Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  And then a night comes forward, a night memory won’t allow me to forget—the night on which Laura, outraged by her progressive madness, walked slowly down the steps from our home and in her arms, holding a chandelier, a sculpture, as Dylan came to call them, and like an offering walked to the canal, and though we both shouted, Dylan and I, “What the fuck are you doing?” threw it in, and as if we were all under a spell, watched it explode before hitting the putrid water, shatter in blue light. And watching those pieces shatter perfectly, my knee began to hurt like a phantom limb, a phantom wound, for no reason at all. I was no dancer. I was nobody.

  We had both gone, Laura and I, as far as we could go, and it was nearly to the end.

  In all the years we lived together, Dylan made one meal. Laura slept through it. Burned scrambled eggs with burned bacon. The smell of the fried yolk made me retch. He hardly ate, and that morning was the same. He picked at his food, swallowing a bite every five minutes. He lit a cigarette and smoked over the food. “Do you wish I’d never met you two?”

  “We thought we were special,” I said. “Meeting you.”

  “Everyone wants to be special,” Dylan said curtly, piecing the fat from the meat of the bacon.

  “But we’re not,” I said.

  “But you are.” He handed me his cigarette and made himself a screwdriver, shaking the orange juice. “We fallen angels are always mightily tested.”

  “Sounds like a good phrase for your wall,” I said.

  “Indeed,” he said and began spray-painting his sudden brilliance. “You know what I wanted when I came here? I wanted to build a boat in the yard. I wanted to sail around the world. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. To never come home to anywhere. To always be out on the water. But I never did. I got caught by New York. Lost in it.”

  “We’re lost too.”

  “We wait for someone to activate the darkness inside us so we can come into the light. Like moths in their cocoons. Poor devils beside butterflies. Like fucking babies squirted through the womb. Every one of us should carry warning labels like on CDs. You can’t blame me. I can’t blame you. Nature and nurture. Even the scientists know that. In the end, we make silk. We go to Montauk. We escape the privation of the clock.”

  When I return, my father looks drugged. His eyes are watery. He’s lost focus. He does not notice the doctor. “You know there is an Indian tribe that believes that on Judgment Day you are held accountable for your conduct in your dreams equal to your conduct in your waking life?” he asks.

  The doctor asks for my mother and me to step outside.

  “I won’t listen to anything you say,” my father says. He is singing, a song without lyrics, and then over and over again a chorus he’s made up: “Moon child, moon child, moon shine, moon night.”

  “His temperature has risen a bit. We want to keep him here just to make sure, you know, everything is steady,” the doctor says. “He may be having slight hallucinations.”

  Laura still had a way with men. She had a way of never paying for anything. She’d had that way since we were girls when she shoplifted makeup from the mall. One night we met two tourists at a bar. One was beautiful, one was not. Laura tapped one on the shoulder as if she’d known him for years and asked, “Why are you taking so long with our drinks?”

  The men looked confused, and then Laura began to laugh, and they laughed back with new desire. We squeezed into the seats beside them, repeating everything twice so they might understand us. They were German. Laura chose the most expensive martinis on the menu, then turned to me. “Dylan fucked you yet?”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “He’s had the entire city,” she said.

  I looked at her face in a way I hadn’t in years. We stop knowing the faces of those we love, those we see every day, just the way we stop knowing our own. The faces we know day in and day out become automatic, like turning on the ignition, lighting a cigarette. Despite the way she had grown thinner, her hair parched, her face worn, her eyes were still beautiful, magnanimous, unavoidable. They had grown lighter, their amber more brilliant. The rings beneath them were now grey and deep, but they broadcast such impossible innocence. Sometimes she would appear naked before me, undressing on the way to the shower, and though she had paled from our days in the desert, her body still glowed in contrast to the stark loft. Her small breasts cast perfect shadows on her skin, her funny walk, the way her ass seemed to speak, sashaying with sweet attitude so opposite to her swan neck, so elegant, regal. She was a thing so alive, always. She couldn’t not be looked at.

  She got up to go to the bathroom. When she returned, a dust of white powder was crusted above her lip. “The curse is back!” she said to the men.

  I licked my finger and wiped her nose.

  “Don’t be a hypocrite,” she said.

  We stayed with the Germans until two in the morning. In the end, while they were outside smoking, Laura stole their change from the bill they had footed for us. The bartender grabbed her wrist. I threw my half-full glass at him so he’d release her. It hit his shoulder. We ran for blocks, the bouncer chasing after us. We ran as if in a dream. The streets were dark. I slipped at one point, and Laura pulled me up, then hailed a cab.

  “Let’s get high,” Laura said when we were safely inside the car. She said it as if it she were saying, Let’s swing, let’s jump on the trampoline, let’s run through the sprinklers. She said it like a child. “Wasn’t that so much fun?”

