Paul approaches. Beneath the thin clothes he wears, his is shadowed against the corrected sky, against the vista that I have made right for him. Paul kneels on the backpack. The man on the bunk is not Davos, but could pass, could pass for Paul’s director. The crew wait for the elevated subway to come, to transfer its noise to the scene. The tiny treasures, Paul had said, what cruel things we talk ourselves into.
“When were you last afraid?” asks the actor.
I can see that it doesn’t matter about Paul’s acting, after all, that he doesn’t need to act for this part.
Of the film, it will eventually be said that Westie wanted to shoot confessions; she wanted to stage and manipulate content so that something secret, or even unconscious, emerged into this universal space. She wasn’t trying to make a statement about public, or private, though as the technology emerged over the following decade, her work would be read that way, would be part of how people talked about blogging and social media and the diaristic mode of the early twenty-first century. She would tell interviewers, rather, that she was performing an experiment. The will to fame or the will to privacy? Which essentially American desire would win? But of course, it was like everything she did, like bad cloud. She didn’t want one thing to win over the other. She wanted the mismatch, the alien invading the familiar, the raw pain as material for a dispassionate artistic eye.
How the actors felt, what it meant to the humans on the rooftop was part of Valerie’s medium, was like the yarn on the clothesline to her. I can’t offer an opinion as to outcome of the experiment. I have never been able to watch W 125, Westie’s first professional film. It is said to be good, I guess.
I will keep it in my brain for years, until cloud sucks it, like so much, away. Paul, the visible erection, in the reenactment of his most terrible moment, while all of Manhattan watches. The breath is sucked out of me. Beneath my skin, a dozen species of jealousy crawl like exotic parasites. I want that confession for my own, to be his love token, but now I can see that this is not the way he is mine, not privately, not absolutely. There are things, I see now, that he wants much more than he wants a life with me and I realize I’ve been lying to myself: I can’t stand to have just a part of Paul, to be the second or fourth choice. On this night without moon, a small portion seems all I can hope for.
Here is what I think the director told Paul on the train, in the Siberian game of brutal honesty. Here is what I think the Oblako swallowed: (Paul is beautiful, and the director might have acknowledged it. Paul is talented, and the director might have granted this, too.) But you are slim, my dear, and it is not a man’s beauty you have. This is why you will always be typecast. You will always play gay.
That is what would not play in the states, Paul as a straight man. How he ‘got thrown’ off the train. Paul and men. There are things in the country of sex which never get unraveled between couples, and this part of him would be something I never totally understood. Still, I have guesses. I have made inroads. I would never learn anything more about that incident with Davos, what kind of pleasure he might have taken, whether it would have been willingly or unwillingly given.
I am told certain insights emerge in Valerie’s movie, but even if I could have stood to watch it, her work was never the kind that revealed truth. For her, truth was only a mercury from inside of which a subject emerged into something beautiful or poisoned or sometimes both.
I must have left the studio, traveled the blocks to 109th, but I was in my own mercury already, already becoming the thing the night had made of me.
Sixteen
Longwood Towers
2010
There are places we fall into, like a crevice or a trough. We can be drawn there, into alignment with their polarity. These places may not be geographically linked, but lines run through them, again and again. It may be possible to meet strangers there, to exchange with strangers. At a certain point, you must step inside, and with the proper sacrifice, you may be able to exit at will.
I am trying to find Emily. In geography of satellites and kilometers, there are a hundred lakes, but there is a shadow geography, in which years and lives may collapse, may exchange. I am looking for another map and cloud has led me here.
The crenelated towers, the mouth of the garage. I descend into the darkness, find a half parking spot between a pillar and an Escalade. Paranoia whispers to me like a wise older sister, and I slip the battery from the back of my phone and drop it on the seat cushion. My blood sings with the advancing sickness.
I’m coming, Emily.
Inside of cloud sickness, there is a branching. The woman reflected in the elevator brass is a soft-core girl, has eggs for eyes, is a faceless face through the dusty window glass. The door opens on the second floor of tower C. I have been here before. I know the way. Details. Everything is enriched in the sunset of my sickness.
