Asleep From Day

by Margarita Montimore

  “So then you agree with my plan?”

  “I don’t know if I can handle another Sally plan right now.”

  “It’s nothing that thrilling.” She pulls out a map of the city. “I was saying, we’re not far from the Downtown Crossing shopping center. We should see if we can find anything for our costumes there.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “What’s gotten into you? You’ve just had a major breakthrough in the Theo mystery. You’re going to see him again in only five days. Why aren’t you more excited?”

  Because there’s a nagging in the back of my head that says I’d be dumb to hope for a happy outcome and questions whether chasing this lost memory is worth it. Because I want to call Oliver and tell him about this new development, but I also want to see him again and maybe kiss him again, too. Because as we walk through the Common and pass the spot where Oliver and I kissed, there’s no maybe about it—I miss him. Because I know these trees and benches are real, but not much more than that, and there’s a pounding right behind my eyes, and I’d give anything for a quiet, unlit room, a big blanket, and maybe a warm body next to me. Because I’m jealous of Sally’s energy and resilience, and I can’t match it, and I’ll never be able to.

  “It’s this stupid headache, Sal. I haven’t been getting them as often, but when they hit, they’re pretty bad.”

  “Oh.” Her tone is deflated, but grows more concerned. “You want to go home and save shopping for another day?”

  “No, we’re already here. We might as well see what we can find.” I force a smile. “It’ll be fun.”

  Sally narrows her eyes, registers my lie, and offers a sympathetic sigh. “We’ll make it quick.”

  We follow a side street off Tremont and find a sliver of a shop that sells flamboyant accessories: candy-colored wigs, feather boas, velvet chokers studded with rhinestones, the works. While Sally fingers a rack of marabou, I find a pair of oversized goggles and a leather cap with earflaps.

  That was easy. I bring the items to the counter.

  “What are you going to do with those?” she asks.

  “Wear them to ManRay. When I go as a poor man’s Amelia Earhart.”

  “Ooh, I love it! Doesn’t Zak have a brown leather jacket? I bet he’d let you borrow it. But you should also get this.” She fishes out a gauzy white scarf from a nearby rack with a magician’s flourish and wraps it around my neck.

  “Perfect.” I pay for the items and wear the scarf out.

  Next, we head over to Filene’s Basement, at the heart of Downtown Crossing. The area is retail heaven, built for commerce with numerous pedestrian walkways and minimal room for cars; shopping-bag-laden foot traffic is preferred here. There’s a faint layer of grime over everything and . . . something else. Hold still. Everyone around me keeps moving, but I tune them out and try to dress up the streets in the darkness and silence of evening. At the edges I can almost—

  “Are you coming?” Sally calls out.

  I twitch and teeter as if on the edge of a precipice. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I’m trying too hard, am too susceptible to déjà vu these days. Maybe I’ve lowered my immunity to coincidence and the quotidian.

  At Filene’s, Sally finds a white halter dress in the clearance racks, and I pay more than I should for a pair of brown leather boots, but hey, you only try to circumnavigate the globe and disappear over the Pacific Ocean once.

  At the make-up counter, Sally spends an inordinate amount of time selecting the perfect red lipstick. I swallow my exasperation every time she holds one up and wonders if it’s “Marilyn-y enough.” She finally settles on a shade sufficiently reminiscent of the platinum-haired starlet and we head home.

  On the T platform, while waiting for the red line, Sally burbles an endless stream of conversation.

  “ . . . And Zak and Daphne go to ManRay all the time, so we should ask if they’re going to this party—no, insist they come if they weren’t already planning on it.”

  “Hey Sal, I’m all for having them join us, but can we keep the Theo thing between us?”

  “Really? A couple of hours ago, you went on a radio show and told god-knows-how-many strangers about it. But you want to keep it from your friends?”

  “Actually, yeah, I do.” Her raised eyebrows and hands-on-hips Wonder Woman pose demands an explanation, but I don’t offer one.

  “And what if one of them heard the show and asks you about it?”

