The party was on the roof. We could hear it from the street: the thrumming bass line from the speakers high above, bouncing off all the surrounding buildings as we waited to be buzzed in. I felt like we were in a music box, tiny and enclosed. Finally, several minutes later, the door opened and we climbed six flights of stairs and out a rickety door, to the most spectacular sunset I’d ever seen in my life. Even Georgie, in the middle of a sentence, fell quiet as we stepped out onto the roof. The clouds were vividly pink, and so close I was stunned. Toward the horizon they grew violet, blue, gold. I felt a sudden visceral urge to tell Georgie about last night’s sky, to describe it to someone before I forgot it. Already I was uncertain of my memory.
Before I could say anything, Georgie squealed. “Tashya!”
She sprinted across the roof and into Tashya’s arms. A full head taller, Tashya gave me a wave around Georgie’s wild hair. Then she looked down at Georgie. Her face was both abashed and delighted; I felt almost embarrassed to see her expression, an intimate thing. Tashya was one of the prettiest people I’d ever seen in real life, with dark hair that fell past her waist and a perfectly symmetrical face. It was hard not to think of her prettiness as an essential part of her, like it was her contribution to the world. I felt really depressed every time I thought this.
I didn’t want to stand there with them, not knowing what to do with my hands. There were probably thirty other people on the roof, none of whom I knew. No one was dressed as a communist, except for one guy with a Trotsky blowout that could have been a regular blowout. Everyone was crowded by a big trash can that turned out to be filled with alcohol. Beside it was a nightstand stacked precariously with mugs, along with a sign that said NO PONG WITH ANY OF THE HANDMADE CERAMICS. NO SINGLE-USE PLASTIC IN OUR HOME. Since all the mugs were ceramic and looked handmade, no one was playing pong, but they dipped their cups into the trash can and pulled them out brimming with a violent blue liquid. I wasn’t sure about drinking out of the garbage, or about having another drink at all. It was too much to navigate.
I went to sit at the edge of the roof. There was a flimsy railing around the perimeter, but I could sit at the fire escape and dangle my legs over six floors of empty space and think about Constant. I was thrilled by the height; it felt fitting to think about him as I sat like this, with my chest full of cold air, though the night was mild and warm.
I’d never told anyone about my inclination to jump off tall things, except him. It wasn’t exactly a conversational topic that came up. Sitting now at the edge of the roof, oscillating between wanting to hold tight to the railing and wanting to launch myself off the edge, I felt both relieved and mortified that he knew this particular detail about me. I kept thinking about what he’d said, how even a meaningless life was better than nothing, and being stuck in a terrible place was better than not being. In the tunnel last night, maybe he had been telling me that he knew how I felt—that he knew what it was like to want to close your eyes for longer than a single night’s sleep. But the more I ran that moment through my head, the easier it was to convince myself I’d misunderstood him, and the more humiliated I became. Who would email after that? I was miserable.
Someone sat down next to me. It was Tashya.
“Hey,” she said. “Look, sorry about last night.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want her to be sorry, exactly. I wanted us all to move on.
“It’s really okay,” I assured her, and then before she could launch into a whole speech, I said, “How was class?”
Tashya was older than Georgie or me. She was so old that I was terrified of her when we first met: twenty-one, astronomical. She was a junior at one of the best conservatories in the world, and at the end of each day she was haggard with exhaustion. She told me she once sat in a practice room for eighteen hours straight without noticing any time had passed. I told her this was a form of torture, like solitary confinement.
My second night in the apartment, she came home in a rage because she’d been kicked out of her practice room after running the same measure in a Ravel piece one thousand two hundred and sixty-six times consecutively. She wasn’t furious that she’d been kicked out, but that after a thousand times she still wasn’t touching a particular note correctly. Georgie and I had been baffled. “I’m just not touching it right,” she kept saying, “the quality just isn’t right.” There was no way to comfort her. She’d disappeared into her room and was gone again before either of us woke up the next day. Tashya was the best pianist in Slovenia—she had played her first concerto with a full orchestra when she was seven years old. But at the conservatory, everyone was best: the best violinist in Luxembourg, the best flutist in Spain, the best operatic soprano in Taiwan. She had a particular feud with a guy who was supposedly the best pianist in all of California and had thus been spending nearly all her time between classes lying in wait for a free piano.
“Horrible,” said Tashya, glum. “I hate Philosophy of Music. I can’t stand sitting in that classroom while Thomas Sato drops names of philosophers that I know he’s never read. Anyone who says they’ve read Kant is lying. I hate philosophy on principle, of course. Music is just sine and cosine, Ocean, it’s just variations on the sound wave, and the fact that it makes us feel sublime things is purely incidental. I don’t believe in the work of making meaning. Some people like Mozart and some people detest him. If there’s meaning in chance, I don’t care about it. I’m going to skip class on Thursday and go straight to a practice room. God knows Thomas Sato would never ditch the chance to listen to himself talk for an hour, so hopefully one will be open.”
“Isn’t talking about music sort of like music?” I asked. I thought so, which was the trouble with language. How could you talk to anyone if none of the words you knew were the right ones? What if you couldn’t even make the right sounds? I wanted to tell Tashya about Constant more than I had wanted to tell Georgie, because Georgie would only become sentimental and romantic, but Tashya was more likely to frown me back to reason.
Tashya swatted the air with her hand. “This is a semantic argument, Ocean. I won’t hear it. If you stretch the meaning of the word music to include language or conversation, then—sure. But you see that this is just the problem, this . . . making of meaning.”
