by Brian Selfon
She had—what’s the term—a negative hallucination. More words are coming back to her from the Franklin library psychology section, which consisted of five books. A negative hallucination is not seeing something right in front of you. A hallucination of an absence.
She had no idea this was still in her head, which puts it in the same family as Dr. Xu’s after-hours emergency number. The thought of this number plops her down into another imagined session with the bowl of marbles. Doctor: Why didn’t you see the bottle? Patient: Want. Exhibit A, her run-in with Dr. Xu’s file cabinet. She recalls and re-experiences her humiliation when she realized she wanted not to see what was in the cabinet. When she realized she was afraid.
Want, that dirty old bastard, hid the bottle of malt liquor. I wanted not to see it.
Dr. Xu, ever insatiable, ever ponytailed, asks why.
Another insultingly obvious question, and she doesn’t need a medical degree to answer it. The bottle signifies the beast, Mama’s worst and last boyfriend. Signifies the one who straightened out little Kerry’s family history, who explained that Mama took up pain pills, and later heroin, after Kerasha was born. Does after mean because? Kerasha now proposes an addendum for the Dictionary of American Regional English, Bushwick edition: after is a sometimes synonym for it’s all my fucking fault. After means I did this to her, I’m the one who made her sick. Fuck you to hell, after. Kerasha would take anything to get away from that monster. Negative hallucinations, road burn—whatever it took for her to get thru that guilt. Whatever was strong enough to cast after into the dark.
Ahead is a messenger bike: duct tape on the handlebars, electric tape on the basket. The fence the bike is chained to is wobbly, and she pries it open using the lock itself as a wedge. This city is made for thieves, she thinks. She mounts and pedals hard. With the wind in her hair and on her face and chest, she knows she’s moving and yet feels she’s stuck. Feels like she’s biking through the mouth of Dr. Xu’s answering service, pedaling over taffy teeth.
“Open all senses,” Nicole used to tell her, “and not just your own. See from my eyes. Listen as that chair.” Kerasha never did listen as a chair, but she forces herself to notice the people she’s biking past. Not just to rely on the instincts and peripheral vision of skinny Kerry, but to use the full mind of her current big self. Her city is suddenly peopled. Here’s a pair of squat hard-hat men, both drunk, it looks like, but still wearing their reflective work vests. Here’s a little old woman with a bent back and a walker. Kerasha wonders about the back, how long it’s been curved like this. Whether the woman can go an hour without thinking about it and, if so, what mindfulness technique she uses. Give me the right teacher, Kerasha thinks, and I’ll disciple myself like a motherfucker. Pedal, pedal, Uncle Walt narrating once more:
Wandering and confused.… lost to myself.…
Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping.
Skateboarders, shirtless potbellied men, a pair of bike cops each with a foot-long hero. What’s this, Camp Happy Paws? Looks like a pet store. New to Kerasha, who remembers the refrigerator repair shop that used to be here. A city can change in six years. Can a person? Hope to Jesus, Uncle Shecky would say. This is one of the few points where he, Saint Augustine, and Sister Xenia would all agree, and of course June Jordan has something to say about this: My name is my own my own my own.
Kerasha wipes out. One minute pedaling away on her stolen bike, the next airborne, then skidding across the asphalt, she rolls until she stops, and now she lies still, except that she’s shaking. Her brain, like a pair of doctor’s hands, moves up and down her body. Where does it hurt, and is anything ripped or broken, and are you going to get up from this or has the next you already taken shape—the old you just another corpse.
“Are you okay?”
Okay enough to raise her eyes, and here’s that girl again: dirty, kindly, a touch shy, a heap of sly. The girl Kerasha saw through the basement window, with the needle. Here I am, she thinks. Little me.
A time blur. She must have remounted the bike, because in a moment of clarity she catches herself leaning it against a fence behind Hank’s Fit Rite Tires, a holdout in Bushwick’s shrinking industrial section. A hangout for kids, Kerasha remembers, the kind who aren’t given bikes, who wouldn’t just leave one lying around. Little Kerry spent some time in this lot but hasn’t visited since before Franklin. Little has changed: the familiar smell of oil, the same Teen Titan faces spray-painted on the concrete-block wall. The hum of traffic. Kerasha can just make out the overpass over the twin auto-body shops across the street.