  Our entire friendship was in the back of that cab we took at fifteen, the Superstition Mountains disappearing behind us, the windows rolled down, the dawn rolling up, the wind in our hair, going home together far too late in silence.

  Years passed in New York. They passed quickly. There were beautiful nights running home in the rain, standing at the canal and watching it snow. There were the rare sober nights spent in movie theaters crying at foreign films. There were the nights Laura and I danced in bars alone far past four a.m. The shutters closed, a secret crew smoking and laughing and defying the morning. There were Saturdays on rooftops when someone played a song we had not heard since we were kids, and we were thrilled. The world still might be ours. There were the few parties, where perhaps we met someone who gave us the impression that they believed in us, that they would help us in some undefinable but essential way, through whiskey eyes. But Sunday always came. And with every Sunday we were sadder.

  The subway was my solace. I memorized the variance in the sound of the trains. The A’s low rumble as if it had inherited the knowledge that its journey ended at the ocean. The difference between the new F and the old F even before it pulled into the station. The torturous turns the 2 made as it pulled in and out of Park Place. The tender whirr of the G. I studied the faces of other commuters. I tried to imagine their pain, their bliss. I still stayed on the train past my stop and took it to Coney Island. Sometimes I rode the Ferris wheel alone just to feel the wind, just to see the sea. I loved it in winter most when all that was open was a hot dog stand, the conductors lazily chatting in the train yard about their children, their shifts. Rubbing their arms from the freeze, wearing only their blue knit MTA sweaters. It could have been anywhere in America and in the off-season, it seemed the New York everyone had received, all glittering, claustrophobic, vertiginous, was completely elsewhere.

  Everywhere we went, everyone was on drugs in a frivolous way. We believed we were too, but we were on drugs in a heavy way. It was such sordid glory, to be the one always with the number, always with the secret bag tucked in our jeans, in the foil of our cigarette packs, in our rundown lipsticks. To be the girls at 979 who knew where the stash was. There were too many people now to simply leave it out on a table. Laura and I had purpose. We were possessed with the power to ensure all the beautiful people wouldn’t leave the night without getting high.

  In time, though, Laura began to lock herself in the bathroom for hours,
talking to herself. She took chairs out to the lot and sat staring into the canal, missing the party entirely. And in time, I was exhausted if not high, a shell of a person. And some nights, alone in my bed, I felt that my heart might cave in at any minute. Some nights I walked home through the snow or the rain or the heat, walked until the dawn fell and saw death. I saw auras, patches of sky vacuumed through. I believed I saw the devil once. He had a bellowing face. He was beautiful. Dark complected, tiger eyed. He was far from me, across the room from me. I could not help but be drawn to him. I began to get closer. I could hear him say as a vial was placed in my hand, “And in the end, even God will have to admit that all those who wandered here wandered toward good.”

  Dylan was snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Ariel, you want some or what?”

  “My bones are sore,” I said.

  I see the panic in my mother’s eyes. “I have to go out for a while . . . I need some air,” she says.

  My father’s nurse comes to change his sheets. They are entirely wet. I long for a drink. It is not even noon. I can see that the heart rate on his monitor has elevated. His blood pressure too. I can see his soul on that monitor. I remember suddenly to pray. I do not believe the words that run through my mind as I recite silently. But I repeat them beneath my breath, over and over again.

  There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed. At 979, it was eternally 5:13 in the morning. The dawn is so violent when you’ve stayed up all night. At that hour, I see the three of us at Dylan’s table or in the truck, doing lines of whatever pill or powder we could find, downing the last drip of whiskey, so high we screamed at the dawn for its innocence. Some nights in bed alone, I tried to pray. Tried to repeat the words my mother used to hush me up in my childhood bed. Shema Yisrael. But the rest of the words wouldn’t come. I hadn’t prayed since fifteen. That night long gone, sitting in the backseat of the meth car, behind the blond boy streaked blue, gazing at the desert still as midnight, believing time was not a circle but a ladder that only led upward.

  One morning, I looked at the clock and saw that it was 5:13 when Laura begged me to come up on the roof with her. We waved at a train. No one seemed to notice. No one waved back. No one was looking out of the train window at that hour. They were good people. They were going to work.

  That night on the roof, Laura said, “Let’s jump.” She said it over and over again, giddy. Let’s jump, jump, jump.

  I thought of what my parents would be doing at that very moment, asleep together at the end of a long night, my father closing the garage as the blue dawn rose over the desert. His taxi safely inside. Everything slowly gaining color and definition with the song of the birds. “Come on, Laura. Let’s go down.”

  “Maybe if we jump,” she said, “we won’t fall, we’ll just keep going. Didn’t you ever play that game as a kid? The Peter Pan game, where you’d fly off some steps and see how long it’d take you to land?”

  “Danielle is not Laura,” I said. She threw her cigarette toward the tracks, then took both of my hands and began to whirl me around and around and around.