  “Well, I’m obviously not going to deny it. I just don’t want Friday to turn into some kind of big drama. Having you involved is drama enough,” I tease.

  Sally pretends to pout for a moment then, like a magpie catching sight of something shiny, gets distracted by a passing thought and resumes her chatter.

  Back at The Lab, Sally heads to the spare room to do Marilyn research on Zak’s computer, and I go to the kitchen, where Daphne is making a smoothie the color of grass.

  “Apple, spinach, avocado, celery and ginger. Want some?”

  “No thanks. But have fun living longer than me.” I grab a Coke from the fridge. “I’m glad to see you being all healthy. You, uh . . . you haven’t been eating a lot lately. I didn’t know if . . .”

  “If I have an eating disorder? Don’t be daft.” She smells the contents of the blender as if it’s a bouquet of flowers and pours herself a glass.

  We sit at the kitchen table and sip our respective drinks.

  “It’s Zak,” she says.

  “What about him?”

  Daphne emits a frustrated sigh and rolls her eyes. “I’m in love with the wanker. Can’t eat, can’t sleep. It’s horrible.”

  “Does he know?”

  “I haven’t told him. Better to let these things play out.” She moves aside her glass and lights a cigarette. “Listen, can we have a quick chat about something else?”

  Uh oh. Her tone is forced casual. I brace myself for bad things.

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I know Sally’s going through a tough time and needed to get away. It was my idea she stay here, and I think she’s smashing, really lovely.”

  “Oh god, it’s been weeks now. I’m sorry, you must feel like you have a fourth roommate.”

  The smell of Daphne’s concoction wafts my way and makes my stomach clench.

  “We love having Sally here but . . . it can feel a bit crowded sometimes. If she needs to stay another week—even two—that’s okay, but it would be helpful to have some idea . . .”

  “Of when she’ll be leaving. Of course. I totally understand. I mean, she’s talking about going to ManRay on Friday, so it doesn’t seem like she’s thought about when she’ll return to New York.”

  “She can return to New York right after that—next weekend—if that wouldn’t be too much extra time to stay,” Sally says from the threshold.

  Shit.

  “Sal, I’m sorry, it’s not like that,” I stand up, expect her to dash away and make me chase after her.

  But she remains still, clear-eyed. Right, I’m the one who dashes. “There’s no need for you to apologize.” She turns to Daphne. “I didn’t expect to be here for this long, honest. Being away made it so easy to think about my life in New York like it was happening to someone else. Look at that girl whose fiancé is on the lam, who was crazy enough to consider marriage when her taste in men is so questionable.” Her husky voice catches, but she swallows and continues, “You’ve been so generous to let me stay this long. But you’re right, I need to set a return date for myself. So if you don’t mind putting up with me for one more week, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Daphne bites the side of her mouth and nods. “Whatever you need.”

  Oh, Sally. Regardless of how demanding being her friend can be, I’m gonna miss the hell out of her when she leaves.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  ..................

  9/9/99

  BACK OUTSIDE, THE SOUND OF a motorcycle in the distance mingled with the leftover karaoke din in Astrid’s
ears. The wind picked up speed, made her a little dizzy. Was the night over? This couldn’t be it, could it?

  They bumped into each other on purpose as they walked back toward Chinatown.

  “Whose turn is it now?” she asked.

  “Mine.”

  “Our choices might be limited at this hour.”

  “Not my choice.”

  “Oh?” Her mouth went dry and her pulse surged. She studied a dustbin across the street.

  “How about . . . my place?” The words bold, their delivery tentative.

  “Your place?” she stalled.

  “Yeah. We can still get the T out to Davis Square.”

  “I have to be up early to catch a bus to New York. But . . .” How were other people so good at articulating their desires? All of them skydivers and she the only one who couldn’t jump out of the plane.

  “But . . .?”

  So high up now, she had to try, she had to leap.

  “You can come over to my place.” If her chute didn’t open, so be it.

  “Sure. That would be—sure. You . . . uh . . . you can kick me out any time you want.”

