THE EAST RIVER, ON ITS SHORT, telescoping passage from Long Island Sound to Upper New York Bay, picks up speed as it forks at Roosevelt Island, then slows back down until it narrows near Delancey Street and the Williamsburg Bridge, where it begins hastening again as it goes churning ’round the bend at Wallabout Bay and past the yellow-pine caissons sunk beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. At this point it is flowing at a slightly faster pace than the average human walker—more equivalent, that is, to the ever-hustling pedestrians of Manhattan. On its western bank, from 125th Street down to the South Street Viaduct, the river’s course is hugged by the FDR Drive, parts of which were built upon rubble imported from Bristol, England, after the German Luftwaffe bombed Bristol to gray smithereens. Prior to that, the river lapped Front Street, one block to the west, which has retained its name despite no longer fronting anything; before that, it bordered Water Street, two blocks farther westward, and no longer, of course, on any water; and before that, the East River met Manhattan at Pearl Street, which was named for the glittering oyster shells that once adorned its shores. This fattening of lower Manhattan, 350 years in the making, was accomplished via landfill, the streets and buildings overlaid upon the shattered remnants of bombed foreign ports, upon infinite piles of brown earth hauled from where hills were leveled and cellars and subway tunnels dug, upon shipwreck debris, broken stoneware, ash, offal, horse carcasses, dung, apple cores, glass shards, grease, and other assorted garbage, piled onto the banks via shovels, pails, horse-drawn carts, bulldozers, and dump trucks.
A few blocks north of Delancey Street, four stories above solid Manhattan schist, Talmadge Bertrand tucked the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers into the snow on the roof, to keep them chilled until tomorrow, and glanced eastward toward the river, across those landfilled blocks whose history Micah had taught him. His cheeks were reddened, but from warmth rather than cold, and an interior warmth at that: from contentment, and possibly even joy, though at this late hour he was too stoned and boozeheaded to parse the distinctions. In some odd and uplifting way, he’d felt like a bona fide adult for the first time in his life tonight. They’d entertained, he and Micah, like some old married couple . . . but some cool old married couple, he amended himself, some cool old married couple still fond of loud music and loosey-goosey late nights, like the Hendersons back home though (on second thought) without the suicidal son and the daughter in rehab and all the rumors about swinger parties that his mother had kept in circulation for at least fifteen years. Micah had set the table with hand-sewn cloth napkins, arrayed it with candles, and decorated it with orange and yellow sycamore leaves she’d gathered from Tompkins Square Park. She’d even fetched him and Matty a little decanter type of thing, to make their whiskey look proper. (A fifth of Heaven Hill on the table, she’d said, was too country even for her.) And man, the freakin dinner she’d cooked: a tofu roll that she’d stuffed with a mixture of onions, celery, bread, and walnuts, plus some herbs and other stuff; cranberry sauce (from dented cans, but she’d doctored it up somehow); curried carrots, like she must’ve tasted when she was in India, or so Talmadge figured; and some sort of vegetable mashup whose ingredients he couldn’t quite inventory but that he’d been unable to stop eating. Plus that redonkulously good pie.
He kept glancing across the candlelight at her, as she listened to Matty going off on one of his unhinged, semi-hilarious rants, and every time she’d smile or laugh Talmadge felt this blast of . . . it was like heat, but lowgrade heat, not like the heat you felt during sex, which was burning heat, big fat log heat blazing you from the inside out, but more like the softer, moister radiator heat you felt afterwards, when it was over, and you were just lying there, recouping your breath and wanting so badly to say something but never knowing what. After all these months spent in each other’s exclusive company, tonight he’d been able to glimpse himself and Micah through another person’s eyes—Matty’s, which were kinda screwy eyes, but whatever. And what he’d seen through that lens, he’d liked. Something true, something ancient, something sustainable.