The light below 2f spills into the hallway, a blurred square summoning me. I pick out details: a mezuzah by the door, scrape marks by the lock, and splinters in the wood. There is a memory of violence here, of ancient fire and it layers over, a voice saying help me, for God’s sake, help me. Everything blurs and brightens.
Enemy. I am coming.
I slide the key card in. The lock clicks and the door swings open. The smell of stale smoke assaults me, molasses, campfire. Through here, I think. Right through here. There is a shattered brightness within, everything sparkling. A tuft of blond hair emerging from under a sofa cushion. There is bleached blond hair through the dusty glass.
There was a map here, but the map has been stolen.
Lady? Lady honey? I’m coming.
As through the wrong end of a telescope, I scan the apartment around me, books knocked from shelves, the glass coffee table smashed. On the screen of the monitor, a woman in her underpants is frozen mid-stride, cigarette butts mashed into the cup beside. Poking from beneath the couch cushion is the artificial hair of a dirty naked doll. From the shelves, decayed film spills from rusted canisters. Audition (Probe), Dayan Roza, W 125.
Things branch out and out and out, and endlessly out. Which to choose? How to go?
A voice: you’re so close. It doesn’t have to be this hard.
A magic trick, my hand filled with glistening scraps of paper (confetti on grass that I gather up). The scent of lemon rises. A small sacrifice. The small sacrifice to find the way. Inside the mouth, a sobbing that wants to be a sucking. Ease beckons. A small sacrifice.
Then, gently at first, but with a terrible insistence, something, a voice or a presence, stays me. It is a kind of song, but without sound. Dry with longing, with a weeping that has lasted for days. A sacrifice, it says, is not ease. The song becomes a woman. She moves terribly close to me, and I can smell her own lemon on her; her eyes have been eggs, her mouth punched dough. Sacrifice, she says, is right here. She touches me at the base of my breast bone, and I feel something enormously tender leave me.
Darkness has fallen. Dim light from the street falls through the tower window.
I’m holding a recording device in my hand and listening to a woman speak. The woman is me. It’s someone else. You confused me for someone else.
The light picks out details, the sparkling of shattered glass. Beneath, a photograph still in its smashed frame. I peer closely. Boys in athletic shorts smile joylessly. Bunk שש, Kif-Vesely’e. I cannot make out all the faces, but behind them, there are the towering pines, the cabins in the distance, and there is a lake. I have been there before, and cloud will lead me back.
No, says the voice of Judah Cohen through the device’s imperfect speakers. You come to me, too. That night, at the Fens.
And so I stand, and I follow.
Seventeen
New York City
1993
In the health class of my dreams, women tell girls about love, and girls pay attention. When you are young, the women will say, and you love, you will let love go inside you and replace everything that was there before. Living with love instead of orga
ns makes you ravenous. You will try to eat things like glass and small animals in order to survive. When love goes away—and it will, girls, it will—you yourself will become the hunger. And when hunger has a mind it can destroy everything. Later, you will be a hundred and six, dementia-ravaged. You will be three husbands into your life, and still you’ll be able to prod the suffering from that time like the gap of a pulled tooth. There, the women will tell the girls. Now we have prepared you for love.
Back in the sublet, my beeper explodes. 487 7285 487 7285 487 7285 487 7285. I turn it off, and the telephone rings. On the answering machine tape, Paul is drunk. He’s drunk and angry. He calls me and he pages me. He pages me a couple times, then he leaves more messages on the machine. He’s sorry he said he was mad. Everyone’s having fun and I should totally come out and he’s fucking serious about it. He’s not kidding around. I lie on the futon, smelling his scent, and listen to his distorted voice over the speaker. He’s at the West End shooting pool. He’s going for pizza. He’s back to do a couple more shots. He’s just got to—unstick the wrap from this spoon and he wants to talk to me. He just wants to talk to me, but I can’t. I see him on the rooftop, hard for a man I don’t even know, and telling the world the secrets he claims he can’t remember. I don’t answer the phone.
