Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  2

  At eight the next morning, he stood in front of a glass wall, the smell of fresh bread coming from the bakery behind him. He stared out at the traffic circumnavigating Columbus Circle, from inside the Time Warner Center. He’d spent half the night at a back table at Veselka, studying the address book, where he’d found Skeevo’s number scribbled down and had sent him a text message: Hi, this is William Cho, Irene’s friend. We met in Staten Island that day. To his amazement, there had been a reply after only moments. Cool. How are you? And after a few quick pleasantries they had agreed to meet the following morning at the bakery, where Skeevo was washing dishes part time and learning the mysterious art of bread making. William hadn’t seen much point in going home, and he’d been afraid to sleep, for fear he’d wake up and find the feeling had gone. He’d spent the rest of the night wandering around, and it had left him with quite an appetite, so he was glad to see Skeevo bring over a few fresh loaves of something called pan de horno, which was heavenly.

  “People think it’s all about the starters, or the yeast,” Skeevo explained. “But just as with a lot of things, there’s an art to it. You form a relationship with the dough as you knead it. Too much or too little, and you get flat, dead crap. Not enough air in there. It’s a living thing, bread.”

  Steam rose off the bread as William ripped into it. Light glinted off the ever-rising escalator steps. A red sunburst of fabric was being hung in the window of a store across the way. He kept thinking he might see Irene stepping out of the entrance to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, on the arm of some man in a better suit than he’d ever own.

  Skeevo wore an ADVENTURE TIME T-shirt, ripped jeans, and a pair of sneakers with silhouettes of Questlove on the tongues. His cheeks were reddish and rough.

  “I guess you heard what happened with Irene,” Skeevo said.

  William nodded. “I was with her at the hospital when it happened,” he lied.

  Skeevo didn’t say anything but sipped his double espresso and scratched his cheek.

  “How did you hear?” William asked.

  “Facebook,” Skeevo replied. “Fucking shame.”

  William cleared his throat. “How well would you say you knew her?”

  Skeevo shrugged. “Better than most customers. Which isn’t to say very well. But you learn a lot about people when you smoke with them enough.”

  “Like what?”

  This earned him a suspicious look, and William stared at his bread, flushed.

  “I’m—I’m just trying to find her father. She asked me to—I think she asked me to make sure he knew what happened.”

  Skeevo toyed with the neck of his T-shirt and laughed. “Wow. I guess dying really changes people. She told me she never wanted to see or hear from that piece of flyshit again.”

  William frowned. “What about her mother?”

  “Left when Reeny was little. Ran off with some other woman and left her with the dad and the soon-to-be wicked stepmother. Guess they were pretty much a treat in and of themselves, but it wasn’t until Daddy Dearest pissed away her college fund at the track that she actually took off.”

  With that, they sipped in silence again. William checked his phone and saw there was a voicemail from his mother, which he deleted unheard, and a text from Sara, inviting him to brunch at the Harbor Grand Hotel. William saw Skeevo was staring up at the snow-capped statue of Christopher Columbus in the center of the circle.

  Remembering a random fact he’d learned about it at school, he said, “Did you know that every official distance in New York City is measured from that statue? It’s the center of the center of the universe.”

  Skeevo laughed. “I’ve learned in my travels, William, that the universe has no center. No center, no limits. We live in the midst of infinity.”

  Just as William was about to agree and thank Skeevo for his time, he caught sight of something—someone—familiar out of the corner of his eye. A streak of blond hair and a red coat passing the Sunglass Hut.

  “Irene?” William shouted, and jumped up so quickly that he slammed his knee into the flimsy table. Whirling as he tried to stop it from tipping, he wound up instead sending espresso and pan de horno everywhere, landing on his back on the marble, his eyes fixed on a crown of lights high above.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Skeevo moved to help. “You okay, man?”

  Blood rushed back into William’s cheeks as he felt clear air fill his lungs. When he looked up again, the woman in red was gone.

  “Sorry.” William breathed deep. “I—it’s like I keep forgetting.”

  Skeevo grabbed some napkins and helped mop up the mess. “Hey, no sweat. Happens to me too. Last week I saw her standing on the F platform heading uptown when I was heading down. A week before that it was twice in the same day.”

  “It’s crazy,” William apologized. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Listen. This is love. It’s far more powerful than death. It’s like I was saying. In an infinite universe, in an infinite number of infinite universes, all things exist simultaneously. Anything that can be, is.”

  William got up and stood by the glass. “Are you saying you believe in ghosts?”

  Skeevo folded his fingers. “I once saw three ghosts in a single afternoon.”

  Stifling a groan, William pressed his hot forehead against the cool glass of the window. He felt faint vibrations from a bus downshifting in the circle. It eased around the southern curve and curled around to head north along the park. An endless river of traffic wound counterclockwise around Columbus Circle, all roads leading away from this point, like the cross of two axes on a piece of graph paper. This is love. He drew two zeroes in the condensation, with a comma between. 0, 0. Then he traced a cartoon ghost around it.

  “I didn’t even know her,” William sighed. “It’s so stupid.”

