Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  I let him go, watching the shadows enfold him, then waited, standing on the jogging path, expecting any minute to hear a splash. Silence. And then I heard vomiting, a wrenching, helpless sound tinged with panic, as if a ferocious animal were clawing its way out through his skin. Then weeping, sobbing intermingled with yelps of pain. I walked away, up toward the old train tracks, inhaling the smell of grass and trying to steady the wire of fear jumping inside me. I sat by the tracks and put my hands on the iron rails, imagining the sound of the train, its distant vibrations, the promise of that faint, rhythmic clacking.

  After a long time, I descended the hill and found Halliday lying by the river, unconscious. Vodka and vomit fumes hung on the air. I had the absurd thought that the grass in that area would not survive.

  “Come on,” I said, shaking his shoulder, but he was out cold. I considered leaving him there, dropping the car keys in his pocket, calling a cab from the Y, serve him right to wake up at sunrise, shivering among disapproving joggers. But even as I entertained these thoughts I was bullying him into a standing position, “Up. Up. Come on. Let’s go,” seizing his hands and yanking, hauling, dragging, heaving him onto his feet, all hundred and eighty pounds, or whatever the hell he weighed. He drooped on my shoulder, a sleepwalker reeking of vodka puke as we walked, my spine trembling with the effort of holding him up until somehow we reached the car and I emptied him into the passenger seat. I got in and rolled down all four windows.

  “Anthony!” I shouted over the wind as we headed east. “What hotel are you staying in?”

  “Courtyard,” he said obediently, his eyes shut. I knew where the Courtyard was—I’d passed it today, driving into town on State Street. Halliday leaned against the door, either sleeping or dead. “Room number,” I yelled as we approached, but he was out again, so I pulled into the parking lot of the Courtyard Inn and extracted the key stick from the inside pocket of Halliday’s jacket, checking it for vomit flecks before I presented it at the front desk. A girl in desperate need of a diet was eating Doritos and watching Jay Leno. “Forgot my room number,” I sang. “Halliday.” She managed the impressive feat of looking up the room number and telling me how to find it without once compromising the connection between her eyes and the TV set.

  In the car, Halliday hadn’t moved. I drove to the parking area nearest his room, pried him from the car and herded him up a set of outdoor stairs to the second floor. He walked heavily, doggedly, sensing he was almost there. His room was roughly interchangeable with mine: two large beds, garment bag open on one of them. I steered him to the bathroom and turned on the shower, adjusting the water so it wasn’t scalding. Then I left, shutting the door behind me. “Take a shower and brush your teeth,” I instructed through the door. “And drink water. Lots and lots of water. You can do it in the shower if you want.” Why bother? I asked myself, even as I spoke. What did I care if he felt clean when he woke?

  A long time passed before I heard any evidence of a human mass beneath the spigot. I flipped on the TV and found Unsolved Mysteries again—a teenage girl who disappeared while walking her dog; close-up of a scampering terrier dragging its leash. Her remains found one year later in a limestone quarry. A high school yearbook photo: Blue eyeshadow, lopsided smile. Too much mascara.

  By the time Halliday emerged in a towel, soap and toothpaste smells perfuming the bathroom steam, I had pulled the leaden curtains and turned down the bed. He looked awfully good to my male-starved eyes: lean torso, lots of dark hair. I did my best not to gawk. He climbed into bed without a word, pulling the covers to his chin.

  “Take off the towel,” I said, but he didn’t react. His eyes were shut.

  I turned off the light, slipped my jacket back on and left the room. A light rain had begun to fall. I walked through the parking lot toward State Street, watching the garish lights crackle against the sky. I remembered driving past this very spot earlier this very day, and feeling pride. I remembered the feeling, but I couldn’t find it. Or even imagine it. I was alone in the middle of nowhere—worse than nowhere: the place that had made me. And now the depression, the Rockford thud whose arrival I had awaited from the moment Irene and I first drove into the city, blanketed me in its crushing, airless weight.

  “You again,” I said.

  My old friend.

  I can’t bear to see you alone, it said.

