Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  Happy Fourth.

  She’d arrived in a city celebrating its independence from her nation. Fireworks sound the same as bombs. Or as imagined bombs. On the bed, weak and ridiculous, foolish with tears, she let relief claim her.

  2

  Inez was photographing the mirror and Dana was watching. This was often how it was: she did things, and Dana watched.

  “No one’s going to buy it,” Dana was saying, softly, to the ceiling.

  She’d sat on the end of Inez’s bed, then flopped backward, so that her feet were still planted, and her palms were upturned by her sides. Her body seemed to announce, with a certain fatalism, that it would never move from this position.

  “I wished this girl in the bodega a happy Fourth,” Inez said, tossing her the cigarettes, “and she looked like I was about to shoot her.”

  The cigarettes lay where they landed, on her friend’s belly.

  “Well,” Dana said dully. “Sometimes you have that effect on people.”

  “You saying I’m scary?”

  “Can’t you just put it out on the street?” Dana said. “I don’t know why you can’t just put it out on the street.”

  Inez could put the mirror out on the street, sure. She could also—and this would be much more spectacular—toss it out one of the windows of the loft’s main space and watch it cartwheel down to smash on Broadway. But there was something far more appealing about selling off a piece of childhood, about having the object taken off your hands and out of your life for cash. Her plan to sell the mirror was, to her mind, both hygienic

  and ruthless.

  Around the mirror’s corners were the scarified white patches of stickers stuck there in clusters, then scraped away at a later date. She hadn’t noticed these patches until now, the gummy blight of them, and she scratched at them ineffectually, feeling Dana’s gaze on her all the while. The real blight, of course, was the mirror itself. It hung low on the wall in its cheap molded plastic pink frame, at a height right for a seven-year-old, the one she’d been twelve years ago. As she stood in front of it now in her bare feet, her reflection was neatly guillotined.

  How to photograph a mirror? With her phone raised at her hip she took another picture and studied the image. There they were, her skinny hips cocked, and her head cropped out, a small blare of flash around the top of her phone and her fingers. She scowled at this image of the object, then at the object itself, looking between the two, and at herself, looking. You could see the white patches in the photo. Maybe someone would consider the thing “distressed.”

  “Why,” Dana said, “now?”

  Inez began half humming, half singing, as she typed “Craigslist” in the screen’s search bar.

  “Are you singing the Bee Gees?” Dana asked, apparently amused.

  “Aaliyah!” Inez said. “Fucking sacrilege! Bee Gees.”

  She resumed the tune but as she clicked into the blurry photographs and banality of for sale > furniture, the humming lost its will. Ugly furniture was all the same. All the cheap Billy bookcases. All the bland dorm-room desks. People, though, that was a whole other thing. She strayed within seconds to personals > miscellaneous romance. The pink mirror faded and was forgotten.

  “Miscellaneous romance.” That phrase was funny: romantic like the posts in > m4w, with their anxious, explicit wondering over anatomical parts? “Do you have cute feet?” they asked the ether. “Do you have big labia?” Or romantic like the messages posted beneath lewd requests that rang with something more plaintive than filthy—with need, rather than desire? “Will you spit in my mouth?” “Will you spoon me?” One message ended with the question “Does that make sense to you?”

  She clicked and read and clicked and read, wound out of herself so thoroughly that when Dana spoke again Inez jumped slightly, just slightly, probably not enough for her to notice.

  “Did you post it? Can we finally go now? We’ll miss the fireworks.”

  “You know the fireworks will be lame, Gabe firing off one pathetic little rocket or something. Okay, listen to this,” she said, and she began to read aloud in a goofy voice, gulping each word: “‘Let’s play Doctor! I’ve got all the equipment for your erotic sensual exam. About me: open-minded, kicked out of medical school—wonder why, lol?—semi-sane and lots of fun in the exam room.’”

  With reluctance, Dana sat up, dislodging the cigarette packet.

  “Wonder why, lol!” Inez crowed.

  “We’re never going to get to this party,” Dana said.

  Charged with glee now, bent over the laptop balanced on her crossed legs, Inez said, “He calls himself a regular guy.”

  “Maybe he is,” Dana said.

  “‘Seeking young woman, slim, attractive, to be locked in closet for an hour, maybe more. Generous financial donation. Regular guy, nothing funny.’”

  A small silence grew in the room. Like an oily bubble blown for a child, it suggested wonder as much as absurdity, the two states overlaid and glistening. The bubble swelled, wobbled, popped. Inez looked up. Dana’s expression was heavy with warning.

  “I’d totally do that,” Inez mouthed.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would. I’m going to.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I am. Dare me.”

  “Absolutely not. No.”

  “Hey, Dana, am I slim?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Attractive?”

  “I will not endorse this. I am not daring you to do this.”

  “Generous financial donation.”

  “No. You’re not doing this.”

  “I dare me. I double dare me, I—”

  “You need to triple shut up.”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “Then I’m going.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  But Dana was actually getting up, actually gathering her things, frosty and fumbling.

