Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  I woke several hours later to the choral opening of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” My subconscious had tried to incorporate this second wave of the party into my dreams. But my subconscious had done all it could. It was time to deliver me unto reality.

  *

  Weeks turned into months. I started keeping a notebook by my bed:

  Jared spits grapes into the air and tries to catch them in his mouth.

  Jared feels like he’s seen some pictures of your dick from the 8th grade.

  Jared has decided tequila gives you diarrhea.

  Jared thinks this is some Cheech and Chong shit.

  Jared has discovered jazz.

  By documenting his activities, I thought perhaps I could trick myself into thinking I had signed up for this. Like a scientist observing a nocturnal creature. Or I’d try to offset the hot rage coursing through my veins by envisioning scenarios in which Jared’s existence served to bolster mine. You know what I need? I need to Windex every surface of my apartment at 4 a.m. Thanks, Jared, for saving me the trouble of setting an alarm or buying drugs of my own.

  The woman who lived in the apartment next to mine did not have the box seats I did, but she did have a four-month-old baby. I asked her if the people in the back ever bothered her.

  “Oh, you mean Jared?” she groaned. “When we moved in, he was still a little kid. I thought he was so cute, playing in the backyard. But you know what they say about tiger cubs.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Don’t adopt tiger cubs.”

  I felt the pulse of their lives steadily behind me. Not just physically behind me, but in time. I was watching them go through their formative years (some had lost their virginity, some were just pretending). I was waiting for them to grow up, desperate for the glue to set, for the clay to dry, for the inexorable metamorphosis that would bring about their conscious selves. But I couldn’t keep waiting without getting older myself. Their very existence highlighted my own aging in a way that jarred me. Before Jared, only events in my own life—a friend’s marriage, a sick parent, the twentieth anniversary of a seminal movie—had triggered ruminations on the passage of time. Which meant that, despite the stresses of aging, I had always had a manageable view of it. I reflected at will. But after Jared, my own mortality could smack me in the face at random. If I was in a good mood when I heard him, I found myself eager to learn something from his youth and to be reminded of my own. If I was in a bad mood, I never wanted to hear from a person so much as a day younger than me so long as I lived.

  They say holding on to resentment is like letting someone take up space in your brain rent-free, and my rent was pretty high as it was. But I couldn’t help it. I talked about Jared to strangers, to editors, to physicians, to hairdressers and bus drivers. Okay, one bus driver. But I think we can all agree that’s one too many. I talked about Jared with people I admired—people who I meant to tell how much I loved their work but all that came out was Jared vomit. I talked about him at book fairs, in towns and cities across the land. I went on CBS This Morning to discuss an op-ed I had written but Jared had kept me up the night before, teaching himself to play “Go On with Your Bad Self” on the guitar. So I talked about him with Charlie Rose.

  Out of helpfulness or exasperation, friends floated suggestions.

  “Why don’t you—”

  “Shoot them?” I interrupted. “I can’t shoot them.”

  “—move out.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me. Rather, it had occurred to me that murder was more of an option than moving. A true test of a New Yorker if there ever was one. I was fully aware there were other apartments I could live in, other boroughs I could go to. But to live in New York is to weigh your traumas, and moving is a formidable one. Plus, while I might not have been here first, I was here truest. I respected my apartment. I did not litter it with beer cans and try to set the furniture on fire. Instead, I begged for mercy. Please be quiet. Please please please. I did this sparingly, concerned about its diminishing effects but mostly concerned about something utterly mortifying: Jared’s impression of me.

