February
There were no concerts, no gallery openings, no parties. There were no nights stomping maudlin across the bridge home, taking taxis, the breeze in our hair, gazing at the lights of the city rushing away from us and all its promises, all its power. I saw no ballerinas; Laura left the instruments in their cases. All shows were canceled. We stayed at Dylan’s.
We edged toward winter, and day by day, New York grew dark earlier. The leaves were thick in the streets. The first snow fell. Leaving the subway late at night was not as scary as it was lonely in the cold. The wind from the river blew so hard I lost my footing. The train swayed. The old Kentile Floors factory sign kept watch over us, a remnant of the defunct industrial past. So long bereft of any use, we thought it beautiful solely for the fact that it endured when everything else had changed. We watched the flakes melt into the black canal, as if in a hurry to flee their swirl, become sludge.
People have always needed somewhere new to go and quick when old things disappear, and it was perhaps for this that they began to gather at Dylan’s. It was slow at first, friends stopping in for drinks that lasted late into the night on any given day. But then it became every night that I would find someone or other lying on my bed, sprawled in a daze of booze and marijuana. Someone in a corner, all pale, speaking to no one in particular about what had happened, all the conspiracies already, this was all for Israel, it was Israel’s fault, calling Dylan’s corner at the end of everything, paradise, nothing could touch us there, reading his scrawl, thinking it scripture. And there were always girls, girls in chokers, girls with magenta hair, girls with guitars, girls carrying canvases, girls who had lost someone in the attacks, girls who liked girls and boys, girls who ended up crying about the fucked-up world and remained with us in the morning, always, always staying in the tent in the truck in the lot.
But the first official party did not happen until the New Year. Dylan hung a swing from the ceiling he had made of a plank of wood and rope, and set up pillows in the old windowless freight elevator that smelled of urine so people could ride up and down, drunk or high, like some sick circus ride. “Like passing through the rings of hell,” he said.
Before anyone had even arrived, he had set out a bowl of cocaine in the center, surrounded by bottles of vodka, tequila, gin. Beside the coke was a stack of blades he used for cutting paper and two sheets of glass with a pressed lily between them. “¿Qué es?” Laura asked.
“The white blossom,” he said.
The fractured mirrors surrounded us, the bed, the swing, the table, as in some carnival funhouse, reflecting us back to ourselves, our fissure, what we were becoming. The lot grew full of people we did not know shattering beer bottles off the concrete walls as Dylan had urged them to do, howling at their capacity for destruction, expressing admiration at how good they could smash up their pain. Dylan had set up a station for lighting fireworks over the canal.
It became a trend that after women took lines of cocaine, they would kiss each other provocatively for the camera. There was always someone taking pictures. I had never until that night tried the stuff.
“Just do a line. You won’t die or anything, promise,” Laura said.
Dylan was suddenly behind us, his arms around our bodies, his breath hot on my shoulder. He could be so becoming, even with vodka on his breath. He took a key from his pocket and scooped some powder onto it. He held it to Laura’s nostril, and then to mine.
“Dance with me,” Laura said. Her hand was reaching for Dylan’s, but he shrugged her off. He took the camera away from the photographer.
“Come here, then,” she said to me. “Sit on my lap.” Laura pulled me onto the swing. “Here,” she said. “You’ve got glitter on your lips.”
Her lips were soft, her tongue softer than any boy’s. It curled around mine, probing. I hadn’t been kissed since Eli. Her hands went to my neck. My bones shuddered. I was her marionette. I was her dancer; she was my music. Her hair brushed my shoulder. We paused, and our lips joined again. Her breath tasted of wine. I felt the cocaine burn in my throat.
She drew away. When I looked up, Dylan was watching us, the camera at his side. Laura bounced off the swing. She had won him for the night.
