Never Go Alone

by Denison Hatch

“Developers,” Jake said.

  “Scum,” Mona added.

  “Think you’re being a little militant about that?”

  “Militant?” Mona asked quizzically, “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind . . .” Jake realized he’d gone off track.

  “If you’re going to talk about militant—about tactics taken from war? How about entire blocks of people gettin’ kicked out of their houses while the cops protect the bad guys? How about developers paying through the ass to City Hall to change zoning regulations? You know they’re altering rent control statutes just to make it easier to raze the past and bring up these monstrosities that look like video game levels. Glass boxes and bullshit everywhere you look. You want New York to look like Dubai? ’Cause they certainly do.”

  “I was just asking. Sorry.”

  Mona stared at Jake for a long moment. “Have I met you before?”

  “Don’t think so . . .”

  “You look real familiar.”

  Jake decided to stop playing coy. “Are you on UrbEx, maybe?” he asked. “I’m Jake.”

  “Mona.”

  Jake glanced to the left and right. “Well, the crowd beats my normal spot,” he said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “The Silver Pickle.”

  “Really?”

  “You know it?” Jake asked.

  “Yeah. The Bronx. The biker joint.”

  “It’s my type of place. Not my type of people,” Jake said.

  “Sure,” Mona laughed, “nobody chills there just ’cause they want to. They go to the Pickle ’cause no one else wants them.”

  Too close to home. “So, who do you roll with?” Jake finally asked.

  “Rory.”

  “I’ve been hearing his name a lot. Who’s Rory?”

  “Rory Visco? Serious?” She realized that Jake was. “He invented this stuff. He started tunnel hacking with his brother when he was getting his PhD in urban planning from MIT.”

  “MIT, huh?”

  Mona nodded.

  “Isn’t that, like, a good school?”

  “This is a democratic life.”

  “I’m just sayin’, I mean, I just didn’t think people that went to MIT would be here . . . I sure wouldn’t, man. I’d be like Steve Jobs or something,” Jake replied.

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me. I work at a department store,” Mona announced glumly, “but I’m goin’ to the Arts Institute too. Graphic design.” She pointed to a party poster on the wall. “I made that,” she said.

  “Yeah? You’re talented.”

  Mona smiled for a second then shut it off. “You’re a noob, aren’t you?”

  “Huh? I . . . I just explore by myself.”

  “You’re a soloist?”

  “Yes. A soloer,” Jake replied warily.

  “That’s dangerous.”

  He tried another tack. “Truth is, I do want to roll with a crew. Will you take me out?”

  Mona shook her head. “No.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know you, Jake.”

  “I’m a nice guy.”

  “This,” Mona pointed around, “ain’t nice guy storage.”

  “I was lying about that last part then . . .”

  “Sorry.” Tired of the conversation, she stood up to go. “That’s another funny thing about the Internet,” Mona said as she glanced back at Jake. “You’re never really sure who you’re talking to. Maybe you meet a guy at a bar, and he introduces himself to you like it’s the first time he’s seen you when really he’s already spent hours checking out all your pics and memorizing your hometown and the fact that you love yoga and sunsets?”

  “Maybe,” Jake said.

  “Except I was joking about the yoga part.”

  “I know.”

  “’Cause I’m not a moron. I don’t get my exercise inside a little room that I’ve paid thirty dollars an hour for permission to enter. I don’t get permission.” With that, Mona disappeared into the crowd. Jake grinned.

  He stared at the dance floor ahead. Fragmentary swathes of light rippled over the crowd, projected from a sophisticated light system. If one was wondering where the most hip and exclusive club in New York was? It was here, tonight, in this place. The hard part wasn’t getting in; it was knowing about it in the first place. Looking for Mona, Jake sauntered through the dance floor. Every once in a while, he’d stand on his tiptoes. The crowd was so into the music that the floor beneath them began to vibrate, oscillating up and down by a half inch with each heavy bass vibration. Everyone was in the groove, the beat sucked through their veins and thrusting their heart valves at exactly the same pace. As Jake observed the crowd, he realized what he was looking at. It was a new religion. Dictation was a thing of the past—the future of humanity was feeling the vibe. Millennials were all agnostic or worse. The irony was that they just had a new master: the button pusher. God now dictated their emotions from the controls of a DJ stand towering above. Jake eventually saw Mona’s red ponytail whipping around in a wide circle ahead. He moved up behind her and fell into the groove. She danced back, rubbing her body on him. The process was highly choreographed—never obscene but certainly not chaste. After about thirty seconds, she glanced backward to check out who was dancing with her. She suddenly stopped gyrating.

