Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  * * *

  LOOKING BACK, what strikes me is how ordinarily my life developed for years after Alison’s death. I had friends and boyfriends. I excelled academically. Experimented in typical quantities with the kinds of drugs a fundamentally risk-averse girl could feel more or less comfortable with: I smoked pot on weekends, nibbled once on shrooms in Prospect Park, imbibed a few sips of absinthe at a party. I fretted about my weight, hamster-wheeled on an elliptical machine after work, caved and ate two egg rolls for dinner. At work, I decorated my cubicle with a framed photograph of myself on the rim of the Grand Canyon and a mediocre sketch I’d done of a cathedral during a semester abroad in Grenoble. My job paid a pittance and was glamour-adjacent, and therefore fit perfectly with a certain vision of what a girl’s early years in New York ought to look like: fetching coffee for a MacArthur genius; ferrying a portfolio of illustrations through the sleet to the West Village brownstone of a writer I adored; referring to best-selling authors in the informal parlance of the office, according to which Astrid Teague was just “Astrid,” and Ian Mann’s forthcoming book was simply “the new Mann.” On first dates, there was a nifty trick I liked to perform, where I would pull the boy into a bookstore, pick up a novel off the display table, flip to the back, and show him, in the acknowledgments, my name. Every Sunday afternoon I posted up at a café, pen in hand and the pages of a manuscript stacked before me, and when I caught the glances of people at nearby tables I quickly looked back down in a way that conveyed that I was busy making an important contribution to the creative economy.

  As it happened, the editor I worked for mostly acquired mysteries. Ian Mann published a book a year about a psychologically damaged private investigator. Astrid Teague wrote atmospheric whodunits set in Cornwall, where she’d grown up (and where she was now rehabbing a dilapidated manor house, which had recently been captured in all its shabby-chic glory in a Martha Stewart Living profile, “Astrid Teague Comes Home”). Many of the books I worked on turned on the mystery of a girl’s death. A beautiful young body turns up in small-town Maine or in an eightieth-floor hotel room in Shanghai. Sometimes the girls didn’t turn up at all—they vanished without a trace, evaporated into their surroundings. In my favorite of Astrid’s novels, The Girl in the Picture, a woman’s body was discovered by a boy and his English setter in a cave on the Cornish coast. The woman had no wallet on her, no identification of any kind. Nobody came forward to claim her, nor did she match any missing person reports. But she did have a camera, and the photographs she had taken before her death became the clues a local detective used to uncover the identity of a hauntingly beautiful woman nobody seemed to miss.

  It was pure coincidence, me working on these books. I had applied for over a dozen jobs, after all. I hadn’t sought this genre out intentionally, any more than the girl in the next cubicle who worked on popular science, or the girl down the hall whose domain was military history and the occasional sports memoir. My boss didn’t know my personal history, and I was proud of the professionalism I brought to this work. For instance, one of my responsibilities was to write discussion questions about these novels for book clubs.

  What do you think would have happened if Leah had survived the fire? Would she and Colin have reconciled? Why or why not?

  While Rose Van Kleef believes that Emmaline might still be alive, Orrin knows that she is dead. Which do you think is the more difficult circumstance, knowing that a loved one is dead, or not knowing?

  How did you react to the comic moments in this otherwise dark novel?

  I would write these questions, and my boss would tell me I had done a good job, and her praise would make me happy. If for fleeting moments the whole arrangement began to rankle, I would remind myself that people had every right to enjoy these stories, just as I enjoyed books about all kinds of terrible things that had happened to other people but not to me. What else, in the end, were stories for? This sentiment instantly made me feel better—not, it seems to me now, because I believed it, exactly, but because it seemed a very adult stance to take.

