New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  I need to see her. I’m frowning so hard they pinch my nose.

  “For the hump,” she says, and touches her neck, like she had one too. “So you could stand up straight again. Like you did when you were little.”

  Now I wish I hadn’t put the glasses on. I have to look down at my hands. The fingertips are all smudged from the toner on the letter. “Mama Alice,” I say, and then something comes out I never meant to ask her. “How come you never adopted me?”

  She jerks like I stuck her with a fork. “Because I thought … ” She stops, and shakes her head, and spreads her hands.

  I nod. I asked, but I know. Because the state pays for my medicine. Because Mama Alice thought I would be dead by now.

  We were all supposed to be dead by now. All the HIV babies. Two years, maybe five. AIDS kills little kids really quick, because their immune systems haven’t really happened yet. But the drugs got better as our lives got longer, and now we might live forever. Nearly forever.

  Forty. Fifty.

  I’m dying. Just not fast enough. If it were faster, I’d have nothing to worry about. As it is, I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

  I touch the squishy pad of fat on my neck with my fingers, push it in until it dimples. It feels like it should keep the mark of my fingers, like Moon Mud, but when I stop touching it, it springs back like nothing happened at all.

  I don’t want to get to go to college because somebody feels bad for me. I don’t want anybody’s pity.

  The next day, I go down to talk to the harpy.

  I get up early and wash quick, pull on my tights and skirt and blouse and sweater. I don’t have to work after school today, so I leave my uniform on the hanger behind the door.

  But when I get outside, the first thing I hear is barking. Loud barking, lots of it, from the alley. And that hiss, the harpy’s hiss. Like the biggest maddest cat you ever heard.

  There’s junk all over the street, but nothing that looks like I could fight with it. I grab up some hunks of ice. My school shoes skip on the frozen sidewalk and I tear my tights when I fall down.

  It’s dark in the alley, but it’s city dark, not real dark, and I can see the dogs okay. There’s three of them, dancing around the dumpster on their hind legs. One’s light-colored enough that even in the dark I can see she’s all scarred up from fighting, and the other two are dark.

  The harpy leans forward on the edge of the dumpster, wings fanned out like a cartoon eagle, head stuck out and jabbing at the dogs.

  Silly thing doesn’t know it doesn’t have a beak, I think, and whip one of the ice rocks at the big light-colored dog. She yelps. Just then, the harpy sicks up over all three of the dogs.

  Oh, God, the smell.

  I guess it doesn’t need a beak after all, because the dogs go from growling and snapping to yelping and running just like that. I slide my backpack off one shoulder and grab it by the strap in the hand that’s not full of ice.

  It’s heavy and I could hit something, but I don’t swing it in time to stop one of the dogs knocking into me as it bolts away. The puke splashes on my leg. It burns like scalding water through my tights.

  I stop myself just before I slap at the burn. Because getting the puke on my glove and burning my hand too would just be smart like that. Instead, I scrub at it with the dirty ice in my other hand and run limping towards the harpy.

  The harpy hears my steps and turns to hiss, eyes glaring like green torches, but when it sees who’s there it pulls its head back. It settles its wings like a nun settling her skirts on a park bench, and gives me the same fishy glare.

  Wash that leg with snow, the harpy says. Or with lots of water. It will help the burning.

  “It’s acid.”

  With what harpies eat, the harpy says, don’t you think it would have to be?

  I mean to say something clever back, but what gets out instead is, “Can you fly?”

  As if in answer, the harpy spreads its vast bronze wings again. They stretch from one end of the dumpster to the other, and overlap its length a little.

  The harpy says, Do these look like flightless wings to you?

  Why does it always answer a question with a question? I know kids like that, and it drives me crazy when they do it, too.

  “No,” I say. “But I’ve never seen you. Fly. I’ve never seen you fly.”

  The harpy closes its wings, very carefully. A wind still stirs my hair where it sticks out under my hat.

  The harpy says, There’s no wind in my kingdom. But I’m light now, I’m empty. If there were wind, if I could get higher—

  I drop my pack beside the dumpster. It has harpy puke on it now anyway. I’m not putting it on my back. “What if I carried you up?”

