Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat.

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp.

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears

And water'd heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-William Blake

The events in this story take place some few years before Blood Saga, and the appearance of Christopher Ashby, Lawrence Malone, Daniel, Sunny and Kruinh in The Old

P A R T

O N E

H E R O E S

O N E

WHAT

HAPPENED

THAT NIGHT

“Maybe it’ll give me some new nightmares.”

-David Lawry

On the very night that it happened, David Lawry was already telling himself he needed to get the fuck out of this town. When he left he should have stayed gone, but he came back to be with his mother, to care for her in those last years with the cancer that nibbled on her with a slow boredom. Only now she was gone, and he was still here with this shitty job and this shitty place. No, before he drove over to the Eastside that night, he already knew he needed to be gone.

“Everyone thinks you have to go to California,” David was saying to himself as he drove, “but you don’t. What the fuck is in California anyway?”

On Dorr, heading south to downtown, he passed the campus of Saint Ignatius Men’s College Prep where he’d gone it seemed, about a million years ago. The school was set far off the street, and in the night completely dark, not like the place of his riotous youth when things were better, when you didn’t know what you were going to be, but you didn’t think that Joe would end up working at CVS and Mark would put on a hundred pounds and do accounting for the tire company. David had been a middling student, and he had gotten into a middling college. Two years later, looking for some more adventure and looking to get the hell out of Ohio, he’d ended up in Ann Arbor. It was around there he’d made his life. He had loved Michigan and never thought he’d be back here. But sickness changes things.

Everything changes after thirty. The control you thought you had, the dreams you thought mattered…. Everything changes.

Being a police officer on the outskirts of Ann Arbor was nothing like this. When he came to Lassador as a detective, even though the transfer was easy, he wondered if being a detective out there qualified him for the shit he saw down here. He’d always heard of the violence in Lassador, but that was all downtown, or on the Westside, or in Far South. It was removed from him. He lived in the nice part of Lassador.

Now David Lawry crossed the bridge into downtown and it looked a little dead tonight. These few blocks, where Door met Denning and Denning went south were quiet, nice to look at, nice to live in. He’d been in Ainsley, Michigan before, and he was pretty sure downtown Lassador was the size of that whole town. Out to the east were the broken factories, the ruins of old Saint Patrick’s, the Amtrak station looking like the large and unlovely carcasse of some prehistoric beast. South went into Germantown and Little Hungary, but he headed west, and when you crossed Sherrold, things went a little dicey, and when you crossed Clemente, more dicey still, and when you had finally hit Stickney, if you didn’t have a gun you were taking your life in your hands.

“Life in your hands,” David murmured.

It was a defence mechanism, really, to think about the nice things back in Ainsley when he was in the very ugliest parts of his job. He had gotten the dispatch as he was hitting Denning, on his way home, and took it, calling for back up. But his gun was ready and he climbed out of the car, siren on, and crossed the yard. The man was shouting. The wife had called and said he was on drugs and he was out of his mind. All of the houses were depressed. This could be seen even in the dark David could see the basic bungalows with stoops of wide porches hadn’t been painted, and there was no sidewalk or where there was sidewalk, weeds grew up out of it to destroy what was.

The man was screaming, “You fucking bitch!” But she wasn’t screaming back. David kicked down the door the same time he bellowed “Police.”

Two other cars were rolling up, coloring the dismal street red and blue. David looked around in horror and disbelief. Before things could come together in his mind, the large man, blood all around his mouth, screamed and rushed David. David Lawry pulled the trigger once twice, three times, forcing himself not to shut his eyes.

“It was self defense, so it’s not like he’s gonna get in trouble,” Officer Carlton was saying.

“Would everyone in the family see it that way?” Barton asked.

“Anyone in the family? There’s no one left. Didn’t you see what that fucker did?”

“You just can’t tell these days? You do your best, and these days it seems like all cops are under fire.”

“Stop your fucking pity party. When a cop puts his knee on a fucker’s neck, he should be under fire. When you shoot someone who was only selling cigarettes, you should be under fire. All Dave did was his job.”

In the precinct office, empty as it was at this time of night, under the ugly fluorescent light, David Lawry wondered if Barton and Carlson thought he didn’t hear them? Of course, he probably looked as out of it as he felt.

“You can go home,” Captain Karney was saying. Karney, related to Kevin Karney who’d played on the basketball team? Maybe. “You did good, Lawry.”