  Delight lit up her face. “Wow, nervous stammering looks cute on you.”

  “I’m not nervous.”

  “Anyway, who says I’m gonna want to kick you out?”

  “You probably won’t.”

  “Confident much?”

  “It’s more of a pseudo-confidence-slash-overcompensation thing. Let’s go.”

  She couldn’t tell whose palm was sweaty as they held hands all the way up to Tremont, to the border of the Commons. Leaves had begun their scatter at the base of the trees. A couple of students smoked outside the giant Emerson College dorm building and, next door, a man in a patchwork coat painted a clown face on the Dunkin’ Donuts storefront.

  Down the wide stairs of the Boylston Street T station, they waited on a C and E train to pass before a B finally arrived, one of the last of the night. They boarded the narrow, rickety train, and took seats near a cluster of frat boys wearing bedsheet togas and tinfoil halos, their faces and bodies covered in glitter. The low-rent angels swayed, grinned, and held themselves in an overly stiff way to belie their inebriation. Their conversation was so loud, eavesdropping was inevitable.

  “Oh, come on, dude. You wanna tell me you think your entire existence might be a dream? Is that what you’re really saying?”

  “No, I’m saying consciousness is some convoluted bullshit that a dead French guy can’t explain away.” One of the guys stumbled as the train took a turn and bumped onto Theo’s leg. “Sorry, man.” He turned back to his friend. “Maybe it’s like that Chinese guy who dreamed he was a butterfly, but then wondered whether it was the butterfly who was dreaming him.”

  “It’s all the same thing,” a third guy interjected. “According to Parmenides, the universe is a single eternal action and all events are part of it, including time. The problem is the duality of our mind, appearance versus reality. We can’t trust our logical, mathematical minds because we confuse the real flow of events with our attempts to interpret them. Even experiments in quantum mechanics show particle behavior changes based on whether it’s being observed or not. So if the observation gives it substance, what if the external world is actually an internal experience? It’s all taking place in our brain, so maybe the universe is a giant electromagnetic blank canvas and we just plug in and project our own reality onto it.”

  The haloed men swayed in silence for a moment, then one said, “This is why I fucking love Davy. You get enough beer in him and he’ll go off on these philosophical rants that’ll melt your brain.”

  Theo and Astrid exchanged bewildered smiles. As the train made its ascent above ground and crawled along Commonwealth Avenue, they caught more snatches of the group’s chatter (“But what about Kierkegaard?” “Kierkegaard was a miserable prick”) until it approached a major intersection with a CVS on one corner and Pizzeria Uno on another.

  “This is us,” Astrid said.

  They sidestepped the drunken angels as they got off the T.

  “Wow,” Astrid said. “That was . . .”

  “Yes.” Theo draped an arm around her. “That was.”

  Down Harvard Avenue there were still a couple of bars open, but most of the shops and restaurants that lined the street were dark. They walked past the giant sign for Blanchard’s Liquors, its neon switched off, but Astrid was lit from within, charged with enough voltage to illuminate the sign, the street, the whole city.

  They didn’t speak as they walked, a low hum between them, a shared frequency.

  As she unlocked her apartment door, Theo tugged on her hair. When she turned around, he kissed the tip of her nose. “Thanks for having me over,” he said. “Even though it was my brilliant idea.”

  He caught her playful punch before it landed.

  Inside, a short hallway opened up to a large foyer whose only furniture was a sewing table with an old computer monitor. A mantle covered with smiley face stickers held multiple incense holders and the walls were shrouded in aqua- and salmon-colored tapestries. A shag rug shaped like a daisy spread out from the middle of the room, which served as a nucleus to the rest of the apartment: kitchen, Cass’s room, and bathroom on one side, living room and Astrid’s room on the other. Beaded curtains that faintly rattled marked the entrances to the living room and kitchen. The air was heavy with the scent of marijuana and patchouli.

  “It’s nice to see that The Grateful Dead, apart from being iconic musicians, are also such . . . unique decorators,” Theo said.

