Moon Over Harlem
Loren MacLeod

“Loren MacLeod’s work has appeared in Chiaroscuro,
Dark Planet, Glyph, and Twilight Showcase. She lives
in Virginia. Comments and questions may be
directed to: loren_macleod@hotmail.com
©Copyright 2001
Loren MacLeod

The people who know what happened to me say I’m some kind
of hero, but since I went to a fancy college I know that’s a cliche.
It’s true I’m not a bad guy. But I’m not a good guy, either, and I get
into these moods where all I see is a snow-balling chain of events
beginning with Professor Wieland. I mean, I was sitting in the back
row of his class on ancient astronomy, right? And watching him
draw a dramatically simplified version of the Aztec lunar calendar.
He was lecturing and muttering to himself as the chalk in his liverspotted
hand screaked around the blackboard, turning my nerves to
fried tinsel. Screak, screak. Suddenly, I couldn’t tolerate the noises
made by my classmates - the coughs muffled, the feet shuffled, the
notepapers ruffled. Somebody uncapped a pen - snick! - sending a
hot wire up my spine.
It was starting again. The clock seemed frozen at 6:30 pm. The
overhead fluorescents glared down on the scuffed linoleum floor,
the rows of battered wooden desks, and the clean, shiny hair of my
girlfriend, Elisa, who was sitting up front and didn’t see me
sneaking in twenty minutes late. I was trying to concentrate, but
ended up fidgeting like a first-grader and staring at the back of
Elisa’s head, staring at that waterfall of perfect hair. And then I saw
... her face. Minhoi’s face, I mean. Min’s exquisitely beautiful face.
She looked just like the day I first met her, a vision from the Far
East in a tight satin dress and high-heeled Corkease, trolling the
corner of 125th Street and Broadway with a Newport wedged
between her pearly teeth, smiling bemusedly at the wet-smack
college kid (me) who had somehow found the balls to talk to her.
Now, I want you to understand that Elisa was a really great girl -
pretty, sweet-tempered, and smart (a straight-A sophomore at
Barnard). But she planned on us getting married right after
graduation and, well, sex with her was like a stubbed toe compared
to what Min could do for me.
Min, my eternal love, fatefully portrayed in the ripples and glows
of another girl’s hair. She had high cheekbones, a lush mouth, and
enormous, almond-shaped eyes that seemed to be all pupil, deep
and soft as black velvet. Lustrous, dark-gold skin dusted with what
you would think was flour. Or that powder geishas use. My tongue
snaked out, wanting to lick it off.
Screak, screak.
It jolted me out of my seat. It was the last straw. I slipped
through the rear door and hurried back to my single in Furnald
Hall, where I dumped my books, stuffed the gun into the waistband
of my jeans, and pocketed the ten and two twenties I’d stolen from
a friend and stashed under my mattress next to the letter from the
Dean informing me that my cumulative GPA had rendered me
ineligible for graduation. Five minutes later I was travelling, heading
north on Amsterdam Avenue.
Columbia’s campus sprawls over a hill that crests at 116th Street.
By the time I got down to 121st, I’d passed the massive granite
walls that rise up on either side of Amsterdam to support the
university’s fortress of imposing towers and neoclassical buildings. I
glanced back once and caught my breath, so noble were their
silhouettes against the dying sun, which glittered on their windows
and set their copper roofs ablaze. But below me waited a trough of
stubborn darkness: three abandoned blocks of nineteenth-century
tenements, gutted by successive fires and slashed over with graffiti,
their doorways either boarded up or yawning blackly open like
entrances to a tomb. As usual, I got the willies and stepped up my
pace. I cursed the string of broken streetlamps that seemed to abet
the sinister aspect of those relics. Only a few things could raise the
hair on the back of my neck, and that little valley of shadows -
painstakingly avoided by even the local hoodlums - was one of
them. So, you can imagine my relief when I reached 127th and the
denizens of the ghetto returned to haunt the crumbling stoops and
sidewalks. Steam escaped from mouths and manhole covers, only to
be snatched away by the freezing winds that swept down the
Avenue and temporarily removed the stench of backed-up drains
and food-stamp cooking. I assumed the nasty weather would force
most of the criminal elements inside. That way I would only have to
watch out for the really strung-out ones, the ones who didn’t care if
was summer or winter, Tuesday or Friday, 1969 or 1979 - just that
there was some honky walking alone, after dusk, and they should
jump him.
But I had that gun! The nickel-plated .45 I swiped from my Uncle 
Larry. Prematurely senile Uncle Larry. The NYPD forcibly retired him
after twenty years on the beat and took his badge and gun. He
bought this gun, left it in a drawer, forgot all about it. Now the .45
was a lump of ice pressed against my kidneys, and I thought it gave
me a dick-first, John-Wayne, don’t-fuck-with-me swagger. Because in
front of the filthy bodegas and ugly red-brick housing projects were
guys in flared pants and Shaft jackets, passing a joint or a bottle in a
bag, jiving and spitting on the ground and listening to the radio
with “Soul Soldier” turned way up. Some knew my face, some
didn’t. But they all gave me a stone-eyed stare. I looked up,
ignoring them, and saw a familiar line of cornices and rooftops
arranged helter-skelter against a dull-black sky with lurid, fleshcolored
clouds. A full moon, as yellow and bloated as a Chinese
lantern, floated above a derelict water-tower. I looked down. There
were vacant lots overgrown with weeds and strewn with rubble.