  The harpy’s wings flicker, as if it meant to spread them again. And then it settles back with narrowed eyes and shows me its snaggled teeth in a suspicious grin.

  The harpy says, What’s in it for you?

  I say to the harpy, “You’ve been my friend.”

  The harpy stares at me, straight on like a person, not side to side like a bird. It stays quiet so long I think it wants me to leave, but a second before I step back it nods.

  The harpy says, Carry me up the fire escape, then.

  I have to clamber up on the dumpster and pick the harpy up over my head to put it on the fire escape. It’s heavy, all right, especially when I’m holding it up over my head so it can hop onto the railing. Then I have to jump up and catch the ladder, then swing my feet up like on the uneven bars in gym class.

  That’s the end of these tights. I’ll have to find something to tell Mama Alice. Something that isn’t exactly a lie.

  Then we’re both up on the landing, and I duck down so the stinking, heavy harpy can step onto my shoulder with her broken, filthy claws. I don’t want to think about the infection I’ll get if she scratches me. Hospital stay. IV antibiotics. But she balances there like riding shoulders is all she does for a living, her big scaly toes sinking into my fat pads so she’s not pushing down on my bones.

  I have to use both hands to pull myself up the fire escape, even though I left my backpack at the bottom. The harpy weighs more, and it seems to get heavier with every step. It’s not any easier because I’m trying to tiptoe and not wake up the whole building.

  I stop to rest on the landings, but by the time I get to the top one my calves shake like the mufflers on a Harley. I imagine them booming like that too, which makes me laugh. Kind of, as much as I can. I double over with my hands on the railing and the harpy hops off.

  “Is this high enough?”

  The harpy doesn’t look at me. It faces out over the empty dark street. It spreads its wings. The harpy is right: I’m alone, I’ve always been alone. Alone and lonely.

  And now it’s also leaving me.

  “I’m dying,” I yell, just as it starts the downstroke. I’d never told anybody. Mama Alice had to tell me, when I was five, but I never told anybody.

  The harpy rocks forward, beats its wings hard, and settles back on the railing. It cranks its head around on its twisty neck to stare at me.

  “I have HIV,” I say. I press my glove against the scar under my coat where I used to have a G-tube. When I was little.

  The harpy nods and turns away again. The harpy says, I know.

  It should surprise me that the harpy knows, but it doesn’t. Harpies know things. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the harpy only loves me because I’m garbage. If it only wants me because my blood is poison. My scarf ’s come undone, and a button’s broken on my new old winter coat.

  It feels weird to say what I just said out loud, so I say it again. Trying to get used to the way the words feel in my mouth. “Harpy, I’m dying. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But probably before I should.”

  The harpy says, That’s because you’re not immortal.

  I spread my hands, cold in the gloves. Well duh. “Take me with you.”

  The harpy says, I don’t think you�
��re strong enough to be a harpy.

  “I’m strong enough for this.” I take off my new old winter coat from the fire department and drop it on the fire escape. “I don’t want to be alone any more.”

  The harpy says, If you come with me, you have to stop dying. And you have to stop living. And it won’t make you less alone. You are human, and if you stay human your loneliness will pass, one way or the other. If you come with me, it’s yours. Forever.

  It’s not just empty lungs making my head spin. I say, “I got into college.”

  The harpy says, It’s a career path.

  I say, “You’re lonely too. At least I decided to be alone, because it was better.”

  The harpy says, I am a harpy.

  “Mama Alice would say that God never gives us any burdens we can’t carry.”

  The harpy says, Does she look you in the eye when she says that? I say, “Take me with you.”

  The harpy smiles. A harpy’s smile is an ugly thing, even seen edge-on. The harpy says, You do not have the power to make me not alone, Desiree.

  It’s the first time it’s ever said my name. I didn’t know it knew it. “You have sons and sisters and a lover, Celaeno. In the halls of the West Wind. How can you be lonely?”

  The harpy turns over its shoulder and stares with green, green eyes. The harpy says, I never told you my name.

