by Emily Gould
Alexis was just walking in the door at that moment, and she ran over to both of them and joined the hug. “Oh, Laura! Thank God you’re okay!”
This welcome was the opposite of what she’d anticipated, but it made sense. She was also thrilled to see her coworkers. It was a gross, sort of exploitative job, but the bartenders and waitresses there were the constants of her life. She hugged Stefan back and told them she’d missed him, sincerely.
The rest of the shift was manic and blissful because there was no time to think. She was becoming better at waiting tables. She felt the pleasure akin to that of learning how to speak a new language, making small mistakes and learning from them. She slapped down her tickets with a smile or a joke so that the bartenders would prioritize her orders and she could deliver drinks more quickly and endear herself to her customers. She got faster at making change, and her muscles learned the wrist-flick that eased credit cards through the slot in the machine on the first try, the exact pace to walk at so that the tray of drinks in her hand would sail and not wobble or slosh. Everyone she served said yes to another round. People were determined to eke out fun wherever and however it might be found. The men hit on her, of course, but there was something in their eyes, even among the drunker ones, that made the most lecherous things they said tolerable. Everyone had to acknowledge one another’s shared humanity, or something. Everyone was just so glad not to be dead.
Even after tipping out the bartenders, she’d made more than she usually did in a week in that one night. For the first time, she allowed herself to hail a cab to get home, even though it wasn’t a long walk. She tipped the cabbie 100 percent of the tiny fare and danced up the stairs to the apartment, feeling only a little bit ashamed of how euphoric she felt. It was unseemly, at a time when so many people were mourning, to feel so happy, especially because it was their misery that had, indirectly, caused Laura to be able to feel accepted and useful. But she couldn’t help the way she felt.
Callie was sitting at the kitchen table in her beautiful kimono, chain-smoking. Laura couldn’t keep the joy out of her voice as she greeted her; she was excited to tell her how much money she’d made. Maybe they could look for a bigger apartment soon, one that actually had a separate room for Laura to sleep in. Callie looked up at her, and Laura saw that her usually immaculate makeup was smudged, black mascara leaving streaks down her cheeks.
“Something terrible happened,” she said.
“Oh my God. Where was it this time?” Laura hadn’t heard anything or smelled anything different, and she hadn’t heard sirens. The streets were still somewhat deserted, but that was normal now. They were under attack.
“They found Dylan. They were staying in a hotel with a pool. He can’t swim, I guess? He didn’t know how to swim, but he was in the pool. Everyone was fucked up, I mean, I’m sure they were. I don’t think he meant to. Oh God.” Callie started crying too hard to keep talking.
“He’s in the hospital?”
Callie’s face was down, her shoulders were shaking. “He’s dead, Laura. By the time they found him he’d been underwater too long. They couldn’t bring him back.”
Her first thought was of the incredibly unsatisfying way they’d said goodbye. Or really, the way they hadn’t; she and Callie had left the house in the chilly early morning, before even Dylan’s parents were awake; they’d had to continually keep feeding and shushing the dog as they waited for the cab to take them to the bus station. It had seemed important to be secretive, mostly so as not to offend Daisy, who might feel that her heroic drive down to the city to get them and keep them safe had been in vain. But Laura had also wanted to avoid a conversation with Dylan about why she didn’t want to stay there any longer. Even so, she hadn’t been able to resist going in at the last minute to kiss his sleeping face. His dirty-blond hair had been greasy and spilling across the pillow like a girl’s. He’d stirred and half woken, tried to pull her back into bed with him, and she’d even thought about letting him, missing the train, staying. But what then? He was going to LA soon anyway; what difference did another day together make? He’d kissed her one last time before slipping back into a doze. She’d had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d been about to say her name but hadn’t quite trusted himself to remember what it was.
She decided to wait for the pain on their building’s roof. She gathered a few supplies—some cigarettes, the Pyrex measuring cup they used for coffee that she filled with water, a warm hooded OSU sweatshirt. Still in her black work clothes, she climbed the small, filthy final flight of stairs to the rooftop and picked a corner facing southeast, then just sat there, waiting.
