Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  Bill did. They both sat there, motionless, wordless, listening to the battery of fist on wood. He had an urge to giggle, like they were hiding from a teacher, caught smoking a spliff behind the bike sheds. Finally, the footsteps receded, with more yelling, more threats. Casey blinked, slowly.

  “Cunting landlord!” he said.

  “What’s going on, Casey?”

  He inhaled, extravagantly, as if summoning a swan dive: “What’s going on, what’s going on, Marvin Gaye? Everything, Willie! Everything, always. What isn’t going on, that’s what I want to know. It all goes on, all the time, and it doesn’t stop. All of it goes on and on—and what our little piss hearts can’t bear is that it will go on without us! No different! Just the same!”

  Casey’s hands were shaking and now he seemed to be addressing something in the ceiling.

  “Only different all the time, always changing, never the same. Mother, Mother! Ongoing. More and more of it. Going on, different every moment. On and on. The world turns, Willie!” He spun to look at Bill, and Bill felt himself flinch.

  “And so does the city, Willie! Turning and turning. But the center does hold! It always has! Always new, never old. Always come the new bright things and the bigger buildings and the taller towers. They tear ’em down, build ’em higher to kill us all. Ay caramba.”

  And then, on exhaling: “Oh, Mother.”

  He took another breath, trembling, the blue of his eyes searing as if with some cold light.

  “Go now,” he muttered. “Clear out, I want to sleep!”

  Casey’s manner had shaken Bill a little, but this blunt dismissal was reassuring. Characteristic. When Casey grew bored of you for the day, the process was irreversible. Bill watched his friend shut his eyes, small, pinkish, wrinkled. And did a tear streak down his cheek?

  Not something Casey would forgive Bill for seeing, if so.

  Quietly, he took out five fifty-dollar bills from his wallet and made a stack of them on the table. He looked for something to weigh them down. A cat skull, stuck all over with rocks and jewels and glitter. He could hardly bring himself to touch the thing. As he swept crumbs into the nest of his hand and tipped them into the box, three cannoli remaining, and stowed it in the fridge, he ignored the feeling of wretchedness oozing up from somewhere inside him. Guilt? He’d left things a little better, hadn’t he? Cannoli and cash—that wasn’t nothing.

  16

  Inside the warehouse, Kate lost Inez within seconds. Sound this loud became embodied. She felt an indecent rolling of it from the pit of her stomach up through her chest, jellying her insides. Elbows and knees knocked at her and the air was jungle-dank with sweat, the taste of so many bodies in her nose and throat. A man fell into her and grasped her arms, pawing his way up to right himself, almost taking her down. His goggly eyes looked like things you’d stick on the end of a sock puppet, one veering skyward, the other leering to the floor. She yelped, but it was like screaming in a nightmare; she could hear nothing at all. Feeling the first stirrings of proper panic, she began pushing past strangers, hacking at limbs like they weren’t really human. Either the way out, or the toilets. Whichever she found first.

  It was a wall she found, a sallow wall, damp with moisture, but as she set her back to it the floor started to tilt, gently, some sick tease. When she blinked, she wished she hadn’t: everything refracted and blurred, trailing echoes of itself, woozily haloed in gold. She blinked again but nothing returned to normal. When she crouched, the floor came up to meet her. It was all getting worse—the triple vision, the acceleration of the total physical crisis that was happening and that was her fault. She was going to die and she was on her own. Here. How stupid, how mortifying. Her mum would never forgive her, her mum would kill her. What exactly had she taken? There seemed no way to ask that.

  Someone familiar was emerging from the terrifying crowd—dark hair, white dress, the image overlaid with echoes—and now a hand reached out to her hand. Kate went for it. Inez, who was emitting spectacular trails of light with every movement, slid down next to her and then took her other hand, too.

