ABBY, AUGUST 3, 2015
Then I saw Eleanor Boyle in a cloud. Her voice message arrived late at night. “Abby, I know we haven’t seen each other since forever,” she said. “But fuck, something weird just happened, pertaining to you. I’m in Midtown, and I think you still are too? Come see me.”
She worked for a casting agency on the sixty-eighth floor of a brand-new white-glass building on a silent far-western block. Her window looked out on a bank of cotton batting. She crossed an acre of carpeting with a nervous lipsticked smile, her body tilting toward me in a tight purple sheath dress. Such a vast office—I realized Eleanor must be the boss. She hugged me a bit breathlessly. I felt nervous to see her too. Reuniting after years of no contact usually feels awkward, though I’m not sure why that should be. Maybe it serves up the passage of time right there on a plate, naked and unavoidable?
Eleanor must’ve been thinking along the same lines, because she said, “Look at us. Femmes d’un certain âge. I’m fifty in three fucking years,” said Eleanor. “And you in four!”
“Believe it or not,” I said.
“I haven’t managed to skydive yet. Have you?” She settled back into her white leather desk chair.
“Is that mandatory?” I said.
“Well, life can get a bit monotonous if you don’t take a goddamn risk now and then,” she said. She was still Eleanor, bony and leggy and profanity-inclined, her hair still in the red flapper’s bob, sleek around her head like an old-fashioned pilot’s cap.
“Well, it is possible that I may be drawn to other types of risk,” I said. I felt propelled toward recklessness by her, just like in the old days.
Her brows jerked up, two slender leaves caught in a sudden gust, and she gave a delighted grin. “Oh, Abigail. You wicked vixen.” She gave a little shrug. “I fuck mostly women now, and that helps.” She waved her hand toward a cork-covered wall. Headshots pinned in a grid: rows and columns of rapt eye contact, scintillating teeth. “I meet a lot of lookers. Hazard of the job.”
“I heard that somewhere, that you’d come out.”
“I had an insane party at that hookah club to celebrate it. I tried to find you, to invite you, I think, but you were . . . gone, it was the most bizarre thing.”
I nodded. “Yes, I know. I still feel guilty about losing touch, dropping off the map that way . . . You were so important to me.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.” She swiveled a bit in her rolling chair, then leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. The front hanks of her bob pointed toward her brightly painted mouth. “Abby, I’m thinking you’re in some kind of trouble?”
“Um, possibly,” I ventured.
“A cop came to see me.” She leaned forward even more and lowered her voice a bit. “Handsome as fuck. At first I thought he was snooping around about an incident we had here, one of my partners developed a hard-on for a chorus kid and took things a little too far, left us very liable, the cretin.” Her eyes glittered. “So at first this lawman was just asking about the agency, our business, then he said he’d read my bio on our website, and saw I had a degree from Western New England. And then he said, really casually, I know someone you might know.”
The clouds roiled outside the window, making it seem like we were moving, as if we were in a ship in the sky. “Me,” I said.
“Were we good friends, he wanted to know. Whether you’d used drugs. Your political leanings, of all things. Fuck if I know, I said. We were party girls, we liked to dance, I told him. And then I told him you met a guy, got very into him, and we kind of lost touch.”
“True,” I said.
“He wanted to know who the guy was, and at that moment, I thought, she’s either banging this hot cop or she’s in some kind of deep trouble.”
I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. I thought back to when he’d asked me about myself, and I’d talked about Eleanor, my oldest friend in New York. He must’ve assumed we were in contact, and closer than we actually were. But why would he be poking around in my deep history like this? Making inquiries about me?
“I told him that I didn’t remember your boyfriend’s name. I said, all I know is that the guy’s long gone. Dead.”
This last word landed like a punch in my chest, and the punch unleashed a torrent. I began blurting everything—the night in the cab, the glimpses in the library and the paint store. Rock Center and the bridge and the beach. I told her about Mariah and Dennis, the fire, the detective.
As she listened, Eleanor rested her chin in one long white hand and peered at me with a puzzled expression. When I finally stopped, she said, slowly, “You really think she burned down your house?”
