're all Manifest Destiny and he's all Notes from the Underground, and the twain shall never they meet, or something. Still. He's been through these kinds of places before. So when they step up to the glass fronted door, Marcellus smooths back his ragged mane of hair, tugs down on the dusty sports jacket he rescued from a cafe chair (the owner was temporarily missing), and is momentarily glad for his running shoes. They don't look new no more, but they still look good.
The door opens. Georgianna waltzes in and up, and Marcellus takes a deep breath and forces himself to relax. He keeps his eyes on Georgianna's behind as she climbs up ahead of him, and then into the waiting room which could have been cookie cutter stamped out of the universal mold of shitty waiting rooms everywhere.
The other door opens. A dark-haired young woman enters, clipboard in hand, and this is the first sign that Marcellus receives that this place is the real deal. That they got some serious mojo going on, that they're practicing what they preach and actually making a difference. Young woman like that, working here? Still fighting the urges, fresh off the needle, and she's already selling the kool-aid? That's impressive. That's a bit much. Shit. Girl like that, she should be holed up somewhere praying she don't fall back into temptation, not carrying clipboards.
So he forces himself to stand upright, puff out that old chest, shoulders back, and raise his chin so that he can fix this young lady with his best and most dignified gaze. Give her a taste of the ol' patriarchal. Some of that dignitas, let her know not to come on strong. No words yet. He links his hands behind his back, and listens. Taking it all in and trying to ignore how hard his heart's beating. The way his body is steeling itself for a fight.
Twilight
"Maria. I thought it was to-day," Georgianna sheepish and still happy but smaller somehow in this space. More dingy and abstracted and shabbier, if the adjective can be applied to a creature like Georgianna. At least she suits the sidewalk, can blend into the life of the street. Everything here is edgy and sharp and cheap and the lights are too-bright and too-artificial and -
"Never you mind." The young (no, wait. She's not young. She's young only in comparison to Georgianna and Marcellus. Young only in the way that people who have parked themselves in the long decades of middle age but still bear the hard-luck stains of their youth can seem young, and then only to the old) woman responds to Georgianna, not-quite-clucking but the intent is there. Is embedded in the texture of her response and the way she sweeps open an arm like she's going to envelop Georgianna in it.
For all that, her attention is on Marcellus. Her eyes are a dull, weepy blue, and much, much harder than her voice. Taking in Marcellus and his dignitas, Marcellus and his puffed-up chest, Marcellus and his old-man-of-the-streets gravity. The dusty suitcoat and even the running shoes, measuring him much as he is measuring her. "You want to come sit with her through intake, you're welcome to. Then we can talk about whether there's anything we can do for you. Can't come back no further than that, though." A sudden smile, not nearly as kind as it should be, shows the flash of a gold eyetooth. "We're technically considered a treatment facility and we got HIPPA to consider."
She extends a hand to Marcellus, then, her right. Tattoos on her fingers and her knuckles and her wrist. The prison sort: stabbed into the skin with a needle and the barrel of an ink pen. Not just a junkie: she's done time. The hard sort.
"Maria Gilchrist."
Marcellus
"Maria," says Marcellus, as if tasting the name, the savor of it. He shakes her hand with his own paw, not too hard, but making sure to put a little squeeze into it, to let her know he's no milquetoast pushover from the streets eager for a free methadone hit. His hand is large, one might think almost swollen, the pads of his palm callused and firm like a farmer's, but he's never tilled no soil. It simply comes from a life of pushing yourself up off the concrete, of climbing over rough brick walls, off hauling copper pipes off walls and occasionally - a few years back when he still felt young - doing some construction work off and on just to feel like he was laying some sweat into the mortar of the city, just for the sheer pleasure of swinging a hammer and doing some honest work in the sun. Though the extra cash didn't hurt, nor did learning where all the supplies were laid up. Still. Those days are long gone now, but the mark they've left on his hands remain.
He lets go. He knows those eyes. He's seen then before, in a variety of faces. Drug dealers who've been slinging a few years get 'em. Comes from having to punish junkies that don't pay, make them scream loud enough that the others get sent a lesson. Certain kinds of cops get 'em after years of seeing the worst humanity has to offer, and deciding that gives them permission to indulge in a more vicious style of correction. Even some charity workers, the kind that know that they're just another phalanx in the war against the baser aspects of human nature, who've been taken advantage of too many times, or like Maria, have far too intimate a knowledge of how the down and out can angle to take advantage.
