Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  She stared at the mass of bodies as if they were one of those Magic Eye paintings; look at it right, a half-crossing of your eyes, and it would yield up some hidden shape, curved dimensions rising from the flatness to describe a recognizable form. The partygoers below her yielded no shape, no hidden image, but the sight of them provoked a sort of vision: an enormous jet of water, shooting down as if from some enormous aerial hose, like the kind some street workers use to blast lichens of gum from the sidewalks, scouring the whole space, scorching the whole party off this roof in furious tides and showers of liquefied mess, drowned screams.

  She blinked and realized how badly she needed the bathroom, but knew how impossible the line inside would be, all those bonded groups of three and four taking fifteen minutes in there to cut lines on the toilet seat while outside twenty people shifted and groaned and crossed their legs and checked their phones and occasionally nominated themselves as the hero who’d thud on the door and yell, “Hurry up, there’s a line.” Fuck that. She squatted low behind the water tower, bouncing on her haunches, pulled her underwear to the side, and watched piss stream and pool and run between her sneakers. When she was finished, she ran a hand between her legs to wipe herself, then rubbed warm piss on her shorts.

  She stood and looked down at the crowd again, letting her right hand dangle. Someone was looking up at her. Weirdly beautiful amber eyes—that was the first thing she noticed, even from up here. She recognized him vaguely, or thought she did. Someone else’s images on social media. He was saying something to her, raising an unopened beer can, offering. She climbed down.

  “I literally have piss on my hand,” she said, unmoving.

  “Wow.” He retracted his hand. “For real?”

  She nodded, taking in his costume of painted bones.

  “Donnie Darko,” she said, with disappointment.

  “Or like, just a skeleton?” he offered. He added, “My sister’s studying to be a doctor. I copied it from one of her anatomy books. The human body is insane. Like, check out my manubrium—that’s this bit.”

  He touched a forefinger to his breastbone and gave her a beer.

  “Cool,” she said, and conceded: “Your ribs are really cool.”

  The bones were hyperrealistic, beautiful—a literalized nakedness that was both dorkily vulnerable and deathly elegant. Spine, pelvis, tibia. Every part the same in every body. She thought of her own bones glowing inside her, the same essential scaffolding, snappable.

  “That film’s overrated, by the way,” she said. “So fucking overrated.”

  He smiled warmly and his eyes seemed to deepen a shade darker, like tea steeping.

  “They said you were kind of . . . harsh.”

  She looked at him. He told her she was “kind of like a celebrity or something.” He added that his name was Dylan.

  “That’s a nice name.”

  “I’m nice,” he said. A slight shrug in the words, of simplicity and sincerity. His phone sounded.

  “My friend Caleb’s at a party in the East Village,” he said. “Some old artist dude called Casey. I might head there.”

  He paused, looked at her, patently hopeful.

  “Do you want to come?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “But I want to stay here even less.”

  29

  On the corner Bill had stipulated, there was a café with its one front window open to the world. Its clientele sat at the bar facing the street, replica sunsets flaring in the corners of their black sunglasses. Kate was staring at them when she felt his hand touch her elbow. She was never ready for him.

  “Look, I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, and she was instantly alarmed, “but I think there’s been some sort of zombie outbreak.”

  He had a bottle of champagne in one hand. He rested the other heavily on her shoulder and looked at her gravely.

  “Shit. Really?”

  She was trying to gauge his mood, to steady herself and find him and catch up and match him.

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “We’re going to have to be very careful. Stick close to me.”

  “Okay.”

  He took her hand, her pleasure bloomed, and they turned their backs on the sunset and began walking. He glanced down at her feet.

  “Woah!” he said. “Louboutins!”

  “What?”

  “Your shoes!”

  He was astonished, as he should be.

  “Yeah, I can barely walk in them.”

  “Where are they . . . who . . . ?”

