RONAN
I lay in bed with my eyes closed for as long as I could, trying to convince myself I was safe at home in New York City and the night before had all been a dream.
But I knew from the second I woke up where I was. I could tell by the smell that I’d come home—old man and cigarettes, coffee and Stetson cologne and the muck of the river—and by the amber brilliance of the sunlight.
I lay still, taking stock of my body. Searching for the aches and woes of withdrawal, but came up with nothing.
Nothing, except abject emotional misery. And a head full of bizarrely vivid dreams (black water; whales in the sky; drowning in the dreamsea). And whatever the hell had happened to me the night before, to get me to Hudson.
One new piece the morning light illuminated: Katch called me, from a pay phone, and told me to meet him at Penn Station. And when I got to the station he’d called me again, from a different pay phone, telling me he was delayed but to get on the 9:30 train to Hudson, and he’d meet me there.
Why the hell would I have agreed to that?
More pieces were missing. I’d have to wait and hope they resurfaced.
I put clothes on, moved through the house. Taking stock of the situation. The fridge full of mismatched plastic containers; food brought by friends and neighbors. The line of empty beer cans beside the kitchen sink. Pabst Blue Ribbon; Dad hated the stuff. But Marge, the woman who’d worked the butcher shop cash register for as far back as I could remember, had loved it. Funny, how well I still knew the man, how certain I could be about this. That he would never be sleeping with Marge, any more than he would buy Pabst Blue Ribbon even if it was on sale. She was taking care of him. Cooking, cleaning. Wiping his ass for all I knew.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, coming into the living room.
My father frightened me. Sitting in his ancient recliner, still in the same pajamas. Still not hearing me when I spoke. Still not seeing me.
Water dripped into a bucket in the corner. The bucket was overflowing. I picked it up, took it to the bathroom, dumped it into the toilet. Some splashed onto my hand. I lifted it to my face—smelled it—licked it. Sure enough: salt water.
“What’s up with the ceiling, Dad?”
No facial hair. More forehead than I remembered. His curly hair cut shorter.
“Ro,” he said, then opened his mouth, but nothing further emerged—which had always been his way, to say as little as possible, to make his sentences short if they happened at all. Back then I’d felt like it was a choice, a facet of his taciturn masculinity to keep his words mostly to himself. Now it was like there was nothing there, like a lifetime of holding back his words had caused him to lose them altogether.
I went back to my room and got dressed to go out. I had to get the fuck out of there.
Dad was waiting for me when I stepped out of my room. Standing in the hallway, mouth slack, eyes glazed.
“They’ll be so glad you came home,” he whispered.
“Who, Dad?”
He turned and padded softly back to his recliner.
“No one’s happy to see me, Dad. Nobody in Hudson likes me.”
“They finally got you here,” he muttered as he went. “They’ve been trying for so long.”
* * *
IT WAS WORSE BY DAYLIGHT, somehow. The night before it hadn’t felt real, the spectacle of what had happened to Hudson. In the dark it had the same stillness of any normal American city that wasn’t New York. The store signs were all updated, that was all. Now I could see it for the corpse that it was.
But not a corpse, or not just a corpse. The dead city had been infected with something, and reanimated. Doors opened and shut, cash registers clanged, pedestrians smiled; but the soul was gone.
Last night it had felt like the phantom ache of a long-gone tooth. Now each gap felt raw, fresh, like a hard fist to the face had just popped it clear out of my jaw.
A clothing boutique inhabited the body of what had once been Warren Street’s best Italian restaurant, Mama Rosa’s. My favorite toy store was now stocked with antiques. So was the bakery. So was the photography shop.
What did they do to you? I whispered, over and over again.
Barely ten A.M., and there I was. Awake. Dressed. Walking. When was the last time I’d done that?
Historical Materialism, one store was called. I went in looking for Karl Marx references, but of course it was only capitalism being clever—good old-fashioned materialism, the empty pursuit of material objects, as applied to old things—not historical, per se, but old, having been created during history.
“The theme this month is seafaring,” said a sweet young woman with rectangular spectacles who I was probably wrong to instinctively hate. Harpoons hung from the ceiling. She held up a tray in which hooks and blades lay spread.
“That’s so great,” I said, staggering backward, fumbling for the doorknob in a blur of horror. “So great.”
It slammed behind me.
I’d written a note. Left it on the butcher block in the kitchen. Hey Marge! I’m back in town for a bit—give me a call when you get this? Ronan. And I added my cell phone number.
The weirdest part of all: a coffee can ashtray on the front porch. Full of cigarettes. Unfiltered, though, and not Dad’s brand. I’d picked one up, sniffed at it. Cloves. Katch’s brand.
Marge made sense. Her beer cans could fit into a comprehensible narrative. Katch and his cigarette butts popping up on my father’s porch could not.
Was he from Hudson? Was that why he showed up at my studio’s doorstep? Was that why he’d had me come home?
They finally got you here, my father had said. They’ve been trying for so long.
I remembered the big real estate project Dom had mentioned. Maybe the people behind that were the they? But they’d have had a million ways to reach out that didn’t involve a boy like Katch.
