In the morning Georgie woke me up so we could bring an order of fake IDs to the Western Union. She did this by making an ungodly amount of noise in the kitchen so that she didn’t personally have to rouse me. She’d been traumatized, she’d told me, because everyone in her family was a troll in the morning. Georgie was also a troll. Last week she lobbed a boot at me when I tried to get her up, past noon.
I was already awake, though I hadn’t gone to bed until nearly six in the morning. I was combing through my night with Constant, minute by minute, trying to decide how badly I’d mortified myself. Should I be embarrassed to have called him Constantine? Did he think it was lame that I hadn’t painted anything, and did he blame me for the map’s incompleteness? Did I run weird, and did he notice while he was running behind me? Why, why did I tell him I was suicidal? And did any of it really even happen?
The more I thought about it, the more the whole night seemed like a dream. Sunlight streamed into the apartment. In the full and natural light, the night seemed less real. The sky was back to its normal, friendly blue; when I tried to recall the electric shade from last night, all I could see was this morning’s sky. It was like trying to remember a tune while another song played. I had no email from Constant with the promised map.
But then, as we were walking to Western Union, Georgie said, “Did you know the power went out last night?”
We were getting fake IDs because Georgie had recently lost hers to a bouncer in a foul mood. She’d put off acquiring a new one until she’d learned I had never had a fake ID. She was horrified on my behalf, and immediately set off finding seven to twelve more people for the order, to keep down costs. I thought this would take her a few weeks at least, but three days later she’d amassed photos, information, and money from no fewer than fifteen people, which meant we’d only have to fork over seventy-five dollars each. I had done so, reluctantly, after much pressure—another reason I hadn’t had enough money for a rideshare last night.
“Yeah,” I said. I thought about telling her all that had transpired but didn’t know where to begin. To say “I met someone” seemed insufficient.
It didn’t matter. Georgie launched into a prolonged explanation of why she and Tashya had left the bar without me. She’d taken several shots backstage with one of the other performers to calm herself down, but she hadn’t eaten all day and the shots turned out to be absinthe.
“I’ve never had absinthe before, I didn’t know what I was drinking,” said Georgie, as though this explained how one might accidentally ingest five ounces of hundred-proof alcohol. “Then I literally forgot my entire set. Like, I couldn’t even remember the joke about that time I peed myself at a bar and didn’t know what to do so I bought a pitcher of beer and poured it down the front of my pants, and you know that was so mortifying it’s basically branded into my brain. Then I had to puke, because I was so nervous. And Tashya happened to be peeing, so she took me home.”
Georgie didn’t mention that she and Tashya, hopefully prior to the puking, had kissed so emphatically they’d knocked the cold-water knob clean off the sink. I knew this because the other comedian, perhaps the absinthe supplier, had recounted everything to me in great detail after I’d searched the bar for them. I didn’t begrudge Georgie and Tashya, or at least I didn’t anymore. It was hard to stay mad at Georgie because she was so tiny. There were other reasons—she was kind and generous and funny and took almost nothing seriously—but mostly it was because Georgie hardly cleared five feet in platform sneakers, the only type of shoe she owned. It was like staying angry at a child.
Georgie insisted on going into Manhattan. When I asked why we couldn’t find a closer Western Union, it turned out that she also wanted to go to a very particular store in Soho for a very particular face wash. It never occurred to Georgie that this might be inconvenient for me, because nothing was ever inconvenient for her. Georgie was always running off somewhere to help a friend in need: yesterday to Astoria to help a high school friend build some floating shelves, the day before all the way out to the Rockaways to collect shells with a friend majoring in sculpture. With Georgie, I was always just along for the ride.
I didn’t mind much. While Constantine had made me feel like all my circumstances were illusory, Georgie made me feel more grounded. She had such curiosity and affection for life—it was hard to be too gloomy around her.