  “What do you want, man?” she asked.

  “Rory!” Jake yelled over the extreme decibels.

  Mona shrugged. She couldn’t hear him.

  He leaned in, centimeters from her ear. “Which one’s Rory?” he yelled.

  Mona pointed across the crowded dance floor. On a raised platform next to the DJ table sat a tall, thin man with green eyes. Jake immediately recognized him as the mysterious man, wearing the hoodie, who’d helped him enter the party. It was clear that Rory was held in high esteem amongst the crowd. With a nod to Mona, Jake pushed through the mass. He was heading in Rory’s direction. Once Mona realized where he was going, she began to follow quickly.

  “Hey!” she yelled, trying in vain to stop Jake.

  Finally at the other side of the dance floor, Jake approached Rory.

  “Thanks for the hookup!” Jake yelled.

  But Rory couldn’t hear him.

  Jake tried again, “Thanks for the rope back there!”

  “Oh yeah,” Rory replied nonchalantly, “it’s chill.” Rory turned back to his friends, not interested in the rando. But Jake tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Hey. You asked me who I rolled with, right? I’m a soloist, but I want to roll with you.”

  “That’s not going to happen, bud,” Rory said.

  Just then, Mona appeared behind both of them. Her eyes displayed just the tiniest flash of fear, as if she felt responsible for Jake bothering Rory.

  “Jake! Stop it!” she yelled.

  “You know this barn?” Rory asked Mona.

  Mona shrugged. “We just met. No . . .”

  “Get outta here, dude,” Rory addressed Jake. “You’re making my girl uncomfortable.” Rory leaned in and gave Mona a kiss.

  But Jake wasn’t done. “Hey. I get it. Nobody gets the keys to the kingdom just handed to them. But are you saying no one helped you along the way? I know that somewhere along the line, you had someone who believed in you. They saw you struggling. They put their hand out for you, and pulled you up the wall, man. I know it in my heart. All I’m asking is for a chance. Let me show you what I got.”

  “I do what I want,” Rory said. “That’s it. That’s my life. What I want. A hundred percent of the time.”

  Jake opened his mouth to retort, but a loud commotion behind Rory broke their contact. Jake noticed Emanuel standing below the platform, yelling indistinguishable complaints at two of Rory’s crew. Rory’s friend Castle was built like a Navy SEAL. Next to Castle was Nik, a dark-garbed hipster with brooding eyebrows and a well-trimmed beard. Emanuel was trying to step onto the platform. Castle was holding him back and jawing right back into his face. It was easy to understan
d that something was gnawing at Emanuel. Jake tried to get closer. Their words were a few feet from being understandable. Jake crowded onto the top of the platform just as Emanuel pulled a pistol from his blazer jacket. He held it up in the air. Now Jake could hear.

  “You gonna hide behind your boys, Ror?” Emanuel screamed.

  Another one of Emanuel’s friends reared up from behind the Dominican. The guy leaned back and rotated his core in an attempt to roundhouse Castle. Castle ducked out of the way but fell to the ground. Emanuel pointed the weapon towards Castle, who scrambled. Nik was frozen as Rory leaped from behind him towards Emanuel. Emanuel saw Rory coming. He lifted the gun slightly above Castle and pulled the trigger. The bullet ricocheted above the crowd and bounced off the ceiling. Once the speed of sound from the hot lead blasted through the space, the whole place went to riot.

