by Simon Jacobs
You cap the spray can with a clack that rebounds through the galleries like every door closing. “Just meet me by the Egyptian thing when you’re done,” you say, and disappear, a tinge of resentment in your wake, for questioning your radicalism—the temple to Osiris, relocated from other shores via freighter to the museum’s northern wing in the 1960s, has been a place of solace since we started coming here in daylight hours, when most of it was still encased in glass. The stone is now so thick with graffiti that it gives the entire monument a greenish cast, but there’s something comforting in the fact that it’s still standing, that despite best efforts no one has been able to take it down.
I walk through just the emergency lights like an ill-defined spirit of vengeance across beds of shattered glass. I pass a decapitated statue of Sakhmet, its head resting three feet away, one ear missing. Deeper within the museum crouches East Asia, Oceania, their pedestals empty, artifacts spewed across borders. I pause at each unmarked painting and object, unsure of how to proceed, as if totality had been something we intended when we arrived here, when I recognized the cross-streets and pulled the cord on the bus, saw the butt of a metal pipe against porcelain and knew finally where I was, as if this wasn’t ultimately the perfect example of just using the items we suddenly had in our hands.
By the time we leave the magnificent cavern, our heads are filled with paint fumes, outbursts of black.
*
The second-to-last phone call I received—on the bus, as we crawled across Pennsylvania toward the city, numbed now to the changing landscape—was from a high school friend I hadn’t talked to in three years, who told me that another mutual friend, close-knit into our group during school but, again, whom I hadn’t spoken with in years, had died unexpectedly, at twenty-one. The circumstances were mysterious and difficult for my friend to corroborate: he’d seen him the previous night, they’d hung out for a few hours drinking, went to a restaurant, and then parted ways and gone home (they were both on summer break from school). That morning, the morning we left Indiana, the mother of the mutual friend had gone up to check on him, but his bedroom door was locked. Eventually, they’d broken in and found him dead inside. There was speculation that he’d accidentally or purposefully mixed some kind of pills with the alcohol, my friend said, but they weren’t sure. People (he listed names) were gathering in Dayton for the funeral tomorrow, in case I wanted to be there.
I turned and told you what happened, about this friend who was dead (who I don’t think I’d mentioned before), and about the friend who called to give me the news (likewise). I left it dangling at the end, the hint of proposition: “The funeral is tomorrow.” You burrowed your head into my shoulder but didn’t say anything, silently refusing to enter—I realize now—the trap that I’d created, that I would blame you for setting when Casey died a month later. How much grief, it seemed to imply, could I reasonably be expected to exhibit for someone I’d never mentioned caring about, who didn’t exist between us until this moment? How deep and true could you expect this to go?
The last phone call came two hours after that, when you were asleep, the scenery in the window unspecified, probably still Pennsylvania, and was from another high school friend, with whom I’d communicated even less recently. He said my first name, then my first and last name, to confirm who he was talking to. He asked if I’d heard about Nik, who had died this morning. I told him that I’d just heard. He was less sure than my other friend, more audibly broken up. They still weren’t sure. People were gathering in Dayton for the funeral. I filed the losses.
The peripheral world gets smaller.
Let’s pretend we’re walking home.
South again, you mount one of the stone lions outside the library. “What do you think it takes to bring one of these beasts to life?” You wiggle your hips.
“Probably a little more than you can give it,” I say. “Probably nothing short of divine intervention or a lightning strike on an eclipse night.”
You resolve to try anyways. You begin to grind back and forth on its back, grabbing the mane for leverage. I look side to side, embarrassed, as if someone will catch us in the act, but the street is deserted, almost seems to mock my concern. “What are you doing?”
