C14

NECROPOLITAN

Chapters 1-4

chapter 1

It was only after I was diagnosed that I began to understand. Not just about Sebastian, but about the city. How close it is to the true cities of the dead. As if New York’s poles of excess and panic sparked extremes in all spheres; life growing brighter, death more sharply defined. Its towers weave a space that draws us fast to shadow.

I should have noticed before, about the city, since I grew up in a suburb, half an hour away when traffic was light. But Cranesport was in a different category, half drowned, on life support; its vegetative state persistent and irreversible.

Terry Schiavo with a mall.

Perhaps because of hometown coma I grew fascinated by those borders that separated life from its opposite long before I could define what it was that interested me in the divide. The interest was not communicable like a virus, yet surely one symptom was passed on to me by my brother. Wilton loved horror movies. I watched my first Stefan Verloc film on his VCR. Verloc was a vampire, played by Johnny Stang, who lived in an underground city and climbed into the world at night to drink of the blood of innocents. The films were C-grade, you could see wires holding up the bats. I was terrified, of course—at age eight, who wouldn’t be?—but the principal emotion I felt was recognition. Because I knew elegant people who in their homes or at the Rugby Club appeared charming and normal and who, as soon as darkness fell and movement faded from the streets, returned to a crypt of silence and low cold; insulated from both life and death. Men and women who talked and acted at one remove. The remove was caused by solid things: money, power, élite schools; but it had effects that went far deeper. Even in Cranesport people got sick and died yet thanks to that remove the pain of these events seemed largely taken away.

Although I could never have verbalized it then I had a gut understanding that the only way to live without pain was to be insulated, as vampires were. My brother says I was convinced Stefan Verloc was actually Mr. Moyer, who lived two houses away and whom we glimpsed most mornings being whisked by limo to his investment firm. Later I came to believe Verloc resembled everyone I knew.

I cannot explain this fixation at such a young age. My childhood was filled with a vague kindness, and the strongest memory that survives is of a boredom so suffocating it felt as if the very oxygen had become thick as molasses and I was drowning in a room full of air. In retrospect my youth seems to consist of one long hot afternoon when the smells of lawn and barbecue lighting fluid; an oath of pop music from a passing car; the bendable scabs of latex paint I peeled off the porch rail, seemed to melt into a version of forever. Then my parents and all their friends were folded into those people I had seen in my brother’s late-night videos who were not quite right. Then there was no difference between them and the well dressed, smiling neighbors who one day did not know the name of your kid sister because they had just been born out of fiberglass tamales in the basement and slept in coffins fueled by complex tubing through which pumped the blood they stole from me and other children on our street.

The city was different. I was a suburban kid and found it confusing and impenetrable. It wasn’t boring, though. The impossible forest of towers spiking over the crest of highway thrilled me as it did most visitors. What I liked most was the edges where the behavior I recognized began to crumble. This is what the city meant to me: an ancient lady with cut-off pantyhose for socks yelling Yiddish at a wall; a tall black man dressed in woman’s clothes; a white man with his pants around his ankles, shitting in a doorway; a woman sucking a man’s tongue down her throat on the sidewalk; a pair of cops, tense as hunting tomcats, leveling pistols at something hidden beneath a liquor store.

In Cranesport everybody looked like everyone else, but in New York the faces were so different they seemed to belong to a strange species, of mastodons and kinkajous and civet cats, races mostly extinct or in the process of disappearing. Of course the plays we saw and the restaurants we ate in and the pace of the streets colored my take as they did the perception of other tourists. But the electricity in my fascination came from the edge, and the peril those who lived there seemed to court, on one level or another. I was young enough then to confuse peril with originality.

Our trips were rare and short and I suppose their scarcity value helped idealize the city. Its sparkling heights, black chasms, its vast sounds that echoed long after the air could not have carried them anymore, took on the sheen and glitter of myth. I conflated it in my head with legendary cities I read about in young-adult novels. In this way Gotham took on aspects of Atlantis, Caer Ys, Manoa, Lyonesse. It resembled both Disney’s Magic Kingdom, and the lost city of Prester John.

I was not a good student, except in art, but at that point in my early adolescence, when the long afternoons began to filch my oxygen, I would sometimes surprise my mother by biking to the library to research an essay on Caer Ys, which I illustrated with detailed sketches in pencil. It seemed a core image of my life up to that point: a city off the coast of France that one thousand years ago had sunk forty fathoms into the waves and was out of reach to ordinary humans but that would rise again one day when the flatscreens fell silent and all the strangers we lived among came into the streets and looked up in awe at what was about to happen. By a parallel (if opposite) process to that which turned ordinary people into the undead, Caer Ys to me became New York, and more specifically Manhattan.

And then came boys, and for a while they replaced for me the edginess of New York, the sunken cathedrals of Ys. My distaste for what I thought was ordinary was not shared by most kids at Cranesport High and they saw me as cold, inward, a snob even. I was plump, had too many freckles, my eyes were big and set a little too wide, my underlip was full and pouty. My mouth went on too long and curved up on both sides like snow from the blades of a plow; for these reasons and others I did not attract the really good looking, who tended to hunt with the pack. I was attractive enough, though, to lure those who modeled themselves on slightly less common clichés—the white rastas, Emos, the cyberpunks. I had a steady boyfriend who wore rings in his nose and planted viruses in think-tank computers over the Net. I lost my virginity to him under a humming Dell in his basement. His parents thought we were playing GTA.

So during that period Caer Ys and Manhattan faded into the mists lost cities generate for themselves out of the very concept of abandonment. They lingered only on the edges, in my consciousness of New York, of the electric darkness of its towers always on the horizon of my town, my psyche. Perhaps my idea of the city was echoed, distantly, in choice of fashion: black ballgowns, cloaks, motorcycle boots. Ebony eyeliner and lipstick. I looked like a cross between a Victorian widow and a baglady. My father, who’s half-Irish and has cops in the family, got a cousin in the State Police to find out what cult I had joined. My mother’s rage was in proportion to her knowledge that nothing she could say or do would change what I was wearing, whom I was seeing. Anyway I didn’t go too far. Ironically, given what would happen to me later, I was squeamish about having cold metal invade my body, and did not go in for tats or piercings. In junior year my boyfriend and I staged a “vampire party” at the only place that would rent to us: a Jamaican bar just over the Westchester line. It was supposed to be for our crowd of outsiders but word got around and the kids who showed up came in German sports cars and their black duds were from Prada and Armani. Somebody ran up a $164 tab and started singing, inexplicably, “Don’t worry, ‘bout a ting” in a bad Rasta accent, over and over, when the owner refused to take his Platinum Card. I got so depressed I cried. I got so drunk I crawled out the kitchen door and threw up into the weeds lining the commuter railroad whose tracks ran behind the joint. I remember a phrase that went through my mind, over and over, as I hurled: “If you press it, it will bleed.” I had no idea at the time what it meant, or why it should loop in my head like that.

Thanks to my skill at sketching and my father’s ability to pay one hundred percent of my tuition I was accepted into the Rhode Island School of Design. There I found myself surrounded by people like me, children of plenty, produce of the ‘burbs, who all had sworn a blood oath to turn our backs on the images and people we’d grown up with. This concept was in itself trite and predictable but RISD was built on the illusion that it was feasible. For four years I and my peers tore down and rejected everything, based on its belonging to passé tendencies. Because we were too busy tearing down to think up something new, what we made—what we liked—relied on the extent to which it made fun of what had gone before.

I specialized in post-neo-expressionist abstractions that funneled into techno nightmares. Among my bands of Pollocked oils lurked fragments of image, carefully detailed: spires, dumpsters, skyscrapers all submerged fathoms deep in ocean water. Strange fish—coelacanths, placoderms, mutated wrasse—finned through shattered windows. The depths scumbled into forms that might or might not have been people. I worked hard; my fingers were scarred by mat knives and paint thinner. I lived on a diet of Old Golds, non-fat vanilla yogurt, and mochaccinos from the RISD café, punctuated by the occasional vindaloo from Kashmir Ghetto on Thayer Street. I lost weight. Coddled in the amniotic fluid of college, I believed I might actually make a name for myself as an artist. I even coined a term for it: Annabelle’s Brilliant Career. ABC for short. It was not wholly ironic. In my junior year I got into the habit of staying late at the studio. One of my professors, a lean and jagged man named Roger Dworkin who was known for his fine brushwork, his mastery of the techno style, and his overuse of the term “brilliant,” took to dropping in to see how I was coming along.

I walked by the power station at three a.m. I smoked on the mock-Tudor steps of HP Lovecraft’s house. I slept with Roger Dworkin.

And when I got my degree I moved to New York with the group of friends I had made at RISD, and a lot of RISD people I was not friendly with also.

The East Village had been through four cycles of gentrification by then and was just at the point where prices were stagnant prior to the next surge. It was expensive but cheaper than Williamsburg and in Alphabet City you could score shares for something less than a Somali ransom. Anyway we all figured high rents were entry fee to the avant-garde art world. I shared a dark two-bedroom with my friend Binkie, who was in fashion design, and Johnboy Dodge, a film major I had slept with once only. I waitressed, and painted when my roommates were out. I drank every night at a bar on Avenue B. Later I walked the streets by the river, down where the projects kept things honest. I found the hidden villages where the homeless lived. Sometimes I took the train to the Bronx, learning to walk in the shadows where crack was sold. If you wanted crack you stuck your cash through a basement grate at one end of a row of tenements, took a chit, and got your Rock from a hole in a wall at the block’s end. I was pretty thin by then, and hard to see in my black coat, under a hood I pulled low over my eyes. Lookouts whispered lovingly on cellphones as I passed. These blocks, where the streetlights had been made dark, looked underwater to me; the ruined walls, the half-boarded windows as easily inhabited by squid and goosefish as people. Plane by plane, the memory of Caer Ys, of the doomed city, eased its way toward the front of my consciousness again.

Perhaps it was my renewed appreciation of risk that caused me to sleep with Roger once more. He’d Slamtrak to New York for an opening, telling his wife he was going to spend the night at a friend’s apartment. The friend was in on the scam; if Cynthia called, he told her Roger had just gone out for a newspaper or something. Then he called my cellphone to warn Roger, who as a matter of artiste pride would not carry a cell. Thus, once or twice a month, we wrote a little play on the theme of domesticity. I bought him pains au chocolat for breakfast. He would kiss the back of my neck, sending voltage down my spine as I drank coffee.

Roger stashed clothes in my closet. He persuaded the owner of one of those sixth-floor galleries on Spring Street to look at my work. My latest installation, of underwater scenes painted on plywood framing a large LED screen on which played computer-mixed videos of the scenes on the plywood, was set up in a group show the spring after I graduated. The Times did not review it, of course, but Churn wrote a paragraph that characterized my oils as “disturbing” and (for some reason) “nomothetic.”

