Chapter Twenty #3
Danny searched around the room, trying to spot Nina or one of his friends, but his view was crowded by the flurry of painted shapes and faces.
He ducked around a corner, past a portrait of a girl holding a cat and a landscape of the Manhattan Bridge drawn in colored pencil, past black-and-white photos of folded hands and squiggly paintings on canvas.
Students brushed past him as he scooted around a sculpture made out of old coat hangers and an oil painting of a potted plant.
Danny peeked down empty aisle after empty aisle until he was standing alone.
That was when he saw it.
To be fair, it was pretty hard to miss. It was in the corner by the windows—a giant sculpture, twice as big as anything else in the room, a giant globe made out of what looked to be chicken wire, standing ten feet tall, at least. The outside of the structure was covered in something lustrous that shimmered in the afternoon sun like scales on a fish.
Danny stepped in closer, peering up at the colossal ball, his eyes focusing, realizing that the scales on the globe were, in fact, tiny faces captured in squares—hundreds of colored photos with white borders and black handwritten words below them: chrysalis, hallowed, stereotyped, vessel, wilderness, crackle, inconclusive, somber.
The faces in the Polaroids were of strangers and friends and people he half knew.
And then his eyes fell upon one face that he knew all too well.
It seemed to be wincing at the camera, holding up a hand to shield his eyes from a flash.
Below the photo, written in Sharpie, was the unmistakable word.
“Excalibur.”
Danny didn’t have to look at the plaque on the floor to know whose project this was.
The photo in question had been taken on his first day of school, that day in the lunchroom when Christian introduced him to Orion and the rest of his friends.
Danny’s eyes searched the other photos that collaged the chicken wire globe, some emerging as memories.
FLASH—Astoria standing on a bench in Washington Square Park, reciting a poem.
FLASH—Nina burying her toes in the warm grass in Sheep Meadow.
FLASH—Christian sticking out his tongue while trying on a pair of heart-shaped glasses at Patricia Field.
FLASH—Danny slumped onto a white leather sofa at the Big Cup.
Danny ran his hands across the photos, his fingertips sparking as they absorbed each moment caught on film, all the decisions and choices that added up to a failed friendship.
Then something else caught his eye, way in the back of the sculpture, close to the ground, almost completely out of sight.
It was a Polaroid like all the rest, but with its back facing out, a black square in a sea of color.
Danny crouched down onto the floor, which smelled of citrus chemicals, and stretched out his arm, reaching for the photo.
He pinched it between his fingers and gave it a little tug.
It released itself without a fight, like a cherry tomato being plucked off a vine. He turned it over.
At first it appeared to be just an out-of-focus squiggle of lights.
It had clearly been taken in a dark setting.
It mostly just looked like a mass of fuzzy, moving bodies, but as he looked closer, he could make out two tiny but distinct figures in the center of the frame, just two people out of a thousand in crystal clear focus.
They seemed to be holding each other tightly as the world blurred around them.
Growing from one of the figure’s shoulders was an unmistakable pair of wings.
Danny knew immediately when this photo had been taken—that evening at the Limelight, which meant that the two figures must be him and Christian.
Orion must have taken it from the balcony when they were dancing together and Christian must have been wearing his Angela Mercy wings.
A jolt of electricity shot up Danny’s spine.
But Christian wasn’t wearing his angel wings on the dance floor. He’d left them in his dressing room and was going to pick them up the next day.
Danny held the photo closer to his face and squinted.
He must have been mistaken. Perhaps it was just a light flare or maybe an error in the film.
Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been real.
They hadn’t really flown together that night—had they?
It was just the music and the mirror ball, he thought, and the Staten Island iced teas.
Danny’s eyes drifted south to the word written in Sharpie on the border.
Just a single syllable. Rare for Orion. Just two letters: “Be.”
Danny made his way to the subway, the sidewalks eerily deserted for the middle of rush hour.
He passed under the newly erected scaffolding, a construction site at Lincoln Center.
