“You can’t sleep here.”
The voice was male and not particularly friendly sounding. The statement itself was demonstrably false, as Richard had been sleeping undisturbed in the back booth of the bar for what felt like a long time. Obviously you could sleep here—that someone didn’t want him sleeping there was an entirely different issue. He began formulating a response to that effect, when he felt rough hands grabbing his green sports jacket, hauling him up from the bench. Anyone strong enough to lift him from a prone position would have to be terrifyingly enormous; he opened his eyes and verified this fact.
The bouncer, a bearded leviathan encased in jeans and a black Zildjian T-shirt, deposited him with gentle condescension on the sidewalk in front of the bar. Before closing the door, the man clapped his hands together as though dusting them off, a bit of gratuitous cruelty that drew a laugh from somewhere inside. Inside where? The bar had no sign, just a giant, ornate letter M stenciled on the window that Richard could barely make out in the dark. Of course, not knowing the name of the bar was the least of his concerns. He also didn’t know where he was, past knowing he was somewhere in, or near, New York City. A man in a charcoal business suit with a phone to his ear skirted balletically around him without a downward glance. Richard slowly pulled himself to his feet and looked around, bleary. There were no skyscrapers here, no identifiable landmarks. A gust of wind blew a sheet of newspaper past a row of storage units next to where he stood. He imagined picking up the paper and discovering, Twilight Zone–style, that it was some impossibly distant date in the future.
What had happened? He wasn’t sure. It felt like his brain had been replaced by a urinal cake—he was having difficulty remembering anything that happened longer than about ten seconds before. His ejection from the M Bar already had a reported quality, as though it was someone else’s anecdote. Vaguer still was an earlier memory—more of a ghostly afterimage—of walking down the street drinking from a paper bag, singing, babbling to himself, getting pushed over by someone. He was just sober enough now to have a sense of how incredibly drunk he’d been, and how unbearable sobering up the rest of the way would be, if he let it come to that.
He moved slowly down the sidewalk, toward the black shard of water visible between buildings, just to have something to move toward. Like life, he thought, immediately hating himself for always having the same thoughts; his mental landscape was like the background in one of those cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons he’d watched with Cindy when she was young and he was unemployed, in which the same five background frames—a house, a rock, a bird, a car, a dog—cycle past again and again, although in his case: pointlessness, deception, regret, and so on. The shimmering, sinister glass of a storefront momentarily reflected his image, and he thought how incredibly tired he was of this guy, this scuttling lump.
He wasn’t so much tired of his defects—they were so old and familiar that, like a tattered quilt, they brought with them a certain shabby comfort—as he was tired of the splinter of his consciousness that recognized these defects yet refused to do anything about them. This, in fact, was the truly defective part, the part that knew better but didn’t care, or didn’t care enough, or had just given up a long time ago. The derelict mansion of his life had been built from bricks of fear and weakness, but wholesale surrender to his own worst instincts undergirded the whole rotten edifice.
The sidewalk petered out into cobblestones and a sort of open-air plaza near the river. Stumbling through it, he was dimly aware of other people doing things: walking their dogs, talking, laughing, playing music too loud, eating, drinking, sleeping. Dimly Aware of Other People: now there was an epitaph. A gray concrete retaining wall impeded his progress, separating him from what, despite his brain fog, he recognized as the East River. It had to be, because Manhattan glowed behind it, a smeared stadium of light. Somewhere in Brooklyn, then. The interior of a taxi flashed in his mind, but his motives for coming here were lost to him. Movement for its own sake. Escape. He threw one leg up on the wall, then leaned forward and leveraged the considerable remainder of his person up. Though he could have simply lunged or rolled his way over the side, some ridiculous part of his ego—as though there was an unridiculous part—commanded him to stand and enter the water like a man. This took some doing, but he eventually was looking down at his own feet, then farther down to the greedy froth churning at the base of the concrete wall below, garishly lit by the streetlamp overhead: plastic bottles, beer cans, used condoms, candy wrappers, dead pigeons, mud, and other stuff floated in the water, topped by a sparkling blue bacterial foam. A whirlpool of junk, like your own life.
Someone yelled, and he jumped.