I was on my way, I thought. ABC.

The combination of waitressing plus the endless series of parties you had to go to so gallery flacks would not forget your name wore me out. My periods became irregular. I had persistent cramps. I lost more weight. Mentally, I was also run down. Caer Ys, which had seemed close—almost close enough to touch—during my first months in New York, started fading again into those horizon mists that had veiled it from Cranesport. The life I’d thought I wanted felt no different from college, except that the same things were now happening in Manhattan. I ate curry every Friday at Milon instead of Kashmir Ghetto; I sipped vanilla mochaccinos at the Bean, on 3^rd Street, instead of at the RISD café. The safety of my habits was as unchallenged, in its own way, as that of my parents and their friends. The mythical city still existed—curiously, it attracted me as powerfully as before—but it had retreated far from places RISD grads lived, in those parts of the city where even I in my dark disguise could not walk at night.

In early summer I found a part-time job at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen on First Street. The pay sucked but the hours were flexible. More importantly, it was a door to the elusive people who lived as distant from suburban life as if they were living underwater; to those so cursed that the idea of redemption must be as strong and amazing as the possibility that a drowned island could rise again out of the Atlantic.

Johnboy had taken to painting roadkill. From the suburb his mother lived in he brought dead raccoons and skunks and woodchucks and propped them on steel racks in his room. It didn’t bother me, except in mid-August when the heat quickly ripened the skunks, but Binkie said she couldn’t sleep with dead animals in the same flat, so Johnboy moved out. Binkie found me a half-time job stealing pregnancy swimwear for a catalogue called Belly Flop. This involved, not physical theft, but going into designer stores, trying out the latest bathing suits (with a wadded towel over my tummy to fill them out), and sketching them quickly from what I saw in the dressing room mirror. Later I turned the sketches into finished drawings. This paid well, and I quit waitressing. Roger was feeling guilty about his family and we broke up every two months. It hurt the first time, less the second. The third time it was a relief. A lot of the regular clients at the soup kitchen were people who had been thrown out of psychiatric clinics when Medicaid cut its rolls. I borrowed books on the chemical structures of schizophrenia. The crystallography of some of those molecules reminded me of my own drowned architecture. One evening, a kitchen regular followed me home. He was big and strong and would, I think, have raped me if the owner of the Arab bodega on the corner had not heard my yells and come out with his brothers and pulled the guy off. They beat the shit out of him and left him bleeding between two cars. I saw his blood on the sidewalk the next morning, and was glad.

I still had the abdominal cramps. It had nothing to do with Roger, as I first had thought. I went home for a long weekend and mentioned it to my mother. Before I could object she had called Doctor Slayne and made an appointment for Monday.

It feels to me sometimes as if the forms of entropy, once seriously engaged upon, follow a course always identical in degree of slope, in their separation from normal braking. Doctor Slayne palpated, then x-rayed me. Then he scheduled a biopsy. One test led inevitably, for confirmation or denial, to another. By Tuesday afternoon I had been diagnosed with a well-differentiated tumor in the left ovary. Doctor Slayne was calm and rational and so was the oncologist he referred me to. We walked through various strategies and agreed on a middle course that would preserve, with one ovary, the possibility of getting pregnant. By the end of the following week the sick ovary had been removed, along with six of the nearest lymph nodes.

Due to entropy’s nature and my mother’s direction the weekly chemotherapy sessions, as well as the operation, were performed at Cranesport General. I lost more weight. For six weeks straight I threw up daily from one end and couldn’t shit out the other. Some but not all of my hair fell out. I cut the rest short and wore a fur-lined Russian Army cap I bought at the Army Navy store on 8th Street. I did the backward commute to Cranesport once a week for two months. The blood tests and ultrasounds were clear for almost eight months and then, just like that, they weren’t. An MRI showed recurrence in the uterus, the large intestine, a train of lymph nodes near the spine. Clear-cell carcinoma. ... I could opt for more chemo but the side-effects would be worse and the chances of success were low. Doctor Slayne kept his eyes on the pictures as he told me. He had known my family longer than I had been alive.

The fear that surged in me then was not as sharp as when they first found the tumor. It was more like an ache that had never left. It made me feel as if I’d been hollowed out from inside far more than I had been by surgery. I realized that all my self-awareness, and my awareness of self-awareness, had prepared me for the tired facts of such a situation; but the emotions had not been subject to preview. For two weeks I went through the classic routines of denial, anger, grief. I did not quit the soup kitchen but raged and sniveled inside as I worked. Afterward I went home and hollered and threw things if Binkie was not around. I convinced myself—part of the anger process, I guess—that I was the victim of a health system dominated by men that let women suffer as a form of control, and as a way to make a lot of goddam money. I gave a name to my disease: Mister Tumor.

I never called him that in public though. I had been educated to believe that all consumers were equal in our society, even those who bore a deadly sickness. Now I was not so sure. If I told everyone I would be pitied, yes; paid attention to, most likely; but I had serious doubts that I would be treated as an equal of people who were not dying. My sell-by date was too close. I told myself I was not ashamed of my condition, but in company I avoided the subject.

I canceled my Facebook page. The last thing I needed to see was pictures of cute kittens and sunsets. Or posts about baby showers.

And one morning—it was a few days before Thanksgiving, my second Thanksgiving in New York—I woke up to find that some housekeeper inside had tidied up most of the mess and I simply went on as before. That equanimity only lasted a few hours but it returned the next day and hung around a little longer. And so forth. My strength for now was good as long as I didn’t stay up too late. I did tell Binkie, and she sobbed and was for a while far more depressed than I was. Finally I asked her not to tell anyone else and it forced her to act the way I did, as if nothing had happened, and she too seemed happier that way. Roger left a message. I did not call him back. I worked less for Belly Flop and more at the soup kitchen. The lack of cushioning in the gestures and regards of our customers felt familiar to me, the padding of whose world had been removed also. It reminded me of the people who lived beyond the shadows I could penetrate: black movements in the streets I could not enter; those who lived on the edge of my world, under the drowned spires of an unreachable city.

I opted against more chemo. From what Slayne said, the choice came down to how I wanted to spend what were almost certainly my last few months: puking, or living.

Two weeks after that final talk with Doctor Slayne, Johnboy called and asked me and Binkie to a party. Johnboy’s paintings—highly polished oils that both flattered and mocked the Hudson River school and especially Asher B. Durand by turning them into stark statements of eco-doom—had become popular enough among European investors that Johnboy now felt confirmed in other aspects of his philosophy. One of these was what he called “ad-hoc living,” and the throwing of snap parties, in this case at the loft Johnboy shared with his latest fuck-buddy, an NYU grad student named Laurie.

It was a long time since I’d been to a party. And I had reached the apogée of boredom about my condition. On one level, of course, I continued to pretend this was not going on—that I was not due to die, as Slayne gently put it, "in six months if you're lucky, a year if it drags on." And part of me wanted only to enjoy the experiences that were left, and one of my favorite experiences was parties. So I went.

He was standing, half hidden by drapes, at the window of Johnboy’s loft. Cigarettes were cool again that season and the loft was filled with taupe boomslangs of smoke that twisted in the spotlights Johnboy aimed at his canvases. I thought he was a non-smoker, desperately sucking cleaner air from the opened window, till I noticed the butt at ease in his fingers. What really caught my eye, I realized later, was his stillness. While everyone else was centripetal, angled into the crowd, moving constantly either to attract or deflect attention, this man was centrifugal. Mostly he did not move at all except to bring tobacco or a bottle of beer to his lips.

Johnboy was talking to a German. "I am having the same feelings in FriedrichStrasse Station as in Bleecker Street," the German told him enthusiastically. “In Humboldt University I am Casavetes studying, deshalb—for me, this is nice.” Johnboy made some comment about Adorno and turned away from the German, as if student penury might be catching. I was standing beside him as he turned. “Who’s that?" I asked.

“Gunter.”

“No,” I said, pointing more obviously. “Him.”

“Oh. Sebastian," Johnboy said. "He goes to school with Laurie. There's too many students here," he added, and walked off to talk to someone in a cape that looked like it might have come from Milan.

I ambled toward Sebastian. The window was a good pretext. I muttered something about fresh air and took him in close up, from the side. He was of average height and build. His eyes were large, half-closed, with deep irises of a color I could not determine in the shadow behind the spots. His features seemed almost frail—a thin nose, prettily curved lips. They were saved from femininity by cheekbones and jawline as solid as those of a Slovak coalminer’s. Light pockmarks, from past acne perhaps, on his chin. He had a habit of constantly smiling on the left side of his face while the other part of his mouth remained still and judgmental. Thin fingers, with chewed nails. He wore the uniform—black boots, black drainpipe jeans; a black T-shirt that read “Bad Sushi.” It was a post-punk group, their flyers were everywhere in those days. He said, “Mephitic.”

I said, “What?”

“That’s what they called it, a hundred years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t really. “What‘re you talking about?”

“The air,” he said. “A hundred years ago, see”—he waved at the window—“this was all saltmarsh. It was supposed to be unhealthy, mephitic. This was a shipyard in those days. I mean, where this building is now. Nothing but hookers, sailors and river pirates, at night. They rolled the sailors, sometimes they killed them.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Because of the tides, the dead got washed across the river into Wallabout Bay. Just over there.” The coal of his cigarette waved.

“The dead,” I said. I forced myself to say it.

He shrugged and narrowed his eyes, almost to a squint. I know now this was a trope of nervousness. At the time I thought his eyes were irritated from the smoke. His jaw seemed to lengthen.

“Sometimes I think I know too much about this town,” he went on in a low voice that I had to lean forward to hear. “Sometimes I walk round and all I see is the ones who lived here then. Slaves, tea merchants, smugglers. Hot-bun girls, tannery workers. People who’ve been dead a hundred and fifty years. You think I’m weird.”

“I don’t think you’re weird.”

What I did think was, this was a shtick, everyone in the scene had one. The difference was, I had not heard Sebastian’s before. Mephitic; you had to hand it to him.

“Praise Jesus,” he replied, and the smiling side of his mouth lifted higher.

“I’m one of them,” I added.

I don’t know why I said it. I know I found Sebastian physically attractive, right from the start. Something about his stillness. And I had a feeling, which proved to be correct, that he was not one of the art rats. Another point in his favor. Maybe I already knew, not up front but from the little spaces between movement where a person’s rhythms lie, how useful he could be to me—how many more spaces inside me he might fill than Roger, who spent so much of our time together negotiating absence.

