Riot Street

by Tyler King

  “Then what did they offer you?” he asks.

  “Frankly, I sort of tuned out when Cara started talking.”

  He smirks. “Everyone does.”

  “I think the gist of it is she wants me to write for one of the online sections. More essays. And I’m flattered,” I say so as not to sound like a horrible ingrate, “but I’d rather cut off my hands than make that my career. No one is going to take me seriously as a journalist if my entire portfolio is nothing but diary entries.”

  “I’m taking you seriously.”

  “No offense, but you don’t count.”

  “Oh,” he says, leaning back in his chair with arms crossed. There’s something goading in his expression. A dare. “Why’s that?”

  “Let’s not kid ourselves. You have a financial stake in keeping Echo’s story in the headlines.”

  Ethan was the one to contact me after my essay went viral. He arranged this interview. And while the lure of a job at a major magazine was too tempting to ignore, I’d be an idiot to think Ethan doesn’t see some personal advantage in this. Like when a musician dies or an actor goes on a Twitter tirade, publicity sells. How many spots has his book climbed in the Amazon rankings since my essay went live?

  “Then why write the essay if you don’t want the attention?”

  If I’m honest, Ethan’s book was at least partially to blame. Response or retaliation, I’m not sure anymore. But in the time since The Cult of Silence was released, I had this gnawing urgency to put the ordeal in my own words. To reclaim the narrative and with it what little agency Echo had left. I thought the essay would feel like a victory, a bit of redemption for Echo and all the ways she’d been distorted over the years, pimped by strangers who profited from her tragedy. Instead, I feel like just another john.

  Now Ethan wants me to work with him. How am I even considering this?

  “I have ambitions,” I say. “Why should I abandon them because people like Cara are preoccupied with one brief episode in my past? I’m more than that.”

  “No one starts out at the top,” he says. “You have to be willing to pay your dues.”

  “I know. I’d be happy grinding it out at some little alt weekly to get a few miles under my tires. At least it wouldn’t feel like prostitution.”

  “So it’s about pride? You’re too good for us?”

  “What? No.”

  I take a deep breath and slide my hands into my jacket pockets. I’m making a mess of this, and I don’t want to leave Ethan with a bad impression of me. He is on a short list of journalists who have reached that rarefied air of influence and respect. The articles he writes shape debates and affect policy. Whatever my personal feelings, it doesn’t help my career to make an enemy of him. These sorts of encounters can follow you for a lifetime. Forever known as the brat who spit in the face of Ethan Ash.

  “If I take this job now, I don’t want to get stuck, you know? I don’t want to be typecast in this narrow field. If I don’t start getting some professional reporting under my belt soon, I’m never going to get my career off the ground.”

  He mulls this over, appraising me with intelligent eyes. I can’t help the feeling that everything I say digs me into a deeper hole. Ethan’s too important a name in this industry to brush off. It’s in my best interest to create a professional alliance that I can revisit in the future when a better opportunity comes along. He owes me that much. But as Ethan cracks his knuckles on one hand with his thumb, I realize I’m wasting my time.

  “I should go,” I say, and reach for my messenger bag on the floor. “Again, thank you for getting in touch, but—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Avery, take the offer.” Ethan rubs his hands through his hair and entwines his fingers behind his head. “It isn’t a death sentence, it’s a job. You put in some time, make friends, and maybe you have an opportunity to branch out, move up. But you won’t get that if you walk out. Here you can learn. You can tap into a vein of experience you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.” Ethan leans forward, elbows on his knees, and speaks with a voice that wrests all the air from the room. “This magazine has a history and a name that will enrobe you in a certain layer of credibility and open doors for the rest of your career. Writing a few essays seems like a small price to pay for that kind of privilege. And they’re going to fucking pay you for it.” He punctuates this with a hand in the air. “So swallow your pride and be grateful.”