  “I’m going to e-mail him,” Inez sang, “I’m e-mailing him now.”

  She felt the look, felt her friend waiting there, and kept her waiting. She could sense Dana stooped and motionless in the doorway, backpack slung over her shoulder, gripping its front strap tight, as if it were a parachute harness, a fist over her heart. Pull in case of emergency. Inez faked something conclusive—a forefinger’s smack of the return key.

  “Sent!” she whispered, lying.

  “I really,” Dana said, “really don’t think you actually want to do this. I mean, I think you’re fucking with me. Which is whatever . . .” Dana’s voice was shining now and she blinked a few times, fast. “Oh, just do whatever you want—get yourself killed.”

  Inez had learned the trick this summer, doing it into her iPhone’s camera, reversed so the screen mirrored her face: a minuscule muscle tensing. That shrinking of her eyes’ lower corners that made them loom larger and lovelier, made some mystery out of them. And then, if you tipped your head forward a little too, so you had to raise your gaze just a few extra millimeters . . . She willed the radiation of hot, grave attention into Dana’s waiting gaze.

  “What?” Dana blurted, shifting her bag’s strap.

  “I have to ask you for a favor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “When I go missing,” she said, and now she felt her own smirk breaking through and cracking her solemnity with something she hoped was wicked, “you have to make sure the Post uses a really hot picture of me.”

  And then, a private flourish, she conjured the sight of her own strangled body dredged from the East River, eyes open and sightless, lips parted, her face shaded beautiful lifeless blues. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks.

  “Oh, fuck you,” Dana said bitterly. “Seriously, fuck you. I’ll see you on the roof. Or not.”

  And she left, knuckles tight on the backpack strap.

  One further line of the ad that Inez
hadn’t read aloud was this: “Include the word ‘real’ in your e-mail subject line.” This instruction seized her in a way she couldn’t explain. It set off a warped thrill, the idea of declaring her reality, over e-mail, to some stranger.

  Creating another e-mail address, xmariaforeverx@gmail.com (Maria was her grandmother’s name, but also just a name, millions of people’s name), turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. And when, from an in-box empty but for the rote welcome note, she clicked compose and typed the words “I’m real . . .” everything in her quickened. It was a kind of salivation, strung through with a taste of something bitter. There’d been a line in a movie she’d seen: something about how the best perfumes always had something rotten in them.

  

  He’d replied in ten minutes, and she was astonished to be at his door fifty-seven minutes later, watching her own finger move toward his door buzzer. It sounded inside—a harsh and angry blare, all tired wires and ill will—and her muscles jumped to run as the door opened.

  He nodded at her, uttered her grandmother’s name as a question.

  “Hey, show me your passport,” she blurted back.

  He faltered. “I don’t have one.” A small voice, nondescript.

  “ID, then.”

  And, silently, he complied, shuffling off to a nightstand to find his wallet, to draw out his driver’s license and come back to hand it to her. She felt him watching, without comment, as she took a picture on her phone and texted it to Dana: if I’m not there in three hours lol. She handed his ID back, told him what she’d done, and watched him slide it into his back pocket.

  “Nothing funny,” he said, quite softly.

  “Right.”

  He wasn’t a monster; there are so few. He was, however, creepy-looking. A pointed face, a snaggle tooth, and, visible as he turned, a greasy braid that snaked, dwindling, down the back of his neck to end in a curled tuft held by a rubber band. It made her think of the My Little Ponies she’d played with as a kid, the meagerness of their synthetic manes and tails, the gorgeous clunk of the scissors, and then the lurch as you knew that what had been cut would not grow back.

  If she and Dana passed this man on the street he would, Inez knew, bring to bear a pause between them. And the pause would be Inez waiting the one beat until he’d passed, just out of earshot, or sometimes not, to say to her friend, her friend who was gay, her friend who she knew already sensed these words coming, “Why’d you ignore your boyfriend?” And however many times Inez made the joke, applying it to whichever passing stranger qualified as sufficiently mad or stinking, Dana could never quite manage to not smile. Inez knew this, that she would always make her laugh. Even when the joke was cruel. Especially when the joke was cruel.

  His apartment was one room that smelled of mold mingled with weed and incense. Tattered dream catchers hung in the grimed windows, trailing dusty feathers caught by cactus spines. Damp shoe boxes with bulging sides and collapsed lids were piled up against the walls.

  With his gaze settling somewhere around her knees, he said: “Hold out your wrists.”

  Not gentle, not gruff either. He had a tie, an ugly, paisley tie, with which he noosed her hands, knotting it tepidly, frowning with concentration, like a parent readying a child for school. There was a queasy tenderness to the process that made Inez snap her attention to one of those dream catchers in the windows and fix her stare on it. Nothing in the world but a dream catcher, twisting sickly, as if it were feeling out the contours of her fear—which was here now, sudden and too late, hammering.

