The stairwell smelled like mildew, old cooking, and something else beneath those two things that Greg couldn’t identify and didn’t want to think about too carefully. The carpet on the stairs had been worn down to the backing in the center of each step, and the single bulb on the second floor landing was out, so they climbed the last two flights by the light coming through the stairwell window, which was filmed with grime and turned everything the color of old paper.
The fourth floor hallway had four doors. Three of them had the particular sealed quality of spaces that hadn’t been opened in a long time. Mail piled at the base of one, a dead plant tipped over in front of another. The door at the end of the hall had light coming under it and the faint sound of something Greg couldn’t resolve into music or speech, just a low frequency presence on the other side.
Vic knocked twice.
The man who opened the door was wearing a white suit.
He was perhaps fifty, with a face that was difficult to look at directly, not ugly, not remarkable, just somehow resistant to being fixed in the mind, like trying to remember a room you’d only glanced into.
His eyes were what Curtis’s had been. The veins threaded through with black, the pupils so dilated the irises were thin rings of color around two dark centers. He looked at Greg with those eyes, and Greg had the distinct and irrational sensation of being looked at from a very great distance.
The apartment behind him was immaculate. Greg could see that immediately, even from the doorway. Clean white walls, clean floors, furniture arranged with the deliberate simplicity of a place that had been considered carefully. A bookshelf with its books in order. A table with nothing on it. The contrast with the hallway behind them, with the building itself, was so complete it produced a kind of mild vertigo, like stepping through a door in a dream.
“Victor,” the man said, and then looked at Greg. “And a friend.”
“This is Greg,” Vic said.
“Greg,” the man said, as though tasting the name. “Come in.”
They went in. The apartment was warm and smelled clean as well as faintly of something herbal that Greg couldn’t name. The man closed the door behind them and gestured toward a long white couch against the wall, clean as everything else, where they sat. Greg perched at the edge of it out of habit.
“How much were you looking for today?” the man said, remaining standing, his hands folded in front of him.
“Three,” Vic said.
“Two,” Greg said.
The man nodded as though this confirmed something. “Sit comfortably,” he said. “There’s no rush.”
He looked at them both for a moment. “Would either of you like some tea?”
“No thanks,” Greg said.
Vic shook his head.
“I’ll make some for myself,” the man said, before he moved toward the kitchen.
Greg leaned toward Vic immediately.
Vic looked at him.
“The suit he’s wearing,” Greg said. “That’s the same suit. Same as the two guys I saw following me. Yesterday and today.”
Vic’s expression was not the one Greg expected, not surprise, not confusion.
“I know,” Vic said.
Greg waited for more. More didn’t come. He was still trying to formulate the next question when the man returned with a white cup and saucer and sat down in the chair across from them, crossing one leg over the other, perfectly at ease.
“My name is Fourteen, it’s nice to finally make your acquaintance,” the man said, looking at Greg.
Greg opened his mouth and closed it. “That’s a number,” he said.
“Of course,” Fourteen said pleasantly, and sipped his tea.
He set the cup on the saucer and held both in his lap and looked at them both with an expression of genuine warmth, the kind that Greg associated with people who were either very good or very dangerous, and sometimes both.
“I need to share something with you before we conclude our business,” Fourteen said. “If you’ll allow me.”
He did not wait to see if they’d allow him.
“The most extraordinary thing about the human condition,” he began, his voice settling into a register that was neither loud nor soft but somehow filled the room completely, “is not its capacity for violence, though that capacity is considerable, and not its appetite for pleasure, though that appetite is boundless. It is the capacity for selflessness. The willingness to place another’s suffering above one’s own comfort. To reach toward another person’s pain with an open hand. There is no other force in the natural world that operates this way. A river does not divert itself for the sake of the stone. But a man will.”
Greg shifted on the couch. He wanted to say something, to interrupt, to ask about the suits or the vials or the name, but Vic’s hand came down on his forearm, light but definite. Greg looked at Vic and Vic was watching Fourteen with an expression Greg had never seen on his face before. It was open and still, like a man hearing something he’d been waiting a long time to hear.
“Kindness is not weakness,” Fourteen continued, turning the teacup slightly in its saucer. “This is the lie that the frightened tell themselves. Kindness is the only form of courage that requires nothing in return. To be kind to someone who cannot repay you, who will not thank you, who may not even notice: this is the divine action. This is the closest that flesh comes to something larger than flesh. Every tradition that humanity has ever built around the sacred has at its center, if you clear away the ornament and the doctrine, this single instruction: see the other person. Actually see them. Extend yourself toward them without calculation.”
He paused and drank his tea.
“The world does not reward this,” he said, more quietly. “The world is not organized around this principle. But the world is wrong. And somewhere in each of you, beneath everything that has accumulated, you know that it is wrong. That knowledge is the most valuable thing you possess.”
He finished his tea and set the cup and saucer on the floor beside his chair with great care, and looked at them both.
Greg felt strange. Not high, he knew what high felt like in all its variations, but something adjacent to it, a heaviness behind the eyes. He wanted to attribute it to the crystal wearing thin but the feeling wasn’t chemical. It was something else that he didn’t have a category for.