The sky was beginning to glow purple; the sun was preparing to rise. The noise from the street below picked up a few notches in intensity as the city, which had been oddly still, began to come to life for the day. It had to, despite everything that had happened. It had no other choice. Laura lit another cigarette, more for something to do than because she really wanted it, and smoked it as slowly as she could as the sun breached the lower corner of the horizon, sending neon orange streaks sizzling up between all the still-standing buildings. She became aware that she was crying, and had been crying for a while. The crying was for Dylan at first, but as it continued, it became for everyone dead, for everyone who’d lost someone, and for herself, for how empty the rest of her life would be.
* * *
She spent that day in bed. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, and she wasn’t even bored, she just lay there and stared at the ceiling, feeling pinned to the bed by an ache in her chest that radiated outward, weighing down all her limbs and keeping her immobilized. She didn’t know where Callie was. It had been dark for a long time when Laura heard her stumbling into the apartment in her tall chunky boots, and then she also heard a male voice—not Davey’s—mumbling something drunk and inaudible before the door to Callie’s room closed firmly. Laura got up and went to the kitchen. Her stomach felt painfully empty, like its dry walls were clenched together in a knot. She got a packet of ramen out of the cupboard and ate it dry, with the seasoning packet sprinkled on top, and drank a glass of tap water standing up by the sink. Then she went back to bed and lay down and fell fast asleep. When she woke up it was 9:00 a.m., a normal time to get up and start the day, so she did.
Third Street was empty, but that wasn’t so unusual for this hour. The Hells Angels had strung an American flag between their building and the one across the street somehow; it hung down toward the center of the street, drooping rather than blowing in the wind. Laura bought an egg sandwich and a light and sweet bodega coffee on her way to the F train as though she were a commuter on her way to work somewhere. She had no idea where she was going, but it seemed important to be going somewhere.
The subway stopped in the tunnel between Fourth Street and Fourteenth Street for a blood-chilling minute and then started again. People chatted with each other and read the Post over each other’s shoulders and talked about the headlines. The sudden familiarity was horrible but wonderful, and Laura almost wished she could participate in it. She felt tears threatening the Wet n Wild pencil she’d stupidly applied, and a woman sitting across the aisle caught her gaze and said, “You okay, dear?”
It felt fraudulent to get this sympathy; no terrorists had robbed her of her boyfriend. He’d done it himself, by being drunk and high and stupid, or worse, wanting to die. He’d put her in the terrible position of feeling like she didn’t deserve this stranger’s kindness and resenting it because of how guilty it made her feel to be getting it anyway. And she could never tell him how angry she was; he would never have to pay for his crime against himself. She hated him and ached to be near him. She tried to distract herself by looking at the subway map above the woman’s head and found herself devising a plan.
In the months she had lived in New York City she had not yet once been to a cultural institution, unless she counted Brownies. No operas, no public lectures at Cooper Union, no museums. She had never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in her life, only read ab
out it in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in grade school. That book had left an indelible impression, though. Now, in the echoing lobby full of kids and families, Laura looked at a paper map and tried to find the French king’s bed those fictional kids had slept in. They had spent a lot of time looking at ancient Egyptian things, too, and had swum in a fountain where they also collected change to pay for their next meal. The museum smelled like cool clean marble and burnt coffee and soup; she was hungry again, probably from not eating all day yesterday. She followed the smell of the food to the ground floor, where there was a crowded, fluorescent-lit cafeteria, serving all kinds of gross food for outlandish tourist prices. She picked out a flaccid bagel stuffed with an inch of cream cheese, paid for it, and took her tray to a corner of the room. The bagel’s skin was pliant, not crunchy, and her teeth slid through the giant disk of cheese with a pleasantly disgusting ease. She finished it and still felt ravenous, so she went and bought another and ate it with the same speed and gusto. Her body, at least, seemed determined to live.
