Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  “How can you say it like that?”

  “Because you’re asking sucky questions.”

  “What the hell is your problem?”

  “You’re not the only one hurting right now,” Suzy says. “This isn’t just your thing.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do? Sweep it under the rug like Mom? Roll over like Dad? I don’t even know what you’re doing, but you’re acting like the news was that the mail might not come today.”

  “Just ’cause I had my cry in the car before dinner doesn’t mean I’m feeling less than you. I’m just…still thinking about it. There’s gotta be some other option.”

  Suzy’s done it for years now—positioned herself as the elder sister emotionally. Matched every tear of Grace’s with a stoic dry eye. It’s a point of pride that no one else cares for. But it’s always been important to her. Especially after a broken levee like last night—a steady return to calm and clear, to the rational position. Suzy doesn’t know shit about dealing with death, but she knows how to piss off her sister with her stoniness.

  “You aren’t gonna think yourself…into a better…place with this one,” Grace says, tripping over the reproach because of a clogged throat. “He’s sick and there’s only one thing to do.”

  “But what are we supposed to do?”

  “Maybe we can move back,” Grace says.

  “You don’t want to move back.”

  “I could help Mom. We could help with the hospital. He’s not gonna be able to work after surgery or radiation or whatever they decide to do.”

  “You’re not moving back,” Suzy says. “Mike won’t live here. You don’t even like it here.”

  “Then, what about you?”

  “You’re volunteering me?”

  “What’s your problem?” Grace says. “We could rotate. Ask to fly out, trade off weeks. Try to do all our off days out here, drive up and back.”

  “They didn’t ask for our help.”

  “Well, what if I want to help? What if I want to be there?”

  “Grace, no offense, but you’ve gone home, like, twice a year since high school—at least, when you’re not getting married and I’m not graduating. It’s not like you’ve spent all that much time there.”

  “Well, Suzy, the circumstances have fucking changed!”

  The scenery out the window is the scenery that will be outside in five minutes and in thirty minutes and in three hours.

  “I’m sorry, you’re right,” Suzy says. “You should do what you want. We should help. We should plan to be here, if that’s useful to them. All I’m saying is, they seem to have it under control for now.”

  “They have literally nothing under control. They are in the worst position I can imagine.”

  “There’s just…there’s nothing we can do today. Coming home, sitting around there, it’ll mean four sad people instead of two. Four people who suddenly aren’t really working. Five if you include Mike. And until someone knows how we can help, we just have to keep at it as planned, you know? Just like you said.”

  “Mike said he’d move here. On the phone last night, when I told him, he said he’d move.”

  “He’s a noble guy. You’re very fortunate. I just don’t know how right that is for you two.”

  “I thought it was sweet. It was the right thing.”

  “Do you think we should’ve stayed longer?” Suzy says.

  “Dad wasn’t gonna allow it. He’s even more concerned than you are about missing out on things.”

  “We should’ve dragged him to the concert.”

  “We’re not too far yet.”

  “Nah, you’re right, stick to it,” Suzy says. “That’s Dad: Fidelity to the game plan, that’s what wins races.”

  They crash in the Village, across the street from the park. It’s an old roommate of Grace’s, Rose, red lipstick and black hair and an Alabama accent so much itself it sounds like bad acting. They met on an Allman Brothers tour, ended up in New York around the same time. Rose said it was ’cause she wanted to follow the culture, but Grace explained to Suzy on the way in that it was really because her husband was black. The place is smaller than Grace and Mike’s. There’s a pullout bed in the couch that comfortably sleeps one but that’s capable of squeezing in two sisters who grew up sharing a room.

  The windows look out onto the northwest corner of the park, and they’ve been open since June, Rose tells them, on account of the blackouts and air conditioner bans. Suzy stretches her head out and around the corner and glimpses the arch through the trees. She feels a heightening tide of interest in her sister, the contrasting awareness that someone she’s known without gaps these last few days—and whom she knew without gaps growing up—could have come here in a huff of certitude and lived in all manner for years without Suzy really hearing much about it. Though Grace hardly spoke of her New York period to Suzy, it all just seemed to have transpired so naturally, so inevitably, that it had gone just as it would ever go. For Grace—and this is the point, the differentiation—there is never an anxiety of mislocation. The only place she could ever be is where she is.