Keeping the rhythm costs whatever breath you’d otherwise use to answer. You set your jaw and close your eyes, like this routine takes every ounce of your concentration. The scene is baroquely pornographic, as if we’d walked onto a tidily composed set on which we were supposed to play out the fantasy of some unknown director, where I’m the audience, and standing there beneath the streetlights and security cameras and around it capitalism and maybe somewhere above that the moonlight, tasting residual blood, watching your thighs tense—imagining, as anyone would, the lion as some beastly stand-in—I think, yet again, of the broken vase, glazed with an invisible layer of our dried sweat and oils, degrading it by degrees. I’d brought up your brother again once, obliquely. After we’d had the vase for a few days, when it had settled into the arrangement of the room, I drew my finger across the pattern of lotuses connected to cherry blossoms etc, etc and said, “It reminds me of something I’ve seen before—does it for you? Remind you?” The question was phrased in a way that made it incomprehensible. The only aspects of your brother I remembered were the tattoo and the fact of his death; I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup in long sleeves.
You answered, “I mean, it reminds me of Japan,” which, fair enough, was what I’d replied to essentially the same question when we first brought it back, and that was all we said. Already a tacit understanding had formed, an unspoken agreement on what we would and would not acknowledge, a kind of commitment to choosing silence over dialogue.
By now you’re straddling the lion’s neck, totally spent, your hands splayed over the molded mane. You look up, panting, and brush the hair off your forehead. It takes you a minute to catch your breath, and then, saying nothing, you slide off the statue—I have the briefest image of your fingers untangling from long hairs—leaving a glistening streak down its side. You walk lightly, in a wider stance for a minute, then seem to forget. I wait for a breeze to clear the evidence, to crystallize this into an anecdote you’d once have shared among our circle of friends while I sat beside you, envied and silent, the chosen accomplice. The eyes stare out like statues do.
*
Three blocks later, we cross a high-end chain drugstore, recently shut down, its windows freshly blacked-out. We break in at my suggestion, a demonstration of our volition. The alarms go off immediately; in this neighborhood we still only have a few minutes before the cops arrive. You grab the back of my shirt and we stumble forward in the dark, as in the cellar—the only light comes from the jagged hole in the lower half of the sliding door. “Oh, John, let’s live here,” you say.
The shelves are still variously stocked; they haven’t had a chance to come in and clear it all out yet, to distribute the remainders to other branches or ship it off to a landfill. “Okay…” your voice comes from behind me. “So, what exactly can we take?”
“Anything that fits in your mouth.”
You dash off in the direction of the beauty aisle, while I lurch uncertainly toward the nonperishable foods in the back, for no particular reason except that they’re the most recognizable in the dark. I paw the shelves blindly, not really trying to accumulate but enjoying the feeling of knocking items to the ground, as if I’m some larger and more basic creature. After a minute I shout through the alarms, toward the general sound of your presence, “What’re you finding?”
“Cosmetics!” you shout back. “I can finally do my eyes!”
I slam myself into the back wall, padded with bubbly packages of junk food. I let them rain down on me from the upper shelves. I clamber to my feet and circle the store toward your voice, upending sundries as I go. I hear you rustling behind a nearby shelf. You scream, “AERIAL ATTACK!” and something shatters at my feet.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Oh shit, it’
s a second barrage!” Another item hits the floor, and a third cracks against my head. I go down onto my hands and knees.
“Fuck! Joey!” My palms pick up little shards of glass and paint-smelling liquid. Something cool oozes down my forehead, hardening in the air. I hear sirens. “We have to go,” I say, as the synthetic, faintly peroxidal liquid trickles into my eye. “We have to go.”
Another shout—“BOMBS AWAY!”—but this time it sounds like it’s from the street. Still, it must act as a trigger because you launch another bottle from the adjacent aisle. It ricochets off my back before breaking open on the floor.
My vicinity now smells very strongly of chemical flowers, something created in a laboratory without context.
Through the imperfect black paint on the windows, spears of bright light trickle through. The hole in the sliding door glows orange, then red, like an unearthly halo. The sirens are right out front. When you shout “CATAPULT!” I’m sensible enough to roll out of the way, and whatever you’ve thrown lands just to my left—it clatters like something cheap and plastic, easily broken apart, I guess probably a hair dryer.