“I didn’t do anything.” David was surprised his voice didn’t break. “We didn’t do anything. We didn’t save anybody.”

“You saw a lot, Lawry,” Captain Karney said. “We all saw a lot. Go home. Get some rest. Maybe sleep in.”

“That won’t be necessary,” David said, getting up.

Karney was about to say something to the young detective. Instead he just shook his head and said, “Please sleep in.”

On his way out of the station, David ran into Cody. He was new to the force and he looked as pale and blank as David felt.

“You need a ride?” David called to him.

Cody hadn’t heard him. He called again. The boy looked distracted.

“Naw,” he said. “I let my brother have the car. I’m waiting on him.”

“You know you could take a cop car home?”

“I don’t like to do that,” Cody said.

“Cody,” David said. “You need a drink?”

Cody took a breath.

“Yeah.”

“How could you do that?” Cody kept saying. The Scotch sat in his hand half empty. David found that he’d put two away and thought he should probably stop, For a cop to be driving drunk with another cop was a bad idea. They weren’t far from the station. Maybe he’d take a cop car home tonight and put up the siren, then who would stop him?

“I don’t care how high you are,” Cody said, “How could you do that to your family? I mean, did you see it? Of course you saw it. You saw it first.

“I thought we’d make things better. I thought we would save lives. But half the time we’re too late. I thought we’d get the bad guys, but we never do. What’s the point?”

When David didn’t answer, Cody said, again, “What’s the point?”

“I…” David began. “We… We do good.”

“We don’t even do good when it’s simple stuff like keeping down the noise in an apartment building. Remember that woman who called in about her neighbor. And then we thought we took care of it. But—”

“No one could see that coming—”

“But it still came. That asshole still went in and raped and killed an old woman just because…. A noise complaint?”

“But it’s not always like that.”

“It is always like that!” Cody argued.

“Back in Michigan it wasn’t,” David said, sounding desolate and empty to himself.

“Maybe I should get back there. Maybe we need to get out of Lassador.”

He drove Cody home. Cody lived on the Southside too. Cody was on Mackey Street, and a little further south, in the old house he’d grown up in on Belmont Avenue, lived David, not far from the girl’s Catholic school where his sister had gone. It was a little house, raised up on a ridge over the sidewalk, like all the houses that sat on the inside street looking off of Denning. Some houses never got clean because there was no time to clean them, but this one was never dirty because there was no time to live in it. He was exhausted and more than. He turned on the Late Show for company, and after shutting the curtains, he collapsed on the couch with the light on and fell asleep.

David jumped out of his dream, screaming. It took him a moment to look around and realize he was in his house. The little house with the steps that went up to two little dormer rooms and a bathroom. There was this living room, a master bedroom and the kitchen behind him, a small space to protect, and there was the company of the light and whatever was playing on television. When we was little there had been an end to TV, a sign off and then stripes across the screen till six am, Now TV never went off. It was a constant friend. He was covered in sweat and he smelled like cigarettes and liquor and the staleness of the day. David stripped in the living room on the old beige carpet, then stomped up the stairs and stood under the shower. When he had toweled off, he went into the darkness of his childhood bedroom. He could not make himself sleep in the master bedroom where his mother had lain dying. He flung himself on his face and went back to sleep.

His body woke up him up at seven. He stood up and looked out of the window. The day was sunny and he could see directly into the house next door. He knew all his neighbors, and Claire was getting dressed in her bedroom. Thoughtlessly he watched her, and now she saw him. She looked directly at him, and suddenly David realized he was naked.

Claire smiled across the space between the two houses. She turned to look at him, and opened her blouse. She took off her brazierre and bared her breasts to him. It was a moment before he realized he stood there with an erection. She smiled and then, turning around, closed the curtains. David stood in his room naked and hard like a teenage boy, and like an old man, which he felt if he didn’t look it, David was too exhausted to be embarrassed, He groaned, threw himself back on the bed, and remembering Captain Karney’s order, went back to sleep.

David Lawry was a good enough looking man. He didn’t pay too much attention these days to his image in the mirror, and that is how he chose to describe himself. He’d always been able to get the girl, but that hadn’t mattered in a while. Caretaking was sexless. Mourning was sexless. There was just doing what he had come back here to do. And you could resent it, but there was no point in that. In the morning, dressing for work, remembering the encounter that had taken place, he examined himself.

