Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  On the corner of our street, near the watermelon men, was a single brownstone and a sign in its yard that read, members only. Our first morning, Dylan peeked in and asked for the special. He exchanged hugs and handshakes with everyone there. We were not introduced. He emerged with three beers, though it was noon, and three plates of eggy grits and shrimp. “Eat quick. I have to be in the city by one.”

  When we emerged from the subway, I saw it, my New York. The one I had dreamed of all those years. The blocks were full, the streets dotted with yellow taxis. We were bombarded by sirens in every direction. I smelled the warm nuts and the hot dogs grilling and the smolder of the trains going and going beneath us. Everyone honked. The buildings glittered in the sun. The trash cans were brimming. Some blocks smelled of rotting fish, some of the cologne of clothing stores wafting into the street. On every corner hundreds of posters advertised concerts, parties, call girls. It was loud as a drug, and it made my mind quiet.

  Dylan wandered into a restaurant. “Need a drink,” he said and sat down at the bar. The waitress wore a bowler hat. She didn’t smile at us. She looked askance as if there was some very interesting scene playing out in the restaurant just beyond us. We ordered orange juice. Dylan asked the waitress to add some champagne to his.

  Dylan drank fast, always. Within moments, he put cash on the bar without seeing the check. “Vámanos.”

  “You’re such an alcoholic,” Laura said.

  “Indeed I am, Laura. But I’m also so much more than that.”

  Dylan did not tell us where we were going. He walked fast, half a block ahead of us. I read the time at the top of a building: it was seventeen minutes past one. We were already late. The elevator opened up directly into an apartment. One of Dylan’s chandeliers hung in the entryway. There was a single white leather couch, bar stools. Everything smelled new, like money.

  “These are my art assistants,” Dylan said as we entered. “They’re doing an internship with me.”

  “Lovely to meet you,” the hostess said. I knew she was about the age of my mother, but her thinness and her crisp dress and the way her nails were painted and her hair coiffed told me she was nothing like my mother, that she could have whatever she wanted. We sat quietly as she spoke to Dylan over glasses of white wine and small sandwiches, her hand occasionally resting on his shoulder a few minutes too long. They were speaking about people we’d never heard of with calibrated passion. Laura began to fidget.

  The hostess turned to us. “Do you two study art? Are you in college now?”

  “Yes,” Dylan said. “They are students.”

  “So you’re old enough to drink, then?” She laughed.

  “Yeah, of course,” Laura said.

  “I’m a dancer too,” I said.

  The hostess snuck a glance at her watch while sipping her wine. It was still three quarters full. Ours were already empty. “I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before,” she said to Laura. “Do you model?”

  “No, but everyone asks me that,” she said.

  “You have such an exquisite face,” the hostess said.

  I was drunk by the time Dylan hailed us a cab. He shouted directions at the driver, his foot perched on the console. Laura sat between us, her head on my shoulder, her skirt hitched up so that her thighs directly touched Dylan’s jeans.

  Wherever we ended up, we stayed through the night. Dylan left us alone and wandered the crowd. A band came on and played, and then another. I had fallen asleep in a booth when Laura shook me. “We’re going to a party.”

  “Another?” I asked.

  We walked some blocks, the haze of light and noise like a dream. I was stumbling, my arms around Laura for support, Dylan just ahead of us. Finally we approached a red door and went up some stairs to an apartment. There were six people there when we arrived, but throughout the night, the buzzer rang and more and more flooded in. Someone passed around a plate of cocaine, someone passed around a joint. Laura sucked on the marijuana. Finally there was a crowd around the couch listening to an older man play the guitar. He was slurring the lyrics of the songs, tilting from his stool.

  “Why don’t you play?” Dylan said to Laura. “He’s a very important producer, you know.”

  “I’m shy,” she said.

  “Stop that,” he said and pulled the skin at her cheek.

  Everyone was still talking as Laura began to sing, and then the chatter grew dimmer and dimmer, and then the chatter was gone. The entire party was watching her. My face grew hot. She sang a song, slowly and quietly and then louder and more violently until I was back in the desert with her, the bushes shivering, the mountains shaking. When she was finished, the older man who had been playing banged his beer down on the table. “Now that’s a damn fine voice. Where have I seen you play at little girl? Knitting Factory? Limelight?”

  “Yes, Limelight,” Laura said, smiling from inside her lie. Her shirt had slipped off her shoulder, exposing the scar she had until then always immediately covered up.

  That night, waiting sleeplessly into the dawn for Laura to come in from the truck, I watched the first bustle of trains pass overhead. It was near night again when I awoke to her beside me. She was talking in her sleep.

  Laura and I got jobs as waitresses at a pizzeria three blocks from Dylan’s. He’d agreed we could stay with him until we could afford a room elsewhere.

  Laura forgot to light the candles on the tables. She missed appetizers and drinks in her customers’ orders. She left bits of cork floating in the wine. She was fired after her first weekend. “Whatever,” she said. “Dylan’s friend got me a show in September.”

