“Why are they together?” Lauren asked me.
We were sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park watching an older man kiss a younger woman lightly on the lips. They pulled apart and laughed airily.
“He’s got money,” I said.
“She has low self-esteem,” Lauren answered.
This was a game we were playing. It had started in the back of the Chinatown Bus, on the ride up from Washington, D.C. And it carried over now, through the Lower East Side, to this bench in the park where we were waiting for Cokie.
“Why are they together?” I asked Lauren, pointing out a new couple. These bright young hipsters with their bleach-blond hair and their neon windbreakers. They were practically jamming their hands into each other’s pants.
“She’s got money,” Lauren said, without affect.
“He has low self-esteem,” I answered, the same.
We had arrived the day before on the Dragon Bus. This third-rate bus line that had been blowing tires and bursting into flames up and down I-95 for the past six months. Real deaths. Not just cheap thrills and excitements. Still, thirteen dollars got you all the way to New York City and back, and they showed you a bootlegged copy of The Matrix 2. It was a no-brainer for us.
“Why are they together?” Lauren asked me.
“He has an umbrella,” I answered simply.
“Mm.” She smiled. “Lucky girl.”
Lauren had come with me to a downtown courthouse the day before, to deal with an outstanding legal issue, which I was happy to report was mercifully and speedily resolved. This was the reason for the trip. And now we were free to do whatever we wanted here. To go to the wax museum or the top of the Empire State Building. To eat lunch at Planet Hollywood or the Hard Rock Café. We could take a ferry to the Statue of Liberty or stand on line for tickets to The Phantom of the Opera. Or whatever else it was that real New Yorkers did for fun. But Lauren just wanted to see Cokie.
Cokie was in her first year of law school at NYU. We knew that she lived in a tiny studio around the corner from here, but we had no idea where. And Cokie wasn’t answering her phone now, which was driving Lauren crazy. More to the point, she wasn’t answering her texts. This was a concession to the fact that Cokie had apparently stopped talking on her cell phone. She would listen to your voice messages and text you back, but she would not pick up your call. Cokie had already broken off our plans for dinner the night before, and I had a feeling we weren’t going to see her today, now, either.
“Why are they together?” I asked.
I was watching a young Hasid, in his stiff hat and his dark curls, as he whispered something into the ear of his woman. She tightened her lips and shook her head firmly, no. The man couldn’t help but smile luridly then.
“Arranged marriage,” Lauren said.
“True love,” I answered.
* * *
We were staying in SoHo with Lauren’s sister Rachel. We had other friends, other places we could go, of course, but this arrangement was nonnegotiable. It had something to do with the politics of sisters, a thing I could not fully comprehend. It had to do with old rivalries and new grudges. It had to do with sibling debts, which were to be paid out, over the course of a lifetime, in blood and tears.
Rachel Pinkerton didn’t believe in the idea that she and Lauren should be allowed to grow apart gracefully. She nursed a fantasy of two sisters who were exactly alike. She was two years older than Lauren, and she always would be, of course. This gave her license to comment on the clothes that Lauren wore, or the way that she did her hair. She felt that it was her place to have opinions about the things that Lauren ate and the jokes that she told. Rachel couldn’t help but give off this tension in everything she did. It emanated in the way that she narrowed her eyes and nodded at the things that Lauren said. It was a pressure and an expectation that she had been cultivating over the course of a lifetime. Rachel’s was a well-traveled disappointment.
Worse, Rachel wanted credit. She wanted attention and affection. Buried under everything was a skin-deep plea for validation. She wanted Lauren to feel jealous of her somehow. This was why she’d been so insistent that we stay with her in the first place. We were there to meet her banker boyfriend, and sleep in her posh apartment, and pay witness to the life that she had made for herself here. The whole thing was a provocation.
But Lauren was nothing if not subdued in her reactions to all this pageantry. Answering questions blankly, as though she hadn’t even known they were meant for her. She was coy, she was aloof, she was withholding. This was the thing that was most surprising to me, really. I knew Lauren, first and foremost, as a fighter. But in Rachel’s presence she was suddenly deferential. She was vulnerable. She was noncombative.
