The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  A month before graduation, Sarah and I sat in our favorite bar, the Flying Horse, drinking Coronas with lime. It was the beginning of April and already 95 degrees by lunchtime. My jeans were heavy on my sweating legs; my elbow dripped sweat on the laminated fake-wood table. The Santa whose light was always on stood merrily on top of the bar, next to a few of his variously wounded and tilting reindeer. A few flies buzzed slowly around the leis and Mardi Gras beads hung around Santa’s neck. The television over the bar was turned to QVC: diamonds! sparkled on red velvet.

  I moved a red checker. “San Francisco,” I said.

  Sarah moved a black checker. “My family lives there. No way.”

  “But maybe I could fall in love there.”

  “That’s a cliché.” She peered at the board. “Did you steal one of my checkers?”

  I took the black checker—half a black checker, actually, maybe one of Santa’s reindeer ate the other half—out of my pocket and held it up. “Santa Fe.”

  “That’s worse than San Francisco. God, you’re pale. Don’t you ever go outside?” She leaned over and wiped a smudge of eyeliner under my left eye. Her thumb was heavy.

  I pulled away. “Cut it out. And don’t change the subject. We have to go somewhere. And Sarah, this whole thing with Bauman—it’s not healthy. You two have to get away from each other.”

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly downcast, as if I were saying something that had never occurred to her. She sighed. “I know. He is such a liar.” She twisted the lime from her beer and stabbed it with a toothpick. “He’s a narcissist and an asshole.”

  I put the half a checker on her side of the board. “My sister’s in New York. Let’s go there.”

  Sarah brightened. She began stacking the checkers into a tower, the black and red circles making what looked like an odd vertical code. “Yes. Okay. That’s it.” She frowned. “Bill loves New York. Do you think I should let my eyebrows grow back?”

  “Maybe.”

  Her hands hovered around the wavering but upright stack of checkers, not quite touching them. “Look how it balances,” she said with the unguarded joy that always made me love her. She’d gotten so thin. Her wrists were like the wrists of a child. “See that? Don’t move, Gabriel. Shhh.”

  Think of the next decade or so as a series of boxes. Think of me as the man who was trying to get the right people and things into the right boxes. In the first one, put the three of us—Caroline, Sarah, and me—in the apartment on East Seventh Street. For me, use a Mr. Potato Head: remove my eyeliner, the chains around my combat boots, the boots themselves. Take off my flat black hair and put my wavy red hair back on. Give me a new pair of boots, Doc Martens, sans chains. For Sarah, a Little Mermaid. Give Sarah back her eyebrows (lightly, though—eyebrows take longer to grow back than you might think) and put her on the pull-out sofa in the living room, which never got really dark at night, or so she said, as she lay there awake, her mermaid’s tail thumping restlessly under the sheet night after night. Mark her tears with a thin bit of charcoal; make them trail all the way down to the floor, and then out the door, like the footsteps in a dance studio. For Caroline, a paper doll. Paste a thought bubble above the frowning Caroline paper doll’s head that says, “What a drama queen.”

  In this box, put a bike lock key (bike messenger), a paper coaster (bartender), a hundred-dollar bill (waiter, my best night, and my first one with Leo), a snippet of sweaty T-shirt (construction), a coat check (I absolutely did not steal from the checked coats, no matter what rumor was spread), a pink While You Were Out slip (office temp), another coaster—a stack of coasters.

  In this box, write LEO and nothing else.

  Pile this box with snow, the next with rain, the next with all the heat waves that seemed as if they would never break. Put the Cyclone in the heat-wave box, and at the very top of the highest curve, I’m not kidding, put Leo, saying, “I think I need some time alone,” his words half carried away by the wind as the roller coaster cars crest and tip down.

  Make a box of nights, and on the sides write all the names of all the bars in order of genealogical succession—the Anvil, the Mineshaft, the Tunnel, the Lure, Jackie 60, the Cock, and manhunt.com. Add pop-up line drawings on cardboard of penises everywhere, of every shape imaginable, and in every degree of popping up. Outline certain ones in gold. In the corner, very faint, one sketchy girl with small breasts and blue-tipped hair. Randy? Brandy?

