by Jill Ciment
Kat joined the lines of returning theatergoers. A plump woman in an unbecoming usher’s blazer demanded to see her ticket. Left and right, others streamed past without producing a stub.
“Where are their tickets?” Kat asked.
“I remember them.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
Kat hadn’t washed her hair in a week. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot from nine days of grieving and drinking. One of her sandal straps had broken. She carried her worldly possessions in a shabby imitation-leather suitcase held together by duct tape. She didn’t look like a theatergoer.
She waited on a park bench with a view of the entrance. About fifteen minutes before the play ended, the ushers abandoned their posts to watch the last act. Kat walked straight through the deserted gates. The stage was strewn with paper shreds, like the bottom of a hamster cage. Vida wasn’t onstage, just a bereft old king and a young female corpse. Swaying on his knees and embracing the limp girl, he electrified his grief. The current ran through Kat’s veins. Edith’s death felt wholly shocking again.
As the clapping began, the actors, holding hands like paper-doll cutouts, swept onto the stage to take their bows. Hands covered in blood, Vida held the fingers of a beggar whose eye sockets were blackened and bloodied to look void. Had her character plucked out his eyes?
Kat called to her, but Vida didn’t hear anything except the audience’s escalating applause. The louder the adulation, the more beautiful and fulfilled she looked. The brighter her radiance, the sadder and angrier Kat became. It wasn’t fair that Vida got to bask in glory while Edith lay in a morgue refrigerator. She started to make her way toward the stage, but the plump usher stopped her.
“If you don’t leave this minute, I’ll call security,” she warned.
“I know one of the actresses, Vida Cebu.”
“You’re not on her list.”
“You don’t even know my name.”
Having no choice, Kat returned to the park bench, which she now shared with a homeless man and his dog.
“Did you like the play?” he asked.
Vida was the last player to leave. The other actors had waited until the audience dispersed, then left as a group. Twenty minutes later, Vida walked out alone, cell phone to her ear. Her prideful radiance was long gone. She looked wan and agitated. Maybe she was finally listening to her messages? Kat rose from the bench, about ten feet ahead, and blocked her path.
“Edith?”
“Edith is dead.”
“Oh my god. When? How did it happen?”
“She died the night after we fled your poisoned house. Her bed was glowing. If you’d returned her calls earlier, she might have gotten out in time. Why didn’t you call her back?”
“Listen to me, Kat, I didn’t know anything about the mushrooms until I found one in my closet. Did Edith’s doctor tell you she died of mushroom poisoning?”
“There wasn’t time to call a doctor.”
“I’m very sorry about your sister. Is there anything I can do?”
“Can you help me save the letters in the basement?”
“I’m sorry, but no one can save anything. I wish I could help. Believe me, if I could stop the burn tomorrow I would.”
“Why didn’t you call her back?”
“Kat, no one’s responsible. You have my deepest condolences for your loss, but no one could have predicted—not me, not the city, no one—that this was coming. It was an act of God.”
“Don’t blame this on God.”
After Vida left, the theater lights went out. Kat remained in the dark forest. She hadn’t made any plans past the confrontation. She should call Frank to see if his cousin had changed his mind about her spending the night, or if that didn’t work out, she could always call Gladys and join her in the van, but the BlackBerry was dead from all the calls she’d made to Vida.
She walked to Grand Central, twenty blocks south, so she could charge the BlackBerry without having to waste money at a coffee shop. She had only thirty-four dollars left, plus the twenty Frank had given her.
Grand Central’s terminal was surprisingly crowded for a midweek late night. The four-faced clock above the information booth read a quarter to midnight. She looked around for a free electric socket, but the commuters had all commandeered the plugs. Or were they commuters? None appeared to be unplugging anytime soon. Occupying the nearest socket, an older unshaven gentleman in a crumpled suit recharged his cell phone and his electric shaver. On the next bench, a middle-aged lady had set up a half-dozen gadgets to suckle power from a surge protector. Who commutes with a surge in her purse? Had she found mushrooms in her closet? Fortressed behind three big suitcases, a little man slept on a bench with his head atop his recharging laptop. He’d removed his shoes. Had he woken up in a glowing bed? They weren’t here to catch a train any more than she was.