He stood there for a while, by the thick steel-clad door, looking toward the river, his heart hot and melty. It didn’t look like a river, from his vantage—just a ribbon of blackness interrupting the dense urban light grid, an absence rather than a presence. His eyes were drawn to the long glinting bridges spanning it, with the stalled traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge resembling a festive string of white lights hung for the season. Then he peered upward, to where a narrow sliver of moon hung tilted in the sky, so minimized by the quivering radiance below it—by the million-windowed incandescence of Manhattan, its infiniteness of glowing filaments, the excess lumens hurled skyward into a blue-yellow penumbra—that the moon appeared quaint and obsolete up there, like a rowboat docked beside a cruise ship. He recalled his father’s glee after purchasing an electric bug-zapper for the family fishing camp, up on Black Creek near Uncle Lenord’s. Dick Bertrand had hauled Talmadge, aged seven or thereabouts, onto his big pleated lap and said, “Watch this”: moths and gnats and fireflies and beetles and dragonflies orbiting the blue cylinder until, bzzzzp, they’d hit it and explode, two thousand volts of electricity spraying bug parts into a micro-dappled circle on the concrete porch. “Dumb little buggies,” Dick Bertrand told Talmadge, patting the knob of his kneecap. “They think it’s the moon. Ain’t that somethin?”
Back downstairs, in the shuddery bronze light of the apartment, he checked on Matty before making his way to the bedroom. “You good, dude?”
From the floor, where he was laid out beneath a wool blanket, Matty signaled thumbs-up. “The Son of Man,” he said, cocking his thumb toward the biblical passage graffitied onto the wall, “has a place to lay his head.”
“Matty 8:20,” Talmadge said, circling the room to blow out the candles.
“You got it, man.” Slyly, with one side of his mouth curved upward, Matty added, “I might get frisky with Maybelle tonight.”
Pausing to ogle Maybelle’s pale, impastoed haunches, Talmadge said, “Be careful. She’s a handful.” Instantly, however, he felt an odd twinge of guilt. Despite her fecund nakedness and come-hither pose, he’d never considered Maybelle in that way until just now: as a pinup, a wet dreamscape. He felt as if he’d just mentally undressed the Virgin Mary, and was grateful to blow out the final candle so as not to risk the sight of Maybelle looking stricken and blasphemed. Poor pure Maybelle. He’d just handed her over to Matty like a druglord’s party favor.
“Awesome,” said Matty, wiggling down deeper beneath the blanket. “That was a cool night, man,” he said. “I think we killed the dead lady’s whiskey. Thanks for the chow.”
“That was something, huh?”
“Fucking amazing. You got a cool chick.”
“Yeah,” Talmadge said. He sensed this compliment deserved more and better words, but he didn’t possess them. “Yeah,” he repeated. “I do.” Then he announced he was baggin’ it, and went feeling his way down the hallway to where Micah had been asleep for hours.
In their bedroom was a futon they’d cadged from an NYU dumpster. On both sides of the futon were plastic milk-crate nightstands, Talmadge’s red and Micah’s blue. At the foot of the futon were other plastic crates, filled with their clothes: Micah’s clothes were folded into neat little mall-store stacks, while Talmadge’s were squished and stuffed into the crates, sleeves and pantslegs overflowing the tops. A pair of backpacks were positioned against the near wall, and against the far wall was a choir pew salvaged from the renovation of St. Margaret Mary’s on Second Avenue that they’d re-employed as a bookshelf. This sat beneath an ancient sheet of plywood boarding the room’s window, onto which had been sprayed, probably decades ago, an indecipherable graffiti tag that might or might not have spelled out jewel, jews, jaws, or jawas (as in the hooded pygmy scavengers from Star Wars: Talmadge’s preferred interpretation). Propped against a corner, too, was Micah’s banjo, an heirloom from her mother, who’d gone missing just before Micah’s twelfth birthday.
Though familiar, this was all barely visible to Talmadge as he tiptoed into the room, with only the nearest edges of the room’s topography discernible in the dim orange glow of the kerosene heater. Aware that he was swaying from the whiskey, he navigated his way slowly, so as not to disturb and disappoint Micah by kicking something over and/or lurching toward the bed, lout-style. He undressed as quietly as he could, wincing at the heavy cowboy clink of his buckle as his belt unspooled onto the floor.