“I’ve changed my thinking about what’s in the realm of the possible,” I said. “But tell me, have you ever experienced such a thing?” She sat back in her chair and stretched her arms overhead, revealing a pale tuft of rose-white fuzz in each armpit. I searched her face for reassurance. “I mean, I’ve sometimes wondered if maybe this sort of stuff happens often to women our age, but nobody talks about it. Like night sweats, loss of skin tone, and visions of self?”
Eleanor cocked her head to one side and regarded me silently for a long moment. Finally, folding her hands in her lap, she said, “How did he actually die, Abby? The boyfriend. I heard rumors. Suicide. Or fell off a fire escape when he was high on something. Or there was a structural collapse of some kind . . .”
My throat seemed to close up. I shook my head. “Not a fire escape. A balcony,” I said. “I can’t remember much else. How it happened.”
“Well damn, Abby, it’s all a strange story, isn’t it.”
She peered at me, assessing.
“I know.” I let loose a long, shaky sigh. “You think I’m losing my mind.”
“You know what I think, Abby? When we were in college, Dougie Corwin gave me pot cookies on the sly,” she said. “I got so stoned, the world got strange, and I didn’t understand why.”
“I always hated Dougie Corwin,” I said.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Any chance your teenagers are spiking your cookies?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” I said.
She leaned forward. “This girl could be anyone. So she looks a bit like you. So her boyfriend looks a little like him. We all have our doubles, our slightly altered versions. Every other day someone says to me, oh my god, you look exactly like my fucking sister Sheila. Doesn’t that happen to you?”
“But she lives in my old apartment,” I said, my voice oddly pleading.
“You saw a sliver of a woman’s face through a dark doorway. And the woman immediately slammed the door on you. Was it actually her?”
I stared at the floor. Frigid January morning, the climb up the stairs, the glimpse of her. Was it her?
“And you believe you were her—but what does she have to say about it?” Skepticism in her voice. “Does she believe she’s going to be you?”
I turned over each encounter in my mind. Finally, I said, “No. She says she’ll never be me.”
A gentle knocking, then someone beyond the door said, “The two p.m. call is getting restless out here, and we’re running out of chairs.”
“In a minute!” Eleanor turned to me, gave me a sad little smile. “Abby, has she ever even told you her name?”
“A, is all she says.” I shook my head. “I guess she thinks I’m a stalker or a lunatic or . . .” my voice lapsed.
“You need a therapist?”
“I’ve been seeing one.” I didn’t tell her it was Dr. Merle the Miracle Worker.
She rose with an expression of relief, straightened her dress, strode around the desk. “I better get out there. We’re casting a genderqueer Oklahoma!,” she said. “Tattooed ranch hands of all persuasions. Might get interesting.”
We hugged at the door, holding each other a little more firmly and comfortably this time. “Thanks for calling me, Eleanor. For letting me know. I know this seems crazy, I’m sorry—”
“No apologies,” she cut me off. “You just take care. Stay in touch. And Abby. If you see the younger me,” she said, “tell that gorgeous little fucker I said hello.”
ABBY, AUGUST 10, 2015
The detective texted, but I wouldn’t answer. A stormy torrent of messages scrolled down my phone’s screen, beginning with, “Let’s meet again, just say when and where, I’ll bring the DiFiori’s,” until the last, two nights ago: “Ghosting me?”
And this morning I woke to realize I’d been five weeks alone. Light leaked into the hotel room in two blinding stripes, over and under the black-out curtains. I was working hard to ready the house, hoping we’d move in again by the end of the summer, get it spiffy and shining for my boys. I rose to pee and brush my teeth. But I didn’t make it to the bathroom. The floor went all atilt.
I barely made it back to sit on the end of the bed. I crawled across the rumpled sheets to my phone.
But who to call? Dennis would be fast asleep on the West Coast.
The detective? No. Clearly, no longer trustworthy. If he ever had been.
I tried Mariah.
She arrived at the hotel in her hulking SUV, careening up under the portico where I sat slumped on a bench, a jacket over my nightgown, a pair of polka-dotted rubber boots slipped over my bare feet, and a few belongings in a plastic grocery sack.
She rolled down the window and said, “You look like what they used to call a bag lady. What have they done to you?”
“Who?”