  Shivering, I stuck my hands in my pockets, where one of them collided with Halliday’s car keys. I’d forgotten to leave them. An uplifting discovery; I could drive his Grand Am to the Sweden House and return it in the morning. But I didn’t want to go to the Sweden House. And when further burrowing revealed that his room key, too, was still in my possession, I headed back at a trot, drawn by the pulse of warmth I imagined radiating from Halliday’s sleeping body. I hadn’t lain in bed with a man in so long: even a comatose one would be a luxury.

  The room, of course, was exactly as I had left it. I showered and dabbed dry my face, wishing the towel were softer because my bones ached, bones held together by pins; the rain made them ache, I was sure. I wished I’d brought my special lotion; I knew the cheap motel brand would sting. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I regretted having showered. Without makeup, there was something too exposed about my face, broken-looking even though the cracks were hidden inside my mouth, under my hairline. This new face gave too much away; it was that, and not the absence of beauty (though perhaps they were related), that I would never get used to. Still, if I left before Halliday woke, he would never see my face. I went naked to his garment bag and found an undershirt and some boxers, the most delightful exhaustion lapping within me as I slipped them on. I switched off the light and climbed into bed beside him, my stomach to his back. After a minute or two, I pulled the undershirt over my head. It wasn’t often anymore that I felt skin against skin, and I wasn’t going to squander a chance.

  Sometime before dawn, Halliday took a long piss in the bathroom. Water, I noted dimly, he drank the water. I faked deep slumber on his return, doubting his enthusiasm over my uninvited naked presence in his drunken bed; but then, guessing he’d dispensed with the towel, I cracked my eyes for a peek. The room was too dark. When he’d settled back down and was breathing evenly again, I slithered out of the boxers. I hadn’t lain naked with a man since that one right after I came back to New York. Paul Shepherd. His name streaked through my mind, a name without a face. Paul Shepherd from Hong Kong.

  The next time I woke might have been ten minutes later or an hour. Halliday was facing me, sound asleep, the towel unquestionably a thing of the past because I felt his erection against my leg. This was a lovely sensation indeed, and for a while I just lay there, enjoying my good fortune, until a certain restlessness set in, a wish to parlay this good fortune into better fortune still.

  “Anthony,” I said, but he didn’t stir. I tweaked a hair from his head and he murmured, shifted. I reached down and touched him, took him in my hand, to which he sighed and tensed, pushing against me—I’m just taking advantage of what’s in front of me, I told myself, I’d be crazy not to—the question was how to do it without waking him. Technically I supposed it was against the law, having sex with someone asleep, so waking him up to insist that he wear a condom seemed a poor move, strategically. But I could live without that, I decided, it was worth it to me (such was my desperation), I was premenstrual, I’d be fine; he’d been married, so he probably didn’t have AIDS. I began formulating excuses in the event that he should wake to find himself in a compromising position, as they said, such as: I didn’t know you were asleep! You spoke, you said, Charlotte, let’s make love, or better yet, Gosh, I’ve been asleep, too, you mean we—? or hey, why not this?: Nothing happened, you dreamed it all up, rolling these possibilities through my mind as I pondered an architectural model of our prospective union, a model whose two engineering objectives were sexual intercourse and the preservation of the inebriated slumber now engulfing the male participant. After some tentative essaying of legs and knees and hands
I made my choice, awkward and ludicrous though it surely was, for it involved suspending my left leg midair while bending the right knee over Halliday’s side so as best to avail myself of the crucial part of him, which I guided inside me with the delicacy of someone loading a nuclear missile into its silo. Now he began to move, playing his part—one hell of a dream you must be having, I thought, and stepped up the prattle of excuses, I didn’t know, I was asleep, too, I have these waking dreams I’ve seen doctors about them, this mantra of exculpation clacking through my mind as I mashed myself against him, afraid he would come before I did and then where would I be? Yes. There. No. Yes. There—in a heedless deviation from my architectural model, I seized his ass and shoved him against me and came, long and tortuous and mostly silent, at which point he did, too, with the startled cry of someone slipping off a ledge; his eyes burst open, but I’d sensed that possibility and shut my own at the very same instant, feigning sleep, awash in satisfaction, the drift of tides, sounds of distant barking dogs, telling myself there was no way he could prove it, I was asleep, I’ve been asleep the whole damn time you can’t tell me I wasn’t, I have proof, I had dreams …

  But as I floated toward sleep, Anthony’s arms loosely around me, I found that I couldn’t relax. An object was lodged in my chest, caught there; a fist-sized object that had to be expelled, an object consisting of words, a very small handful of words. I didn’t want to say them. I was afraid to.