  Two one-night stands. An awkward Christmas dinner at his parents’. A few months of silence. And then what? A couple of awful summer months when she’d been either ducking out to the studio, stuck in the hospital, or forcibly convalescing in his apartment. A year later and William still didn’t have the faintest idea what Irene had been doing with him.

  3

  Before leaving the mall, William showed Skeevo the address book, but he didn’t recognize any of the names or places in it. He seemed only moderately surprised when, afterward, William awkwardly asked if he could buy an eighth ounce of the same stuff Irene used to get, which he’d been increasingly nostalgic for, especially after the awful weed he’d been buying off a neighbor’s teenaged son. Skeevo met him in the men’s room ten minutes later with a small, pillowy paper bag that smelled like what he remembered. He told William to call anytime and to punch Irene’s dad in the throat if he ever did track him down. Then he went off to resume kneading.

  William tied his scarf back on and caught an E train to the Harbor Grand Hotel, which was down near Wall Street, but on the opposite end from where he used to work and not anywhere he knew well. He had to plug the address into his phone, the new Cobalt 7 with TrueVoice technology; his brother had bought it for him for Christmas, and thankfully it had a supercharged battery. As soon as he sat down on the train, he took the address book out again and flipped through it one more time. Each name, street, state, and zip code brought him an ounce of peace. They were like elements in an epic equation, in which X equaled Irene. Who she’d been, before anyone had known her.

  There was no entry for “Mom and Dad,” but that didn’t mean they weren’t in there. One hundred and twelve names in fifteen states. All night he had been ruling out the ones he recognized. This had narrowed the list down to just a dozen people. They could be clients or friends or weirdos she’d met on the subway. But maybe one of them was her family.

  William got off the train at Church Street, where he noticed a new voicemail from his own mother and decided to ignore it until after he’d gotten a chan
ce to smoke, which he’d found considerably helpful in dealing with her general lack of sanity. He walked past the eternal construction around the World Trade Center site to the Harbor Grand: a gorgeous hotel built above an old colonial inn that supposedly had been there since shortly after the natives had sold Manhattan to Peter Minuit for sixty guilders and some loose beads. Inside, he found less of a restaurant, more of a tavern, furnished with antique chairs and silver gaslights.

  He didn’t see Sara anywhere but did spot George, sitting at the head of a long table, regaling people from the opening the night before.

  “Mr. Cho!” George said, standing up with a mimosa in each hand. William could see that he hadn’t slept either, and after a congenial hug, George sat back down somewhat absentmindedly, still with both drinks. “Sara had to duck out. Thanks for coming by last night. You really should have stayed! You missed all the drama.”

  “There was drama?”

  George practically licked his lips. “One of Irene’s exes showed up right after the toasts.”

  William considered he might remind George that he was one of Irene’s exes as well, but there was no chance for a word in edgewise.

  “Yeah. You probably never met her. She used to come visit sometimes up in Ithaca. She’s the worst. When Sara saw her come into the gallery, she nearly lost her mind, I swear to God. The last time she came around, she ran off with Irene in what turned out to be a stolen pickup truck. One minute the two of them were doing it on Sara’s roommate’s chaise longue, and the next minute the cops were calling from Pittsburgh, and the two of them were gone, along with all the Percocet I had left over from getting my wisdom teeth out.”

  William tried to look both impressed and concerned. “What was her name?”

  “Alisanne. Alisanne Des Rochers.”

  William tugged awkwardly at the end of his scarf, a strange heat creeping up the small of his back. He had looked last night for Alisanne in the book and not found her, but now he recalled some jagged evidence of pages torn out in the D section.

  “What did she want?”

  “Who knows? She’s a maniac, I’m telling you. Sara caught her poking around Irene’s birdcage piece and totally flipped. She had Abeba make her leave. It was intense.”

  After two mimosas, William excused himself to the bathroom where he went to the sink to splash some water on his face. He came out and sat down on an old Windsor bench in the reception area that creaked miserably under his weight. He took the address book out of his suit pocket and thumbed to the back, where there were a few loose photographs. There were the naughty Polaroids, of course, but also several PG-rated pictures taken in college days. George and Jacob dancing with Irene in the student center under a disco ball. Sara and Irene collapsed under shopping bags at a food court, sharing a root beer float the size of their heads. Irene standing ankle deep in a creek, arms stretched to a brilliant sun just out of the frame. Her face in the glow of twenty birthday candles on what appeared to be a penis cake honoring Jacob’s birthday. In another she and Sara and George were covered in white paint, and Irene was sticking her tongue out. Her shirt said I GOT RIPPED AT VAN WINKLE’S—NYC, NY. They all looked younger and happier.

  Just then George stopped in from his own trip to the bathroom. “Thought we lost you,” he said. With a loud thump, George landed on the bench beside him, which complained but didn’t break. William tried to tuck the photos away, but George had already seen them. “Looks like sophomore year maybe? Habitat for Humanity.”

  “You should probably have these,” William said, pushing them toward George.