  In this box, put the yellowed plastic clock that is embedded—still embedded, I’m sure—in the top of the stove on East Seventh Street. Make sure to fix its hands somewhere between 4:37 and 4:38, because that is where they have probably stood for the past forty years and where they’ll stand for the next four hundred. Put unidentifiable crud in the edges of the clock. In a circle around the clock, in white chalk, write Caroline moved to Berlin today.

  Make a box of haircuts, with swatches of differently dyed colors of hair pinned up in rows like butterflies. Put a mustache or two here, too. A set of long sideburns.

  In this box, put the curve of Leo’s arm as he throws a stick for his big, happy black dog in Tompkins Square Park while his boyfriend (you could tell), a thin-faced guy with glasses, laughs. Add a stack of coasters in the lower right-hand corner. On the underside of one of the coasters, deep within the stack, write in a circle, in black ballpoint pen, What am I doing with my fucking life? Glue all the coasters together.

  Make a box of Sarah and Gabriel Discuss Whether or Not Love Is Possible.

  gabriel says I really think so of course it is think of

  sarah says You’re dreaming bud

  Nail doll-sized wooden chairs to either side of the box, on lower inside corners, but paint the box’s interior in a color that gradually changes from, say, black at the bottom to a washy mauve at the top. On a tiny chip that will play if you press it, include layers and layers of street noise.

  Make this box a mirror.

  Fill this box with things left on the floor of the East Seventh Street apartment after parties: bits of balloon, a Percocet, a bright red bangle of Sarah’s, half a birthday candle, condoms used and (once, maybe twice) unused, a silver belt buckle with a mustang embossed on it, Johanna curled up in the fetal position and snoring, a field of sprung corks, part of the chocolate skull of a chocolate snowman, a page from a datebook with an unknown phone number scrawled on it, a dark plum lipstick, a cracked R.E.M. CD, one playing card (six of diamonds), a few date pits.

  Why do the remnants of people’s parties all look the same? That’s the ironic question this box asks, though it’s not a question I ever asked myself at the time. I wasn’t ironic at all, except in the things I said. I loved to throw parties. There were always several cakes, no matter the occasion. I thought I was Gatsby, Pollock, Peggy Guggenheim, somebody. I threw a thirtieth birthday party that went on for a week, traveled upstate, and finally ended, at daybreak, at the Saint. I kept thinking I should go visit Caroline in Berlin and throw a party for her there so she could see how good at it I’d become, how life-changing a great party could really be. I tried to explain this to her in a letter, but it sounded wrong somehow, so I never finished it. Actually, I never wrote it, except in my mind. Put that letter in this box, too.

  Fill this box with shredded pages of The Hudson Times, the almost-disappearing, half-assed tourist newspaper on Wall Street where I got a job as the assistant to the obituary editor, a crumbly old guy named Skip. See the pictures of the dead I found for Skip; see me spending a great deal of time cropping the pictures just so with lengths of cut-up manila folders. The pictures of the dead were like playing cards: the baseball player, the bookie, the entrepreneur, the woman who swam the Hudson in 1938. I shuffled them, filed them, scanned them into the computer and made a digital archive of them called Dead New York, or deadny.org. Toss a few of the cards—the shrewd bookie, the happy-go-lucky baseball player, the intrepid lady swimmer—in this box.

  In this box, put my father’s radio, still tuned to the station he listened to i
n Brewster. In New York, that was all classic rock. Layla. Gloria. Angie.

  In this box, paste a cartoon of the towers falling. Sketch them with a pencil; turn the pencil on its side to make the plumes of smoke endlessly rising into the air. In another panel, sketch Sarah and me sitting by the East River on the Williamsburg side, watching those same plumes, the next day. We are quiet, two in a long line of quiet people watching at the edge of the river, which slaps softly at the ratty, junk-filled vacant lot of a shoreline. Sarah is sketching the plumes; she is turning the pencil on its side. She has kicked off one of her sandals, and the river laps at her dirty toe as she draws. I watch her draw and wonder why it is that I don’t want to be drawing, why it is that that would never occur to me: to put my pencil on this moment, to feel the fulcrum of fate in the soft gray line that extends from my hand. I am uneasy about this. I look at my hand, at my palm, and it is not my hand from the dream—not burning, not transparent, not outlined in black—not at all. It is so ordinary. I look back across the river and I think: All of those people are dead. With a terrible sinking sensation, I realize that when I go back to work, which is a five-minute slanted walk away from the towers, I will be passing through a city of the dead. They will be everywhere now, too many to be cropped into place on the back page of The Hudson Times. Dead New York, indeed. I think that I should really quit, that it would be holy or something to quit. Sarah bites her lip, leans closer to the paper, going over the plumes she has made. I turn my palm over on my knee. If I quit, what would I do for money? I realize I don’t want to go back to bartending.