In the morning, we heard that thousands of birds had fallen from the sky in cities all over the world. Fish had washed up on shores across the country, their blood staining the beaches on that first day of the year. I had believed if I touched no one, no one would die. If I skipped the cracks, if I saw nothing, if we were out of the desert, we had escaped hell—but it wasn’t true. Everything was just dying faster in the world.
The nurse sweeps into the room. She ignores my mother and me. My mother’s legs are crossed; her hands are on her temples. I know she is getting a migraine. “You have a fever,” the nurse says to my father. “I’ll get the doctor.”
“I’m happy with a fever; a fever I can handle. As long as I can walk without pain,” he says.
“What does that mean?” my mother shrieks. “Why would he have a fever?”
“Mom, calm down,” I say.
“Calm down, Rachel,” my father says.
“It’s relatively common. A bad reaction to the anesthesia,” the nurse says and leaves us.
“When can I go home?” my father calls after her. He sits up in the bed. My mother leans over him to wrestle him down. “You can’t make me stay here!” he screams.
The snow turned the nights violet. On the subway, I knew warmth from huddling against strangers in the crowded train. On the coldest nights, Laura and Dylan slept inside. We had one industrial heater that worked intermittently. I could smell Dylan, though Laura lay between us. And for knowing it was his smell, for taking note of it at all, I felt guilty. When we were all together, he never tried to touch me, and though I had seen him naked a dozen times by then, he slept in the bed inside with his jeans and boots on. Some nights he never came home at all, and it was just Laura and me. If I tried to speak of where he might be, she changed the subject or left me alone to smoke a cigarette by the canal. There were subjects we suddenly no longer touched like an old married couple making do.
One night, there were sirens and a crowd of people staring into the canal. The bridge was covered in ice. The snow heaved into us with the wind, sputtering out over the canal like confetti. In the water below, we saw a dolphin, perking its head in and out of the water, its face and skin covered in the black liquid poison that filled the canal.
“He’s crying,” Laura said.
“He must have gotten lost coming in from the ocean,” said one of the bystanders. “They’re going to let him die here.”
“Can’t someone get in and save him?” Laura said.
“No one is going in there,” the woman said.
“No one is going to save him?” Laura screamed.
That night, we were alone, and I awoke to Laura’s naked back, the sprawl of freckles on her browned skin reminding me in the confused half-light of waking next to the one back I’d loved before. I covered her up. How she did not wake from the cold, I still do not know. She always spoke in her sleep, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, sometimes in a language I did not recognize. She was always thin, and thinner that winter. Her ribs were like an accordion beneath her skin. Her legs shook in her sleep.
I couldn’t sleep and walked to the kitchen. I looked at the clock. It was only still evening in Arizona. I dialed my father for the first time. In the past months, I had only spoken to my mother.
He did not say hello, only, “Are you ready to come home?”
“I am trying to dance,” I said.
“No, you want to ruin your life,” he said. “And die there while you’re at it.”
“Dad, please.”
“‘Please’ is not going to help you. I had a dream last night that you’ve been given the evil eye.”
“I just wanted to say—” I began.
“Come home,” he interrupted me, then hung up.
I smoked a cigarette by the window and watched the trains crisscross, stall, and then slowly dip underground again. I walked back to the bed. On the nightstand was a leather-bound journal. I whispered, “Laura” to see if she was awake. She snored once and turned over. I opened the book.
There was sheet music pasted in, drawings of Dylan, a photo of the two of us young on the steps of my old apartment building, looking ironic or bored, the desert behind us. There was a letter penned in nice script, in Spanish, signed Maria. The letter was old and yellowing. Below in Laura’s own hand, I read, the curse must be broken. And below that, a Jonah of the desert. The rest of the pages were blank except for a single photo in the back.
I noticed Laura staring at me and flipped the book closed.
Dylan walked in at that moment and destroyed whatever angry exchange there might have been.
“I was stuck in a train for three hours,” he said. “People were going mad, trying to climb out the windows into the tunnel. They didn’t tell us anything, just kept us like that. For three fucking hours.” He walked toward the bed and lifted the covers off us. “Did you hear me?”
