Oh, the world! I wanted to be free of all my past mistakes, free of the physical constraints of the known world, the boring breath and blood of it all.
I trailed Brandon closely, only letting him get a storefront or two ahead as I walked past our old haunts. When I looked up at the awning of Nussbaum & Wu, I remembered my first walk through the neighborhood with Brandon. We had wondered if they were roommates, if Caroline Nussbaum and Jane Wu had dreamed up the restaurant as they lounged in their dorm room, rock-paper-scissoring it to see whose last name would appear first on the sign. But in that second when I lifted my face to the NUSSBAUM & WU sign, a slave to memory bliss, I lost Brandon in the crowd.
I blamed it on the children. Where had these unnerving hordes of children come from? They were pouring out of the bookstore down the block and distracting me with their inane chatter as they commandeered the sidewalk, carefully pedaling by on their neon bikes with training wheels, though their helmets and elbow- and knee-padding suggested kiddie daredevils maneuvering death-drop hairpin turns and BMX half-pipes. And then the moms swarmed, a shifting sea of black yoga pants and strollers with plaid bonnets—and I couldn’t see Brandon, I couldn’t see the back of his head, and I went up on my tiptoes, and that’s when my vision shuffled, when upper Broadway whirled into color and movement, but no discernable shapes. I flattened my feet to the concrete and put my hands out like I was surfing. Of course I dropped my bouquet. How could I hang on to anything? I seemed to be spinning furiously and far past the point of nausea. I was on a new frontier. I opened my eyes wider, trying to steady myself, but my vision blurred further, so I closed them tight.
Dear Reader, how mercilessly the world shook me! I was on some hellish electric gerbil wheel locked inside the jaws of the zipper at the Lyon County Fair, being spun around and around while simultaneously being flung back and forth. My dizziness intensified as my larynx went rogue, as I keened “Bran-duhn” in a feral soprano that bore no resemblance to my workaday teacher’s voice or to the blandly iconic tones of my suburban Midwest upbringing: Hey, everybody doin’ okay? Anybody need a smoothie or some chips? Our Lady of the Malls had left the building.
And then it was over as abruptly as it had started, and I tripped across the sidewalk and clung to the wall of Nussbaum & Wu in case it happened again. Two businessmen in dark coats looked at the spilled bouquet on the sidewalk and then over at me with guarded concern: I was a rabid dog they pitied but were too wary to approach. Their bare-bones kindness strengthened me, and I shrugged—it’s no big deal!—and offered them what I hoped was a winsome smile right before …
Dear Reader, I pause to apologize and ask you to please cloud your mind with refreshing images: Fresh laundry drying on a clothesline! A wedge of lime in sparkling water! Because I projectile vomited my espresso onto the sidewalk, my stomach buckling with each sharp heave.
When it stopped, I kept my stance—crouched over with my head hanging down, my hands at my ears, holding back my hair—and longed to cave into myself and disappear. Of course that’s not what I wanted at all. I wanted Brandon to appear and place his gloved hand on my head and say Caitlin. I wiped at my mouth shamefully, and looked up to see a man inside Nussbaum & Wu carrying a bus tub, a white towel flipped over his shoulder, frowning and muttering, cursing, probably.
And so I stumbled away from the windows and affected a blithe smile as my fellow pedestrians cut a sharp circle around me. The public vomiting both shamed me—the elementary school nightmare brought to vivid life—and energized me, for I found myself in possession of the renewed vim and vigor of the post-barfer as I skittered around on the sidewalk and picked up my bouquet. I rearranged it the best I could, stuffing the salvaged petals back into the plastic cone, holding the bouquet to my chest, the awful scrunch of cellophane and the rubber-banded stems pressed to my sternum as I hurried down Broadway, watching for Brandon.
I was distracted by a woman standing on the corner, one hand holding open an NYC guide book, the other hand protectively cradling a multi-zippered nylon handbag, which was also tightly strapped across her chest.
Before exiting the Midwest to attend Columbia, I, too, had heard the horror stories: My cousin’s best friend lives in an apartment building where a Rockette was MURDERED with an ICE PICK! MY neighbor’s aunt was shot RIGHT IN THE EYEBALL by an INSANE drug addict when she wouldn’t give up her danged purse, and so she had to get herself a GLASS EYE. REAL NICE SOUVENIR, RIGHT?