We walked to the subway. I felt paranoid and kept looking around for the police. I couldn’t help but imagine that a security camera had caught my face and Constant’s, and we were now among New York’s most wanted. Georgie was talking the entire time about a party she wanted to attend, but I was busy running through arrest scenarios until Georgie poked me in the arm and asked me what I was going to wear.
The train pulled into the station. I was overwhelmed. “What?” I said as we got on. “What did you say? Wearing to what?”
There were no seats. We stood by a pole, with a guy wearing earbuds.
“The party,” said Georgie. “Arlo said the theme is communism, but he didn’t say if it was pro or anti. So I guess we should just play it safe and wear red. But my red top—you know the one? The off-the-shoulder one—is in my hamper. But not deep in my hamper, so I might be able to resuscitate it. I don’t know. What if the party is ironically anti-communism and we’re the only ones who show up wearing red? What if everyone else is dressed up as McCarthy?”
I could tell the guy with the earbuds had paused his music and was eavesdropping.
“I’m really tired—”
“No, Ocean, come on! You have to come. You didn’t come to the last one! I promise I’ll let you mope in your room for the rest of the week, but you have to come to this. There are people I want you to meet! Please say you’ll come. You’re coming.”
The party was being hosted by one of Georgie’s school friends, who (Georgie said) she was much closer to now that she (Georgie) had dropped out. When Georgie was at school, she had sort of hated everyone, except it turned out that she was just sleep-deprived. She hadn’t batted an eye when she’d learned I was taking a gap year without a good reason. She was skeptical of higher education to begin with, and besides, she knew plenty of people who took time to find themselves in Nepal or Malawi or, well, New York City.
But I felt like I was squandering time. Most days I was depleted. I felt both dull and absurd. I didn’t want to go out and interact with people; even the mention of the party made me feel suddenly wide-awake with panic, like someone was peeling my skin off. All the time I felt guilty, and at least vaguely horrified by what I’d done. My whole life I’d told my mother everything, and now everything I told her was false. But Georgie was always going out, and she always wanted company. Last night I had finally caved, and they’d left me at the bar. But as I watched Georgie chew on her lip, it occurred to me that she was trying to make it up to me. I felt suddenly unkind.
“Well,” I relented. “I might leave early.”
“That’s fine!” Georgie beamed. She had no intention of letting me leave early.
The train trembled on. I asked Georgie if she knew how they built the tunnels under the river, but she only shrugged. I guess this was an effect of having grown up in the city: even the most extraordinary details were mundane. But I thought about the underwater tunnels every time I was on the subway; engineering fell so far outside my reality that it might as well have been magic. So much of life was like this: inconceivable. I couldn’t help but feel suspicious that these hidden mechanics were a form of afterlife torture for killing myself—how little I knew, and how no one else seemed to care.
As soon as we got off the train, my phone began to vibrate in my pocket. It was my mother. My hands immediately went clammy; I felt each pore open until the sweat was welling in my palms, a ticklish sensation. It was crazy to me that some of the most extreme things I felt weren’t real: my stomach didn’t tear its way through my intestines and fall straight to my feet, but it sure felt like it. My heart seemed to swell until it was stuck in my throat, but it wasn’t really throwing itself against my rib cage like a panicked dog in a crate. I answered the phone.
“Hi, Mama,” I said.
“Ocean, how are you?” she said, except this wasn’t what she said at all. She said Sun Haiying, my name in Chinese, which was almost Ocean but not quite; and then she said, “How are you like today,” or in fact, “Today how are you like.” I wasn’t sure I believed in translation, as a concept. I wasn’t sure you could lay two languages on top of each other and pretend like they matched.
In Chinese, my name means something close to “shadow that passes over the ocean.” My grandfather had named me. He had been on his deathbed, so everyone had to defer to him, though he had picked a dreadful name. My grandmother had even consulted a woman who calculated fortunes, who agreed it was inauspicious. My grandpa named me this because my mother was leaving for America—because he would never meet me, because he could not imagine me except as a shadow over the sea, the wing of a bird with nowhere to land. Every time I thought about this, my nose smarted like I might cry.