  Jared was cool. He just was. What’s worse, he plugged into some residual teenage part of me that wanted to be cool, too. At first I dismissed him as “high school cool.” Naturally other teenagers laughed at his lewd jokes—their bars were just as low. But signs of Jared’s enduring cool were emerging. For starters, the kid had great taste in music. You know what they say: If I can Shazam you, you’re too close. Yet even as I wanted to destroy him, I would nonchalantly reach my phone into the air. The Velvet Underground. Nina Simone. The Black Angels. Townes van Zandt. Charlotte Gainsbourg (who lived across the street). He had access to every hot spot in the city and would make plans to patronize places I had only seen in passing. Meanwhile, he started to diversify his friends. The milquetoast-looking blonds in Irish fisherman sweaters still appeared, but so did black guys with white sneakers, Hispanic girls with red sneakers, and one guy with a Mohawk. They were like the American dream come to life, friends united by a force stronger than acceptance—money. And their banter improved. They had heated political debates. The girls doted on the younger sister, offering to stylize her. They teased a friend who had been in a commercial about his “bullshit acting career.”

  Who would they listen to now? Who could reason with them? I’d fantasize about morphing into Chris Rock or Karlie Kloss. I’ll tell you what: If Karlie Kloss lifted my window wearing boy shorts and a tank top, and asked them to be quiet, they’d shut up right quick. Once, and this was a real low point, I dressed up to tell them to be quiet. I let my hair down and put on bright lipstick and a V-neck top, markers of authoritative attractiveness meant to be seen from a distance, pathetic signals that I knew from chill, that my threshold for fun was high. But by the time I opened the window, they had vanished. I leaned out into the open air. Had my dreams of their alien abduction come true? I raised my head to see the whole group had migrated to the kitchen, at least seven of them. Silhouettes of branches framed the picture. They were dancing, arms up, hips pinballing back and forth, hair swaying. Jared entered with a bag of ice, put the ice on the kitchen island, and spun one of the girls, dipping her below my sight line. She came up, laughing. And for a full minute, I was so in love with all of them, I almost couldn’t stand it.

  *

  Around this time, I began dating a younger and emotionally unavailable man who was completely wrong for me in every way but anatomically. So I fell for him. This fellow had been smacked in the face by the lucky stick, whereas I was pretty sure I felt it go whizzing past my ear once. Like Jared, he had grown up in Manhattan, though the upper part. He had Jared’s surface-level deference that passed for manners, the sort of verbal salve that kept you from ever calling him an asshole because he did things like pick you up at your door. Like Jared, he was raised in a bubble of privilege. There’s a bench in Central Park with his name on it, a baby gift. But unlike Jared, he had the years and the sense to try to pop the bubble with duct-tape-repaired furniture and self-funded travel to war zones. He winced at the suggestion that the universe had conspired to make his life easier, which was a huge tell—people less privileged are comfortable with acknowledging when they’ve had luck, because of all the times they haven’t.

  One evening, after I failed to properly close my bedroom blinds, Jared and his friends caught a glimpse of us naked.

  “What’s the relationship?” he shouted up, making a megaphone of his hands.

  “You have to admit,” said the emotionally unavailable man, “that’s some sophisticated heckling.”

  Staying low, I opened the window further.

  “Shut up, Jared!” I snapped.

  Jared’s friends snorted and slapped the table.

  “Oh shit, man,” said one of them, “she knows your name!”

  It was the first time I’d used his name, a treat I had been saving for myself. I lay on my back and grinned at the ceiling. The emotionally unavailable man had already g
otten dressed. He was paparazzi sensitive, having twice caught ex-girlfriends taking pictures of his aggressively pretty face when they thought he was asleep.

  “Jared thinks the streets of London are paved with Harry Potter jizz,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, propping myself up on my elbows.

  He had my notebook in his hands. I dismissed it as “notes” and he shrugged, incurious. If he had flipped the page he would have seen, written redrum-style: “Jared: why won’t you graduate?” I had begun monitoring Jared’s conversation for words like application and early decision. Clearly, he was old enough to have friends who had graduated. Recently, a girl had come over for dinner and Jared’s mother asked how she was liking college.

  “It’s okay,” said the girl, “I just haven’t found my friend group yet.”