She wonders whether she came here straight, or whether she zigzagged like the good little thief she used to be. She wonders whether the good little thief and the basement girl are the same, and whether the “are you okay?” girl is just another specter. I am the history of the rejection of who I am.
“I’m trying, Dr. Xu,” she says. The words come out and rouse her, and she is suddenly outside Dr. Xu’s office building. By the orange-gray glow of the streetlights, the squat, wide complex is unexpectedly beautiful.
Her hand pulls out a fresh burner phone. Her fingers once again dial the emergency after-hours number.
“Yes, this is a medical emergency,” she says. No taffy mouth on the line this time, it’s a human energy bomb, a woman with an accent Kerasha can’t place.
“Please hold!” This woman is shouting at midnight, joyous, and she sounds amazing for someone screening calls from crazies. Medicated, Kerasha decides, another patient, probably, working off her community-service obligation. All too relatable, until Kerasha sees through the dirty trick. Realizes that this poor patient is being forced to participate in someone else’s mind fuck, getting thru it by becoming complicit.
Not for me, Kerasha thinks. I’ll just stick to my own meltdown, thank you very much. Got plenty of voices already, my own wrong way to do things.
“This is Dr. Brown.” Reserved and cautious, she sounds, and Kerasha pictures a heavyset black woman with salt-and-pepper hair. Pictures herself, but older, and realizes this woman is another of her psychiatrist’s absurd inventions, the other half of Kay. This “doctor” has my last name, asshole. Was I not supposed to notice?
Reluctantly, Kerasha admits to herself that this anger is just a front. What she really feels is disappointment. She called and he didn’t answer. He was supposed to get on the phone, he was supposed to ask if she was okay. “Guess it’s just us, Kerry,” Mama used to say, usually in the wake of a breakup. “You and me against the darkness.” And now I’m grown, and it’s still Mama and me and the darkness.
“I need Dr. Xu,” Kerasha hears herself saying. Hating herself for it.
A sigh from Dr. Brown, or whatever her real name is. “Dr. Xu is not on call.” No doubt this is the hundredth time she’s had to explain this tonight. But this is the first time you’re explaining it to me, bitch—how about some compassion? Dr. Brown talks through a yawn: “Please describe your emergency.”
“I can’t get away from myself,” Kerasha says. Or maybe she just thinks this. The phone is off. It is in her hand, her trusty fingers having done her work for her once more. Another blur. The skyline changes as she runs east against the night. She catches a street kid’s frightened look. Scared of me, Kerasha realizes, and then she’s here and gone and here again, now in the thick stink of Smelly Terri. Minutes later she sees the big woman, slow-pushing her new shopping cart. Shaking a sleepy maraca. Kerasha wonders whether, rather than the reserved and cautious Dr. Brown, her future self might be Smelly Kerry. No strain to the imagination here, just another woman with a shopping cart and a forgotten history.
Kerasha moves past the old warehouses, some empty, some dens for skells. A few are getting the loft treatment—she visited one recently, when she took the gun and the badge from the detective’s nightstand—but all these buildings are crumbling inside, all are soft in the bones. And beyond the warehouses are the Moses towers.
The lock on the service door off
Lafayette Street is still broken. The stairwell takes her to the basement, where the grate to the boiler room is still loose. Skinny Kerry probably had no trouble slipping in, but big Kerasha can hardly fit through it. Somehow she twists and pushes and squeezes into the air shaft. The windowsills, from floor to roof, are quality stone, and Kerasha steps and pulls and swings her way to the top, knocking down, as she goes, little tokens of family life. Plants, mostly, but also clay vases, dolls, and action figures. People make and collect art, even here, Kerasha knows better than to be surprised. But she’s moved, despite herself, by a drawing fingered into the dust of an unwashed window. A figure of a girl reaching for a breakaway balloon. The bend of the string shows wind, and the girl’s just standing there with her arm up. She’s not chasing the balloon, Kerasha knows. She’s saying goodbye.