Dark alleyways blocked off by iron gates. Piles of garbage and
blackened snow. The ghosts of dead hopes and blighted dreams.
All of which whetted my desire for her.
Min lived in a large but shabby brownstone that had been built in
the early 1930s by a successful Negro racketeer to accommodate a
migration of relatives from the South. It must have been grand in its
day, but now the apartments on the ground floor were knee-deep
in trash and reeked of mildew and piss. Disembodied voices floated
down the stairs. I bounded up the steps two at a time and knocked
the code on 3C, shivering like a dog trying to take a shit in a
rainstorm. Come on, come on, come on -
Min opened the door two decades after eternity and offered me
her right cheek. “Hello, Chrishtopher.” The adorable lisp was
courtesy of the gaps in her teeth. A naked bulb screwed into the
ceiling above the door turned her skin a ghastly greenish-yellow
and shadowed the shallow pits where she had dug into it with
ragged fingernails. Her huge eyes were a virtual roadmap of swollen
capillaries lacing out from the thin ring of brown surrounding their
dime-sized pupils. She was going down fast, her looks and health
losing out to a steady diet of drugs and bad luck.
Business as usual. I pecked the cheek, and the $50 disappeared
into her tiny hand to pay for admission to the shooting gallery, the
dose, and the syringe. I’m squeamish, and have an absurdly low
tolerance for pain. Min knew to get special rigs for me, namely
ultra-thin baby needles laced with lidocaine, stolen from Mount
Sinai Pediatrics by junkie nurses and sold to establishments with
picky clients like me. These she placed prudently in a cabinet above
the stove, away from prying eyes and sticky fingers. I mumbled
something about how she should take better care of herself and
brushed past her, hurrying to the kitchen, which was an out-and-out
horror: sticky parquet floor, stained countertops, blackened spoons 
in the sink along with little porcelain dishes scraped clean of every
remaining trace of “he-rawn” with an X-Acto knife. And also, in its
own corner of Hell, a child’s plastic sandbucket overflowing with
bloody rigs. I leaned over the grease-encrusted stove, opened the
cabinet, and became angry and bewildered to find nothing behind
the row of dusty soup cans except ... hello.
At first I saw just a corner of it, and for some reason assumed that
it was a gigantic albino cockroach lying belly-up in the shadows.
But no, it was brick-shaped and wrapped in thick white paper with
a famous Chinese character stamped on it in red ink. It wasn’t that
cheap brown stuff, that Mexican bonita which smells like rotten
fruit. No, this was snowy opium powder straight the misty, dragonhaunted
lands of the Orient. This was China White.
Holy Jesus! It came to me, then. A flash of unwelcome insight.
Min had a new boyfriend, a coke-snorting, smack-dealing, snappydressing,
psychopathic hustler called Reggie whose favorite pastime
was yo-yoing baby mice in and out of a jar filled with fire ants. This
was probably his. Nobody used the kitchen much - that’s why the
cabinet was such a super hiding place - and I guessed that Reggie
just stashed it in there without saying squat to Min, who, as tout le
monde knew, could not be trusted with so much as a joint. She,
meantime, had obviously forgotten (along with my baby needles) to
mention our little arrangement to her paramour.
Now I had the jitters even worse. I mean, man, oh man, where
and how does a two-bit thug like Reggie acquire an article of
merchandise worth thousands of dollars? But that’s as far as I went
with that line of inquiry; there was something infinitely more
important on my agenda, and I had already concealed her under my
coat. The narrow hall was squeezing me toward the back of the
railroad apartment, toward the living room, where I saw Min
dancing over by the turntable, swaying like a drunken marionette to
the music while her nipples poked through the holes in her
macrame hostess gown. Two nodders I didn’t recognize were
vegetating on the sprung sofa. Winter clothes hid their scarred
bodies but not their hands, which were grossly swollen from skinpopping.
A chemical smell rolled off of them, as if they were
bloated with battery acid and it was leaking out of their pores.
Drawing on the surface of the coffee-table was Min’s three-year-old
daughter, a ghoulish little thing with my nose and the eyes of a
circuit-blown robot. Crayolas were scattered hither and thither
among melted candles, assorted drug paraphernalia, and a pale
ceramic statuette of Kuan-Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy. I
glanced at Min again. She had lit another Newport, and was staring
up at the cobwebs drooping from the egg-and-dart ceiling moldings,
probably reminiscing about the den of iniquity she called home
back in Saigon, before she met the U.S. Marine who fell in love with 
her, brought her all the way back to the States, and dumped her for
his high-school sweetheart.