The next-best guess I could come up with was a homophobic conspiracy to get me home and murder me . . . but Katch was clearly queer himself, and probably wouldn’t be a part of that . . . and why would my hometown bullies suddenly want me dead?
The familiar sooty chrome exterior of the Columbia Diner caught my eye, sucked me inside by awakened twenty-year-old instinct— an entire childhood’s worth of Saturday-morning breakfasts with my dad, on our walk to work at the butcher shop—remembering the way I always wanted to sit on the stools along the counter, but Dad said those were for people who were by themselves, whereas we got to sit in the booths—and how I’d always imagined the counter to be for grown-ups, and dreamed of the day when I’d walk in the door on my own, miraculously an adult, and sit down on a stool and ask for my regular—
But there were no stools now. No counter. The booths remained, but their shredded pleather had been replaced with something shiny and stylish, in one of those of-the-moment shades I refused to know the name of. Puce, probably, or ecru. And there was no bowl of pee-flecked mints beside the cash register anymore. And there was no cash register. And the massive laminated diner menus I loved so dearly had been replaced by small squares of card stock. And instead of a heavy old Greek there was a young man with rectangular spectacles.
“Cup of coffee,” I whispered, horrified as a recovering alcoholic would be to hear himself ordering a scotch on the rocks. “Black. No sugar.”
He took me to a table. I sat. I drank my coffee when it came.
I never touched the stuff in New York City. My life was already high-strung enough without surplus caffeine. Part of my patented System for mind-altering substances. By exerting control in small ways, like skipping coffee or never smoking pot, I could ignore how I’d lost control in big ways. Like how I was spending five hundred dollars a week on crystal meth—Tina to her gay friends—and doing some increasingly unwise things while under her influence.
“Oh my god, my place is such a shithole,” said a boy behind me. The girl he was with smiled understandingly. “The whole building smells like pork fat like all the time, from my neighbor downstairs cooking damn empanadas for the thirty-ish people who seem to live there.”
“State Street is the Wild West,” the girl said. “The new frontier.”
“I know,” he said, and here came the punch line, the self-congratulatory point to the story: “And it’s totally worth it, for how much space I get for the money.”
Unspoken: unlike your place.
I knew all the beats, because I’d been overhearing this conversation for years. Had had it myself on more than one occasion. But that had been in Brooklyn—Williamsburg, then Bed-Stuy, then Bushwick. That had been someone else’s home being unraveled. Now it was mine.
State Street had been where the poor people lived, or one of the places, back in the day. Now it was the new frontier, the development that the gentrifiers were just beginning to dismantle.
I shut my eyes, blocked out everything but the words they said and the taste of my coffee. Hate and caffeine; each one exhilarating in its own way. On the wall beside me, a pig was painted in bright primary colors on a piece of plywood with splintered edges. It could have been the work of a child, except for the eye—which was entirely too human, and deeply disappointed in us.
Why did this hurt so bad? I hated Hudson. I’d hated everyone in it. For twenty years I’d hid from it.
But my father loved it. And losing it had broken him.
When the gentrifier larvae got up to go, I followed them. I barely thought about it. Hate had filled me up, was pressing the buttons that operated the machinery of me. We went down two blocks, then turned west and went one more. At Fourth and Columbia, they entered a long low industrial space that had been inactive for as long as I could recall but was now bustling with light and motion.
I walked inside and bile flooded my mouth. Light fixtures made of stag horns hung from the ceiling. So did human-size dream catchers. Hundreds of frames filled the walls, old photographs and obscene needlepoints and protest slogans in bright calligraphy. A woodworked banner placard ten feet tall and twenty feet long was behind a desk.
PENELOPE’S QUILT, it said.
“Help you?” a woman asked, smiling, because of course I did not look like a local. I had the knitted cap at an insouciant angle, the tight jeans, the short sweater. The beard that was eloquently tapered instead of unruly and lumberjacky. The leather jacket that was black and shiny instead of brown and scuffed from farm or shipping labor.
She thought I was One of Them.
And I hated her so much. With those vintage rhinestone cat-eye glasses—which were, admittedly, magnificent—and that proprietary smile.
“Not just this minute, thanks,” I said, but did not depart immediately.
“I’m Lilly,” she said. “You tell me if you need anything.”
Of course I knew what Penelope’s Quilt was. The internet’s largest community of artists and makers. Headed by a quirky gay celebrity billionaire founder CEO, who was apparently running for mayor of Hudson. Hundreds of thousands of new artworks came on the site every week, but none of them could be bought with money. Barter only. Every maker started with a baseline score, and then the community assigned value to each new work, and then you could exchange that work for another artwork of equal or lesser value. Or you could trade twenty-five original lithographs for a fucking hand-sanded Tlingit canoe or whatever. It had been explained to me a hundred times before, by earnest artist friends who adored it, and it had always seemed proudly, unacceptably complicated.
What the fuck was it doing headquartered in Hudson?
“Here,” Lilly said, putting a pamphlet in one caffeine-shaking hand. “Come to our potluck!”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling, drowning, and stumbled out into the bright white day.