“Sí, jefe,” Laura said. I pretended to be asleep.
“Get me a beer,” he said and slapped her leg. “And you . . . sleep outside with Laura. I want to be alone in my own home.”
In the tent, I woke up sick with a fever. It was pure fever without vision or chorus of voices. I slept the entire day. I remembered none of it except for one dream of my mother. I saw my mother’s face as an adult’s, her body that of a child. I spoke to her, but she would not acknowledge me. She sat before a wall of indigo glass vases and, just beyond it, the Galilee.
Outside the window where the vases were shelved, the olive trees wrapped tortuously about everything. There were gardens of azalea, white roses, walls laced with bougainvillea. We walked through the garden, my mother and I, without saying a word. The fountain was covered over with moss. Everything reeked of disintegration. We arrived at the lake, at the Sea of Galilee. We stood there and watched as its surface changed, turned into the canal just beside Dylan’s, full of abandon, full of rot. The late afternoon turned to night. We looked up and over the lake, stars fell. My mother looked at me. She was trying to tell me something, but her mouth would not open.
When the fever broke, Laura was sitting beside me, smoking. The sunlight through the flap of the tent was so cold it was blue. The sheets were wet beneath me. She had covered me in her mother’s coyote fur. “I sang for you.”
“How can you love him?” I said.
“You know how,” she said.
Dylan had not sold a piece of art the entire time we lived there, so when he finally did, for a healthy five figures, he told us, there was another party. It was bigger than the last. There were a DJ and burlesque dancers, the elevator was outfitted in disco lights, and there was a small canoe in the canal so guests could row out over the waste. Hundreds of people came in eclectic costumes. Dylan walked among his guests like a king. Everyone knew his name. The old producer smashed Dom Pérignon bottles against the wall and then sat on the swing with a girl who had her hair in pigtails. Laura shouted at him that the swing would break, and he looked at her as if he’d never known her at all.
There was a dancer climbing a piece of fabric suspended from the ceiling. She flew. We drank absinthe, we drank champagne. I was dizzy. I was swaying. The din was deafening. Suddenly Laura was nowhere, and Dylan was behind me, his hand at my hip. “Come here. Come with me,” he whispered. I followed him to the bathroom.
He had a vial in one hand. He poured it out on the toilet seat. “You look a little overwhelmed,” he said. “Maybe this will help.”
“I’m good,” I said.
He took two lines off the porcelain and poured the powder on the indent between his thumb and forefinger. He pushed my face, softly, down into his hand. I sniffed. He spit into his fingers and pushed through my jeans into my underwear. “I don’t want you to feel good. I want you to swim in fucking starlight.”
I slammed the bathroom door. Laura was in the kitchen taking shots. No one had seen. Nothing had happened.
And then I wasn’t swaying. And then I was dancing inside the crowd. And then I was in love with every man and woman whose sweat touched mine. I was lying down, my head in the lap of a beautiful stranger, who caressed my hair, my arms, his eyes bright, concerned. “Who are you?”
“I’m a dancer,” I said.
“That’s pretty, a dancer,” he said. “Pretty, pretty dancer dancing in the desert. Pretty warrior dancer. But who is going to save Sonora?”
Laura shook me. I had fallen asleep outside on the bench beside the fire.
“Where’d he go?” I cried.
“Where’d who go?” she said. “Who were you dreaming of, Sleeping Beauty?”
The sun was up. The last embers were dying in the firepit. There were only a few of us left. Some were drinking beside the canal, unable to let the party end. Wishing it to go on. Cursing the last guest for leaving. And then, from hundreds, there were only just we three, as if there was never a party at all.
Where we lived, there were no bars, no restaurants, no flea markets. Only the bodega and the train station, the men and their watermelon stand at their own parties in the members only club raging on, undisturbed. We liked to say we were in the middle of the desert, the end of the world.
