Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  No one said anything.

  “Could’ve burned the whole block down. All these candles. That heater.”

  “We’re real careful,” Micah said.

  “Bet you are,” the cop snorted, and to demonstrate the hazards pushed an unlit candle from the sidetable onto the floor. Then he pushed another one, this time spitefully. “You’re aware this is an illegal tenancy.”

  “The building’s abandoned,” Micah said.

  “That makes it yours?”

  “It makes it nobody’s.”

  “Which makes it yours?” A tickled expression brightened his face; he was going to enjoy recounting her logic later at the precinct house. “The world doesn’t work that way, hon. This little real-estate joyride—it ends today.”

  Micah bristled; she didn’t know what was happening with Talmadge, though the pieces were beginning to bump together in her mind, but on this aspect she felt solid. “I know how the world works,” she said, with an assertive twang. “And I know that after thirty days of adverse possession y’all need a court-ordered eviction.”

  “Adverse possession, y’all,” the cop aped. “Yeah, not so much.” He grunted. “All I need to do is make a quick call to the FD to get this place barricaded as a fire hazard.”

  Micah felt herself falling back in retreat. She didn’t know if he was lying or not; Lola’s playbook hadn’t addressed this particular threat. “Is that what you’re doing?” she asked coolly.

  “We’re doing a couple things here. That’s one of them, yeah.” He tossed his partner a heads-up. “The other is that we’re arresting you for unlawful possession of marijuana.”

  “Oh come on,” Talmadge wailed, his eyes roving toward the female cop. “It’s not even an ounce.”

  “We’ve got other things to talk about,” his cop said, directing Talmadge to place his hands against the wall. “Things like trash.”

  “Ma’am?” Micah’s cop said to her.

  Micah blinked at her obliviously.

  “Need you to do the same,” she instructed.

  Vacantly, Micah said, “You’re arresting me?”

  “The weed’s mine, I told you,” Talmadge protested. “She’s straight edge.” He gasped as the handcuffs clamped his wrists. “She’s—she’s fucking pregnant.”

  The cop’s hands went soft on Micah, in mid-frisk. “Is that true, ma’am?”

  “No,” Micah said, and shot Talmadge an unfocused stare. “The baby’s dead. I miscarried.”

  The room seemed to tilt with this statement, so that everyone—maybe even the cops, she wasn’t watching—rebalanced their feet on the floor, like when the subway takes off.

  “What?” Talmadge moaned, but Micah could see the confused relief dribbling through him. Even handcuffed, a weight came off his shoulders, and on his face was a wreck of collided emotions only partially masked by a willed expression of dismay. Whatever sentence he’d been fearing had just been reduced, and just as she’d expected she felt a cold brute anger spasming her. “When?” she heard him ask. The chilled pinch of the handcuffs on her wrists dilated the anger, as by now the clues were gelling together, a blob of indictment taking unruly shape in her mind: Matty and Talmadge had been scrounging data from the trash. Just how it all worked she didn’t know, but Lola used to bitch about the guys (they were always guys) who did that in San Francisco. “Paper divers,” she called them, citing them as the reason she and Micah found so many dumpsters padlocked; they were ruining it for everyone, Lola complained. Garbage was the only pure crop that civilization produced, she and Lola used to say, because no one owned it, no one wanted it, no one fought over it, no one had ever launched a war to claim it. Land, air, water, people, animals: all these had been commodified, sacked with pricetags, and enslaved on that vast plantation known as civilization. Only garbage was free, in every sense of the word. Except—that wasn’t true, she understood now. Even that had been corrupted. And there was its corruptor, staring at her with stunned, sad-dog eyes, his lies scattered between them on the floor. This had all been an adventure for him; nothing more. His were borrowed principles, returnable at will. “This off-the-grid thing, it’s an action, not a life,” he’d argued, as if these were distinct, as if your actions were spendable, but your life was an inviolable fund. When the stakes were revealed, he’d bailed.

  “Micah,” he whispered, but his voice bounced off her. She recognized the iciness overtaking her; she’d felt it with Leah, when Leah dropped the rupee note into the boy’s hand and somehow with it Micah’s devotion. The sudden immunity to love. Its swift and unsalvageable disposal. “Micah, look at me,” he begged.