On the roof of Tower C, Kerasha catches her breath. Counts down from fifty-four, and wonders if Nicole, the yoga embezzler, wherever she is now, is feeling a happy twinge. See, Nikki? I listened. Let on the inhale, go on the exhale. Sister Xenia would call this prayer, and Saint Augustine and Malcolm X speak from experience: however you sin, even if you enjoy it, God is there for you. God will wait.
But Kerasha doesn’t think she can.
Let, inhale, go, exhale.
Of all her advisers, it’s Nicole she trusts. With oxygen comes perspective. Looking out across Brooklyn, she sees an expanse of dingy potential. Countless windows to open, countless doors. Over the course of her lifetime, however long it may run, she will never run out of places to break into. Pausing and gazing, invading—
Evading.
Her breath stops.
I don’t take what I want, I take because I want.
And where does it come from, this want?
A wet, shaking chill comes over her. Her sense of dingy potential, absolute five seconds ago, now shivers small and ugly in the shadow of something massive. Again she slaps her arms. Get the blood flowing. Always be feeling, even if it’s pain. Anything to get thru that shadow. Once more Kerasha beholds the winking yellow lights of Brooklyn. Beholds, also, the luminous citadel of Manhattan. These are the stars by which she navigated her childhood. They tell her she’s home now. Her long night’s journey has ended.
Sanctuary, she thinks, this vast rooftop her private domain. No one else has set foot up here, as far as she knows, not since the last layer of waterproof coating was brushed over it. With no badges, no skells, no wardens, and no Mama, this is the one place no one can hurt her.
“Bullshit.”
Kerasha sinks. Her breath—her precious, counted breath—is all gone now.
All is gone.
“This isn’t the place you come to be alone.” The voice is familiar, so soft, so light. And such power it has over her, Kerasha can’t raise her eyes to face it.
Which may just be her least-bad strategy. “Eyes on your feet, girlfriend,” Nicole used to say. “Ground yourself—the literal ground, our angry earth. Put your pain in perspective, girlfriend, and say thank you, angry earth. You hold us up, day after shitty day.” Evasion after shitty evasion.
Kerasha’s feet have never held such a fascination for her. Look at them, those laces, taut and carefully knotted. You can tell a real thief, she thinks humorlessly, because she doesn’t trip over her own feet.
“Smile,” Nicole used to say. “The brain belongs to the body, not the other way around. Studies have been all up in this shit. A fake smile actually gets you partway to happy. ‘Fake it till you make it’—that comes from a false assumption. Faking is making it. Deep shit, right?”
Kerasha pushes her mouth into a smile. This does nothing for her happiness, but she doesn’t want to disappoint Nicole, even if it’s just Nicole-in-her-head. So she raises her eyes from her feet and fixes them on the skinny, dirty girl who shares this dark night with her. Covered by the same starless mass, lit ugly by the same winking lights, the girl holds up a bucket. She gives it a good shake, and the rattle is of a churning mass of tiny metal bits.
“Our bucket was right where we left it,” the girl says. She indicates a nook under the tower’s secondary heat vent. The angle of the overhang and an imperfection in the roof rust have protected the bucket from years of wind and rain. I acknowledge this duplicate of myself, Kerasha thinks. A new personal low: she wishes Dr. Xu not only would answer her calls, but could be here with her on this roof. So what if he looked toward the bucket girl and sees only the naked air. The point is Kerasha shows progress. Please, good doctor, take out that pen: this patient’s hallucinations have gone from negative to positive.
The bucket rattles again. This time the girl not only shakes it but holds it up and tilts the rim toward Kerasha, daring her to peek inside. “Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you itchy?”
Kerasha again forces a smile, the way Nicole taught her, but the neurons don’t fire. Never did. Fake happy never could cross over.
What’s real is the acrid smell of vinegar and metal and burnt tar, and that inimitable something-something. The bucket is directly under her nose now. The girl is before her, reeking, unwashed. “There’s more to you than you’re telling me,” she whispers, “but what I want you to think about is what you’re not telling yourself.”
Then the girl is gone, and Kerasha holds the bucket in her own two hands. Even alone, even in darkness, there’s no sanctuary. True history: this spot on the roof of Tower C isn’t where little Kerry came to get her head right.