  “Your name is Darkness. You told me it. You said you wanted me, Celaeno.”

  The cold hurts so much I can hardly talk. I step back and hug myself tight. Without the coat I’m cold, so cold my teeth buzz together like gears stripping, and hugging myself doesn’t help.

  I don’t want to be like the harpy. The harpy is disgusting. It’s awful.

  The harpy says, And underneath the filth, I shine. I salvage. You choose to be alone? Here’s your chance to prove yourself no liar.

  I don’t want to be like the harpy. But I don’t want to be me any more, either. I’m stuck living with myself.

  If I go with the harpy, I will be stuck living with myself forever.

  The sky brightens. When the sunlight strikes the harpy, its filthy feathers will shine like metal. I can already see fingers of cloud rising across the horizon, black like cut paper against the paleness that will be dawn, not that you can ever see dawn behind the buildings. There’s no rain or snow in the forecast, but the storm is coming.

  I say, “You only want me because my blood is rotten. You only want me because I got thrown away.”

  I turn garbage into bronze, the harpy says. I turn rot into strength. If you came with me, you would have to be like me.

  “Tell me it won’t always be this hard.”

  I do not lie, child. What do you want?

  I don’t know my answer until I open my mouth and say it, but it’s something I can’t get from Mama Alice, and I can’t get from a scholarship. “Magic.”

  The harpy rocks from foot to foot. I can’t give you that, she says. You have to make it.

  Downstairs, under my pillow, is a letter. Across town, behind brick walls, is a doctor who would write me another letter.

  Just down the block in the church beside my school is a promise of maybe heaven, if I’m a good girl and I die.

  Out there is the storm and the sunrise.

  Mama Alice will worry, and I’m sorry. She doesn’t deserve that. When I’m a harpy will I care? Will I care forever?

  Under the humps and pads of fat across my shoulders, I imagine I can already feel the prickle of feathers.

  I use my fingers to lift myself onto the railing and balance there in my school shoes on the rust and tricky ice, six stories up, looking down on the street lights. I stretch out my arms.

  And so what if I fall?

  A love story that could only happen in New York.

  THE TALLEST DOLL IN NEW YORK CITY

  MARIA DAHVANA

  HEADLEY

  On a particular snowy Monday in February, at 5:02 p.m., I’m sixty-six flights above the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street, looking down at streets swarming with hats and jackets. All the guys who work in midtown are spit into the frozen city, hunting sugar for the dolls they’re trying to muddle from sour into sweet.

  From up here I can see Lex fogged with cheap cologne, every citizen clutching his heart-shaped box wrapped in cellophane, red as the devil’s drawers.

  If you happen to be a waiter at the Cloud Club, you know five’s the hour when a guy’s nerves start to fray. This calendar square’s worse than most. Every man on our member list is suffering the Saint Valentine’s Cramp, and me and the crew up here are ready with a stocked bar. I’m in my Cloud Club uniform, the pocket embroidered with my name in the Chrysler’s trademark typeface, swooping like a skid mark on a lonely road in Montana. Over my arm I’ve got a clean towel, and in my vest I have an assortment of aspirins and plasters in case a citizen shows up already bleeding or broken-nosed from an encounter with a lady lovenot.

  Later tonight, it’ll be the members’ doll dinner, the one night a year we allow women into the private dining room. Valorous Victor, captain of the wait, pours us each a preparatory coupe. There are ice-cream sculptures shaped like Cupid in the walk-in. Each gal gets a corsage the moment she enters, the roses from Valorous Victor’s brother’s hothouse in Jersey. At least two dolls are in line for wife, and we’ve got their guy’s rings here ready and waiting, to drop into champagne in one case and wedge into an oyster in another. Odds in the kitchen have the diamond in that particular ring consisting of a pretty piece of paste.

  Down below, it’s 1938, and things are not as prime as they are up here. Our members are the richest men left standing; their wives at home in Greenwich, their mistresses movie starlets with porcelain teeth. Me, I’m single. I’ve got a mother with rules strict as Sing Sing, and a sister with a face pretty as the Sistine’s ceiling. My sister needs protecting from all the guys in the world, and so I live in Brooklyn, man of my mother’s house, until I can find a wife or die waiting.

