* * *
On Fifth Avenue there are people ceaselessly. I can’t possibly look at each face. The entrance to the Pierre is heated. In the summer it’s cooled, but just that square of sidewalk. Outside its boundaries it’s me for myself. The calf’s brain guy takes me by the shoulders and kisses me on the forehead.
“You’re an amazing person,” he says.
* * *
I buy cigarettes in the first store I see. I buy a beer and drink it out of a paper bag. I walk downtown by myself.
* * *
“Now you’re just flirting with me,” I say.
The delivery guy shrugs.
* * *
When my phone’s fully charged it shudders forever. I snort a bag of SWEET PUSSY and wait a few minutes until I can’t feel. I read the curious, confused, mean, desperate, apologetic texts on my phone like a book.
* * *
The art is burned or shot through with arrows or made with scissors and distemper. I stand in front of a white feather sculpture with a motor in it. In a timed way it trembles. I spiral down the Guggenheim with the art guy. The whole time we’ve been going the wrong way. At the bottom I read what’s painted on the wall and it says what we will see is not nihilism but the pure possibility that rises from destruction. I scoff. The art guy has two fingers inside of me.
“I feel so good,” he says.
“This show is naïve either way,” I say.
* * *
I make my dimples show.
“Did you miss me?” I say.
At the cop bar the ex-Ranger does not stand up. I throw my arms around his neck.
“I missed you so much,” I say.
I feel him keeping himself away like he doesn’t want to touch me but then he does.
* * *
I smooth the ex-Ranger’s smooth face. We are drunk. There are double and triple versions of us.
“How many other girls did you have up here while I was gone?”
He counts on his fuzzy fingers.
“Four.”
I bite him in a fake way.
* * *
I wake up and his hands are around my neck. They’re not squeezing, they’re just there. My shoulders are pinned by his knees. I reach up as much as I can and caress the tops of the ex-Ranger’s feet.
“Baby,” I say.
* * *
The Sheikh told me he was for hire like me.
“Sunni, Shia, I don’t care,” he said.
“So you make bombs for Jews and Christians, too,” I said.
He shrugged.
“If I lived in Israel or Lebanon, why not? I would adapt to my surroundings.”
I remember looking out the window at the pastel sky of Dubai.
* * *
“I want to buy you a steak.”
I look at the guy who buys me things. Then I look at my wrists. I look at the gap between my thighs. If I get too skinny he will leave.
“Rare,” I say.
“Did I do something wrong?” he says.
I touch him immediately.
“Not at all.”
When the ribeye comes I try to eat it all for him.
* * *
After the junk-bond guy comes in my mouth I lay my head on his chest. He pushes his hand down the back of my tights and cups my ass, one of his fingers in the crack.
“I’m right where I’m supposed to be,” I say.
He hugs me tighter and doesn’t let up. He smells like wool and I fall asleep to the sound of the movie’s gunfights.
* * *
They all stayed. Because two weeks is not a month, I think. But also because, in the beginning, I didn’t pick them. They picked me. Probably my stash of spoons is in the kitchen but it is so hard to get up.
23
“Aren’t you happy we’re eating cod sperm again?”
At the omakase bar I drape my thigh over the calf’s brain guy’s. The fish come is much richer in my mouth than his.
“If I wanted to break one of your bones, like a little one, how much would that cost?”
I look at the side of his face. I’m mismanaging him.
“Like a finger?”
He looks at me, too.
“Yeah.”
I move my leg.
“Let me think about it,” I say.
* * *
The bar is striped in an insane way, like a dazzle ship, which is camouflage that is meant to confuse not conceal. The art guy is talking. The bartender is talking. I can hear them but it’s getting hard to see.
“How much you think he got paid to paint this?” the art guy says.
“Bank,” the bartender says.
I feel for the art guy’s knee.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I say.
He passes the coke under his fingers. In the hotel hallway I have a slit of vision that’s closing. The exit sign swims at me. When I get outside I’m blind. The cold air is shocking. I squat to my feet. I haven’t had a panic attack in such a long time. I listen to the neutral gray hum of Eleventh Avenue. I think I’m supposed to be the one who is dazzling.
* * *
I see her back as soon as I walk into the locker room. I find it insulting, like the delivery guy’s psychological stamps. She turns to me and her TODAY folds away. I walk back out. Today I don’t feel like working out.
* * *
I couldn’t decide. I put a spicy tuna and a salmon on the Duane Reade counter. The cashier shakes her head.
“I’m not scared of death,” I say.
“You should be,” she says.
She holds her hand out flat to me and looks the other way. I’m joking. I think about it all the time. I think today a man could kill me. Like everyone, I want to control the way I die.
* * *
The ex-Ranger takes me to a restaurant in Queens that has valet parking. I pick at my fish.
“How is it?” he says.
It doesn’t matter where he takes me or how it tastes. He could take me anywhere and feed me anything.
“Bony,” I say.