“Whoever is responsible for this evil twin of my beautiful friend. Seriously, you look awful. I’m taking you in hand.”
The SUV gobbled the FDR Drive, assorted pylons and towers gyrating past, whirling like dervishes. I was aware of Mariah chattering about this year’s art fair in Miami and a South African collector trying to court her with blood diamonds. “And I have no truck with blood diamonds, Abby, but wow they were sparkly.”
The garage door to her carriage house rose with a flourish, and in we rolled. What a wonder, what an ultimate luxury in this city, an always-available place to park. And the storage space: cleaning tools arrayed neatly on hooks, shelves of surplus paint and thinners for her studio, cases of sparkling water and wine. I was ready to simply sleep in that organized sanctum, sunk into the comfy leather car seat, but then Mariah was easing me out, with my arm over her shoulder and her curls brushing my face, spicy and herby smelling, like rosemary.
And then it was morning and Hyde was bent over my bed with a purple smoothie on a tray. “Extra protein and vitamins D through F,” he said.
“I think that only leaves E?” I drank it down, feeling sure I would vomit it up within the half hour. Which I did.
I called Dr. Singh to consult on this latest downturn. “Your CT scan appeared clean, but if your symptoms are still troubling you, I will order a detailed MRI. But Abigail, your house, your situation, this is also psychological trauma.”
“Yes, yes, I’m seeing a shrink,” I said.
In fact, I hadn’t seen Dr. Merle since the single visit in May. I realized I’d never received her bill. Strange. I’d have to check in on that. In any case, after I hung up with Singh, I called her office and booked a date.
Later, sluicing water across my body in Mariah’s pharaonic marble shower, I realized it had been a while since I’d glimpsed the girl. Had she finally quit me? Had the city reabsorbed her, like in that vanished twin syndrome I’d read about—when an ill-fated fetus is reabsorbed, boosting the odds that its counterpart will survive?
Next, I called Dennis, who was incredulous that I’d landed at Mariah’s place. I know it made him uncomfortable. And I admit, I enjoyed that. Benjamin was loving his surf lessons, updating me almost hourly with selfies, boy with surfboard, boy on surfboard, boy with cute girl in bikini on surfboard. He resembled an adorable sleek otter in these pics, in his obsidian wet suit and his hair slicked down wet and his big laughing eyes.
But Pete. He wanted to come home. “Grammy is mean to me; she’s always after me to weed the driveway or run to the store for Miracle Whip. I want to come home. I have work to do.”
“But home isn’t quite functional,” I said, flinching it a bit—because the degree to which this was true shocked me, how the summer had brought us to ruin. Still, he begged me and Dennis. At last we relented and we booked him a red-eye.
ABBY, AUGUST 13, 2015
My frail boy, he seemed to be backsliding, his voice more hesitant than it had been a few months before, the slight stutter, the muttering quality had returned. I gathered him from LaGuardia early in the morning.
“Did my Ministry vinyl ever turn up?” he said. “That was an original vinyl, I think it might have been worth something.”
“No, I don’t believe it did,” I said brightly, turning around with a smile. “But remember your trumpet from sixth-grade band? That came through totally unscathed!”
He looked wan. I knew he must be weary from the overnight flight. I suggested he take a rest when we got to Mariah’s.
When he went to unload his bag from the back seat, he noticed a tote bag holding posters. I’d printed them on the high-res machine at work that we used to test packaging designs. The color saturation was sumptuous. He stared down at the announcement for a Labor Day rally and march. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains,” he read out loud. He looked up at me. “Now you’re quoting Rosa Luxemburg?”
“Murdered by fascists in 1919, Berlin,” I said. “I’ve been reading.”
He frowned at me. “Are you antifa, Mom?”
“No,” I said, shyly. “Maybe a fellow traveler, a bit. Do you mind?”
He stared at the poster again. “I’m not sure.” Then he said, “I’m starving.”
At a diner around the corner from Mariah’s we ate cheeseburgers and talked about what he’d need for the new school year, with the first day just two weeks out. New jeans, new notebooks, a new pair of sneakers.
I pointed to his grubby old shoes. “I guess you’ll be saying so long to Dax?”