A roar—from a car, I’m sure—tears through the wall, and I hear signs of an escalating conflict outside. My right eye is glued shut.
“Joey, we have to get out of here.” By now, I’m speaking mostly to the ground.
One aisle over, however, you are having way too much fun. “Quick! They’re mounting! I hear them at the gates!”
A handful of glass containers hits the tile by my head—the expensive nail polish, I think.
“What do you say, John? Are you hurting yet?”
Something explodes by my ear and I’m misted with glass particles and a scent so concentrated and powerful that I choke on it. My body reacts as if to vomit, but there’s nothing to bring up; my chest goes rigid against the gray tile and my throat clenches repeatedly, mouth open, struggling to find something to expel. I get up ropy spit and drool until the convulsions subside, breathing shallowly, like the air can’t find a deeper way into my lungs. I roll helplessly onto my back and look up at the ceiling. I chew a few times on nothing, slowly and carefully, like I’m working into a motion I haven’t performed in a long time. Through an indeterminate haze drifting in through flaws in the black windows, I can just make out the shapes of the fluorescent lights above, empty and dead. The darkness is tinged with red, presumably from a safety light—no matter where you are, somewhere, something still has power. The memory of the gun rises up within me, a memory I’ve fought to keep buried: it was on a frantic night like this that it appeared in my hand, that the weapon revealed itself. I hear your footsteps first, and then watch you loom into view above me.
Earlier on in our days of exploration, when we were dividing the city into neighborhoods, you once got off the train at one station while I stayed aboard, bound for somewhere else. Immediately after the doors closed behind you, I turned to flirt unabashedly with the woman sitting next to me. In my head, it was a terrific joke of detachment—this complete stranger had been sitting next to us the entire time, had watched you rest your head on my shoulder and kiss me goodbye; it was unfailingly clear that you and I were a pronounced and public couple. Yet as I dug into this woman over the next several minutes—her book, her music, her destination, her home—my attempt at affecting her became, for all practical purposes, serious, the comedic timing apparent to no one but myself, and thus it slipped from my supposedly lighthearted, obvious joke into something else, something sinister that felt awfully like real damage, that felt like menace. When I noticed the shift—this dangerous, unaccountable shift—I removed myself from the train, I pulled back.
You did not. “I told you there was going to be a war,” you say, standing over me, your feet at either shoulder, arms crossed, bearing of statue. “Just listen.”
From the sound of it, your lions have come alive outside. You haul me up in the faulty non-light. I’ve got sea-legs, as in they don’t work at all. The top half of my body slumps into yours.
“You’ve dribbled down your front, bless you. Let’s get you home.”
With that innocuous final word, I feel a shiver in your chest—transmitted through us both—indicating that every time we say it now, no matter how often, it will be an accident.
The good thing is: I smell like flowers, and they no longer seem that fake.
Together, we shoulder through the blacked-out doors and into the street, now lit by a false, electric daylight, the tone of a parking garage. My eyes are stinging, tearing up from the perfume and polish and sudden light, one of them stuck fast. Close at hand, I make out the shape of something burning beneath a glaze, hear a pattern of thunderous crashes, human yelling.
Beside me, you whisper, “I told you.”
I want to tell you that I suspect it’s not as big as you think it is, or that it’s much bigger than you think it is, that violence creeps up in the oddest, most convenient places—but it sounds too much like a truism, especially from someone who can’t effectively see anything. Still, I consider the heightened sense of smell particular to the big cats. And all at once, my legs are working just fine.