If that was the case, I wanted to make clear right now the limits of entanglement. By warning him off I would head off my own regret, when everything ended, far too soon.

But probably the biggest factor was that I was getting the same feeling from Johnboy and his crowd that I used to get in Cranesport. That I was partying with the undead, the undead and the un-alive as well; people long overdosed on the safe things they had piled up around them. Art in America reviews, Weber grills, abstract oils, Bavarian cars, it was all the same. Dying as I was, I wanted for once to say something that was not self-referent or protective but as real as I could make it.

Because I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. That’s why I told the truth.

He stared at me. He flicked his cigarette ash to the floor.

“One of the dead?” he said.

“Yes.”

A beat.

“You’re dying?”

I nodded, already sorry I had told him.

He said nothing for awhile. Then he reached out the hand that held his cigarette and touched my shoulder with two fingers, very softly. It was not sympathy, or at least it did not feel like it. It felt more like curiosity, the way someone might touch a substance he was unfamiliar with, to see if it was wet or dry.

Other than that he did not react much. He looked, at most, curious, as if I’d told him about returning from some exotic place, like Sikkim or South Georgia Island.

Now I felt, for no good reason, annoyed. When I avoided telling people I was sick, it was in the sure knowledge that, should I change my mind, I had the power to break people through the skin of normal life and dunk them, if only temporarily, in the freezing pond of my wee drama. But this fellow acted as if I had offered him a tourist tale. His movement had brought him into an angle of spotlight, and I could now see Sebastian’s eyes were very dark blue, almost black. I had the sudden, strong illusion I had met him before.

“You wanna go get a coffee?” he asked. Then, qualifying his offer—“Well, maybe not, you just got here”—“Sure,” I interrupted. “I’d like a coffee.”

He nodded. He dropped the cigarette in his beer bottle. We left the party without saying goodbye, to Johnboy or anyone else.

chapter 2

She reminded me of that rhyme—

As I was walking down the stairs

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today;

I wish, I wish he’d go away.

Annabelle was there, of course, and not only that, she had presence. It was an ambivalent presence, though. People of both sexes were aware of her, as if a small force had come into the room, a ghost or draft, something they could not name and perhaps were not fully happy with. She seemed to have an ability to walk between people, not let them snag or hold her. For most people, who measure what they have by what they can keep, that computed as absence, but an absence powerful enough to be present, if you know what I mean. I noticed at the party, before she came to the window, that someone would make a comment and she would smile and turn a little sideways, as if to deflect a blow, let the energy of it be spent on landscape. Among that crowd of people burning to be noticed, to be hooked, it made her stand out to anyone with eyes to see. But nobody was really looking except me.

I didn’t expect her to talk to me. Some girls find me interesting I guess, the dark loner trope, but her type don’t. There was a feel of burnish to her—she was not blasée or decadent but I got the same sense looking at her that I got looking at Uncle Louis’ coffeepot, the one that belonged to our family in Brittany and was supposed to have been handed down like a dirty secret since before the Revolution, every generation of starch-coiffed women rubbing and polishing it till the silver was thin as wax paper. Annabelle looked rubbed and polished that way. It was an impression due mostly to her thinness; and to the skin of her face, which was pale and a little shiny; and to her hands, which were also very white, and seemed to glow as she used them to smooth down the layers of her clothes.

Anyway, she wanted coffee, so we went outside. It was warm for early December, but the temperature was in the forties and the air’s bite felt good on my skin after the heat and party smells upstairs. I thought at once of Chez Louis, simply because I was broke as usual and at Louis’ the lattes would be free—and rejected that idea, out of hand, at once. I won’t take a girl there, as a rule; or at least, not till I’ve been seeing her for a while, and Uncle Louis and Mrs. Ruben have heard about her and are on my case every waking moment to meet her, give her food, ply her with questions and Côtes du Rhone. Once she goes to Louis’ the girl is no longer mine. I mean that in the relationship sense of course. Almost every time, once a girl goes to the restaurant she either gets so weirded out by the scene there that she ends up equating me with Louis’ and dropping us both; or she wants to go back, and if I don’t want to she goes without me, and soon we’re talking about the same people and eating in the backroom and I can’t tell anymore if she is more interested in me or in the restaurant.

There are no half-measures, with girls and Chez Louis.

But this one—well, one thing was, she wasn’t interested in hanging around and talking about where we might go. She took off down Rivington Street, and when I asked her if she had a place in mind she said no, she just wished to walk. I thought briefly of my bike, padlocked in Laurie’s stairwell, and then forgot about it. Laurie’s was in the ZOY, the Zone of Yuppification, where derivatives traders took their models to slum in crease galleries, the strange-hat boutiques. But New York is a city of frontiers numerous and fast-moving as those of an African civil war and a block later we were in a salient where Fukienese fish shops had taken over from Jewish ribbon merchants. A block after that was the projects, which were Dominican at that point in time. And then the river. She walked narrow and long; by that I mean she threw, say, her right leg way forward, then performed a trick whereby her thighs didn’t roll but seemed to slide across themselves like plates on an axis of thinness until suddenly her right leg was back and the left stretched in front for the next stride. It was a fast form of travel and I had to work to keep up. Beyond the FDR Drive a stockbrokers’ ferry kicked up spray that yellowed in the holiday lights of the Williamsburg Bridge. All long and forward and she did not hesitate when we reached the water but turned south, where Corlear’s Hook ended and the Drive raised itself on great steel thighs, opening up a snatchworld between the cobbles of abandoned wharfs and the damp underside of highway. There Chechen limo drivers scored blowjobs from Honduran whores, and the eternal lost found nooks that would conceal them awhile from the Maglites of the city’s Finest. Mayor Montefiore won election on his promise to continue the Giulianification of Manhattan’s streets, and his cops had rousted the homeless from here at least three times that I knew of. But the lost came back, like rust, like mold, as soon as the common areas were left unguarded. They came back for the same reason everyone else came to Manhattan, because the money was here, for panhandling as for venture capital; and they pitched their camps of cardboard and plastic in the dead angles between highway buttresses and river bulkheads, between piles of roadsalt and the patches fenced off for sewer repair. It was not the safest area at night and I said so. It was as if she had not heard me. I had to admit, if she was truly dying, then maybe safety didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to those less reckless in their way of living, of walking.

I wanted her to hear me, though. The lights of that middleworld were odder even than Laurie’s loft: the spotlights from construction at the old sugar refinery across the water fought with the morgue glow of streetlamps whose shadows and columns of gray-tan illumination twisted against the play of headlights on Water Street. All seemed not to illuminate but to rob the night of fixity of shape. Even in that skirmish of lights I could see my first impression at Johnboy’s had not been wrong and she was beautiful. Well, maybe not beautiful: her eyes were set too far apart, and her mouth was a bit wide and it curved upward on both sides, like a dolphin’s, into the mound of her cheeks. Freckles were sprayed across her nose and on both cheeks, as if someone had been careless with the airbrush. Her lower lip seemed a bit full; she could pout viciously, if she had a mind to. The military cap she wore, earflaps tied up, made her face look small and withdrawn, a mink hiding under its fur. But her gaze was steady and the narrow lines of her reminded me of old clippers that used to dock right where we were walking. And what I liked about her fit: the steadiness of her gaze and the way she slid along her own axis to walk; how she smiled slightly, without wanting to, even when she said she was dying; how the shine to her contrasted with the color of that gaze which was dark as a window a killer had broken through. I’ll make a few other admissions right off the bat: That she was dying made her more interesting to me because I had long been interested in death and what went on around it. That she was pretty and dying also hit some vapid General Hospital notes in my pathetic psyche. Maybe tragedy would make her more available to those less pretty; and availability in itself was a turn-on.

She wasn’t pretty the way magazines wanted, though, or she would have been changed by the power loveliness brings. In my defense I have to say that what I liked about her had little to do with what others might think. It came down mostly to the steadiness which now I realized was rooted like a unicorn’s horn in the wide space between her eyes. And that way of walking, which was hard and fast as a boy but that moved her ass in arcs a boy could never match. And the cap, from beneath which her curls broke free as prisonbreak. And her smile, cetacean as I said. So though I had to walk faster than normal to keep up it wasn’t so much the effort as that feeling—you know, the feeling you get when you see someone who twangs all the right strings on your cello, lust and loneliness and voids and spaces all coming together in some vast, secret music that will fill up inside you the lonely places no one has ever filled completely or for long—it was that feeling, or potential of feeling, that had me breathing hard as I strode alongside her.

I have a problem, which is that I can’t shut up when I get excited or hopeful. When that happens I have to talk, and I just pick up a story, any story. I have a thing about stories. It doesn’t matter if they’re about me or Chez Louis or something that happened in the city, I pick one up to hide the fizz inside. Since we were talking about the city when we met I started again, riff on riff, how the first tea clipper was built right here, the Hou Kwa, pretty little thing with a sharp bow and narrow lines that cut into the sea the way Annabelle walked; built right here in the Brown & Bell yards on Catherine Slip. And how the Lows, who owned her, were also slavers, and they shanghaied men in bars where the Pathmark now stood, got them blind drunk on crap rum and bundled ‘em into the forecastle and when they woke up they were offshore on a six-month trip around Cape Horn to Canton and a murderous mate with a bullwhip hounding them into the rigging in a storm. I wanted, I thought, to be shanghaied by her—

She stopped. She wore two coats, for some reason, and hugged both around her, burrowing into the scarves and shawls underneath like it was a cave with a fire in its depths. Even in the screwy lights I could see she was shivering. Sebastian? I took off my scarf and put it around her neck, which was silly considering she already had three or five of the things. She smiled at me—she was thinking the same thing—and my dick got hard. Just like that. I have to tell you, my dick gets hard easily, though not from what you might expect, such as porn or a glimpse of naked tit. No, it happens when there’s a girl I like and I get a feeling that we’re on the same wavelength, that a message was exchanged. We were thinking the same thing. Let’s get you back, I said, you’re freezing.

I rousted one of the Chechens. He cussed me out but when he saw Annabelle he kicked out his bitch and held the door for my companion. She lived three blocks from me. When we got there she said she still wanted a coffee and I know it’s a hackneyed phrase but it really felt like my heart flopped upward four inches. We walked right by Louis’ and I led her around the corner to the Death Café, not even thinking about it, because the name is just another East Village conceit and most people including me still call it the Dogleg because the bar’s crooked and that was its old name. It’s no more or less black or filled with death imagery than any other bar in the area. I walked her past the Hammas Hummus Chicken Emporium & Pet Store, and the Kampuchea Grocery on the corner, where Pong the Hmong stood like the Khmer Rouge’s worst nightmare among his rotting fruit. My neighb. A brace of artiste rides were parked in front: a 1995 Chrysler with computer circuits glued on the sides and an F-15’s afterburner unit welded on top; and a Ford, painted black and scrawled with bad rhymes, whose every inner inch, with the exception of the front seats, was filled with naked plastic dolls clumped together by polystyrene.