I’d walk in the middle of the street to remain visible to the little traffic there was. Every night, I’d pass the woman who sat on the drawbridge over the canal. She would pull down her pants in front of the few passersby and police. In the afternoons she would punch the air and in the early mornings would scream at someone certainly still locked up with her inside her mind. “You come from a sick house, a sick family.”
During her monologues she would lapse into a maniacal clapping, her accent sometimes British and of another era, sometimes of the American street. “You destroyed my life!” she bellowed over the canal. Sometimes she would relieve herself in the polluted marsh at its banks. When she was finished, she’d speak of her actions in the third person. “Can you believe that bitch just took a shit?”
She always wore the same thing: black leggings and a sweatshirt wrapped around her head like a turban. I never knew where she showered or slept. She never asked for anything. I never asked her name. I thought sometimes she was a creature born of that polluted waterway, the Gowanus, stinking worse than feces in the unbearable summers, a conglomerate character of its strange beauty by moonlight and boastful wreckage by daylight.
One particularly freezing night, three police officers surrounded her and told me to walk on the other side of the street. I heard her call to me for the first time. “Tell them you are seeing this. Help me.”
This, we were told, was part of the city cleaning up.
My mother yells at the nurse, “Why is the doctor taking so long?” and then collapses into a fit of coughing. The sound hurts even me. I take my father’s hand. He escapes the grasp of the nurse and shoves me off. He tries to stand but is too weak.
“We’re going to have to restrain him,” the nurse says. “He has to calm down.”
My father falls silent. He lies back down. And this is almost worse. I cannot look into his eyes. They are lopsided, mahogany. I cannot look at him in this bed. I stare out the window, stare out into the desert. My eyes glaze over. I wish for the doctor, for a scream, a siren, to break the silence. Break what we feel, being in this room, relying on machines to measure the life coursing in us, measuring the beats we have left.
“Did you dream, Daddy?” I ask. He looks at me fearfully. “While you were out?”
“Ocean,” he says. “And I wanted to swim. So I did. But the waves were strong. At the top of the beach, there were houses. But between the sand and the houses, there was a drop. A cliff. There were people living in the cliff with candles, praying. And there were people at the bottom of the cliff. People who didn’t survive being thrown back from the ocean. I thought that was where I was going. The ocean was throwing me back so hard I’d miss the beach and fall into that cliff.”
My father begins to cry. The salt is in my throat, my mouth.
“Which ocean was it?” I ask.
“Home,” he says.
That winter, Laura and I took the train to the Atlantic Ocean. We stood on the boardwalk, pieces of snow in our hair. The ocean was darker than I imagined, far darker than the clear sea in Mexico. It was so loud. Planes flew overhead. The waves tumbled violently. The beach was empty except for three Orthodox Jews, all in black, walking beneath large umbrellas. “Looks like a funeral,” Laura said.
“Is it any better here?” I said.
“Where do you think that plane is going? Maybe we should go there.”
“Paris,” I said.
“Oui, oui,” she said in an exaggerated French accent. “Mademoiselle, venez ici, vous êtes très jolie.”
“I’m cold,” I said.
“Even the fucking sun is cold here.” She pulled at her hair, stretching, squinting toward the horizon, though it was overcast. “The thing about New York is that it’s unavoidable. Maybe that is the only way to be, the sort of person no one can consider forgetting. Like Dylan. You have to be hated and loved by everyone at the same time to accomplish that.”
“So I should just go on as blow job girl forever.”
“Yes,” she said. Her face lightened. “That’s a great idea.”
The men with their black umbrellas turned uphill on the sand from the water. They walked in single file, the eldest leading the younger men behind him. They all had cigarettes. As they passed Laura and me, they averted their gaze. Laura called, “Hello.” The youngest nodded. They walked down the beach and then paused. They wrapped their arms in Tefillin, then took a few steps forward and back and began to rock. The ocean muffled their words.