But this was an act, too. Lauren had done this to herself, and there was no sense in making it worse by kicking and screaming. Even before we got there, Lauren admitted her mistake. She should’ve never told her sister we were coming to New York. Rachel would’ve never even known. But it was too late for that now.
* * *
For the last fifteen months I had been receiving weekly letters from the FDNY, compelling me to pay a $607 bill that I had no intention of ever paying. It was impossible to say what an ambulance ride was worth to any given person, of course, but it sure as shit wasn’t worth a whole month’s rent to me. I contacted my legal counselor (Cokie Braque), and we went to work crafting an increasingly elaborate appeals letter. Cokie was having a riot with this, generating byzantine sentences like: Because I did not want, need, or request these services, I never explicitly or implicitly agreed to pay for them. In addition, the very fact of my being made to go to the hospital under such circumstances is coercive and unethical …
Cokie finally texted me and told me to request an in-person appeal. She said that the city lacked the resources to pursue outstanding claims below a certain threshold. She figured there was a fifty-fifty chance that they would throw the whole thing out without even reading it. And if not, well, there was always another written appeal.
I had memorized the entire letter, ready to recite it on command before His Highness, the Honorable Judge. This included the closing remark: Therefore, I respectfully request that you rectify this situation, with all speed, and reconcile your expenses, if need be, with the party that solicited these services in the first place.
In other words, the NYPD. Har-har-har.
But there was no judge, in the end. There was no courtroom, either. I was directed to the basement office of a harried clerk with a stack of paperwork standing two feet tall on her desk. She asked for my driver’s license and typed my name into a computer. When it came back clean she asked me to sign a piece of paper and told me I was free to go. The State now considered the matter resolved.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” she said, waiting for me to leave.
It was only outside, on the steps of the courthouse, that I had the wherewithal to be ecstatic about this decision. I fought the law and the law gave up. But Cokie was nowhere to be found to share in my good fortune. And yet, we still had to pretend that we were hanging out with her for the benefit of Rachel, who was determined that Lauren and I should have dinner with her hedge-fund-manager boyfriend, Tad.
I had met Tad briefly on the first afternoon. The girls had disappeared into the bedroom, leaving us to talk vaguely about sports and the weather as we waited. We could hear the sound of their strained-but-even voices through the closed door. It was important not to rise to the level of shouting yet. Rachel simply wanted to make a point of saying that it was fine that Lauren had already broken their plans for dinner. And Lauren, in turn, just needed to say how much she appreciated that Rachel cared enough to try and plan the whole weekend to within an inch of its life.
I did my best just to nod in earnest as Tad listed off old friends who lived and worked in Washington, D.C.—congressional aides, and lobbyists, and policy lawyers—curious to see if I might know any of them.
“Maybe, yeah. Definitely sounds familiar,” I said, trying to imagine a world in which I could possibly know a single one of Tad’s friends.
* * *
I had woken up in the apartment, on Saturday morning, walking on tiptoes, with a desperate desire to keep the floorboards quiet. Lauren smiled at me, from the expensive pull-out couch, announcing at full volume, “Rachel’s not here.”
“She isn’t?”
“No. She spent the night at Tad’s.”
“Oh.” I straightened to my full height again. “Why aren’t we sleeping in her room, then?”
Lauren just shook her head.
“C’mon. I wanna do it in Rachel’s bed.”
“Gross, no. Absolutely not.”
“At least let me roll around naked.” I was wriggling out of my boxers.
“No!” Lauren laughed, as she leaped up off the couch and caught me at the door. Blocking me with her hips. The whole thing made me a little hard, and I pressed myself into her. But Lauren’s body lost its tension immediately. She was looking past me toward the door. It was never going to happen here.
“I’m supposed to go hang out with her this afternoon,” she confessed.
“That’s okay.”
“Yeah, for you, maybe.”
* * *
“Why are they together?” We were sitting on a bench in the Canal Street station.
“I don’t know,” Lauren answered seriously. “Because he has money and she has low self-esteem, I guess.”
We were talking about Tad and Rachel. I was trying to figure out what it was that Lauren’s sister did here in the city, to live the way that she was living. Rachel told me she was working as a “brand consultant,” a title she seemed to be inordinately proud and haughty about. It was a thing that sounded made-up to me, or at least highly dubious. But Lauren told me it was real. Rachel had been trying to rebrand her tomboy little sister all weekend.