The Ford belonged to my friend Tox but I did not see him when we walked into the bar. She seemed to hesitate when she saw the menus labeled “Death Café,” which was the only way you could tell the name of the joint. But as I said it was just a gimmick and with all the people in there drinking and yakking you could hardly call it dead. Still I got hot all over in case she thought I was making some kind of point, ‘cause I wasn’t, I really hadn’t thought about it—which, as Jean-Louis would have said, was typical.

We chose a couch next to the radiator, under a life-sized mannequin of a mermaid trapped in a fishnet, who stared in mute appeal out the window at Tox’s Ford. Annabelle sighed as she sat down. I wondered if I had tired her out by walking as far as we did. A girl who spoke only in monosyllables and in a language that might, possibly, have been Ukrainian took our order. The music was typical Dogleg: two girls in post-punk outfits doing rude things to an electric dulcimer, a double bass. After five minutes she stopped shivering and after ten she began peeling off coats and shawls and scarves and waistcoats till the couch looked like a Goodwill Center and she was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, looking around her, and I thought Shit, Sebastian, it wasn’t such a bad impulse to bring her here. That was when Phoebe Legere came in with her band of over-the-hill sycophants. Phoebe always dresses like Bride of Dracula, even to the red makeup dribbling from the corners of her mouth, and her loyal band are all in black of course with white faces and lisps. Tonight I noticed the washed up actor, Stang, sloping in her train. That’s all he does, slopes around, waiting for someone to remember what D-grade horror flick they’ve seen him in before.

Tox came out of the toilets then. He spoke to Phoebe and loped over to our couch, holding up a plastic box with a crusted hypodermic inside. What do you think? he demanded. You think it could be his? I shook my head, the last thing I wanted to look at was that spike, and anyway I was looking at Annabelle. She smiled up at Tox; I did not know her well enough to read her but I could have sworn she was interested, and curious. At least she was not repelled as most people would be by this six-foot-three psycho-punk hophead with a shaved head and giant shoulders and enough bad attitude to fill Grand Central Station—not to mention by the works he carried, with dried blood all over the needle.

Whose? she asked.

He stared at her.

G.G. Allin, he replied contemptuously, and looked back at me.

Is it from Chong again? I asked and he sneered, a loathsome mix of furred yellow teeth and bloodshot eyes, because it was from Chong and he knew that made it bullshit. Phoebe and Stang began their notorious Yma-Sumac-duets-with-James Brown act. An outlaw dog began to bark. I saw Annabelle take in Stang, her eyes widening. The Dogleg was in full swing and it was becoming unclear whether we’d ever get our coffees. Annabelle looked at me, then at Stang, dipping her head sideways toward the actor, and I nodded. I had to cross my legs at that point, so she wouldn’t see me get hard again, because it was happening once more, the period-doubling thing, that code unlocking further codes, opening up more hatches in my chest, breath of warm oxygen sifting shyly into the absolute zero of my abdomen, the part that wanted to shut itself off because it was so fucking scared of what might happen if it did open, because it wanted so much to open; but it gaped wider each time I looked at her. Everything she did was not like other girls. No scareoff, no cockteasing; not interested in the bling or vector of other people’s gaze, and I wondered if death did that. I wondered if knowing you were gonna die did that. I felt a sudden curiosity, deep—and by deep I mean it was really strong and hard, like suddenly realizing you’re thirsty, you’ve had nothing to drink for fifteen hours and every cell in your body needs water to keep the line between membrane and cytoplasm sharp. It’s the flip side of the story syndrome, of the need to tell stories. When I get involved with someone I need to find out her story. Or his; it works with friendship too, except for the hard-on part.

That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Because I never felt this curiosity, this vampire need to suck someone’s history, so early with a girl; never felt it till things were complicated and involved and I knew that if she said “We’re through,” the pulling apart would rip membrane. Draw blood. But here it was only two hours after I met her and I wanted to know about her as desperately as I wanted an Irish coffee at that point. So when Phoebe and Stang shut up I started asking questions. She came from Cranesport, in the stockbroker belt. She was an artiste, of course. Saying you’re an artiste in the East Village is like living in Gary, Indiana in 1960 and saying you work in steel. She volunteered at the soup kitchen on 1st Street. And then she shook her head, and I knew what she meant then too. Talking about herself would lead to what happened to her. She started asking me questions, tit for tat, which was what caused the big, the fatal blunder. I told her about Louis’—that wasn’t the blunder, not yet—and how I waited tables for my uncle, and how I went to NYU. What was I studying? Gallatin—the school of make-up-your-own-major. Necrology, I added like an asshole—(here! it was here it happened!)— the science of death, and she swung that steadiness onto me, like a car with high beams turning onto a country driveway in the dead of night. Is that why you’re interested in me? she asked. And No, I said, finally realizing my mistake, No no no a bazillion times no, too loud of course. And then I said what was on my tongue, which is usually a fucking bad idea. You seem more full of life to me than anybody in here, than anyone on this planet. Which is why I—

High beams from maybe ten feet away.

Why you what. Her voice had a rough quality to it. I only noticed this now. It sounded as if voice were a tree, and words the leaves, and her voice-tree had a thin thin layer of bark peeled off all along its limbs, leaving grain exposed. It felt as if the layer of protection stripped off her voice echoed a protection stripped off from who she was inside. I was likely extrapolating here from what else I had learned of her, yet in my mind the connection was never to quit.. I crossed my legs the other way, and cleared my throat, as if in reaction to what I’d been thinking.

Why I’m, I mean. That’s why I’m interested. Your life—

In memory it felt like it happened then too but I have thought a lot about memory and what really happened between me and Annabelle, and I’m sure now that what occurred at this point had been rolling up for a while, like that backwash of wave on Jones Beach that sucks water off the sand, the ocean hawking, hawking, saving it while the water builds and the wave rears up taller until it just can’t hold in anymore—and it crashes down in a smash of foam. On Jones Beach, though, you know the foam is the end, not the beginning.

What I knew here was, I was zoom-zooming on her. Zoom-zooming is what I call the foam, because it ain’t friendship and it ain’t love and it’s way more than infatuation. English is a poor language sometimes, or maybe all language is poor when you have to describe the zoom-zoom. What it’s like, though I don’t want to think about it because while I didn’t get addicted it got close, and closeness counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and heroin; what it was like was when you’re doing smack and when you feel that first spread of heat around your heart, and you know you don’t need anything else, not love or Christmas presents or outside thrills, as long as the spike is full. I was zoom-zooming on Annabelle and like my obsessive storytelling it was way too early for that to happen. Or that’s what I was thinking when there was an almighty smash outside the window and I saw the cold mermaid above our heads shiver in her net.

We went outside, with the rest of the bar’s occupants. A yellow cab had driven right through the Avenue A lights and onto the sidewalk of the Kampuchea deli and into Pong the Hmong’s outside display of rotten fruit. The taxi was buried up to its front wheels in the fruit stand. In the stark stare of Pong’s canopy lights the yellow cab was entombed in oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, persimmons, broccoli, apples, daisies, kiwis, roses; all the outside-fruits and -flowers that Pong flogged to those too drunk or lazy to buy fresh produce elsewhere. The cab’s bright yellow mixed with the yellows of King Edward potatoes and sunflowers, the orange of mangoes and squash, the red of apples and pomegranates. It reminded me of some sixteenth-century painter I learned about in ConWest, who painted lavish canvases of people made of fruit. The crowd from the Dogleg gaped as Hmong sped out of his deli with a pump shotgun and began beating on the taxi’s roof with the butt, screaming in Cambodian. The driver, a Pakistani, was on his cellphone already, crying for help in Urdu. Between the pair of them it sounded like fourteen Harley high gears all being stripped at once. I thought I should get her out of here, in case the driver had his own piece, or the cops showed up and shooting started, so I put my arms around Annabelle’s shoulders. She didn’t wriggle away, but looked sideways at me, and her dolphin grin was stretched to the max, tiny pointed teeth peeking out from under those long lips.

Look, she said. Arcimboldo!

I had to twist away from her so my dick didn’t poke into her ribs then and there.

chapter 3

I would be lying if I said I was not attracted to Sebastian. There was something clean about him—I don’t mean in the Cranesport sense, I’d known only too many of the Ralph Lauren clones, the Todds and Chucks who were clean by the standards of Mr. Moyer; those who didn’t do too many drugs and made good money with the right firms in law and finance. The undead were clean enough in their way.

But I mean clean in the sense that he didn’t try to fool me about himself. I thought the reason he didn’t was that what he was interested in, what he sought, was strong enough so there would be no way he could hide it even if he wanted to. Whether he wanted to be clean in that way or had no choice made little difference. It was an element strong enough to burn away any crust of feint or dissembling. He wanted something and it was not because others wanted it, like the Chucks and Todds. It was urgent info that might save all of us—as if he were the only one who knew when the wave would come to drown the city. I know this sounds ridiculous but it was the feeling I got from him and despite everything that happened after; despite what I was to do to him, and he to me; I never found much reason to edit that first impression.

And he liked me. I could sense that. His body was thin and long and it had its grace. When he held me against the cold I did not react defensively, because of my first read of him I suppose. I completely forgot to think about being sick and how that might block things. When he held me I straightaway got that nano-loosening, the uterine toast, the first hint of wet that came with it. And I didn’t even think about how normal that was, how my body was reacting exactly as if it were not sick. Later I did remember and I was stupidly proud and, also stupidly, I felt grateful to him. I suppose it would have happened with anyone cute.

But strength and clean-ness are fine when you can use them. These are also qualities of the scalpel, and of madmen. I did not think Sebastian was mad but I knew that quality of cleanness could do damage. I did not have time to cope with more damage. I liked when we went down to the river; some stupid People magazine part of me registered the coincidence between my interest in drowned cities and the way we went to the waterfront first; how he knew its history. But I was scared of his interest in death. I had made up my mind to ignore what was happening to me as long as I could. That did not mean I didn’t know it was there; it did not mean that I refused to talk about it with those, like Sebastian or Binkie, who were honest in their interest. But only up to a point. The balance I had achieved allowed me to function, for now and in what time I had left, and I was unsure how stable it was and I did not want it threatened—I did not want it pushed. He walked me home, and I gave him my cell number and e-mail because I liked him and thought he was cute and he turned me on a little, and he gave me his. By the time I reached my floor, however, I had decided firmly not to see him again.