"Macellus," he says, and wipes his hand on his hip without realizing it. "Fine little church you got going here, Maria. Fine little church. Upstanding and outstanding. You been with the outfit long?" He bares his ivories at her. Gives her a taste of the teeth, what had been a million watt smile in his twenties but is now more an intimation of mortality rolled into the effortless old-man charm he's able to manifest when provoked.
Twilight
Maria's got a grip too but she doesn't employ it. No jewelry on her other than a pair of cheap studs in her ears and the plain cross on a tangled gold chain around her neck, visible where her thrift-sort blouse opens at the base of her throat. Smiles, nearly easily, when Marcellus puts that squeeze into their handshake, but somehow given his measure of her and her measure of him it feels more like a showing of teeth.
Then somehow that moment passes. He's on to the church, upstanding and outstanding, and her smile widens enough to flash that gold tooth again. Something predatory about it too, predatory but genuine right: the pleasure she takes in her righteousness.
The fight for the soul of the world.
"Year and a half, two years, give or take," she returns. Shifting her clipboard from left hand to right as she pulls back her arm. "Bit more, maybe. I was one of the original graduates of rEEntry. Took me right outta prison - I come out still using - cleaned me up and told me about God and the Devil and I finally got it. Here I am two years later, sweeping the streets. Bringing the light of His name to the despairing.
"Paying it forward. As it were."
Marcellus recognizes those tattoos on her hands, on her wrists, dull and blotchy as they are. The North Side Mafia, they call themselves. Or the 41st Street Locos, sometimes. Her past written right into her flesh.
"Fightin' the good fight. Got a 0 percent recidivism rate.
"Interested in seeing what we can do for you?"
Marcellus
"I've always got an interest in seeing what can be done for me, but this time, perhaps the first and only time, I'm here for my friend, Georgianna, and thus will step into her shadow, as it were, if you will." He smiles again, a flash of the ivories, and then steps back a half step, hands once more linking behind his back, bowing just slightly at the waist as he does so as if he were a modest Shakespearean actor granting another their moment in the spotlight.
And yet. "Zero percent ressy-division rate?" The word sounds familiar. "That mean, like, no backsliding, no falling off the wagon?" An eyebrow quirks. Polite skepticism. That just can't be. Might as well tell him that people ain't people, or that each and every one of Adam and Eve's children got enough backbone and ol' fighting spirit to kick the habit. Something, he knows, that just ain't so.
Twilight
Marcellus cedes the floor to Georgianna and Maria's attention lingers on him, her head canted just downward, that steely reflectiveness never leaving her eyes, not even as he sketches that slight bow. Not even as she turns to Georgianna, not quite tut-tutting, but fussing over Georgianna the way no one ever fusses over Georgianna. The way a woman like Maria with tattoos and the hard ghost of heroin withdrawl still riding her skin should never fuss over anyone except either her NA sponsor or her dealer, when she returns back to the block.
And yet.
A glance over her shoulder at Marcellus as she leads the pair of them back through the door beside the reception desk. Shrewd as every other glance she had given him, a sketch of surprise that he recognizes the word. It's a professional word. It's one she learned phonetically, the way he pronounces it. One she's spat out to politicians and grant-writers and inspectors like a charm and down-and-outs like a ward and never heard spat back at her with understanding from a client. From a potential client.
"I can't promise you that none of our graduates have fallen off the wagon, Mr. Marcellus. I can promise you that when they do, we pick them back up and hold them up to be annointed by His hand and in His name.
"But we're not primarily a treatment facility. They're fundraising for a treatment facility too, got it half built already. Us, we're half-way house. Mostly we take people coming out of prison or jail. Or folks with a record who ain't integrated back into the world just right.
"When I say that, I mean, not a single one of our graduates has gone back to jail. That's a record to be proud of. We're getting us some traction now."
--
Back: past the reception desk manned by a heavy looking white guy who is crawling with prison tattoos, just like Maria Gilchrist. Except: his aren't from the 41st Street Locos. His are from the Aryan Front. He eyes Maria and eyes Georgianna (here, his eyes narrowing, like he knows that she's a he and cannot erase the contempt from the skin of his gaze no matter how much he's been saved or annointed or instructed to keep that shit to himself) and eyes Marcellus and nods to Maria but not the others.