I’d read up too on the young Milanese man who had been knifed by a family of fascists—two sons and a dad, with a dog named Rommel—and was honored every April with a wreath laying in Milan. Pete set down his burger and said, “I knew you were up to something, Mom. Dmitri told me you’d contacted him. I think it’s very weird. I thought you hated him. I mean . . .” He gave me a searching look. “Really, are you antifa, Ma?”
I blushed. “You know what I like about it? Its clarity. ‘No tolerance for intolerance.’ I realized that it appeals to me, the clarity, at this point in my life.” I shrugged. “So I decided to help out, just a little bit.”
He nodded, measuring my words. I opened my tote, rummaged around, and pulled out a pack of small square decals bound by a rubber band. Double flags, the stylized fist. In big block font, classic black on red: WE WILL NOT AGREE TO DISAGREE. I slid one out from the rubber band and handed it to him. “For your new shoes?”
He studied the decal, flipping it over and over, then looked up at me. “There’s going to be an action at the end of this month. Not that I think you should go,” he added. “Not that I think you would.”
He asked me if I was going to finish my fries. I pushed their grease-spattered cardboard boat in his direction. We finished our meal, and not ten minutes after we’d returned to the carriage house, Dmitri turned up. He was coming, he said, from his new girlfriend’s apartment just a few blocks away. “She is a certified flamethrower, this woman,” he told me earnestly. “She’s a French exchange student at Stuyvesant, but she’s like pure French resistance.” He turned to Pete. “She has a tattoo that says ‘Killah P.’”
Pete looked impressed. Dmitri turned to me, with an air of patient explanation. “A Greek rapper, murdered by Golden Dawn faschos a few years back. Google him.”
Pete toured him around the carriage house. He seemed, adorably, just a bit proprietary, proud to be staying in such a place, with its vaulted ceilings, the luxe living spaces, the studio with its appealing mess of works in progress. Dmitri took it all in, smiling and nodding politely. He laughed when he saw the portrait of Mariah’s grandfather. “Damn, check out the medals on that guy.”
And then he turned to me. “You should come to the Labor Day action, Abby. We need numbers, all we can get.”
“She can’t,” Pete said.
“I can’t,” I nodded. “That’s the last weekend to deal with the house, before Dennis and Ben fly home and we move back in.”
Peter showed Dmitri into the tiny elevator, which Mariah had lined with cream-colored linen and framed sketches—mostly portraits of her old loves, hung there like trophies. I’d looked for Dennis in this gallery, and didn’t find him, but every time I took the slow and jolting ascent to my room on the third floor, I’d stare at one of the several empty spots, the naked linen, and I’d wonder. Mariah had assigned Pete a tiny room up under the old carriage house eaves, where she stored ball gowns from the 1950s, things her mother and grandmothers wore to weddings of deposed royals, the princes and princesses of Greece and Romania, who were now dressage riders in the English countryside or worked at investment houses in Zurich. Tulle and lace and satin, so thick and rich it hung in slabs like meat, hung high on a pole that extended from wall to wall. Dmitri reached up and ran his hand over the massed skirts. “Oh shit, you can still smell the perfume,” he said.
“Bye, Mom,” said Pete, gently pushing me out and closing the door. A bit later, I knocked with a tray of snacks and sodas. Dmitri was gone, and my son had fallen fast asleep on a narrow twin bed below their skirts, a boy in a bower.
ABBY, AUGUST 14, 2015
In Brooklyn, the spacklers were spackling, a toilet sat in the entryway ready to be set atop the wax circle around the frightening hole in the floor of the bathroom. New ceramic tiles, square and white as movie-star teeth, grinned at me from a carton. Finally. We had talked for years of renovating that raggedy overworked single bath. Dennis and I could never pull the trigger, but the fire had pulled the trigger for us.
Pete’s room held a pile of melted and waterlogged video game gear and he kicked dejectedly at it. “Well, I’ve outgrown this crap anyhow,” he said. Once upon a time I had despaired about those games and the hours they consumed, but now I just felt a pang. Was it only eight weeks ago he and Ben had been excitedly designing a colony in space?
Downstairs, the whine of the saws paused, then the contractor on the job called up to me. “Someone to see you, Abigail.”