“How much does she pay to rent that place?” I asked.
“No idea,” Lauren answered, not at all convincingly. I smiled at her as she glanced away from me, before turning back, annoyed. “Fine, I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anyone else. Rachel is sort of embarrassed about it.”
“I swear,” I said, putting my hand to my heart.
“Twenty-four-hundred dollars.”
“Oh. My. God. Lauren!”
“Yeah.”
“A month?”
“Yeah. It’s like all the money she makes.”
“Your sister’s lost her fucking mind.”
Lauren laughed. “I’m serious. Don’t tell her I told you.”
“God,” I said, leaning back against the wall. There was something staggering about this number. It was like being punched in the stomach. It felt invigorating to me.
“Tad basically pays for everything else. That’s how she justifies it, at least. I’m pretty sure she’s just biding her time until she moves in with him.”
“Right, well…” I said, with nothing more to say about it.
“Why are they together?” Lauren asked me, after a pause. We were watching two middle-aged lesbians strike a pose of laughter and affection across the tracks.
“They just haven’t met the right man yet,” I said drolly.
We stood up as the lights of the uptown train appeared along the tile wall, with a whinge of metal and a whoosh of hot air. Lauren was going to the Upper West Side to meet up with her sister. I kissed her goodbye and watched the doors close, as she pressed her palms to the glass like a captive. And then she was gone.
I went up the stairs to cross the tracks to the Brooklyn-bound side, and ended up going all the way to street-level instead. I decided I would rather walk now. I didn’t have much of a plan in mind, anyway. Just some friends across the river. I figured I would point myself in the direction of the bridge and see where it took me.
It was admittedly kind of fun to be back here, after so long. New York wasn’t like other cities. There was a kind of dirty magic about the place. There were things to see here: celebratory things and things in dispute. New Yorkers liked to make a fuss. They needed a commotion. They reveled in a scene. The thin air was buffeted with the sustained blast of car horns. Horns all day; horns for no reason, it seemed. These were just the general complaints of a nervous city.
There were fire trucks and garbage trucks and men up on lifts. There were cranes that floated over the skyline on invisible swinging pivots. There were Jersey barriers and metal scaffolding, which appeared in the nighttime, and never really went away. There were cavernous holes in the ground; holes being dug at all hours of the night and day. Roads were ripped up, razed, diverted. Traffic was slowed down, shut down, rerouted. Things could change irrevocably in an instant here. Hence the reason for the horns.
The hot garbage smell of summer was gone now, too, replaced with the bowels-y stench of ginkgo trees in bloom. The air felt cool as it funneled in off the East River. I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, happy just to watch the people. There were beautiful women everywhere: honest-to-god supermodels with legs running up to your throat, and just the everyday kind, too. There were famous actors walking around, riding the trains like nobodies. And then there were the ones who looked famous—who should’ve been famous—who weren’t famous, and never would be.
* * *
The plan was to meet up with Lauren and Cokie at a bar in Williamsburg. I got there first and waited with my beer, watching Wheel of Fortune on mute, above the bar. Lauren came in suddenly, flying through the door, alone, and in a state.
“Where’s Cokie?” I asked.
“She’s not coming.”
“I thought you said you were meeting her?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Lauren said, as she dropped her bag on top of the bar and exhaled loudly.
“What happened?” I asked anyway.
“We got into a fight.”
“You and Cokie?”
“No!” Lauren snapped, like I wasn’t listening. “Me and Rachel.”
“Right. Okay.”
“And she said this really fucked-up thing to me.”
“What?”
Lauren hesitated and looked away. Looking for the bartender, looking for the stool standing right there in front of her. “Do you have any money? I need a drink.”
“Yeah, of course. Sit down.” I pulled out the stool and she climbed up on top of it. The bartender brought her a whiskey, and she slowly started to breathe.
“It’s so stupid,” she said. “It’s like she walks around with no cash in her purse, all day, right? And she keeps asking me to pay for things.”
“What things?”
“Everything! And she’s not even asking. She’s just like, Hey, can you get this? like it’s this expectation. Money for coffee; money for cigarettes. She loses her MetroCard and she makes me swipe her through. And it’s not like I have any money, either, you know.”
