I never took anyone home. After seven years, I told myself, my cells would be entirely different. I have always been susceptible to a fool’s suspicions. Walking on cracks, the myth of renascence after a set of years, but somehow I ignored all of Dylan’s broken mirrors. When seven years had passed after Eli, I would find a man and we would make love and we would cross the ocean, live entirely elsewhere of everything.
But there were still men everywhere. And there was power in being so young. I barely knew how to wear my own face. But I was nothing desperate, hardly aware of time being a thing that might affect the eyes, the hair, the legs.
One night I met a Frenchman. His suit smelled expensive. I sat alone with him over six cocktails. He wore a Cartier watch. He spoke to me in French, blew in my ears, kissed my palms with the slightest tongue, warmed my calf with his hand. His eyes were a soft blue. His cologne was already on my skin.
“I live downtown,” he said at last.
He hailed a cab for us. In the backseat, we kissed. His hands were already in my skirt. His suit buttons opened onto his chest. He opened the car door for me, exited, and paid the driver from the window of the passenger seat. I looked out upon it, Ground Zero. The American flag was still in the windless night. The shreds of buildings in heaps. Police cars lined the perimeter. The glow of rescue lights flowed across the scene, fogged in the dust that had not settled. Everything smelled of a fire gone wrong. All the hair of the centuries burned off the dead. I slammed the door and told the cabbie my address. The Frenchman banged on the back of the car as we drove away. Still, I wonder about him.
I found Laura that night lying down on the floor in the center of the loft with all of the chandeliers off but one, glowing atop her so that she was made of blue. Her arms spread open. I noticed a new phrase of Dylan’s scrawled in large black print on the wall: Fireworks or shooting stars? I walked closer and kneeled over her. She clutched her journal to her chest. Mascara was caked on her cheeks. Her face was pale. Her hair sweaty on her forehead.
“You look like a corpse,” I said.
“I fucked two producers in a row for a record deal,” she said. “And now I don’t want it anymore.”
I tried to draw Laura up, hug her.
“Actually, I fucked them at the same time, one in the ass, one in the mouth. Guess it’s a game they play.”
“Protection?” I said. “What about Dylan?”
“Oh, Dylan the lady-killer.” Laura lit a cigarette and held up her journal. “You know when he found us out there, his girlfriend had just died. She climbed up the fucking roof because he kicked her out in the cold and tried to get in through the chute and fell, fell, fell. Look in there; I found the article about it. Found a pic of her too. Fucking birds in the wild wood.”
I turned to the last page of the journal and opened. “But that’s you,” I said, and turned the photo over. It read: Danielle, ’97.
“But it’s not,” she said and stubbed the cigarette out on his floor.
I drew her up, and we climbed into bed. She asked me to hold her heart. “Hold it down,” she said. “It feels like it is going to burst.” I wrapped myself around her. I placed my hand on her chest until I felt her heart slow. The blue light of predawn smothered the room. I felt the depressions of her scar and imagined the craters on the moon, the craters in the desert.
“Everything here, all these instruments. I hate it,” she said. “They were all hers.”
“Laura, we just need sleep,” I said.
“Can I read you something? I wrote it tonight.”
“Shall I hum for you?”
“Yes, you be the music.” She began to read. “Everything is winter in summer. August in February. If there is a dream world more true than the waking world, it is us, naked and roaming the desert, modern-day prophets haunted by what’s buried beneath us—the ancient oceans, the ancient bones, the ancient names. I had a dream of God. He came to hear me play. I was singing to Him, but my voice wouldn’t sound. He froze my fingers. And then snow began to fall, inside the bar and throughout the city, and I knew it was falling everywhere, even over the desert.”
Laura started drinking more heavily. Her night with the producers got her a studio date, but the date came, and she called to say she had a chest infection. Daily she announced a new bizarre affliction. I found her in bed at four in the afternoon, nightmares spelled out on her face, her eyes open though she was asleep.
One night I came in through the alley and found Laura screaming at Dylan in the lot, demanding he tell her about Danielle. He held her shoulders and put his hand over her mouth as if hearing the very name was a violent act. When he saw me, he pushed her toward me. She was our child, and now it was my turn to watch her.
“I’m losing my power, I’m losing my power,” she whispered. “Please help me.”
The next morning, I was late and ran down the subway stairs for the coming train, running with everyone else, running as if from a flood. The stairs were icy from the previous day’s snow, late for the season, and in that part of the city, unsalted. I slipped, I landed wrong. My meniscus tore. The doctor said we’d know if I’d dance again in six months. “I don’t have six months,” I said.
Things changed after I fell. I couldn’t wait tables because of the strain on my knee, so I took a job at an office as a secretary. This lack of movement for eight hours a day, shuffling papers, the phone ringing, a blaring computer screen, depressed me as it depresses everyone.