  He only pushed them back. “No, that’s all right. I’ve had enough nostalgia for a week. Sara just finally finished going through everything from her stuff we put into storage. Photos, dishes, jewelry, books . . . all those clothes. God. We took most of it back to that secondhand shop she liked so much with the vintage shoes. Mel’s? I guess now it’s thirdhand.”

  He seemed to regret this observation almost right away, and William ignored it.

  “I’ve been thinking—well, right before she— . . . I think she wanted me to get in touch with her father and stepmother. I think someone should, you know? It doesn’t have to be me, but . . . I just want to know who she was. Where she came from. You know, I don’t even know why she—why she liked me.”

  George sighed and raised his hands into the air as if offering something to the heavens. After a moment William wondered if he hadn’t begun calculating field equations in his head, but then he finished with a stretch and a loud yawn.

  “There’s a kind of apocryphal physics story,” George said finally. “Someone’s giving a cosmology lecture about how the sun is just one star in three hundred billion in the Milky Way galaxy, which is just one galaxy in two hundred billion in the universe, which is just one universe in the whatever-it-all-is—and this woman stands up and says something like ‘That’s crazy! Everyone knows the Earth is flat and rides around on the back of a giant tortoise.’ And the lecturer says, ‘Well, ma’am, in that case, what is the tortoise standing on?’ and she replies, ‘Another tortoise, of course!’ and he says, ‘Well, so what is that tortoise standing on?’ and she says, ‘Another tortoise, of course!’ and he says—”

  “George!”

  “Right. Sorry. So he says—he says, ‘And what is that tortoise standing on?’ and she says, ‘Sir, I’m telling you, it’s tortoises all the way down!’”

  William got the sense that this was the punch line, and he gave George a perfunctory laugh before saying, “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s Irene. She’s just tortoises all the way down. Mysteries on top of mysteries, however far down you go.”

  William felt something seizing up in his chest and hurriedly tried to pay George for the mimosas, which he refused, of course. He looked about ready to fall asleep on the bench.

  “My love to Sara,” William said quickly, before walking off to the men’s room. There he locked the door and rolled a joint on the counter by the sink, carefully, just the way she had taught him. Then he stepped outside and walked down into the Battery, where he could smoke it in relative peace and quiet. He stared out across the gray skies toward the Statue of Liberty, cold and alone in the open harbor, and thought about calling his mother.

  They hadn’t exactly been getting along lately. Shortly after Irene died, she had asked him to join her for a Seoul Jinogwigut—a ceremony to usher the last of Irene’s seven souls to paradise. He didn’t expect her to understand that he didn’t want Irene’s seventh soul ushered to paradise, just as he didn’t want to hear her theories about how Irene’s cancer had been caused by jabkwi, wandering malicious spirits, who had nestled into the psychic hole Irene had created by turning her back on her family—her ancestors were pissed, in other words, and misfortune was sure to befall those who pissed off the ancestors. Whatever. Let her stand around shaking jujube sticks and burning paper effigies of horses and invoking the spirits. But now it had been a year, and his mother was still trying to come up with ways to help Irene’s soul reach the next world.

  When the tightness in his chest finally dulled to a weak throb and he felt sleepy, he walked to the street and hailed a cab. It was only when he sat down in the backseat that he realized he had absolutely no idea where he wanted to go.

  “You know a bar called Van Winkle’s?” William asked.

  The driver nodded. “Up on Avenue B.”

  William said that was the place, even though he didn’t have the faintest idea. He clutched Irene’s address book in his hand like a holy book as they headed uptown. Pressing one cheek against the cold window, he listened to the other cars. Their sounds began to overlap, repeat, and blur together. The foggy voice of the radio tuned to sports. A faint, charred coffee smell came from the front seat. The door hummed and the road sang, and soon everything was lost in a white wall of shrouded air slipping past the window.

 
Ice was quickly covering the windowpane. Strange—though not as strange as the warm hand he felt on his. Without looking, he knew it was Irene’s hand. It just was. And she just was there, as if she had always been. Not ghostly, not cold, nothing spectral or apparitional at all. Her hand on his arm and on the back of his neck. Her head pressed onto his shoulder. Fat snowflakes were falling outside the window. William could feel her fingers sliding between his, looking for a comfortable grip, as she sighed lightly and kissed the side of his neck and then a slightly firmer one, pecking at a spot she always liked. He was afraid to look directly at her.

  Are you a ghost? he asked.

  No. She giggled. I’m a bird. A very special, rare type of seagull.

  What makes you so special and rare, Madame Seagull?

  I hate the sea, she said.

  That’s pretty inconvenient.

  A long sigh that tickled his neck. I’ll admit, it’s a problem.

  So where do you live then?

  She jabbed her nose into his neck a half dozen times as he squirmed. I’m practicing to be a William-pecker. So I can make my nest inside Williams.

  Outside a beam of blond sunlight fell onto the frosty window, and William watched as a million fine, symmetrical crystals of ice melted and condensed into steam, filling the backseat of the cab. He turned to try to kiss Irene, but she pressed his cheek the other way. He could almost see her hair out of the corner of his eye, falling down over the white shoulder of his shirt, spilling thick and golden. Then he pushed her hand away, turning the rest of the way—and woke up alone.