  “I’m taking Trashman here to the house,” the male cop told his partner, rotating Talmadge into the doorway. “You want to stay with her, Shenice—see if she needs medical, okay? Meyer’s on his way over.”

  The apartment was darkening now, the fading afternoon light dissolving into the plaster and plywood. “Can I sit down?” Micah asked, and the cop said sure, her voice different now that her partner was gone: blunted, less intrusive, recognizably female. There’s a specific trick, Micah discovered, to sitting down while handcuffed, and when she swayed and stumbled the cop gripped her shoulders and lowered Micah into one of the metal chairs. She felt an almost violent desire for tears, to map the extent of her losses with sobs: the baby, Talmadge, the squat, the future she’d just seen smashed. Yet nothing came. Her chest felt constricted, cuffed. Even her mouth was dry.

  “That your boyfriend?” the cop asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, and not knowing how to amend or append resorted to adding, “Kinda.”

  The cop looked as though she wanted to ask something else, something unofficial, woman-to-woman, but stopped herself. She shifted on her feet so that all her weapons and gear shuddered and clinked. “You need a hospital, ma’am?”

  Micah shook her head no.

  The cop studied her. Her radio squawked, but she ignored it. “Look,” she finally said, kneeling so that she could meet Micah’s eyes. “There’s a sergeant on his way to take you to the precinct. Is there anything you need from here? Because I don’t think getting back in here is gonna be an option for a while. Maybe ever.”

  Micah nodded, sensing uncommon charity. “There’s a bag, in the bedroom. The striped one by the bed. It’s got my money in it.”

  The money was what was left of a cash-stuffed envelope Leah had given Micah upon her arrival in San Francisco: “walking-around money,” she called it. Micah had never counted it, and rarely plundered it in the years since. At least half of it remained, a stack of hundreds as thick as her ring finger. Or at least she hoped it remained. She hadn’t checked it in forever, and what she’d just learned about Matty caused an ember of fear to redden in her mind. When the cop returned with the bag Micah asked, “Will you look inside it, please? There should be an envelope.”

  The envelope was there, and the cop peeked inside it. “Where’d the cash come from?” she asked, laxly suspicious.

  “It’s mine,” Micah assured her. “I been saving it—for years now.”

  Peering up from the bag, the cop regarded the room with soft bewilderment, then narrowed her gaze back to Micah. “Can I ask you a question, then?” she said. “If you got money—why you living this way?”

  Micah had the answer, of course. Her life was the answer. Just as the World outside, and the cop standing before her like one of the deputies who’d taken her from her home when she was ten years old, was the answer. The cop’s eyes were receptive, even beseeching, but in the desert of Micah’s mouth there were no words, just the ashes of a thousand sermons. “There’s one more thing, in the bedroom,” she was able to say.

  “What’s that?”

  “My banjo, up against the wall.”

  “A banjo?” The cop stiffened. “I ain’t getting no banjo.”

  “Please,” Micah implored. “It was my mama’s. It’s all I got of her.”

  “Shit,” the cop said, rising.

  When Mica
h walked out of the 9th Precinct with the banjo strapped to her back, five hours later, it was like she’d been spat from the belly of a whale. The detective, Meyer, had spent three hours harrying her with questions like: Who was Monya? Had Monya ever visited their building? Had she ever been to Brighton Beach? What about Coney Island, then? What was the last thing she’d purchased? What was the last gift her boyfriend had given her? What was the source of their income? Were they anarchists? Was she sleeping with Matty too? And then, near the end: Did she consider herself dumb, or was there another way she could explain her ignorance of her boyfriend and her roommate selling dumpstered financial data to the Russian mafia? He was clearly frustrated with her; when another plainclothes cop pulled him from the interview room, she heard him mutter “fucking oblivious” before the door clanged shut.