  In any event, my living situations, too, affirmed a certain vision of what twenty-something urban life ought to be. For two years I stayed in the shitty Prospect Heights apartment. (On cool summer evenings, when the sky was the brushed-velvet way it gets after a nine P.M. sunset, the twinkle lights really did grant a celestial loveliness to that cracked patio.) From there, I moved to a brownstone in Bed-Stuy where a dozen creative types had set up a communal living system—a rotation of cooking and cleaning duties, weekly “family meetings.” When the novelty of this arrangement gave way to weariness at its perpetual high drama, I left for an illegal sublet in the basement of a formerly grand, now-dilapidated old mansion on the far eastern edge of what might, with some fudging, be considered Ditmas Park, just a few blocks from the heart of Caribbean Flatbush. My studio had two half windows at the top of one wall, with a ground-level view of the sidewalk, so that from my desk I could watch the disembodied feet of passersby: black stiletto boots, duct-tape-patched Adidas sneakers, green galoshes. The room was lit by the harsh yellow light of two bare bulbs hung from the ceiling.

  I didn’t have to live like this. A tidy allowance from my parents flowed directly into my checking account every month. I suppose I chose this arrangement because I was a privileged kid eager to prove to myself that I didn’t need the comforts I’d never been without (and eager, too, I might add, to do this before I got too old to enjoy it). It was the sort of thing, in other words, that you do not because you want to do it, but because you want to have done it, to have a story you’ll share, you imagine, years later at a cocktail party or on the sideline at a soccer game (your child pure magic clomping through the grass in tiny cleats).

  I admit I was rather impressed with myself for living in a building where I was one of the only white tenants. What a sharp little pride I felt, riding the 2 home from work and watching the other white passengers empty out, and what a sweet triumph it was on those nights when I outlasted them all. When, six months after I moved in, construction began on a luxury condo three blocks from my studio, I felt genuinely aggrieved. I suppose I must also have thought myself pretty high-minded to live where I did, among the people I lived among, despite what had happened to my sister. This must have been part of why I chose to live there, on the fringe of the largest Caribbean neighborhood in the city, right? To get to think these things about myself.

  I took it as my working assumption that for my neighbors my presence was not entirely welcome, and so I smiled very warmly at everyone but spoke to no one, what I thought of as “not bothering people.” All in all, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of charting a course through my life in New York that was as palatable as possible. I had not chosen to live in the lily-white postgrad brovana of Murray Hill. I was a gentrifier but, I imagined, an unobtrusive one. I see now that it was not so simple, that in keeping myself apart from my neighbors I was trying to collect a moral credit for living there without really living there, and that this was bound up with a set of more general misapprehensions: that unobtrusiveness was some sort of high virtue; that it was even possible at all; that I could inhabit this building, borough, world, life, without casting out ripples. But I was twenty-five—not so young I couldn’t have known better, but young enough that I didn’t.

  Because of this stance, I came to know my neighbors only by their quirks. A stooped woman who must have been at least eighty fetched her mail each evening in a nightgown and a pair of bright white Reeboks. An old man who spoke Spanish wore a NASCAR cap and was never without his terrier, Jefe, a yappy, trembling creature with cloudy cataracted eyes. I assumed my neighbors identified me in a similar way. I was the white girl who came home from work every night toting a premade chopped salad. The only other white tenant was a man with a scruffy beard and an affinity for scarves who lived on the first floor and played guitar from two to three-thirty A.M. nightly, a habit which would have been merely aggravating someplace else, but which I found gen
uinely distressing here, convinced that it reflected poorly not only on him but also on me, on us.

