It was all over except for the shouting by the time I made it to Willets Point, and in truth, the shouting was just a long thin wail that came from the garage, the door still open and the thin light from a hurricane lamp spilling out. Every time George Wilson paused for breath, I could hear a lifetime of chewing tobacco in his throat. I parked the car crooked on the verge close to the gas station, behind the edge of the building so it would be out of sight.
While I was driving, the moon had risen, and I lifted the demoniac, almost half gone by now, to its pocked and imperfect face.
I wonder what the moon will look like in Tonkin. No, no, it’s Vietnam, I remembered. Bai had been quite down on me calling it Tonkin, and now I was mostly doing it to spite her memory in my head. The Manchester Act was going to pass, I realized in my haze, and Louisville or not, Baker or not, I had better decide what it might do to me and what I would do about it.
I hated the thought of leaving New York, not for a holiday or a retreat but because I had to, and I drank down another measure of the demoniac in protest. The taste had mellowed now, or I had managed to burn away the part of me that cared. I thought it was getting less effective the more I drank, but then a pair of men stumbled by, arm in arm, and I saw their skeletons underneath their clothes and their skin, grinning faces knocking together affectionately as they passed a bottle of something cheap back and forth between them.
Or not so very weak after all, I thought, and I got out of the car.
The moment I stepped out of the car, I was in some dark land, separate as Park Avenue was separate from Chinatown. The few city blocks of Willets Point was its own kingdom entire. With a solemn face, I wandered through the tall ash palaces where the towers and the wings were always drifting away, only to be replaced by the burning of New York itself.
Oh, I thought in sudden revelation, this is where New York goes when it is tired, when it is done.
I expected to see ghosts of all sorts, of gin baby socialites, of gangsters and bellhops and countermen and maids and grand dames and ambassadors, but I never did.
“C’mon, jelly bean,” said a Black man with a trumpet case walking by. He had a brilliant maroon suit with a narrow black pinstripe, and the ash blew away from him as if too shy to touch the hem of his sleeve. “You know better than that. New York’s ghosts are a discerning lot; there’s no way they would stay here to play in the ash.”
I nodded because he was right, and I waved to him when a black car with a driver whose face I could not see pulled over to let him in.
I walked through the palaces of ash, and more than once I had to hide because the men who lived there were a restless lot. Bearing the heads of pigs and dogs, like those cursed by Circe for crimes against her, they came out of their houses and crept into the windows of their neighbors, but their wives, I saw, roamed not at all. I giggled as a man with a parrot head somehow got turned around and climbed into his own window, making his wife shriek in anger and distaste, and I moved on.
The stars were fainter here than they were in West Egg, but I tilted my head back and drank to them anyway, letting the demoniac give them voices to tell me their secrets. Stars didn’t talk like people did, and I couldn’t listen with my ears, but when I closed my eyes, they appeared to throw moving pictures across the darkness.
The stars showed me a neat town of wood houses, not grass-sided huts like I had always pictured. A woman with her hair cropped like mine, her face round like mine, shook her head at Eliza Baker, shook it again and again before turning away, and I saw Eliza with a packet of money in her hand and a confused look on her face.
I was meant to love her, you know, I told the stars solemnly.
Oh? Which?
It was confusing to me, so I asked for something else, and after some thought, the stars offered me this:
Nick’s great-grandmother died just as the war was starting. She was a tiny little lady, and age had put camouflaging wrinkles on her face, turned her sleek black hair white, and given her such a stoop that no one was much able to look at her straight on anymore. In her old-fashioned dresses and her small and elegant apartment in Milwaukee, almost no one in St. Paul remembered that she was foreign.
I remembered what Nick had said, that she was born as her missionary parents came off the Carmine on the Gulf of Siam. I wondered if I had seen some kind of family resemblance in his face after all, whether his dark hair was more like mine than Daisy’s, whether there was something kept hidden somewhere in his easy handsome features. I didn’t think so. I only considered the thought because of what I knew now, and then when his grandmother held up a pair of scissors in her hand, looking straight at me with a solemn look, I realized I knew something else too, and maybe had for a long time.
No wonder I like you so, I thought, and then I put it straight out of my mind.
“Can’t you show me something important?” I asked the stars. “Drinking this much demoniac may just kill me, and I would like it to be a bit grander than old family secrets…”
The stars considered and then the ground in front of me lit up, the starlight catching on every bottle cap, scrap of metal, and lost bolt. Curious, I followed their winding path through the palaces of ash, and I came at last to the billboard west of Willets Point.