Anyway Roger was coming a week from Friday. The sense of not wasting time was for obvious reasons strong in me and I spent the next ten days doing so much that I collapsed every night on my bed and slept like someone drugged. I kept to my schedule at the Catholic Worker and did two of Rose’s shifts as well. That meant I had to take on one of her cases, a shambling white man named Spike who came in with a two-year-old, a black girl who was HIV positive. The toddler was, not him. She had a cold and cried and the man, Spike, was very gentle with her. He had a way of running words together that made him hard to understand, but luckily he didn’t say much, just looked around at what was happening and shifted the huge bag of cans he’d collected and held his elbows. He ate what we gave him and did not complain or demand something else the way some of our clients did. When I interviewed him I learned he had been a printer downtown but then he lost his business and his wife and spent eight months in a funny farm in Connecticut. The child was not his; he had become her guardian when the mother, a friend of his, died. Because she had long ago appointed Spike guardian and there was no other family the state, in its wisdom, somehow allowed Calypso to become the ward of a mental case with no fixed abode. “If you press it, it will bleed,” I found myself thinking as I took the copious notes the city demanded.

After Catholic Worker I went home and made coffee and worked on Project II. This, believe it or not, was an extension of Project I, which was the installation on Spring Street. It was my own shtick, of course: the drowned cities riff. I know I should have done something different but I also did not have the luxury of time to conceptualize and experiment much. Thus while others chose consistency for commercial reasons—because the market preferred artists whose work they could predict like futures, and sell on the same basis—I chose it because I did not have the leisure to be inconsistent.

I was taking it much further, though. While the original canvases were 3x3, I blew them up to 6x8 and cut and framed them in shapes that looked like exploded bits of steel plate. They showed drowned cities as before; more abstract, the forms of water pressuring down on what once had clearly been manmade. At the same time they were more specific, because I was incorporating found objects, bits of poster or crushed sheetrock that I impasto-ed on the gesso with a thick clear glue from New York Central. I liked the canvases but I was moving fast, already shifting forward to other ideas. For one thing I wanted the two-dimensional pieces to tie in spatially with other parts of the city—the neighborhoods of New York that were underwater and knew it. I wanted to go beyond the scope of actual material. Found objects always struck me as great ideas but poor art and to be honest the ones I used did not have the impact I sought. Also—maybe this was my film classes coming out—I wished to bring in stories about those who were going through what I was experiencing. Those who had drowned, or were in the process. And for this I had to reach farther than slide shows. The most obvious story was that of Dahut, the daughter of the king of Caer Ys. I had always liked her story because while she was spoiled and dangerous in ways I was not she was also a girl who clearly had a mind of her own, the way I wanted to be. Caer Ys by all accounts had been a lovely city, with white towers and church steeples and giant granite walls keeping out the sea, and Dahut had the run of the place. Gradlon let her do what she wanted, and when she grew up what she wanted was to hang out by the docks and pick up cute sailors. She would take them, one at a time, to the top of her white tower. There she asked the sailor to put a black mask over his head. She made love to him all night and in the morning she said a magic word and the mask tightened and tightened and strangled her lover. Then she had him thrown from her tower into the sea.

The singles scene was so much simpler in those days.

In my film class at RISD I had written a couple of short scenes on that theme. Now I called Bull, a friend who was an assistant DP, and offered him cash to produce a fast cheap video of that story. I would run it on a plasma screen sited next to the canvases. I wanted another story there as well, though I wasn’t sure which one. On West Canal Street I bought two cheap plasmas to show the videos on, and experimented with different paints that I would use to decorate the actual screens.

And I wanted a live feed, a webcam that would show in real time places such as the area I had walked through with Sebastian, or those burned-out parts of the Bronx and East Brooklyn where people were sinking slowly, and also not so slowly. And hyperlinks to the Catholic Worker and the city’s Department of Homeless Services. I was even thinking about a program I’d heard of at RISD that would mix the images and change them according to the pace and displacement of what was happening both in the videos and among the people watching. I had no idea how it would work at that point but I wanted Project II to establish multiple links between the myth of drowned cities and the reality of this one: I wanted to cross lines of perception so that sight and touch and sound conspired to make the audience see a different world and believe, at least for a while, that they were living in that world. I wanted to intermingle sixth, seventh, eighth senses, of heart and inner skin and great intensity. This was not so different from what many people wanted from art and I was aware that what I was doing was not particularly original. At the same time I knew I needed my art to work more urgently than others did and, like it or not, this made it different, at least for me. I wanted everything, I wanted too much; and I was not prepared to compromise.

One law of life seems to be that activity begets activity—the more you do the more you are called upon to do. Also it was Christmastime at this point, and the usual rush of consumerism and cheap sentiment dragged in strands and lines of family, of obligation. My parents, who had agreed to give me time to myself after The Diagnosis, decided at this point that my furlough had expired and they wanted to see me on the Day and as often as possible afterward. Because they had divorced when I was fourteen this meant I had to schedule half-days to see each of them. Because I loved them at some gut level their grief, and their utter inability to understand why I should be dying before them, caused that stability I spoke of earlier to crumble. Twice in those three weeks after meeting Sebastian the crumble happened and each time it took me a day to get over it. After the second visit, after New Year’s, I sent them each an e-mail asking—no, demanding—that I be left alone again. I felt fine, I was active, I needed to get things done. I promised to contact them again if any of that changed. I had to cut both e-mails short because on top of my own heartbreak, that came from childhood touch and what Christmas promises had been kept in my early years, there surfaced a more recent rage at how much they had chosen to leave me alone when I was growing up. If anyone had a right to see me it was the Erzoglus, the couple who took care of the garden and cleaned the house and babysat us when our parents were off at cocktail parties, theaters, dinners; on fancy trips to give each other “couple time,” and then to “save (their) relationship.” But the Erzoglus, typically, asked for nothing.

Oh this was Cranesport, this was old. I wanted to do and learn new things. I told myself I could cram into my six-to-twelve months more real living than Cranesport families managed in their three-score-and-twenty. And so I had no time for Sebastian. And then Roger arrived. And that was OK because I was still involved with him and I admired his work and all that rolled up into a ball of continuing discovery, as I said before; a ball that included infatuation, and my awe of his paintings, which had a depth and confidence of texture I felt I’d never match, even with all that time I would not have. The chief ingredient of our being together, the domesticity, was new to me still. I guess that means it would be new to me forever, but never mind. He drove his Morgan into town on a Friday night, ten days after I met Sebastian, and what I loved was how he just took off his shoes in my apartment and opened up my closet and pulled his old flannel shirt and corduroys off the hangers. I put my favorite Janice LaCouture on the sound system. I made him coffee. He’s forty-something, with the kind of features that should be hanging off a cliff with the leading lady swooning among attached biceps. Aquiline nose, a chin cleft but strong, the way I like them. I think Gradlon would have looked like Roger. Certainly half of the fine-arts students at RISD, of both sexes, were bowled over by his combination of looks and talent and the way he made them think—it wasn’t true, but he had a showman’s feel for the good hook—think that he had shed all his inhibitions, and wanted you to do the same. And while there were plenty who said the shedding of inhibitions was merely prelude to the shedding of clothes on the part of his prettier students, his art was good enough (and he was discreet enough) to take the sting out of rumors. Graying temples, gray eyes that squint when he’s amused, hands with very broad thumbs, like three-inch palette knives. He’s a little shorter than me but carries himself so straight that it never feels wrong. He was here to go to a dinner at Sarko’s. Sarko owns No Space, probably the hippest gallery in the East Village. He’s big and getting bigger, giving Zwirner and Gagosian a run for their money. Roger had told me firmly when we made these plans that he couldn’t take me to the dinner, as Sarko didn’t mix with people he didn’t know, which I can understand since every artist in the Village is trying to schmooze him or suck him off or in some other way get him to look at their images.

But the Sarko event was tomorrow. This night was ours. We went to dinner at Lucien’s and afterward straight to bed. Roger’s Catholic and his wife won’t divorce him, or that’s what he says. One part of his story that I’m sure about is that they don’t fuck much or ever, because whenever we’re together he can barely control himself. And every time we’ve been together since I learned I was sick I’ve been worried that my female plumbing won’t work right for me, that the spreading tumor will have blocked a canal I need for sex; but even that slight reaction to Sebastian had reassured me, and the night with Roger laid those fears to rest for a while. I loved watching him over me, his strong fingers kneading my shoulders the way they smoothed acrylic over the linen’s nap, his eyes so serious, so intense it felt like they were trying to pierce the backs of my corneas. I was wet and when I opened for him he slid straight into me and it didn’t hurt anywhere. Admittedly he didn’t have the biggest johnson. I tried to calm him but he came almost at once. Later we fucked again and this time it was slower, more measured. He has a way of sitting me in his lap, facing him, my back against his knees, my own knees spread; in that position he caresses the beansprout of my clitoris with his thumbs, one after the other, stroking upward between the labia and, well, Christ it feels good. I came without expecting it. And then, almost immediately, I came again, the warm color of orgasm soaking me like a wave from the scalp all the way down, all the way to the creases between my toes. And I thought of Sebastian then. Just a touch, like the hint of Payne’s Grey you add to the corner of a canvas, to balance yellow higher up. His calm gaze, like a story I wanted to add, three feet to the southeast of the spotlit frame. That clipper ship …

Sebastian had left four text messages and sent two e-mails by then. Friendly, studiously casual. Had a nice time. Just wanted to say hi. Have a drink someday? I didn’t text or e-mail him back. Nor had I seen him, though I walked by Chez Louis, the restaurant he worked at, a couple of times. Once, crossing Third Street, I saw the carnival lights of firetrucks swirling, and New York’s Cutest with their big boots and hoses swarming around the restaurant. I walked over cautiously; a huge fireman with red hair and more freckles than me even told me it was a kitchen fire upstairs, nothing. I walked by the Death Café too—I still wondered about that, whether he took me there because of the name. When I thought of him though, I mean apart from when I came with Roger, I saw the deli, and that Cambodian jumping up and down like a jack in the box, brandishing his gun at the Arcimboldo cab.

I woke up the next morning with one of those soft, lazy hangovers that are deceptive; they make letting down too easy and forgetting a cinch. But they feel nice and languid and they’re good for fucking. Binkie was seeing some hedge fund wiz—a married hedge fund wiz—and, lured by the spectacular apartment his brother owned on Jane Street, had not returned last night.

Roger woke before me. He brought me coffee. He got back in bed. He put his hand over my breast, then looked at me sideways, squinting a little, and asked if I would tie him up.

We’d tried this once before. I wasn’t thrilled but in the estuary of sheets covered with my juices and his sperm, in the Payne’s Grey light of a New York Saturday, in the fool’s paradise of what felt like health, I answered, Why the hell not?

