All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  Gregg again stood on my fire escape. He was overdoing it with the glowing bumblebees and dragonflies, I wanted to tell him. The gaps between the lights as important as the lights themselves. He would test that theory. Wearing fingerless gloves, the bees and dragonflies fell from his hands and glowed in a swarm, dangling from the wrought iron fire escape. Electric faeries glowing in the wineglasses. Kath’s spindly floating avocado pit had cracked another vertical shoot.

  “Why are you always in my window?” I asked.

  “So I can keep an eye on you,” he said. He tugged at the lights. “There was a man here earlier today looking for you.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Some delivery guy. He said he had a package for you. I told him I would sign for it but he said he needed to give it to you personally.”

  The fear formed again, about to release a bubble.

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Like a delivery guy. FedEx uniform. White, kind of gaunt, clean shaved.”

  The fear of Thomas dissipated.

  “He said he would come back later.”

  Gregg continued tugging at his lights.

  “You’re having a guest over?” he asked. I waved around the knife to point out the obvious and Gregg nodded down and to the side.

  “That crazy woman on the bike?”

  Below the fire escape, Gregg’s friends—a white man and an Asian woman—entered the courtyard.

  “What are you doing up there, Gregg?” she said. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “Gregg come down here and say hello, tell us what you plan to do with all these goodies,” the man said.

  “I’ve never seen so many pine trees,” said the woman. “You know they’re going to die in these pots. There’s not enough room for the root balls. It’s too crowded.”

  “Looks like you need to entertain your friends,” I said.

  “They’re very demanding,” he replied, and climbed down to greet them.

  There was still time to buy beer. Outside, the cold had resumed and women tucked their arms into the folds of their men’s coats. I flipped my jacket collar and rolled and lit a cigarette and walked to the bodega. My cracked phone buzzed the Reuters newsfeed. Sign of the Times: Major US Insurers/Reinsurers to Underwrite Cyber, Political Instability, Solar Radiation Policies. Yet still nothing from Kath. I hauled home a twelve-pack of Budweiser bottles. Still no message from Kath. I cracked open a beer and lay on the couch. Entertained prying open Thomas again but couldn’t penetrate the binder’s force field. The beer went down in four gulps and I twisted open another and ignited the broiler. It was time to cook. I snugged the flank steak beneath the flame and set the pot to boiling, to blanch the kale. Thereby willing Kath’s impending arrival.

  I repacked Thomas in his box and fluffed the couch pillows and dunked the boiled kale in ice water to stop its internal cooking. Shredded the warm greens with the German knife and sprinkled in fried shallots and shook them together in a wooden bowl. The steak now cooked, I slid it in the warm oven to absorb its own juices. Kath now forty-five minutes late. Her customary arrival time. I set the table. Lit two candles. Texted her to ensure her okayness. That she wasn’t hit by a bus. I opened another beer. It went down easy. Outside, Gregg’s friend explained the impact of Silent Spring and how this was emblematic of the influence one determined person can have on the world. And not just influence. Real, positive change.

  I switched on Mingus. Switched him off. This was bad. Bad for me to do to myself. I told myself to remain calm. She wouldn’t not come for no reason. Yes, there had to be a reason. My cracked phone vibrated a new message. I fumbled with the lock. It was an email from Fleeger’s secretary about unfathomable amounts of crude oil pooled beneath the Rockies. I didn’t care. I cared about Kath and why she wasn’t here. I cared about the Nazca lines of past patterns scorched into the mantle of my almost-barren earth. I opened another beer and waited for a signal. At a certain point if the message is not forthcoming, it will never arrive. This was the stage we entered. A premature denouement. I rolled another cigarette. There was no way I could stay here in the apartment. If I did I would asphyxiate.

  I opened the closet and extracted a jacket.

  “Stephen, come down here and join us for some cheer before your guest arrives,” Gregg said.

  I told Gregg I would join them later, closed the window, and exited the apartment. Capitulated to myself and sent Kath another message: just wanted to make sure you were OK.

  Cash flitted from the ATM and I gathered twenties from a puddle. I walked to the Village. Around the back of the Bowery Hotel. Past windows stacked with restaurant kitchen machinery, Hello Kitty dolls, sous-vide vacuumizers, soft ice cream machines. Past bars and restaurants and galleries specializing in cocktails and cuisine and culture. Deep fat fryers, rubber kitchen mats, Hobart food processors and small Chinatown apartments packed with Mexicans. Emotional affibrilation revved inside my chest. I needed to see her. Wanted to see her. To determine if she was alone and if not bury my loss in the bars. I picked up the pace. Alone again among the tenements. I looked over my shoulder, uncertain why, but there was no one there. Perhaps I was worried Thomas had snatched her. Neon church crosses and slick pavement. My phone vibrated a message from Kath. Thank God.

  “Stephen, where are you?”

  As if she was outside my door. My thumbs fumbled with the proper response. With whether the proper response was no response. You’re repeating past mistakes, I told myself. Comporting with hardwired patterns of thought and behavior. I succumbed. Capitulated. Responded that I was walking. That I didn’t understand why she didn’t come over. Don’t write that, I told myself. I hurried to shut down the phone to abort the message’s transmission but the quick little bar told me this was futile, that the message was already sent. Ellipses of Kath’s response now in production.