“Right,” I said, stopping again. “So that was the fight?”
“No. I didn’t even wanna have that fight. I didn’t even really give a shit, you know? But then she started spending all this money on me. In this stupid way; charging things and showing off. And, out of nowhere, she tells me that she’s gonna take me to some bourgie fucking salon in SoHo so that I can get my hair cut.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And I was like, wow, okay, thanks, but no, I can’t. You know? And it’s insane. This is like a hundred-and-fifty-dollar haircut.”
“You didn’t want it?”
“That’s not the point. I was already late. And she was pulling this shit on me on purpose. It’s this fucked-up control thing she has. And, seriously, like a hundred other reasons why not. We’re right there on the verge of killing each other. I wasn’t gonna sit in some salon with her for two more hours.”
“Right.” I nodded.
“And Rachel says, ‘Oh, well, it’s easy for you because you don’t care about being a woman.’” Lauren’s face filled with rage. Trying not to cry.
“She said that to you?”
“Yeah. I mean, like, what the fuck? And I just went off on her. Right there on the street, in front of everyone.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Lauren stopped again, taking a breath. “And the worst part of everything is that I really wanted that haircut.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“I’m serious. When am I ever gonna pay a hundred and fifty dollars for a haircut? And at this insanely fancy salon. I mean, it’s disgusting. And I really wanted it.” Lauren allowed herself a smile, finally.
“I just needed to talk to Cokie. You know? That’s what pissed me off the most. Rachel can’t help herself, fine. But Cokie’s not allowed to do this to me.”
“What is her problem?”
“No idea,” Lauren said blankly. She turned to me and put her hand on my leg. “Anyway. That’s it. I didn’t mean to dump all of this on you, really.” She glanced around the bar absently. “Where are your friends?”
I shrugged. “They’re at somebody’s house in Gowanus, wherever that is.”
“Sounds far,” Lauren said. “Should we go?”
“No. I don’t care. I’m happy just to sit here with you.”
Lauren leaned in sweetly and kissed me.
* * *
We were on the train again, going over the bridge. Lauren had her head down, smiling as she read a text message. I could see her rushing to reply before we plunged back into the tunnel and out of service.
“Is it Cokie?”
“No … Rachel. She’s staying at Tad’s again tonight.”
“Oh,” I said. “Good, then, I guess.”
If I didn’t know Rachel Pinkerton, it was because Lauren didn’t want me to know her. And that was fine, too. It didn’t matter to me who was right or wrong. All of my sympathy was reserved for Lauren this weekend.
“I think she’s feeling bad about this afternoon,” Lauren said, looking up at me. “She wants us to meet them for brunch in the morning.”
“Brunch?”
“Stop.”
“Do we have to call it brunch, though?”
“Call it whatever you want. Tad’s paying.”
“Oh. Free brunch.”
“Exactly.” Lauren closed her phone and stuffed it back into her bag. She pressed her head to my shoulder as we trundled off the bridge and down into the tunnel.
* * *
“Where is Cokie?”
This was the first thing Rachel asked when we sat down at our table the next day.
“I don’t know,” Lauren answered, keeping her head down, as she tried to read the menu. But Rachel was insistent.
“Well, is she coming or not?”
“No.”
“I told you to invite her.”
“She’s not returning my calls,” Lauren snapped. “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, in a softer voice then, backing off.
Tad and Rachel pored over their menus, prattling on about carbs. This was a thing that they were suddenly dogmatic about. Lauren had warned me about this. She’d told me how her sister had been shaming her away from carbohydrates the entire weekend. It was the reason that Lauren made a point of asking the waiter about the buckwheat pancakes. She was baiting him into a recommendation.
“Mmm, that sounds delicious. I’ll have that,” Lauren said, snapping her menu shut.
We sat back with our Bloody Marys and did our best to honor this minor institution called brunch. Brunch was all about the surface of things. Sitting together; eating together; seeing and being seen. Even the name itself was a surface: brunch.
I was made to understand that conversation was more or less determined in advance. Poor Tad was doing his best just to keep things moving along this path.
“So did you fly up or take the train?”
“Neither. We took the Dragon Bus,” Lauren answered simply. It turned out the cocktails here were stronger than expected.