Tessie Tourist looked up at the street sign at 106th and Broadway and broke into a smile. Just ahead was Straus Park, a tiny, triangular oasis for weary walkers: a few benches and trash cans and some ornamental bushes that bisected Broadway. She crossed over to the park, sat on a bench, and wrapped her arms around her handbag—her Baggalini boyfriend!—and read her guidebook. Just looking at the bench made my right hand throb with all the old hurt, the creaky tenderness.
I had always felt safe in Manhattan. I had never been a victim of random anything. No, I personally orchestrated each bit of doom that came my way. The very bench on which Tessie Tourist perched had been my first urban downfall. I am afraid, Dear Reader, that I am being entirely literal.
It was the first Friday night of my freshman year: I was out late with Brandon and Nancy Ping, my assigned roommate at Carman Hall, and to our delight the Morningside Heights bars were pretty lax about carding. We were enjoying the sort of tipsy evening where one ruminates on theology in a bar booth. Nancy, like me, was a former straight-A Catholic schoolgirl, jaded and liberal, the mildest of believers, but Brandon was all in. And so the two of us sat across from Brandon, taunting him with the most inane biblical wisdom, those verses never cross-stitched and placed in oak frames: rules on menstrual impurity, barley cake composed of human dung, etc. Brandon enjoyed his Heineken, nodding affably and letting us ramble before he offered up his Godly defense: “You’re both looking at it in pieces. Anything can sound stupid if you take apart each and every detail.” He took a long swig of beer, and then drew a square on the tabletop with his index finger. “You’ve got to look at the whole picture, all at once.” He slowly circled his finger around in the square, as if coloring it in.
From my peripheral vision, I saw Nancy watch his moving hand. “I see,” she said softly.
“It’s the same thing with Neil Young,” Brandon explained.
“Who’s Neil Young?” Nancy looked at me as if I might know. I did.
“Who’s Neil Young?” Brandon wiped a fake tear of despair.
“Nancy? Do NOT get him started on his love for old-man music.”
“Reading the Bible is like listening to Neil Young’s masterpiece, After the Gold Rush.” Brandon ran his hand through his gold-brown hair, which hung to his shoulders and smelled like me: He used my cherry bark shampoo. “You can criticize certain … well, artistic choices, I guess. But you just have to put your headphones on and take the trip. And, man, it’s beautiful.”
It was the sort of evening where a girl leaps up onto a park bench to serenade her awesome new roommate and her boyfriend, the sort of evening where she morphs into a retro disco doll and sings: “Night fever, night fever!” It was dark, but I could see Brandon watching me and laughing, and Nancy watching Brandon watch me, and when I struck a certain dance move—my hand moving diagonally in front of my body a la John Travolta in his glorious white suit—I lost my balance. My wedge heel sunk into a slat in the bench, and I pitched forward.
“Caitlin!” Brandon yelled, as if his voice could catch me. I was falling at a weird angle, my body plunging in a twisting motion.
I landed with my full weight on my right wrist, my hand pancaked backward. It didn’t hurt right away but it felt so cold, as if my hand had been plunged into a freezer while the rest of my body sweated in a tank top and short skirt. When Brandon and Nancy yelled “Don’t look!” in unison, I obeyed, and then there was a bit of mild good luck, some slacker guardian angel stopped hitting the snooze button and threw me a bone: An empty cab screeched to a stop right n
ext to us. Except the cabdriver did look, and he gasped, “Oh my sweet dear Jesus.” He got out of the cab and helped Brandon and Nancy get me off the ground and into the backseat. All the while, my hand felt alien to me, a bundle of broken-off icicles that had glommed onto my arm.
I rode in the backseat between them. Brandon had taken off his T-shirt and loosely blanketed it around my hand, and Nancy cradled her own hands into a supportive nest for it. She was shivering, and by the sound of her constant swallowing and raspy breathing, trying not to cry.
A nauseated sleepiness came over me, and I started to recede, but the air moving over my wrist and hand was as intense as bucketing ice water, and I said, “Please turn the air conditioning off.” From either side of me came whispered rosaries of assurance: Brandon saying, You’re gonna be fine, Cait; you’re gonna be fine, Cait; and from Nancy a string of It’s okay we’re almost at the hospital It’s okay we’re almost at the hospital. But no one was doing what I asked, and so I wailed: “God, please please please turn off the air conditioner!” The driver pumped the gas, our bodies lurched forward, and icy, silvery pain tornadoed through my hand. Brandon—O, sweet angel of Heineken breath and aquamarine eyes glowing in the darkness—whimpered out the bad news: “Caitlin, the air-conditioning isn’t on. It’s really hot in here.”