  “I love you,” I whispered into his doomed, unconscious ear. “I love you, Anthony Halliday.”

  There, I thought, it’s gone. I said it and it’s done, it’s gone.

  But of course it wasn’t gone. It was indestructible.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The first night Charlotte discovered the math teacher’s house dark, she pedaled home unfazed; it had happened before, several times. She was always careful not to allude to these failed visits, preferring to let him think she’d been off doing other things. But had it ever happened two nights in a row? She stood at his back door the second time, hand almost touching the knob, but was stopped by the thought of how angry he would be, if he knew. Anyway, he would never leave a door unlocked.

  On the third night, a bead of anxiety hardened inside Charlotte’s chest, small, dense; she noticed it when she breathed because it hurt, like a stitch. She stood astride her bike in front of the dark house in plain sight (breaking every rule) for twenty minutes. It was midnight.

  After that, she waited five days before going back. It was early June, school nearly out—Baxter had ended last week. Charlotte didn’t feel like going outside. When she wasn’t studying for exams or working at Fish World, she burrowed into her room with the shades down, reading about Rockford’s industrial triumphs before and during the wars. When the First World War began, it was “furniture city,” the second-largest maker of furniture in the country (after Grand Rapids, Michigan), not to mention the largest producer of hosiery—the Nelson “Seamless Sock” having captured the market in the 1880s. Her mind rustled, meanwhile, tallying proofs of his love: the amber bead, of course, but other ones, too—cars that had rounded corners exactly on cue, and exactly the right color, to prove it. Rockford’s machine tool factories thrived during the wars, making aircraft propeller governors and air-control valves and hydraulic transmissions and air-cooled aircraft engines, yet some aspect of love still eluded Charlotte—a smell or a taste, a hidden texture, something she sensed she should know, but didn’t. This worried her.

  She went to her desk and opened the calendar where she’d kept the coded records of her visits.

  It was strangely empty. She’d gotten lazy in recent weeks, taken few notes, and now she lacked any map against which to measure the meaning of that empty house three nights in a row. Well, she would start with last time. Ten days ago. She’d left the house at twelve-nineteen (she made this up). A warm night, unusually warm for the start of summer, she hadn’t worn a sweater. He’d seemed glad to see her (she made a note of this). They lay with his window open, warm air spiraling in from outside, and as Charlotte was slipping toward sleep, she’d asked, “Can we go places now, if you’re not a teacher anymore?”

  He turned to her. He was no longer thin. This fact had presented itself without warning a couple of weeks before, and Charlotte had been shocked, feeling she didn’t recognize him.

  “What places?” he asked.

  “Anywhere. Like a movie. Or Chili’s.” Just once in a while, she was thinking, like friends. Like other people.

  He didn’t answer, but he took her hand (she made a note of this).

  “I’ll be seventeen in three weeks,” she said. She’d been looking for a way to mention her birthday. She was hoping for a gift.

  And rather than get up, as he usually did before she was even asleep, Michael lay there watching her—Charlotte felt his gaze even through the sheath of her eyelids. So comforting, to be watched as she dropped into sleep, the safety of it. As if he were holding her. She squeezed her eyes, willing herself to sleep now, fast, before he left. If he doesn’t get up before I … It was automatic.

  Michael lay there, watching the girl. He wanted to say something to her, a particular thing he’d rarely said before, to anyone. His mind swarmed with memories now that Rockford was fading around him, a fresh set of documents harvested, his next move finally clear: a last exodus in what had revealed itself only now as a steady migration in one direction (west), whose endpoint he had very nearly reached. Los Angeles. For years it had hovered before him, a flickering mirage awaiting his arrival. He would make movies. Build a white house overlooking the sea.

  He remembered the reek of meat. A humid, bloody, gagging smell, mysteriously sweet, that had soaked the Jersey City apartment from a Halal butcher one floor down, suffused the mattresses and sheets, imbued the splintered floor and the foam-rubber couch, so there was no relief from it.

