1984.

Every step Hank took up the stairs of Jasmine’s building made the wound in his abdomen burn. He leaned on her for the whole three flights. Then, she opened the door to her apartment, and the air sang with perfume, overpowering the hallway stench of beer, sweat, and urine.

As Jasmine brought him inside, it was like breaking open a dull, gray stone to find a geode blazing with color. Scarves, fans, masks, and feather boas draped across her walls around posters and cut-out magazine pages of sex symbols like John Travolta, Madonna, Prince, Freddie Mercury, and Grace Jones. 

A jumble of her dresses hung from a rolling coat rack in the corner like so many exotic birds. Her shoes, high heeled and strappy, stood below. Underneath the one window, with its ragged blinds, a folding card table held piles of Jasmine’s cosmetics and a light-up vanity mirror with a crack running through its surface. On top a television stood three styrofoam heads — one with a black wig, another silver, and the third bare.

She helped him to her couch, which groaned underneath him. The pillows and duvet shoved over to one side told Hank that it also served as her bed. He saw no bedroom, no kitchen either, just a hot plate sitting on top of a small refrigerator barely big enough for a gallon of milk. 

The only inner door opened to a bathroom, which Jasmine stepped inside once she got Hank off his feet. A few minutes later, she re-emerged wearing a nylon cap over her head, wig in hand, which she added to the other two on the television. 

She had removed her dress and instead wore a flower-print kimono, frayed at the edges, with a white camisole underneath. Hank could see her form was less curvy than it previously appeared, her angles more masculine. 

“You’re a man,” said Hank.

“Listen,” said Jasmine. “I do not need you bleeding on my couch, trying to tell me what I am. I will put your big beefy ass through this window, we clear?”

“We’re clear,” said Hank. 

He hadn’t meant to offend. He never met a trans woman before. His only frame of reference were prison inmates who heard would have sex with other guys. They would sometimes dress or act a little more feminine, and they were usually easy to get along with. Maybe Jasmine would be too.

“Good,” she said and collected her medical supplies, which, as she promised, primarily consisted of a needle and thread. There was also a roll of toilet paper, some duct tape, a plastic cup of water from her sink, a towel, and a bottle of Medusa’s Head rum. Jasmine waved the Medusa’s Head at him. “You want some of this to drink first?”

Hank shook his head. 

“Suit yourself,” she said, and took a swig before kneeling at his side. “Lift up your shirt.” What he showed her made her whistle. “If you aren’t the most lucky motherfucker…”  Hank had to agree it didn’t look good. 

Jasmine slipped on a pair of latex gloves and got to work washing away the blood caking on the hairs of Hank’s stomach to expose the wound. His eyes wandered the walls as she did, and he noticed the photograph of a black woman with a tiara and a scepter, looking like a princess.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Jasmine threw a glance over her shoulder. “Oh, her? That’s Miss America, Vanessa Williams.”

“Miss America is black?”

The question apparently hurt Jasmine, because she had to close her eyes and let it roll through her. “Lord Jesus, give me strength. Yes. Yes, Vanessa Williams is black and, yes, she is Miss America. And it don’t mean shit they took her crown away for those sexy pictures she took. That’s her body, and it ain’t nobody else’s damn business. Vanessa Williams is still Miss America no matter what they say.”

“Oh,” said Hank, “I didn’t know.”

“How the hell not? You been living under a rock.”

“Prison.”

“No shit? I done some time too. You know…” She gestured around the room as if it would offer a better explanation than she could. “For reasons…”

“You’re a prostitute,” said Hank.

“Boy, you ain’t got one single drop of tact, have you? We don’t say ‘prostitute,’ we say, ‘lady of the night.’”

“Lady of the night,” Hank repeated, chewing over the idea that Jasmine was a lady.

“That’s right. And what about you? No way was that your first street fight. Got yourself an assault charge or something?”

It would be the first time Hank managed to say it out loud to anyone since the Crimson Wraith. “I didn’t mean to kill my wife.”

That made Jasmine stop. She lifted her hands like maybe she wasn’t sure she wanted to be touching him, and Hank wondered if she was going to tell him to leave. Eyeing him carefully, she asked, “You didn’t?”