Maybe I’ll go out to the Night Café, somewhere Paul won’t be, and pick someone up. Someone disgusting and fat, or some foreign guy from School of International Affairs. I find one of my heels and sharpen my eyeliner. It is runny with the heat and I look like I’ve already been out all night, like someone you’ve already taken home and woken beside the next morning. I tie up my sweaty hair in a hairband, and wiggle into my shortest skirt.
The machine goes on again. Paul’s voice is gummy with confusion. I don’t know if it’s drink or cloud or my nine-dollar phone. “Mellie. You reread the entire suite before anyone else solves the crew. I thought you knew how graphite and full of acts it was. I am just so wired of being tight cast.”
I stand there, balanced on my one bare foot, craning to hear. Misery, like addiction, is solipsistic. It convinces you that no one can be hurt like you can, that you suffer uniquely. But misery is full of shit. Right now, this very instant, your dear ones are suffering on your behalf. In the depths of misery, you are like any addict. You are a victim, but you are also an abuser.
I can hear Paul’s voice cracking over the line, the static. I can hear his anguish. “. . . And then how are you going to no sorry. It’s the bouncer line at the gallery. My precious privacy lip—Mellie, I thought you wanted me to. I thought—” He’s speaking in cloud, but it gets through to me. He’s saying, he thought I knew. I think of his silence in the previous two days, the smoking and the glowering. He’s saying, he thought I’d wanted him to play this part, that I’d understood what I’d signed him up for. That it’s my fault, his shadow silhouette against the uptown sky.
Something happens. I hear what sounds like the grunt of a sucker punch, a scuffle through the machine. Maybe it’s only a drunken fall, but there is something wet and gagging in the sound. Then it fades. There is street noise, traffic and car alarms, and it blends with the sounds through my open window. He’s not far away.
I pick up the phone. “Paul? Paul?”
No one answers.
I have eyeliner on one eye, blush on the opposite cheek. I am wearing two different black pumps, but I hobble down the steps and out to the street.
I calculate the distribution of pay phones in the area, cross to the west side of Broadway and begin to scan at 110th. A girl in a transparent rain slicker and pink skirt lies across a park bench gazing at the sky; a cop lolls against a car, looking up and out at the river. A pair of teenagers pause, chopsticks hovering over their takeout containers, tilt their chins to the clouds. The street is unusually crowded. There is light where it isn’t expected; there are distant explosions. I focus on the shadows. My eyes scan the dark spaces. I call on my powers of recognition.
At the end of the block, there’s a payphone but it’s broken. I double back. There’s a booth in front of the West End. The receiver dangles. I double back again toward Yankee Muffin, my old dorm, rat rock.
The rats on rat rock squeal.
Overhead, the sky bursts with light and color and an instant later a boom echoes.
There is sudden, violent movement by the fence which encloses the rats. Two large forms and a smaller one have cornered someone. I think of bears, of a mama bear and papa bear and baby bear. I think of bearbaiting, of grizzly attacks. I begin to review my bear lore in my head. You punch a polar bear in the nose. Brown bears are vegetarians. The thick pelt of a bear protects it from bee stings. I try to remember if you can kick a bear.
The cornered man is Paul. I see his face in the starburst of light from above and the baby bear is not a cub. It is one of those white dogs with pointy faces and not enough fur. A prize dog, I think, who knows how to make its brothers into meat. It strains at its collar, baring its teeth and the chain links rattle as Paul scrambles uselessly backwards.
Boom Boom Boom Boom.
The rats are in frenzy, and it is not because of the flashing the sky. I understand now why the streets are full of people, what the explosions going off in the night sky are, why everyone is looking up. It’s the Fourth of July. It’s Independence Day.
In the raining green light, I examine the men with the dog. Yes, the one whose face is visible has the heavy jaw and crew cut I associate with Mr. Boyfriend’s New Jersey relatives.
“Whatever you want,” says Paul. “I could write you any size check you want.”
