The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  I have to prod Paul at Columbus Circle so we can get the local. My internship is around here, the main office where the production company rents out equipment to student filmmakers and industrial film productions to finance the art film and documentary side of the business. I listen to Paul as we head uptown and watch out the window for rats on the tracks. Even in Boston, where they were more rare, I’ve always made this a transit pastime. Rats remind me of science fiction, those novels about when everything has broken down. Rats are time travelers from Armageddon. Near Yankee Muffin on Forty-Second Street, there is a place we call rat rock. It’s just what it sounds like and at the same time evil and mysterious. In the middle of this normal city block, there’s a massive, jagged boulder. It’s like some ancient glacial deposit that proved too expensive or time consuming to move, so even though that fifteen feet of real estate is worth about five mil, the developers left it and rats moved in. I suspect Yankee Muffin exacerbates the problem by filling the dumpster with leftover raspberry white chocolate chip muffins. At night, when you pass the rock, it is alive with their furry bodies; it is a rock of whiskers and bright black eyes and long hairless tails. It is not the only rat rock in New York City.

  The train stops at 116th and we follow the crowd of students returning from Zen Palate and Super Bob Flanagan and the Angelika toward the night, toward the fluorescent glow of West Side Market. Paul is still talking as we wander the aisles collecting an unlikely basket of sundries, melba toast and Doritos and crème fraiche and grape juice.

  The ice boy, Paul says, is more beautiful than his human sister and he enthralls the villagers, enraptures them. Their wheat rots; their berries ferment; their drying fish burns. The harvest is abandoned and the village is going to starve. The girl looks on at what she’s wrought, as the brooms and buckets of soap flakes emerge and winter approaches. They’ll have neither wood nor meat not wood not meat, sings the fortunate daughter. The villagers begin to freeze in attitudes of prostration around the boy, bowing and stilled with wonder. The trolls beckon the girl: you can fix this.

  There’s a deal, of course: cut off the ice-brother’s nose and plant it, and enough food will grow for the winter. She has no choice. She takes a glistening, sharp blade and swipes at her own brother. He bends, cradling his wounded self and remains on the still and darkened stage, as the villagers stir and awaken. After the audience is sure the play has ended, even beginning hesitant applause, the boy at last reveals what is left of him. He is hideous, hideous, so hideous that even his sister cannot bear to look at him.

  In the final scene, the ice boy takes refuge among the trolls and as the curtain falls sings a broken song about losing love when you lose your beauty.

  “The knife’s one part of the play which doesn’t make sense,” Paul tells me as we take our place in the checkout line, “because it is made of ice and it cuts ice. Something’s not good in the logic. Right?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Absolutely. Definitely.”

  The checker smiles at Paul, even though he is four people down the line and I realize: I’m not the only one who can see the thing about Paul anymore. He is still on the thin side, but his twenties have begun to sculpt his face into something angular and arresting. His lips are full; his skin is a lovely color which people call olive or describe in terms of kinds of nuts—cashew skin, macadamia skin, skin which is edible. Even now with the yellow of travel and illness beneath the surface, with sleeplessness visible below his eyes, lady checkers and the boys in tight pants buying condoms behind us and the fashionable downtown women smile at him. He wasn’t Boston beautiful, is not Midwest or bland, but this is New York, and beauty has a richer palette in this town. Paul doesn’t respond to the attention, but if it’s from obliviousness or disinterest or cool, I can’t say.

  “I wrote you from Siberia. Did you get the card?”

  I shake my head.

  “Yeah, I think maybe I didn’t have your address with me.”

  Paul is the ice boy. The blond boy in the tutu had originally been cast in the role, and then whatever happened on the three-day train ride from Novosibirsk, whatever had broken Paul’s arm and now the ice boy is Paul. He’d been in a train car alone with the director; he’d thrown himself off the moving platform; he’d been recast. This is what I gather. The tutu boy now plays a troll-villager-tree.