Danny hated walking through these sites, always sure that today would be the day a board would slip or a hammer would drop, killing him instantly.
He wove through the maze of steel beams and hastily painted green plywood, lit only by industrial bulbs dangling from the ceiling.
Turning a corner, he caught sight of something that made his heart quicken, something out of place even on New York’s unpredictable streets—a pair of feathered wings disappearing around a corner just before he had time to see who they were attached to.
Christian, he thought, remembering his costume at the Limelight.
He doubled his pace, trying to catch up to the winged figure, but the plume of feathers vanished once again around a tight corner.
“Christian!” he called, his shoes thumping across a wooden board laid haphazardly over a cluster of electrical wires.
Bursting out of the construction maze and onto the sharp triangle corner of Broadway and Columbus, he scanned the wide avenues for the pair of wings.
He peered downtown just in time to catch sight of the winged figure descending into the ? train subway station.
Danny dashed down the stairs, pushing through the turnstile, the bing of his MetroCard echoing through the station.
He ran onto the platform, looking uptown and down, but was met with an uncanny sight—a completely vacant subway station.
There was no angel in sight. There was no anyone in sight.
Usually there’d be at least one other person, a bag lady sleeping on a wooden bench or a teen drawing a mustache on a movie poster.
Danny looked down at his feet and noticed a dusty white feather brushing over his sneaker, tumbling gently down the platform.
He followed its path, slowly drifting in light somersaults before landing softly on a discarded, torn copy of that morning’s New York Post. The photograph on the cover sent a chill up Danny’s spine.
It was the ink-printed face that had been following him around the City all year.
“LITTLE CHOP OF HORRORS: ‘Club Kid’ Angel Melendez Found in Pieces.”
A lump formed in Danny’s throat as the words jumped off the page. He reached down and picked up the paper.
“In a horrific discovery, children playing at a local beach in Staten Island stumbled upon the dismembered remains of a young man, now believed to be Andre ‘Angel’ Melendez. According to eyewitnesses, the children were playing at the water’s edge when they noticed a box filled with two duffel bags that had washed up on the shore. ”
Christ.
“Many in the community are expressing sadness, but not surprise. Those familiar with the so-called ‘Club Kids’ lifestyle say that this tragedy was the inevitable result of a reckless party scene defined by late nights, excessive drug use, and a heedless disregard for personal safety. One thing seems clear, when it comes to the Club Kids, the party’s over. ”
So that’s it, Danny thought. This is how it ends, his mind flashing back to the Chinese restaurant, to the first time he saw the missing person ad.
The flyers stuffed in windshield wipers, taped in windows of dry cleaners and delis, soon to be torn down and tossed in the trash.
Danny’s heart sank, though he wasn’t sure why.
Death was sad, duh, but he hadn’t known this person—had barely stepped into his world.
And maybe they were right. The Club Kids did seem reckless.
He’d seen it firsthand at the Limelight—how many were likely on drugs, dancing like they didn’t care about tomorrow.
But he’d also seen their vibrance, their need to stand out, to make their mark in a world that hadn’t made room for them.
And then from the darkness of the tunnel, Danny spotted two yellow lights, slowly approaching from uptown.
But as they got closer, something didn’t look right.
They were too small and too slow to be an oncoming train.
Danny listened for the squealing of wheels or the clanging of steel on metal, but the only thing he could hear was the sound of padding footsteps, kicking through dust. Danny’s heart began to pump blood in the tempo of allegro.
What in the fuck were those yellow lights?
They most certainly weren’t headlights on a train—they were a pair of glassy eyes. Danny froze, his heartbeat changing from allegro to vivace, his fingers trembling at his side, sweat pooling in the armpits of his shirt. The creature slunk out of the darkness, tawny and muscular with matted fur.
Danny’s eyes turned into snare drums as he watched the beast pad down the train tracks, shaking out his giant mane, thick and black and covered in subway soot.
No fucking way, Danny said to himself, his heart going full prestissimo.