“Don’t say that.” Rachel glared at her.
“Why not?”
“Is Dragon the name of the bus company?”
“Dragon is a slur, Tad.”
“No, it’s not,” Lauren scoffed. “It goes from Chinatown to Chinatown. What else would you call it?”
“The Chinatown Bus. Not that that’s any better, really.” Rachel turned to her boyfriend with a scowl. “It’s some kind of illegal bus line.”
“It’s not illegal,” Lauren laughed.
“It’s just not really regulated,” I said.
“Oh, okay. These are the buses that keep catching fire on I-95.”
“Right. Exactly.”
“I don’t understand why anyone would take that bus in the first place,” Rachel said, clearly disappointed at the depths to which we had dragged her brunch.
“It’s practically free,” Lauren said.
“And they show you terrible movies,” I added.
“But why do they keep crashing?”
“Tad,” Rachel said.
“Well, I mean, they’re old buses,” Lauren conceded.
“And the drivers keep falling asleep at the wheel.”
“Right.” Lauren nodded. “I read in the newspaper that some of these guys drive back and forth five, six, seven times in a row.”
“Jesus,” Tad said.
“And they’re all wired up on Benzedrine and diet pills, too,” I said. “By the middle of the night these dudes are tripping their balls off. I guess it is kind of scary, when you think about it like that.”
Lauren laughed. “And they drive fast, too. Like, way too fast.”
“Can we please talk about something else?” Rachel asked. Tad nodded and cleared his throat, trying to rescue us with another mild non sequitur.
“So what brought you up to New York, then?”
“I had to go to court,” I answered simply, fishing the olive out of my drink. Lauren tried to stifle her laugh.
“Court?” Rachel asked pointedly.
“Yeah, but not really. I mean, I’d been hoping for something that looked like Law & Order, you know? But it was really just some clerk’s office in the basement of the building.”
“I’m sorry, did I miss something? Why did you have to come to New York City to go to court?”
“Well, it’s a long story, but basically I was refusing payment on an outstanding bill for an ambulance ride.”
“What was the ambulance for?”
“I mean, that’s the long story, Tad. But the point is I’ve been contesting it with the city for over a year.” They looked at me without comprehension.
“Another Bloody,” Lauren said, catching the waiter’s attention.
“Two,” I said, raising my hand.
“Why wouldn’t you pay for your ambulance?” Rachel asked critically. “You took it, didn’t you? I mean, imagine if we all stopped paying.”
“I’d be in favor of that,” I said with a shrug. “And, anyway, they threw the whole thing out. The lady ripped it up. I won.”
“Oh. Uh, congratulations,” Tad said.
“Thanks, Tad,” I said, lifting up my empty drink in salute. I clinked his glass as Rachel Pinkerton scowled.
* * *
An hour later we were walking up Prince Street, following through on a brand-new plan with Cokie. I steered Lauren around the sidewalk traffic as she held her head down, punching out a text.
“Cokie says to stop at the next block,” Lauren said, raising her head to find it. “They’re gonna pick us up in a white van.”
“A white van?” I asked. “Is that a joke?”
“I dunno. Apparently we’re going to somebody’s house.”
“And Cokie’s driving a white van?”
“I don’t know who’s driving it! I’m just telling you where we have to go,” Lauren said, betraying her own impatience.
But as we got to the corner, we saw the van pulling off to the curb, right where it was supposed to be. The door opened and we climbed inside. Cokie leaned over the backseat to kiss our cheeks and wrap her arms around us ecstatically. As she sat down again we saw that there was a guy with his arm across her seat-back. He looked uncannily like one of the Strokes. It was the drummer, or the guitar player, or one of the other ones. I was sure of it.
Cokie introduced us to the people in the van, but the names went right past me. We shook her boyfriend’s hand, and pretended not to know who he was. And, all at once, I wanted to start laughing. I was ready to give Cokie a pass for the whole weekend. She was blowing us off in order to make out with a Stroke. How does that even happen? I exchanged a glance with Lauren, but she wouldn’t smile back. It was clear she felt that Cokie was still avoiding her somehow. Lauren went silent for the rest of the ride, which was a thing that Cokie couldn’t help noticing. Lauren was not relieved to find out she was less important than The Strokes, and she was hiding it very poorly now.