He's filing stuff; something edgy about him, something not-quite-right but that's exactly what you'd expect from someone like that. The sense of propulsive, explosive promise beneath his skin. Some people were made to fight.
Then into a windowless office. There are some binder-bound manuals on the shelf and a Bible or three. A Christian's Guide to the End of the World and Spiritual Warfare and SIGNS and a handful of other similar titles, thumbed and worn on the shelf over the desk.
No computer immediately visible, the office furniture is an old shell of a cubicle from a 1990s era dot-com place gone bust. A rolling chair (the cheapest sort) set in front of the widest part of the desk and two more folding metal chairs for Marcellus and Georgianna to perch on.
Once they're settled, Maria hands over the clipboard to Georgianna. It is full of forms. Demographic data and release forms and questionnaires. Some pieces have been filled in already, and Georgianna's rap sheet has been printed out, stapled to the back of one of them. Mostly a cascading series of legal releases and warnings but there are also questions about address and next-of-kin and psychiatric and medical history. Little red arrow-tabs have been stuck all over the place.
"I'll get you two some coffee while you get to work. Georgianna, don't forget to initial everywhere I put the red tabs, okay? Need to dot our ps and qs, don't we."
Marcellus
Marcellus doesn't speak up after that - he gets a plaintive look from Georgianna, who can sense on some instinctual level that there's friction afoot, and she doesn't want any static, not now, not when she's this close to locking in on something good. So Marcellus just nods and follows behind, marking the receptionist with increasing bewilderment, but again, not making any ripples, keeping his demeanor smoothed out, chill. Placid.
The little room they sit in makes him want to start itching, to keep an eye on the door at all times and be ready to bolt as soon as a nurse with medication walks in. This is the kind of place that gives him nightmares, where they grind down all the individuality you've built up over the years to a smoothed out, bland, ready sit and smile and be part of the functioning world nub. Maria hands over the forms, and Marcellus takes one look and restrains the urge to groan. These look serious. These look in depth. God knows what Georgianna's being asked to sign here, to agree to. For all he knows, she could be giving her kidneys away on page 17 and her right to a lawyer right after.
So he smiles at Maria and gives her a little enthusiastic nod, as if a cup of coffee would make everything all right, and then scoots to the edge of his seat and reaches out with a gentle hand to take the forms from Georgianna the moment they're alone. With his other hand he reaches into the blazer's pocket and pulls out a narrow set of reading glasses, which he perches on his nose as he looks down at the paperwork and begins to read through it. No way but to dive right in, and he knows what to look for. He's been here before, seen forms like these before, and its come so that he can scent out the trouble clauses like a good pig can root out truffles.
Phil @ 10:55AM
[Wits + Investigation]
Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP] VALID
Twilight
"I think it's gonna be real good in here for me." That's Georgianna, softly as the door closes behind Maria. The plaintative look in her eyes, hands on her thighs. Looking haggard and trying to look bright and trying not to look at those bibles and the other Christian works on the shelf. Doesn't have a real close relationship with God and His People, Georgianna, for obvious reasons, because too many of His People are raving psychos about people like her.
Still: and Marcellus knows this, there's a core of belief in her, in something that is immanent and unknowable right. Even if its just that A&R rep at Atlantic records whose gonna listen to her demo, one of these goddamned days. She hands the clipboard over to Marcellus, surrendering it entirely once she sees that he has reading glasses. She shifts her plastic bags on the floor between their plastic chairs and the soft, damp smell of her stacked notebooks rises up from the plastic. Noticeable in a way that her body odor is not, even in the close space, only because that's something you get used to on the streets.
"S'a lot of papers, though. I thought I already answered all their questions." There's a nervous edge to her voice. Not like she's expecting red flags and trouble clauses, but like she's expecting something to round the corner and tear this opportunity back out of her hands.
And these forms have red flags crawling all over them. Not just the little red-tabbed arrows pointing out the places to be signed and initialed, not just THOSE red flags, but a half-dozen others.
Look, there's not a computer in the office. Come to think on it, there's not a computer at the receptionist's desk neither. Place hasn't been open but two maybe three years, at most, and what sort of half-way house, transitional housing, inmate-services what-have-you charity gets started in 2010 without visible computer systems. What sort of place says: HEY, let's keep all our records longhand.
(Papers you can lose. Shred. Burn up. Paper disappears. Bytes and bits and electronic data, they deform the world. Linger behind all ghost-like on hard drives and thumb drives and in cached e-mail for an age and then some and anyone with the proper skills can drill down through the layers of fractured data and put back together some sort of residual trail, days and weeks and years later. Anyone.)