  The crowd parted like the Red Sea around Emanuel, who jammed his piece into his pants and turned heel. He pushed through a couple and made his way to the stairs as the panic set in. The crowd’s feet formed a stomping herd towards the main exit. Rory pulled Castle off the platform, and the two of them ran back towards the entrance that Jake had used. Jake tried to follow but found himself rebuffed by the crowd—whose desire to vacate the premises was bordering on fanatical at this point. He could only do his best to not get knocked over. The wave took him the other direction. Jake suddenly felt someone grasping for his side flank. He looked down. It was Mona.

  “Hey. You want Rory to say yes? You want to roll with our crew?”

  “You mean your boyfriend?” Jake asked. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t really his place, and it definitely wasn’t his job description to care.

  “What do you think this is, the nineties? I don’t DTR.” Mona replied, nonplussed.

  “DTR?”

  “Define the Relationship. Christ,” she muttered.

  “So you were gonna say. What do I have to do?”

  “You want to get him interested? Show him something interesting. Who are you? Why do you matter? How do you fit into the world? What makes you any different? I’d like to see that too. Why should I care? Until then, you’re just vapor on the Internet.” Her hand gesticulated as if it was flowing through water. “Just another guy, frontin’. Not doin’. Like we do.”

  Mona quickly faded back into the crowd as if she’d never been there in the first place. And Jake realized he might have a new boss.

  One that he liked.

  EIGHT

  THE PARTY OCCUPIED HIS DREAMS. She was there in every frame. She was always beckoning, but he could never reach her. He woke up the next morning not entirely clear where the rave had ended and his unconscious began. But the events of the evening all came flooding back as Jake padded through his morning routine.

  He sat down at the desk in the second bedroom. He leaned to the right, towards the floor. He yanked up the fake flooring, opened the safe, and pulled out his personal cell phone. Nothing. Then the state phone—Susan and Tony’s lifeline. Of course, there were multiple messages and four missed calls. Villalon had been trying to reach him for the last two days, but Jake wasn’t ready. You can’t show all your cards to the desk jockeys too early, even if a gun went off—especially because a gun went off. This one was clearly going to be a tightrope walk, the line slimmer the longer it proceeded, and Jake was only at the very beginning. He didn’t want to give them a reason to come down too hard, too early. And he knew he’d find something even more irresistible at the end. Besides, he didn’t love their company, so why encourage the behavior? His relationship with Susan was like a night terror. At least it was slightly better with Tony. Jake cleared the alerts, confirmed the device was on silent, and placed it back into the safe. He lowered the floor panel back in like a puzzle piece. He checked the time. It was already close to midday, and he had to find a nice, tall building somewhere in the Bronx—and climb it.

  ▪

  As he walked through Hunts Point in the South Bronx, Jake quickly absorbed his first lesson about urban exploring: Most buildings did not want anyone climbing them. Now that he cared to look, he realized that the everyday texture of city architecture was much more complex than a bystander might realize. He was looking at the details—and they were formidable. Any number of barriers and systems were utilized to keep people out of the warehouses in this region. Of course, a building owner’s desire to not be trespassed upon was completely understandable. That’s why some of the warehouses protected their backyards with high fences, others with barbed wire. A few went the extra mile and equipped their buildings with surveillance cameras or horizontal bars to form a ceiling over open areas. Ironically, given the security, not many of the buildings seemed to be used regularly. There was a little deli on the corner, what looked like a web design company in one building, perhaps some sort of textiles business next door. But most of the buildings were empty, including the one with a huge and distinctive sign: “Morton’s Eye Drops.” The sign—memorializing a long-forgotten brand of eye drops—would make a great backdrop.

  Rivett loitered by the door to the building. Perhaps it wasn’t as empty as he thought. But after spending five minutes aligning his department-purchased GoPro camera to a newly acquired tripod-and-selfie stick, no one had entered or exited. Unfortunately, there weren’t any alleys on either side of the warehouse. It was completely flush to its neighbors, and all of the first-floor windows were protected by integrated iron bars.