  Here now, there is this scene out the window. The corner of Waverly and Macdougal, sidewalk, trees, brownstones, park. Suzy feels a familiarity with it—not the precision of this vantage point, but a sort of cubist collage of all vantages onto the park. She begins to imagine the occupation of the frame out the window by everyone who’s ever passed through it before. Everybody who’s crossed that intersection, every kiss on the corner, every trumpet solo at the benches along the walking path—all layering in composite. That interconnectedness, the density and overlap, the city’s suggestion of constancy, of relatedness, of infinity. And Gracie amidst it all, carving out her existence. Or whatever she did here. It’s a lot to process—every body in all of time all at once. And for a little while the exercise crowds out the beacon at the edge of the frame, that bright light Suzy’s spent the car ride attempting to ignore. But now that it’s been invoked—explicitly ignoring it only brings it forward—it shows itself in full, a marquee in neon:

  DAD IS DYING

  DAD IS HALFWAY DEAD

  Rose is home now and she’s animated about market produce—strawberries, blueberries, peaches. But she quickly pivots to the concert. Rose heard about the tour on the radio in the spring. The terms were clear: there would be a postcard lottery, and those who won the lottery had the opportunity to stand in line to buy tickets. She sent in a few postcards with her name, address, and number—and then several dozen others with her friends’ and family’s names and addresses, but her phone number still. In the end the Garden received over a half million postcard requests, and Rose, she wound up with three winners, twelve tickets scattered throughout the arena and spread across the last two dates. She went the night before and earmarked this pair for Grace. Which is how Grace and Suzy wind up dusting makeup across their faces and heading out the door, a door so wet with heat Suzy has to dig her heels into the mat to pull it shut. They hit the street a little after seven.

  In order to avoid the congealing cab traffic around MSG and the furnace of the subway, they walk from Waverly Place. It takes a half hour, passing over to Sixth Avenue and up into the edge of the West Village and Chelsea and finally Herald Square. Every glimpse south, the two towers, nearly complete, leering twins. Grace says she’d watched them grow from stumps. At almost every corner there is a direction—north or west—with a blinking walk sign, and even when there’s not, there is a gap in the traffic, such that it’s possible to eat up blocks without stopping even once. Grace leads Suzy into the street as though all accumulated habits from the past seven months—all that Sela-brand behavior—had simply been borrowed on short lease, had had no effect on her bearings in New York. At the busier intersections a battalion from their curb meets a battalion from the opposite side, and without stutter-stepping or even meeting eyes, one slips past the other with zero contact.

  As they inject themselves into a capillary off Herald Square, the f
oot traffic has trouble passing unmoving cabs on their way to the beating heart at Seventh Avenue, cabs and town cars with transmissions in neutral, a sense of the imminent failure of blood-pumping Penn Plaza. It’s a half hour before Stevie Wonder is due on and it’s still light out. There are shirtless men, some in body paint and frosted sparkles, someone in a loincloth and top hat, colored bandanas and sleeveless tees with The Tongue, necks and arms and stomachs with a half summer’s tan, girls on the shoulders of boys, looking the police horses in the eye.

  The crowds gathered in the plaza fail to find lanes to the checkpoints—past the drug dealers and the scalpers selling six-dollar tickets for fifty. The flow is slow, and in frustration fights erupt and arrests are made. Though it feels like movement is futile, Grace is convinced it’s gonna work out—this is the fourth show in three days, it’s worked out before. Only in faith of slow certain progress do they find their way to the first security checkpoint, and then the second, third, and fourth—where staff collect wineskins and champagne bottles—before funneling at last into the mouth of the arena. Dante’s fifth circle, Suzy says. There wasn’t much cool air to breathe on the outside, but it’s altogether absent as they press deeper.