Brilliant, he said.

We found enough bathrobe ties to satisfy the three-inch rule. And I strung him naked across the mattress, his wrists and ankles secured by half-hitches to the bed-legs underneath. I sat carefully astride him, fit him inside me. His eyes were shut. I said, I’m dying, Roger.

It was the hangover, it wasn’t the hangover. I mean, I didn’t mean to tell him, and I don’t think I would have if I wasn’t hung over. And I probably would have kept my mouth shut were it not for the added disconnect that last night’s orgasms, and their aftermath, imparted to the decision process.

At the same time I knew damn well that the effort of hiding what was going on in my body demanded so much energy that it had to have an equal and opposing force, to reveal; to stop what was in effect a lie. I thought then, Hullo: so this is why I told Sebastian?

I’d lied so well so far that Roger did not believe me at first. As men will, he assumed that I was talking about the sex. First he thought it was a compliment to his unbelievable sexual proficiency. Then, when he realized I wasn’t particularly excited, he thought I wanted something different: a French tickler, perhaps, or masks to wear? When I said no, he decided it was the ties between us, emotional I mean.

I said, No, I’m really dying. I’ve got cancer, I have six months, maybe a year. Well, less now. I watched him as the words sank in, as he watched my face for signs of trick and found none. I realized then that the strongest reason I had told him was that he was tied up and powerless beneath me. In this way, in this coerced moment, I could tell him I was dying and retain control over his physical reactions. I could slap him, I could leave him. I could strangle him, as Dahut would have done. The anonymity of Sebastian had been a form of control, I realized. Because our worlds barely touched, I could tell him with little fear of damage, of tales told to others. Tying Roger up physically had the same effect for now.

He did not like it. His erection shrank. His face melted in the corners. He said, Jesus, Annabelle, and pulled against his ties. He said My God, and Take these off, but I would not. I just sat on his shriveling johnson and watched him. And then he started to cry, and I felt bad, and held him—and then all the useless, exhausting, energy-curdling grief came out, in ways it had not come for days.

But I did not untie him for a good long time.

One good effect of telling Roger was that he took me to Sarko’s dinner. He said Sarko’s rules were fine in normal circumstances but he was not going to leave me behind now. I said OK because I approved of his determination, though part of me also wondered why should dying make this different? Why could he not screw his courage to include me if I was going to live? This, I had a feeling, was a question that would crop up again.

Anyway he called Sarko and I could tell it did not go well. But Sarko was Roger’s main gallery guy and they made a lot of money for each other and so the deal was done. Roger was down for a while after that call. I had to stop him from phoning every oncologist he’d ever known or heard of for second opinions—that route had already been thoroughly traveled by my father. Deprived of aggressive, manly action to take he grew silent, apt to take me in his arms for no reason. I had to remind him that I only untied the bonds, in bed, after he promised to pretend. To act as if nothing had changed. To tell no one. I realized as I said this that I had now told two people in ten days—and thought of Sebastian again. I’d never asked him to keep mum. What I’d thought earlier was not wrong but it was also true that my insulation from his world, given that we both lived in the East Village, was paper-thin. He might even now be telling his friend Laurie, who would tell Johnboy, who would tell ... Thinking of his face, his hands brushing my throat as he put his ratty scarf around my neck under the shifting lights of the river, I did not think he would—and laughed at myself for being naïve. The Sarko affair was another example of how people promised one thing and then did the opposite. I mean Roger promised to follow his rules and then broke them. And Sarko, who according to art gossip styled himself as the avant-garde dude, friend to the broke and edgy, spent his time excluding people who hadn’t already become rich and established like himself. But he was the third most powerful gallery-owner downtown so no one would call him on it.

I did not buy a new dress for Sarko’s (though I considered doing so) but chose my best long dress, the indigo one with a V cut almost to my butt in back. I wore only a chemise and two scarves over it. OK, and a silk cardigan Dad gave me. I used foundation on my cheeks and nose to fade the freckles. Sarko had a duplex off Tompkins Square that showed off the most expensive raw art object you could find in Manhattan: space. The place was huge. Pickled cherrywood floors ran right across the block between views of the Williamsburg bridge and the Met Life building. One of Roger’s biggest canvases was speared in flattering fashion by designer lights to a wall of plain brick. On another, a flat-panel video screen the size of a summer cottage showed three tugboats towing barges full of yellow mineral in figure-of-eight patterns on a river flanked by residential towers.

The scene shifted to nude, yellow-painted figures moving in precise patterns in a tunnel. They lifted their arms upward like worshippers. Some of them carried signs with the figure “8” on them, drawn horizontally. Some of the women had the symbol painted around their tits: an infinity of nipples. The tunnel was lined with dirty white tiles but its roadway was covered in the yellow mineral, which was of a fine, talc-like consistency. A wide, shallow tin tray full of the same mineral was set in front of the flat-panel. Footprints marred the mineral’s surface and disturbed a dusting of yellow collected around the tray, and after hesitating (Cranesport! You don’t make waves!) I kicked off my pumps and walked across the tray, leaving my own footprints there and on the parquet around.

After all you can’t make this sort of stuff and not participate in other people’s. The style of installation was familiar to me. Before I could put a name to it I spotted a very tall bearded man, dressed in sweatshirt and jeans, stooping over a couple of women in elegant silk clothes of Parisian cut. It was Barney Mack; he had gotten famous creating pieces such as this one. The taller foreigner said, I distinctly heard her say; “nomothéthique,” and for a second I felt dizzy. For a moment I thought there were indeed links in this world, in Mack’s installation, that went on for light years like a line in Einsteinian space and must inevitably be deflected by something else I knew, though infinitely far away.

For an instant I also thought she was the Churn writer who reviewed my own installation.

Sarko came over and was gracious enough, although even before Roger introduced us his eyes did the art-flick: it’s what I call the professional glance in the East Village, that calculates your worth in an instant and moves on at once to find someone of greater value, which wouldn’t be hard around here. I drank a flute full of champagne that was very cold and dry. Then I drank another. I wandered around, looking at the other art—there was a very nice Moira Dryer. I fished my MP3 player and earbuds out of a cardi pocket and put on Janice LaCouture, the Moiré Jackhammer album, and climbed up an art déco spiral staircase to the same vast space, one floor above.

It was dark there. Black curtains were hung all over, with fancy lighting behind. Janice sang “AntiKythera,” a piece where she blended her barbed-wire-and-nectar voice with Otis Wichita’s tenor sax. The champagne made me feel slow and relaxed. It made me feel as if I’d parachuted into an altitude where everything lost speed, where even gravity was turned to its lowest setting, and your heaviest jokes worked. That feeling made me think of this morning and it made me think of sex with Roger and how he used his thumbs. I wanted to see him, all of a sudden. I wanted to get out of here and tie him up so he could not talk to Sarko anymore, and fuck him silly. But I forgot that thought at once because everybody else started coming up at that point: the buffet table was upstairs.

I didn’t eat, I found the champagne filled me up just fine. When we went back downstairs I spotted Johnboy standing by the fireplace, cracking jokes with the silk-clad Europeans. Surprised but vaguely pleased at this sign that he was coming up in the world, I caught his eye and smiled. He did not respond. Later, I noticed, he kept staring at me, trying to figure out what I was doing here.

Everyone else clustered around Barney Mack and a short blond woman dressed in bib overalls, ballet slippers, and nothing else. You could see the woman’s nipples peek from behind the bib every time she leaned forward. I remembered who she was: a Norwegian pop star called Hekla. I even had a few of her songs on my MP3. She was Mack’s companion. She looked about eighteen. I unhooked my MP3 earbuds. Somebody was insisting that Mack’s installation was based on the Mayan calendar and the duodecimal system of Babylon and Mack was getting quite theatrically teed off. No, no, no, he kept shouting. Once you look for meaning you destroy the meaning. It was the usual artiste froth, the act you put on to convince buyers that what you do is much more complex than the simple fact that you have to do it. The only difference with Mack was the volume with which he said it. The force of it was wrong for this space, this crowd. It convinced me he was having a joke at his audience’s expense. He seemed to be shouting at my feet; I looked down and realized I had forgotten to put my shoes back on. My toes were still dusted with the yellow mineral. I said, My feet will find their own meaning, but I didn’t say it loud and nobody heard. Roger said (I think) I prefer the CERN reactor to a man dressed entirely in leopardskin. I was suffused with leniency then. I thought all these statements were true in their way and I admired all these people for trying to find a sort of meaning, even if it had to be lack of meaning when so many things, war and dying children and cancer and heartbreak, wedged their shoulders against the queer wheel of search. I didn’t mind that there was money present, in those Europeans, in Sarko and Mack; there was curiosity here also, and education and travel and strange languages, that I thought vaccinated these people against the disease of Cranesport. The living dead rarely spoke foreign languages. They didn’t go anywhere much more exotic than Disneyworld, or Cancún.

Then came a squeeze of laughter. I turned to see Mack in front of the fire with his pants around his ankles, his hands at his crotch. A shiny stream came from that area and steam surged out of the logs as he pissed into the flames. He was singing in a high, false voice; “Go on now, walk out the door—just turn aroun’ now ‘cause you’re not welcome any-more…”

That was when I decided to call Sebastian. The decision was by no means pure, right then. I don’t know if it ever became pure, or even clean the way Sebastian felt to me. I didn’t feel pure, just drunk, a little headlong. What was happening, I reckon, was simply an acknowledgment that I was going to call him because I had already, in the back of my mind, lined up the props for it, cellphone and motivation and the folder where I threw receipts and business cards, and phone numbers from people I met at parties.

I didn’t think about it much. I hung around the outskirts of people’s opinions. Mack was filthy drunk and completely naked by this time. The European women made a show of pretending they weren’t checking out his johnson. They talked intimately of the Dogme group, and the snow in a place called Lech (pronounced with a little nose-clearing at the end), and what a risk it was to start a Rhône-Alpes-hors d’oeuvres-and-silk-scarf boutique downtown, but life was all about risk, non? So that made it somehow alright to lose all that money, potentially, even though that would in fact be a problem according to someone they all referred to named Pierre-Yves. Someone else said a village named Winkenbach (same nose-clearing) in the Bavarian Alps had been plagued by a rain of frogs, and this enhanced, for me, the sense of living—not the frogs, but the fact that my world, Annabelle’s world, could include raining frogs, and a village named Winkenba-ch, and a trap of yellow mineral. And I felt warmer than ever.