In a linen jacket and blue gingham shirt, the detective stood next to the toilet in the entryway, one foot up on the seat, presenting a bouquet of pink roses wrapped in cellophane. “For you,” he said, smiling brightly.
Then his smile vanished and he straightened. The bouquet fell, dangled by his side. My son had come down the stairs ten seconds behind me.
“How’s it going, Pete,” he said.
I turned to see a measure of comprehension cross my boy’s face, the shadow of a moving thought.
“You remember the officer,” I said, brightly.
Pete had halted a few steps above me. “Uh huh.”
“A little goodwill offering,” the detective said, putting the bouquet atop the toilet tank. “I hope all is OK with you, kid,” he added.
Pete shrugged, his eyes revealing nothing. I noticed then that he had a package tucked under his arm. Oblong, wrapped in dirty brown paper.
I was reaching for it when the detective spoke from behind us. “I’m off then, just wanted to check in . . .”
“No, you stay, I’m leaving,” said Pete. Evading my grasp he shoved past us, clutching this square to his chest like a shield, then dashed out the door and onto the sidewalk, the sound of his sneakered feet snapping like raps on a skull, away across the pavement and out of sight and hearing.
I looked at the man. Eleanor was right. He was handsome as fuck. The powerful planes of his face, softened by thick eyelashes, lush brows, those bronze eyes, that flickered with intelligence and calculation. I felt them taking my measure.
“I know you’ve been snooping around about me,” I said.
He nodded. “I thought that might be what you were pissed about. Just trying to help you out, and Pete.”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what you’re up to.”
“Yeah,” he said. The slow-dimple grin. “I’m always up to something, so it’s good for you to realize that. But you’ve gotten to me, Abigail. I mean it.”
“Don’t even try,” I said. “I’m not falling for it.”
As I said this, aggravating liquid started welling in my lower lids, eyeballs pressed from behind, painful knot yanked tight in my throat. He saw and moved toward me, put his arms around me. Even as I stiffened away from him and the tears spilled, in another part of my brain—oh, my poor, strange brain—I was absorbing the feeling of his bones again, tensile, strong, the clever architecture of him. But I gathered myself and said, in what I hoped was a cold and ruthless tone, “Delete me from your phone.”
Driving home, in a woeful state, I steered, almost without thinking, to Rocco’s on Bleecker Street. Sprinkle-covered Italian cookies and a cold Coke with plenty of ice. This has always been my go-to treat in times of confusion and despair. And always from Rocco’s. So how could I be surprised to see her there?
I feel her first. A cool gust down the back of my neck, in the heat of the old café. I turn to see who is invading my personal space. I nearly jump out of my skin.
You don’t look good, she says. Your eyes are like red planets.
I thought you were gone.
Not yet. But soon. He made some real money. We’re going away, soon.
Yes. The turning point for him. Eli had been prowling the heat-addled neighborhoods of central Brooklyn on his bike. To photograph, to score, I’m not sure which. August 1991. On Utica Avenue, where West Indians and Hasids lived uneasily crammed together, a small boy and girl, children of Guyanese immigrants, were mowed down by a blue Grand Marquis station wagon in a motorcade carrying a revered rabbi. In the heat of the summer, as the day burned on, tensions boiled over, car windows were smashed, stores torched, and finally, a young Orthodox student was stabbed to death.
Eli, prowling the streets, heard the wild rumors, more death, another famed rabbi connected to it. Crown Heights was burning. He turned up at West Twelfth Street at dawn the next morning with bruises purpling on his back, cuts on his face. I rummaged for rubbing alcohol and cotton, but all I had was vodka and a balled-up T-shirt. I swabbed him while he told me, breathless with exhilaration, how he’d been photographing boys tearing the metal grille off a clothing store, “They turned on me, and I huddled on the ground over my camera and just let them kick the shit out of me, but no way were they getting my film,” he said. He’d gone straight to the Post, who bought it all.
We got drunk, our boozy sweat blurring the copies of the Post; he ran out at dawn and bought more and left them lying all over the bed. We woke up at noon inky.
The memory makes me smile and she stares at me.
Sit and have a sprinkle cookie, I say. I open the little striped bag to show her.