She found an open outlet near Track 101. After plugging in, she must have dozed off, because the next time she looked over at the four-faced clock, it was six a.m. She washed her face and hair in the ladies’ room and dried herself under the hand blower. At the next sink, the woman with the surge protector in her purse brushed her teeth.
She rode the express train back to Brooklyn. She still might be in time to save the letters if she could just persuade the HAZMAT chief that the archive wasn’t contaminated. Edith had kept the letters in hermetically sealed, double-strength plastic containers. Maybe the containers could be burned and the archive saved? She’d explain to the chief how invaluable the letters were, that they were going to the Smithsonian next month to become part of the National Archives.
The pale morning sun had just cleared the roofs by the time she emerged from the subway. Gladys’s van was still parked at the corner, her sleeping profile silhouetted in the driver’s window, a cat on her shoulder. A bright yellow three-story-high and half-a-block-wide tent covered the row houses. A truck with a baby-whale-sized cylinder was parked in front. A thick hose ran from a valve on the tank to a fitting in the tent. Kat could see that something was happening within. The plastic kept inflating and deflating, as if the row houses were fighting for breath.
Frank was the only soul around. Hands dug in pockets, he faced the yellow enormity, his expression bearing the anguished surprise of a man who has just turned around to find a three-story-high wave about to crash over him.
“Am I too late? Is it over?” Kat asked. “Our mother’s archives are still inside. Edie would be devastated.”
“You couldn’t have done nothing anyway. The acid they’re using can eat an entire SUV in less than six hours. By tonight, our homes will be ash, like nobody ever lived there. I know those buildings like I’d built them myself, and now all that knowing’s going to be useless. Where are we supposed to go?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You wonder why those sad sacks on the Jersey Shore are rebuilding in exactly the same spot after the ocean tore away their last homes. Where else they going to go?”
Kat tried to locate the spot where she imagined her front door was, the one that would always open for her no matter how far she strayed. Heat waves rippled off the plastic. The seams appeared to be melting. The tent was a gas chamber, just as Mrs. Syzmanski had predicted.
All the letters—Abused, Bewildered, Compromised, Damned, Ebullient, Fuming, Guilty, Humbled, Infatuated, Jilted, Kinky, Loveless, Manipulated, Nervous, Obstinate, Petrified, Queasy, Ridiculed, Shadowed, Teased, Unloved, Vilified, Wistful, Xenophobic, Yearning, Zealous—asphyxiated.
Not all the letters. There were three hundred survivors. In her bereavement, she had almost forgotten about the manuscript. Thank god she hadn’t listened to the editor and winnowed the pages to under a hundred. The manuscript must be on his desk. Maybe he had been trying to reach her all week with good news? It would be such a tribute to Edith and her mother if the letters were published.
“Frank, I have to leave now to take care of something important.”
He watc
hed warily as she picked up her suitcase. “Are you coming back?”
She suddenly didn’t know. What was left for her to come back to?
Kat waited in the reception area at Sutton House for her affable editor to come out of his office to greet her like last time. She wanted a contract or she wanted the manuscript back. She perched on the leather sofa adjacent to a wall-length, glass-fronted bookcase and crossed her ankles to conceal the broken sandal strap. She could see her messy reflection in the spotless glass. The shelves were bricked solid with colorful spines so straight and orderly compared to the chaos and devastation only a subway ride away. About ten minutes later, his assistant, the young lady who had brought Kat a coffee with two sugars during her last visit, appeared with the survivors, still safe in their three-ring binder.
“He wants you to have these back. There’s a letter inside.”
“There are three hundred letters. What does his say?”
“I don’t know,” she lied.