The downers I was prescribed felt good. I had held things so tightly for so long. I had held everything so tight, so tight, I’d fall only to fever. I had held the world inside my chest or else be attacked by visions of its doom. I’d never panted. I’d never stomped the ground. I’d never left my stomach unclenched. I’d never left my hair down from a bun without blow-drying it. I’d never let go of anything.
When Laura drank, I drank with her. She stopped practicing. I stopped dancing. All she did was search for evidence of Danielle. She heaped pieces of clothing she dug out of the closet into a corner of the loft, daring Dylan to rid her of them. In response to this, Dylan stayed in his truck with various women, a different one every night. And Danielle’s instruments remained everywhere, untouched.
My father called me back at last after my injury. “I have the sciatica, Ahlam,” he said. “It is not so serious. It just means I have trouble walking. You see, I am with you even in this.”
“That doesn’t really make me feel better,” I said.
“I told you not to quit the piano. Isn’t there a piano near you?”
“I’ve forgotten how to play.”
“Well, all you can ever do is fight, fight, fight,” he said. “That’s all we know how to do in this family. Survive.”
“Do you remember Woody?” my father asks.
“No, I don’t remember any Woody,” I say.
“He is the one who saved us in the Superstitions. I picked him up from this hospital in the cab and thought, I know this American guy. I know him. He was sick. He had some disease with the liver.”
“I remember now.”
“He sang to me in the cab. He was singing. Just like your friend, that Laura. Very nice voice. He sang some song. Moon something, moon child. He’s probably dead by now.”
“I remember his gun,” I say.
“Get me out of here, Ahlam. They’re trying to kill me,” he says.
The underworld could be everywhere. There were those who wandered into the Superstition Mountains, where my father and I once were lost. With a hunger for gold, they wandered looking for secret mines and were found beheaded. The skeletons of wanderer after wanderer were found in isolated passes of the mountains, their skulls found elsewhere. In the ruined Gowanus Canal, there were rumored to be hundreds of corpses tossed and hidden forever in its depths. Beneath this earth, I once believed there was a basement filled with spirits of those p
assed. But I know now they are never above or below. We are surrounded.
Dylan broke only once in front of me. He had such a hard demeanor and caved toward upset and warmth only rarely. But when he did, one was compelled to the belief that maybe in fact, he was good. Like seeing the sun after so many cold months. The sun could be so bright, so intense. Perhaps he took cover in endless women, drugs, alcohol, because his pain was more passionate than ours. Because he wasn’t just a normal person. He was special. He was starlight. How can we ever believe anything else? The people we’ve lived beside, the people we’ve loved. There must be good, we will wait to find it. We must find it.
I found Dylan pacing in the yard, his face red, his boots crunching the glass. “I bought her a bird,” he said. “A blue finch.”
“How kind.” I snorted.
“What was I supposed to do?” He cornered me by the truck, and for the first time I feared him, his height towering over me, his impassive marble eyes. “You two were children. Tell you my girlfriend fell off a roof, and I held her as she died, and I regret the night, and I wish I could take it all fucking back. I wish I had a do-over, but I don’t. Now I’m watching it happen all over again like some curse. This is why I keep Laura far. I don’t want anyone close to me. Do you think I want this to happen again?”
“We should move,” I said.
“You aren’t going to go anywhere.” He grabbed my wrist hard. “Where else are you going to pay no rent in this city?”
Laura came into the yard. “Calling her Ofelia,” she said and walked casually toward us, swinging the birdcage. She leaned up to kiss Dylan. “Thank you, my love.” Dylan was crying.
Most of the time, the loft was so full, there was no space for confrontations. Laura would stay in the truck waiting to be loved or banished back to my bed, depending on Dylan’s company, his mood. It was always so full of voices of those hoping for another party, another cocktail to drink, the possibility of a night that’d bring them home too late. And Dylan would guide them there. He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He’d corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn’t know we had anything we would miss.
When Dylan was gone, we took to our corners, Laura humming beside her bird’s songs, me practicing my pointe, stretching, anything to hold on to my body. With Ofelia, Laura sat on the ledge of the window, watching the train snake past, smoking. Then she would sit at the piano. There was music for a few minutes, coming in spurts out of her like a weary machine. The hour she began drinking crept steadily up until it was standard to see her with a tallboy of cheap beer in place of breakfast. By nightfall, there was nothing for her to do but call a dealer to keep her steady, awake, alert. “Let’s call in the troops,” Laura said.
There were days we barely left the loft. An outing to the bodega was enough, as if we were being kept, propelled back to Dylan’s home, as if it were a vortex beyond which we were not allowed free roam.
I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.
No one had told me that you can wake up, years passed, and not understand the person you are, the things you did the night before, the things you said, the things left undone, that it can feel like a nightmare, a wildly seductive, spinning nightmare.
One morning, I found Laura sitting at the window, twitching. “I’ve figured it out. New York is too loud to make music in.”
“Or it’s Dylan,” I said.