“Now,” Fourteen continued, “Before we conclude, would you both extend your palms, please. Up, to the sky.”
Vic had his palms up before Greg had processed the request. Greg looked at Vic, then turned his own hands over slowly, holding them out, feeling faintly ridiculous.
“Praise be to the prophet,” Fourteen said.
“Praise be to the prophet,” Vic said, without hesitation.
The silence held Greg for a moment. Fourteen was looking at him with those enormous dark pupils, patient, not demanding.
“Praise be to the prophet,” Greg said.
Fourteen smiled.
He reached into his jacket and produced five glass vials, empty, the same size as the one he’d sold Vic before, and set them on the arm of his chair. Then he produced a syringe, standard gauge, and rolled up his left sleeve to reveal an arm that was unmarked; no bruising, no track marks, nothing that corresponded to drug use.
He pressed the needle to the inside of his elbow and pushed it in.
What came into the barrel was black.
Greg watched it fill. Fourteen’s expression did not change. There was no wince, no held breath. He drew the plunger back slowly, the vials filling one by one with the black fluid, that same diesel smell rising faintly into the clean air of the apartment.
Fourteen withdrew the needle cleanly and rolled his sleeve back down. He handed three vials to Vic and two to Greg. The transaction was complete; there had been no money involved and Greg realized he had not thought to ask about that at any point.
“Go well,” Fourteen said, rising.
They rose. They went to the door. Greg looked back once from the doorway and Fourteen was already seated again, picking up his teacup, turned slightly away.
The door closed behind them with a soft and final click.
They hit the street outside the building. Greg kept walking for half a block before he turned around.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
Vic had his hands in his jacket pockets and his face had the settled quality it had carried through the whole visit, that openness, that unfamiliar stillness. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“You know what I mean. The sermon. The name. The man drew that stuff out of his own arm, Vic. He put a needle in his arm and pulled out a vial of black liquid, handed it to us, and you’re standing there like we just had a normal transaction.”
“It was a normal transaction,” Vic said.
“It was not a normal transaction.” Greg held up the two vials. “I’m not putting this in my veins. Whatever this is, I’m not doing it.”
“You’re overthinking it,” Vic said. “You overthink everything when the crystal’s wearing down.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing.” Greg put the vials in his breast pocket and looked at Vic squarely. “Just tell me what’s going on. All of it. Who is he.”
Vic looked at the sidewalk, then at the building, then at Greg.
“He’s just a man,” Vic said. “He has a sermon he wants to deliver. You sit and listen, you hold your palms up at the end and say the thing, he gives you the ichor. That’s all it is.”
“That’s all it is?” Greg repeated.
“That’s all it is.”
Greg looked at him. “And you’ve been doing this, and don’t think it’s weird in any way?”
“Yeah, I’ve done it every day this week.”
“Every day?” Greg rubbed his face with both hands. “And you’ve actually been using the stuff?”
The pause that followed was brief but it had weight.
“Not exactly,” Vic said.
Greg lowered his hands. “What does not exactly mean.”
Vic looked somewhere past Greg’s shoulder. “I haven’t used it,” he said. “Any of it. I’ve been going every day, listening to the sermon, getting the vials, and selling them. Ten bucks a hit. It’s free product, Greg. You just have to sit through the sermon, say the words, and you walk out with free product you can flip for ten a unit.”
Greg stared at him. “So everything you told me about what it does…”
“Things I heard from people I sold it to,” Vic said. “Yeah.”
“And the coming down for days…”
“I was tired,” Vic said. “I don’t know. Seemed like a good selling point.”
Greg put his hands on top of his head and breathed out slowly.
“Let me get this straight. You’re going to a man named Fourteen every day, listening to a sermon about kindness, letting him stick a needle in his arm to draw out black fluid that you sell” Greg looked at him. “That doesn’t seem at all strange to you.”
Vic considered this with more genuine thought than Greg expected. “It did at first,” he said. “But the sermons are…” He paused. “Greg, he makes sense. When he talks, things make sense in a way they don’t usually make sense. I’ve been thinking about what he says all week. About selflessness and seeing people. I look forward to going. That’s the honest truth.”
“You’re crazy,” Greg said. Not meanly. Just as a statement of observed fact.
“Maybe,” Vic said. “But I’m also up about three hundred dollars this week.”
Greg looked at the vials in his mind’s eye, sitting in his breast pocket against his chest. He looked at Vic, who had the expression of a man who had made his peace with something and wasn’t interested in unmaking it.
“Whatever you say man. I’ll catch you later.”
Greg spent the rest of the day working.
He did the dumpsters on the east side in the early afternoon while the crystal still had some edge on it, finding two bags of cans behind a bar that had clearly done good business over the weekend, and a length of aluminum conduit in the alley behind an electrical contractor’s shop that he broke down and loaded into the cart. He found half a breakfast burrito in a takeout bag on top of a trash can that he ate without deliberation, cold and slightly dry, beans and egg and a little hot sauce that still had some presence. He found a grocery bag near the bus stop that had two apples and a container of hummus.
He thought about Fourteen’s apartment the whole time. The whiteness of it. The way the man’s arm had not reacted to the needle. The way Vic had sat on that couch with his palms up and said the words without any of the hesitation that Greg had felt.
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