  In this box, paste a pay stub dated September 21, 2001, because I don’t quit. Everything feels weird. New York is suspended in time: vertiginous, a necropolis, a bubble. The gods have struck us, burnt us. Some story is happening in the heavens that we can’t see. Next to the pay stub, paste a scrap of The Hudson Times, and on that scrap sketch me slouching reluctantly down an ash-filled Wall Street with a paper cup of takeout coffee a few weeks later, as the dead, crowded on the sidewalk, still in their business clothes, look on silently, jealously. I am completely freaked out. A few days later—in a coincidence worthy of the stupidity of The Hudson Times—the real obituary editor, Skip, dies. I spend hours trying to crop his picture; we give him a full-page obit. They offer me his job, which I take, because the world is ending, and I didn’t draw the plumes of smoke—why didn’t I?—and maybe Sarah and I will move out of New York anyway. Go back to Arizona. Go live out in the desert. On another scrap of newspaper in the lower right-hand corner, sketch me at thirty-three, sitting at the old obituary editor’s desk, looking out the window where he used to lean on his elbows to smoke a surreptitious cigarette, thinking that I should put it on a T-shirt: The towers fell and all I got was this lousy job.

  In the next box, put the cake the two postmenopausal copy girls made for me to celebrate my taking the job as obituary editor. The cake is in the shape of a tombstone, with my name, date of birth, and an unfulfilled dash engraved in black frosting on the top.

  In this box, write Leo in invisible ink, but on top of it write Janos in florid, purple cursive. Add a snippet of black silk from Janos’s cummerbund, one of his dark hairs, my key to his townhouse in Gramercy Park, Monopoly money for his real money.

  Leave the last box entirely empty. This is the box of the enormous things I kept expecting to happen to me that didn’t quite happen. I didn’t have a word for what that thing, or series of things, might be. It was the same feeling I had had as a little boy, staring out through the gate connected to nothing at the end of our curving brick walkway at the house on Tinker’s Way; the same feeling I had had in the swamp with Caroline when her hair turned into black-and-gold birds; the same feeling I had had alone in my bed at night in the Sunburst when I was in exile; the same feeling I had had in the geodesic dome at Arroyo D’Orado College when I felt the winds charging at me, and away. This is, in other words, the box dedicated to the gods. They had changed me once, but since then, capricious, they hadn’t thundered back. They might have struck the city, but they hadn’t touched me on the forehead. The years went by, box by box, my resolve to make them waning, and I was still waiting for the gods to notice me, waiting to cross their path on my way to the subway or in a kiss or in the face of a stranger. I was waiting and waiting for them to change me again, to find me. And then they arrived.

  3

  The City

  You don’t know which one is the goddess. She hides her face among the others, and it’s dusk.

  So there I was, in the city of the dead, on a Tuesday afternoon in the last few months of my thirty-seventh year. I looked out my dirty window at The Hudson Times. I could see the place where the East River bent into the Hudson River. The river was just beginning its daily transformation. The small, gray waves were tipped with light. The clock at the top of my computer screen said 4:58.

  I typed out, “May Goddard, Rockette and Contortionist, 97.”

  Our crammed, dilapidated offices were on the eighth floor of a small, still elegant stone building at the corner of Wall Street and Water Street. South Street Seaport was a few blocks east; the massive, cream-colored stone façade of the New York Stock Exchange was about three slanted blocks west. Catty-corner from the exchange, a statue of a benevolent-looking George Washington being sworn in as President of the United States stood outside Federal Hall, a relic from the days when New York was the fledgling country’s capital. Two centuries ago, when necessary ships had docked at the wharves along South Street, The Hudson Times had rivaled the many other New York dailies, packed as it was with the freshest news of tides and captains and voyages and the arrivals of mighty schooners and brigantines and, later, steamships.