  How easily she slept! An American sleep; the sleep of those who believe they will never be alone, or forgotten, or lost. That they are always safe. A sleep he was coming gradually to enjoy himself.

  He remembered the waiting. Hours of watching sunlight twist through coils of the gasoline pumps at the filling station where he’d begun working one day after his arrival in America. More than a year ago, now—March—wet and icy but stubbornly without snow, which Aziz (as he was known) longed to see. In the filling station office he listened to sounds of trucks, waiting for the phone to ring—his UN contact, a man whom Aziz believed was his inferior and so despised. But he himself was a fugitive, a dead man who lived, who carried three false passports, and so could not be slipped onto one of the lower diplomatic rungs, as others were.

  To empty his mind he prayed, prostrated himself in the strangely dilute American sunlight, sun dissolved in water, sun filtered through leaves. On the grimy floor of the filling station office he knelt, facing east, and looked for a rhythm in this waiting, this emptiness, a way to inhabit them. But as the days wore on—days, then weeks—he began to seethe with boredom and anger and restlessness.

  At the end of each endless day, he crept up the rungs of a swerving fire escape and looked at Manhattan from the roof of the building where he and nine other men shared two rooms, distant cousins by birth or marriage (as they believed him to be) all sleeping in shifts; where each night Aziz shook another man’s hairs from the sheet: Ali, his ghost twin, who worked overnight driving a limousine. Aziz almost never saw Ali, but he was on intimate terms with the smell of his Ralph Lauren cologne, the stenciled hieroglyphics his gelatin-pumped Nikes imprinted on the kitchen linoleum.

  At sunset, Manhattan shimmered like a single thing, a beaten piece of gold or some mythical animal flicking its pink feathers in the sun, and beside its ravishing silhouette the steps Aziz and his compatriots were taking seemed too small: amassing drums of nitroglycerine and ammonia and fertilizer in a nearby family’s basement; stacking them behind an upended plastic swimming pool in whose turquoise basin they would eventually fold them into gallons of pet
rol, using a canoe paddle to stir. Bemoaning the fact that Wall Street had been made a pedestrian zone to protect it from suicide bombers. Collecting bits of pipe for detonators. Useless. Useless and small. Like Jersey City itself, which had looked so near to Manhattan on the map as to be the same place, as good as there, Aziz had told himself in English, practicing, but that had proved an error of perspective that you could only make from afar.

  At night, they watched TV. Aziz and his gaunt compatriots crammed together onto a foam-rubber couch that stank of Ralph Lauren cologne and butchery; they huddled like pigeons, craving the anesthesia that issued from that screen, the tranquilizing rays: cars animate as human faces; breakfast cereals adrift in the whitest milk Aziz had ever seen; juice erupting from phosphorescent oranges. And girls: ribbony girls whose hair floated and danced, girls who winked at each occupant of the foam-rubber couch individually, eliciting a chorus of exhausted sighs. And even as the anesthesia worked upon Aziz, even as his mouth fell open, eyelids splayed helplessly to admit these sights, hands curled like an infant’s, he was aware of the rage waving like a flag near his heart, reminding him that this hypnosis was a conspiracy at work, whereby a seed of longing was implanted forever in one’s thoughts. Aziz had been seduced by his rage years ago, caught in its swooning thrall until everything else in the world seemed faint beside it. At times he felt gouged by all he had given up to fight this war, whittled down by the many years of effort, as if the anger had chewed something away in him. But if fighting the conspiracy had reduced him, that loss merely strengthened his grim and patient will to destroy it.

  First visit to Manhattan. From across the river the city had looked dense enough that Aziz pictured it being all center; he would see the cars, the oranges, the girls. The famous people. But when the bus rolled into its slot at the Port Authority, he found himself among hustlers and addicts and victims of birth defects and malnutrition. He walked gingerly south on Eighth Avenue in a frigid wind, expecting at each corner to tilt his head and see the beautiful and the famous. What he saw instead were men in African garb, various Asians and Central Americans; foreigners speaking languages Aziz could not identify, many hawking items clandestinely over card tables or blankets thrown across grime-encrusted sidewalks: watches, belts, used radios, stereo equipment, along with (Was it possible? he wondered, standing closer, disbelieving) the same bootleg videos of Hollywood movies that were sold throughout the world!