  She was saying something, Inez was, very close to her ear. She was saying Kate had to ride it and let it wash over her, to not fight it. She was squeezing Kate’s hand with the words and telling her it was going to feel amazing. Any moment, she said, and Kate believed her, believed in this imminent amazing. She was staring, she realized now, at the straight line of Inez’s collarbone, which seemed, in its perfect horizontality, like a tiny monument to indestructibility. Inez was telling her to breathe, but Kate was thinking, as she stared at beautiful human bone beneath human skin, of that lovely word adamantine. It seemed edgeless, this breath. This was the first thing, the sensation of something vast and bright and extraordinary suffusing her insides, which now seemed grateful to have been transformed. She felt oxygen coursing through her, alchemical, and she made it slow, this next inhalation.

  The second realization was even better: Inez, with her blackened soles and brutal cheekbones, had come to find her! Had made her way through this surging crowd, had come to find her, and she’d found her! And with these facts, a grand, wide certainty: that tonight, all of it, its enormity, belonged to her. She wasn’t going to die! And George, his fusillade of text messages—every small and worrisome thing—was like scant ashes blown up into the sky, diffused and vanished. She began to laugh, and laughed more at how easy it was. Laughing was the easiest thing in the world.

  “Yeah?” Inez said. Her hands, now, had come alive in Kate’s hands, little bright animals, and Kate squeezed, stopped them scampering away.

  “Yeah.” And for some reason: “Immortal!”

  “Who’s immortal?” Inez laughed. And then, flexing her jaw. “Now we have to move.”

  Being on her feet was like levitating. Inez said a word that sounded like honeymoon.

  “Are we on our honeymoon?” she said into the shell of Inez’s ear—another miracle!—another extraordinary physical creation, and she kept her lips against it, just to tell it so. This seemed like a kind of sex, a penetration—words as warmth and sound.

  “You’re honeymooning!” Inez said. “Your first time. Your honeymoon.”

  And now she was pulling her into the crowd, and here were the others, who looked to Kate like lesser gods, shouting welcomes as they moved.

  “Medicine!” Kate said, the word leaving her easy as air. And this was the funniest, truest, most perfect thing she’d ever said.

  

  When Kate woke, her toes were poking through the holes of a crocheted blanket, a homespun thing that you’d wrap an infant in. She was back on the roof where the night had started an eon ago. It was hot, a tremble of skyscrapers in the distance, but it felt early, the sky high and new, a thin disc of moon in the blue, ready to dissolve on her tongue. A few slumbering bodies surrounded her, mouths slack, rib cages rising, falling, rising. Inez wasn’t among them.

  Last night, phrases had occurred to her like blazing revelations, rising up in her mind as twenty-foot neon citadels before which she’d wanted to prostrate herself. God, maybe she had—had there been a moment of her actually kneeling somewhere, delirious? Now, as she tried to grasp the words again in daylight, she saw they were dumb—completely dumb. Bad song lyrics that meant nothing.

  She set about a slow negotiation to take her body from horizontal to vertical, coaxing it into standing, an enactment of evolution, knuckle-dragging she-ape to upright woman.

  It occurred to Kate that all the definitive images of New York City she’d accumulated were views from a distance. That it was a place best seen from bridges and water and sky. How might you do that with a person? Specifically: yourself. To find an aerial view of your own being. To reach the kind of vantage from which you might properly survey what had been built, what was under construction, to gain a sense of the contours of the thing. To see where the damn bridges went. The lie of
the land, they said, and yes, it was a kind of lie. Because this view, she knew, this lovely hazy morning vision, denied all the bloodstreams of traffic down there. It couldn’t tell you the way cabs’ side mirrors flashed reflections of fast-walking bodies and street crossings, the way the image of those bodies was doubled again in the mirrored planes of buildings. This was being, too, all the quick currents and charges, synapse flares, unmappable.

  No one woke up. She looked around at them, heedless, sleeping, unaware of being watched, and felt a little guilt and thrill—a small clutch of panic that one of them would wake and see her standing, watching them.

  The elevator sent her down, and with a shove to that heavy door she was outside, in the world, walking through quiet streets to the subway.