  He has a point, sure. I’m not oblivious to that, nor the idea that just appearing on the Riot Street masthead will be the most significant step in my career to date. And who’s to say I can’t parlay that into a better gig? When someone is in bed with pneumonia and Ed needs a hungry reporter to drop everything and run down a story. When an associate editor is looking for someone willing to pull an all-nighter tracking down a source or a quote.

  But what if I accept and that chance never comes? And one day I realize five years have passed and I’ve missed my moment? We live in a world where youth is not only a prized commodity, but a prerequisite. If I’m not landing cover stories by the time I’m twenty-five, I can kiss my dream of a Pulitzer goodbye.

  In my right pocket, I feel for the shell casing of a Winchester .308 and roll the smooth brass between my fingers. I don’t know if it helps, but I’ve been doing it so long I’d miss it if I stopped.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  2

  Stranger on the Train

  It starts in a subway car on my way uptown to catch the train home. A robust woman with a voice like an outboard motor berates a shameless public masturbator until we stop at Fulton Street and he’s chased out the door. Onlookers snap, tweet, and post their videos of the incident while an oblivious stream of new passengers file inside. Among them is a Grandpa Joe type in a light trench coat and herringbone trilby. Water beads off his shoulders and collects in a pool around my feet. A few stops later, he’s with me when we exit at Thirty-Fourth Street and take the underground pass to Penn Station. At Hudson News, where I grab a snack before making my way to the Amtrak terminal, he’s in line ahead of me counting out exact change for the clerk in nickels and pennies.

  That’s when I spot it: Ethan’s book sitting on a rack below the gum and mints and other impulse buys that rim the checkout counter. Next to James Patterson’s latest and Stephen King’s fourth this week, The Cult of Silence is too loud to ignore. It’s been out for more than a year, long since dropped from the featured-release displays and constant marketing push, but someone’s resurrected it from the discount graveyard and left it slotted in front of the most recent page-to-screen adaptation with the new movie-poster cover art.

  I consider hiding it. Tucking it behind Patterson or the copies of Cosmo and People. But as I reach for it, the trilby man grabs it with thick, wrinkled fingers and drops it on the counter. It takes him another two minutes to forage $9.99 plus tax out of his many coat pockets.

  I should take the opportunity to ditch him and thus interrupt the emerging synchronicity, but I’m weak and can’t part with the KitKat and grape soda in my hands. So I wait, pay, and take as long as time will allow to arrive at the platform for my train. When I do, boarding has already begun.

  In the economy-class car, I squeeze down the aisle in search of an open row. The car’s crowded, but not full, so when I eye some free territory toward the back, I dodge and parry between passengers to claim it. A broken voice crackles through the scratchy intercom as I fall into my seat next to the window. The train rolls forward then back, and with a final announcement through the intercom, musters up a great force of determination to surge forward on its seven-hour haul to Syracuse.

  That’s when my shadow, Trilby, old-man-shuffling right for me, wedges himself past Mother Goose corralling a gaggle of children to drop himself in the window seat opposite me. He pulls down the seatback tray and, from another coat pocket, unwraps a pastrami on rye.

  He’s like an ex I can’t shake. I don’t even know his name, but we’re trapped in an unheal
thy relationship. I could move, but now it’s a matter of autonomy. I was here first, and a girl’s got to stand her ground. So I put on my headphones and pull out a magazine while I eat my snack, determined to let Trilby have no greater effect on my life than I’ve had on his.

  But my eyes wander, and once he’s dusted the sandwich crumbs from his chest, crumpled the wax paper wrapping into a ball, and stuffed it into one of the cavernous coat pockets, Trilby sits three seats away licking his arthritic index finger to flip the pages of Ethan’s book.

  What did I ever do to deserve this man?

  * * *

  We’ve all experienced it. The pattern of coincidence known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise referred to as frequency illusion. It’s when you learn a new piece of information—a phrase like frequency illusion, for example—then repeatedly encounter it within a short span of time. Or a song you haven’t heard in years makes a conspicuous comeback, following you from the coffee shop to the mall to a busker playing guitar in the park. You’ve been going about your life, oblivious to this thing, then suddenly it’s stalking your every step. In my case, it’s an elderly man with a book.