  “It’s still kind of probational. My look, you know, isn’t what most people associate with an ice boy,” Paul says, clearly mimicking someone. Paul’s father is darkly Sephardic, his mother palely Chinese, and the lineage predicts nothing about his looks. It is not a cherubic beauty, not blond or rosy. I cannot look at him. I cannot help looking at him.

  Before the checker totals our food, I throw in a stupid bouquet of Gerbera daisies. I have Mr. Boyfriend’s money in my wallet, but I’m feeling extravagant anyway, regardless. For the record, I am actively on purpose trying to be normal, but I keep doing random fucked up shit like staring down pretty checkers or buying flowers. Paul isn’t aware. He’s gawking at the magazine, which shows a bikini-clad starlet, or maybe he’s simply gone slack-jawed with his face pointed in that direction. The tight pants guy watches him, the checker and the pretty woman from downtown.

  “Time to go,” I tell Paul.

  “I’m frayed, Mellie. I feel like little threads of me are coming loose.”

  “A string walks into a bar,” I say, stopping him until the light on Broadway changes.

  “What?”

  “It’s a dumb joke. I’m a frayed knot. You need to sleep.”

  “Yeah, but how? How am I fucking going to sleep?” His leg is a blur; his foot taps up and down, up and down. As soon as the signal changes, he takes off.

  “We should try to call Nancy. When we get back to the dorm. Do you have a good number for her?”

  “Is she still with Andi?”

  I shrug. “Working in the kitchen at that retreat center, last I heard.”

  “You know it’s not a real rehab,” Paul says.

  “Rehab? Nancy doesn’t need rehab,” I say.

  “Andi, I meant,” says Paul. “I don’t know. That’s what I heard.”

  “Nancy will take care of her,” I tell him.

  I flash my badge for the security guy at the dorm, and he makes Paul sign in. My freshman year, this girl’s Mercedes was stolen as her parents were unloading her suitcases onto the sidewalk. People get jumped. It’s not fucking Princeton New Jersey up here. It’s not Hanover New Hampshire. Pretty preppy kids get one-hundred-thousand-dollar degrees, but it’s still an actual city. So, security at the dorms.

  As I open the door to my darkened room, I hear the phone ringing, see the pulse of the message indicator. I think, Nancy and then, Mr. Boyfriend. Indeed, later, I’ll listen to seven messages from my Russian admirer, but at this moment, it’s someone else. It’s my other stalker.

  “Amelia,” says the breathless voice. “Amelia, this Zarah. I’m still trying to reach you.”

  I’ve got a single this year, and the room smells faintly of plant matter, of something tropical and thick. I flick on the light, and hand the receiver over to Paul. He puts it on speaker. The source of the plant smell is a giant, overgrown ficus which I’d left by the half-open window some weeks earlier. It ought to have died, but it’s been raining, and there’s a drainpipe at just the correct angle, and enough light through the airshaft that instead it’s been photosynthesizing like the tropics. It can’t have been three whole weeks since I’ve been here, but then also I think three weeks seems right.

  Through the speaker, Zarah prognosticates. “We’re worried about the signs. The readings aren’t clear, but I see a cliff. Arid, dry land. You are being drawn over the edge against your will.” Zarah is a psychic. She’d called me first after my grandmother’s funeral. I assumed that my mom had put her up to it. There’d be some scam, eventually, some need to pay more to find out the ultimate answer. But now it’s been weeks, and still, she contacts me at intervals without explanation or request for paymen
t. It’s like some plot I’m entangled in where I have to see it through to the end, even if it’s only an accident, even if it’s all been meant for some other Mellie with some other fate.

  Paul flops on my mattress. There is laundry everywhere, not all of it unembarrassing. Balled-up Kleenex spill from my trash basket. Last I’d been here, I now recall, had been to convalesce in the dorm during a bout of bronchitis. Mr. Boyfriend had offered to nurse me, but he had a frustratingly undemanding schedule, wanted to hold my hand and spoon-feed me ginger ale. After about twelve hours, he left me for his twenty minutes on the treadmill in the basement gym and I pinched a check and escaped. Next to my computer, there are still several plastic cups encrusted with orange DayQuil powder from my illness. The combination of fever and cloud and the fuzzy high of pseudoephedrine had been a pretty lovely place, and the fact that I was missing classes seemed to matter less there.

