Ultraluminous

  “Of course,” I say.

  “I would never do that.”

  I don’t say it doesn’t matter. Or that in a way I prefer it because it’s a simple straight line.

  “I know, you’re nice to me.”

  * * *

  The bath is as oversized as the bed and we both fit. I arch my back against the faucet. I put my soapy feet up on his shoulders. I wiggle one of his ears with one of my toes.

  “Are you sick of me yet?” I say.

  “Not yet.”

  I squint at him. He’s not a stupid man. Maybe he’s less stupid than all of them, even the calf’s brain guy.

  “All day I try to think of new ways to please you.”

  He grabs my foot and kisses its sole.

  “You’re everything good, baby,” he says.

  * * *

  “Decay,” the junk-bond guy says.

  The hairs that are gray on his chest feel like wire. They are even deader than regular hair, like dead is a phased state. I think the suicidal poet would like that. I spin one around my finger. I think the secret to a successful suicide is irreversible momentum.

  “New things are dumb,” I say.

  I let up on the tension and the hair slackly spins the other way.

  * * *

  I scowl into the open refrigerator.

  “You can put whatever you want on the grocery list. You can even cook me dinner,” the junk-bond guy says.

  He’s standing right beside me. I have no room to maneuver. I grab the cheese.

  “I don’t cook,” I say.

  * * *

  My clothes are the same shade of red as the baby coffin, not the two-man saw over the mantel. It’s a true, bright red. I don’t think I would fit in there, much less him and me. While I’m nodding the baby coffin, a shoe, grows true-red laces that furl to the floor. It is not unpleasant. I look at him on the living-room couch beside me.

  “Why don’t we walk over to your office? We could have lunch at that diner, get a couple of those good martinis.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” the junk-bond guy says.

  * * *

  “You said you were going to ask me something later. Remember? A long time ago when we were talking about where we went to high school. We made a deal.”

  He pours more wine in my glass.

  “You answered already. I didn’t even have to ask,” I say.

  I watch him search his brain. He doesn’t find it.

  “What was it?” he says.

  “If you don’t know I’m not telling.”

  I pour more wine in his glass.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy’s reading in bed and I’m lying there on my stomach. He lowers his book. He squeezes the hand on my ass.

  “What was it?”

  I shake my head. In a few seconds he starts reading again.

  “I’m going to give you a stock tip, for the future,” he says.

  “An insider stock tip?”

  “Don’t call it that.”

  * * *

  I go into his son’s room and drag out boxes until there is room enough to sit in the closet and then I close the door. The junk-bond guy opens it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Please, I want to be alone for one hour,” I say.

  He closes the door. I feel strange. Like maybe I am unraveling. I think in the future there is no nice cake waiting for me.

  * * *

  In the sideboard mirror he watches himself fuck me. I lay my face on the runner. We’re both on top of the dining room table and I’m sure it will break. It doesn’t. What I wanted to know that I didn’t have to ask was how much he got for his bonus.

  * * *

  “Why did you come back here?”

  “What?”

  I float in the bathtub with my hair spread out around me.

  “To New York,” the junk-bond guy says.

  * * *

  I fall asleep with his hand over my mouth.

  51

  An astronomical X-ray of the ultraluminous type exceeds the possibility of luminosity. It is a disk of matter accreting, radiating as it’s sucked into a black hole. It reveals the universe for what it is, which is being ripped apart. I listened to what he was telling me.

  “Like me,” I said.

  “What?” the Sheikh said.

  I grinned at him.

  “Ultraluminous.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  I get into yoga poses for him. I let my knees fall down by my ears and look up at him standing over me.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police? He’s just going to do it to another woman,” the junk-bond guy says.

  I told him I came back to New York because of the man who tried to kill me.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I was a whore in a Muslim country. There was no police for me,” I say.

  * * *

  I eat a peach at the kitchen sink and look out at the empty courtyard. The junk-bond guy comes by and throws something at my back.

  “Don’t stand in the window.”

  “There’s nobody out there,” I say.

  Rich people are never home and the doormen already know everything or think they do. I pick up the pack of cigarettes and follow him into the maid’s room.

  * * *

  “Your mother must have thought you would go to college. After going to all that trouble of getting you a scholarship to Sacred Heart.”

  “She thought I would meet a man who would marry me and take care of me for the rest of my life.”

  “So you said fuck her,” he says.

  We are looking at each other, turned on our sides, in the bed.

  “In a way,” I say.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy hands me a section of the newspaper and makes his face upset. I look at the headline. It’s about Krakow, Poland.

  “These terrorist attacks are terrible,” he says.

  “Terrible things happen every day, just not to you,” I say.

  “Do terrible things happen to you every day?”

  “Not every day. I’ve been lucky for a prostitute.”

  The junk-bond guy butters half an English muffin and gives it to me.

  * * *

  At four o’clock we watch the market report and I curl up beside him and lay my head on his chest as he explains things to me.

  “Are you paying attention?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  I am. I cup his balls in my hand.

  “Do you prefer high-yield bond?” I say.

  “That’s what they’re called,” the junk-bond guy says.