  Grace had shoved the flask she brought down the front of her underwear, right beneath the zipper of her jeans, a spot security elected not to frisk. And so Grace and Suzy head to the bathroom to take swigs. It’s lazy on the floor, thick and anxious, the uncomfortable hum of a hometown crowd after a visiting slugger’s grand slam. It’s a distended anticipation before Stevie, whose set is only the signal that it’ll be that much longer until the main draw. And yet in that time distance before the show, most of the men are still walking around—to get malt balls, to buy beers—with Jagger hips thrust forward and Jagger mouths pursed. Everywhere the strut and the pout.

  In the bathroom the sinks are for blow and the stalls are for smack. Finishing a flask, it seems, is meant to be done in the white light of the concourse.

  “We can just drink at our seats,” Suzy says.

  Grace shakes her head like Suzy’s missed the point and pulls a tightly wound plastic sandwich bag of cocaine from her bra.

  “Where’d you get that?” Suzy says, and Grace says Rose had leftovers from the night before. We’ve never done this together, Grace intimates with a look, and time is, as we’ve learned this week, rather precious. Suzy keys enough to satisfy Grace and wonders if any of the people here are using the blow she brought from Sela. As the bump hits her brain, she seizes on the thought: it’s empowering, her magnitude, her capacity to affect a big thing. She rolls into the arena, her feet like racing wheels, her brain holding a new thought, a thought she’s had before, the same thought she had the first time she tried coke at Vassar, which is, Oh right, this stuff really does work.

  Their seats are stage left, at the preliminary ascent of the lower bowl. They’re pretty good seats for a concert, but they’d be even better for a Knicks game. All Suzy can really make out are the sunglasses and the shirt at the piano, rainbow scales like a freshwater fish. The memory of the set, Suzy knows in the moment, will be stripped down to that shirt and Stevie’s Clavinet. Rainbow scales and the wah-wah of that electric piano, left hand on the Clav like a bullhorn of rhythm. Each time Wonderlove moves into a new song, she forgets the previous one, all except for “Superstition” because it’s the last.

  Stevie bows, with an allusion to possibly being back later, and as the lights come up, the crowd continues to dance, stomping the seats to no beat but the memory of that wah-wah. No music but the effortful rhythm from the clap-and-stomp of the section across the court.

  “I need to pee,” Grace says, the meaning of which is ambiguous to Suzy, who follows her. No point coming down in the middle of a Stones concert, and so Suzy digs in with her painted pinkie nail, hits both nostrils. The way Grace smiles—wide enough to hurt—and the way she just hangs there watching Suzy, failing to dial that smile back to sane, convince Suzy that Grace has not ever loved her quite as much as now. “This is fun!” Grace says twice without space for a response, and then they chase out when some ladies in headdresses demand they share.

  “This is good, this is fun,” Grace says again at their seats, swigging from the flask and rolling her hand in a soft demand for Suzy to do the same.

  Grace is dancing to some memory of a beat, hands above her head, hair shaken out into her face, lips and hips clicking to a four-four.

  “What song is that?” Suzy says, joking.

  “I don’t know. All of them.”

  Suzy closes her eyes and moves to the same thump, and soon, somewhere in that black moment when she’s not seeing, the sound in her head becomes the sound of twenty thousand attempting to will a beginning with its rhythm. An unflinching beat—hands clapping above heads, and feet on concrete steps; the punching of an uncountable number of beach balls like a Drunk ’n’ Draw rally that has no shot at ending. Two minutes, three minutes of antici—

  And then the lights drop on the upbeat, and the plinkings in minor of a Halloween sound track prompt the “Ladies and Gentlemen…”—and then they appear—“the Rolling Stones!” Some shadows stumble into position, followed by this little streak of white skipping across the backdrop like the reflected light off a watch face. And so the band is playing without any buildup—enough’s been had—and they’re thirty seconds in, and then they’re a minute into “Brown Sugar,” and it’s a Bobby Keys solo, which is about when Suzy stops thinking about the fact that she’s seeing the Rolling Stones for the first time and starts experiencing it, a distinction that only makes it more difficult not to sit above herself in row 16 and watch herself watching, watch herself watching herself drunk and high, in all ways elevated an inch or two out of her skin, a feedback loop of self-consciousness that’s exitable only when she starts watching Grace, who, she supposes, has never had trouble experiencing an experience before.