  The members start coming in, and each guy gets led to his locker. Our members are the rulers of the world. They make automobiles and build skyscrapers, but none as tall as the one we’re standing in right now. The Cloud Club’s open since before the building got her spire, and the waitstaff in a Member’s Own knows things even a man’s miss doesn’t. Back during Prohibition, we install each of the carved wood lockers at the Cloud Club with a hieroglyphic identification code straight out of ancient Egypt, so our members can keep their bottles safe and sound. Valorous Victor dazzles the police more than once with his rambling explanation of cryptographic complexities, and finally the blue boys just take a drink and call it done. No copper’s going to Rosetta our rigmarole.

  I’m at the bar mixing a Horse’s Neck for Mr. Condé Nast, but I’ve got my eye on the mass of members staggering out of the elevators with fur coats, necklaces, and parcels of cling & linger, when, at 5:28 p.m. precisely, the Chrysler Building steps off her foundation and goes for a walk.

  There is no warning.

  She just shakes the snow and pigeons loose from her spire and takes off, sashaying southwest. This is something even we waiters haven’t experienced before. The Chrysler is 1,046 feet tall, and, until now, she’s seemed stationary. She’s stood motionless on this corner for seven years so far, the gleamiest gal in a million miles.

  None of the waitstaff lose their cool. When things go wrong, waiters, the good ones, adjust to the needs of both customers and clubs. In 1932, for example, Valorous himself commences to travel from midtown to Ellis Island in order to deliver a pistol to one of our members, a guy who happens to have a grievance against a brand new American in line for a name. Two slugs and a snick later, Victor’s in surgery beneath the gaze of the Verdigris Virgin. Still, he returns to Manhattan in time for the evening napkin twist.

  “The Chrysler’s just taking a little stroll, sirs,” Valorous announces from the stage. “No need to panic. This round is on me and the waiters of the Cloud Club.”


  Foreseeably, there is, in fact, some panic. To some of our members, this event appears to be more horrifying than Black Tuesday.

  Mr. Nast sprints to the men’s room with motion sickness, and The Soother, our man on staff for problems of the heart and guts, tails him with a tall glass of ginger ale. I decide to drink Nast’s Horse’s Neck myself. Nerves on the mend, I consider whether any our members on sixty-seven and sixty-eight might possibly need drinks, but I see Victor’s already sending an expedition to the stairs.

  I take myself to the windows. In the streets, people gawp and yawp and holler, and taxis honk their horns. Gals pick their way through icy puddles, and guys stand in paralysis, looking up.

  We joke about working in the body of the best broad in New York City, but no one on the waitstaff ever thinks that the Chrysler might have a will of her own. She’s beautiful, what with her multistory crown, her skin pale blue in daylight and rose-colored with city lights at night. Her gown’s printed with arcs and swoops, and beaded with tiny drops of General Electric.

  We know her inside out, or we think we do. We go up and down her stairs when her elevators are broken, looking out her triangular windows on the hottest day of summer. The ones at the top don’t have panes, because the wind up there can kick up a field goal even when its breezeless down below, and the updrafts can grab a bird and fling it through the building like it’s nothing. The Chrysler’s officially seventy-seven floors, but she actually has eighty-four levels. They get smaller and smaller until, at eighty-three, there’s only a platform the size of a picnic table, surrounded by windows; and, above that, a trapdoor and a ladder into the spire, where the lightning rod is. The top floors are tempting. Me and The Soother take ourselves up to the very top one sultry August night, knees and ropes, and she sways beneath us, but holds steady. Inside the spire, there’s space for one guy to stand encased in metal, feeling the earth move.

  The Chrysler is a devastating dame, and that’s nothing new. I could assess her for years and never be done. At night we turn her on, and she glows for miles.

  I’m saying, the waiters of the Cloud Club should know what kind of doll she is. We work inside her brain.