I tried to catch Johnboy’s eye again but now he was clearly depressed at having come to a party to which a nonentity like myself could be admitted, and refused to look at me. I looked at Hekla; she returned my gaze, her blue eyes cold as snowmelt. She reminded me of a Cranesport woman who has just spotted someone at a club gala wearing the same dress. I’m talking murder here. I went home drunk in the Morgan. Roger put the top down and for the hell of it he kept on east down Houston and swung onto the FDR Drive. We roared across the Williamsburg Bridge and back with the cool wind snapping in my ears; and I felt alive, alive, because the wind was touching me and the engine noise boxed my ears and Manhattan was so beautiful at night like this, with the lights of jets climbing to Sirius and the harbor black as the deepest, coldest of oceans.

When we got back I told Roger I had to pee. I asked him to drop me off before he took the car to the garage. I ran up the five floors to my apartment and didn’t mind for once that it was only two tiny rooms with a view of fire escapes. I found the folder with Sebastian’s note, and called his number.

chapter 4

I didn’t get her fucking call. The reason I didn’t was that I’d been leaving my cellphone on all the time, even when I was away from the charger, which I never do, but I did it hoping she would call, and the battery kept running out of juice. And sometimes with the power low the ring wavered, or never reached normal volume, so I couldn’t hear it.

When she did call I was probably in the room over Louis’. This was how low I had already sunk. It’s not fair to say it was because of her, because she didn’t bother to call earlier; the honest reason, I suppose, would be that on the basis of maybe three hours total hanging out with her, I had gotten obsessed with a girl who over the few days since I saw her had become mostly memory. This is a problem, right? It’s called fantasizing, and if you do it a little it’s a way to explore options, and if you let it affect your life it’s a trap. I couldn’t remember her very well physically; an impression, the way she seemed to slide between people, was stronger than the memory I had of her face. It had become allied over time with what I think was a different view, of the way she walked, thrusting each hip so far forward that she seemed to flatten along the axis of her motion. Flatness and the path between, and a smile like a dolphin’s—I remembered that much. It interests me, how memory works, because I am always trying to sort out what memories I might have of my mother, who died when I was two. I know that ninety-nine percent of what I see when I remember her comes from photographs Jean-Louis has, and what he told me of her later. He remembers a lot, and has tons of pictures. Sometimes, though, I get a strong feeling—not a memory, more of a mood—of someone soft and smelling of cinnamon and salad; someone to lean against, find comfort in. Maybe that’s from one of Jean-Louis’ girlfriends. Maybe it’s just a cliché of motherhood. Maybe it comes from the pictures too because in all of them she is overweight and she appears soft, visually. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a real memory in there somewhere—I mean, one of mine.

My adviser at NYU, Professor Frucht, often refers to a pseudo-science called “hantologie,” invented by Jacques Derrida. It explains how what we do is shaped by our memories of the dead.

Anyway, what memory didn’t do, I guess brain chemicals made up for. Over the three days after I met her, while I kept to my routines—NYU, waiting tables, avoiding the room over Louis’; walking a lot, because when I went back for my bike at Laurie’s I found it had been stripped, everything taken except rear wheel and frame—I also found time to divert my various errands to include 6th Street, where her apartment was. Or walk by the Dogleg on the braindead theory that, because I saw her there once, I’d see her there again. I got a stupid pleasure out of seeing, through the plate glass, the couch where we sat; or spotting smears of onion where the cab smashed into the Hmong’s fruitstand.

I heard a weird thing about that. The cabbie who lost control of his car was found shot to death two days later on Third Avenue, near an NYU dorm. They picked up Pong for questioning but couldn’t pin anything on him. Tox told me. I spent so much time loitering on the streets, cellphone stashed in an easy-to-reach pocket, that I started running into Tox two or three times a day, which is always a bad sign. Tox is my best friend, probably. He lives on the next block. I’ve known him since second grade and we’ve done a lot of shit together, but Tox is also a semi-functioning junkie, a boozehound, a chainsmoker and generally a magnet for bad vibes.

It happens, on a city street—some guy comes down it with a real bad attitude and his psychic radar will be scanning for a good target and a guy like Tox is it. I once saw Wardell, a six-foot-eight Jamaican who hangs around Tompkins, usually dressed in an orange jumpsuit, career out of the Pakistani deli on a July midnight high on crank, roaring Oh God! Oh God!—and then rolling on his back on the tarmac, waving his limbs around like a dying bug. After which Wardell jumped up, still roaring, and charged down the sidewalk, a man on a mission, and that mission was to visit the wrath of Jah on anyone who gave off bad vibes to Wardell. He spotted Tox, who was slouching down the street looking for someone he knew or maybe just ruminating about how his hero, G.G. Allin, used to give concerts on Saint Marks during which he’d take shits onstage and throw the feces at the audience, and eat what was left. All Wardell’s alarms went off at once. The Jamaican charged so fast that Tox, who maybe was not thinking about G.G. at all but just timing his next methadone hit, which was hard to do since Mayor Montefiore was in the process of kicking the meth clinics out of Manhattan; or maybe he wasn’t even doing that, just thinking about nothing and holding his balls in his pocket with his left hand as is his wont; anyway he never saw him coming. Wardell smashed him in the face with his right hand, so fast again that he didn’t have time to close the fist all the way and Tox’s jaw was merely cracked and easy to wire up. Still people who know him learn to be wary of spending too much time with Tox, the way they might avoid taking long country walks with one of those people who’ve already been hit three times by lightning.

My obsession wore down—partly because of Tox, partly because it seemed so useless, and unhealthy somehow too. I got Annabelle’s last name from Laurie—it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill name, either—but couldn’t find her on Facebook, and after three days I quit trying. A couple of days later I stopped doing the 6th Street detour. The idea of Annabelle after a week lost the poignancy it held over the first forty-eight hours, when it hurt, it actually hurt not to see her, this girl I’d known for three hours total; hurt around my upper ribs somewhere. I could let myself be diverted into normal channels.

Which was good, I had a lot to cope with then. NYU for starters. Though as a twenty-two-year-old junior I was firmly on the Bluto track it was still possible to be behind on coursework, even at Gallatin, and I was several papers in the hole. I had been doing OK in the chief elective for my so-called major. This was Professor Frucht’s course, pretentiously titled “Tithonius’s Revenge: Social Perspectives on Death and Dying in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” but even there I had reading to catch up on. Which was not really a problem because I was definitely into the subject, still OK with my made-up major at that point. The seminar met the Tuesday after I first laid eyes on Annabelle, and Frucht’s theme that day was the concept of death as a register of control. Frrrom this perrrspective, he said—he has a cute Hungarian accent, and rolls his ‘r’s like a Frenchman—the idea of death is a function of a society’s degree of control over nature. If there is relatively little control, say for Neanderthal, you deal with death thrrrough magic, and shamans: you put food in the grrrave, you talk to the animal spirits. A little control, a little sedentarrry agriculture, yes? And this gives you power structures, in this case organized rrreligion. Which becomes a machine for explaining death in a way that perrrpetuates the prrriesthood.

Real, substantive control over nature? You have this—he swept his hands at the windows—Amerrrica; a society that denies death. Where people actually believe their medicine can treat everything, that they have a rrright to live forever.

It was curious; somehow Frucht had become an idol to the school’s neo-Goth contingent. This group, who usually never ventured out in daylight, would spend entire mornings following him, screeching like the seagulls at Coney when they find a bag of fries. They tried to crash his seminars—he locked the doors as a result—and generally drove him nuts. A student had recently committed suicide by hacksawing through the “golden cage,” which was what students call the high railing at Bobst Library, and jumping off a balcony into the atrium eleven floors down, and this seemed in some sick way to have galvanized the neo-Goths. More of them were following Frucht around, and black-clad groups could be seen clustering on the Escher-patterned marble of Bobst, looking hopefully upward … But most of the people registered for his class were sociology or psych grad students who couldn’t get into more popular courses. The exceptions were me, and a very strange, tall dude on crutches who seemed to do nothing but draw maps for Frucht. Most of Frucht’s students fell asleep, or doodled, or read other stuff, except for me and the mapmaker. That day, thinking of course of her, I said, What about people with terminal illness, which does exist here? And he said that this was seen, socially, as an exception, a tragedy; plus, the term “ill” often was used to deflect from the truth of dying, just as dying was euphemized as “passing on.” I said nothing, but I thought that this didn’t seem true of Annabelle. What I told her about the feeling of aliveness was true, or seemed so at the time. I thought, with a wince, that it was possible I would never find out what she truly was, or what she really believed, because she clearly was not interested in seeing me again.

After class Frucht asked me to wait. In the corridor, which was otherwise empty, he told me that he had intervened personally with Gallatin over my application for a job as assistant orderly at the New York medical examiner’s office. They had agreed in principle, Frucht said, beaming—pending an interview. Frucht is not gay, or at least I know he’s married to a woman. He wears loud ties. He trained as a pediatrician, and maybe that’s why. Anyway he’s also a toucher. He touches all his students, on the cheek, the shoulders, the arms, and I had to steel myself as he patted my shoulder, my face.

Then he went white, staring over my left shoulder. I turned, to see a knot of pale, heavily pierced kids, dressed in black cloaks, tumbling out of the elevator and calling in cracked teenage voices, Perfessor Frucht! Wait, Perfesser!

When I turned around, Frucht was sprinting for the fire exit, his pink and orange tie fluttering in his wake. And the anomaly followed through in my brain, that I had reacted against Frucht’s touch twice as much as I would have normally, because nobody had touched me since Annabelle. And it reminded me then of how much I wanted to be touched by her.

But as I said I had a lot to do. Also I was still broke, which meant I had to ask Jean-Louis for maximum shifts at the restaurant. Here was an added reason I couldn’t focus so much on Annabelle. Waiting tables at Chez Louis was like wrestling a giant octopus whose tentacles were the pushy uptown crowd, and the asshole artists who think this is their personal watering-hole, and N’dombé the cook who is so fuckin’ fast that the wait-staff never get a break, and Jean-Louis who becomes a typical restaurant gauleiter when the pressure is on. The octopus is also made of the L toward the back of the restaurant that increases your wait-staff-mileage by thirty percent, and clay kitchen tiles that macerate your feet like saltimbocca veal, and the TV actors who are stars, sort of, and the magazine writers who think they are, and drinks by Finn O’Sullivan, the bartender from County Donegal whose caipirinhas, much in demand, double our workload; and hustling trays and drinks and keeping the orders straight, all of which means that six hours later, on a shift like the one on the Saturday ten days after I first met Annabelle, nothing penetrates your exhaustion except the yayo or ex or crystal meth which N’dombé keeps on hand, unbeknownst to Jean-Louis, so we can all get through the night. That and the pounding Streetfight music he puts on the sound system after 10 pm. All of which meant that after that Saturday shift, I and the rest of the restaurant staff ended up where I had refused to bring Annabelle: the backroom over Chez Louis.

