by Lisa Unger
I am about to close the box when I see something silver glinting near the bottom. I rustle through the mess I’ve made and find a set of keys attached to a leather tab. The keys to his Jeep, which has sat untouched in a garage uptown since before his death.
He’d bought the Jeep on a whim after a big job, before we met.
“Oh,” I said, on seeing it. “Wow.”
“This.” He swept his hand wide. “This was the car of my dreams when I was kid.”
“Really?”
I rested a hand on its hood; my fingers came away brown with dirt.
“The ultimate freedom,” he said. He gazed at it lovingly. “Your driver’s license, right? A vehicle that could take you off-road. To places where there aren’t any rules.”
We were a month into our new relationship, sick with love, revealing ourselves to each other in moments like this one. There was a boyish light to his face, something I hadn’t seen yet. It ignited something in me, a matching excitement that there was a whole new world out there waiting to be explored and held in my lens.
The Jeep was dusty blue, with fat, deeply treaded tires, mud-spattered. Inside, the leather seats were worn, all the gauges analog, glass foggy. There was a simple AM/FM radio.
“Remember what it was like to be in the car? No phone, no navigation computer, no screens. Just the radio, the sound of the tires on the road, the wind rushing.”
“Uh.” I didn’t share his nostalgia. I remembered endless rides with my parents arguing over where they needed to be and when they needed to get there, a great flapping map, folded and unfolded, turned every which way by my mother before my father finally pulled over. I had my Walkman, the only saving grace, a giant device with a cassette tape I made. I let David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division bury me deep in sound, staring at the landscape racing past the window, watching the sky, the clouds. That vaguely carsick feeling. That heavy boredom with no end in sight. Having to pee, not wanting to say so because I knew it would just aggravate my father, who was obsessed with “making good time.”
Later, under my mother’s hysterical, terrified tutelage, I became a nervous driver. I preferred to be a passenger in Layla’s junker to driving my dad’s old, well-maintained Ford.
“I remember.”
“It was like this safe zone,” he said. “No one could reach you. Maybe no one even knew where you were.”
He held the door open for me and I climbed inside. Roll bars, a fabric roof.
“Is this safe?” I noticed a small rip where the “window” zippered on.
He bounced into the driver’s seat, and the whole thing rocked. Shooting me a devilish grin, he coaxed the engine to life.
“I mean,” he said. “What’s safe really?”
“Uh.” I fastened the seat belt, which looked a little frayed, gripped the armrest as he rambled onto the street.
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” he teased.
We roared out of the city. Where did we go that day? It was spring, the air growing warm. We headed north up the Henry Hudson, spent the day hiking in the Catskills, dinner in Woodstock. He was right; our phones left behind, we were freed.
The Jeep—it has been on my list of things to deal with; I should sell it. But it’s another piece of him I can’t let go. I shove the keys in my bag.
After I’ve put things back in the boxes, I grab the black dream journal and write it all down, anything that I can remember. I even take some stabs at the phone number I saw in my dream on the matchbook. The name—Elena. When I have it all on the page, a black scrawl on bright white, manic, barely legible, I flip back again through the journal, this time looking under the filter of Mac’s question. Was there something about Jack I didn’t know? Are there secrets hiding in my dreams?
I’m surprised at how much I’ve written, almost the entire notebook filled. Written in that space between sleep and wakefulness, I barely remember writing most of it.
There are sketches, too, renderings of Jack, a sad self-portrait where I’m slumped over, eyes dark with circles, a maze, a room I don’t recognize with a fireplace burning, and snow falling outside the window.
Before I picked up a camera, I used to draw. The lines are dark, heavy-handed, my talent middling at best. Flipping back and forth through the pages, there’s an odd voyeuristic thrill, as if I’m looking at the diary of a stranger. Most of it is gibberish. I turn back to more recent entries, am about to close it altogether. That’s when I see it, a single word embedded in a checkerboard of black and white squares: Morpheus.