  I don’t change his name in my head.

  * * *

  He licks my clit again and I come again. Heroin is an echo but an orgasm is a pattern. It is the same tiny escape each time, never less. I think of the ex-Ranger. I think of every man I have ever picked for myself and the pattern they’ve made. The Sheikh was different and not because I loved him more.

  * * *

  After the man tried to kill me I swore off all patterns as ritual, superstition. In a few days they came back. I know I didn’t kill the man who tried to kill me because then I would have heard from the police or the Saudi or the Sheikh. I go to the bathroom and then I stay. I lie down. I should have brought a pillow. Eventually the junk-bond guy finds me.

  “Can’t sleep?” he says.

  “Is this what it’s like to be married and never be alone?”

  He sits down on the floor beside me.

  “No,” he says.

  * * *

  “You’re the best fuck in the world.”

  The junk-bond guy tucks my hair behind my ear. I take it out.

  “I’ve worked hard,” I say.

  “It seems natural,” he says.

  I say what I’ve prepared in my head.

  “If we could see what was coming we would kill ourselves. Blindness is what keeps us alive.”

  He nods at me.
I get up from the living room couch even though I just sat down.

  “I need coffee,” I say.

  * * *

  I inch into a stinging bath. He opens the door I just shut.

  “I’m worried that you’re planning something,” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “To kill yourself.”

  The bath stops hurting and becomes a warm embrace.

  * * *

  Across the dining room table I smile at him.

  “Are you sure you didn’t want to go out? After dinner we could have walked along the river.”

  “I’m fine, baby,” I say.

  * * *

  In the master bedroom I hug him close to me. Outside there’s no car bomb. There’s no sound at all coming up from nighttime Sutton Place.

  “We are fine,” I say.

  The junk-bond guy moves down. He traces the scars on my thigh with his finger and then his tongue.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy is adding to the grocery list. I tell him I want a sheet cake.

  “Like with a design? Like HAPPY BIRTHDAY?”

  “Whatever they have premade. A party cake,” I say.

  He writes it down.

  “What I really want is sushi from Duane Reade,” I say.

  “They have sushi at Duane Reade?” he says.

  * * *

  I sit on the dresser while the maid remakes the bed with big white sheets.

  “Before you would’ve had to live here,” I say.

  “No, no,” she says.

  When she brought back the groceries she set the cake and the Duane Reade bag apart from the rest. She turns away from me. She won’t be back again before I leave. I know her schedule now.

  * * *

  We have spicy tuna rolls for dinner. The junk-bond guy puts a piece in his mouth cautiously.

  “This is maybe dangerous.”

  “Stop being so bougie,” I say.

  I can’t eat mine either.

  “Can I serve you a piece of cake?” I say.

  The cake is white with two fat blue roses and it says nothing. The junk-bond guy holds up a withered piece of ginger.

  “I don’t think you’re really okay,” he says.

  * * *

  I take my phone out of the desk drawer and make a call. It is three in the morning. At the click of the connection I feel panic that is hot and cold at the same time. I squat to my feet to keep from blacking out. She picks up on the third ring. I don’t say anything.

  “Baby. Are you okay?” my mother says.

  I hang up.

  * * *

  I tap out another bag. I just snorted three. I’ve never done four bags at once before. I’ve never been over nine bags a day. I could run out or not wake up.

  “Fuck.”

  I scrape it back into the DONT HURT EM glassine.

  * * *

  “It’s Friday. It’s our last weekend together.”

  He drops his head on the nape of my neck.

  “We made it,” I say.

  He just fucked me up against the apartment’s front door and my face is still smashed to it. I look out the peephole at the empty hall.

  * * *

  I rise up on my forearms and look at him.

  “This is the sphinx pose.”

  The junk-bond guy turns a page in his book.

  “You did choose this. Sex work. Nobody forced you.”

  “I did choose.”

  I lower back down onto my stomach.

  “It doesn’t change what it’s done to me,” I say.

  I wait with my forehead to the bed. It takes too long for him to turn the next page.

  * * *

  I’m bleeding and I get some of it on two of my fingers. I walk from the bathroom to the living room and wipe my fingers over the humped back of the African fetish object and then I walk to the bedroom and lie down again.

  * * *

  On TV it is the anniversary of 9/11.

  “Where were you?”

  “I don’t remember,” I say.

  The junk-bond guy laughs. I don’t ask him where he was. He tells me anyway.

  * * *

  I was in Dubai. I had been there two weeks and whoring was still a new thing. Sometimes I told those first men I was from New York and usually they said, “I’m sorry for you. But in most places terrible things like this happen every day,” followed by one of many musical Arabic phrases that ended in “Allah.” In the bathroom mirror I look at my beautiful face that I have always let take care of me.

  * * *

  At the dining room table I sit beside the junk-bond guy and not at the far end.

  “What do you think about my offer, for one year and an apartment?”

  “Can I tell you next week?” I say.

  Underneath, my feet are crossed at the ankle and squeezed between his. I try to put a whole rose in my mouth but it won’t fit. His face doesn’t look the way I think it should.

