CHAPTER THREE THE RETURN
The first man I visited was named Quincy.
Quincy was nineteen. He was a Saint, low rank, a runner, the kid who carried the product from the stash house to the corner.
He was also, I had learned by putting my attention on the parking lot that night and running it back like a tape, the one who had fired the shot that hit me.
He had been aiming at the Jackals’ car. He was a bad shot.
He was always a bad shot. The bullet had gone wide and caught me below the collarbone and Quincy had not even known he had killed a man until the paper told him, and when the paper told him he had laughed, because Quincy was nineteen and nineteen-year-olds who carry guns do not understand that the dead are still in the room.
Quincy lived in a one-room apartment above a barbershop off Glenwood.
He kept a pistol under his mattress and forty dollars in a sock and a picture of his little brother on the fridge.
His little brother was nine. Quincy sent his mother fifty dollars a month from the product money and his mother did not ask where it came from because his mother knew and the knowing was its own kind of death.
I went to Quincy at three in the morning. I did not knock. I was inside the room before he knew I was there. I stood at the foot of his bed. He was asleep on his stomach, one arm hanging off the mattress, the pistol near his hand even in sleep, the way a child sleeps with a stuffed animal.
I did not have a voice yet, not in the way the living hear. But I had the room. I could make the room cold. I could make the light move wrong. I put my attention on the bulb in the ceiling and it flickered, and Quincy stirred, and I flickered it again, and he sat up, and he saw me.
He did not know me. He had never seen my face in life.
But he knew what I was. The body knows. There is a part of the brain older than language that knows when the presence in the room with it is not alive, and that part of Quincy’s brain screamed, and Quincy screamed, and I did not move, and I did not speak, and I let him scream until the screaming ran out of him like water out of a broken cup.
Then I spoke. Not with my mouth. I put the words inside his head the way you would put a hand on someone’s shoulder.
You killed me, Quincy.
He said no. He said it out loud, to the room, to me.
He said I did not kill nobody, I was not even there.
And I showed him. I took his memory of that night and I held it up in front of him like a slide on a screen, the parking lot, the cars, his hand on the gun, the kick, the bullet leaving, the man at the door with the bag falling, the Cheetos on the concrete.
I made him watch it. I made him watch it three times.
The third time I made him watch it from where I had stood, from inside the hot punch of the bullet, from the floor looking up at the fluorescent light.
Quincy pissed himself. Quincy cried. Quincy begged. He begged a dead man for a thing the dead man could not give, because forgiveness is for the living and I was not that anymore.
I did not kill Quincy that night. I left him alive, because dead men are not afraid, and what I needed on the Boulevard was afraid men.
I left him shaking on the wet mattress and I put one more thing inside his head before I went.
I put a number. A P.O. box. I told him, in the way that does not use words, that there was a box at the post office on the Boulevard, and that he knew what to do with it, and that the only way to make me stop was to do it.
The box was real. I will tell you about the box.
The next morning Quincy went to the post office on the Boulevard and he mailed, in a brown envelope with no return address, every dollar he had in the sock, which was forty dollars, and a note that said I am sorry.
He did it because he was afraid, and fear is a kind of honesty.
He did not know yet that he was the first.
I had a week. I gave myself a week, because a week is how long it takes a neighborhood to understand that something has changed, and I wanted the Boulevard to understand, and I wanted the Saints and the Jackals to understand, and most of all I wanted Royce to understand, though Royce would be the last to understand, because Royce was the one who thought he owned the game, and the man who thinks he owns the game is always the last to see the hand that takes it from him.
Quincy told two people. He told his boy Terrell, who was also a Saint, and he told a girl named Keisha who ran with the Jackals, because Quincy and Keisha were together on the side, which is the kind of secret that does not stay secret when the dead are paying attention.
Quincy told them that a man had come to his room and shown him his own memory and that the man was dead and that the man knew.
Terrell laughed. Keisha did not laugh. Keisha went home and she thought about it, and she did not sleep, and the next night I went to her too.
By the end of the second day, the Boulevard had a new word for what was happening, though no one could agree on what it was.
Some said ghost. Some said the man from the gas station.
Some said the Boulevard itself had finally had enough.
I did not correct them. Dread is more useful when it does not have a name.