  17

  Not a smart thing to attempt in this state, after a night like that, but it was never a smart thing in any state, was it, basically. Inez hefted up her bedroom window, the window of her childhood, stepped out, and gripped the iron railings. She’d made it home for once, to Broadway, just before the night softened into morning, leaving Kate sleeping in a pile of others on the Bushwick roof. She didn’t want to be there when Kate woke up: she could picture her all bloodless and shell-shocked, asking with her eyes how it was that her mind had been removed, rearranged, and put back again. She’d figure it out. Mornings after: they were for being alone.

  A tight column of a courtyard, all these jostled, unseen back ends of buildings, pipes, dirty windows, laundry steam, and the carbuncles of air conditioners, humming their ugly chorus into the hot afternoon. Climbing up to the roof had become a kind of addiction this summer. Today the trance of it took over almost instantly: hands and feet and hands and feet and hot metal grating underfoot. Breeze growing brisker, coming up into more blue, so that distant water towers emerged and the lower buildings and their noises receded. Don’t look down was the well-worn warning. But if you never looked down you denied yourself the purpose of the ascent. That sweet-hideous lurch of seeing how far you’d come, how high you were, the flutter and wash of vertigo. A repetition of black wrought-iron ladders, zigzagging smaller, nothingness between each tread.

  When she reached the roof itself there was the familiar pulse of relief and regret. A relief to be on this vast solid plane, banked with concrete walls sloped smooth like skateboard ramps, to have made it here, to lie flat on the baked concrete, belly up. Regret in the basic anticlimax of any apex, this flat lack of steps to climb.

  Modest little honks and humming and rumbles floated up from Broadway. She sat up and scanned for the small green squares of roof gardens, these secret aerial oases of the rich. Apple trees in tubs, tiny wrought-iron tables and chairs. And there, a female figure in a sun hat, seated, reading, oblivious to a teenage girl staring at her from many rooftops away. Inez willed her to look up and see her. The figure remained perfectly small and still, head bowed. Some wealthy arty white lady living her wealthy arty life. Extraordinary, that you could stand here, in downtown Manhattan, center of the world, dense with lives, and no one could see you.

  If Inez had a ball, and a throw forceful enough, and a voice loud enough, she would have yelled “Catch” and lobbed it across all these rooftops, to land in the lady’s lap. But her own hands were empty. And in her pockets: a half-crumpled packet of cigarettes, one smoke left. If she had a gun, and a bottle, she’d set it up there, right on the edge of the wall, and shoot. God, that would feel good. She lit the last cigarette.

  Superstition was bullshit, Inez knew. It was something for girls who thought “the universe” was some kind of wish-granting fairy godmother who communicated her indulgences through inscrutable material signs. But when that girl, the wrong Kate, appeared right there in Washington Square where some other Kate had said she’d be, and when this unwanted Kate had pulled out the same cigarettes as her, and a little lighter the same bright yellow . . . well, it just seemed like something. Like it had to be something. And it had, hadn’t it?

  There’d been the version of Kate in Washington Square, startled and flustered like something out of a BBC drama full of bonnets and corsets. Blushing like she could be curtsying in one of those swanky old brick houses beyond the fountain. And then, last night, this other girl, transformed.

  The universe didn’t wave wands, but wasn’t there a magic to dispensing molly like wishes, spiriting a posse to a party, all your friends sailing through that door behind you without you even trying, without a bouncer even flicking an impatient hand out for an ID? It had not yet ceased to please her, how much more astoundingly fun drugs made the world. And how much more fun it had made Kate. All of her—not just her pupils—bigger and darker and brighter. There’d been a great satisfaction in leaving her and all of them sleeping on that other roof this morning, a bunch of dopey dwarves under a spell.

  She wondered how old the bouncer had thought she was. Whether he knew he was waving through a teenager. Twenty! She’d be twenty this year. It was her last summer as a teenager. Twenty was impossibly old. Two decades old. But still a year away from a legal drink. How boring that would be, a legal drink. The end of something. How incredibly boring it would be, a nonfake ID.