“Where are we going, Cokie?” I asked.
“Uptown,” she said. “To Harlem, I guess. Right?”
“Right.” This was about as much as our rock-and-roll friend said.
“Yeah. It’s just a day party. Somebody’s house or something.”
“Right,” he said again. “Sean’s house.”
* * *
We parked on a leafy street, lined on both sides with ancient brownstones. Lauren and I followed behind the kids from the van, up the steps, and through the unlocked door of a townhouse. Sean, it turned out, was Sean Lennon. Lauren laughed and grabbed my arm. Where the fuck were we? We wandered through the rooms in a kind of daze. Outside the house, I had felt some loose allegiance with the people in the van, but they’d all since scattered. And Cokie, too, seemed to keep disappearing on us, flashing in and out of rooms, as we searched for the liquor.
“Why are they together?” I asked Lauren as I handed her a drink.
“How do I know?” she said with a blank face. It was clear she didn’t want to play this game anymore. “Do you think we’re underdressed?” she asked seriously.
“Not me. I was going to wear this anyway.”
Lauren smiled and reached out absently for my hand. Clinging to me in this room full of strangers. “What are we doing here?”
“We were invited.”
“Right,” Lauren said as she watched Cokie drift through the room one more time. The tension between them was making this whole thing feel that much weirder.
“I’m gonna go find her,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I just need to talk to her.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “You should go.” And she did then.
Ending up at a party like this is supposed to be thrilling, of course. It’s supposed to be wild and indelible. But, in reality, it was still daylight outside, and the majority of the guests were remarkably well behaved. More than anything, this house became the setting for Lauren and Cokie to work through this rift in their best-friendship. A quarrel that was never fully articulated to me in the first place. But if I knew nothing else, I knew enough to get out of the way of a thing I didn’t understand.
Boredom always follows expectation at a party like this. It’s like any other party, really. I walked through the house, taking books off of shelves and entering into vague conversations with strangers. I was doing my best not to stand out, or get kicked out, or otherwise draw attention to myself unnecessarily. No one really cared, though.
I was determined to stall now for as long as I could. I was eager to give Lauren and Cokie the wide berth that they needed. In the end, though, my hand was forced. I walked around a corner and found three long-haired kids blowing coke off the white piano from “Imagine.” They looked up at me with their blank and buzzing faces, and I froze.
“Oh,” I said, as though I’d just found someone sitting on the toilet and knew I’d have to turn around. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.” I couldn’t stop myself from cracking up as I hurried away. I was already retelling this story in my head. It just wasn’t possible for me to wait any longer now—I had to go and find the girls.
* * *
I was relieved to find Lauren and Cokie laughing and passing a cigarette in the backyard. They were sitting out on the garden patio, conspiring like old times. Whatever tension there had been between them was suddenly and mercifully gone.
“Sean Lennon just told me it was good to see me again,” I announced with a smile. “What the hell is going on, Cokie?”
“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “The dude I’m making out with is in The Strokes. You know that, right?”
“Duh, Cokie,” I said pityingly.
“Why didn’t you just tell us that?” Lauren asked.
“I don’t know … It just sort of happened. I didn’t even know who he was for like a week.” Cokie laughed, clearly enjoying herself. “All I know now is that it’s gonna have to stop soon. They’re gonna kick me out of school.
“Speaking of which…” Cokie beamed at me. “Lauren says you won your court case.” I took a small bow and the girls began to clap.
“We should celebrate,” Lauren said as she picked up the champagne bottle that was resting at her feet. I dumped my drink into the grass and sat down beside them. Lauren filled our glasses, and we raised them in a toast.
“To law school.”
“And the FDNY.”
“And the Tomboys,” I said simply. Lauren and Cokie smiled then, looking almost touched. We clinked our glasses together and drank.
* * *
It was a relief to find the apartment empty when we got back to Rachel’s. We were in and out and back down on the street in ten minutes. Hurrying through the sketchy beating heart of Chinatown at eleven thirty at night. We searched for our bus under the eerie sodium glow of streetlights, laughing as we clasped hands and hurried down the damp streets. We sped up instinctively as we passed the silent men standing in the doorways smoking cigarettes. Past the mysterious storefronts, with their graffitied metal shutters pulled down to shoulder height.