My hand was hidden under a pale green sheet at the hospital. A social worker with a clipboard and an appealing necklace—it looked like a string of cherrywood pearls—and a white-coated surgeon stood at the end of my hospital bed. The surgeon was briskly showing me X-rays on a portable light board. He pointed to the illuminated bones piercing my skin, the compound fractures of my hand.
“The poor kindergarten turkey,” I said. Nancy and Brandon were on the right side of my railed bed. Brandon was still shirtless and had some blood on his chest; it was also on Nancy’s balled-up hands and on her arms. A nice nurse on my left side checked the IV line in my good hand. The morphine was doing a sweet trick, tucking me deeper and deeper into peace. I stopped thinking My parents are going to freak out so hard as I drifted into a haze of happy warmth, for the nighttime city beyond my hospital window was a sea of bobbing lights, still incandescent with possibility.
“Before we take you in for surgery, we need to talk for a quick minute about exactly how this happened.” The surgeon’s mouth was a grim line.
“My wedge got wedged,” I blurted, my noun-to-verb wordplay failing to impress. My eyes kept fluttering shut. Still, even injured and fighting off prescriptive sleep, I retained the spirit of any pretentious eighteen-year-old. “I can actually describe the feeling of falling … more than the falling itself.”
“Okay, Caitlin.” The surgeon nodded in a companionable way right before he asked both Brandon and Nancy to step out of the room so he could speak privately with me. But he was looking at Brandon when he asked.
“Why”—Brandon’s voice was soft, and he held the surgeon’s gaze—“would I need to do that?” He folded his arms over his bare chest.
The surgeon looked over at the social worker and raised his eyebrows—Do your thing, good cop—and so she did; she smiled at Brandon empathetically, as if she, too, had just been implicitly accused of shattering a hand. “I understand that you want to stay with your friend. But it’s a standard part of our patient care protocol.” The morphine kicked in harder, and the world gentled: The voices in my room sounded cushioned and tunneled, beyond my understanding. My pain fell away. I felt only the slow warmth of euphoria as I lay in bed, tucking my chin to my chest, folding in on myself, as if in possession of a sweet, delirious secret I wasn’t quite ready to share. But just as I was going deeper, deeper still, Nancy’s voice pierced my halcyon half-sleep: “She really did fall. He didn’t do it! He loves her.”
And then a quick cave of airy, opiate dreaming, and it was morning: my right hand full of pins and rods and metallic pain, and the room faintly scented with the coppery smell of blood. I tapped the fingers of my left hand on my mattress.
I would be fine. I could still type.
The IV hurt, though, the constant, plastic fatness of it in my vein.
Nancy was in the twin bed next to me, sleeping on top of the hospital sheets, her hair pulled back in a still-smooth ponytail. Her red sundress—patterned with whimsical inch-high Eiffel Towers—was now wrinkled and stained brown with dried blood, and her eye makeup was all helter-skelter, but she was still the sort of girl who looked beautiful in the morning. She woke with a quiet moan, acclimating herself to the hospital room, to life, before she looked over at me.
“Oh, Caitlin.” She propped her head up on her hand. It would be a while before I could do that. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know, actually,” I croaked.
“Brilliant question. Sorry.”
“Where’s—”
“They wouldn’t let Brandon stay. The jerky doctor—did you notice his shoes? I was like, 2001 just called, and it wants those earth-toned Dansko clogs back—he was such an elitist; last night he cornered me and asked if all three of us went to Columbia, and when I told him we did but Brandon didn’t, he was all like … hmmm. I could so tell he was insinuating that if you don’t attend an Ivy League university, you’re automatically a domestic abuser. It was insane, Caitlin. It was discrimination! And then he claimed the hospital only allows one ‘guest’ to spend the night, and smiled as he said it, like: ‘If I’m talking to Miss Gullibility here, I’ll say whatever I like, because I’m not only a good-looking sandy-haired surfer type, I’m also a doctor, so dude, I’ll be making the rules.’” Nancy held her hands out and jiggled her shoulders, aligning her torso as if about to catch a wave. “I’m totally going to call later and check on these so-called rules.”