The men from New Jersey do not want a check.
There should be a lock on the fence that encloses rat rock, but now the gate is opening. The second figure emerges into the street light, the almost-healed bite marks around his mouth. Mr. Boyfriend has a chain and a padlock in his hand. I see that he has planned all of this, the cut lock on rat rock, the dog. It is my flaw to underestimate people, but Mr. Boyfriend is not stupid, can be determined when he needs to.
“What’s it worth to you?” says Mr. Boyfriend. “Are you just going to sit there?”
“Jesus,” says Paul. “We’re not even serious.”
The dog strains. Mr. Boyfriend gives a few lazy kicks in Paul’s direction and he scuttles back through the open gate. I cannot see the shadows of the rats, but I can tell where they are by the movement of Paul’s feet, by the dance he is doing. The dog barks. Mr. Boyfriend locks the gate.
“Jesus Christ,” screams Paul. “Jesus Christ. Let me go.”
Paul is clinging to the fence, trying to get higher. Me, I’m in mercury time, waiting the slow seconds while Mr. Boyfriend and his cousin walk toward Morningside Park, dragging his dog, like they’re just out to watch the sky.
It is the finale. The sky cracks and splinters. There is a silence between explosions. The rats squeal. I should go to him. But there is a hitch in my love. There’s a piece of me that wants to gaze at the sky with the rest of the crowd and wait till the noise is over. It’s a nanosecond, or it’s a full minute, and then I waken back to myself and I am running. Paul calls to me. He has crawled up the fence, six, seven feet in the air, and now I can see the fence is writhing.
“It’s OK,” I say. “It’s OK.”
“Help me,” he screams.
I shake the lock, but there’s no give.
“Can you go over?”
There are rings of barbed wire at the top, but as I glance up, I also see something else.
“Hold on,” I say.
“Don’t go. Don’t leave.”
I still have the keys to Yankee Muffin. I unlock the gate, slide it up, open the bolt on the glass door. The shop smells of ammonia and powdered sugar, is dark but the faint red of the emergency exit lighting. Boom. The sky flashes again. Paul is screaming and the rats are squealing. I drag the step stool from the utility closet and boost myself up to transom height. I punch open the window. Boom.
The mind. The insan
ity of our thoughts. I think to myself: maybe I could have been an assistant manager here. Maybe I should have stuck it out at Yankee Muffin. Maybe I’ll do it in the fall.
As if I’m coming back to school. As if a normal course is still available.
“Paul,” I call. I can see his face, now. He’s been beaten up pretty bad. But worse are his ankles. Things are there. Animal things hanging from him. Paul spider crawls across the fence, toward me, and I take his hands guide them to the transom. He shakes himself, like a fishing line that has picked up an excess of seaweed. I reach for a hold—his belt buckle—and I pull and he pulls and the sky explodes with color.
Eighteen
The Village Fens Apartments
2010
I am sitting in the living room of a refurbished townhouse. The air smells of fresh paint, and fluorescent bulbs glow in all the fixtures. An old woman pours me tea.
“So you are friend who bring picture? Camp friend from Andi?”
Midnight nears; my journey from Longwood Towers had traced a confused march through the Fens, the sickness leaving me in stages, my destination clarifying slowly. My hands are sliced with razor grass, my shoes soaked in dark mud, water darkening my cuffs. Judah leans against the wall, watching me and Mrs. Auslander. His face is—a face. Lined, weary, beneath his shaven head, but still handsome. The face of the lead guy in the nostalgia act, leaving his two kids behind to go on the reunion tour. Me, though, I always went for the keyboardist, stupid jaw, bad hair.
When I had hammered on the door, I had seen him. Judah: shirtless, the faded tattoo legible on his chest. The faded tattoo I recognize from Dickinson now I see it whole: If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. I had said his name. I was still sick and slightly raving, and he hesitated to admit me, but his name in my mouth had shaken him. Then, the old woman in the hallway behind him had stepped forward, insisted he let me in, and then taken my arm and led me inside.
The Likely World Page 30