Then there are the trouble-clauses. Like, the papers shuffled in the back giving Maria Gilchrist DURABLE POWER OF ATTORNEY in the name of Georgianna a/k/a George Aaron Thompson. Don't have to know shit about the law to get that that's a trouble clause.
Behind the DURABLE POWER OF ATTORNEY is another assignment, for MEDICAL POWER OF ATTORNEY. Another damned trouble clause.
The longest portion of the agreement requires Georgianna to initial each and every one of the endless rules. Most are about what Marcellus would expect: it's not string-free, but instead full of the usual strings. Abiding by a curfew and remaining drug free, making the bed and participating in clean-up chores, the usual get-right-with-god and also clean-behind-your-ears shit. But also:
Applicant agrees to refrain from contact with unapproved external persons for the first 30 days of program and for renewing periods of 15 days thereafter until cleared by sponsor for re-entry for step-down management.
And for god's sake: they ask for so much contact info. Next of kin. Known relatives. Children and grandchildren and godchildren. Your last five known addresses and dates of residence.
Marcellus
It takes Marcellus a good thirty minutes to thumb through each page, with his licking said thumb as he does so and occasionally reaching out to pat Georgianna's knee when he senses her becoming restless. He tries not to frown as he digs deeper. Tries not to allow his wariness to show on his face, and then his apprehension, and then his growing anger. Finally, the coffee untouched, he turns over the last page and sets the stack down on the table. He sits back, takes off the narrow glasses, and then slips them in his jacket pocket. Ignoring Georgianna's plangent expression, he digs his thumbs into his eyes and then rubs the base of his palms into the hollows of his eyes, and drops his hands heavily into his lap.
It's good that they're alone. It's good that Maria got tired of waiting for him to painstakingly read each page, because with an eye to the door, he leans forward and holds Georgianna's eyes, and then slowly shakes his head. His expression dead serious, he reaches out for her hand, finds it, grasps it, and gives it a soft squeeze.
"This ain't a good place, Georgie. They want you to sign away everythin'. Your legal rights. Your medical rights. Shit, if you sign those papers? You won't be allowed to see even me for a month or more. And they get to decide when. Girl, you stay here, you're askin' to be put in a jail cell."
He feels for her. He really does. But Marcellus has never been one to varnish the truth or gussy it up. So he tells it to her straight, straight as he always has, and gives her hand a second squeeze for good measure.
Twilight
Maria returns with the coffee. Weak, cheap shit and probably decaf, in old styrofoam cups. Sets them down on the desk and eyes the pair of them, Marcellus in his reading glasses with the clipboard in hand, Georgianna sitting next to him, arms crossed then, watching.
Five uncomfortable minutes or so she stood there watching the pair of them before abandoning the projecting of being the watcher watching the bee.
During the next thirty-minutes the woman returns once or twice after she's informs them that she's Just Checking In or asks How's It Going and leaves each time, closing the door behind her. Both times her eyes were on Marcellus rather than Georgianna. Lingering.
By the time Marcellus finishes his review of the papers, Georgianna is a bit more agitated. Running her thumb over her index finger the way she operates her Dictaphone and frowning at him, her gray braids swung forward over her hunched shoulders.
"That ain't what they said." Hesitant, suspicious, with narrowing eyes. Though, in case it needs be said: that suspicion is not for Marcellus. It's for those fucking papers. Marcellus shared a fifth of whiskey and brought her donut holes. All this place has done is made her promise after promise and given her a dry peanut butter sandwich and a cup of shitty coffee. "It ain't."
She's insistent on this point. Like she's trying to write the deal original back into being by dint of sheer belief, or like she's trying to convince Marcellus that she wouldn't, wouldn't never have gone for it if what he said was true.
"Come and go as I please. I get an apartment all to my self. Studio with a hot plate and a minifridge. No visitors but that don't mean I can't go visiting." Keeps on repeating this array of promises and perks and the sort-of-straight, sort-of-stable life to which she aspires.
"I can go visiting whenever I want."
Then she leans over, asks Marcellus to show her where, exactly where he found the rules and the phrases and everything else she's being asked to sign away. He can see the exact moment when her stubborn, resistant belief in the dream-of-dreams ends. She sits there a moment, shuffles her feet on the tile floor, then reaches beneath the metal chair to drag her two plastic bags forward, readying herself to heft them again.