  “How could you love a man who made bombs that killed innocent people?” the junk-bond guy says.

  I bite through the icing and my teeth sting.

  “Who’s innocent? Everyone is participating from the moment they’re born. There’s no victims, there’s no luck. Don’t you agree, Mr. High-Yield Bond?”

  “No.”

  I shrug.

  “Love is irrational,” I say.

  He pushes his plate away untouched.

  “Too sweet,” he says.

  * * *

  “That gun’s still in your purse.”

  “I told you about that months ago. Why are you going through my things?” I say.

  “Why did you bring it here when you knew you were only going to be with me?”

  Jesus, I think.

  “Because you can never really know anybody.”

  The junk-bond guy’s face is suspicious. He stares deep into my eyes, looking for something. He shakes his head.

  “You’re so high,” he says.

  He turns over in the bed so his back’s to me.

  * * *

  Before the Sheikh left to slaughter his cow he told me he was going to give me something.

  “Here,” the Sheikh said.

  He was different not because I loved him more but because he taught me something. I wake up in the morning and the junk-bond guy’s not there.

  * * *

  It’s been too claustrophobic. I’ve said too much. I say my name in the bathroom mirror.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I say.

  I walk by the living room.

  “Let’s smoke a cigarette,” I say.

  He’s sitting on the living room couch with his arms crossed, not reading the newspaper, not doing anything. I go into the maid’s room to wait for him. I think maybe he won’t come but he does. He sits down on the couch beside me and I stand up. My purse is by my feet. I brought it with me secretly. He didn’t notice or he wouldn’t be here. I steel myself. I point the ex-Ranger’s gun at him. I see on his face what that man who tried to kill me must have seen on mine. It’s not surprise. It’s terror. It’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Please. Have mercy,” he says.

  The second I know I won’t do it I do. I shoot the junk-bond guy twice, in the chest and the head. With the silencer it is silent enough. His legs tremor and stop. I touch him and the life is gone. I recognize it instinctively and know it’s the first time I’ve felt it, death. That’s it. I feel crazy with a calm center. From the kitchen I take the slice of sheet cake with the other rose on it that he wouldn’t eat and stuff it in what’s left of his mouth because one of those fortune cookies was his. I unlock my phone from the drawer. I lock him in the maid’s room.

  * * *

  In the elevator I stare at the doorman’s back. I think this is a mess. Maybe I overreacted. Maybe he didn’t know. It’s still Sunday. It’s not even next week yet. But now it’s started and it’s irreversible.

  “How is it outside?”

&n
bsp; My voice sounds elated. The doorman makes an okay sign with two fingers.

  * * *

  From the time I returned to New York I have given myself fifty-two weeks, one year.

  52

  “Okay, one year. I accept your offer,” I text CBG and GBT.

  * * *

  No man dumped me there to die of exposure and dehydration. I drove into the Arabian Desert by myself and then I drove out again. I was there to practice. The air smacked and behind me a wave of sand billowed into a burning cloud. I held the scarf to my head and both crouched and ran. It was five pounds of C-4 explosive, what the Sheikh gave me.

  * * *

  I sit in the middle of a bed at the Pierre completely naked. The calf’s brain guy sits on the edge. He’s taking off his shoes. I think it will be easier the second time. I wait for him to turn around because I want him to know me, finally. When he does and he sees the gun he has the same look as the junk-bond guy and it’s still terrible but a little less this time. He lunges for me and I shoot immediately. I shoot three times. He splatters all over me. I push with both hands and he falls off the side of the bed onto the carpet. I’m crying, I think. I only know because I can feel the tears on my face but then I think maybe that’s the calf’s brain guy’s hot blood. What I wanted was Goldman Sachs. In a frenzy I kick him under the bed.

  * * *

  In his glass bedroom the art guy has blackout curtains. I pull them.

  “I thought you were never coming back. That was so stupid, that thing about the coke. I’m sorry.”

  “This is not about that. This is because you grabbed my arm at a strip club and then when I asked you what you did you said you worked at a hedge fund.”

  “What?” he says.

  As soon as he sees the gun he turns around and runs. I have to chase him. I have to shoot him in the back four times. He falls onto his glossy kitchen floor and I slip and fall down beside him. He’s so heavy. He’s two of me, like all of them. I drag him by the wrists, gasping and sweating and crying again, definitely this time and uncontrollably, back into the blacked-out bedroom. I lock the door. I give myself a whore’s bath in his bathroom sink. I try to compose myself. I wipe off my makeup and do it all over again. The eyeliner can’t tell but I’m afraid. My wings come out exact, even. I unzip the garment bag I’ve brought. I put on a bright red, skintight suit. Off the art guy’s island I snort another bag. I want to be certain my face will look the way it always does. In the living room I turn on his camera on its tripod and sit down on his couch. I cross my legs and then I cross my arms on top of my knee so my wrists and hands dangle delicately in the air. I see myself in the viewfinder. My face is seductive. I look into the recording eye of the camera silently. After five minutes I stand up and walk out of the apartment. I leave the video running.