  “Someone close to you is very worried,” says Zarah. “The numbers are clear—you must maintain contact with this person, or there will be consequences that stretch ten or twenty years into the future. The second thing is your diet. My readings suggest you are eating too much red meat, too much color in your diet.”

  Paul has cracked open the Doritos and is dunking them into the crème fraiche and at the same time smoking his third Prince. I drink the grape juice from the bottle.

  “There’s an ancient story,” says Zarah. “A man comes to the base of a mountain . . .”

  “Listen,” says Paul, cupping his hand over the mouth piece. “You know what’s still legal in Russia? They sell it in these packs, from a cart on the fucking train. They call it Oblako. They’re like, Tea? Cigarette? Chips? Oblako? The train was eighty hours. That’s more than three days. I wouldn’t have made it through, Mellie. I swear, something was trying to make me go crazy.”

  “Oblak?”

  “It’s their cloud. No one in Siberia gave a shit. How about you? Are you still into it, at all?” He sets his cigarette butt delicately across an empty mug and shrugs out of his jacket. He has changed, set building and carrying packs across Russia, and just the final adjustments of his early adulthood. He is muscled, is what I notice. He has gained a little of the right kind of weight. He picks up his cigarette again. “It’s just so I can sleep. So, would you? Know anyone who could hook us up?”

  Through the speaker, Zarah says: “Which means the decision point is approaching, the place between your best possible future and your worst—”

  I click the receiver into place and lift it again. What Zarah wants is unclear, but I expect, if she’s been sent by my mom, it’ll continue until I call home. I’m not technically out of touch with my mother. I leave her messages when I know she has clients, and I even wrote a letter, but I let the holidays come and go; I haven’t told her what I plan for this summer. In ten days, I’ll be kicked out of the dorms. And, I know I should be trying harder. This weekend, for example, I’d promised myself I’d study for finals, but I hadn’t reckoned on Paul’s arrival.

  “I have a number,” I say. “People use it for parties, whatever. I still roll a little cloud.”

  “Parties,” says Paul, looking at me. “Rolling cloud. Look what’s become of you, Mellie.”

  I patch in the phone number, enter my code, and wait for the callback. What’s become of me gazes back from the reflection in the half-open window; I remember falling asleep a few weeks ago on my way back uptown. I’d woken in the Bronx, staring at the morning-after party girl across the aisle until I realized she was me. I can clean up, even in a reflection. I can rub away the circles of eye makeup and smooth my hair and I still look like someone you’d give the internship to. But I can see it might not always be this way. That on my worst days, my own future might be upon me like Paul’s seems to have come over him. The phone rings; it’s my delivery guy; I place my order and he gives me his time frame.

  “What should we do while we’re waiting?” I ask Paul.

  We are sitting next to one another on my bed, listening for the phone. I look coy, in the mirror. The light is not unflattering. I look thin.

  “I don’t know,” says Paul, stretching out his long legs. “What do you want to do?”

  And then I decide. I’m tired of holding myself in, or it’s the way time has reshaped him, or it’s cloud, the courage cloud has loaned me. I reach across his body with my far arm and place my hand on the bed beside his, my cheek grazing his, our lips close. I shift my weight and I lift my body. He turns toward me, and it’s enough.

  “No talking,” I say.

  We are good at hips, he and I. We are good at mouth. We speak tongue, and skin, and slipping from clothes. I like the way I have to pull at his jeans, how he bucks his still-slim and hairless legs out of them, like a creature momentarily roped, and then free. My things tear, are left in shreds. I swim closer. I’ve got to be closer, I’ve got to get inside. I remind myself to open my eyes so I can see his face and the lines of his muscles, so I can grip in my teeth the evidence that this is real. He is better without clothes, the unexpected curves and dips of him. What I think, I keep thinking as we move with each other, is that I want to clench him inside of me, to hold him forever. How has it taken so long for this thing I have wanted, and what, G-d what, will I ever do now?