  Everywhere I turn, Ethan is there.

  Hours later, the windows are dark when the train jostles and slugs, slowing on its approach to the Walsh train station in Syracuse. I must have drifted off sometime before sundown. Now while impatient passengers unfold from their seats and relieve their travel cramps, stretching in the aisles and gathering suitcases and small luggage from the overhead racks, I steal a glance at the stark white cover and blurry title font on the seat beside Trilby. The train grunts to a halt, and he catches me. We share a long moment of awkward eye contact.

  Does he see her? The version of me created in Ethan’s words. The image extrapolated from the hours Ethan spent absorbing a sociopath’s reminiscence. Is it obvious?

  Passengers move toward the exits and the aisle clears. I’m not sure why, but I don’t want to be the first of us to stand. I wrench my eyes from Trilby and his liver-spotted jowls to yank my messenger bag from the floor and pretend to fish through it for my phone. He heaves himself to his feet, grabbing the seat back in front of him for support as he squeezes out from the row. Before his frame disappears from my peripheral vision, something lands on the seat cushion next to me.

  He’s left me the book.

  3

  The Runaway

  Eight a.m. Thursday morning and I’ve got a pillow over my face. On the other side of my bedroom wall, my roommate is into day two of her post-breakup hibernation: the anger phase in which a constant soundtrack of man-hating anthems bellows through our apartment on a loop. Kumi was up at seven to treat herself to her ritual Breakfast Milkshake of Mourning—the piercing whir of the blender snapping me awake—to the tune of Taylor Swift.

  It’s been three days since my interview. I said I would give Ed and Cara my answer by Monday. For whatever reason, Ethan has taken a personal interest. I would be an idiot to pass this up. If I refuse and nothing better comes along, I might spend the rest of my life reading his bylines and thinking about the biggest mistake of my career. Or I take the job and manage to embarrass myself and sabotage any glimmer of journalistic aspirations by falling into the essay abyss. Thus far I’ve yet to find an off-ramp from this cycle of possibility and doubt. Despite my reservations, I admit there are more items in the Yes column than not.

  Either way, Kumi and I are moving to Manhattan tomorrow. Her wealthy but absentee father has recently decided he wants to be back in her life, so his bribery mission begins with paying for an apartment in the city while Kumi attends law school at NYU and I start applying for jobs. She was hesitant to accept until we started looking at rent prices and realized all we could afford was a storage unit in the Bronx or maybe an abandoned car by the river. So she agreed, on the stipulation that I get to come, too. Her dad wasn’t in a position to put limitations on his apology for being a catastrophic jackass for the last six years. Having deficient father figures is sort of the basis for everything Kumi and I have in common.

  Just as Carrie Underwood launches into the chorus of her revenge fantasy, my phone buzzes on the nightstand.

  I haven’t spoken to my mom since the essay went up last week—I gave her an advance copy and received her blessing before publishing it—but her name flashing on the screen sends a jolt of apprehension through my chest.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say, answering the call. I pull the duvet over my head to replace the pillow while Kumi belts over the vocals of Katy Perry.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  Her voice is bright, airy. Birds chirp in the background and her rocking chair creaks on the front porch. I picture her in jeans stained from her garden, drinking tea while she watches the squirrels run across the yard. The image comes from a photograph, I think. One of her I must have seen years ago. She was younger, barely in her twenties. Hair like a brushfire and eyes green as spring grass, smiling into the camera. People used to tell me we look alike. But she barely resembles that person anymore. I prefer to think of her happy.

  “Sorta. No. I’m awake.”

  “Are you still in bed? Echo, it’s such a blissful day. You should be outside getting some sunshine. Come out for a few days. We’ll go canoeing at the springs.”