It’s where she came to get high.
Double yourself, one last whisper from Uncle Walt, and receive me darkness.
Then the bucket drops, and there’s a sweet, silver tinkle as a hundred dirty needles spill out around her feet.
chapter 37
That night, in the second-floor office of a narrow house in Brooklyn, the door is locked, the blinds drawn, and a blackout curtain is pulled down and secured to the wall with Velcro strips. Shecky, unshaven and looking especially thin, sits on the floor and opens a briefcase. The snap locks are faulty, he notices. The Paradise Club obviously doesn’t want this back.
And no wonder. Inside the briefcase, in place of the Paradise Club’s usual crisp white-and-blue currency bands, are crumpled tens and fives. A handful of Jacksons, an occasional Grant. The bills are stained and faded, and Shecky can identify a few counterfeits by sight. Nature of the business, counterfeits mixing in. He’d identify more by touch, he knows, but right now he’s wearing nitrile gloves. A line from somewhere: “A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.” Well whoever wrote that obviously never smelled narco money. Was never near the oils and powders, the raw human filth. Shecky breathes through his mouth, but he’s not ungrateful. It’s the foulness of this money, along with the prevalence of counterfeits, that justifies the 10 percent fee Shecky charges clients like Red Dog. Whereas with his mom-and-pop-shop clients, he keeps only 5.
Shecky sorts and bands the bills, counting as he goes. The soundtrack to Futurity plays from his phone and helps keep his mind off the stink. Ten dollars, twenty, five, five … He doesn’t need a tally sheet to see columns in his head. Tens, twenties, ones, more ones, all make tick marks that flow to subtotals, which in turn swell to a grand total: $225,000. After putting the money back inside, Shecky can barely get the briefcase to close. The lock doesn’t catch until he puts his whole body against it.
Simple math: $250,000 lost in a black garbage bag, $225,000 in this battered briefcase, means $25,000 the Paradise Club is keeping to “cover expenses,” as Vasya put it.
Twenty-five thousand. So that’s what it costs now to get rid of a problem.
He shakes his head, thinking about Henry’s friend, as he recloses the battered briefcase.
* * *
The storage unit he rents under a Delaware-incorporated LLC is on a side street off Broadway. The padlock is difficult to open with shaking hands, but at last Shecky gets into it. He turns on his hurricane lamp, and his heart clenches and for a moment seems to stop. He comes here every month, always has papers or
drives to pick up or drop off, yet every visit is charged. Each object, aside from his active business documents, touches on some mistake, some loss, some alternate version of himself he can no longer see. Here are vacuum cleaners left over from when teenaged Shecky would scavenge from streets and dumps, repair and reassemble what he could, and resell them so that he could pay Uncle Joseph for his “monthly keep.” Here are the textbooks he bought used for his two semesters at Brooklyn Law, back when Uncle Joseph still wanted him to be the “family Jew.” Next, participation trophies from high school swimming. Shecky guesses no one else kept theirs, or had so little to keep.
He puts the briefcase on the wobbly desk, another relic from his law school days. Turns to the immense file cabinet right next to the desk—this is where he keeps the files he can’t throw away yet. He unlocks and efficiently empties the cabinet, creating neat stacks of files and drives on the desk. He has to move the briefcase closer to the edge of the desk as more and more files come out. Amazing how much this cabinet can hold. Some of the files he knows by sight, from the color and thickness of the folder. Some he’s touched just this past week. Business only, the stuff in this cabinet, though right now what he needs is handwritten on a card taped beneath it.
Twenty-five thousand dollars went to Vasya’s contractor, which means twenty-five thousand dollars must be found for Red Dog—and found quickly. Henry’s crazy friend made a terribly strong case for that. In a sense it’s as though, having snuck into the house, she’s never left it: he can still feel those ladder kicks. Removing the last files from the cabinet, Shecky decides he’ll waive his usual fee for Red Dog. The full month of secured transfers—on the house. Painful, to let go of money like that, but appropriate under the circumstances. He goes further. Entertains the option of permanently reducing his rate for the client. A full one percent? Two? But hold up, old man, stop right there: you can’t make business decisions with shaking hands. Haven’t you learned?