  I traveled into the city for ballet classes. I didn’t make any friends. Most of the dancers were older than me and back in school. Most were trying to be nurses and librarians and some were trying to be actresses. None were still trying to be ballerinas. Most were better than I was. I was imprecise, my turnout, my pointe, was not well articulated. Where had I trained, the teachers wanted to know. But I was still young. There was time, they said.

  One ballerina dined in the restaurant daily and alone. She ordered garden salads or broth. A club soda. Never a single slice of pizza. Beneath the table, she moved her feet from second position to third and fourth and fifth. We never spoke until one night I served her cocktails with her meal.

  “Don’t let it ruin you,” I heard her say as I walked away. I wanted to believe I had no idea what she was talking about. I wanted to believe I had forgotten everything my father had ever said.

  In the weeks leading up to Laura’s show, Dylan and Laura went to parties where she met booking managers, producers, writers, gallerists, directors, actors, filmmakers. I was always missing something while on shift. Labor Day had come and gone, and it was the first September in my life that I had not returned to school. The air changed immediately and cooled. The leaves in the new wind made a shivery melody on my path home, almost already yellow in the late summer sun.

  I walked the city often. When I came home too late and Laura and Dylan were already gone, I took the train with a notebook and rode it to the end of the line all the way out to Coney Island. On the subway, I wrote choreography inspired by the city, my small body converged on by forces larger than monsoons, larger than mountains. Sometimes I switched lines and exited at Lincoln Center just to watch dancers pass me by, hoping one might recognize me there, praying one might notice I was meant to be among them. The past had been deleted in the struggle of the trains, the pushiness of the crowds, the loudness of the sirens, the music blasting in the street, all of it filled me up.

  I had no visions. I had been excavated by the constant stimulation. The city blurred me, made me another of its anonymous spectators. I felt happiest in my exchanges at bodegas over the purchase of a coffee or cigarettes or when observing the break-dancers twirl and the mariachis croon. All intimacy was exchanged as if in a foreign language, via gestures a
nd quick, mistaken glances on the train.

  I wanted everything to remain like this, veiled in invisibility. I was afraid to meet a man, to sleep with a man. I believed in the suspicion that if I remained alone, untouched, the curse would not come for New York. No one would ever die again.

  Finally, one night, I came home only to Laura. We had hardly been alone together. She was in the kitchen with a cello. Her legs were spread around it, and she was playing a more violent melody than I’d ever heard her play, banging the wood of the instrument like a hollow drum, destroying whatever pretty noise might come out.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “Friend of Dylan’s,” she said and continued her banging between dissonant, awful chords.

  “Why make it so ugly? Doesn’t sound like your stuff.”

  “I’m evolving, Ariel,” she said. “Can I get a smoke?”

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “He’s my lover,” she said. “And he happens to be out with another woman tonight.” Laura lit her cigarette and pushed the cello toward me. “Don’t look at me like that. We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  My father turns to me. “I love you more than anything, habibti. Have you been here with me all night?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I say.

  “Why do you look so serious?” he asks. “Smile a little. Take the hair out of your face. You are still a child. Do you know that I was thrown into the sea off the coast of Italy because I had no papers? My daughter should be happy. Go sit at the piano and play.”

  “We’re in a hospital, Dad,” I say.

  “You know, I used to listen to you play. I would sneak in from the garage and listen to you. You didn’t know it. Even when you made a mistake, I would smile. You don’t know how beautiful you were.”

  Laura’s show came so close to the beginning of everything. We had only just arrived. It was simple then to think life could change after only a night. We were eighteen and said we were twenty-three. I will be forever twenty-three. We must have looked so young. Our faces without wrinkle, fresh, our eyes unlocked. I see girls now at our age then, their posture high, their faces unwittingly too open, unbroken.

  The bar was in the Lower East Side, and the bathrooms were unisex, the floors wet with toilet paper and used condoms, the walls filled with love letters and hate letters to the government. Dylan and I sat on stools near the bar toward the back and watched as the crowd poured in, all dressed in black with dyed hair everywhere, spiked chokers, and fishnet tights. He passed me a drink in a red plastic cup, and I almost vomited at the first sip.

  “How you doing, white swan?” he shouted over the din.

  “It’s the same dancer,” I said. “The black one and the white one.”

  “And who’s your charming prince?” he asked.

  A girl in a miniskirt nudged herself between us and ordered a drink. I watched Dylan’s eyes on her body, tracing her curves. She bumped into me as she pushed back out into the crowd. Dylan pushed my hair behind my ear. “Bitch,” he mouthed.

  Laura began to play. She started soft, and the crowd screamed for her to sing louder. Her head whipped around, and she began banging the cello. Her voice croaked. “She’s a natural,” Dylan said. He was smoking, looking toward the stage at her, tapping his feet, his hand on my thigh casually at first, then rubbing through my jeans up and up, never looking back at me at all as if this were the way things always were for us.

  The nausea in my stomach from the drink raced up into my throat. I ran to the bathroom and remained there through the rest of the show, through the applause, and through her finale, playing a mournful song the crowd at last allowed her. “Kol Nidre.” I knew it was for me.

  I left without them.