The name of the nightclub embossed on the glass in my dream night before last. The same as the name on the matchbook: Morpheus. What does it mean, these spiderweb threads between two dreams? Is my subconscious playing tricks on me—or trying to tell me something? Using my phone, I search the word.
Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, the king of night, he can take any form, bringing messages to mortals from the gods. Born of Nyx, the personification of night, he sends dreams to the sleeping through two doors, one made of ivory and the other of horn.
I click on an image where he’s depicted as a winged angel, bending over the sleeping form of a young woman in a red dress. He holds her in his arms and whispers in her ear. I get lost in the image, its bold colors and delicate lines. Her peaceful sleeping face, the tenderness of his touch. In the Arms of Morpheus by Sir William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens, painted in 1894.
Morpheus: a character in The Matrix, or the origin of the word for the opiate morphine. Down a bit farther, I find a website for a nightclub on the Lower East Side, click on it. I scroll through the images there, mostly drunk people taking selfies in rowdy groups, grainy images of the dance floor. The home page is red with the name in elaborate script, an address on Ludlow Street, and hours of operation. It doesn’t even open until 10:00 p.m. Have I been there before? Is it the place in my dreams? I can’t be sure.
I write it all down, fatigue pulling at me, a buzz of anxiety persistent in my head.
What has Morpheus been whispering in my ear? What is he trying to tell me?
The bed beckons me. I could sink into its white fluffiness and disappear. But no. There’s been enough sleep, enough of the maze of my dreams. Time to rejoin the living.
I put the book back by my bed and get in the shower. The water is hot, as hot as it will go, nearly scalding. I wash it all away, try to clear the cobwebs in my addled head. I have to get back to myself, to the waking world and figure out what’s going on.
As I’m drying my hair, lost in thought, the buzzer rings.
“Detective Grayson here for you,” says the doorman through the intercom.
It’s only seven in the morning. Grayson was like this in the beginning, calling and showing up at strange hours as if time and propriety meant nothing to him. I can’t imagine him sleeping in, taking a day off, living a life, though he must do those things. “Send him up.”
I flash on my dream Grayson, his face wrenched in anger and disgust. I’m not sure how many or what pills I took last night, how much I drank. Right now, though I am tired, I’m oddly more alert than I remember feeling for a while. Maybe Dr. Nash is right. Maybe I am getting stronger. Maybe my brain is reorganizing itself, working through fear, anxiety, grief.
There was a time when Grayson and I weren’t friends, when I was his prime suspect as all spouses of the murdered must be. He battered me with questions for hours on the darkest day of my life until my mother’s lawyer came and forced him to stand down. I hated him that day, feared him. Layla’s words push through: Maybe that wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was a memory. Or some facsimile of memory, some twisted depiction of how I saw him once.
Dr. Nash: I really do want us to think of this as good news. I doubt she’d say that if she knew that I was mixing pills, taking them with alcohol.
When I open the door for the detective, he’s th
e man I know—steely-eyed, intense, but rumpled, dark valleys of fatigue under his eyes. He has that look he had at the beginning, as though he’d been up all night, slept in his clothes or not at all. There was a partner at first, an older man who smelled like hamburgers and cigarettes—who’s since retired. Grayson hasn’t been assigned a new partner that I know of. I haven’t asked him about it.
“I thought you were staying at the Van Santens,” he says.
He glances around, as he always does, eyes searching. Must be a cop thing, always looking, examining. Not unlike the photographer, always waiting for that moment, the perfect blend of light and shadow, the detail that tells the story. “I called over there. She said you left.”
There it is, that niggle of defensiveness, as though I must explain myself. “I had to come back here for a few things before work.”
He walks a loop around the room, his thick black boots heavy on the floor, casts a glance at the now open boxes.
“Finally unpacking?”
“Something like that.”
I make us some coffee, and he comes to sit at the island that separates the kitchen from the living space, puts his cell phone down with a meaningful tap on the quartz countertop. Sometimes I feel like he’s waiting for me to talk first, like it’s a technique he uses to get people to fill silence.
