Badger

Chapter 5

Chapter 5It was five after ten, just enough time to get to Somerville.

And of course I went. You know I went.

There was no stronger object to draw me away, keep me in place. The Badger’s pull propelled me down the wonky Park Street steps, through the plastic jaws of the turnstile, down to the Red Line platform. Through the tunnels, up to the surface, across the Charles, past the spot where I’d stood on the bridge railing, then back down into the earth through Cambridge, all the way to Davis Square. All those stops, all those doors that parted and chimed and invited me to change my mind . . . No chance.

I got to the address a minute or two late, jogging more to minimize how rained-on I was getting than to be punctual. It was an all-night diner, which surprised me. I’d been expecting something more sinister. I looked for the Badger’s bicycle on the sidewalk. Nothing.

As I opened the door, a slap of what-the-f**k-are-you-doing? nailed me across the face, but I shuffled inside, scanning the stools and tables. No Badger. Rather than wisely take that as a sign I ought to turn around, I sat in an empty booth and studied the laminated menu, like maybe the description of the eggs Benedict would tell me why in the hell I’d come here.

Before the door even swung in, I knew he’d come. My body prickled. I was facing the end of the restaurant. I couldn’t see him, but I felt him. Felt every footstep until he passed me and slid onto the opposite bench. He looked me over with his Russian assassin’s eyes, blue irises hiding in the shadows of his languid lids.

“Hey,” I said stupidly.

“Hey.”

“I brought all the cash I have, which is only about thirty bucks. I’m not sure how much you had in mind.”

He glanced at the menu. “That’s fine. I only want toast.”

“Pardon?”

He met my gaze again. “This place doesn’t take cards, but that’s fine. I’m a cheap date.”

“Oh. I thought you wanted me to pay you, to talk or something.”

His eyes narrowed. “You a reporter?”

I shook my head. I wouldn’t tell him I’d wanted to write about him only a few days ago. I didn’t want that anymore. He had far too many dimensions, far too much to try to capture in something so dumb as a local color piece. And it wasn’t worth the couple hundred bucks I might get paid if such a thing would only piss him off.

“So,” he said. “I was a d**k to you the other night.”

I gave a little start. “Um, yeah. You were. And this evening.”

“But you were worse,” the Badger said. “Threatening suicide’s a pretty shitty thing to do to a stranger.”

“I know. But it was the only way I could think of to get you to talk to me.”

“I don’t like being jerked around.” He said it slowly, then paused, glancing at our hands or the table between us. “But here I am, so I guess it worked. Congratulations.”

I smiled tightly. “What should I call you?”

“You don’t like Ronaldo?”

“I don’t think that’s your name any more than ‘the Badger’ is.” I looked to the center of his chest, to a diagonal stripe of dryness bisecting a V of damp cotton. He’d been wearing his hoodie and holster, but where he’d ditched them I couldn’t guess. A phone booth, maybe, if he really was a hero. Or in his top-secret Badger Cave.

“Call me whatever you feel like. But I don’t hand out my name to random girls off the street.”

“You think I’m a cop?”

“I don’t know who the hell you are, except maybe somebody who’s going to pick up this check, in exchange for wasting my time the other night. But no, I don’t think you’re a cop.”

“Definitely not. I’m a writer,” I said. “An unemployed copywriter. Not a journalist or anything. What do . . . What are you?”

He leaned forward and I did the same, and the conversation turned hushed and strange and intimate, a conspiracy gelling across the Formica.

“I’m a guy on a bike with impulse-control issues and a lot of warrants.” His lowered voice was the first taste of discretion I’d yet witnessed from him.

“Were you ever something else?”

A waiter interrupted us and took Badger’s order for toast and a cup of coffee, mine for scrambled eggs and decaf.

“What’s your deal?” I asked when we were alone again.

He smiled, more tired than amused. “Exactly what you see.”

“Why do you . . .” I sighed, feeling ridiculous, afloat in a vat of questions. “I don’t even know why I care. Or why I did that stupid thing on the bridge. But you’re more different from me than anybody I’ve ever heard of. I guess I want to understand you. Or figure out what the heck you are, and what you do, and why you do it. What’s going on in your head that lets you do it, because I’m sure as hell missing it.”

He shook his head. “That’s all backward. It’s whatever you’ve got in your head that keeps you from doing stuff. That’s what I’m missing. That filter. That little secretary’s desk your thoughts and reactions pass over before somebody stamps them ‘approved’ or ‘denied’ and either lets you get on with them or changes your mind. I’m missing the ‘denied’ stamp.”

“Oh.”

Our coffees arrived, and I pondered that idea as I shook a sugar packet.

“I get that, a little,” I said, stirring my coffee. “When I was addicted to painkillers, I’d get like that when I came down. Do you . . . Are you on something?”

“What do you think?”

“I think maybe, yeah.” I squinted at him. There was lucidity there, a glimmer of presence I’d never caught in the eyes of still-intoxicated women as they arrived at the correctional facility. “Well, maybe not. I don’t know.”

“I don’t need anything like that. If there’s anything I need, it’s probably h****n, and I’m not rich or stupid enough to take that s**t up.”

I nodded, believing him. “Most of the Internet thinks you’re on meth.”

“Internet’s a f*****g retard,” Badger said. “All it cares about is shopping and p**n and videos of cats falling off shit.”