It was a tea-party for the damned, dimly lit. From the bathroom
came a stench like a ribbon of pea-green smoke snaking its way
through the acid tang of Min’s cigarettes. My poor stomach was in
knots. I couldn’t risk doing her in the bathroom anyway (the latch
on the door was broken), but it occurred to me to try one of the
bedrooms leading off the hall. I started for the coffee-table and its
impressive array of equipment.
“WHERE’S MY FUCKING SHIT.”
I jumped out of my hide. Min startled out of her reverie. Twin
demons were clattering down the hall toward us - Reggie’s twotone
patent Pyramids with the five-inch heels.
“MIN.”
I wasn’t Min, I was Jack: Jack-be-nimble-Jack-be-quick, and my
only choice was to nip into the coat closet, the big one with the
slatted wooden doors. I hunkered down on the floor and peered
through broken and missing slats. The hems of silken dresses
caressed the skin of my forehead and absorbed the cold sweat that
had broken out on it. I got the .45 out and shoved its nose into the
crack where the doors met. I saw Reggie charge in a split second
later, volcanically enraged, his gentle green eyes so wide from
pumping cocaine that they were about to pop out of their sockets,
cartoon-style, and start orbiting his head. Min received a backhanded
slap.
“WHERE THE FUCK IS IT BITCH.”
Disclaimers tumbled past her rotting teeth. She flattened herself
against the wall. The nodders bestirred themselves like groggy
vampires - Reggie was kicking them in their ulcerated shins. Then
he started tossing the place with one hand while the other shakily
brandished a gun; I could tell his motor coordination was shot from
a powerful combination of anger and fear and blow.
“KILL YOU PIECES A SHIT YOU CUNT!”
Bam, bam, bam.
I jumped and jumped and jumped. As bullets from the .45 blew
open the doors and exploded into flaking plaster, into the sofa,
which puffed up surprised cotton, into Reggie’s jerking flesh, and
into the soiled shag carpet Min trimmed down with a pair of
scissors so nobody would go batshit searching for dropped pills.
And then, suddenly, it was very, very quiet. For about a minute.
The record turned soundlessly on its plate. An acrid smell wafted
over to me, followed by the overwhelming scent of blood. You
should know that the scent of blood does something visceral to a
person, that it is nothing you can control. No matter how hard you
try to calm your nerves, the physical reactions come.
I knew that someone, somewhere in Harlem - some 
neighborhood Samaritan - was going to call the police, and with all
the screaming people and goodies on the premises, I should’ve
split. But no, no, no. I had to cook. So freaked out was I by the
gunshots and the smell of blood that the cops were just a fleeting
mental note instantly dismissed into utter oblivion by China. And I
scuttled out to grab works off the table.
Clear liquid bubbled in the teaspoon, absorbed itself into the
cotton, and sucked itself up into the pink-tinged syringe. I watched
it, shaking with impatience, but had to wait for the ambrosia to cool
down (it’s that or parboil your heart). Then I raced through the rest
of the ritual: tapping the cylinder, tying off my arm with my belt,
getting a register, and ... you’re wondering about her, aren’t you.
You want me to tell you how China is a sweet, numbing syrup
composed of love and desire and knowledge, and that her absence
is an insatiable ache in my body, every single cell of which shrieks
across the membrane wall, begging for that moment when I sink it
home and become a tiny, shimmering being, a gossamer existence
twinkling inside a dense opium fog ...
Well, I never bothered to ask or wonder how much the stuff was
cut. Sixty percent pur e. It hit me like an avalanche. I spent the next
three months in a coma, at Mount Sinai, and when I got out I had
to stand up before a grand jury. This jury decided not to proceed
with an indictment on charges of second-degree murder. Still - and
I have to hand it to them - the suits on Reggie’s side put up a hell
of a case against me. First, they said I shot him over a drug deal
gone south. But Min testified to the contrary. Next they claimed I
went into a jealous rage over her “romance” with him and how he
had replaced me as a “father figure” in the life of our child. She
couldn’t or wouldn’t deny this, so my own lawyers (hired and paid
for by my shell-shocked parents) segued into an elaborate song and
dance about my happy engagement to Elisa (broken by then, of
course), and described my indifference toward the little girl, whose
paternity anyway was mired in doubt due to the sporadic
prostitution of her mother. Finally, there was the irrefutable fact that
I had saved four lives (not including my own) by gunning Reggie
down before he went trigger-happy himself. And that was that.
Other things didn’t get wrapped up and disposed of so neatly. For
example, there are still times when I hallucinate and believe that I
am glowing like a lantern in the midst of the opium fog. When I
look up through its dark layers, I see China. My precious, precious
China. My eternal soul-mate. She is magnificent, dazzling, a hundred
thousand times more merciful than
Kuan-Yin. Her face is a pure and
blinding white. Whiter than a skull,
whiter than a cold city moon.