  When he opened the door to the closet she saw there was a fat pillow in there for her, an archipelago of stains—tea stains?—across one corner. He still didn’t meet her eyes as he murmured, softly, as if he hardly wanted her to hear it, “Just you try and get away now.” And then she was inside and as she looked up the door was shut and he was locking it with a fleet, efficient twist. She heard his face against it, muttering, in a tone almost kindly, “Now you just stay there till I’m done with you.”

  Which would be precisely one hour later, the time stipulated, agreed, and paid for already in two fifty-dollar bills inside an envelope with “Maria” written on it in pencil.

  Her eyes drank in the darkness, concentrating it to yield shapes and gradations, while her heartbeats became so violent that she wondered if some kind of permanent cardiac damage might be likely. With her back against one wall of the closet and her feet against the other, the hems of his shirts and jackets grazing the top of her head, she breathed in their marijuana residue as she listened for the inevitable sound.

  He never did do anything. Or if he did, it was done silently somewhere, unseen. She hardened her jaw, swallowed, ran her tongue around her teeth, behind her upper lip, and thought about how in a few hours she’d be on the roof. She’d be there telling Dana she’d done it. Maybe she’d actually fling the bills in the air, make it rain. Rap video.

  Her headphones rested around her neck, a silent, protective noose, and she slipped her wrists out of the tie—shackles like slips of cloud—took out her phone, and switched it to vibrate. Brightness thumbed right down low, in case light through the door-crack ruptured whatever illusion it was that he needed. She willed someone to text her and ask where she was so that she could reply, fingers electric with the relish of it, “Tied up in the closet of some guy’s basement apartment.” No one did. In her iMessages, the thumbnail image of a stranger’s driver’s license, delivered to Dana. His hollowed cheeks, a gaze that seemed to register some kind of exhaustion or disappointment (this again?), like most mug shots do. Reaching up into the jackets, she fingered a pocket in the darkness and pulled out a piece of paper, a ragged envelope, folded in half, a shopping list written in pencil in the same cramped and irregular letters that spelled out her grandmother’s name on the envelope he’d given her: “milk, oranges, oreos.” Something about this list made her feel shame. The intimation of the smallness of a life. She put it back quickly, as if it were infectious, as if something bad might seep into her fingertips.

  And then, ridiculously, she heard the sound of a guitar. And singing! So softly, to himself, as if she weren’t there. As if maybe he’d forgotten that he’d locked her in his own closet. If she squinted through the chink she could just make him out, a sliver, in profile, strumming, eyes closed, chin raised: “where have all the flowers gone, long time passing.” If Dana had been there too it would have been funny.

  It occurred to her that he could forget about her. That nothing was stopping him walking away and leaving her locked up. Her pulse picked up the pace again and her heart felt tiny, a stuffed animal flung around inside a dryer.

  Part of Inez had believed Dana when she’d said, her voice all embarrassing as it wobbled with the threat of tears, that she was going to die if she did this reckless thing. Maybe not quite die, but come right up close to the silvery edge of it. It was almost disappointing, then, how much this guy didn’t seem like the strangling type. But then what did a strangling type look like? She studied the photograph of his license again, the photograph of his photograph. He stared back at her, and the longer she stared, the sadder and stranger his face looked.

  She checked the time again: just five minutes. Willed herself not to check it again. This would be the challenge, not to look.

  And she did it. She checked only when he was ostentatiously noisy about the process of release—and there it was, a perfect hour. Clearing his throat, shuffling over to the closet, rattling the latch open slowly, perhaps so as not to surprise her, or to wake her if she’d fallen asleep.

  “I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” he said, straining and failing to sound stern, and she nodded a bit, mute, not quite sure whether she was still meant to be in character at this moment. Maybe character wasn’t even the right word for whatever she was. Was she a specific someone to him, or a re-creation of someone now gone, a body for a ghost? Or just a girl, a
ny girl, tied up, in his house. She told herself she didn’t care. Didn’t care if he wondered about who she was, what her life was, what she did when she wasn’t occupying this small dark space of his closet, knees under her chin. He helped her up, awkward and tender. This—him taking her tied hands to pull her up—was the only touch they shared, and it embarrassed them both.

  “See you next week,” he said, the necessary words of termination. He lifted his hand in a stiff and small sort of wave. She made a noncommittal noise, shook the feeling back into a leg, stamped the numbness out, and then it was over and she was walking out into the currents of downtown Manhattan with a hundred dollars packed tight against her skinny rump.

  The evening seemed to have grown bigger, everything enlarged, as if it were impressed with her, as if it were opening its mouth in some wide “woah” of appreciation. She realized her hands were shaking slightly, that her body felt hot and cold, but that this feeling was the opposite of weakness. There was a laugh inside her, a laugh at nothing. She felt it on her lips, an uncontrollable smirk. She hoicked up the noose of her headphones to clamp them down over her ears and turned up the volume, Atlanta rap juddering through her skull,

  ear to ear.

  She walked south down Bowery with such swagger that oncoming men opened their mouths and said things at her, things to be ignored, their walks widening into parentheses, a force field around her.