  She crushed the yellow American Spirit pack into a ball, cellophane scrunched against paper, and threw it across to the other side of the roof, watched it skitter on the concrete and lie there, a sole unsightly piece of litter on this wide unpeopled plain. She realized, with something like fury, that she was starving.

  18

  When Bill got home he found Inez standing slumped in the light of the fridge’s open door, despondent.

  “There’s nothing to eat!” she said, turning to him with a look so excessively doleful that he laughed. She pushed the door shut with half-assed truculence and whined, “I’m fucking starving.”

  If an empty fridge were a way to dodge her overreaching inquiry about his night, an early-hours arrival home—the “walk of shame,” as people younger than him liked to say (or used to? Language kept accelerating, you couldn’t hope to keep up)—then maybe in the future he should avoid grocery shopping entirely.

  “My poor little Victorian orphan. There’s granola,” he said, kissing the top of the head. She made a soft noise of disgust.

  “And almond milk. Which might be a bit old. Or we could go out,” he added. “Do you want to go out?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Great,” he said, trying to minimize his delight, buoyant with the novelty of it.

  When they stepped out into the street and the hot morning he felt her eyes on him. She was giving him that look, that awful smirk. So: he hadn’t escaped.

  “What?”

  “Just glad you’re getting some, Bill.”

  “What?”

  “You totally got laid last night. I’m glad. Hope they’re hot. Who are they?”

  “Jesus, Inez.”

  “You fucked the son of God?”

  “Yes. Christ and I got it on.”

  “So is He a top or a bottom?”

  He pushed his fists into his eyes. “Inez,” he said, “do your friends ask their fathers about their sex lives?”

  “I’m not fucking asking. I’m just saying. Glad you’re getting some.”

  “It’s way too early for this. And by that I mean that it will always, always, always and forever be way too early for this, okay?”

  “You’re such a prude.”

  “That’s what they say about me, sweetheart—William Marrero, massive fucking prude.”

  He swallowed revulsion at having said his own name out loud.

  “How are the college applications going?” he said, a definitive change of tack, and she drowned out the end of the question with a groan.

  “So that’s ‘still not going,’ then,” he said, no fight in him now.

  “Why would I waste all that money?”

  “Education is never a fucking waste. J
esus, I thought we’d taught you that. If we taught you one thing—”

  “Said the high school dropout.”

  “I wish I hadn’t.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  And neither did he. It was the best thing he did, really. He was always pleased when interviewers brought it up. “So you left school at sixteen?” they’d say, and then he could rail on—piratical, swashbuckling!—about self-education and life and experience and the stultification of institutions. Except, of course, the last time he’d done that, the quiet, rather severe-looking woman from that British magazine had asked, in a voice as small as it was accusatory: “Does that not make your tenure at NYU somewhat hypocritical?”

  He’d thought about that “somewhat” for some time: a rather quaint word. It only heightened what it purported to soften. “Yes!” he’d cried back at the journalist. “Yes, I’m a total hypocrite.” And then with an exasperated, self-lampooning shrug: “But, y’know, my daughter needs a college fund.” The piece had run under the cringingly enormous quote, “Yes, I’m a total hypocrite!”

  He turned to Inez as they walked.

  “Also, you wouldn’t be the one paying. It would be your loving mother and father wasting all that money.”

  Before either of them could say anything else, they heard rapid footfalls behind them and he tensed. Fight not flight, preparation for a mugging—an old habit, undying. He grabbed her wrist and turned, and as she shook him off, exasperated, a young woman, thin, wearing leopard print leggings and a skimpy black vest, hastened desperately and awkwardly toward them.

  She waved. “Hi! Excuse me!”

  She was carrying an iPad, but it was her coked-up anxiety that identified her before the prop did. Inez seemed to recognize it, too. It had been a while since an encounter of this kind. He’d thought, in truth, that at the tender age of nineteen she’d now be seen as too old for modeling, that the window had passed.