From outside, a siren yelped: one of those short, sharp squeals that New York City cops issue to nudge idling vehicles out of their path, or to put potential do-badders on notice. Underlying that was the base hum of the city, chordal and constant, like the grind of some massive hidden gears, the subterranean hamster wheel that powered the city. Talmadge was still unaccustomed to the sound of it. Like the crickets back home in Mississippi, rubbing static into the aural nightscape, the urban hum redefined silence. It went mostly unnoticed, beneath the higher-decibel soundscapes (the sirens, the sanitation truck brake-squeals, the carhorns, the seismic subway rumbles, the fragmented pedestrian babble, the irregular gin hoots of the smokers congregating outside an unmarked cocktailery four doors down), until bedtime, when Talmadge often found himself lying in the darkness trying to identify its source: air traffic, maybe, or the vibrations of the FDR Drive to the east, or a hundred thousand vacuum cleaners being operated all at once. White noise, people called it, but this seemed inaccurate to Talmadge. Snowfall: that was white noise. This noise was the color of a truck axle. He slid beneath the sheets with a movie burglar’s stealth.
He was startled, then, when Micah rolled over, sharp and alert. “Hey, baby,” she whispered, with what sounded like noontime wakefulness.
“You still awake?” he said. “Shit, sorry.” How long had she been up—and had she been listening to him and Matty as they’d sat drinking and toking in the living room? He rewound the audio of his memory, scanning the mental tape for regrettable snippets he might need to address. He prayed she hadn’t heard him and Matty caterwauling about the night a monstrously drunk Chi-O pledge named Chivers Holley had peed Talmadge’s bed during sex, forcing Talmadge to request a replacement mattress from the dorm’s RA. Three nights later, when he returned to the dorm room with Chivers after a more sober date, he found a plastic painter’s tarp draped over his bed. After Chivers had stormed off in debased fury Matty came bursting into the room, gasping with nasty laughter. This was not the kind of reminiscing you did around Micah (“That poor girl,” she would say, forcing you to think That poor girl and feel not amused but rather ashamed of your crass eighteen-year-old self). Nor, for that matter, did you crack jokes about getting it on with sweet chaste Maybelle. “I was just kinda chillin’ with Matty,” he said, adding as a preemptive defense, “Just kinda like, talking dumb college stuff.”
“Naw, it’s cool,” she said, propping her head on a hand. “Y’all have a good time?”
“Yeah, yeah, you know. Good to reconnect. There’s not many old friends, you know, I’d wanna hang with . . .”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“But, I think he’s a little freaked.”
“Bout what?”
“You know, the squat, the diving, the whole anti-civ rap . . .” This was true—even after Micah’s lecture, Matty still kept surveying the apartment and mouthing What the fuck?—but Talmadge meant to illustrate another point: that the here-and-now Talmadge Bertrand was a distinct and even antithetical creature from the Talmadge Bertrand who’d laughed gutbustedly as Chivers Holley went sniffling down the dorm hallway. That he’d experienced a Great Awakening after emerging fetal and sinless from that ketamine hole in the blood-red light of that camper van, waking to a face so tender and wild he felt sure he’d died and this was Heaven, with her as his guide or his holy reward, dribbling water onto his lips with a teaspoon, whispering hush. That he’d renounced all his old citizenships, rewired his thinking, had thrown himself—heart, soul, mind, the “whole ench-o-lada” as Uncle Lenord would say—in with Micah: was hers, on almost every level. “Baby,” he said, smiling a smile invisible to Micah in the darkness, “you didn’t know me back when.”
She said, “I know you now,” and drew a fingertip across his chest, rousing the few stray pale boy-hairs.
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “I’m just sayin.”
“Are you good with you?”
Talmadge frowned. “Am I good with me—what?”
“Are you happy?”
“Am I happy?” he replied, the question’s preposterousness causing his head to lift fractionally from the pillow. “Shee-it. Happy as a dog with two tails.”
At this she laughed, lightly but appreciatively, poking his chest with her fingertip. “That’s a new one, man.”
“Uncle Lenord,” Talmadge said. “I got hundreds.”
Micah scooched closer to him, laying an arm across his chest and her cheek against his clavicle. She let out a long and conclusive-sounding sigh, as if she’d been waiting up all night to gauge his happiness quotient, and, now that she’d done so, could finally rest. This wasn’t typical Micah, however. She tended to lead without glancing back; you either kept up or lost her. Talmadge knotted his forehead, wondering if he needed to ponder her happiness, and thinking how bizarre that would be at the end of a night like tonight, when his swollen sense of contentment had been all but popping his shirt buttons.
Out of nowhere she asked, “Are you hard down there?”
“Am I hard?” he spluttered, his head rising off the pillow again. “Harder than a—”
A fingertip mashed his lips. “Don’t say it, man,” she laughed.