* * *
I try to instigate a fight.
“Everything about you irritates me.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says.
He’s sitting on the futon. I’m standing in front of him. I jam my high heel into the ex-Ranger’s knee.
“I’m expensive,” I say.
He kisses my leg.
* * *
The guy who buys me things is talking about me to the salesguy. The salesguy is wearing neon bike shorts and his legs are hairless and thick. I’m a little away from them, on a high floor of the Dover Street Market, in a six-thousand-dollar dress.
“You should buy that for her,” the salesguy says.
“I don’t know if she deserves it,” the guy who buys me things says.
Both of them snicker.
* * *
“Is your father alive?” the junk-bond guy says.
I look at him like I’m surprised. At one point they all have a theory. There are three or four to choose from.
“Of course,” I say.
I don’t know if that’s true or not. The junk-bond guy puts on my boots for me. I laugh at him. He zips them up.
“There you go, baby,” he says.
* * *
As a little girl I asked my mother where my father was and she said he didn’t care about us. When I was a teenager I thought who he didn’t care about was her. I looked for him. I found him.
* * *
I have always been suspicious of theories. In a diagram a tangle of lines connects this to that but it doesn’t explain why. I try to study my ceiling to make sure it didn’t change shape while I was away. But I’m nodding and I can’t.
* * *
I’m really high. I probably shouldn’t have left my apartment. All words blur into symbols.
“Salaam,” I say.
“Salaam.”
I’m struggling with my money. The bodega guy puts his hand on mine. He takes
a ten and four ones and in their place he puts a pack of Marlboro Reds.
“You need matches?” he says.
I shake my head.
24
Two girls work on me. I get elaborate nails that take hours because I have time to waste. Every finger is a different sugar skull.
* * *
The calf’s brain guy opens my palm and kisses my hand.
* * *
I look at my finger and it makes me dizzy. It’s purple and throbbing. An ER nurse holds it in the palm of her hand.
“What happened?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
* * *
“Come on, your fucked-up finger is amazing.”
My jaw is compulsive. My brain is artificially happy. I snort his line, too.
“Okay. No face.”
“No face,” he says.
The art guy gets down on his knees. I’m wearing magenta fishnets and I shove my two hands down the front and as soon as he takes the picture I smile really big where he can’t see.
* * *
I’m on my fourth or fifth Cherry Bomb when the ex-Ranger buzzes in. As soon as he sits down I put my hand on top of his.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks at my splint.
“Hey,” he says.
He doesn’t say anything else.
“Hey,” I say.
* * *
I’m on Second Avenue when I see the Polish magazine seller. I stop in front of him.
“What are you doing over here? You’re supposed to be on Sixth Avenue,” I say.
“The police,” he says.
When he looks up he recognizes me. He takes off his hood and shows me his horrible nose. He picks up the magazine I was looking at months ago. It is neither less dusty nor more. Like TODAY and SWEET PUSSY I know he has nothing to do with me. I’m making mistakes of perception.
“Three dollars for you.”
“Get away from me.”
* * *
I have the Polish diner deliver because I can’t stand to see that woman right now.
* * *
Everything exists, in every iteration, so naturally if I look for something I find it. I shift my focus and there it is.
“I want you to cover my eyes because I shouldn’t be allowed to see you when you come in me,” I text GBT.
* * *
While he fucks me the guy who buys me things clamps his hand over my face. He is literal. When he comes naturally I see nothing.
* * *
“Did you know Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country? All of its neighbors are also landlocked and none of its rivers flow into the ocean.”
“I did not know that,” the junk-bond guy says.
We’re eating Thai food in his living room. What I’m eating is two orders of spring rolls.
“A closed system,” he says.
“Like Amex,” I say.
He knows this. It makes him happy. He holds one shumai up on his fork and I eat it.
“How do you know that?”
“I know a lot of things,” I say.
* * *
I was with an Uzbek girl in a bathroom doing coke. She told me that. She also told me she was Miss Uzbekistan at a Miss World pageant on Hainan Island.
“Really?” I said.
“I thought I was going to do something with my life. Then nothing happened.”
Her English was good. This was at one of the Saudi’s parties and the next day it hurt to walk.
* * *
In a closed system nothing is created or destroyed, so every iteration exists always and what it does is change form. That’s a justifying explanation. There are still wholesale kitchen supply stores on the lowest Bowery. On what feels like a whim I buy mercury candy thermometers in one of them. There are chandelier stores, too. Showy glass chandeliers, dripping low from the ceilings, almost sitting on the cushions of jewel-tone love seats. I could decorate my apartment. A saleslady comes up to me. She whispers under her breath.
“You are Polish,” she says.
“No,” I say.
The walls are mirrored and I know that I belong here, matching everything.
25
I walk in the dark and the city is white and quiet. It’s a slow blizzard. Somewhere on Fifty-Second Street I see another person. A strong memory of mine is feeling trapped in Manhattan.