  “What does it feel like to have a mother?” she said as we spun.

  “I have to stop,” I said. Laura sat down cross-legged and pulled at her hair, waiting for an answer. “To have a mother feels like somehow you are safe.”

  “Safe,” she repeated. “Maybe that’s why I’m so unsafe.”

  “It’s five fifteen,” I said.

  “So?” she said. “Since when do you care what time it is?”

  At last I went home. While I was there, my father stayed out wandering in his taxi every night. I’d hear the garage door at three in the morning, his slow shuffle through the door, the clink of ice in a glass.

  While he was out in the night still in pursuit of his alien ship, my mother and I would share two bottles of wine and sit before the television. She’d fall asleep halfway through the first movie. I’d shake her awake around midnight, bring her to bed just the way I always did. “How’d you finish all that wine?” she’d say.

  Finally my father broke his silence. “Let’s go take a walk, Ahlam. Let’s go to the reservation.” As we walked, he would take a step and wince. We rested every hundred meters. “I just need to go in for another procedure. Just one more this time,” he said.

  An hour later, we were in the car. I was driving him to the hospital.

  “Just down Mountainview, like the way we used to go.”

  “I know the way, Dad.”

  “I just need them to give me morphine. It’s the only thing that makes the pain go away,” he said.

  On the drive home, dazed and dreamy, my father spoke. “The one they nearly left in the road out of Palestine . . . that was me. I am Yusef. I am the curse. She nearly left me, my own mother. I brought this tragedy.” From his pocket he produced a fifth of vodka.

  “Dad, you can’t drink with that medicine,” I said.

  “We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That’s why I named you Ahlam.”

  I lit a cigarette. “Go ahead, take a smoke,” my father said. “It won’t kill you. Only sadness will.”

  For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night. For my father’s family this was called Palestine, for my mother’s, it was “next year in Jerusalem.” One branch of my blood comprised of wandering in the desert for forty years at my birth; the other of wandering for two thousand, only to find themselves home in a land continually threatened by war. For those who were here before us it was all the names, all the names slowly being erased, names long since renamed, long since buried.

  I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.

  When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain. There was a new café on our block between the loft and the train. There were two girls sitting on a patio table at its front. There was a luxury furniture store opening in a month. The Kentile Floors sign was to be taken down. Every day there were new faces arriving in the city, drugged with dreams. Nothing would stop New York. The watermelon men looked on, tilted their hats with less and less passion, suspecting soon, perhaps, they would be disappeared from their own block. I loved the secret spaces in New York, the vacant spaces. The abandoned buildings of Fort Tilden, sand filling the floors, the abandoned homes in the Navy Yard, their windows broken through by tree branches, the outdoor shuttle train in Crown Heights, moving through the snow and the leaves and the forgotten cigarettes, moving on beside the park suddenly as if through the woods. I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.

  I was still a secretary. There were new horrors to fear. Every day a dog and a cop passed me in the station. We always saw something, but we never said anything. There were new bombs and new famines and new viruses.

  One afternoon, I followed a young dancer out of the train at Lincoln Center, her tresses wrapped up in a perfect bun. Her smell soaked the car, her smell of hairspray, of chalk, of lipstick, of hope. I had no business being there, but I followed her until she disappeared through the glass doors. “Hey,” I called after her. She never turned around.

  When I got home, Laura was on the bed with a man I’d never seen before. The stranger’s hair was white, but his face was young, handsome. There was foil on the table with powder in it. Beside it were two syringes. I never le
arned his name. “It’s pure as shit,” Laura said.

  I had brought my music box ballerina from Arizona, the one I had had as a child. She was blonde, slender and tall. She danced to “Für Elise” forever, as long as you wound her up. She could have spun and spun just like I was spinning and spinning out of orbit except that I could blame no one for it, not even Laura. And so that night, coming down hard and sad and nauseous, my heart beating too fast, I thought it made sense to let my ballerina go. I spun her up and dropped her in that poisoned canal, Beethoven fading as the wind took her slowly away from me.

  I return from retrieving my mother when I see two officers rushing down the hall toward my father’s room. Their guns bang against their legs, and for a moment I fantasize slipping one out from their holsters, taking hostage of the entire hospital, letting my father go free. There is shouting and commotion, and my nails are pressed into my palms, drawing blood.

  My mother looks at me, and we both begin to run after the guards. She falls behind me, whimpering. My father’s room is empty, the sheets hanging from the bed, the IVs tethered to nothing.

  At the last party I remember, Laura stripped to her bra and underwear, climbed atop the stove, grabbed Dylan’s hair, spit on Dylan’s face, told Dylan to light her on fire if he wanted to get rid of her. He picked her up and moved her outside like a bag of trash to deposit outdoors while she struggled, kicking against him. He mouthed crazy to the guests, making a circular motion at his temple with his fingers to signify such dispensable madness. I went out after them.