We stowed our bags under the bus and found our seats in the back, with the engine warming up. The cool smell of diesel clung to the static air. I pulled an ugly-looking can of beer out of the brown paper bag that I’d been carrying for the last half hour. It had a picture of the Chinese zodiac and an unreadable name. The stone-faced old man who sold it to me actually smiled as he pushed it across the counter, which was strangely thrilling.
“Wait,” Lauren said, as I scratched my nail under the tab. “I have some pills.”
“What pills?”
“I found them in Rachel’s medicine cabinet.” She smiled wickedly. “I stole them.”
“You stole them?” I laughed. “What are they?”
“I dunno. I think it’s probably MDMA.”
“MDMA? Like ecstasy?”
Lauren nodded, pulling them out of her pocket to show me. “I just figure maybe we shouldn’t drink anymore if we’re going to take them.”
“I’ve never done it,” I said, feeling strangely prudish.
“Oh, good. I can be your first, then.”
I nodded, and we both began to laugh. Growing giddy with the promise of strange drugs. The doors were closing, and I felt the pneumatics under the bus lift. I watched as the television screens flashed on above our heads.
Lauren tapped a small green pill into my open hand. “It’s funny that Rachel has these,” I said. It was too perfect, really. This image of Lauren’s prim older sister squirreling away club drugs in her bathroom tickled me.
“I bet you they’re Tad’s,” Lauren said. “Patrick Serf told me that Wall Street dudes eat MDMA on the weekends like it’s candy.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Which hopefully means that it’s good.”
“I’m not sure I’ll know the difference,” I said, as I pinched the pill between my fingers, studying it. “You’re sure that this is safe, right?”
“As safe as this bus.” Lauren handed me her water bottle, and I put the pill onto my tongue. Smiling as I swallowed it.
We held each other’s hands as the Dragon Bus crossed through Lower Manhattan, and the city lights, into the semidarkness of the Holland Tunnel. Lauren laid her head against mine as we watched the twelve-inch screen hanging down from the ceiling. It took me a second to realize what was happening.
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s the same movie.” They were replaying The Matrix 2, this terrible, off-brand copy of the mediocre original.
“No,” Lauren said, pointing at the screen. “This is the next one.”
“What do you mean? There’s a sequel to the sequel?”
“Yeah. This is The Matrix 3!”
We couldn’t stop laughing over this. It was like a joke being told for our benefit alone. As though the whole reason to keep making these hundred-million-dollar movies was to entertain us on these bus rides. It felt like flares shooting across the screen. It was impossible to watch, almost. Nonnarrative. Nonsensical. And distracting as hell. It had something to do with kung fu and space insects and the FBI, I thought.
“These are the post-9/11 movies we deserve,” I said, shaking my head.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Lauren said with a laugh.
“Just tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. I can’t follow it.”
“Follow what, though? It looks like a screensaver.”
“What are you looking at?”
“I’m not even sure. It’s like one of those magic eye tricks. I’m mostly trying to concentrate on Neo’s face. But it like doesn’t move when he talks.”
“Yeah. I’ve noticed that, too,” Lauren said. “It’s awesome.”
We stared up at the screen with our eyes doing pinwheels as the drugs coursed through us. The tunnel swallowed up the skyline, leaving us with a ceiling above a ceiling, and a movie that couldn’t be stopped. The light got brighter, and the colors bled apart. Our fingers intertwined in the dark as the serotonin dripped. A chemical approximation of love was commingling with the real thing now. The walls and the ceiling of the bus seemed to open up as we were shot out the other side of the Holland Tunnel and into the night.
“Why are they together?” Lauren asked as she stared into the screen.
“Who?”
“Trinity and Neo,” she said.
“Because he’s The One,” I answered simply.
Lauren smiled at me with a liquid feeling of empathy. There was contentment with the world and with each other. Love was a feeling floating just outside our bodies. Lauren’s face began to glow as I kissed her in the dark. We smiled into each other’s mouths and laughed into each other’s eyes as the whole bus disappeared. The gravity released us, and we were suddenly weightless. Somewhere high above New Jersey.