Oh, she says, delighted. My favorite!
And so we sit there at a marbled Formica table dusted with the powdered sugar of earlier snackers. Severe summer sunlight bounces around the mirrored space. It is companionable, perching there together. We sit in silence, and I watch as she delicately presses a finger into each sprinkle that falls to the tissue-like napkin she’s spread on the table—as I have—and licks it off the tip. Then I do the same.
He’s full of hope. It’s so good to see. I like our chances.
No, I say. I pull my phone from my pocket, power the launch screen. This is your future.
I slide the phone across the table. I know this is a dangerous impulse. She won’t touch it. She just stares at the image there, dumbly. Her eyes go obsidian black. Her hair is piled atop her head in the heat, wet wisps are pasted to her neck.
She delicately lifts the phone, peers at the photo for a fleeting instant, then hurls it away as if she suddenly realizes it’s searing her fingers. It bounces on the old table’s marble rim, tumbles to the floor with a startling crack. She stands, a scream-like scraping of her chair. I see her turning away and moving fast toward the door, and I bend to retrieve the dark and fractured device, and as I double over, I know darkness is coming for me again too.
August 15, 2016
From: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com
To: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu
You’ve seen the data off the dead phone. All of it—texts, location tracking—support the story as she tells it. Some of the texts make me look like hell, I’ll admit. I’m not proud of it, G. But as probably you recall, I’ve always been a bit of a shitheel.
Sending you and the neuroscientist, Kazemy, possible dates for a classified meeting here to present findings. You’ll have your theories worked out, more or less?
ABBY, AUGUST 16, 2015
I woke to find myself in Mariah’s bed. A velvety altar, decked all in the plushest fabrics in shades of white and chocolate and ivory. I rolled there groggily as I woke, felt myself adrift in a melting hot fudge sundae. A remarkable and pleasant sensation—but then I sat up with a jolt.
Pete. Where was my boy. He had run away.
Mariah wavered into focus, seated in an enormous armchair, wearing spattered painter’s overalls and a bra, her hair spread in a dark corona around her head. So pink and clean were the soles of her bare feet, propped on a white ottoman, like treats on display in a posh pastry shop.
I realized after a moment that she was working a smallish clump of white modeling clay in her hands. She turned it and pressed it. Finally her eyes met mine but her expression didn’t change. She didn’t acknowledge my awakening, my stirring, didn’t shift at all. She kept working the clay.
“Please tell me Pete is here,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, struggling to keep her in focus.
“Pete is here.”
“Seriously. Is he?”
“He is downstairs, very happily sampling my music collection. The Breeders, I think. Listen.”
And I did hear it, the shuddering baseline, just audible pumping up like blood through the heart of the house.
“Did I drive here?”
“God no. The waitress at Rocco’s called you a cab, I think your car got towed.”
“Shit. Thank you though.”
“And some asshole stole your phone, apparently. Not in your purse, not on your person,” she said.
“Shit,” I said again.
“But on the upside, Pete told me you have a lover.”
I checked her face for a mocking smile. She was impassive, still, apparently, sculpting. I dropped to the bed and closed my eyes. “Shit,” I whispered.
“Abby, don’t sweat it. It is high time for you to get yours.”
Her hand moved so lightly. Unseen forces sent it this way and that. I watched, enthralled.
“And Dennis,” I said. “Is it high time for him to get his?”
Her movements didn’t stop, didn’t even pause. “Ultimately, we’re each and every one of us walking alone,” she said. “Him, me, you. Paths will diverge and converge.”
“So you are a divergence for him,” I said.
“Your married love is so deep and so long, your paths will bend toward one another again, if you allow it to go that way.”
“Or what we’re doing now might destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to build.”
“Or it might just destroy the constraints,” she said. “The atrophied bits, that lock you in place. It might bring you both, Dennis and you, just the right degree of freedom.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“You think I’m just making a self-serving argument, I’m sure,” she added with a smile. “But I love both of you, truly. I want what’s good for you.”
I sat up now, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, steadying myself by gripping a sleek dark-wood bedpost. Maybe I was close to attaining the right degree of freedom. I felt freer now than when I was her, in my twenties, with Eli, or than I’d been at any other point in my life. I stood, my feet shaking, but holding me. “I think I’m a bit angry.”