* * *
I was twelve. It was the first warm day after four brutal months and I walked down Avenue B, all arms and all legs, and suddenly I had this power. Since then it hasn’t stopped.
* * *
This yoga teacher keeps us in the fetal position forever. I imagine how we must look to her: like evenly spaced, curled-up animals with whom she can do anything. I think she is intoxicated by herself. The TODAY girl is on the next mat. She is wearing a sports bra that cuts her tattoo in two. My eyes are supposed to be closed but they are not.
* * *
It could be any time but in here it’s dark and pounding.
“When’s your birthday?”
“Why?”
I try to put my tongue back in the calf’s brain guy’s mouth.
“What do you mean, why?” the calf’s brain guy says.
“I’m a Cancer,” I say.
* * *
The art guy takes me to a movie in the basement of MoMA. There are great stretches of boredom. I don’t tell him it’s the kind of movie I like. I think I should touch his dick but when I look over he is sleeping. It’s not his birthday. Birthdays are for wives and real girlfriends, too. The movie’s Italian and after two hours there is a massacre.
* * *
I sneer at the text that I sent ER: “Want to do something fun.”
* * *
They can’t give Coney Island new teeth. It’s still the seediest beach. There is patchy snow on the sand. No one is here. Behind us are projects. In front of us is ocean. I drink a shot of vodka and pass the bottle to him.
“You don’t love me,” I say.
I touch his knee with my splinted hand.
“I love you,” the ex-Ranger says.
* * *
We have drunk sex that feels like magic, in an arched alcove of that abandoned building on the boardwalk. These small bursts of joy are supposed to keep people breathing.
* * *
I look at the ass of the guy who buys me things and notice it is whiter than the rest of him. I remember that over Christmas he went on a tropical vacation.
“How was the island?”
He’s on his hands and knees on top of me.
“What?” he says.
I’m stalling. I don’t feel like licking him. When I found my father I asked him to tell me a nice thing about my mother. He said she was the most brilliant person he had met, she was sparkling, and then it went nowhere.
“My asshole. Now,” the guy who buys me things says.
I stick my tongue in him as he fucks my tits.
* * *
The junk-bond guy fucks me in the guest bedroom. He makes a show of being generous. He tells me to touch myself until I come. Afterward we lie on top of the covers.
“Did this used to be your daughter’s room?”
“I have a son,” he says.
I can feel him anticipating that I will say something else. When I don’t he touches my broken finger carefully.
“I’m nice to you, right?”
I look at him.
“Yes. Thank you,” I say.
* * *
The first man I ever had sex with was British. He didn’t pay me but it was an exchange. He was a manager of a club I wanted to get into. It was so important to me but I can’t remember its name. It was on Bleecker and Thompson. I lied and told him I was fourteen. On the Internet I search for it. It was called Life. I shut my computer.
26
The wax lady looks at my vagina and shakes her head.
“I didn’t do this,” she says.
“Last time I had to go to some
one else.”
She puts her hand on her white hip. She stares at me silently.
“She was not discreet,” I say.
The tiny pinch of the tweezers is so much worse than the wax’s wide yank.
“Ingrown,” she says.
* * *
I think there is come in my eye. It’s red. Imagining sperm swimming around my iris makes me squirmy. I can’t look at myself. I put my compact away.
“Something in your eye?” the calf’s brain guy says.
“You,” I say.
He laughs. I steal the olives from his martini. This restaurant only has one bathroom and while he was jerking off on my face somebody was knocking on the door.
“A real boss would fuck me in his corner office during work hours.”
He snatches the toothpick back.
“I’ll fuck you wherever I want,” he says.
* * *
I look at the sleeping hermaphrodite. One side is long hair and a tight ass, the other side is breasts and a penis. The Saudi had one of these statues in his garden. This one is iridescent, new, awake. I turn and face the art guy and cross my arms over my chest.
“If I had a dick I’d fuck you in the ass with it. I’d make you suck me off in the stairwell and then I’d come all over your face.”
A woman moves away from us.
“But you don’t,” he says.
The stairwell is lit neon green. It’s the color of future vomit. It’s screeching with Guantánamo Bay torture music. Actually he came in my mouth. When he said to meet him at the New Museum, first I went to Broadway where it used to be and I felt lost, left behind, like the city no longer wants me.
“You have the sweetest pussy in New York City.”
The art guy hip-checks me. I check him back.
* * *
The repetition of words and images will not sucker me into thinking there is a pattern when there isn’t. The city does not want or not want. It does not trick. The bricks now are stamped IED.
* * *
“Why did you get kicked out of the army?”
The ex-Ranger rolls up a twenty.
“I didn’t.”
“Okay,” I say.
* * *
I think about teaching the ex-Ranger my system. When I get up to nine bags a day I taper for two weeks until I get back to three. The right way to do heroin is the management of tolerance. I think about confiding in him. He’s not the Sheikh. He can’t teach me anything. I don’t.
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