February 1985

I’d been living in my little loft for nearly half a year. The Westchester house, mortgaged to the hilt, was seized by the bank, along with truckloads of valuable shit. They got JeanLuc’s art. No will, because these types never expect to die. Others practically rehearse for it. The ones who don’t leave all kinds of filth in their safes, in bank deposit boxes with the fenced jewelry and laundered cash. It’s comical in a way—it’s like they think they’re immortal—like vampires. Khalika once said she was surprised that their images were reflected in mirrors.

The place would have been a hard sell anyway, because of the bloodbath. Of course, some freaks love to live in horror houses. In fact, they make shitloads of money telling stories of horny demons who want to fuck them in half after they get bored with chucking chairs and plates around. Why else would they buy it, even at a bargain price?

Khalika said she doesn’t think there’s anything you couldn’t find somebody to buy, especially if they thought they could turn a profit. So sure, live happily ever after in a house with a killing floor. Even then, the aura of what happened would be inside the walls, the ceiling, the cupboards—crouching in the eaves. Dead birds would be found in the window wells. Waking up in the middle of the night, voices, everything off kilter. Khalika claims she felt it in the house from the start, then, whenever she was there. It was like an unresolved tension in the air, emanating from the bones of our parents’ former home. I felt and saw it too, but I tried to push it away. The house stunk of the capital vices too—all seven of them—with exploitation and murder thrown in.

It really needed to be razed, we decided.

The crime scene: the cops had first dibs. The yellow tape went up. They confiscated all the underage stuff, some snuff porn that Khalika had already viewed and thought looked fake. There would only be one copy of the real deal—in the hands of the proud owner. I guess people want to believe only so much about this kind of thing and no more. Their psyches must reject to protect, until there’s no denying it anymore—until it visits your block, your house. They’ll read about it, shake their heads, and go on. It’s all they can do. Maybe they want to believe that, if they are very careful, it will never touch them or theirs, will never reach out its clammy hand and grasp them from behind by the throat, take them down, down, down, past the basement of what can be assimilated by the mind.

After the bank’s big grab, all I needed to do was pack my suitcases, Mercutio’s tack, some clothes, my books and music, and a few boxes of odds and ends, mostly papers and photos. Dick’s partners, the so-called legit ones, took over the agency. After all, they’d bankrolled it and had the biggest stake in it. Naked Envy went on as before, its sulfurous stench mixing with cigarette smoke and cigar butts, spilled beer, cheap or expensive aftershave and stale testosterone. I boarded Mercutio, and the girl who owned the barn agreed to feed his cat with her own as part of the deal. I couldn’t separate them. Nimrod would have hated living in the loft anyway, as much as Mercutio would have, even if I could have shrunk him down and snuck him up there in a carrier. I promised Mercutio that I’d visit regularly, take him out for adventures on the surrounding acreage. I’m already saving for a trailer so we can explore other places. The barn owner said I could hitch it to her pickup any time I wanted. I keep my money—which is quite a stash already—in the dishwasher. They don’t have a clue who I am at the Envy—the stepdaughter of their dead partner.

Before we parted company for the last time, DB said to call her if I needed anything. I said I’d stay in touch. I was closing in on the big 2-0 and could legally be on my own. I was really flying, wasn’t worried. I could handle it.

On a Monday afternoon not long after I signed the lease on the loft, I put the spider outfit on, took the subway to the Envy, and auditioned to Bob Dylan’s “New Pony.” It wasn’t hard to nail it. The new pony went through the paces. The few years of dance lessons Dick paid for to keep me occupied really paid off. Thanks, Dick.

Lurch, the manager, remembered Khalika, of course, minus the blond cornrow wig and street talk this time. I had lots of good moves I’d picked up when Khalika and I had checked out a few belly-dance dives on 8th Avenue in the Village. We were entranced by these women whose movements reflected everything female. Some of the dancers looked over fifty. They hit on everything—sex, birth, death, grief, joy—to the ancient, dark throb of a doumbek, getting it on with the haunted strings of an oud. I couldn’t get enough of it. They were like goddesses in the flesh, and in the dim light, hypnotic.

I was hired on the spot and Frank, the day bartender, penciled me into the schedule. Lurch had some kind of accent I couldn’t place. Dollar signs flashed behind his blank, detached stare.

I walked out onto the street and started back to the train. After I’d walked a few blocks, I suddenly felt like I’d been dropped into a scene from Freaks. The buildings on either side of Lexington Avenue loomed huge and monolithic, nightmare structures out of scale with the frenzied humans skittering around under them like beetles, or puppets jerked wildly by a lunatic puppeteer on uppers. One argued with himself, slapped himself in the face. Another screamed threats at the sky, gesticulated, then leapt around in a circle in a strangely graceful frenzy before collapsing in a doorway, laughing maniacally. Farther on, a woman in a bathrobe and slippers hissed, “Dirty cunt,” at me and stuck out her tongue, waggled it obscenely before using it to flick out her two front teeth. As I reached 5th Avenue, a Black guy in a Hawaiian shirt punched at an invisible assailant, gritting his teeth, drooling. “Motherfucker mess with me… come at me, bitch.”