“Did you talk to the building staff?” I ask, finally giving in.
“I did.” He touches his phone and the screen comes to life. “Did you know that there are security cameras in the lobby?”
I guess I knew that. It might have been on the website or some of the glossy selling material the broker gave us when she was trying to convince Jack (I was already sold) that the exorbitant rent was worth it.
The aroma of Jack’s favorite roast fills the room, deep rich coffee, with a hint of lemon, a note of something green and earthy. He’d wear the same jeans for a decade, but he’d spend nearly twenty bucks on nine ounces of Ethiopian Yirge Cheffe.
“Want to see what they caught?”
There’s an unpleasant twist in my middle. Do I? My world is on such a tilt, I’m not sure I want to know what the camera caught in my lobby. I flash on that image of Morpheus, the prone woman in his arms. What’s he whispering to her as she sleeps?
I stand beside Grayson as he opens an email with a movie file attached and presses Play. He’s slow with it, thinking, not fluent with his device. His fingers are thick and calloused, cuticles ragged.
We watch the tiny screen as people move through the lobby—a bike messenger with a big bag slung around his tall wiry frame; two lithe women with high ponytails and yoga bags glide past, laughing, tossing careless waves at the doorman; a woman with a black German shepherd, holding tight to the leash as the dog pulls.
“You should get a dog,” says Grayson absently, apropos of nothing.
“Just what I need.” Surely, I don’t need to remind him that I can barely take care of myself.
For a few moments, the lobby is empty.
“Wait for it,” he says.
A boy, slim in jeans and a Yankees jersey, walks through the door carrying an orchid. He brings it to the front desk, says something to the doorman and leaves quickly. I see his face, dark-skinned, fine-featured, big doe eyes and a wide mouth. His hair is shorn close to his head, face slack and innocent like maybe it was his job to drop off the flower, that’s it. There’s nothing furtive about him, nothing nervous or edgy. Just a city kid.
“He just dropped it off, said it was for Poppy Lang, did not—according to the doorman—give an apartment number,” says Grayson. “When they did the afternoon deliveries of packages, laundry, dry cleaning—which, again, cannot believe you let them do that.”
He pauses here to again adequately express his disapproval of the arrangement, which never seemed like anything but a convenience to me. Or maybe it’s more that I don’t care about anything in this apartment. Which I guess is a whole other thing.
“They say that they brought it up to your apartment. Bruno, the guy who delivered it, said if he knocked the photo off the wall, he’s sorry. He was wearing his headphones and maybe didn’t even notice.”
Grayson shrugs as I take the information in.
“I don’t know,” he goes on. “Seems like he would have noticed.”
I want this to be true, that it was just Bruno the delivery guy in my apartment, that the orchid and card were left at the lobby desk. I’ve seen him in the hallways with his cart, headphones on, humming or singing. He’s a big guy, plodding, not careful. I can imagine him, bull-in-a-china-shop-style, knocking the photograph to the ground with his shoulder. Could be he didn’t notice. Or.
“Maybe he just didn’t want to get in trouble,” I offer.
I thought about how the photo was far from the wall. Thrown, I thought, not accidentally knocked off. The glass was shattered as if it landed with force. But really, how could you know such a thing? Chaos theory and all of that. Complex systems highly sensitive to changes in initial conditions. Who could say how he knocked it, how it fell, where it landed?
Grayson replays the video and we watch again.
“Recognize the kid?”
I shake my head. “Never seen him before.”
“We pulled some security footage from other buildings,” he says. We watch the slender boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen—walk easily up the avenue, camera angles shifting, then turn and disappear into the subway station on Twenty-Third Street. He has a city kid aura to him, watchful but fluent with the streets, how things work, when to jaywalk, when to wait, slithering quickly through slow-moving crowds of people.