She took an elevator to a random floor and exited into a mostly deserted gallery of eighteenth-century Spanish paintings in which dark figures rolled their eyes upward in various ecstasies and agonies. She tried to stare at them until she felt something, but it wasn’t happening, so instead she decided to just walk through each room of the museum as fast as she could, stopping only if something arrested her gaze and made her feel compelled to stare. She was desperate to feel anything from an external source; she wanted to be forced to feel some other way besides how she already felt. The music that was typically in her head all the time had gone silent, she realized. There were no random jingles and half-remembered melodies trickling through her brain, trying to distract her, forming themselves into new songs if she paused long enough to listen. This pleasant static had always formed the backdrop to her thoughts, and now it was gone as though it had never existed.
Ancient Egypt was the last place she tried, and at the entrance to the Temple of Dendur something finally happened; she felt angry. The people who had built this temple had built it to guide someone into a supposed afterlife; how fucking stupid was that, was all of this? Death was final, she was sure. She thought of the kids in the Mixed-Up Files and how magical they had found this place. To Laura, at this moment, it seemed to embody false hope that you could be reunited with someone you loved in another realm, if you followed the right protocols, built the right shrine. That kind of thinking was dumb and dangerous. But how could kids have understood that? She herself had not understood it until just now. She wished she could go back to not understanding.
5
Laura was sitting on the stoop outside her apartment building and she couldn’t figure out how she was going to stand up and walk. Callie stood next to her, leaning on a parked car. Laura had made it down the steep flights of stairs but then felt woozy and blacked out slightly. Now she was clutching the filthy pavement where thousands of trash bags had sat and thousands of dogs had pissed because she felt the world turning too fast, trying to tip her over, too.
She kept thinking of Dylan’s body. It had been such a perfect body, and then via some process she didn’t understand, it had now been transformed into something that his parents had transported, in some kind of small container, so that his friends could gather and say goodbye to what had been Dylan and then do something with the container’s contents, together. Did no one else realize how bizarre this was, how completely disgusting and surreal?
“I can’t go. I’m not going. I can’t move,” she explained to Callie.
Callie winced and tugged on the sleeve of Laura’s black hooded sweatshirt. “You don’t have to go, but you’ll regret it if you don’t. And I really don’t want to go without you. Come on, get up.”
She hoisted Laura up by the arm in a businesslike way. Blackness swarmed behind Laura’s eyes for a second but then dissipated. She counted her breaths and tried not to think of anyone’s body as they walked south toward Joe’s Bar, where the memorial was being held. It was midafternoon but felt later because the days were getting shorter. It was too cold to be outside in just a sweatshirt. Callie had put on her makeup for her, painting her eyelids and her lashes with layers of waterproof liner and mascara, dabbing concealer onto her puffy, tear-chafed cheeks. Still, she knew she looked bad. She had a momentary pang about not wanting Dylan to see her looking like this, then realized she’d never have to worry about that again.
There it was, on the bar, visible as soon as they walked in: a generic-looking black urn no bigger than a beer stein, flanked by vases of what looked like cheap bodega flowers and what must have been Dylan’s senior photo from high school. He looked so different in it from the Dylan she’d known: awkward and skinny, with a bad droopy wave of bangs covering part of his zitty forehead, and a blankness in the eyes that negated the effect of his forced smile.
Callie left her side and moved toward Davey. The bar was full but not packed, and there was a stage area set up with instruments and amps and a mic, as if for a concert. She wondered who was going to speak and what on earth they could possibly say. No one had told her anything about what to expect from this event, or made it seem like she was responsible for doing anything, and it occurred to her now to be insulted by this. Shouldn’t she say something? She had been his girlfriend. Did that matter now at all? There were lots of other women in the bar, and they all looked just as sad and stricken as she did. How was anyone supposed to know that she was different from the rest of these women, more entitled to grieve? Or maybe they’d all slept with Dylan. Maybe they felt the same way she did. She hadn’t even known him well enough to know if his relationship with her was the kind of thing he got into all the time. She had to believe that she’d been special, because otherwise the pain she felt now was so, so extraordinarily stupid and pointless.
Callie came back over to where she was standing and handed her a vodka tonic. It was heavy on the vodka, and the first sip made her feel like she was sinking through the floor of the bar. “Davey’s saying they’re going to play soon, but they need someone to sing. I told him we would do it since we know the words to at least a few of their songs.”