Kat removed the envelope. She didn’t finish reading the rejection. She crumpled it into a ball and dropped it at her feet.
She needed a drink.
Crossing Fifth Avenue, she returned to the garnet-red bar where she’d met Lenny and ordered vodka, a double. Shaken by the rejection and the feeling that she’d let Edith and her mother down, she opened the binder and leafed reverently through the pages, stopping to reread the last letter, “Bereft in Plattsburg.” The young widow who wrote so lightly you could barely make out her question. Will I find love again? She had chosen that letter to close the volume so that the reader was left weeping. The editor was blind. These letters were extraordinary. She’d make sure they got to their new home at the Smithsonian, but where would she go? Back to California? She imagined herself returning to the trailer in the primeval redwood forest whose massive trunks held up heaven. She wanted so badly to return to her old carefree, careless self.
Three doubles later, she staggered to Grand Central to find an empty bench for the night. The evening rush hour was just ending. She sat on both the manuscript and the BlackBerry so that no one would steal them, and then tucked her suitcase between her knees.
She’d just closed her eyes when someone clapped stridently next to her ear. “You can’t sleep here,” said a policeman.
“I must have dozed off. I’m recharging my BlackBerry.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“It’s my dead sister’s.”
“You sure about that?”
He reached for the phone, but Kat wouldn’t let go.
“Lady, how much did you drink today?”
His partner, two benches down, was rousting a rag bundle. “Up and at ’em.” The officer poked the pile with his nightstick. Two swollen, cracked, filthy feet emerged and began to stir.
“You, too,” Kat’s policeman said.
She was herded into a knot of homeless and shooed out of the terminal. One of the men, a rather charming old salt, invited her to spend the night at his “country estate,” a mattress he kept hidden behind a bush in Central Park. She declined.
She just wanted to go home, even with no home to go to.
In an all-night Laundromat, Ashley heard a ruckus behind her. She’d been stuffing a pillowcase with some other girl’s freshly dried clothes. The girl had stepped outside for a smoke. In the washing machine area, the night manager was shooing away a homeless woman who had tried to recharge her cell phone in one of the laundry’s sockets.
American beggars have cell phones? Who do beggars call? Who calls them?
“You can’t sleep here stealing my electricity!” the manager shouted.
“I have every right to be here,” the beggar said. “My clothes are still in the dryer.”
“Show me which one?”
“Okay, my clothes aren’t in the dryer right now. They’re in my bag, but I laundered them here earlier. I paid good money and I have every right to sit here.” She started to open her ratty suitcase to prove to the manager that her clothes were clean.
“Lady, I don’t want to see your dirty underwear.”
While all eyes were on the commotion, Ashley hoisted the overstuffed pillowcase, hiding behind its bulk, so that when she snuck past the girl smoking in the doorway, all the girl would see was a fat pillow atop two comely legs.
Halfway down the street, she heard the beggar call, “Ashley?”
She about-faced. She barely recognized Kat under the street lamp, hobbling on a broken sandal. The old twin had fared worse than she had. Her suitcase was belted with duct tape, her clothes looked slept in, her blond hair was matted and jutting, like a picture Ashley once saw of sun flares. There was nothing to be gained in befriending her. She surreptitiously glanced at Kat’s white-knuckled hand, clutching the cell phone. She could easily snatch it and run, but she didn’t. Kat remained the only person in America who had talked to her “on par.”
“So how best seller doing? You still need Russian translator?” Ashley asked.
“When can you start?”
“I check schedule. How life at Metropolitan Hotel?”
“It’s a long story. Are you still house-sitting for the actor?”
“Lousy view. I move up to penthouse. Plenty of electricity. Much juice as phone can drink.”
“Does the penthouse also have a bath? Oh, Ashley, I would do anything to take a long hot soak and get out of these filthy clothes.”
“Electricity costs.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“I can find my own plug, thank you.”
“Price include hot bath and clean bed.”
Kat gave her four ones and a fistful of coins.
“Here are rules. We tell doorman you American grandmother come for visit.”