  “We’re moving tomorrow.” She knows this, but my mom doesn’t adapt well to change. Selective memory is her defense mechanism. “And I have to work.” A decision on Riot Street aside, I still have looming deadlines for freelance clients. “Besides, the springs are closed. Another bacterial flare-up.”

  “What, really? Where’d you hear that?”

  “Saw an article online.”

  “Hmm. I must have missed it,” she says in a dour tone.

  My mother doesn’t watch the news. Or read it. Or otherwise acknowledge the crimes and tragedies of humanity. She says it distracts from the “pursuit of wholeness.” So I have listened to no small amount of browbeating concerning my chosen vocation.

  “You’re depriving yourself of felicity with all that calamity and woe,” she is fond of saying. And that chronicling society’s failures—her concise view of the work of the news media at large—is a distraction from the “human imperative of spiritual awareness.”

  She didn’t always talk like that.

  Simply put, I am a disappointment who is wasting the best years of my life. And I need to find Jesus. Or Allah. Or Buddha. Anyone will do, as long as I find an idol to guide me toward enlightenment. That kind of thing is important to my mother. It gives her purpose and provides meaning and order in a chaotic world. A plan for everyone. A purpose for it all. I don’t begrudge her these things. I only wish she’d recognize that our shared history had the opposite effect on me. When you grow up secluded from society, under the autocratic regime of a self-appointed guru—and it all ends in mass casualties—you develop a healthy skepticism about deities and dogma.

  “Anyway, honey, the reason I called…” Her rocking chair creaks through the phone and the screen door claps shut. “I went online and looked at your essay.”

  I close my eyes and hold my breath, bracing for impact. “Yeah?”

  “Have you seen these comments?”

  A gust of air leaves my lungs and my muscles relax. “Don’t read the comments. Ever. People are awful.”

  “Some of these…” Her voice trails off, in a tone that makes me throw off my duvet and sit up in bed. “The things people are saying…”

  “Mom, I knew this would be part of it, okay? I don’t look at them and you shouldn’t either.” Can’t put a spent bullet back in the chamber. There’s no use flogging myself with the witless snark of internet trolls.

  “About me,” she says.

  “What?” Her muttered statement sideswipes me. “What about you?”

  “‘This woman should be in prison.’ ‘How is this not child abuse?’ ‘Her mother should have done this girl a favor and blown her own brains out.’” Her voice cracks. “‘She should—’”r />
  “Mom, stop. Close the page. Just walk away from it, okay? I’m serious.”

  She breathes heavily through the phone. Stuttering gasps. My mother and I aren’t close—she pretends we are and I let her—but I never intended to cast her as the villain. For as fucked up as my childhood was, her experience was far more difficult. And while there’s plenty of blame to lay at her feet, it wasn’t like her actions were malicious. She was a naïve woman deceived and manipulated by a sociopath. A young mother with no money and nowhere else to go.

  “Echo…” A long, pained sigh trickles from her lips, and it cracks my chest open. “Why would you want to do this?”

  “Mom, I swear, I—”

  “Why would you want to make a life at this? This, letting people peck over your private sorrows, it’s noxious. I don’t want that for you. I want you to find your joy and be at peace and fulfilled. How can this make you happy?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because I don’t have a better answer and it pains me that she takes the brunt of the attacks and feels sympathy for me. “I didn’t mean for—”

  “They haven’t said anything I haven’t thought myself. Don’t worry about me, honey. I’m happy you were able to express these thoughts and relieve yourself of the burden. It’s healthy to confront our emotions and take control of the shadows. But I worry what effect this negative energy will have on you. So much hatred and bile—you can ignore it, but it’s there, festering, eating away whether you notice it or not.”

  I apologize again, and again, and keep apologizing until she’s said her piece. I owe her that much. And I understand that when she tears at the shreds of my dreams like she’s ripping off wallpaper, it is only because she sees my career path as detrimental to my well-being. At the moment, I can’t argue otherwise. So check one more item in the No column.