All of his shirts and all of his pants matched, so there wasn’t a lot of looking for what to wear. Something beige and some beige blazer, a red tie, a white shirt. He was tall and white, not Caucausian, but nearly alabaster, pale as fuck Tony Manning, a sergeant on the force said, and David’s hair was dark and thick and fell in wings that Sonia said were from the Nineties and needed to be taken care of except they were so pretty. He was dark eyed and aquiline nosed like all the Italian ancestors who’d had some name someone on Ellis Island had not wanted to spell properly and so had written Lawry.

“It was the bad skin,” David remembered, rubbing his chin and thinking about how he should have shaved as he headed downtown.

He’d had the worst acne in high school, then started using something to clear his skin and it had worked, but his mother had cried, “What the hell. You look like Michael Jackson! What’s in that?”

At the time David didn’t care that he looked like a ghost. He didn’t have all those red marks over his face, and he was dating Suzie Mansfield and liked the way he looked in his wrestler’s singlet. Twenty years later, he remembered that this is why no one associated him with sunny Italy. He’d stayed pale ever since.

Well, Anthony Paglioti. Remember him. What an asshole. Curly blonde hair, blue eyes, had a face like a possum. He was white as fuck too. And he was Sicilian. So it probably wasn’t the skin cream. I mean, there really were some white white Italians.

David was aware that his brain was rambling now. He was parking and heading to the squat old precinct building. He was Daniel Trivonti on Hill Street Blues. He’d been a little too young for that but fallen in love with the show in re runs. What was his family’s old name that the man on Ellis Island had been too lazy to translate? That story was a lie. David knew that it was his great grandfather who changed it when signs all over the place said no coloreds, no Irish, no Italians. He’d changed it for his childrens’ sake and those kids had gone out into the world worrying, would someone know what they were? Would they get away with the ruse? Imagine that. He remembered Woody Stabler, this gay kid at Saint Ignatius everyone made fun of. David didn’t want to because…. Because he just didn’t. Later, when he thought about life he wondered if it was because his grandparents were like that, spending a long time proud of what they were, but afraid of being found out. And now here he was, and he didn’t even know his real name.

There was a mood in the station when David came in, and he grabbed a donut, which made him a stereotype, and asked Delores at the desk, “What’s going on?”

“You don’t know?” she looked almost irritated.

Captain Karney’s door flew open and he said, “I thought I told you stay home.”

“You told me sleep in,” David held the donut half to his mouth.

“Well, you should stay home.”

“Whaddid I do?”

“It’s not what you did. It’s… It’s Cody.”

“Cody Taylor?” David said. “Cody Cody? ”

“Cody shot himself this morning.”

The ground lurched under David. He felt sick. He put the donut down and went for the bathroom, trying to not fall as things turned around him. He threw up, and was surprised at how much was in him. He kept vomiting into the toilet and then he washed his face and rinsed his mouth.

When he came out, Carlson was there.

“That kid ate his fucking gun. His brother said he was feeling awful last night. He said you took him out and he felt better, but you could tell things had shaken him, and this morning he was getting dressed and he was in his uniform and everything. He was sitting by the edge of the bed, and he took out his gun, told his brother sorry, put it in his mouth and just pulled the trigger.”

“What?”

“Yeah. His brother was in the room with him. It was like 7:45, Maybe eight.”

That had been the same time he was watching Claire across the street and she was giving him a boner.

“I’m so sorry, man,” Carlson squeezed Dave’s shoulder.

“Now do you know why I want you to go home?” Captain Karney said.

“I get it.”

“Cause you saw the same thing he saw.”

“A half naked asshole with blood all over his face who had just knifed three kids to death? Their bodies on the floor. And his wife—the woman who called us—whose voice message is still recorded begging for help—dead on the floor. Head almost off? Yeah, I saw it. I saw it, and not only that, but then I killed him. But I killed him too late. He’d done what he’d done, and they’re gone. And now so is Cody.”

“You need to take some time off.”

“Is that an order?”

Karney took a breath. He chose his words carefully.

“No, it is not an order. It should be. But it isn’t.”

“Good, because the only thing that’s going to happen to me is I will be in a house by myself with nothing but my nightmares, seeing this asshole over and over again. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just go back and work.”

As David Lawry went to his desk, Captain Karney said, “and what good is that going to do in the end, Dave?”

“I dunno,” Dave shouted back angrily, “maybe it’ll give me some new nightmares. This current one kind of sucks.”