Asks, quiet: "You think I can get my corner back?"
Just as the door opens.
Maria Gilchrist again, her gaze lancing between the two of them -
"How're things going in here."
- with a smile that never reaches her eyes.
Marcellus
It breaks his heart, it surely does, but that's what friends do, sometimes. They bear bad news. So he points out each bit, helps her through any of the jargon as best he can, and when he sees that penny drop, that wicked ol' penny that reminds Georgianna what he's known all along, that there ain't nothing free in this world, he simply nods and sets the papers down. This is what he's used to. This is the shit that do-gooders try to pull. This is the tug and pull that leaves your heart aching if not flat and dead, so that in the end, you learn to simply not hope at all.
Georgianna reaches down to grab her bags, and he gives her a solemn nod. "We'll get your corner back. Like never before. I'll see to it, old girl, you just leave it to me. Marcellus'll see to it so that it's like you never left."
Then the door opens, and he's up, stepping forward with his hands spread, no-harm-no-foul, his shit eating grin wide as he cocks his head to once side as if to say, compadre.
"Well, it looks like we're gonna be thinkin' things over a little more. Don't want to commit to something this serious without be one hunnedred percent that we are right and completely sure, you know what I mean? Maria?" He takes her hand then, shakes with one, clasps it with the other, gives it a good wag. "Maria, thank you for your time, Georgianna and I surely appreciate it, and when we're ready we'll know exactly where to find you, am I right Georgianna? Let's go now, come on, good girl, need help with those bags? No? You got 'em? Then round you go, I'm right behind you, no, thank you Maria, honestly, for the coffee and the chance, you folks are doin' some fine work here, I can tell, no, I can feel it, through here? Perfect. Well, you know how it goes, sometimes you close the deal, sometimes the fish needs a little time to think, so, well, that's all from us, OK then, take care, adios!"
He runs the razzle dazzle, he puts up his best flim flam, knowing that with a hardcase like Maria it won't take, it won't fluster her for long, but shit, the closer they get to the exit before she puts in the cold hard stop the better their odds of leaving without Georgianna getting all aggravated. More so then she even is. So it's handshakes and raising his voice at key moments, and pretending not to notice social cues at others, all so that he can hustle his friend and himself out of that little shithole and past the secretary and out and down the steps before anybody's the wiser.
Phil @ 2:15PM
[Manipulation + Subterfuge]
Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP] VALID
Twilight
Marcellus steps forward, talking a mile-a-minute, pressing her flesh and giving her the run and run and runaround, his words coming fast and thorough as a carnival barker's, as a livestock auctioneer selling the crowd on the virtues of the latest nag up for bid.
He talks fast enough and sharp enough and liquid enough that she's not quite hearing him precisely and steps out of the doorway over to the desk not quite understanding yet that the forms have not been completed. So he gets past her no problem and he can see the faint movement of her brows, narrowing then smoothing out above her hard eyes, as she flips through the first few pages of the forms and finds none of them completed and turns her head all steady and dull and aslant in the ugly fluorescent light as she follows their retreat with a reforming frown.
They meet the receptionist again walking down the dull, dingy corridor with another client and another clipboard full of forms when they walk past. A grim-looking ex-Vet with a limp and a prosthetic arm that never did fit right and the far-away but somehow still jumpy gaze of the shellshocked. That's where he is when Marcellus and Georgianna emerge and Georgianna's got her bags and not her papers and he turns to look but just grunts, does not interpose himself the way Maria did when she first walked into the room, the way she might have physically had Marcellus not been talking a mile a minute, just levels those piggish and dangerous looking eyes at Georgianna, just flexes that oft-broken jaw. Grunts, and gestures to his new client into a different ugly little room to sign his life away.
Or at least the most important bits.
--
They make it out the door and into the reception area. Marcellus ushers Georgianna out of the waiting room and onto the landing. Down the stairs and has maybe a moment of panicked awareness when the front door won't open. When he realizes that they don't just buzz you in here, they fucking buzz you OUT.
But then the electric hum of the security system and the door unlatches and opens and they're leaving the place when Maria Gilchrist's voice comes over the intercom behind them, tinned and thinned by the cheap, old technology, but recognizable.
"You have a good night, Mr. Marcellus. You have a good night."
Nevermind that it is 11 in the fucking a.m.
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