“Uncle Lenord’s pillow talk.”
She let out a pleasantly appalled groan and rolled onto her side so that her back was toward him. “I want you to do something for me,” she said.
He spooned himself beside her, his penis lurching upward as the blood came roaring into it, its head tapping her buttocks with a sudden though invited insistence. “Put it in,” she whispered, and with his right hand he tried sloppily directing it, the head prodding the firm dry crevasse of her ass cheeks until pushing it downward he felt it sliding across the humid bristles of her pubes. He retreated, and then gave a delicate thrust to cleave it inside her. Missing his mark, he let out a yearnful moan and reached a hand around to clasp her right breast, the pliable lusciousness of it beneath his hand provoking an almost violent rocking of his hip. She yelped lightly as he jammed himself into some incorrectly sensitive spot, her hips recoiling. “Here,” she said, reaching down and taking him into her hand to aim him herself. His chest went tight with trapped breath as he squeezed into her, the head probing the foldsome entrance gently, even meekly, before she pressed herself into him and he felt the whole shaft engulfed by her tender slickness and his breath came pouring out in loud airy heaps.
As he thrust himself upward, burying his face in the corrugated lushness of her dreadlocks, he seized her nipple between his fingers. Then he felt her remove his hand from her breast and transfer it to her belly. “Just like this,” she whispered. “Don’t move it.”
His eyes came fluttering open. “What?”
“Just don’t move it. I wanna feel it just like this, as I fall asleep.”
Obligingly, he froze himself as best he could, though bewildered and not a little stung by the command. He felt himself pulsing inside her in sharp rhythmic bursts. To distract himself he focused on her belly beneath his hand, rubbing a wide and ethereal circle around her belly button until his fingertip chanced upon a tendril of pubic hair and the heady sensation of it buckled his hips, his dick blundering deeper. She clutched his hand, impounding it beneath hers against her belly, and whispered sleepily, “Still. Just still.”
“This is weird, baby,” he protested. “I don’t know if I can.”
“Please,” she said, and he redoubled his effort, resisting the fervent tugging from his groin, his dick’s stallion determination to pull the weight of his
body ever deeper into hers. He clenched his teeth in struggle. “Like that, baby,” she murmured, slow and drowsy, her voice barely audible above the city’s hummy layered drone. “Be still. I just want the fullness of it. Just the fullness.”
Part Two
1
“STUPID STINK BUG,” Alexis finally said to it. The bug was head-butting the walls of her room but might as well have been head-butting Alexis herself, the way it was—she’d just texted this to Miguel—“buggin the shit” out of her. She’d complained to Dave a million times about the bugs, about the way they came seeping into her room by the dozens, where they’d gang on the windowsills until by flicking on a light she’d incite them to riot and with growly buzzing they’d go divebombing her room, divebombing her. One of them got caught in her hair once, right behind her ear, which seriously might have been the worst experience of her life—top three, anyway. She didn’t know why her room had to be their gateway, when her mom’s room and Dave’s office were right down the hall, nor did she get how nature—which, as she understood it, was supposed to be really fragile—could be so superabundant, so invincible, and so . . . annoying. You couldn’t squish stink bugs, because when you did they spewed out that poison gas of theirs that smelled like rotting cilantro, and because Alexis despised even fresh cilantro, this was not not so not an option. Vacuuming them didn’t work either: That just made the vacuum itself stink, thereby broadcasting the odor to the whole house every time someone used it. After Alexis’s 379th complaint, her mom bought her some eco-variety of bug spray at the ShopRite, which was made out of mint oil and for some reason had a photo of a golden-Lab puppy on the label, but it didn’t really do much more than annoy the stink bugs back. Doused in the stuff, they’d drop to the floor onto their backs and kick their legs for a while, like babies in a crib, the cilantro and mint smells mingling into some nightmare Thai salad odor. Dave swapped out the “bullshit green stuff” (his words) for a can of Raid, which he’d deemed “the good old bad stuff,” whatever that meant, but it smelled the way bug spray probably should smell: toxic death, Satan’s morning breath, the end of the world. Exhaling a measure of her aggravation through her nose, she flopped sideways on the bed to reach for the can beside her nightstand. Scooping it into her hand, she texted Miguel an update with her other hand: “Raid. Die stinkbug die.”
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