*
We move eastward, away from the fires, toward the northbound subway—not running, exactly, but walking quickly, as fast as you can walk away from a situation without looking suspicious. Beyond the immediate perimeter of the store, the burning and mounting whatever, the streets are empty—no traffic, no human bodies, no cops. The concrete-bordered avenue is bathed in a glow of red light that seems to come from beyond above, or to occlude the above, as if someone’s put the entire bubble of existence here into lockdown. As if, all at one time, the city has finally decided to address itself. The air is close, busy with the sense of mass movement somewhere just out of view, but a distinct, concentrated chill pipes through the streets and directly into our faces, giving the impression that we’re still indoors, that some controlled substance is being filtered in to appear natural, that the streets themselves are part of a greater structure. I look up—the persistent flow of air now pushing on my throat—and am not surprised: the sky, or whatever is beyond the glow, is matte black, no stars, so uniform as to seem artificial—again, this feeling of shuttering on an immense scale, a dome sliding over.
As we walk against this wind—which feels in its benign constancy like the static gust of an air conditioner—I notice that to either side of us several of the gated storefronts glow orange from within, as if someone had set fires inside them. The light reflects through the gates in pixelated patterns on the sidewalk. The color is inviting, like hearth.
Your commentary is constant, endlessly speculative about the nature of these changes, yet strangely offhand, as if the consequences lacked real effect, could only be interpreted symbolically: a class war, a changing of colors. I’m not listening specifically. I peel my eyelids apart into a clouded right field as a flaming figure hurtles around the corner, running toward us in rapidly increasing resolution. It takes a moment to put it fully together, build it up from an animal: it’s a man on fire.
We tighten our grip on each other and jolt to the side, stepping toward the fires that aren’t burning in the open. His path doesn’t divert, continues to move in a line parallel to ours. The vent of cool air billows the smoke ahead of him and into our eyes. He makes no sound himself: the only noise we hear comes either from the background—the pulsing sirens from everywhere, the hum of the vent—or the physical act of his running and burning. His shoes hitting the street at a constant, unnerving rhythm, the melting rubber sticking and then breaking free; and, as he nears, the crackling of the fire, the flickering bursts of skin separating under so much heat. He pumps his arms, he doesn’t scream—like something mechanical, wound up and then released, repeating the same motion until it winds all the way down, and comes finally to rest.
He passes dangerously close—just a few feet from my left side—and the heat feels like enough to break the skin inside my clothes, as if to draw it prickling outwar
d from my body and consume it in the blaze. There’s a sensation like light rain on my sleeve, sparks of him erupting onto me. Something runs down my leg. I can’t remember if it’s blood or piss that comes out cool. He leaves us in his wake.
“This is us,” you say, turning abruptly to a subway entrance on the right, which, miraculously, hasn’t been closed off.
We descend and enter another, deeper chamber. The station is still lit and not completely empty, which surprises me, as if I’d assumed we were the only ones to have sense to go elsewhere, to hide underground. There are people milling around the empty guard booth, down on the platform below; their movement doesn’t indicate disaster or panic. We vault over the turnstiles, not because we have to, not because they don’t work.
We wait on the uptown platform, where the mildly ironlike smell of tuna fills the air, like someone’s broken open the rations early: undercutting this smell, perversely, that of fresh water. The idea of waiting for a train seems ludicrous—if there was any delicate piece of the city’s infrastructure that would collapse first, it was the trains. At this point, though, I can’t tell if what we’re experiencing—the conditioned air, the planned and random fires, the winnowing of all our paths down into one, this feeling of controlled synesthesia—is the work of such an infrastructure crumbling or boning up; falling apart, or testing its limits. On the other side of the tracks, a woman sits hunched over on the platform, her top half hidden in a heavy fur coat, her leggings in a pattern of hundred-dollar bills, legs dangling over the tracks.
“That man,” you say, rocking back on your heels against a tiled column.
There’s still some resistance, some stick every time I open my right eye. I bat my eyelashes to ease away the sting. “What about him?”
“He was a cop.”
I can’t make out what this means—the implications of each action, already, are starting to lose their individual meaning in the collective well of paranoia. “How could you tell?”