Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney

Author:Elizabeth Gaffney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588364579
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

22.

NEW MOON, OLD MOON

Back up on the street, alone, after Johnny and Beatrice had driven off with the cart full of money, Harris realized he had nowhere to go again. He certainly didn’t feel he could return to the O’Gamhnas’. And so he let his feet take him toward familiar territory: Wah Kee’s flop. He was carrying more money on him than he’d ever had in his possession before, but that didn’t mean he could go check in someplace better. They wouldn’t let a tradesman like him into the lobby at a decent hotel, even if he wasn’t soiled with sewage.

He had accepted Johnny’s kiss, down in the tunnel, and then he had sworn his fealty. What, he wondered, did a promise made under duress mean? Not much. He was still thinking about getting out of town, disappearing. He should have done it long before. Now, at last, there was nothing left to keep him, no more hope of redeeming anything he’d started in this city. He certainly wasn’t going to stand by and serve as a lackey for Beatrice and Johnny the rest of his life.

When he got to Pell Street, he saw Wah Kee’s storefront. He’d never had the money to go downstairs to the opium den before. Now he did, and the choice was easy. Harris had taken his share of laudanum syrups as a boy, when he was sick, and as a young man, experimenting. Smoking it, he knew, would have a stronger effect. He could use something strong about now. Taking opium wasn’t very far beyond the pale, particularly compared to the grand larceny he’d just engaged in—just an escape, just a little bit bad. Harris felt the need to be bad in some way that indulged himself rather than served the Whyos. Yes, he thought, a bit of oblivion, a night of freedom and forgetting, would be just the thing.

A red-eyed Chinese boy took his money and showed him to a couch in a smoky, windowless room lined with padded niches. It was quiet except for occasional coughing and one man’s light snore. The cushions were velvet but shiny and worn through in patches. Harris picked a spot and gave the boy an extra quarter for some additional blankets, tea and a hot-water bottle. Then he hung his coat on a hook at the back of his niche and settled in. The cushions exuded a sour, sweaty smell, but he was quickly distracted from that by other sensations: the bitter flavor that bubbled up through the water of his hookah, the sweet tingling that dawned throughout his body, the miraculously smooth flow of his breath. Soon, every cell of his body—yes, every cell—was buzzing with bliss, with optimism. The change was swift but not overwhelming. His focus simply clicked over into a better place, where everything was tolerable, even beautiful. At first, his imagination turned to thoughts of the occult world of cells and queer animalcules. The microbes swimming in Sarah Blacksall’s phials of sewage merged with the patterns of living color he’d seen through his father’s microscope.

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