“I’m okay,” I said, then, “I’m a little tired.”
“You have to sleep more,” she said severely, and launched into a story about the son of someone she knew from church, who’d contracted stomach ulcers after studying so hard he only slept for two hours a night.
“I’ll sleep more,” I said.
“Good,” she said. She was on her lunch break and she hoped I was on mine too. She was glad to have caught me between classes. Or was I done with classes for the day?
Then I was sweating all over. Sometimes when my mother called I could get by without lying outright, mumbling responses and answering sideways until she had to go. It was lucky (for me) that my mother was a middle manager at an insurance company, because she worked long hours and I could always count on some crisis to call her away. But now I was in a bind: yes was a lie, but no was too.
But she steamrolled on. “I saw on the news that New York City lost power last night.” My mother spoke in statements. I saw, I did, I heard. She was so sure of herself. You would never guess this by looking at her. My mother, like me, was superficially unremarkable: not short and not tall, not diminutive but also not intimidating, and lately, I had noticed, getting older. In my mind’s eye she still looked the way she did when I was four or five: thirty and lovely, with long dark hair. When I looked at her now, the memory laid on top of reality like film on water, and time felt dissonant.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I slept through the whole thing.”
Georgie and I kept shouldering our way through the station. I turned away from her, a little, when I said that. My tongue was fat and guilty. But I’d said exactly what my mother wanted to hear. She told me to stay safe and eat well, and to study hard but not so hard that I got stomach ulcers. Then she had to go.
“I love you,” she said, and my throat closed so fiercely that I looked around to check that no one around me was eating a kiwi, to which I am allergic.
“I love you too,” I garbled out, but she’d already ended the call.
Outside, the day was wickedly hot, and the back of my neck broke out into a furious sweat. I pocketed my phone. The street was absurdly crowded. Great throngs of people bumped against each other, glared and elbowed, trudged stubbornly on. The sun was the angriest of all, garish with heat.
“Did you really get home before the power went out?” Georgie asked. She worked hard to keep her voice neutral, but I could tell she was asking to absolve herself.
“Yeah,” I said. Then, also, “I just didn’t want my mother to worry.”
Lies and lies. The truth, strangest of all: the blue light, the subway tunnels, Constant with his pockets full of paint. Last night felt like a dream, but I sort of liked that. By not talking about it, I was preserving some essential, surreal part of it. Talking about it would only ruin it.
At the Western Union we stood in line behind a family of Italian tourists trying to exchange a fat belt bag of euros. The father, sweating profusely in the unventilated space, was gesticulating too wildly for the small vestibule, trying to explain to the teller that the prices in Little Italy were just absurd. “Eighteen dollars for mozzarella!” he was shouting. “This country is mad.”
“Sir, how much would you like to exchange today?” said the teller dully, like this was not her first time asking the question.
Georgie tapped him on the shoulder. “The Little Italy in the Bronx has better prices, if you don’t mind the trek,” she said, “and their mozzarella is better. Also, the exchange rate here is terrible. There’s a place in Chinatown with a much better rate for euros—do you have a pen? I’ll give you the address.”
The Italian family had no pens, only cash. I dug through my pockets and produced a stubby pencil. Georgie scribbled an address on Eldridge Street on the back of a money-order envelope and hurried them out the door. The teller scowled at us.
“Hi,” Georgie said, scooting to the counter, oblivious. “We’re wiring some money to Shenzhen.”
Georgie handled the transaction. The teller did everything at a snail’s pace, glaring at Georgie every chance she got. I had a strong feeling that I had just lost seventy-five dollars.
Georgie’s face wash cost forty dollars before tax. The store was one of the strangest places I’d ever been. It was very slightly many things: the walls were slightly curved, and along them the great mirrors were slightly warped, and everything was slightly pink, down to the slightly oversized denim jumpsuits on all the ethnically ambiguous employees. Georgie checked out on an iPad and received a package via a conveyor belt: everything was slightly futuristic, slightly bizarre, seriously trendy, like Anna Wintour had opened a chocolate factory. I was relieved when we left.