  Jake slowly padded around the block. He located an alleyway that provided backdoor access to the buildings on the prior street. Jake spotted a fire escape. The fire escape consisted of wrought iron, and although it didn’t extend down to the street, it was only about ten or eleven feet off the surface of the pavement below. Jake glanced around, trying to find a trash can or item that he could use as an impromptu stepping stool. He was careful to be on the lookout for any random passersby. Given his last interaction with the boys in blue, and his steadfast refusal to speak to Tony or Susan until he could prove that he had something solid in his hands, Jake didn’t want to bring the home office into his current improv routine. When a group of teenagers walked through the alleyway, Jake pushed a garbage can around as if he were the proprietor.

  The garbage can wasn’t going to work. Unsteady as a top, even when he was standing on it, he was still a good five feet from the bottom of the wrought-iron fire escape. That’s when Jake spotted an old wooden ladder lying next to a garage on the other side of the alley. He sprinted to the ladder and dragged it back towards the fire escape. The ladder was broken. It couldn’t expand. But Jake was able to lean it against the wall, underneath the fire escape. When he rose to the second-highest rung, as high as he dared, Jake twisted and saw the bottom level of the fire escape just a few feet above him. Using his legs as pistons, he fired his body towards the fire escape. His hands grasped the rusty metal bar and stuck. As his body twisted below, Jake pulled himself up over the railing of the fire escape. Once he was inside, he was able to quickly dart up five stories along the side of the building.

  At the top of the fire escape, his progress was stunted. Jake was now stuck inside an iron cage, a padlock preventing access to the roof; one would escape down, not up, in the case of a raging firestorm. He had to get out of the box. There was a way, but it would expose him to intense danger. The floor below the cage was still open to the air. Jake backtracked and descended. Careful not to look down for too long, he leaned over the edge of the fire escape and stared upwards. Slick vertical bars and no room for error. One wrong move and he’d be a smear on the ground below. Jake fished through his backpack, thinking back to the UrbEx party the night before—he’d kept Rory’s rope. He quickly ran up to the box level of the fire escape once more. He secured the rope to the highest point he could reach, allowing it to unfurl outside of the iron bars and hang down against the side of the fire escape. Then Jake returned to the floor below. He grabbed the rope that was hanging in the air, and he fashioned a rope harness for himself. This time aroun
d—aided by an hour of YouTube tutorials—his fingers displayed confidence and dexterity. The moves were faster, the knot more secure. Finally, he was ready.

  Jake gingerly climbed over the guardrail of the fire escape. He gripped the iron bars above and began to climb up the patchwork. After he’d ascended a few feet, he made the mistake of looking down. The ground below warped in his vision like a funhouse mirror. His brain was sliding reality through a manipulative algorithm of fear and trepidation—and turning to mush in the process. Jake took a few deep breaths. He closed his eyes, reminding himself that the world was not spinning—only his mind. When he opened his eyes again, reality was simply a slow tilting roll. At least it wasn’t the massive tsunami of before. Not perfect, but he’d take it. Jake began to climb again. After a painstaking minute or two, he finally reached the top of the cage. He pulled himself across the fire escape and stepped onto the roof of the old Morton’s warehouse.

  After untying his rope harness, Jake dipped down into a crouch. He only stood when the vertigo had subsided completely. The view was astounding. New York’s flat warren of tightly woven city blocks appeared endless. Especially in the Bronx, which was not polluted with intensely high buildings, the top of this structure afforded Jake an incredible viewpoint over the undulating landscape of the city. As he gazed south, his view encompassed a good chunk of Manhattan itself. With the sun beginning to fall, and Morton’s Eye Drops casting a long shadow across the top of the roof, Jake knew that now was the time to capture his picture. Or—as he viewed it—his bait.

  Jake set up the tripod on top of a ventilation fan and aimed the GoPro towards the sign. He fiddled with the exposure until the device was calibrated to his liking. After commanding the camera to take a photo every five seconds, Rivett turned on the selfie charm. He could be taciturn, but he certainly wasn’t shy. If that had been the case, his band mates would never have selected him as their lead singer. But he still wasn’t quite sure what to do, or what was expected. When the camera’s light blinked red the first time, Jake simply shrugged. The next time he gave a thumbs-up, followed by the middle finger. He hung from the bottom of the Morton’s Eye Drops sign for the last.