  During those first few years in New York I was, in short, living in that period of playacting, of whimsical elective poverty—improvisational dinner parties with mismatched plates, Saturdays scavenging secondhand shops for the perfect two-dollar blouse—that is so common among the children of affluence. The word I would use to describe myself then would not be happy—not that I wasn’t; I was, or at least, I thought I was—but unencumbered. I believed I was enjoying my present life while anticipating, with a minimum of anxiety, the arrival of the next life stage, and the one after that. My illegal underground sublet in “Ditmas Park” would become a one-bedroom rental in Boerum Hill would become purchasing a brownstone in Park Slope, or a condo on the Upper West Side. Pithy remarks at editorial meetings would become acquiring my own books would become launching a best seller. That’s what really strikes me, I guess, about that time. It’s not that my life was ordinary, but that I fell for it so completely, that I failed so utterly to detect within myself the darker currents that must have been there all along.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES I thought I saw Alison. She picked up a box of cereal in the Flatbush Co-op and scanned the nutrition information. She jogged past me in Prospect Park, a beagle on a red leash tugging her forward. She slipped into a taxi in the rain. The Alisons darted. They slipped around corners. They were there and not there. They were always teenagers.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, I ducked out of the office at eleven A.M. for my annual dermatology checkup. It was early October, one of those blue-skied, ludicrously crisp days when the bustling midtown sidewalks seem to hum. At the dermatologist’s I sat for over an hour in the waiting room, occupying myself with whatever inexplicable magazines the office subscribed to. In the examining room, I changed into a paper gown. “Sorry for the wait. I was held up by a gangrenous toe,” Dr. Schwartz said when he finally came into the room. He made small talk as he inspected my skin with a small magnifying glass. Did you have a good summer? How are things at work? He had a strategy of pretending he remembered who you were. “You wear sunscreen,” he said in that doctorly way—not a question, but an entreaty for me to reply in the affirmative, whatever the truth, so that we might move this thing along.

  “See you in a year,” he told me when he’d completed his examination. I crunched out of the paper gown and changed back into my work clothes. I had been away from the office for nearly two hours, much longer than I’d intended, and I was in a hurry to get back. I walked quickly to Lexington, weaving around a girl with her nose in her phone, a towheaded family pointing up at the Chrysler Building. At Fifty-fourth Street, I held out my arm just as a taxi turned the corner into view—a small, delicious victory.

  I spent the short ride to the office checking work e-mail on my phone—a nervous missive from Kris in publicity about an author’s botched radio interview, a note from the marketing director inviting the assistants to help ourselves to the tray of leftover wraps in the kitchen. When the taxi pulled up to the curb in front of my office building a few minutes later, I entered a tip on the touch screen and swiped my credit card.

  “Thank you,” the driver said softly from the other side of the Plexiglas partition.

  My eyes landed on the taxi license affixed to the glass: a photograph, poor in quality, of a dark-skinned man against a white background. Beneath the photo, the driver’s name. Clive Richardson.

  Could it be? I wanted to do something, say something, but my mind was blank. The taxi idled at the curb. My door was already open, propped ajar by my foot.

  What I did next was more instinct than intention. As I climbed out of the taxi, I found myself slipping my phone beneath the driver’s seat and out of view. Then I slammed the door behind me. Within seconds, the taxi rejoined the yellow sea speeding uptown.

  We know what to do with death when it’s close to us. Your mom dies, or an old friend, and you grieve. Maybe you’re not good at it, maybe the death fucks you up, but it’s supposed to be hard, it’s supposed to fuck you up. We know what to do with death when it’s far-removed from us, too. A sports star or a celebrity chef dies and you read the obit. You start off your lunch meeting by saying, “Did you hear about…?” You read the hot-take remembrances on social media for a day or two. You move on. But we don’t know what to do with the deaths of people we knew just a little.

  I didn’t even know Alison Thomas’s name was Alison Thomas until she went missing. Before then, can I say this? She was the girl my wife kept catching me checking out all week. She was the reason I wanted to dish out a killer serve in the volleyball game, to impress her and to make up for the embarrassment of the stupid fucking pink swim trunks I was wearing with the dolphins on them. She was the reason my wife said this supremely condescending “Almost, honey!” when the ball landed in the net instead. In the mornings, while my wife chipped away at herself in the fitness center, I took these long, ridiculously hot showers and undressed that blithe teenage body in my mind.

  I am not some pervert. We see nice bodies, young bodies, we enjoy them. We all do this, okay? It is allowed. But what the hell do you do when the girl you’ve been jacking off to every morning for a week turns up dead?

  The night my wife told me she was filing for divorce, she said, “You know when I knew you were a block of ice right down to your soul? When that girl was killed and you never said a word about it. Every time I tried to get you to talk about it, every time I brought her up, because I was reeling, I was just devastated, you shut me down.”