  Kate could tell he was rattled for asking the question, doubly so for having botched it. A Barney the Dinosaur ambled past, holding his head in his arm.

  “I’m worried we’re not dressed up enough,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be dressed up?”

  “‘Dressed up’?” He stopped, spread his arms in supplication, and gave the champagne bottle a waggle. “Not fancy enough for you, Miss Fancy Shoes?”

  “In costume, I mean.”

  He considered his own jeans, his shirt, sleeves rolled. And then he looked to her, in the white cotton dress.

  “What shall we be?” Then, instantly: “I’ve got an idea.”

  In the drugstore he was pulling her down the aisles, skidding like a teenager. She regretted the footwear deeply. She felt like a person coming off an ice rink, still in skates, all the tiny muscles in her ankles quivering to keep herself upright.

  He was triumphant when he found it.

  “Fake blood!” he said.

  She laughed at him, at his plain joy, his fake blood in one hand and champagne in the other.

  “How much do you love that dress?”

  She loved it; it was the one dress that worked.

  “No love at all, really. How much do you like that shirt?”

  “Loathe it. Despise it. Abhor it.”

  On the street, they splashed the fake blood on each other, daubed it on their faces. It looked more like paint than the product of real suffering, but there they were, stained all over. On any other night it would be just a stained shirt, but tonight, days before Halloween, everyone would know what it was meant to be. She worked a fistful of it straight into his breastbone, scrunching it into his shirt, twisting the material to soak it, the red drenching her fingers. He briefly mimed an orgiastic coronary crisis. Then they admired each other. She took his picture. He clowned for it, but it worked: the champagne bottle still sheltering between his feet, the way a baby penguin hides beneath its parents, his upraised arm holding the emptied vial, his other arm held out to his side, palm up, an accidentally debonair pose that said, who the fuck knows what this is all about, but I’m laughing, laugh with me or at me.

  He did not offer to take her picture in return.

  “So what are we?” he said. “Axe-wound victims? Satanists. Murderers.”

  “All of them, I suppose,” she said. “Any. It doesn’t matter. Just bloodied.”

  They’d turned onto the block and were approaching Casey’s door, when something streaked through her vision and burst at her feet, splashing icy water across her ankles, up over the straps. She yelped—a ridiculous, undignified noise—and Bill’s grip was so hard that she felt the bones of her fingers creak and her throat catch slightly with the pain. A ruptured water balloon, slick against the sidewalk.

  “Strike!” Bill said.

  The door’s buzzer—gray-beige, with tiny cracked and yellowing windows of plastic over ink-faded names, all its buttons indented and grubbed—looked like an artifact. Inside, it was dark and cool and smelled of decades of dust and smoke. Dust wasn’t its own thing, Kate remembered. Not like soil or sand. It was the microscopic flotsam of bodies, inappreciable fragments of people, shed daily and unwittingly. F’ckin’ gross, Inez would say.

  As she followed Bill’s back up the stairs—
lopsided and creaking and uneven—she saw, in running yellow paint, this way on one step, and then, on the step above, to the disco. They followed a series of drippily haphazard arrows.

  The door to the apartment was open and a small figure was standing at the window, his back to them. A tang of urine clung around things meekly. This must be Casey, then. A bucket of water stood at his feet, a bobbing canopy of red balloons spread above him. They swayed and dipped, rustling against one another in a way that seemed to communicate a sentience, their strings drifting beneath them.

  “Neunundneunzig Luftballons,” the old man sang, feeble yet tuneful.

  “Casey,” Bill said.

  The singing stopped and Casey began to turn, effortfully, while they waited. Finally, he was facing them. The intensity of blue in his eyes was indecent and alarming. The blue had an opaque quality as if, Kate thought, a mind could take in only so much of the material world before it closed over, refused to see any more.