  “Come over.”

  I refrained from answering.

  “I want you to come over.”

  “How much?”

  “Very much.”

  Levity returned to my thighs. There was clarity in the streetlights between here and her door. I saw the path before me and asked her what I should bring.

  “Just you.”

  Newspapers strung across a newsstand. Gucci Mane or Lil’ Wayne hanging from a wire. Alongside baggies of candies and nuts. Why anyone would tattoo an ice cream cone to his cheek was beyond me, despite whatever subliminal message this may convey on the street. The Pakistani newspaper vendor nodded as I stepped to Kath’s building, as if he recognized me. I shouldered open the battered door and ascended the fifth-floor walk-up, climbing a trail of apple-flavored shisha through the warm, dry stairwell, like a cartoon dog following the trail to a cartoon ham baking in a cartoon kitchen.

  22

  A CROWD GATHERED ON the landing outside the apartment, all of them with saffron markings to their foreheads, parallel lines connected by a golden swirl evidencing the omniscient third eye of consciousness. The Frenchman was among them.

  “Our deepest regards to Swami Vishnu Vishnu,” he said to Soncha, standing beside her open door. I barely recognized her. Thick mascara had narrowed her eyes, like some optical illusion that induced desire. I said hello to the Frenchman. He nodded toward me and descended the building’s cubist stairwell. Soncha gave me a deep, silent hug and I felt the ribs of her chest, the heavy collective swish of the red ribbons tied to the ends of her forty braids. Per her instructions, I removed my shoes.

  “Yes, be comfortable, Stephen,” she said.

  It felt like entering an apartment in a foreign country. Orientalistic. Beiruti. Tehrani. Purposefully designed to evoke something far away and cherished. Black crystal chandelier set to low, checkered inlaid wooden frames, photos of Soncha’s parents and siblings taken before the revolutions and the wars forced the family into exile. A grandfather surrounded by boughs of blooming jasmine. Mothers in dark round sunglasses and silk scarves posing with musta
ched husbands on the road to the Chouf. To Chambal. Chased brass plates hanging from the walls.

  Kath reclined on the red divan, barefoot, legs wrapped in a white blanket. Two vertical saffron lines and a gold swirl in the middle of her forehead as well. Amid all this rich, undulating texture she looked ochre, earth-toned, almost bland. There was no kiss. There was no embrace. She motioned for me to sit on a floor pillow, beside a man gurgling a shisha pipe constructed from a forty-ounce bottle of Crazy Horse. I introduced myself to him.

  “Ali,” he replied. His hand was small and strong. “Absolute pleasure to meet you, Stephen.” He too had received the parallel saffron lines, which intersected with his long black eyebrow, thereby forming multiple right angles in the middle of his forehead. “We were just discussing Kath’s newest photos of the protests. Such energy, yes?”

  He offered me the knitted shisha pipe. I inhaled deeply and filled my lungs with molasses and apple vapor, the water gurgling and the charcoal brightening, its heavy presence detectable only upon exhale. Soncha reclined on a chaise lounge next to the divan, fingering Kath’s hair as Kath flipped through a copy of Artforum.

  A serious undertaking had occurred among the women and Ali and the guests who departed and I didn’t know the rules and I didn’t know its objective and my attendance at the gathering was never under consideration. I felt that. I was a plot twist. An unexpected visitor stepping in from the night, bearing unmet expectations and questions, here to impose my presence before they retired for the night.

  Soncha answered her phone, told someone to just bring him.

  “Why do you want the date? What if it just happens again?”

  She listened to the phone and lit a white cigarette.

  “Don’t fixate on so much control. He wants to come, he comes. If they have something else they would rather do, they do that instead.”

  She ended the call with a dramatic press of a button.

  “Why are American women so obsessed with planning?” she asked. “No wonder their men are always acting like women.”

  I took no offense to this, because I knew what she was talking about.

  “Allah,” Ali said. “She should find an Arab man.” He repositioned himself atop his floor pillow, as if he possessed the chest of all Arab men. “He will tell you what he wants.”

  “He will rape you,” Kath said.

  Her candor inflicted a wound. Secreted a hot oil through the chambers of my loculated chest. I should leave, I thought. To preserve and protect myself from their exclusive hospitality.

  As they lounged, Ali explained to Kath the Arab word for when music makes you high, and how this word doesn’t exist in English, and how this is yet another serious defect in the Western paradigm, the Western mentality. Because we don’t feel music. Ali dialed up on a laptop a video of tribal music, soldiers in long shirttails and carrying heavy weapons across their shoulders and scaling a bare, granite valley. They took their positions near a road, crouched behind boulders. They’re going to detonate an IED, I thought. A urial appeared above the men, with its alien candelabra of antlers, sniffing the air. They rose from behind the rock spraying bullets at the animal as it galloped higher into the monotone valley, abandoning its ewes in flight.

  “Do you feel that?” Ali asked. “Do you feel the passion and the soul of this music?”

  “I do, Ali,” Kath said.