The best place for an escaped zoo lion to hide—the only place—was apparently right under the zookeepers’ noses. What did that article say? A lion needed fifteen pounds of fresh meat each day? Where better than a subway tunnel? There were enough rats down here to feed every cat in New York City.
The lion did seem to be on the skinnier side, his shoulders bony and his ribs jutting out like rungs on a washboard. But his yellow incisors looked sharp and savage, and his paws were baseball mitts fitted with razor blades and his nostrils flared, sensing the proximity of a warm body.
Danny looked in his periphery, trying not to move a muscle, but he knew it was pointless.
He was alone on that platform. There was no one to call for help, no one to create a diversion, no one to draw a weapon.
Only him and one malnourished beast who, six months into his escape, was probably getting tired of dining on vermin.
With all good options exhausted and the hungry lion approaching, Danny turned to the last person he could think of.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” Danny chanted, his words keeping pace with his heart rate. “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
The lion sauntered down the subway tracks, eyes locked on its prey.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.”
It flicked its ears, curiously, like he was deciding exactly how this would end.
“Now and at the hour of our death,” Danny said, a trail of sweat dripping down his face.
“Amen.”
But Danny had run out of words. He’d reached the end of his prayer and nothing had happened.
The lion was still there, only now, it was baring its terrible teeth and flexing its sinewy muscles.
And its yellow eyes burned, watching this trembling guy who was praying to a God who wasn’t listening, a God who’d been screening his calls all year, who’d let his uncle die and his mom get hit, and kept a man with a voice made for opera houses shivering in the freezing cold.
Danny wasn’t Daniel Lionheart after all.
He wasn’t a martyr or some blameless soul.
He wasn’t some cool Club Kid or some holy guy from the Bible.
He was just Danny. Just Danny, who used to live in a house with a pool but now lived in a walk-up with a deflated mattress, just Danny, who had never saved a drowning kid’s life, or seen the musical Rent, just Danny, who didn’t know a lot of things, who couldn’t drive, or do the splits, or keep a friend, but all the same, this just Danny knew all too well what it meant to fight the monsters that stayed out after dark.
And that was when just Danny, ordinary as ever, decided he wasn’t going to run anymore.
He took in a deep breath, inhaling the cold autumn air, and the lingering smell of old books, and the distant songs from men with no eyes or library cards.
His shoulders rose, thinking about his life, thinking about his friends, about how he didn’t want this to be the opening number in their reverse play.
He clenched his fists, his muscles tightening around all the hurtful words that had been hurled at him, and the hurtful words he’d thrown, and the words he hadn’t yet found the courage to say.
He squeezed his eyes tight, images flooding his mind—Polaroids of fleeting moments, missing person flyers, bodies in the river and bodies on the dance floor and bodies that were afraid to be touched but desperate to be held.
Then, drawing from every corner of his being, Danny Victorio, king of Staten Island, opened his eyes, unhinged his jaw, and let out a fearsome roar.
At first it was a roar of fear—of getting eaten, of getting sick, of getting left alone.
Then it moved to a roar of anger—the mistakes he’d made, the cruelty of fathers, the world that seemed so goddamn unforgiving.
Then came pain—his uncle’s death, his Ma’s busted lip, his torn friendships, his torn shirt in the place where his heart used to be.
But there was joy, too—the thrill of applause, the warmth of a hand, the weightlessness of a dance under a stained-glass ceiling, the feeling of being seen.
And bravery—stepping out of an old house, stepping onto an empty stage, stepping off the edge of certainty and into a terrifying freedom.
The roar caused the ground to shake and the subway rails to quiver in their concrete bearings.
It caused the two rivers to stop their rambling and the leaves on the trees in Central Park to fall humbly from their branches.
It caused the bells in St. Patrick’s Cathedral to hum and the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge to vibrate like guitar strings and the turquoise paint on the ceiling of Grand Central to chip and the paintings at the Met to shift an inch in their frames.
And in that station on Sixty-Sixth Street, a mighty lion bowed his head, then turned and slunk back into the tunnel, disappearing into darkness.