Hank shook his head.

“You sure about that?”

He nodded.

“For real?”

He nodded again. “We had a fight. We had lots of fights. She sometimes hit me. I never hit her. Then one time I did. And she fell. Hit her head bad.” 

So many times, Hank’s rehab group had asked him to tell the story of what happened. To say the words was to acknowledge what happened, to accept it. He never did a very good job before, but he thought his therapist would have been proud to hear him tell it to Jasmine.

“I don’t know if she was a good person, but I didn’t want her to die,” he continued. “And sometimes I miss her. It wasn’t always fighting.”

“Well that’s a goddamn shame,” said Jasmine. “This gonna hurt.” And then she poured the rum on Hank’s wound. 

And it did, better than any punch he ever took. Pain flashed like a wall of white in his brain. He felt it shoot down his thighs and electrify his heart. Hank wasn’t sure what kind of sound came from him, only that it wasn’t quiet.

 In the silence that followed, Jasmine asked, “You done?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, this is the part where I stitch you back together.”

Every time the needle entered Hank, it felt terrible, a tiny bit of awfulness over and over again, a pinch on a pinch on a pinch, each one overlaying the other. It brought a heat to his cheeks and made him want to speak. 

“I told him I didn’t mean to kill her,” he said.

“Who did you tell, honey?”

“The Crimson Wraith.”

“Did you?”

“I did. He caught me. I told him I didn’t mean it.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you told him, then.”

“You know what he told me?”

“What’s that?”

“He made me promise that I would live. And I would make things better. Whatever it takes.”

Jasmine started tying off the stitches. “That why you did what you did tonight? Why you ran like some fool superhero down a dark alley to save a woman you didn’t even know nothing about?

“Yes.”

Jasmine folded the toilet paper several times before taping it over the stitched-up wound. “Well, even if yours truly don’t need no rescuing like that, I guess someone ought to be doing it, now the Crimson Wraith hisself gone missing and all.”

“What?”

“I guess maybe you didn’t hear. No one seen him for about a year now. Places he used to protect, it’s open season again. Gangs arming up and assholes like Matthew trying to stake claim on this block or that.”

The wrongness of that angered Hank. If the Crimson Wraith weren’t around to help, where would he be? “That sucks.”

“It does,” said Jasmine. “Streets are dangerous out there. Cops can’t do everything. And they don’t really do everything that needs doing, do they? Too scared to go up against the really bad ones out there. Much easier to harass people just trying to get by.”

“People like…” Hank halted himself before he used the wrong term, “…ladies of the night?”

“Ain’t like we hurting nobody.”

“Guess not,” said Hank. “I wonder if I could do it.”

“Do what? Hooking? No offence, sweetie, but it’s gonna be a motherfucker finding dresses in your size.”

“No, not that. I mean, you know, make streets safer. Like the Crimson Wraith.”

“Whoa… Just, whoa… You serious? You want to be the Crimson Wraith?”

When he went for his second rehabilitation class, Hank’s therapist told him that it’s good for people who have been helped to help others too. It was like giving that help away made it so they received it all over again. Could he be the Crimson Wraith? Could Hank do for others what was done for him? “Well, maybe… yeah.”

“Huh, well, ain’t that something? The Crimson Wraith right here in my home, bleeding on my couch and shit.”

“I’m not bleeding anymore.”

“No, you’re not. And who do you have to thank for that?”

“You. Thank you, Jasmine.”

“You’re welcome.” She got up and started putting away her medical supplies, but she stopped and turned to look at Hank. “You ain’t bullshitting are you? About doing this Crimson Wraith thing? I mean, you want to do it for real? Like, for real for real?”

“I do,” said Hank, and the more he thought about it, the more it felt right. 

“Well, then, boy like you who goes off running into knives really ought to have someone watching his back.”

From its place on her wall, Jasmine pulled a purple domino mask and slipped it on. Then she put her hands on her hips, kimono falling from her shoulders like a superhero cape. It almost made her look like the Wily Wisp, crime-fighting sidekick of the Crimson Wraith. 

“And, honey,” she said. “Help is right here.”