  He closed the laptop and no one spoke. We sat there in the near dark, with no expectation of a transcendent experience via conversation, no emphasis on being clever or lighting laugh bombs. Kath too was silent. She had invited me here not to discuss her absence from dinner but to try and put me at ease. Her efforts failed. I felt claustrophobic, incapable of eating their lotus leaves. Ali offered me a fleshy chunk of bitter pomegranate and leaned against the divan rubbing his hands through his thick black hair, crossing and recrossing his legs. I stared at the carpet as they discussed upcoming projects and Kath opined that it all sounded very interesting.

  “Is that how you say it, Stephen?” Ali asked. “Play my cards right?”

  I confirmed that it was indeed as Kath flipped through the pages of a magazine written in a language she couldn’t read. In the chandelier’s shadowy light, I noticed she had dusted her skin with something that gave her a sandy complexion, the source of that ochre-toned skin.

  “Kath?”

  “Yes Ali?”

  “I’m really happy that you’re here with us,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  I followed her along a Persian runner into the empty kitchen.

  “Where were you tonight?” I asked. “I made dinner.”

  My confronting her surprised us both.

  “Stephen, don’t make things more complicated than they already are. I don’t need the morality on top of it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Must we run through all the reasons right now?”

  “Yes we do.”

  “But you won’t like what I have to say, baby.”

  “I’ll be fine with it.”

  “But it doesn’t matter how you interpret what I feel?”

  I told her it matters.

  “I think I’m done with you, baby,” she said. She hid behind her hair, like bolts of yarn, marshaling her honesty. “You’re taking this all too seriously.”

  “And you’re taking this all too casually,” I retorted.

  Something solid and heavy dropped a number of floors inside me.

  “I’m done doing things I don’t want to do anymore, Stephen. You won’t understand. Because you’re a Gemini, Stephen. And I’m a Taurus. I don’t do well with Gemini. Christ, you even have me changing my hair color.”

  “You stood me up because of a horoscope?”

  “That was just the sign, Stephen. There’s more to it than that. Then Swami Vishnu Vishnu was here tonight and he told me to follow my heart. I have to live by my feelings now and I didn’t want to come over and so I didn’t. You can’t understand. We’re so different.”

  “I thought you liked that about us.”

  “No, Stephen. There is different by degree and different by species. We are different by species. I want different by degree.”

  I was annoying her. But I didn’t care.

  “Did Swami Vishnu Vishnu tell you that?”

  This lodged a stinger. She sighed.

  “It’s because you’re not a creator, Stephen. You’re a consumer. There are three types of people in this world. There are critics. There are creators. And there are consumers. Stephen, you are a consumer. You drink too much. You eat too much. You don’t want to be empowered and that’s OK with you but it’s not OK with me if I’m with you. Look, Stephen, I have a gift. I know it may not be easy for you to understand, but I do. And the challenge of that gift is that relationships and people come secondary to the gift itself. And that’s my struggle. To follow my spiritual calling. Even if it means hurting others. Which I don’t mean to do, baby, but I must.”

  She was chasing a phantom. Her misadventure sponsored by a trust fund. I refrained from being mean.

  “But, Stephen, I have learned it is a beautiful curse.”

  She sounded ridiculous. I looked ridiculous, hands on my hips, leaning into her, awash in the irrational concerns of a spoiled woman suffering from delusions of grandeur surrounded by a coterie of sycophants. Opiating themselves with pastiche orientalism.

  “Even if you did understand, Stephen, this will always be taboo to you.”

  “What will?”

  “Pleasure, Stephen. Pleasure is taboo for you. You don’t enjoy it. You hurry to the point where you think we’re done and the moment you feel it’s good enough for you, you leave me barely satisfied, wanting more. And I’m left wondering where you’re off to. We have different tachometers, Stephen. I need more than what you can offer me.”

  “I’ll give it to you,” I said.

  “But you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

 
; “Because you will always feel guilty about us. Because I will always be your boss-slash-best-friend’s ex-wife.”

  “He’s not my best friend.”

  “Once he was.”

  “But not anymore. And besides, when this case is done I’m leaving the firm.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Because you know it’s killing you, right?”

  “Because of you I do.”

  “I don’t know, Stephen. Even if you do leave Kilgore there are still too many slashes to deal with. Too many conditions and too much history. You were there when I really needed something and I couldn’t stand being alone. But I was weak. I was a sheep. It was snowing. I was drunk. I needed company and I used you for that. And now you’re cooking me dinner and I’m changing my appearance and leaving shampoo at your house. What do you want, Stephen? You don’t know. And even if you knew what you wanted, I probably couldn’t give it to you. Because you can’t give it to me in return.”

  “And Robert did?”

  “No, he possessed something altogether different. And there was a time when I needed that too.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I needed his ability to tell the world to get in line. To take what he wanted from it. There was a time when I would have killed for him if he told me to. But we don’t have that connection, Stephen. Because you can’t tell the world to go fuck itself.”

  I placed my hands on the sides of her head and choked down the globular sob forming at the base of my esophagus. As if there was nothing more catastrophic in the world at this moment than shedding a tear.