T. J. Eckleburg disdained the glorious city of ash below his eyes. They were closed tight, and while a sensible part of me told me that I only misremembered, that they had always been closed, I knew that that was not true.
I took another sip from the demoniac, thinking that it was rather shabby of Gatsby to give us one only partially filled. Surely I hadn’t drunk enough for it to feel so light in my hand. I glared up at the billboard, frustrated with its silence, and frustration opened up into a childish fury.
“Well, come on,” I said loudly. “Speak. You see so much, what’s the point of you if you don’t speak?”
The eyes stayed closed, but then I realized that I was trying to get water out of a stone.
“No mouth,” I said to the stars. “I can fix that.”
Off to the side there was a skinny ladder, and after I discarded my flimsy slippery shoes, I used it to climb up to the narrow walkway ledge that stretched from end to end across the billboard. I paced back and forth in front of it for a moment, but no further inspiration came until I looked down at the bottle in my hand.
Well, there’s not a great deal more, I thought, and I drank the rest, ending on fumes like gasoline and honey, vanilla and gin. For a moment, I tottered on the ledge, clever enough not to look down though not to have avoided putting myself in this position in the first place. When I got my legs back underneath me, my stockinged toes digging into the grating of the walkway, I bent over and smashed the bottle against the steel.
There was an almighty crash as shards of glass fell to the grass below, gleaming like stars in the streetlamps, and I found a large shard from the shoulder of the bottle, about half as wide as my palm.
“All right,” I said as authoritatively as I could. “You’re going to talk to me, aren’t you?”
I walked from one end of the billboard to another, the shard of glass digging into the paper glued to the wood backing. The paper split as if it was longing to do so, showing the wood underneath. Over the years, the glue had gone and the paper curled away, above and below. When I was done, it looked a bit like the lips of a drunk, lolling open and foolish. It was an ugly and careless job, and for a moment, I wished that Khai were there to show me how to do it properly. He would probably laugh at me for how badly I was doing, and I wanted him to close his capable hand over mine and teach me the way that I should have been taught.
Hey, where are you, anyway? I thought indignantly. I want to see you, I have to talk to you.
I sent the thought out of my mind, because I had always had to teach myself. I shook my head, continued.
When I was done, I dropped the shard of glass and clapped my hands.
“Talk,” I said, and then more insistently, “Talk.”
I felt it this time, my first bit of paper magic done only for myself. Daisy wasn’t there to want it to look a certain way or to need me to be a certain thing. Instead it was just me under a plain Willets Point moon, drunk on something I wasn’t sure people should be drinking at all, watching as a pair of painted paper eyes slowly, oh so slowly opened and loose paper lips started to flap.
What should I talk about? I am only paper.
I glared at Eckleburg’s coyness, crossing my arms over my chest.
“You’re paper with eyes,” I said. “You’re paper that sees, aren’t you?”
My eyes are closed, and I have no tongue.
The eyes tried to close, but I clapped my hands hard right in front of where a nose should be.
“Your eyes are plenty open enough for me, and I gave you a mouth so you can talk. What did you see? Tonight? What happened?”
The eyes blinked almost coquettishly, and then the paper lips spread to speak.
I saw a car, too fast. I saw a woman who needed to leave, and I saw her go flying. I saw the car stop, and then I saw eyes.
“Eyes. Wait. Wait … you saw eyes.”
I saw eyes, mistress, and then I saw no more.
T. J. Eckleburg lowered its lashes but I didn’t think it was being coy this time. I was suddenly possessed of an intense sleepiness as well, a feeling of weight on every limb of my body. I knew that I had to get down before I fell down, and with my luck, I might fall straight into the glass I had shattered all over the ground below.
“I … I have to go…”
I will sleep, mistress, and I will see no more. I am through.
As I watched, the eyes closed and the paper started to peel back from my cut, slowly at first, then faster. Soon enough, the old paper was peeling away from the billboard entirely, the top half staying to promote the optician, the lower falling off to reveal an advertisement for the Bonney Brothers’ Traveling Circus, featuring daring acrobats, the finest freaks, and the death-defying lion tamers.
I stroked the paper lion’s face as I went past, and somewhere, whether it came from the paper or from some deep place inside me, I heard a soft growl.
By the time I hit the ground, I was exhausted. I could barely move, and it took all the strength I had to make it back to Daisy’s roadster. I knew that the state I was in, I would never make it back to East Egg, so I simply crawled into the back, getting the white seat filthy with ash, with everything I had picked up on my sojourn through Willets Point. I thought briefly about smearing everything I had learned all over the leather upholstery, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that, so instead, I fell asleep.