I laughed. “That’s true. So all the stuff you do . . .” I leaned in close again, and he did the same. I watched his mouth as I spoke. “What makes you do it? All the stuff with your bike lock and the paintballs?”

“What made you keep swallowing those pills?”

I frowned. “Well, at first it was because I felt anxious and depressed. But then later it was the chemical dependence making me do it.”

“It’s a bit of both, with me,” Badger said. “I do it to shut my brain up. And I do it because I can’t not do it. My body’s no good at processing adrenaline.”

“Mine, either. But it makes me go all shaky and mute. I guess it does the opposite to you. You said you’re in it to get back at the assholes, not to help the victims?”

He nodded. “When I see something that pisses me off, it’s like . . .” His gaze jumped all over, as if the words he wanted might be scrawled on the walls or windows. “It’s like hell opens up inside my head. Then I chase, and I do something to even the score, and cold blue water fills my skull. All the anger goes hissss.” He closed his eyes as though meditating, wriggling fingers miming dispersion. “Just steam. And I can breathe again.”

I smiled. “You’ve got problems.”

His eyes popped open. “Maybe. But I’ve also got fixes.”

“Temporary ones.”

“Only kind there are, cupcake.”

“What’s . . . Okay, no offense, but what’s wrong with you? Is there a diagnosis or anything?”

“I’ve got faulty wiring.” He tapped his temple. “Apparently it’s called an explosive disorder, if you can believe that shit.” His slapped his palms to the tabletop. “Kaboom!”

Diners seated at the counter turned to glance at us, making my cheeks heat. “Indeed.”

“I have a really nasty temper, and no restraint. I’ve basically got no impulse control, so I do whatever I feel like, the second I feel it. I’m also into really f****d-up sex.”

I blinked. “Oh.”

“Plus, since I got no impulse control, I tell girls I just met that I’m into really f****d-up sex.”

“You don’t say.”

“I’m a f*****g mess,” he said, with the delivery of someone remarking about the weather, like, shrug, What can you do? “I can’t hold down a job, since I always lose my rag and flip out on my boss or a customer or a coworker. But since I started doing what I have been, people give me money. Some random person will flag me down and thank me, and shove a couple twenties in my hand. I actually make more now than I ever did at a real job. Not that I was ever an investment banker or anything.”

I dropped my voice even lower. “And you won’t tell me your name, huh? I won’t blab it to anybody. I like what you do. I’d never want you to get caught.”

“No offense, but considering how we met, I don’t have much reason to believe you’re not batshit.”

I nodded. “That’s fair. How old are you, then? Or where did you grow up? Anything.”

“Grew up all over Boston and the South Shore.”

“Okay. And your parents are from here?”

“My mom was a mail-order bride,” he said.

My head gave an involuntary shake. “Wait. Really?” Something about the way he said it . . . I didn’t believe him. Though it did explain how strikingly Russian he looked.

“What about you?” he asked. “What’s your deal?”

Our food arrived, and I leaned into the padded seat back, our conspiracy ruined by the introduction of the mundane — toast and eggs and jam packets.

“I grew up in Lincoln,” I said. “Then I moved here to go to MassArt. I live in Jamaica Plain now, this tiny place above a laundromat. It’s kind of a shithole, but I don’t want roommates, and it’s what I can afford. Where do you live? Like in a church belfry or an abandoned cannery or something?”

He smirked and oh s**t, he was sexy. Goddamn it. And I’d gotten so good at hating him in the last few days.

“I rent an attic apartment from my grandmother, not too far from here. On Sundays I let her cook for me, and we play canasta ’til her fingers start hurting.”

I believed him this time, more than about his mail-order-bride mother. But he was very tough to get a handle on, his delivery neither snarky nor deadpan nor sincere. I bet pathological liars share a continuum with people with impulse- and rage-control issues, so I decided to take what he told me with a very generous dose of salt.

“So what does your grandma call you?”

“Isaac.”

His attention was on his toast, and I let the name settle between us. It might be another lie, but he looked like an Isaac, I decided, with his interesting, haunted eyes. Maybe his supposed mail-order-bride mother was a Russian Jew. All I had to go on was mythology, but it was better than nothing.

We ate without speaking for a time, and though I still didn’t have much of a clue who was sharing my booth, I suspected I liked him again. I admired him, at least, and no longer worried he was a tweaker. Not one who fed off chemicals not naturally occurring in his brain, anyhow. His own cranial meth lab, prone to frequent explosion. I felt proud to have intrigued him enough to be invited here, and just a little disappointed I couldn’t brag to anyone about it. Not that I had many people to brag to.

I leaned in to whisper, “Does your grandma know about the whole Badger thing?”

“My grandmother’s a shut-in who thinks the Internet is a fad, same as cell phones and homosexuality. So no. She’s not on top of the rumors. She thinks I’m an accountant.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “I just told her that ’cause it’s the kind of job she’d approve of. And she pretends to believe me, and everybody’s happy.”

“Right.”

Badger popped the last of his toast in his mouth and dusted the crumbs from his palms. “Well,” he mumbled, chewing, “thanks for dinner, Adrian.”

“You’re going now?”

He drained the still-steaming coffee from his mug and stood. “Yeah. I got shitheads to shoot. I’ll see you around.”

“Okay. See you. Ride safe.”

“Enjoy your life.”

And he was gone again.