  Good, I thought. You’re learning. You are not prepared for a world beyond Jared’s backyard. You will inevitably seek shelter in others who are exactly like you, who know everything you know and nothing you don’t, but I pray, for your sake, you never find them.

  “Welp,” the mother assured her. “Keep at it. You guys are our future.”

  That night, she hosted a birthday party for her assistant. Adult voices flooded the yard. Motown bumped against my walls. At midnight, the wife half of the old couple leaned over their shared fence and asked the mother if she wouldn’t mind keeping it down.

  “It’s our property, Carol,” the mother shot back. “We can do what we want!”

  *

  I decided to write them a letter. I didn’t write the DJ or the pianist or the newborn baby a letter. But for all my disgust, I still believed we were made of the same fundamental stuff. I had seen the mother grocery shopping and she didn’t cut the line or snap at anyone. She exchanged pleasantries with the cashier and left. Be kind, I thought, for some of the people you meet are using the same organic dishwashing liquid. I believed that if they understood the impact of their actions, if they really understood, we could live in something like harmony.

  I edited the letter for typos and insanity and crept around the block. I stood, looking at their gold mail slot, double-checking to be sure I hadn’t flubbed the geography. The letter hated to bother them. The letter suggested that due to acoustics, it was possible that the residents of my building heard their music better than they did. An easy thing not to realize! The letter wanted to make them aware of the situation, lest they accidentally recite their bank account numbers. Ha! The letter emphasized that it had never been written before. The letter signed off on behalf of the residents of my entire building. This was quite weaselly of the letter.

  I returned to my apartment just in time for Jared and his mother to arrive home from taking the dog for a walk. What a stroke of luck, I thought, to be able to witness them open it, to see the distraught looks on their faces. The mother held a dog leash in one hand and the letter in the other. Jared read over her shoulder. Both our windows were closed, so I could not hear the peals of their laughter.

  *

  “What if he goes to NYU?” asked the emotionally unavailable man. “Or Columbia?”

  We were standing at my living room window. Jared’s parents had covered the yard in grass earlier that day. When Jared got home from school, he sprawled out like a Middle Eastern child who has never seen snow. A group of his peers, whom Jared referred to as “the cavalry,” had come over to admire the grass.

  “Maybe he won’t get in,” I said.

  It was too horrible to contemplate. Besides, Jared never seemed to study or demonstrate flares of brilliance.

  “You realize that’s irrelevant.”

  Takes one to know one, I thought.

  “Looks like fun,” he said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I replied, even though it did, it looked very fun.

  “I don’t think this is going to work out,” said the emotionally unavailable man, his back to the window.

  He broke up with me that night, moving from emotionally unavailable to regular unavailable. Even at the height of our romance, I knew it would end like this. I could sense that I was a novelty, one of the many life experiences he was collecting en route to something else. But knowing didn’t soften the blow. If anything, it made things worse. In my grief, I started hating Jared on a heretofore untold level. Jared was the raw, unadulterated version of this person who had hurt my feelings. These were people with too many escape valves built into their lives. There would always be another party, another school, another house, another country, another woman. I felt the moral responsibility of a time traveler. If I could just stop Jared from being the person he is now, I thought, he could become a better person later. Sure, he might break a heart or two, nobody’s fault, but maybe he would be more torn up about it.

  Armed with this larger sense of purpose, I became less preoccupied with cajoling Jared into silence. This was a good thing. But I also became vengeful, which was a bad thing. I’d figure out what song he was playing and play the same song twice as loud on a three-second delay. I’d pretend to be an emergency room doctor, lifting my window and announcing that I had to be at the hospital in two hours. They were putting other people’s lives in danger. Once I egged his house after he went to bed. “Maturity” and “legality” were abstract notions behind my threadbare eyelids. A couple of the eggs landed on lawn chair cushions without cracking. If only I could be more like those eggs.