“We lost him after that,” said Grayson. “The flowers didn’t come from an identifiable florist—no sticker on the pot, nothing on the card—so there’s no lead there. Like you say, it’s a common flower easily purchased at any corner bodega. He wasn’t a delivery boy the doormen had seen before.”
“No cameras in the subway?”
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing at his temples. “There are more than four thousand cameras in the subways. But half of them don’t work—electric problems, heat, water damage. So, we lost him.”
Since 9/11 supposedly there are seeing eyes all over the city, but it’s the second time those cameras have failed us. Jack’s murder wasn’t caught on camera, either, his killer not captured on film by one of the many security cameras owned by private businesses or the NYPD as he fled the scene. Eyes everywhere unless you want them to be, unless you need them to be, it seems.
“So. That’s it?” I say. Anger, frustration edges my voice. “Another dead end.”
He looks away from me, then back. There’s an odd expression on his face.
“What?” I ask even though I don’t want to.
“Let me ask you something,” he says. He taps a finger on the counter.
“Okay.”
“Have you been dating?”
My cheeks warm at the question. Do I have to answer that? I use the excuse of pouring and serving the coffee to turn away from him.
“Well?”
“I’ve been on a couple of dates,” I answer, not bothering to conceal my annoyance. “I’m not seeing anyone seriously if that’s what you mean.”
“Dating site?”
I nod quickly. I stop short of telling him that it was Layla’s idea, not mine. That, actually, I’m only interested in one thing at the moment.
“I saw you,” he says. He looks a little embarrassed. “Online.”
What am I hearing—judgment, disapproval? Whatever it is, I don’t like it. How often do our conversations turn like this, where I suddenly feel on the defensive? Seems like whenever a lead goes dead, he comes back to the wife. I am reminded that even though our relationship sometimes feels like friendship, it’s not that. It never was and can never be.
He rubs at his temples again, fatigued I gues
s—with work, with life, with me.
“What were you doing on there?” I counter.
“Same thing everyone’s doing I guess.” A lift of his eyebrows. “Looking. Hoping.”
I recast him with this new information. His eyes on Layla yesterday, now the news that he’s on a dating site, looking for love. What did I think? That he disappeared into nothing when he wasn’t in my world? That he didn’t have a life, needs, pain and loss?
“So, your point is?”
“Maybe one of the guys you’ve met,” he says. “Maybe someone was just trying to be cute. Romantic.”
I know he likes his coffee black, so I hand him a cup.
“That seems unlikely,” I say.
I’ve been on three dates. Oliver the actuary, tall, cute in a geeky way—glasses, sweater-vest but with glittering dark eyes, and absolutely ripped from the intense daily workouts he did before heading to the office. He was soft-spoken, still reeling from an ugly divorce and fighting for more time with his kids. We had a nice dinner at Gotham, then went back to his place. I left in the hours before dawn. Can I call you? he asked, as he walked me to the door. Of course, I said. He texted later in the day. I had a great night. Thank you. Then he called the following day, but I didn’t ring him back, or answer his texts. Finally, he stopped reaching out. Cold, I know.
There was Martin who worked in IT—metrosexual, into wine, travel, clothes, never married, pushing fifty. There was a twinkle of good humor to his gaze; he had a way of folding his hands when he was listening. There was something priestly about it. We didn’t even bother eating. We went back to his place, a walk-up in SoHo. There was a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on his shelf, and little else—everything spare and white. He was lovely in bed—gentle, considerate. He didn’t wake up as I slipped out, never called.
Then there was Noah. Noah was tall, big through the shoulders, hazel eyes with thick lashes—a sculptor. There was a deep quiet to him, an astute listener. He had a ready laugh, talked about his parents, who lived all their lives in Long Island and died too young. His hair was a tangle of golden curls, darker but something like Jack’s. And it wasn’t long before I was back at his Tribeca loft, running my fingers through that hair. The space was dominated by his sculptures, towering abstract metal monsters—a dragon, a ghoul, a spider—that cast odd shadows on the wall.