  He looked straight at Bill and gave no sign of recognition, his mouth hanging open, a balloon string pinched between thumb and finger. A threadbare T-shirt that must have once been white was stretched tight over his frail, sloped shoulders and the drooping dugs of his chest, the raisins of his nipples. White corduroy trousers were held around his waist with a red satin ribbon. Tufts of downy hair stuck up from his pink skull. He stood without moving, still seeming not to see.

  Kate realized she’d been holding her breath, had made her jaw stiff with the smile she’d been holding since they crossed the threshold.

  “Willie,” he said, and let go of the balloon with a jazzy snap of his hand. It was a voice scored with scratch marks. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “A happy early hallow-birthday to you, too, Casey,” Bill said.

  “You’re early! No one will be here for hours. I told everyone they abso-fucking-lutely have to all be here at midnight. Midnight. Which means none of these fucks will get here until eleven fifty-five at the earliest.”

  “Well, we’re here now. I wanted you to meet Kate before all your fabulous wretched friends got in our way.”

  Casey seemed to be peering at her ankles. “Did you catch a hit, dear? In those fuck-me shoes! Ooh, my! Cooling, though, no? Freaky hellish hot today with all those ice caps melting. We’ll be swimming soon, an underwater city. Atlantis! Want to lob bombs at tourists with me? Willie, get yourself and your double-you double-you double-you girlfriend a drink.”

  Bill held up the bottle.

  “Champagne?” Casey said, with abrupt disappointment.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I suppose we’ll just have to drink that, then.”

  As Bill began ripping the bottle’s gold foil, Casey turned his attention to unknotting a balloon’s umbilical nub. Kate, the good student, watched quietly.

  “So we do this,” Casey said, “and then—” and with shaky fingers he brought the balloon to his wet lips and inhaled.

  The champagne cork hit the wall.

  “Bang!” Casey squeaked. His heliated laughter disintegrated into coughing and he made a lunge toward the bottle in Bill’s hand. As he drank, champagne frothed down his lips and chin and soaked his shirt. Kate looked at Bill. He seemed caught between concern and amusement. Casey burped, breathless.

  “Forgive me, child,” he said, passing it to Kate. “Ladies first.”

  It wasn’t clear whether he meant her or himself—whether this was an explanation or a correction.

  She took a gulp and passed it to Bill, who’d claimed one of the half-collapsed armchairs by the window. He swung his legs over its side with a proprietorial ease.

  “So what are we doing, Casey?”

  “Well, isn’t it pretty obvious, Willie?” He turned to Kate, lifted a shaking finger to the hollow of his temple, and held it there. “Dim-witted, this one.”

  “We are,” he continued, grandly, “taking these balloons, draining them of their precious helium, then filling them with this precious water, and then surprising these precious young people who choose to congregate beneath my window.”

  “So the balloons aren’t for the party.”

  “Willie!” Casey said, and raised his trembling hands, “this is the party. This is all the party.”

  “Of course.”

  “My birthday,” said Casey. “And this coming deathday. All the dead and alive in one big party. Spirits walking the earth. Leaving, returning.”

  “How old are you, Casey?”

  “Fucking old, Willie, that’s how old. Never ask a faggot how old she is. I’m eighty-fucking-eight. Eighty-fucking-eight today.”

  Kate sat on the arm of Bill’s chair, an uncomfortable and not very stable perch, so that when he knuckled her spine she nearly lost her balance. There was a proprietorial quality to his touch, something more needling than reassuring. As if he were prompting her into saying or being something she was not.

  The old man shuffled to the window, water bomb wobbling in his clutch, then peered into the street, took effortful aim, and with a small grunt launched it. They all heard the shriek from below.

  She drank champagne, bubbles curdling in her empty stomach, and, at Casey’s encouragement, took in mouthfuls of helium and told him, in a tinny voice, royal and ridiculous, that she was charmed to make his acquaintance.