  As Jared barreled toward graduation, he somehow got worse. The neighbors on his side of the street chimed in, their fuses growing shorter as well. The chastising was more effective coming from people who didn’t have to shout from a different tax bracket. But these temporary silences could no longer satiate me. I wanted more. I wanted dark things. I wanted the parents to lose their jobs and sell the house. I wanted the kids to go to military school. I wanted to tase the dog in the throat. I wanted monsters to rise up from the earth and munch on their bones.

  *

  Jared is not keeping me from my work. Jared is my work.

  *

  Sensing I was not, in the classic sense, “hinged,” my friend Charlotte attempted to cheer me up. I assured her that I was not as torn up over the emotionally unavailable man as I appeared to be. She didn’t believe me. I was a wreck. Just look at me. I shouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over some immature guy. She was more right than she knew.

  She insisted I accompany her to an opening at an art gallery, where I didn’t know many people and I didn’t feel like meeting anyone. Which led me to drink. Which led me to spend a whole three minutes contemplating a sculpture that turned out to be a folding chair. Maybe I really should move, I thought. It was an emergency option, but what do you call this? My tree house had become haunted with teenage ghouls and heartache ghosts.

  And that’s when I saw them. Flanking the floor of the gallery was a row of massive spotlights. I approached them slowly and crouched down. Mesmerized, I touched the hot rim of one, following its path up the wall. The light stretched all the way to the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” Charlotte asked, smiling tightly at an approaching security guard.

  I looked up at her, pivoting on my toes until my knees were parallel with her legs.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Why are you grinning like that?”

  “Grinning like what?” I asked, having lost all control of my face.

  *

  Product description for 600-watt halogen light:

  This light can be set on the ground or a rooftop and aimed in the direction of the workspace. This light can also be used to powerfully illuminate a campground or construction site. Ideal for when you need to finish off a project.

  “What do you have,” asked the hardware store cashier, “a possum?”

  I smiled and cocked my head. This was a very specific guess. But he took one look at a nonunionized woman in a sundress, sporting a canvas tote, and went straight to “possum.” In return, I explained the Jared situation—the cashier threw in an on/off switch for free
.

  “You got an outlet by your bed?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, conspiratorially, “plug the extension cord into this and you plug this into the outlet and flick the switch. So you don’t have to get up. You can just roll over and fuck ’em.”

  I never thought I would be so pleased to hear those words from a man.

  I rushed home, high on revenge, exhilarated by the prospect of a new medium. Jared didn’t deserve to hear the sound of my voice. I put one light outside on the fire escape, running the cord under my bedroom window screen, and a second one on a stool in my kitchen. Then I got into bed and waited. I checked the time. He should be home any minute now. But that night I fell asleep to the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees. Same thing happened the next night. And the next and the next. Screw you, breeze. What have you done with my juvenile delinquents?

  I left town for work, planning to take the lights down when I returned. In theory, I should have been grateful. My long night of terror had ended with a whimper—but at least it had ended. That should have been good enough. But my life at that moment was populated by men who had hurt me and my vigilante streak wanted to take just one of them out. Just one.

  Walking up my stairs, sifting through a week’s worth of catalogs, I ran into my neighbor. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her baby was wailing.

  “I might have to kill them all,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “He’s back?” I asked, trying to temper my glee.

  “No,” she said, “not him … her.”

  *

  My dreams of Jared going off to college had, unceremoniously, come to pass. Or perhaps there had been a ceremony. Perhaps a graduation rager had taken place and I hadn’t been home for it. It didn’t matter. The sister had ascended the throne of torment with gusto. Years of watching Jared and his friends had taught her everything she needed to know. The sister’s friends—younger, wilder, louder—made Jared’s look like a prayer circle. They had inherited Jared’s playlist but beyond that, it was just a sea of ill-formed estrogen. The sister’s cavalry was into shit like daring one another to throw bottles against the house and setting off fireworks. Clumps of girls spread out on the grass, taking selfies, contemplating future tattoos, failing to have seen the movie Thirteen.