“Looks like they are praying to the ocean,” Laura said.
“This city needs a prayer,” I said. “But they’re looking at Jerusalem.”
“We need a fucking prayer.”
At Dylan’s, some days I woke up to white noise blaring from the television though the house was empty.
In the shower, I heard someone at the piano. A short melody that drifted or a single note banged on as a child will play, delighted at the violent sounds they can make, not worried for the instrument, not knowing it to be one of the few things left reserved only for beauty. Then the sheath slammed shut. The instruments were all half desired, half forgotten. It was as if they were left behind by a ghost right in the middle of playing.
Sometimes in the corner of my eye, I saw a girl running through the loft. A see-through girl, a silhouette. She looked the way the world looks without my glasses. Vaguely hued, indistinct. She looked the way a body looks underwater, lost in the blur of bubble and wave.
I sat beside the window and imagined the view of the Gowanus Canal was the canal in Arizona beside which my father and I used to walk. A desert canal snaking through the city. I imagined it blue and full of swimmers. I imagined it sunlit. I imagined saguaro in place of signs, paloverde instead of cars. I saw the buildings melt to mountains. Like hunting for a dead beloved’s face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before. Now here was New York, torn through by dust.
I understood why someone would look at the ocean only to be in the direction of Jerusalem. I understood Bedouins who created odes to lovers lost in abandoned camps, lovers who would never be seen again. I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger. Sometimes the sound of someone playing a Bach Partita on their violin wafted out into the winter streets, and I closed my eyes and imagined I was walking through a storm in the desert. Sometimes at work I heard my voice change, I heard Laura in the way I talked, a certain phrase, a certain grammatical error, her favorite conjunction that never existed, and-or-else, and-or-else we’ll just live by the sea, felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and disorganized in my wallet, just like hers was. I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was her face reflected back at me. Still, I don’t know where she ended and I began.
I never took anyone home. After seven years, I told myself, my cells would be entirely different. I have always been susceptible to a fool’s suspicions. Walking on cracks, the myth of renascence after a set of years, but somehow I ignored all of Dylan’s broken mirrors. When seven years had passed after Eli, I would find a man and we would make love and we would cross the ocean, live entirely elsewhere of everything.
But there were still men everywhere. And there was power in being so young. I barely knew how to wear my own face. But I was nothing desperate, hardly aware of time being a thing that might affect the eyes, the hair, the legs.
One night I met a Frenchman. His suit smelled expensive. I sat alone with him over six cocktails. He wore a Cartier watch. He spoke to me in French, blew in my ears, kissed my palms with the slightest tongue, warmed my calf with his hand. His eyes were a soft blue. His cologne was already on my skin.
“I live downtown,” he said at last.
He hailed a cab for us. In the backseat, we kissed. His hands were already in my skirt. His suit buttons opened onto his chest. He opened the car door for me, exited, and paid the driver from the window of the passenger seat. I looked out upon it, Ground Zero. The American flag was still in the windless night. The shreds of buildings in heaps. Police cars lined the perimeter. The glow of rescue lights flowed across the scene, fogged in the dust that had not settled. Everything smelled of a fire gone wrong. All the hair of the centuries burned off the dead. I slammed the door and told the cabbie my address. The Frenchman banged on the back of the car as we drove away. Still, I wonder about him.
I found Laura that night lying down on the floor in the center of the loft with all of the chandeliers off but one, glowing atop her so that she was made of blue. Her arms spread open. I noticed a new phrase of Dylan’s scrawled in large black print on the wall: Fireworks or shooting stars? I walked closer and kneeled over her. She clutched her journal to her chest. Mascara was caked on her cheeks. Her face was pale. Her hair sweaty on her forehead.
“You look like a corpse,” I said.
“I fucked two producers in a row for a record deal,” she said. “And now I don’t want it anymore.”
