The hunchback looks down into New York City, squashing his face against tarnished glass windows. He isn’t supposed to be inside—he should be out in the world, juggling and dancing and attending to the wishes of the common people. He tells himself he’s sick of entertainment, that he’s done enough for those ungrateful sacks of piss and wine; they should be grateful he’s even willing to sail overhead in a private jet and carpet-bomb them with fast food wrappers and used condoms and quarters. Privately, though, he fears that he’s not as young as he once was. His arms ache, and his legs ache, and his back aches, and his warts ache, and his jaw aches, and his testicles ache, and the bald patch underneath his blonde wig itches. He resists the urge to tear it off and scratch his scalp bloody.
When he’s alone and closes his eyes, the gargoyles come. The worst ones whisper advice: who to call, what to text, the best drugs to snort and the best women to fuck and the best shows to watch. He always ignores them (why take advice from anyone that’s not you?). He prefers the ones with monstrous features, twisted horns and drooling fangs and burnished skin that glows gold with the trappings of his cathedral. They rub his shoulders and tell him how strong and brave and wise he is, nibbling bits of dead flesh out of his skin-folds until he’s oiled and relaxed and ready for a long day of wallowing. Once, when he was in the bath, he thought about asking one of them to hold his head underwater. Not so he’d drown, of course; he just wanted to know, for a second, what it would be like to have something important taken from him.
The tall figure behind him clears his throat, and the hunchback remembers he’s there. Correction: that’s the worst of the bunch, the one intruder he can’t forestall or foresee or forget for very long. He’s a clever, spidery cunt, that one; sometimes he looks like his father, and sometimes like one of his sons, and sometimes like a captain in a bulletproof vest, and sometimes like the up-jumped primate with the big ears and the stupid tan suit. Whatever form he takes, the instruction is always the same, and it always makes him want to lock the doors and close the shades and ring the bells until their cords snap out of their sockets.
Be a man, coward.
He thinks of the gypsy woman, and his fear turns to shame. He loves her so much, he knows, and that love makes him weak. He can’t stand how weak it makes him feel. He wants to grab her, to kiss her, to rip out her tongue. He wants to hold her and take her and wear her like a cloak against the heat of the world. He wants her to burn with him, the way that he knows no one else can. The way that no one ever would for him. For a monster.
He tunelessly hums to himself, and words drift to mind unbidden. Out there / Where they all live unaware / What I’d give / What I’d dare / Just to live one day out there.
He can’t remember what song that’s from. If anyone asks, he’ll just tell them he came up with it himself.