Nancy Ping, my other soul mate! She was a fortunate child of the suburbs, an eighteen-year-old ready to call out a surfing doctor on any perceived bullshit, and a big-hearted girl too, trying to cheer me by mocking comfy footwear. Brandon wouldn’t make fun of anyone’s shoes, but he also lacked the confidence to follow up, to phone the hospital PR department for a grudge-fueled chat.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand. “Brandon asked me to call him as soon as you woke up.” Her nails were painted a glossy magnolia pink, radiant as stained glass, and as she tapped on her phone I thought about how every single thing Nancy did was attractive. “He’s waiting at home.”
By home she meant our dorm room at Carman Hall, which she surely hadn’t planned to share with her roommate’s boyfriend, and the memory of Nancy’s easy magnanimity made me cry seven years later as I walked down Broadway, a few easily dabbed tears that swelled into a snuffly crescendo of racking sobs. I bent my head and avoided eye contact, which nobody was exactly dying to make with me.
I felt so cold and sick when I raised my eyes at the corner of 101st and Broadway and looked down the block to my right. There it was, and I perked up, for O, it was a sign within a sign, a literal one; Brandon had led me directly to the Broadway Hotel and Hostel, for it had not been in my thoughts. I wanted to get out of the cold, though; I wanted to sit down. I looked at the hotel sign and imagined Joseph and Mary returning to the barn in Bethlehem when they were in mourning for Jesus, of how it must have felt for his earthly parents to return to his birthplace and remember that moment, personal and universal, when the world changed. Dear Reader, I was headed back to the barn in my own personal Bethlehem, an unimpressive structure made luminous by the past.
I strode into the lobby as purposefully as any thrifty tourist who had booked reservations online weeks in advance. The air was a warmed-over mélange of hamster cages and fried eggs, and I had to breathe through my mouth while I waited to check in.
The hipster desk clerk hassled me about not having a photo ID, but I did possess a tear-streaked face, as well as an impromptu sob story about my purse being stolen, which I embellished with dramatic, ragged sighs. He listened to my tale, nodding and bored: “I’m lucky—I guess—that my credit card was in my coat pocket because I just
can’t believe I had my purse ripped out of my hands on the uptown C train. Sigh. And by a man carrying a rolled up Wall Street Journal, wearing a very nice suit—like Barneys nice. Sigh. He might have bought it at their half-off sale, I have NO way of knowing, but the sad thing—the resonant thing—was that my fellow passengers went right back to texting and reading magazines.”
I told him that I’d previously stayed in a fantastic room with an en suite bathroom and tropical decor, and even a window seat, on my first trip to New York, back when I was an incoming freshman at Columbia. I’d enjoyed such a wonderful week! Could I have that room for the night? I’d written quite a nice review of the hotel on Yelp, and would happily do so again. The clerk listened to me ramble with a progressively stonier expression, quite possibly I was boring him to death, but between being a previous guest, an avid Internet reviewer, and a Columbia grad, I was allowed to pay for a room using my Visa card without a photo ID.
Dear Reader, melancholy victory was mine. A key! I had a key! Well, a key-card, to be precise. And I was allowed to check into my private room early. The thought of staying in a hostel room with three unknown roommates and a pair of rickety iron bunk beds did not particularly appeal. It had appealed even less when Brandon and I had stayed there seven years before, a week of sweltering August to kill before I—well, we—could move into Carman Hall.
As I walked to the elevator, the clerk called out: “Don’t you need to contact anyone about your stolen purse?” I shook my head, but he pointed at the front desk phone anyway: ancient and beige, with a pig’s tail cord—it was that sort of place. The elevator, which provided a bumpy ascension to the fourth floor, smelled aggressively of bleach and floral cleanser, and my room was a chemical garden as well. I laid the roses on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed. The polyester bedspread, patterned with palm fronds, might have symbolized peace, but I had to train my mind away from my Emerald City chorus of potential mattress concerns: paisley-shaped stains and bedbugs and stray hairs, oh my! I listened to the muffled whine of traffic, to the aggrieved German man in the next room ordering takeout: Two cokes and General Tso’s chicken! Yes! Yes! General Tso’s chicken! The memory of being there with Brandon made the room a thousand times bleaker, and I also felt no closer to him. I gulped back a few tears of self-pity. I unzipped my coat and saw that the bottle of Nardil in my front coat pocket looked like a popped-out cylindrical hernia. I would try to be strong and not take one; I would try to power though my nausea.
Dear Reader Page 12