I tried to draw Laura up, hug her.
“Actually, I fucked them at the same time, one in the ass, one in the mouth. Guess it’s a game they play.”
“Protection?” I said. “What about Dylan?”
“Oh, Dylan the lady-killer.” Laura lit a cigarette and held up her journal. “You know when he found us out there, his girlfriend had just died. She climbed up the fucking roof because he kicked her out in the cold and tried to get in through the chute and fell, fell, fell. Look in there; I found the article about it. Found a pic of her too. Fucking birds in the wild wood.”
I turned to the last page of the journal and opened. “But that’s you,” I said, and turned the photo over. It read: Danielle, ’97.
“But it’s not,” she said and stubbed the cigarette out on his floor.
I drew her up, and we climbed into bed. She asked me to hold her heart. “Hold it down,” she said. “It feels like it is going to burst.” I wrapped myself around her. I placed my hand on her chest until I felt her heart slow. The blue light of predawn smothered the room. I felt the depressions of her scar and imagined the craters on the moon, the craters in the desert.
“Everything here, all these instruments. I hate it,” she said. “They were all hers.”
“Laura, we just need sleep,” I said.
“Can I read you something? I wrote it tonight.”
“Shall I hum for you?”
“Yes, you be the music.” She began to read. “Everything is winter in summer. August in February. If there is a dream world more true than the waking world, it is us, naked and roaming the desert, modern-day prophets haunted by what’s buried beneath us—the ancient oceans, the ancient bones, the ancient names. I had a dream of God. He came to hear me play. I was singing to Him, but my voice wouldn’t sound. He froze my fingers. And then snow began to fall, inside the bar and throughout the city, and I knew it was falling everywhere, even over the desert.”
Laura started drinking more heavily. Her night with the producers got her a studio date, but the date came, and she called to say she had a chest infection. Daily she announced a new bizarre affliction. I found her in bed at four in the afternoon, nightmares spelled out on her face, her eyes open though she was asleep.
One night I came in through the alley and found Laura screaming at Dylan in the lot, demanding he tell her about Danielle. He held her shoulders and put his hand over her mouth as if hearing the very name was a violent act. When he saw me, he pushed her toward me. She was our child, and now it was my turn to watch her.
“I’m losing my power, I’m losing my power,” she whispered. “Please help me.”
The next morning, I was late and ran down the subway stairs for the coming train, running with everyone else, running as if from a flood. The stairs were icy from the previous day’s snow, late for the season, and in that part of the city, unsalted. I slipped, I landed wrong. My meniscus tore. The doctor said we’d know if I’d dance again in six months. “I don’t have six months,” I said.
Things changed after I fell. I couldn’t wait tables because of the strain on my knee, so I took a job at an office as a secretary. This lack of movement for eight hours a day, shuffling papers, the phone ringing, a blaring computer screen, depressed me as it depresses everyone.
The downers I was prescribed felt good. I had held things so tightly for so long. I had held everything so tight, so tight, I’d fall only to fever. I had held the world inside my chest or else be attacked by visions of its doom. I’d never panted. I’d never stomped the ground. I’d never left my stomach unclenched. I’d never left my hair down from a bun without blow-drying it. I’d never let go of anything.
When Laura drank, I drank with her. She stopped practicing. I stopped dancing. All she did was search for evidence of Danielle. She heaped pieces of clothing she dug out of the closet into a corner of the loft, daring Dylan to rid her of them. In response to this, Dylan stayed in his truck with various women, a different one every night. And Danielle’s instruments remained everywhere, untouched.
My father called me back at last after my injury. “I have the sciatica, Ahlam,” he said. “It is not so serious. It just means I have trouble walking. You see, I am with you even in this.”
“That doesn’t really make me feel better,” I said.
“I told you not to quit the piano. Isn’t there a piano near you?”
“I’ve forgotten how to play.”
“Well, all you can ever do is fight, fight, fight,” he said. “That’s all we know how to do in this family. Survive.”