  He had been wrong: guests began arriving early, more and more of them. Their volume appeared almost comic. How many people could you fit in this space? The balloons seemed to become excited by these bodies, transmitting currents back to them and between them, like some kind of sentient shoal. Kate found herself crammed and trapped on a sofa, other people’s legs looming above, as an old and grizzled artist talked and talked beside her. About himself, nothing else—like someone had left the tap on, like this reservoir of self-regard would never run dry. When he removed his spectacles to polish them, she risked a glance away and saw the bare back of a woman, the lightest thing in the room, narrow, alive with the movements of small muscles. Kate watched this woman turn, watched her accept a drink, and saw her jaw jut and her face tilt upward into a wide laugh. Teeth flashed. Her dark hair was piled up in an abundant, elegant mess, and her dress was a piece of black silk, with a high horizontal slash at the neck that plunged into a scrap of tight, fine, ass-covering fabric. She had cat ears on. Kate thought of Inez and her scorn and her warning: Don’t even think about pulling some bunny ears shit. Kate had ignored her messages since their conversation on the roof, and the cups of weak tea that followed. That same roof where right now its last party must be under way. The last text from Inez, sent hours ago, which she hadn’t opened so as to avoid a “read” receipt appearing beneath it on Inez’s phone: cant fucking believe ur ghosting me BYE THEN.

  Kate looked again to the woman and saw how, even with those stupid furry ears, with a costume so categorically half-hearted, she and her beauty energized the space around her. The woman leaned in to whisper something to the man she was talking to, and that man was Bill, hands in his pockets, looking at the ground, smiling, nodding as he received these words. As the woman withdrew from Bill she seemed to meet his eye, one of her eyebrows raised, that wide mouth twitched into a smirk, and Bill raised his shoulders into a shrug. Kate drained her glass and fixed her attention on her own feet.

  She wondered when, how many times, what kind of fucking it had been. Imagined Bill’s hands spreading, hungry, across all those tiny hard muscles of the woman’s back. Did men have this, too, this coital sense? Kate wondered. Or only the jealous ones?

  Encased in the Inez shoes—the outrageous, sexy six-inch heels—her feet looked trussed and abused. She unbuckled the tiny, fiddly straps, extricated left, then right, and felt the relief of newly freed feet. The straps had left indentations in her purplish flesh, and she rubbed them, trying to erase them away. She shoved the shoes out of sight under the sofa and took in the sorry state of her toes. A co
uple of tiny black hairs sprouted from her big toe knuckle, oxblood polish chipped into messy, jagged little islands within each toenail, a thin seam of dirt, like a pencil line, running under each one.

  She was terribly drunk and hungry. She considered finding a pizza place and stuffing her face with dough and cheese to weigh down the helium and champagne, but the only way out was past Bill and Cat Ears. He was elbowing through the crowd now, moving toward her, ducking through all its fabulous, head-sprouting costumery, with a pantomime grimace to tell her about the difficulty of his progress. Finally he was there, collapsing into the space beside her, flinging his arm around her and biting the top of her ear in greeting.

  “So what did Don Riley have to say for himself?”

  “Who?”

  “Don Riley! Incredibly famous Abstract Expressionist?”

  She floundered and then saw the tiny shadow of exasperation run through his eyes. He’d enjoyed the “incredibly” a little too much; it had sounded almost English, aristocratic.

  “Old badger-face boring you to death just now,” he said, and rubbed her earlobe between his finger and thumb, like a person testing a swatch of fabric.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t realize he was a big deal.”

  “Didn’t he explicitly tell you just how big a deal he thinks he is? Because if not we can get him back over here to tell us both.”

  He made a pretense of craning around to summon him. Kate couldn’t find it in her to laugh.

  “I zoned out,” she said. “I don’t think he was paying much attention to whether I was listening or not. I just kept wondering how his boyfriend stands it.”

  She’d been introduced to him, a young redhead, sulking, who’d taken her hand limply with a visible wince of reluctance and murmured his name: “Caleb.” He’d worn a bowler hat. Black, spidered rays ringed his right eye.