On the train, I checked my email again. There was still nothing from Constant. I was surprised by how my stomach twisted. Surely he was awake by now. The longer my inbox remained empty, the more I was convinced that the night before had never happened—that I’d fallen asleep in the station and dreamed it all, or that I’d actually killed myself last summer and everything since was an illusion.
But whenever my mind wandered, it settled on his face. I could recall it perfectly. Faces from my dreams blurred within minutes of my waking and then disappeared forever, but Constant’s face remained like it had always been there. Constantine, I thought, again and again. Constant.
“What did you say?” Georgie said.
“Nothing,” I said quickly.
She arched an eyebrow. Georgie had extremely versatile eyebrows that were capable of conveying a great range of emotion, and right now, without saying a word, her eyebrow called me a liar. But she let it go. “So, Tashya’s busy until late, so she’s going to meet us at the party. I guess it’ll be like, what, four-ish, by the time we get home. So we have time to do a face mask and I’ll do my makeup and then I’ll do yours. And we have to rescue my red shirt.” Georgie didn’t stop talking the whole way home.
After the train it was the deli for sandwiches and juice, the bank for cash, the liquor store where Georgie wove a long story for the cashier about how she’d left her ID at the bar the night before but had had an affair with the bartender on duty today and thus could not retrieve it until tomorrow. In the end the cashier sold us the bottle just to shut her up. When Georgie caught me staring at her, she lifted her chin and said, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to sneak alcohol when you have two dads? I can get away with anything.”
Georgie’s parents live on the Upper West Side, with a view of Central Park and a full roof terrace. Before I met Georgie, I thought wealth was something totally different. I thought it was brick houses in the nice part of town and spring break in Florida, and a job at an office instead of a factory or nail salon. But here wealth meant millions and billions. One of Georgie’s dads had a corporate law practice and the other was some sort of big neurosurgeon at Presbyterian. To Georgie, forty bucks was probably just what face wash cost.
Back at the apartment, Georgie poured shots. Before I came to New York I’d never had anything stronger than beer, and then only once or twice. But my first weekend here Georgie and Tashya had gotten me so drunk I remembered very little of what had happened at all, and then in the morning I had my first hangover and puked in the shower onto my bare feet. But now Georgie handed me a shot and wouldn’t let me hand it back, so I took it, and then chugged heavily on the juice Georgie had bought.
“I tried to collect shot glasses,” Georgie said, examining her own shot glass, which was emblazoned with CEBU and several mangos, “one from every airport I traveled through. But then I never wanted to use them, because whenever I brought them out, someone broke one. So now I just buy alcohol from duty-free.”
I couldn’t imagine being friends with Georgie at any other time of my life. It seemed distinctly impossible that she would have paid me any attention had we not ended up in an apartment together. She made me take a second shot. I tossed it in my mouth and nearly puked. Georgie handed me the juice and I drank it, miserably.
Georgie dressed me in a red tank top and a pair of jeans so full of holes I was worried they’d fall apart while I was wearing them. She dug her own red shirt out of her hamper and doused it in perfume, and then we walked to the party. It wasn’t far. The heat had abated, and the evening was beautiful. Georgie started in on the host of the party—some sort of psychopath but the sort Georgie liked—as we walked.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Constant. What if he was some sort of psychopath? I wasn’t sure there was a sort I liked, but I thought I liked him, or at least I liked the time we’d spent together. Had we really painted a subway tunnel last night? What if he never emailed? What if I never saw him again? I tried to wrap my head around that: that he could appear and then disappear, that this was what people did. They came into your life and stayed for some random period of time, and then they left, quickly or quietly or painfully. Maybe he didn’t want to email me. Maybe I bored him. By the time I had that thought, we had arrived.