  I wonder sometimes if we’d still be married if Alison Thomas hadn’t been murdered. Don’t get me wrong, our love was hardening into a battle of wills long before then. But that trip drove a wedge between us that never went away. I couldn’t give my wife the satisfaction of knowing the number that girl’s death did on me. I couldn’t stand to hear her crying her self-serving dramatic tears over a girl who, let’s be real, she’d viewed as nothing but competition. I would listen to my wife crying, and know that she was waiting for me to wrap my arms around her from behind and deliver some sort of Emotionally Appropriate Response, and when I tried to recall what I’d loved about her and why, in our early years together, I’d felt like the luckiest fucker on earth, I couldn’t come up with anything at all.

  ISLANDS

  PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LEAVING things behind. Umbrellas. Wallets. Coats. Shopping bags filled with souvenirs: I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirts, snow globes in which replicas of the Statue of Liberty or the Freedom Tower stand suspended in perpetual winter. Sometimes the objects are more uncommon, hinting at the lives of the strangers who have forgotten them. A bouquet of sunflowers, a note attached with twine: Evelyn, forgive me. A Senegalese driver at the garage once had a customer jump out at a red light, abandoning a tank that held a lime-green snake. Years ago, when he was new to this job and the job itself was so much more dangerous than it is now, he found a switchblade wedged between the seats at the end of his shift. He still has it, in the plastic bureau where he keeps his belongings, along with a jumble of other objects acquired over the years. A child’s pink plastic watch. A ring with a translucent white gemstone, which flickers with rainbow flecks when held up to the light. A camera with a finished roll of film inside.

  You were supposed to turn these things in at the garage, but it was no secret that Larry and his numbskull son with the gold chains around his pimply neck just kept the items for themselves or sold them. What he’s doing is stealing, too, he supposes, but it doesn’t feel wrong. Just the opposite—he is rescuing these things from the careless people who have forgotten them. Though on some nights, after a few beers or a blunt ashed into a Coke can, he wonders if this notion of the righteousness of his thefts is just a bullshit justification. Lately, it seems to him that he keeps these objects as compensation, pitifully insufficient, for his own lost things.

  Today he returns home from his shift with an iPhone, the latest model, in a light-gray case,
not something he can keep. Anytime now the phone will ring and he will speak to the person to whom it belongs. Maybe it will be the banker he picked up in midtown, who shouted into his phone the whole drive to La Guardia. Or perhaps it will be the Park Avenue mother in those tight black leggings with SOUL in big letters down the thigh, with the little boy in the blazer and the little girl in the blue jumper; he’d dropped the girl at Brearley, the boy at St. Bernard’s, the mother in front of a cycling studio on Eighty-third. Or it will be a Russian tourist he drove to Chanel, or a sixteen-year-old girl he picked up in Dumbo who probably has no clue how much her phone costs, or a chef bound for Williamsburg, a tattoo of a pig’s butchery cuts on his own fleshy hock. And when he confirms that, yes, they left their phone in the taxi and he has it, has held on to it for safekeeping, they will tell him how grateful they are, and that old feeling will come over him, a feeling that is not so much annoyance or anger as dispassion: You are invisible to them, you are the back of a head, and then suddenly you are indispensable. Suddenly they are, like, super-appreciative. Suddenly you are a lifesaver, boss. When he meets whoever it is this time to return the phone, and they try to hand him five bucks, or fifty (how variable, their sense of the value of what he has done for them), he will shake his head and politely refuse, as if it is pleasure enough just to be of service to them. His refusal will trigger a shift in the way they look at him, and he will know that they are thinking that he is a deeply good person. Probably they will tell this story: the taxi driver who returned their phone and wouldn’t even accept a reward, though surely he could use the money. When they look at him in this approving way, he will simultaneously feel so good and so disgusted with himself for feeling good, for wanting that look, for chasing it, for giving one shit what they think, that he’ll regret not taking the money in the first place. Because they’re not wrong—he could use it.