  I walked as fast as I could toward the bridge. Everyone was drunk, walking aslant and stumbling. I brushed by them, chain-smoking. I crossed a street against the light when suddenly I heard a scream. I looked up, and a body was falling. At first glance, I believed it was a bag or a bird. I heard nothing of the man, only the pavement. The scream came from a woman leaning out her window.

  The blood flowed fast and then stopped. The man was wearing a tuxedo, but his bow tie was missing, his shirt unbuttoned to his chest, his cuffs folded up. He was on the younger side of middle-aged. His eyes were open, blue. A child’s eyes. A cop came running toward the scene from nowhere and blocked me off with his arm.

  I backed away and began to run until I was on the ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge. I sat at its center, rocking to the rhythm of the rumbling train at my side, the cars passing, the boats blowing their horns beneath me as they passed over the river, their lights creating stars on the waves. A single man in orthodox dress passed me hurriedly, said nothing. I hadn’t yet noticed how arrogant New York was, all of its cement and its lights and its suspension pulleys.

  I heard the suited man hitting the pavement and knew that sound would be the same for a body hitting the river if the bridge caved through. On a mountain, your feet feel centuries of earth beneath them, the ground soft.

  I closed my eyes and opened them and closed them and opened them, and the bridge was underwater, and where the cars and trains had been were now planes falling to the bottom of the depths toward watery graves. The man in the suit multiplied and fractured, like small crows crashing, falling farther through the riverbed.

  I walked the entire way home, a small speck beside the river, the monumental city and all its flashy secrets, all its dazzling shows, at my side, through the brownstone streets where the wind was making a great commotion of the trees, all the while believing that the man was an omen of an end, the end of Laura and me. I would have to leave because of Dylan. She would become famous, and we would see each other for lunches or while home for the holidays. I would dance or I would not dance, and I would be greeted warmly by her after her shows as her old dear friend. It had already happened for her, everything she wanted. Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth. I would now just be the girl who’d followed her through the desert as a child. But she would always be my Laura, hanging from the cactus, weeping as the monsoon came for us both.

  My mother stirs at the sound of our voices. She takes my father’s hand in hers, then frowns.

  “You’re burning.”

  “Where have you put me? Why am I here?” he cries.

  “You had surgery, Dad,” I say. “Don’t you remember it?”

  He begins to shake, his legs, his arms. His teeth chatter. He pulls out one of the IVs from his arms. His eyes grow large as a prey before a predator. I can see the hair on his arms, goosebumps forming everywhere. He rises up to sit. “What is this?” he says, touching his gown. “Have you put me in a madhouse?”

  “Calm down, Yusef.” My mother moves toward the door. “I’ll get the nurse.”

  “What nurse?” he screams. He looks toward me and grabs my arm. “I don’t want a nurse. I want to go home!”

  We were all three of us still asleep when the plane hit the first tower. The sudden sirens everywhere at once brought me up and out and into the lot when I saw the black smoke pluming forth from the city. Laura’s foot was sticking out of the tent, shaking in her sleep. I grabbed her leg and pulled, took her blanket and covered us beneath it as if this might save us, as if we could hide.

  The drone of helicopters rushed overhead. Dylan was naked but ran out of the truck anyway and climbed the ladder to the roof. Laura had fallen to her knees by the time the second plane hit. Dylan walked toward the ledge and shouted at the men with the watermelons, “What the fucking fuck fuck,” in a slur. Their box had spilled into the street.

  I shut my eyes. My father and I are walking in the desert. But the desert is too long. When does the desert end? I heard his voice. “Laura,” I said. My eyes would not shut. The dust was already out to sea, already coming for us, already covering us.


  V

  February

  There were no concerts, no gallery openings, no parties. There were no nights stomping maudlin across the bridge home, taking taxis, the breeze in our hair, gazing at the lights of the city rushing away from us and all its promises, all its power. I saw no ballerinas; Laura left the instruments in their cases. All shows were canceled. We stayed at Dylan’s.

  We edged toward winter, and day by day, New York grew dark earlier. The leaves were thick in the streets. The first snow fell. Leaving the subway late at night was not as scary as it was lonely in the cold. The wind from the river blew so hard I lost my footing. The train swayed. The old Kentile Floors factory sign kept watch over us, a remnant of the defunct industrial past. So long bereft of any use, we thought it beautiful solely for the fact that it endured when everything else had changed. We watched the flakes melt into the black canal, as if in a hurry to flee their swirl, become sludge.

  People have always needed somewhere new to go and quick when old things disappear, and it was perhaps for this that they began to gather at Dylan’s. It was slow at first, friends stopping in for drinks that lasted late into the night on any given day. But then it became every night that I would find someone or other lying on my bed, sprawled in a daze of booze and marijuana. Someone in a corner, all pale, speaking to no one in particular about what had happened, all the conspiracies already, this was all for Israel, it was Israel’s fault, calling Dylan’s corner at the end of everything, paradise, nothing could touch us there, reading his scrawl, thinking it scripture. And there were always girls, girls in chokers, girls with magenta hair, girls with guitars, girls carrying canvases, girls who had lost someone in the attacks, girls who liked girls and boys, girls who ended up crying about the fucked-up world and remained with us in the morning, always, always staying in the tent in the truck in the lot.