All this in the space of a few blocks. It was getting crazier out here by the day. “Just like home,” I said aloud.

Is it the lies that drive us over the edge, or the truth?

When I reached 59th and 5th, a vibrant clot of girls and women in all shapes and sizes lined up behind a fluttering banner that announced a 5K through Central Park. Their red and white bibs read “Women Running Against Reagan.” They aimed to thwart his chances for re-election by running through the park toting water bottles in fanny packs.

Before the starter’s gun went off, a female spectator yelled at them, “You need to run FOR something, not against!” One of the runners gave her the finger, setting off the others. “Shaddup, granny!” and “Fuck off, fascist!” Outnumbered, she returned the gesture before slinking off.

I watched them toe the line, then take off in a wave of arms and legs to the entrance to the park. The carriage horses, behind their blinkers, remained unmoved by the surge. They appeared deep within themselves, in a place unreachable by the mad human carnival going on around them—the blaring of taxi horns, the sirens, the clanging lunacy that dragged people from the hinterlands to gawk and take pictures. To get robbed, raped, stabbed, clubbed, shoved in front of trains.

Suddenly, I felt myself shrink down, along with the entrance to Central Park—Alice before she went down the rabbit hole—as the joggers, now tiny too, approached it. Then it gaped large enough to swallow them, then engulf the whole block—the city itself—into its maw in one monstrous gulp. My knees buckled and I had to sit on a bench and lower my head. Normally, I hated being touched, as did Khalika, but when a passing Hispanic woman asked if I was “hokay,” I had the sudden urge to hug her to me, weep into her soft bosom, go home to the Bronx with her, where she might make me arroz con pollo and put me to bed. Instead, I smiled and said I’d be all right. A runner who showed up late and missed the race offered me her water bottle. After ten minutes or so, I felt better and caught a downtown train to the loft.

Why did I feel like I was losing the plot?

I slept for twelve hours, dreamt I rode Mercutio bareback on a trail that seemed from another era, another place. Without urging, he broke into a trot, then a canter. Suddenly we were lifting off, up, up, steadily and silently until we hovered above the trees. I looked down as if from a plane, everything a miniature, a toy train town. Mercutio galloped on effortlessly, faster still, until we broke free of gravity and floated in deep, silent space. I was delirious with a joy so intense that when I awakened, tears streamed down my face, my hands poised above my chest, as if I had been clutching Mercutio’s mane. It was Mercutio, and maybe Rhiannon, coming to my rescue, I decided. After that I felt OK.

New York was brutally hot. On the avenues, I felt nuked, cooked from the inside. My sister had evaporated again in the heat, like mist over the distant hills on the trails we walked together in our grass-stained shorts, sweaters tied around our waists, forearms streaked with salt and dirt from rock hunting. We’d create scenarios for how we’d escape, maybe take the train to Texas and cross the border into Mexico with a bag full of Bianca’s baubles.

Since high school, maybe before, Khalika’s mantra was always that I needed to toughen up, even when I told her I had reached my limit. She insisted that everything would become clear if I’d only stay the course with her. The world—what inhabited it and drove it—men like Dick, women like Bianca—would gnaw at your flesh, she warned, until it hit bone, then through to the marrow. It could smile while doing it. The goal was to blot out all the beauty, to shroud it before it could rescue you, drag you out of the nightmare men had created by, and for, themselves and the women who aligned themselves with them.

To accomplish her vision, I must, like her, present as a gardenia and close like a Venus flytrap, but faster… faster.

“Evil blooms slowly,” wrote Baudelaire, “like a flower.” To me, it was always there, in the form of my stepparents, of Dollar Man, of all that lurks in the crevices, the shadows, the empty lots that were rapidly being paved over.

Under her tutelage, I aced every test, but refused accelerated learning programs to skip grades at school. Khalika said I was far beyond even the most gifted students, and not just academically, but where it really mattered—my instincts, my vision. I had to believe her, even if I didn’t entirely feel it yet.

She used to leave me poems in the barn when she took off, short, cryptic phrases, sometimes in foreign languages I’d have to look up. I got more and more interested in art-house films, especially French ones and film noir. I once found poetry cryptic too but, somehow, always understood hers, almost immediately got the message or, as Jung put it, “the meaning beyond meaning.” That’s not really a mystery, though. We are a split egg, and people who make it their business to study the strange interaction of twins still don’t understand our peculiar and eerie connection. I never had a knack for metaphor, yet hers seemed to break through. “The connection,” she said once, “ours is on steroids.”

Khalika made sure I understood before she split again. I felt that tension, like something was lurking—under my bed, out the filthy window of the subway as it roared through the dripping tunnels with its dead-eyed cargo. Khalika advised me to ignore it and concentrate on making more money.

“There’ll be a quiz on Friday,” she’d joke before she skipped off again. Then I realized she never said which Friday.