  There really is a moment—right between “All Down the Line” and “Midnight Rambler”—when she is listening, having stepped up and onto her seat, off the ground like Grace and everyone around them, dancing on her two-by-two-foot cushion stage, and fully inside herself, a pipeline between the guitar solos and the liquid slink of her body, when it is being processed as a personal thing, twenty thousand people each with their personal things, too. And then white lights, arranged like cannons on the stage, slam the ceiling, where more white lights come raining down. Suzy fixates on the white above, which turns out not to be lights at all, but Mylar mirrors reflecting the audience. No one seems to notice, but deeper, a half hour later, it happens again, white light into the space-paper reflectors, which begin rotating slowly and showing the crowd back to itself. The audience screams in response, as if fully realizing its size and its presence in this place, before that stage and those men, proof, more or less, that they, the twenty thousand, exist.

  The rest feels like being sprayed by a fire hose, maybe four or five more songs, with a communal “Happy Birthday” to Mick, cake and all with twenty-nine candles, a food fight with custard pies. During “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” Mick shovels rose petals onto the fans in the front row, blowing kisses, whipping his arms in windmills. When the light catches him right, it’s possible to make out the nubs of his ribs, even from a distance, accented by the plunge of his blouse. Eventually a version of “Street Fighting Man” that fails to end—this collective will, it seems, of the crowd, pushing the bouncing ball on the sheet music along, run after run, in order that it not resolve in the Keef-and-Charlie wind-down and Mick bow. And though it’s over, they come back. They play one of Stevie’s songs. They play “Satisfaction.” And then the stage is cleared, and because she read about it in the paper this morning, Suzy knows what happens next: the band members ride the waves of the sealing Keef chord off the stage and into the concrete corridors to the town cars underground, each of the seven onstage dripping sweat, none more than Mick, wrapped in whatever costume has been appropriate for the encore, and in less time than it woul
d take to perform one more song, they’re out on the street, off to Mick’s birthday party, rolling through illuminated darkness, as though anything that just transpired might not have happened at all. And back inside, with the lights high and the mirrors still swirling, Suzy finds herself, a white grub in a pointillist garden, and she asks Grace for one more bump before facing the exit, where they’ll stand without patience, pushing out as they pushed in, but with nothing to look forward to on the other side.

  They debate skipping the subway again but decide to funnel down and wait for the D at Herald Square, one long express stop to the apartment. The platform is crowded, as hot as the arena and smelling a little worse. Suzy insists that wherever they end up next—they accept the reality that neither of them is falling asleep for hours—should have more favorable light than this station to hide their streaky mascara and the sweat stains in their halter tops. Then they hang there quietly, waiting, privately yet simultaneously accepting the new reality that there is nowhere deeper they can escape to and there is nothing left to keep them from considering it head-on. When it comes to Wayne’s news, they are in the place beyond deferment.

  They stand at the edge of the tracks, peering into the tunnel every couple minutes, looking for the first faint suggestion of headlights. When it comes, theirs is a graffiti train, tagged from nose to tail. “The D originates in the Bronx,” Grace says by way of explanation. Once aboard, they stand against the doors and Grace sticks her hand out the open window, trying to touch the wind without touching the wall.

  They sit together in the park, near the arch and the fountain, near the frame Suzy imagined all of New York passing through while she watched from Rose’s apartment window. They recap the entirety of the show, once and then again and again. And as they wind down, as there is less to say, Wayne creeps in once more. Wayne center stage. The place beyond deferment.

  And it is awash in the acceptance of his presence there that Suzy is seized by the beginning of an idea—something she knows she could do, because she’s already proven herself capable of doing it. Something she could do to solve the problem. But for now, with earliest light threading into the sky, she explores the idea without consigning herself to it, the way she can sing along to the Rolling Stones without meaning the words. The idea will be considered more fully once she sobers up, banks some sleep, gets back west.