“It’s the ghost of Danielle,” she said. “I’m being haunted by her.”
“Maybe you have to talk about that night with the producers.”
“Maybe you have to talk about why you won’t fuck anyone at all,” she said.
The sole aspect Dylan was unquestionably generous in was money. He left Laura cash every time he left the house. And with it, Laura began to do cocaine once a week, then twice, then every day, all day. And with ever-decreasing hesitance, I joined her. We sat together in the bed or at the kitchen with Dylan’s blades, a picture frame, a compact mirror, sometimes with straws, sometimes with bills, sometimes keys, and together consumed the pale glory.
On the train to work, sleepless, I’d hear women shrieking, coyotes howling in the screech of the subway turns. I’d see rats crowding at my feet and leap into the street only to discover floating black bodega bags. It seemed that every time I was on the subway, a man would stand from nowhere, pacing the car, and claim that he was suddenly moved by the Holy Spirit. “There is someone here on this very train who does not believe in the Savior. And I’ve been called to stand. I’ve been moved by my faith to save that damned soul.”
Once at work, I’d have to run to the bathroom and splash my face for thirty seconds to stop it, stop the attacks. This was coming down.
But when I was up, I was feverish without fear, in love, my body passionate and full of stars. Higher than any leap could bring me, any rush of performance. I was in love with the world, with the horniness, the meanness, the grandeur of the city crawling beneath my skin. I saw nothing ugly. I saw no war, no calamity, no death, no epidemic, no sudden devil on the train, no sudden devil in my reflection. I saw my body in a wind thick with mint. And I owned every single step.
In Arizona, I drank because I could hear them coming for me, the coyotes howling beneath the floorboards of our new malls and our new schools. In New York, I drank because the night was too short, and the voices of the dead still came for me from the cemeteries landlocked beneath highways and next to airports, from the mighty graveyard across the river blowing dust over us, all of us. In New York, I drank because inside our empty apartments where we lived alone, always alone even if with others, I heard long-dead addicts saying my name, softly and then louder. In New York, I drank to join them. I joined them because they made the voices I heard in my head shut the fuck up. Finally my mind, the things that made me black and blue and blind and ravenous all came to a halt. The blond boy streaked blue and the long-gone Eli and the sadness of my father and the muted desperation of my mother and the eternal return of history and the desert, the shrieking wail of it, the planes’ horrible sound, all the sirens, and the flight of dance and the falling down wrong and loving Laura, and wanting to save Laura, and finding no one in that great big city that embodied it as Dylan, so searing, so empty, all became crossed out, even if a night at a time. In New York, I drank because I was so young it felt like a beautiful thing to let my dreams fall down, and so I shattered them, shattered them good.
The last snow of that long winter, I found Laura beside the canal. She was wearing her mother’s fur, its lining undone, hanging forth. Her tights were ripped.
“Aren’t you cold out here?” I said.
“Look, Ariel, look. An owl just flew past.”
“It’s just snow,” I said.
“I think the owl is yours, Ariel. I think the owl is your animal.” Laura was peaceful. An ambulance bawled in the avenue. Her face darkened in its wake.
“You want to know how my mother died?” she asked from nowhere, looking at the canal and not at me. She had begun to do this more and more. We were losing the ability to look at each other.
“You want to know how she died,” Laura said again, gritting her teeth from the high. “She fell. She slipped, and she fell. It’s all so simple.” She began to laugh.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“They think she was running from something,” Laura turned to me, her eyes bloodshot, yellowed, starving. “But she slipped. Into the canal. And the current . . .”
As Laura fell silent, I saw them gathering toward us, the coyotes, their slivers of silver marring the dark, as the five a.m. blue rose over the glittering city—they came closer and closer and closer, so close, I s
melled their saliva, their fur, so close I knew by heart their ravenous vendetta when Laura took my finger, with its ancient prick, and pressed it to her own.
vi
April
I walk out of the hospital and into the wash with a cup of coffee. The sun is bright, so bright that my eyes begin to tear. The sky is marked with wisps of cloud. There is shade only beneath the olive tree, its black juice smeared in the dust. I break off pieces of a creosote bush. I smell the leaves and what little rain is left in them, the purity of the plant’s smoke. I smell the leaves and remember my father crushing them in his hands, smelling and sighing, his fingers stained, telling me this is what smells so beautiful when it rains in the desert.
I preferred New York under rain. It made winter days warmer and summer days cooler. It made the spring sad and the autumn sad in the exact same way. Like its sound, it leveled seasons. The years smashed together in New York. Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room full of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburg, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night. The new trains arrived from nowhere, their sound on the tracks so clean compared to the old, their automated voices, their fluorescent lights, their machines that told us where we were going but not from where we had come as stops, once passed, disappeared from the monitors. How Dylan’s place suddenly had a name outside its owner, and therefore was no longer ours but everyone’s, less a home than a social event: 979 after its address, 97 Ninth Street.
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