  Only once did she see Talmadge, as she was led past the holding cell where he was standing in a back corner, staring down at his shoes. Another prisoner let out a lecherous grunt as Micah passed, and Talmadge raised his head, from alarm or intrigue it didn’t matter. Their eyes met, just glancingly, yet in that brief optical connection there was an unjoining, a release, an elastic moment in which Talmadge was flung toward his clouded future and Micah toward hers, even cloudier. When Meyer finally released her, Talmadge had been transferred from the cell; she scanned all the faces behind the bars, but none was his. At the front desk a sergeant returned her bag and the banjo and laughed openly as he watched her strap it onto her back.

  It was after midnight, and Avenue C was crowded. The groups of twos and threes that slid by and around her had a boozy lilt to them, and from down the avenue she heard trebly music seeping from open doorways, and the cackles of smokers gaggled outside. For a long and vacant time she just stood there, looking north then south and then north again, thinking and feeling almost nothing at all. Here was the antithesis of the motionlessness she’d felt earlier that day, an eon ago: Everything seemed accelerated, the taxis glistering by in fire-colored flashes, the traffic signals flickering greenyellowred greenyellowred as far down as she could see, the passersby hurtling forward with loose but furious purpose, all of it gathered into a neon hive of motion. She teetered in the hive’s center, awash in what the detective had deemed, perhaps correctly, her oblivion. When sensation finally came, it was base, unthinking, mechanical: hunger. The last thing she’d eaten was the apples and yogurt for lunch. She glanced north again, then south, and started walking.

  6

  THE SAME NIGHT, 10:49 according to the cellphone in Alexis’s hand, she was in toilet stall #1 on the third floor of Westervelt Hall at Richard Varick College, her favorite or rather her least-hated of the toilet stalls. They weren’t actually numbered except in Alexis’s mind, which was probably the only place they were rated too. The protracted bouts of toilet time generated by Irritable Bowel Syndrome tend to force these sorts of insights and judgments on a sufferer; solitary confinement is part of the sentence. Texting, Facebook, celebrity scandal news: These carried you only so far. Eventually, and inevitably, it came down to you and the bathroom you were shackled to. Her familiarity with stall #1 bordered on a kind of surface omniscience: She knew the precise number of tiny bronze-ish hexagonal floor tiles in the stall (482), the number of paint drips marring the cream-colored divider wall (3), the amount of paper the dispenser held (4 rolls), the number of bolts that had never been properly tightened into the door brackets or had worked themselves loose (2), and that if you craned your head forward and a bit to the side you could almost use the big chrome door latch as a mirror. She favored stall #1 for two reasons: It was in the corner up against the wall, offering a fractional degree more privacy than the other two stalls, and the toilet’s automatic flush sensor was less prone to going off for no reason, drawing unwanted attention or, worse, transmitting a false message of hope to any girls waiting for an open stall. The last thing you wanted was social pressure when you were knotted in pain. And Alexis was, at this moment, in pain.

  This was different, however, from the standard-grade IBS pain. That felt like someone was inflating your stomach with a bicycle pump, with a blunt bloated ache that rose into your ribcage. This pain was almost its opposite: as if her stomach had been so thoroughly vacuumed that its lining was sucked into a tightly compressed ball, a hard fist she could feel flexing and rotating beneath her breastbone. The cramps were coming in their typical waves, though from her back to her front this time, and she felt an angry heaviness in her lower gut, as though a lumpy jagged rock was being squeezed through her large intestine and was presently lodged in some hairpin turn, its rough stubbly corners abrading her bowels as her body tried to heave it through the bend. She didn’t understand it; for dinner she’d eaten some cafeteria oatmeal and glugged down a bottle of Ensure, which experience told her should be passing without incident, certainly without trauma. But then also—with a wince of regret she remembered now. While watching a movie afterwards she’d raided her roommate Amanda’s stash of Oreos and Mountain Dew, which were what Amanda lived on. Alexis knew better. Oreo filling went to concrete in her belly.