“No one will believe I’m a grandmother. Let’s tell him I’m your aunt.”
“I move to penthouse week ago,” she told Kat as she retrieved the key from the door ledge. She didn’t immediately turn on the lights as they stepped inside. She wanted Kat to see the unimpeded bejeweled skyline.
“Two-million-dollar view,” she quoted one of the real estate brokers she’d overheard while hiding in the closet.
Kat smiled, her enormous false teeth as bright as a miner’s lamp. “You’ve done very well for yourself, Ashley.”
“This model apartment. I house-sit for her. She think maybe I be model, too.”
“Oh, Ashley, you don’t have to pretend with me. I know you’re squatting. Point me toward the tub. You don’t happen to have any bubble bath, do you?”
While Kat soaked, Ashley plucked her dirty, rank pantsuit off the bathroom tiles, as if it were an infected hankie, and carried it to the trash chute. She didn’t want those rags on her clean floor. Just as she tossed it into the blackness, she saw, or thought she saw, a tiny comet of luminous spores. It twinkled only for a split second.
After washing her hands twice in the kitchen sink, she sat by the wall of glass to wait for Kat to finish. Until tonight, she hadn’t talked to another soul in close to a week. She watched the river far below, a black crevasse between two incandescent glass cliffs. The view had only saddened her until now. She wished she had a picture of herself in front of the skyline to send back to Omsk. What good was beauty with no one to share it? Alone, beauty was almost cruel.
A blackout slammed over the steamy city, like a lid on a boiling pot.
The audience let loose a collective gasp as they waited for the lights to come back on.
The wind machine’s blades made one last rotation. Becalmed on the black stage, the two old pros, Lear and Gloucester, finished their scene with such vociferous authority that the audience saw Gloucester’s blindness.
Acts four and five continued by torch and candlelight, as a castle in pre-Roman Britain should be lit.
Afterward, in the dark dressing rooms, a communal bunker under the bleachers, the blind cast bantered and laughed, the infectious headiness of having surpassed the previous performa
nces. Vida momentarily forgot that her home and everything she owned had been reduced to ash that morning. Unbuttoning her high-necked gown, she felt glorious. Beams from smartphones began to light up here and there. By touch alone, she changed into her street clothes.
“Are those sequined pants?” asked Regan.
She glanced down at the flecks of luminosity playing over her legs. Had she put on someone else’s khakis? She reached into her pocket and fingered the familiar shape of her nail clipper, her talisman: she always trimmed her nails before a performance. The khakis were her favorite old pair, the only article from her contaminated wardrobe that she hadn’t thrown away—she’d washed the pants twice with bleach. The longer she stared at the sequins, the more plentiful the spangles became, as if breeding before her eyes. The sequins were alive! She half screamed, half retched, then practically tore off her pants and T-shirt. One of the knights shined his smartphone on the commotion. The beam caught something alive and glowing in the back of Vida’s dressing room.
The knight screamed.
Lear ordered all the knights to shine their smartphones on the glow, then knelt to take a closer look. “I believe Vida’s growing mushrooms in her dressing room.”
“How could mushrooms not be growing in this damp, hot dungeon?” asked Regan.
“Call the fire department,” Vida told the stage manager.
“For a mushroom?”
“Ask for the HAZMAT squad.”
While the stage manager dialed 911, Vida explained to the cast about the new supermold, and how she had lost her home.
“I believe I’ll wait for the HAZMAT squad outside,” said Lear, backing away from the toxic glow.
Rank was suddenly forgotten; queen and scullery maid, duke and pawn stampeded as a single blind herd into the night. The city was gone, the power outage vast. The normally starless New York sky now looked like a gala show at a planetarium.
Stripped to her bra and underwear, Vida sat away from the others, shivering on the bleachers, though the temperature hovered near ninety. She’d been wearing those contaminated pants all day, next to her skin. She’d put her hands in those infested pockets and then rubbed her eyes.