  “Shh, Cass might hear you. Her parents were big-time hippies. You know what they say about the apple and the tree.”

  “This apple was obviously turned into a bong.”

  She snickered and led them to her room, where she cracked open a window. “Hope you don’t mind if I air out the smell, I’ve never been a fan. Though we won’t get a contact high now.”

  “Depends on your definition.”

  Theo took a slow lap around the room. There wasn’t much to see. Her walls were bare, painted a pearly gray, which matched the makeshift silver curtains (fabric safety pinned to the rod, as in the living room). An overstuffed navy couch and card-table-turned-desk took up one wall, while an Ikea dresser, on top of which was a small TV/VCR combo, and a bed took up the other. Teetering stacks of books lined a third wall. She straightened one that looked about to fall over.

  “I know I still need to get some grown-up furniture like bookshelves and a nightstand. Cass keeps trying to get me out to Salem with her to visit some carpenter she knows who makes furniture out of shipwrecks.”

  “How’d you meet this Cass, anyway? At a Phish concert? High Times convention?”

  Astrid smirked and pushed him down on the sofa. “Drama camp, when we were ten.” She sat beside him. “This was before I discovered I didn’t inherit my father’s acting chops. Cass was really good, though, even ended up starring in a Nickelodeon show for a couple of years. A few months ago, she called me out of nowhere and said she was moving to Boston to attend massage school. I was looking for a new place and she needed a roommate, so it worked out for both of us.”

  A fidgety energy overtook her and she stood up. “You want some water?” Beside her bed was a case of Poland Spring. She took two bottles, lit a cinnamon-scented candle, and switched off the light.

  “Mood lighting, I like it.”

  She looked around the room, thinking of other ways to create ambiance. “Music?” she asked.

  “Come here.” He beckoned her to the couch and gently took both bottles of water from her, setting them on the floor. “I don’t need music and I don’t need water. I’m good.”

  “Okay.” She positioned her knees on opposite sides of his legs, and he placed his hands below her hips. He traced the backs of her legs, stopped midway, and pulled her closer until she was kneeling on the couch over his body.

  Her shyness evaporating, Astrid cradled his neck and leaned forward, plante
d her lips on his, opened his mouth with hers. Already this was plenty, more than she’d expected or hoped for, but she wanted more. She wanted to soar higher, she wanted all of him. It was a moment to savor, yet she was too consumed to do anything but devour. She pulled up his shirt, which he helped her take off by raising his arms. His shoulders were pale and broad, he had a sparse triangle of blond chest hair, and through each one of his nipples was a small silver hoop.

  “Huh. Didn’t expect these.” She gave each one a light tug. “Did—”

  “Yes, getting them hurt. That’s always the first thing people ask. Both of them hurt. Like hell.”

  “Then why get them?”

  “Pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. The more something hurts, the more amazing you feel when the pain goes away. Avoid one and you might not experience the other.”

  “Wow, I’ve never heard someone get so deep about nipple piercings.”

  She kissed his neck. His smell, the lemon and cedar mixed with secondhand smoke and whisky, quickened her breath, added to her buzz. She bit the area where his neck and shoulder met, and he let out a happy murmur. The cause and effect fascinated her, inspired her to elicit more positive responses from him. She stroked the V of his collarbone, then swept her fingers out like conducting a symphony in slow motion, to his shoulders and down his upper arms. Everywhere she touched, his skin grew warmer, as if her hands had the power to ignite him.

  His fingers crept beneath her shirt, up along her spine to her bra, which he unlatched. He was about to take her shirt off when she said, “Hang on. Not to be presumptuous, but do you have any condoms?”

  “Let me see.” She moved aside so he could check his pockets. “Apparently, I wasn’t feeling very optimistic today. Do you have any?”

  “No. I, um . . . haven’t been feeling optimistic for a while now. Let me see if Cass has any.”

  “Don’t let her give you any of those hemp condoms. One word: chafing.”

  She giggled as she left the room.

  A strip of light glowed under Cass’s door. Astrid knocked.