  We fall apart by stages. We are slick, and cold with our own sweat. It is probably four in the morning. We lie under my small blankets, trying to keep all our parts covered. I know I cannot say anything about the sex. From Judah on, men have taught me this. I know what is urgent now is that I say nothing of the sparks which are showering my skin, of the light breaking from me. I hold my lips together. It crosses my mind to think of Nancy. Of what she’d tell me. I had stayed with her, the previous summer. In the evenings, people would just kind of wash up at her place, the protest crowd, townies, the meditation flakes. They collected around her. Andi, the high school friend with the bad boyfriend who was trying to get clean. People thought Nancy had something to offer. I asked her, one night, what they thought she could give.

  She shrugged. “For most people, you know, girls our age, being a slut is about getting approval. But I never slept around to like acquire love. Which is good, obviously, because sex is a crap way to get anything but crabs. No, I went home with people so I could hear their answering machine messages, see what was in their medicine cabinets, check out their nightstands. I think it’s the same now. Only I don’t do it by sucking cock. People want you to know them, you know? It’s stronger if you’re not putting out.”

  I wasn’t sure that covered it, entirely. She was a last resort kind of person. Andi had had two sweaters, and the address of the health farm, when she’d arrived at Nancy’s dorm. They hadn’t even been friends, really. That was what people came to her for—not to be known, but to be saved.

  Paul lies shirtless against the one pillow, smoking his Prince, quiet, but nowhere near sleep.

  “Where you at?” I ask.

  He rolls over to face me, cigarette hand perched on a hip. “Davos, our director, invented this game, or like not a game, but a kind of theater exercise on the train through Siberia. I mean it was so fucking boring. It was a transcontinental flight times four. Beautiful blue, the purest blue, but the same, the same damn thing mile after mile. Like how you always imagine heaven will be, how sick of angels you’ll become. He called the game brutal honesty. What you’d do, whoever’s turn it was, they’d sit in the middle, on this mini suitcase. Everyone else is crammed into the compartment, perched on laps, squeezed on the bunks, asses hanging out of the windows, whatever. But whoever’s turn it was would sit there in the middle and get the honesty treatment.” The idea was to say something you truly thought about the other person, that they didn’t know. Those were the rules. It couldn’t be a compliment, and it had to be true.

  “In theater, you know, people who don’t do it think it might be cathartic or therapeutic. No. It’s the opposite of that. Most people bury pain, or deal with it, you know. Move on. For an actor,
he has to court it, to nurture it, to make it like a pet, so it will come when he calls.”

  “Or she,” I say.

  “Or she. Or happiness, or anger, or loneliness. It’s material; you’ve got to hold onto it. Hold it in. I’m making it all sound more coherent and like explicit than it was. The game on the train evolved kind of organically and of course, people hesitated at first. No one wants to be the first person to say something mean. So it starts out, easy shit, like, ‘In the third scene, you’re flat on the song,’ or like ‘you can be kind of arrogant.’ Not fun, but nothing that’s going to fuck up your life. And then it becomes, ‘Your ass is fat’ and then it’s like, ‘everyone knows you are fucking Paul behind Ned’s back.’”

  “Who were you fucking behind Ned’s back?”

  “That’s a for instance,” says Paul. “It got so the competition was all in how deeply you could devastate, how mortal the stab could be. The turn ended when someone cried or called uncle. Then, whoever had set the victim off would buy everyone a round of Oblako, and we’d all eat it and then pop, we’d be friends again; once again everyone could take a joke.”

  “Your director plays this game or whatever, exercise?”

  “Have you met him yet?”

  I start to shake my head, and then I pause. “Short guy? Wears a bandana?”

  “He’s not that short.”

  “But he was with you in the train car, the whole time?”

  “By my turn, 48 hours into the journey, it was just the two of us. Everyone had dropped out to sleep or have diarrhea from the cart food or screw in the baggage compartment.”