“Yes,” said Mariah. “You are.”
She set the little sculpture on the ottoman. The head, face, hair was mine. The body too. And she had found so much beauty in me. “My dear angry Abby.” She watched me take it in. “Rage is the great engine of our work. And of our future,” she said.
ABBY, AUGUST 30, 2015
And so it was that this very morning, a luminous late-summer Sunday, a time chosen because the city was mostly empty and even the police force was understaffed, that the Brigade decided to strike at the heart of fasco-capitalism. Pete left early in the morning with Dmitri. I didn’t intend to march. I headed for Brooklyn to check on the paint job in the living room and rehang some kitchen shelves, Dennis’s big battered toolbox in the back seat.
But driving downtown, I saw them mustering, south of the old fish market buildings. I couldn’t just drive past. I found a parking spot easily. From a bucket of cleaning supplies in the back of the car, I grabbed an old blackened rag—a scrap of one of those old T-shirts—and tied it around my neck, bandanna style. I slipped into the back of the pack, covering my face as the others did. Pete wouldn’t see me. He was in the front line, with Dmitri.
Who handed me the hammer? I think it was Vincent, who moved through the pack, pulling bullhorns, bats, and other battle gear from an enormous sports-gear duffel slung over his shoulder. Just props, I thought. How did it begin, then? The destruction.
A splattering of eggs on an idling stretch limo. Some logos from a large real estate developer, torn down from a construction fence. A feeling of escalating wildness as the throng headed farther downtown, funneled into ever-narrower streets. But truly the only vivid recollection, finally, I have is that sound. And how it shocked my body, the juice of it, the energy mainlined as with a syringe, and this just through the sound, the sonic boom of the hammer on the thick plate glass, bouncing through the slot canyons, off the skyscrapers wedged so greedily into those skinny old streets way downtown. I still feel the waves of it vibrating through me as I write this, cleaning me out, purifying me in some fashion, scouring every artery and even those lacy passages that run through the center of my bones.
It was a Bank of America branch and its window finally succumbed after my seventh blow, cracking into great shark fins of glass. The fins fell inward, cracking into a thousand spears that scattered across nubby oatmeal carpet and a single rolling chair so similar to my rolling chair at work, and I thought of my window at work, my so-called artwork that I had consoled myself with lo these many years—how many? Thirteen? Thirteen years in the rolling plastic-wheeled chair yearning for color out the big window—and now watching these spears slice through the air of that bank lobby, I felt not an ounce of yearning. I felt power.
How life slows down at such moments.
“No hate! No fear! Fascists are not welcome here!” I could hear the kids screaming behind me, frenzied, a joyous, alarming hysteria.
I turned to see my son. Thrilled? Aghast? His eyes glimmered and in them I saw a face reflected—half covered, mouth, nose, and chin wrapped in a black rag. Was this pirate, this rabble-rouser, this transgressor—was that me? I couldn’t read Pete’s expression. He seemed to be attempting to chant along with the other bellowing onlookers, but when he opened his mouth to shout, no sound emerged.
Then, across the street, a young woman, not cloaked, not shouting or waving her fist. Just watching, intently.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, AUGUST 31, 2016
Abigail Willard would not leave her. She had not opened the file in a month, since her incursion into Laurin’s office. She could not risk termination. She tried to refocus on her duties in the lab, and in the evenings, on Samir, who had gradually coalesced into a boyfriend of sorts.
Then, an email: Could she present her findings in New York by year’s end? Compare notes with the quantum physicist?
Pursuing a physics investigation into Abigail Willard’s affliction was beyond the pale. She’d thought this all along.
Though she’d had to set the case aside, the woman had been haunting her dreams nearly every night. No Freud necessary to explain this, of course. Mme. Willard had been sent her way as a signifier of ambitions that refused to be thwarted.
She replied to the email. Yes, she would make the trip to New York, to present her evidence and her theories. Laurin and his lab be damned. Let him terminate her, if he must. She mused again about how her narrative seemed to flow as if directed by certain unseen forces. As if, for her life, there seemed to be greater designs.