“They didn’t think of this beforehand?”
“They thought they would just play and let the absence of Dylan’s voice be, like, a poetic statement about his loss or some shit. But I told him that was stupid. We’ll sound good with their band, it’ll be a nice way for you to feel close to him, and it will be nice for everyone to see you as part of, you know, his legacy or whatever.”
“I’m freaking out right now, Callie. I don’t want to get up onstage,” Laura said, but as she said it she looked around at the girls in the room. One tall one with a perfect fashion-mullet haircut had a blue leather jacket and pointy matching boots. She was crying streaks of mascara-smeared tears in a beautiful, photogenic way, and someone else with a fancy digital camera was taking pictures that she wasn’t quite posing for, but also wasn’t exactly shying away from. Looking at her, Laura realized that if she didn’t stake a claim to Dylan today, she would relinquish any right to it in the future. It was the last thing she wanted to do, but for future Laura, she had to.
“People are going to get up and say things first, right?”
“His parents are going to speak. I haven’t seen them yet, though. Oh, and your friend Amanda is here. Ryan from the management company tried to make this no-press, but she got in.”
Laura looked around but didn’t see Amanda. Davey and the other members of the Clips were clustered by the bar smoking cigarettes. It was oddly like an ordinary night at Joe’s except that it was happening during the daytime. The buzz of chatter was punctuated by an occasional laugh, and every time that happened, Laura was pierced with a sharp twinge of anger. Dylan’s fucking cremated ashes were sitting on the bar! She shuddered and drained the glass and went to the other end of the bar, far from the creepy photographer, but before she could get the overtaxed bartender’s attention s
he felt a firm tap, almost a poke, on her shoulder.
Laura turned around to face Daisy, who was wearing a shapeless black dress that had some dog hair clinging to it.
“He cared about you,” Daisy announced, without any preamble. She looked at the empty glass in Laura’s hand and her glassy expression became focused; her eyebrows lowered, and her quivering voice turned hissy. “Yes, by all means, drink up. Lucky you, you have a way of feeling better. That is, if you feel bad. You probably think you feel pretty bad, don’t you?”
Laura tried to figure out what she was supposed to say. They were, after all, at a bar. “I do feel bad,” she managed. The bartender pushed another drink toward her, and without thinking she picked it up.
“Shove it in my face, why don’t you!” The hissing was turning into screaming. Dylan’s father came up behind her and put a soothing hand on her forearm.
“I’m fine! I’m fine! Don’t touch me!” she shrieked at him.
“It’s almost time for us to address everyone,” he said evenly to Daisy. Laura, grateful for his interruption, murmured that she was sorry for his loss.
He nodded and smiled wryly at her, seeming anesthetized, very far away. Still, because it seemed important to have said it, Laura tried to stammer something about how much she had loved Dylan.
Without warning, Daisy grabbed Laura by the shoulders and shook her. “Loved! Loved! You don’t know what love is, you little whore! You think you loved my son? He came from my body. My body! I made him! And now he’s dead! You have no idea! No idea!”
Warm flecks of Daisy’s spit were on Laura’s cheeks. She turned away, shaking. Dylan’s father made eye contact with Laura—briefly, maybe apologetically—and led Daisy away. Laura wiped her face with a bar napkin and drank the second vodka tonic even more quickly than she had the first.
A couple of minutes later, they were on the small stage. The microphone shrieked as Dylan’s father began to speak. He thanked everyone for coming and said some things in a monotone about how Dylan had been talented and special. That his band had been important to him, and that he had been proud of his son for pursuing his dream, even though he didn’t always understand his choices. That what had happened was tragic, and an accident, and that accidents happen all the time, and no one knows why but that we have to be comfortable not knowing, and it’s just part of the great mystery of life. He didn’t mention God. Laura had a flash of something like envy; she thought of how her own family would have responded to a death like this, how they would have twisted things around until they could convince themselves that it had been the Lord’s will. Dylan’s dad seemed like a smart, reasonable guy.