Sunt Lacrime Rerum
Sometimes, just sometimes, when the night is close and dense and the Miami heat breathes down his neck like a dragon, sometimes he remembers. It begins so slow, the curl and lap of flames at his ankles and wrist, as if trying to bind him to his bed. Heat blankets him, thick as the old comforters and the fat pilings of hospital blankets back home. He sweats, rivers in the magnifying glass darkness. He's like a worm drying in the sun after a rainstorm, frying in his own fluids. His breathing is loud as the creak and groan of unmaintained beams and the pop and blister of the paint and how it scalds, fresh hot fried eggs, when it plops on his skin.
When he thinks that no one can hear him, he screams. Sure, he yells every time it happens. But not screaming. A trackrat is he--and he knows what a scream is. He knows how a howl of real pain and fear comes up from somewhere deep inside your belly and back, almost to the spine. Knows that fear is a column of ice in your throat suddenly flash melted by a cord of fire. He screams when the sounds inside his head bounce one too many times from skulledge to skulledge, bounce back forth and finally out his mouth in a dissonant chord of anguish. He feels it, all over again, just like he was a kid again. Just like the wail of a siren in the Miami night is Mike, the little runner boy, shrieking when he falls on the hot tiled floors. Just like the burring rumblegrumble of a semitrailer shaking his apartment complex is the noise of the fire engine come finally too late to save their home, too late of exonerate him. Just like his bedsprings are the sirens of the cops who started the damn fire in the first place, who came a framed him for it just 'cause he was a pyro, though just a baby pyro then.
He's furious at them, for now he remembers fourteen as fear. He remembers nothing about that year except a birthday at the Westfield Detention Center, of faces in darkness and trying to save himself in court and his lawyer telling him to shut up. When he's done screaming, done yelling, done bellowing in truly trackrat pain-is- rage-is-hate, when he's all done he cries and that's the rarest of all. He's only cried since he met Horatio, that strange cop who acted like a captain. Who acted like Limpet used to when one of them would wake up in the night with the demons of the past clawing furrows in their brains. He might've been angry, might've been indignant. You profess that you could help me? I've had my life already, Horatio, had it locked up in Massachusetts. Never dated, never played sports, never sang in a chorus or made an idiot of myself at my prom. I had my life. And he might've been angry at Horatio, if Horatio hadn't been right.
You have every right to be angry. It was wrong, what they did. They took your life away from you.
He hadn't needed to say it, because Horatio knew.
And that made him cry.