“Do you remember Woody?” my father asks.
“No, I don’t remember any Woody,” I say.
“He is the one who saved us in the Superstitions. I picked him up from this hospital in the cab and thought, I know this American guy. I know him. He was sick. He had some disease with the liver.”
“I remember now.”
“He sang to me in the cab. He was singing. Just like your friend, that Laura. Very nice voice. He sang some song. Moon something, moon child. He’s probably dead by now.”
“I remember his gun,” I say.
“Get me out of here, Ahlam. They’re trying to kill me,” he says.
The underworld could be everywhere. There were those who wandered into the Superstition Mountains, where my father and I once were lost. With a hunger for gold, they wandered looking for secret mines and were found beheaded. The skeletons of wanderer after wanderer were found in isolated passes of the mountains, their skulls found elsewhere. In the ruined Gowanus Canal, there were rumored to be hundreds of corpses tossed and hidden forever in its depths. Beneath this earth, I once believed there was a basement filled with spirits of those passed. But I know now they are never above or below. We are surrounded.
Dylan broke only once in front of me. He had such a hard demeanor and caved toward upset and warmth only rarely. But when he did, one was compelled to the belief that maybe in fact, he was good. Like seeing the sun after so many cold months. The sun could be so bright, so intense. Perhaps he took cover in endless women, drugs, alcohol, because his pain was more passionate than ours. Because he wasn’t just a normal person. He was special. He was starlight. How can we ever believe anything else? The people we’ve lived beside, the people we’ve loved. There must be good, we will wait to find it. We must find it.
I found Dylan pacing in the yard, his face red, his boots crunching the glass. “I bought her a bird,” he said. “A blue finch.”
“How kind.” I snorted.
“What was I supposed to do?” He cornered me by the truck, and for the first time I feared him, his height towering over me, his impassive marble eyes. “You two were children. Tell you my girlfriend fell off a roof, and I held her as she died, and I regret the night, and I wish I could take it all fucking back. I wish I had a do-over, but I don’t. Now I’m watching it happen all over again like some curse. This is why I keep Laura far. I don’t want anyone close to me. Do you think I want this to happen again?”
“We should move,” I said.
“You aren’t going to go anywhere.” He grabbed my wrist hard. “Where else are you going to pay no rent in this city?”
Laura came into the yard. “Calling her Ofelia,” she said and walked casually toward us, swinging the birdcage. She leaned up to kiss Dylan. “Thank you, my love.” Dylan was crying.
Most of the time, the loft was so full, there was no space for confrontations. Laura would stay in the truck waiting to be loved or banished back to my bed, depending on Dylan’s company, his mood. It was always so full of voices of those hoping for another party, another cocktail to drink, the possibility of a night that’d bring them home too late. And Dylan would guide them there. He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He’d corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn’t know we had anything we would miss.
When Dylan was gone, we took to our corners, Laura humming beside her bird’s songs, me practicing my pointe, stretching, anything to hold on to my body. With Ofelia, Laura sat on the ledge of the window, watching the train snake past, smoking. Then she would sit at the piano. There was music for a few minutes, coming in spurts out of her like a weary machine. The hour she began drinking crept steadily up until it was standard to see her with a tallboy of cheap beer in place of breakfast. By nightfall, there was nothing for her to do but call a dealer to keep her steady, awake, alert. “Let’s call in the troops,” Laura said.
There were days we barely left the loft. An outing to the bodega was enough, as if we were being kept, propelled back to Dylan’s home, as if it were a vortex beyond which we were not allowed free roam.
I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.
No one had told me that you can wake up, years passed, and not understand the person you are, the things you did the night before, the things you said, the things left undone, that it can feel like a nightmare, a wildly seductive, spinning nightmare.
One morning, I found Laura sitting at the window, twitching. “I’ve figured it out. New York is too loud to make music in.”