  Back then, our Times came out twice a day and was printed on massive presses on the ground floor, which these days is occupied by a chain fitness center and a Starbucks. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was still a real, thick, daily broadsheet, and everybody drank heavily over lunch at the Killarney Rose, on nearby Beaver Street. By the end of the century, the paper was much thinner and the type larger. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we were bought out by a Los Angeles–based media conglomerate, and The Hudson Times became a free shell of a paper, thirty-six pages on a good day, about the size of a folded dishtowel. The content was premasticated wire stories, Hollywood gossip, LASIK surgery ads, and a dash of local color—i.e., my section, the obit page, which was devoted to dead New Yorkers and the occasional dead world leader. The newspaper existed solely for the tourists who swarmed fatly around the stores, like Banana Republic and Old Navy, at South Street Seaport, had their pictures taken in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and lined up to watch the blasted World Trade Center site slowly morph into a mall. Everyone on the staff knew that our days of being printed on actual paper were numbered; the conglomerate was eager to move us entirely online. We were a joke, a fake newspaper that nobody really read and that could often be found littering the cobblestones on Fulton Street. Soon we wouldn’t be paper and ink at all; we would just be light. But by then I’d be across the river, across the place where the East River swirled into the Hudson, and inside my house with its crooked gate.

  I wrote, “Goddard retired from the Rockettes in 1943. Her final show was the Christmas Spectacular. She took her last bow dressed as a tin soldier.” Leaning against my cubicle wall was the scratched and fading picture of May, holding her soldier’s hat with one hand and swanning with the other, bowing straight-backed from the hips. That May—she’d almost made it to a century. Barely five feet tall, with a strike-up-the-band smile, she had begun her career as “The Little Butterfly,” tossed into the air in pink and purple wings off the upturned feet of her older brother and caught by the upturned feet of her middle brother in the Goddard Family Flyers, a vaudeville act that couldn’t get work by the time May was nineteen. So she hoofed it. Became a Rockette, dated a few minor gangsters, married Roy, the owner of a furniture business in Queens, and died in her sleep. Roy w
ent in 1979. I wondered what May did all those years, surrounded by Roy’s furniture that slowly, then quickly, aged, just the way Roy had. Tap, tap, tap up the stairs, down the stairs, in her small, echoing house. It wasn’t my house; it was May’s dream house. I knew how she felt; she died there, in her sleep.

  5:11. Past the close, as usual, I thought, and then the managing editor, Sydnee, IMed me: “gabe come on we need to get goddard to copy hurry up.” Fuck this fucking local rag, I didn’t write back to Sydnee, she of the suede miniskirts and sharp little white teeth and talking points. Fuck this fucking bullshit city of the dead for tourists that it was my job to maintain endlessly, like bailing out a leaky boat. Like painting a bridge. Even if I had known what I was doing, I couldn’t have kept up. Nobody could. The city of the dead was always expanding, while the circulation of The Hudson Times was always shrinking.

  The obit section was called, cutely, “Local Heroes,” as if dropping dead were an exceptional act, and I was encouraged, via e-mail from Los Angeles, to cover the passing of “real New York types, Gabe, the kinds of colorful guys and gals that make your city unique!” I was supposed to churn out two-paragraph sentimental tributes, written at an eighth-grade level, to ghostly Noo Yawkers who had lived in buildings that had long since been torn down, eaten in Automats that had dissolved, held jobs that no longer existed: telephone operator, dance hall girl, coal and ice man. May fit the bill so well that I wondered if I had made her up. Yet there she was, faded but real, bowing in her sequined tin soldier’s hat.

  I typed, “Goddard ran May Goddard’s School of Dance on Elmhurst Avenue until 1971, when it was bought by the Arthur Murray chain.” Even I could write a basic sentence like that, plus the subjects were always dead. It wasn’t like they could complain. The light at the tips of the waves lengthened, deepened. Across the dirty river was the open arc of the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, the buildings like enormous stair steps, the dense green trees. It looked like the land of the living, where happy people pushed happy babies in strollers and walked happy dogs on good leather leashes, while where I was felt like the land of the dead. But this land of the dead had brought me to Fleur, and Fleur would get me across that river, sooner or later, and really change my life.