I saw she was right. This made me feel worse about Constant. Maybe nothing had happened between us at all. Maybe we had been talking about different things; maybe we had felt opposite feelings, and this was why he wasn’t ever going to email me.
“Anyway,” said Tashya, “I am sorry about last night. Georgie really was just wildly inebriated. I’ve never seen her so incoherent. She vomited into a fedora we found on the platform. I heard you made it back before the power went out, though.”
I was distressed. It was a tiny lie told for the greater good, but all the same it made me feel awful to see it spread. “Yeah,” I said.
“She’s not hungover at all,” observed Tashya. We turned to squint at Georgie filling (or refilling) a mug with trash punch. She laughed at something someone said to her, then chugged with great verve. Tashya shook her head. “Unbelievable. She’s got the drinking tolerance of a failed Russian poet in the body of a small child. Just a marvel. An absolute freak of nature.”
If I had felt left out when they ditched me at the bar last night, I felt ten times more so now. I had been the last to move into our apartment. By the time I got there, Tashya and Georgie were already flirting. At first they were funny and interesting to watch. Georgie was smitten. The first week I lived there she couldn’t look Tashya in the eye without dissolving into silliness. And Tashya was even worse. She developed a tic of clearing her throat after every third word whenever she talked to Georgie.
But when their conversational spasms finally cleared, it was like they had fallen into a language of their own. When the three of us were together, I was outside their jokes and affections; it always felt a little like I was eavesdropping on something I didn’t understand. Which was okay, except for the mornings when I heard them eating breakfast together outside my closed door, or when I caught Georgie grinning at Tashya when she thought no one else was looking, or when they accidentally made eye contact and out of nowhere became incredibly, silently shy. When this happened, I felt like the loneliest person in the world.
I tried to imagine someone looking at me the way Tashya was looking at Georgie.
“I’m going to get a drink,” Tashya finally said, and beelined for Georgie. When I looked over my shoulder a few minutes later, they were already dancing. The light cast them in pink and gold, and something welled in me painfully, like tears.
Despite myself, I checked my email again. There was a new message. I was so surprised I almost dropped my phone off the roof. There was his name in my inbox: Constantine Brave, like I had conjured it. Relief rushed through me so fast I felt weak at my joints—the night had happened after all, and neither Constant nor I was an apparition.
Then I was confused. It was not an email at all but an invitation to a cloud document. When I clicked through, my stomach went sour with disappointment: it was just a map.
It was better than nothing, I told myself. I didn’t feel like I was losing my mind anymore, wondering if I was capable of conjuring up a whole person, a whole night. And it really was a spectacular map. When I’d first arrived in the city I’d cried in front of the subway map at Barclays Center, trying to untangle the mass of colorful lines. Constant’s map showed all the train lines and all their stops, labeled cleanly in tiny black letters. It showed all the places where you could transfer trains and even some places where you could transfer to a bus. I traced the screen of my phone with my fingernail, imagining Constant painting it with the same sure strokes he’d painted with last night: the arc of his arm, the shape of his back in the dark.
I kept scrolling down the map, and only then did I notice there was a second page. I held my phone so tightly my knuckles went white.
He wrote:
Last night after I left you, I dreamed I was Theseus leaving the labyrinth. (Well, in fact immediately after I left you, I walked to a different station and took a different train; I suppose this makes you the Ariadne I left behind for the wine god. It was Diana Wynne Jones, wasn’t it, who said this meant she fell to drinking? I toast you if you did.) At the other station my train came almost immediately, if you can believe it, but in my dream it did not. In this dream in which I was Theseus, I sat on a bench for ages, eons. And finally a C train came. It was very late, you remember, so there were no express trains. On the C line runs the oldest trains in the city: the R32 model, the Brightliners, first introduced in 1964. They’re an absolute relic, but just imagine them unveiled almost six decades ago, and how impressive they must have seemed among the rest of the fleet, which still had wicker seats. Trains of the future, they said! And in my dream I thought, Damn, they were right, here I am in the future, still on these trains. But as soon as I stood up to board the train, the doors opened and I heard the conductor say, “This train is being held at the station by the dispatcher.” Out rushed hundreds of MTA employees in their neon vests and immediately they began to tear the train apart. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had been waiting for hours, days. Right in front of me they were dismantling this perfectly fine train: unscrewing the doors, replacing the windowpanes, then the seats, then even the shell, even the links between train cars holding it all together. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again the train was a whole different model, one I had never seen before, with bright yellow seats and open gangways. The neon vests disappeared as quickly as they’d come, and the doors opened again. I heard the conductor say, “Due to construction, this train is now running on the B line.” So in the dream I walked home. I woke up still trying to figure out when, exactly, the train had ceased to be a C train.
Of course, it was all a dream. In real life the MTA employees would only get halfway through disassembling the car before construction stalled because the transit president had quit, or the unions failed to reach an agreement with the construction executives, or the city ran out of money. You can fix a map, but a map can’t fix a system.
That was all he had written. I read it five times while swinging my legs off the fire escape. The last of the sunset turned blue, then indigo, and then the New York dark I had come to expect: an inky violet webbed with the day’s pollution, and the brightest moonlight I’d ever seen anywhere in my life. Below, the ground became infinite in the dark, but I had never wanted to jump less. When Georgie came to haul me to my feet to go dance with her and Tashya, I only resisted a little bit.