Glass Houses(34)

The dishwasher was empty. There was another dishwasher to be unloaded, and this one to be loaded up again.

Maybe the smartest thing would be for the Plate Glass Killer to wait years and years and years, until Henry Tyder was executed before starting up again. Then he’d have the last laugh on everybody.





2


It had been years since Alexander Mark had been in the kinds of places he now went to on a regular basis just to see if Dennis Ledeski was there. What was worse, he hadn’t liked those places to begin with, and he liked them even less now. Alexander was amazed that red-light districts didn’t put an end to sex altogether, heterosexual or homosexual, vanilla or otherwise. If there was ever a brilliant demonstration of what was wrong with the human animal when he considered himself nothing but an animal, here it was. It went beyond the simple ugliness of bodies desperately trying to rid themselves of their minds, or the ultimate ugliness of bodies that had actually managed to do so. It was the narcissism Alexander couldn’t stand. Here were people who existed in the world’s first version of virtual reality. There was nothing for any of them outside their own heads. That was how grown men could justify ruining the souls of barely pubescent boys. That was how other grown men could justify ruining their own. Alexander didn’t care what Chickie said. Too many gay men ended up in places like this, and their natural compatriots were not people like Chickie—or even like Alexander himself—but the Dennis Ledeskis of the world, not gay, just damaged. And wrong.

Actually, it had been blocks and blocks since Alexander had left the Zone. He just hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. He realized he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was. He looked around and saw that he was only three and a half blocks or so from Saint Bonaventure’s, which was where he had been going anyway, and only a little bit farther from the one bus stop he knew of where he could take a bus directly to Hardscrabble Road and Our Lady of Mount Carmel monastery. He hesitated for a moment—the conversation was better at Our Lady of Mount Carmel; he didn’t know who or what Sister Maria Beata had been before she left the world, but she had a first-rate mind and a first-rate reputation—and then opted for Saint Bonaventure’s. Intelligent though Sister Maria Beata was, Alexander still couldn’t imagine telling stories of the Zone to a nun in a full-bore traditional habit.

He picked up his pace and tried to get his mind clear of what he had been looking at for the past two hours: the men who all seemed to be hunched into their jackets so that nobody could get a clear look at their faces; the girls who were tired and pockmarked before they were fifteen years old; the boys who were worse. It was one of the great blessings of his life, a true grace, that he had never ended up on a street like that one when he was still in high school and finding his way. He wondered about places like the Zone, about how they had started and what made them still exist. Had there been an equivalent of the Zone in Philadelphia at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Chickie and other men like him said that places like the Zone would disappear if society would only accept gays and lesbians for what they really were, instead of stigmatizing them as sinful and psychologically damaged for being what they were born to be anyway.

Here was one of the things Alexander found himself in disagreement with when he talked to most of the men he knew in Courage. He did think that many gay men, if not all of them, were born that way. He surely knew that he himself had been. He couldn’t remember a time when his desires had fixed on girls instead of other boys. He couldn’t remember even a single sexual fantasy in all his years of growing up that had involved a human female. It wasn’t that he disliked human females. Given the ramped-up tendency of straight men to act like Neanderthals just to prove they were straight, Alexander had come to like women more and more over the years. He just didn’t want to sleep with them.

He got to the block where Saint Bonaventure’s was and was glad to see that the front steps of the church were lit up as if there were going to be a midnight mass. Saint Bonaventure’s was good that way. Father Harrigan liked to keep the place open twenty-four-seven. He even refused to make any concessions to the age of armed robbery, and half the time the Host was exposed on the altar in a gold monstrance with only some little old lady kneeling in the pews to keep it company. Alexander had never heard of anyone coming in and stealing it. Even the crack addicts seemed to want to leave it alone.

He went up the steps and into the vestibule. He could see through the glass-topped inner doors that the Host was indeed exposed and that the only guardians were two middle-aged men, pudgy and dark, having trouble staying on their knees. He took Holy Water on the tips of his fingers and made the Sign of the Cross, but he didn’t go into the sanctuary. Instead, he headed to the left, opened the door there, and went downstairs. He’d made a study of it once, in the long year when he’d made up his mind to join Courage and live the way he lived now. Every society at every time, in every place where there was writing to leave a record, recorded the existence of homosexual men. That, as far as Alexander was concerned, was all the proof that was needed, that homosexuality was as “normal” as it was possible to be. He understood why some gay men wanted to deny that. He understood less well why straight men and women wanted to deny it. It didn’t matter. What was, was. He didn’t need to deny who and what he was, or pretend to be something else, to make a decision to live differently than he might have been expected to.