“Or it’s Dylan,” I said.
“It’s the ghost of Danielle,” she said. “I’m being haunted by her.”
“Maybe you have to talk about that night with the producers.”
“Maybe you have to talk about why you won’t fuck anyone at all,” she said.
The sole aspect Dylan was unquestionably generous in was money. He left Laura cash every time he left the house. And with it, Laura began to do cocaine once a week, then twice, then every day, all day. And with ever-decreasing hesitance, I joined her. We sat together in the bed or at the kitchen with Dylan’s blades, a picture frame, a compact mirror, sometimes with straws, sometimes with bills, sometimes keys, and together consumed the pale glory.
On the train to work, sleepless, I’d hear women shrieking, coyotes howling in the screech of the subway turns. I’d see rats crowding at my feet and leap into the street only to discover floating black bodega bags. It seemed that every time I was on the subway, a man would stand from nowhere, pacing the car, and claim that he was suddenly moved by the Holy Spirit. “There is someone here on this very train who does not believe in the Savior. And I’ve been called to stand. I’ve been moved by my faith to save that damned soul.”
Once at work, I’d have to run to the bathroom and splash my face for thirty seconds to stop it, stop the attacks. This was coming down.
But when I was up, I was feverish without fear, in love, my body passionate and full of stars. Higher than any leap could bring me, any rush of performance. I was in love with the world, with the horniness, the meanness, the grandeur of the city crawling beneath my skin. I saw nothing ugly. I saw no war, no calamity, no death, no epidemic, no sudden devil on the train, no sudden devil in my reflection. I saw my body in a wind thick with mint. And I owned every single step.
In Arizona, I drank because I could hear them coming for me, the coyotes howling beneath the floorboards of our new malls and our new schools. In New York, I drank because the night was too short, and the voices of the dead still came for me from the cemeteries landlocked beneath highways and next to airports, from the mighty graveyard across the river blowing dust over us, all of us. In New York, I drank because inside our empty apartments where we lived alone, always alone even if with others, I heard long-dead addicts saying my name, softly and then louder. In New York, I drank to join them. I joined them because they made the voices I heard in my head shut the fuck up. Finally my mind, the things that made me black and blue and blind and ravenous all came to a halt. The blond boy streaked blue and the long-gone Eli and the sadness of my father and the muted desperation of my mother and the eternal return of history and the desert, the shrieking wail of it, the planes’ horrible sound, all the sirens, and the flight of dance and the falling down wrong and loving Laura, and wanting to save Laura, and finding no one in that great big city that embodied it as Dylan, so searing, so empty, all became crossed out, even if a night at a time. In New York, I drank because I was so young it felt like a beautiful thing to let my dreams fall down, and so I shattered them, shattered them good.
The last snow of that long winter, I found Laura beside the canal. She was wearing her mother’s fur, its lining undone, hanging forth. Her tights were ripped.
“Aren’t you cold out here?” I said.
“Look, Ariel, look. An owl just flew past.”
“It’s just snow,” I said.
“I think the owl is yours, Ariel. I think the owl is your animal.” Laura was peaceful. An ambulance bawled in the avenue. Her face darkened in its wake.
“You want to know how my mother died?” she asked from nowhere, looking at the canal and not at me. She had begun to do this more and more. We were losing the ability to look at each other.
“You want to know how she died,” Laura said again, gritting her teeth from the high. “She fell. She slipped, and she fell. It’s all so simple.” She began to laugh.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“They think she was running from something,” Laura turned to me, her eyes bloodshot, yellowed, starving. “But she slipped. Into the canal. And the current . . .”
As Laura fell silent, I saw them gathering toward us, the coyotes, their slivers of silver marring the dark, as the five a.m. blue rose over the glittering city—they came closer and closer and closer, so close, I smelled their saliva, their fur, so close I knew by heart their ravenous vendetta when Laura took my finger, with its ancient prick, and pressed it to her own.