  Amanda was gone as usual tonight, and established routine said she wouldn’t be back until tomorrow afternoon, for her 2:45 chem class. She was up in Connecticut with the boyfriend she’d retained from high school, who played some preppy sport—tennis? lacrosse? Alexis never could remember—for UConn. Amanda spent every weekend with him, partly (Alexis suspected) because she couldn’t stand Alexis, or rather couldn’t stand Alexis’s IBS, which had come to dominate her college experience. All those students roaming the campus buildings in their t-shirts and sweatshirts and butt-print shorts emblazoned with the college’s initials, RVC—Alexis thought hers should be monogrammed with IBS, so inseparable had it become from her identity. She knew Amanda hated hearing about it, but Alexis couldn’t help talking about it—whining, cursing, analyzing it—because it was consuming her: rendering her so listless and fatigued that she often skipped classes; leaving her withdrawn and antisocial, because hanging out was too fraught when you feared having to scramble to the bathroom, mid-conversation, for what could be an hour-long stay; and even degrading her appearance, because how much effort did you want to apply to your makeup just to stare at your warped funhouse reflection in the chrome latch of a stall door? Her mom blamed stress for the flare-ups—the stress of starting college, the stress of her weight gain, the stress of urban life. Amanda, who was an art major, had by now developed a boilerplate response: Alexis needed to get herself to campus health services. “I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” Amanda said once, exasperated. “I’m not a friggin doctor. I’m not even pre-med.”

  A sudden gush of pee surprised Alexis. This was weird. She’d just peed a short time ago, when she’d started her layover here in stall #1. Weirder, she wasn’t so much squirting it, in the normal way of peeing, as allowing the urine to come bursting out; clenching her bladder had zero effect. And weirder still, the pee kept going forever, going and going and going some more, splashing into the toilet in less of a stream than a slosh, like water dashed from a bucket. Then it diminished to a steady leak, but still, it kept going, leaking and leaking and leaking out of her. (How much freaking Mountain Dew had she drunk?) Anyone overhearing this deluge, Alexis thought, would be hard pressed not to comment—the way the girls used to do, during the first few days of dorm acclimation, before word of Alexis’s medical condition got around. As if by conjuring, someone entered the bathroom, and as if by plain bad luck another prolonged cramp went rippling through Alexis. She stifled a yelp as the someone appeared as feet beneath the metal door, feet positioned in front of the sinks that faced the stalls. Alexis frowned. Whoever this someone was was wearing new flipflops, unfamiliar bright orange ones. Alexis knew all twelve girls on her floor by their flipflops, if not all of them by their names. The someone pivoted from the sink, and with a glimpse of the toenails Alexis identified her as Megan from down the hall. Megan painted her toenails in varying pastel colors, like e
ggs in an Easter basket. Megan disappeared, and then Alexis heard the squeak of the shower handle followed by the ch-ch-ch-chwah of the water stuttering out. The shower static filled the bathroom, and Alexis was relieved to be able to breathe again. When she did, however, a horrible dying-old-man groan came rumbling out of her, a sound that felt far beyond her control, as a breaker of nausea rolled through her at the head of a brutal, spasmy cramp, as though the rock had been dumped out of one bend but had just stalled hard in another. She hoped Megan would be showered, dried, and gone by the time the rock wound its way out of her; she sensed this was going to be explosively humiliating.

  A new wave of cramps billowed through her, followed by another, and then, to her great alarm, another. They felt connected now, like someone flipping a jump rope inside her. She crunched herself down on the seat, noting the imprint of sweat her forehead deposited on her kneecaps. For an odd while, then, there was nothing, and she wondered if this crunched positioning was the key; she was panting, but the pain was absent, and a flicker of hope sparked inside her. But then another cramp engulfed her and she was thrown back upward, and as another one came fast behind it she bit so hard on her lips that she tasted the metallic tang of her own blood. She tried pushing out the rock with all her might, but it was stuck, the rock was jammed somewhere down in the tangled nest of her intestines. Another cramp struck, this one so vicious that it lifted her pelvis off the toilet seat; her hands went flailing behind her for something to grip. Nausea came, with shaking. She moaned, fear seeping into her now, especially as a new and separate kind of pain, unlike any other she’d ever experienced, gripped the front of her, down at her vee-jay. It was like the rock had made some unfathomably hideous wrong turn. She looked down, and would’ve gasped had a tortured yowl not overwhelmed her throat. Her labia were spreading around something black and gooey and round. With an ungovernable scream she tried tightening her muscles to suck it back in; the thing vanished, but only for a moment, until another cramp-wave shoved it back out. She reached down a hand to try to push it back inside.