I should explain: I grew up in this room, this building, this biz. My Dad, Jean-Georges, is Jean-Louis’ brother. He was his partner in setting up the restaurant, which at the time was called Chez Louis et Georges. A family business, my Mom was a waitress. When she died Jean-Georges went on a drinking binge that lasted eight months. When he came out of that he flew straight for a season and then one morning left our apartment and didn’t come back for two years—although after a couple of months he started sending postcards. From Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tonga.

So Jean-Louis ended up being the one who raised me. Jean-Louis and whatever woman happened to be sharing his bed at the time. Jean-Louis and the rest of the crowd at the restaurant, and in the building, where he had rented three apartments in the meantime. Mrs. Rubin and Galloway the action painter and Jimmy the super and the diva Billy Boyd. That Saturday was typical of a weekend shift: N’dombé and me and Jean-Louis on duty, and N’dombé’s nephew Aboulaye busing tables. For customers there were regulars like the journalist Cormac “Kill-‘em-all” Clinche, who drifted up from the restaurant when his bill got too high and collapsed on one of the three couches that lined the walls. Mrs. Rubin of course presiding at the head of the long table in her Traviata robes; glaring at Jean-Louis’ latest concubine, who at that point was Sophie, a shy woman of Romanian origin who wilted under the Rubin onslaught. Five bottles of Côtes du Rhone had already been emptied, I noted, opening another. The conversation that evening had to do with Billy Boyd, who for the third time in ten months had concocted a fabulous meal—in this case, crawfish étouffé with a reduction of sundried tomato, ginger, and sea-scallop broth. He left it—well, he left the sauce—simmering on the stove while he relaxed on his futon with his eighth G&T, listening to Verdi, the MP3 on sample. Of course he passed out; given the custom-made retroviral cocktail he’s on he shouldn’t be drinking like that to begin with—and the saucepan caught fire, and then the paint over the stove. The alarms went off and the fire department came and all hell broke loose.

Jean-Louis, figuring the Fire Department might notify the Health Department about the pig in our basement, nearly shat himself trying to get downstairs to lock up Mook. Galloway, who has emphysema, partly from smoking and partly because he volunteered at a soup kitchen near ground zero after 9/11 and the facemasks didn’t work with his beard, came very near to passing out as he humped his menagerie of parrots—who also have health problems—down the fire escape. Screaming at Boyd, Fuck you you fuckin’ faggot, I’ll fuckin’ get you for this! while Gunga the macaw shrieked Fu-u-u-uck, fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck! in his high croak and Joe hung gasping on the iron uprights of the outside steps, wheezing between the “fucks.” Now Galloway raged at la Rubin, who sat like Shiva with two drinks going at once, glowering at Galloway when she wasn’t glaring at Sophie or making goo-goo eyes at N’dombé. Cochise been fuckin’ croakin’ for three days! Galloway, somehow, could wheeze and cough simultaneously. Macaws are (wheeze) used to the fuckin (cough) rain forest, they’ll die (wheeze) from smoke!

You can’t throw out Billy, he’s got AIDS, Mrs. Rubin hollered back.

Oy git sick of all diss fookin AIDS excusees, Kill ‘em All growled. Fooking veek-tim culture. Kill ‘em All was somewhere between a journalist and a public relations flack; he wrote a story once for Vanity Fair on South African commandos and ever since then figured himself a tough guy, and a South African to boot, though he was actually born in Sussex. There is a scar on his cheek that he got in a drunken moped crash in Bermuda which enhances the dangerous effect. Why don’t you all shut de fock op, N’dombé growled. He’s the reverse of Jean-Louis and, while in the kitchen he’s cool, outside he has a low threshold. Everybody has a low threshold except me and Jean-Louis (when he’s not downstairs) and Lizzie, Galloway’s daughter, who was upstairs with her baby because her husband, who’s a cop, is always out way late—of that, more later.

Billy is a brilliant chef and he sings like a—like a prince, Mrs. Rubin shrieked at N’dombé. And you wonder why I never heard the fucking cellphone ring? On top of it all, now that I was off-shift and off my feet, sprawled back on the couch under the bad oil-painting of a fishing harbor which had also come from Brittany; now I was being soothed by the Côtes du Rhone in one segment of my brain while another was hopping around like a flea on a skillet from the line of crank N’dombé gave me during the last rush; I could think of nothing. I could empty what passes for my brain. Nesorenko the owner blew in, looking at everyone as if he hated us, which he does because everyone has rent stabilization in this building. He has bleached blue eyes and is thin except for a very localized, round belly that looks as if he swallowed a stone like Kronos and which pokes out from between the buttoned flaps of his leather jacket. He was looking for info on the fire so he could maybe build a case against Billy Boyd but it never works because everyone in this building has the same interest in not giving him cause to evict, because we figure once he makes one eviction stick the next will be easier, so everyone hangs together. Jimmy the super came in his wake, trying to play the diplomat between the tall Uke and his tenants. It didn’t matter, it all washed over me like surf over a clamshell.

And that was when the memory of Annabelle came rushing back into the void. I had never missed so often and for so long a woman I had seen so little. And that fact in itself depressed me further, because it might mean she was the One—you know, The-Love Affair every pixel of our pathetic entertainment culture tells us will rock our world, will bring us champagne dreams and caviar days, will make up for our utter inability to become as rich and famous as TV says we must to be truly happy; will make up for failure, rejection, boredom, and arrogant clients from Saddle River.

So I sat there, buzzed with fatigue and wine and speed while in the corner, in my backpack, muffled by Egon Furchtbar’s third volume of The Thanatos and You, my cellphone warbled quietly to itself, or perhaps, power gone, did not react at all when Annabelle called.

I got her message an hour later. These were her words: Hi, umm. Sebastian? It’s Annabelle; from Johnboy’s party? Umm, I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. (Pause.) Well, I was thinking maybe we could get together next week. Maybe Tuesday? Well, so, give me a call, if you like. Bye.

Verbatim, yah? What she said; I saved it on the voicemail. But what she really said was, I had registered with her, somewhere on her chart of things to notice. Her voice had that roughness-lite I’d noticed in the Dogleg but inside it was soft in tone, which said that when she thought of me it was not bad, as it might have been if she thought I was an asshole for bringing up necrology; if she thought that was why I was interested in her, because she was a case-study in dying, as in one of those Victorian novels, Paul et Virginie maybe, that existed to make housewives weep. The Death of the Other, Frucht calls that period of history, a benchmark of bourgeois individualism …

Her voice was tentative also, and what that meant was she did not feel she had power over me—she had not built up stocks of indifference or contempt to overwhelm my clear interest in her (as totted up in those serial texts and emails). So maybe, according to what Frucht said, what worked across a culture worked in people too, and her lack of control over my nature meant some reflex of was being triggered here?

It was too late to call her that night. Anyway I was too buzzed to make much sense; witness my musings over Frucht. Excited by her message, I stayed up even later, smoking and sucking down Côtes du Rhone and arguing with Kill ‘em All. And Lizzie came down because the rug-rat would not go to sleep. She had in tow an old man from the fossil housing on 1st Street that Mayor Montefiore wants to move to the Bronx. Lizzie always has an adoption case of some sort going. She drank a glass of wine, saying she wished Eleonore was nursing, because the alcohol would seep into her breastmilk and calm the baby, but Eleonore had never latched on to the tit: her lactation counselor was annoyed with them both. Lizzie seemed upset about this. The old man drank three glasses of Côtes du Rhone in rapid succession and nodded off in a corner. I took her, the baby I mean, on my knee and rocked her. She stopped crying and spat up on my jeans. Lizzie looked at me speculatively. I went to bed. The next morning I woke up at waiters’ hours—almost eleven—and went straight to the coffee shack at First and 1st and had a double espresso/banana smoothie to steady my nerves. Then I found her number on the cellphone and hit “call.” I was ready for disillusionment, for voicemail, but Annabelle picked up on the second ring. Her voice was calm and welcoming, the way sunshine looks on the pine boards of a room in the country; as if she had nothing to do but warm people like me who entered that room with good intentions in the morning, who spoke to her in the varnished stillness. All she said was, Sebastian, and: can you meet me Tuesday? And details of how and when. But that tone was as quiet and soft as it had been on my own voicemail, and it preserved that feeling around me, of a quiet, sunlit study, even for the two days I had to get through until I saw her again.

Except for my mom dying, which I don’t remember, and being busted for possession of a controlled substance, with Tox of course, when I was fourteen, I haven’t had too many lousy things happen in my life. Still—maybe because the absence of your real parents is hard enough to blacken the picture; maybe because my Dad’s folks came from Brittany, which is a desolate coast peopled with rocks and dark Celtic spirits and a peculiarly grim strain of Catholicism—I tended to assume life was not going to be indulgent; that what made you happy had to be fought for, and would in any case be rare as calm seas off Finisterre, and just as seldom attained.

For four days with Annabelle though, I thought, I really believed, that perhaps the dour Breton view of things was wrong. For four days almost nothing screwed up, starting with when I met her after her shift, at the Catholic Worker, and she couldn’t leave—she was involved with a case she’d inherited from someone else, a thin, beaten looking white man who had a tiny black kid in tow. He was a typical homeless guy in the sense that his job was collecting empties and redeeming them for five cents each and he kept losing cans out of his bags and the baby kept crying. I put the baby on my knee and the magic I seemed to have with Lizzie’s baby worked with this kid too. Girls, for obvious if usually theoretical reasons, like it when guys know what to do with babies, though that’s as far as my skills run—soothing them, I mean. The man, whose name was Spike, kept coming up and taking my hand in his own grimy ones and repeating Jeez! Jeez! as if I had performed some trick that would score him hootch and shelter forever. But it was clear that he was fascinated not with me but with Annabelle, and I felt a kinship with him because of that. Plus, it sounds meant to say but it’s true, given his problems he clearly wasn’t going to be competing for her affections.

After she finished her paperwork we went to a café on 3rd and started talking, and we didn’t stop for hours, because something had been removed—some traffic barrier in her, in me, that had acted as a brake on our words last time. Maybe those days apart had given us both time to whittle down our respective fears about what might occur, or not. With me, I know, the fear sometimes came out as a reluctance to do something because it might turn out bad. Talk about an illogical impulse, talk about a caution that, later, I would throw blithely to the winds. Anyway we were ripe to tell each other, without preconceptions; just tell. I know “tell” is a verb that demands an object but in our case we didn’t know or care what the object was, it was sheer impulse—tell. And what we told attracted rather than separated us. I wouldn’t give it more, or less, importance than that. I heard about Cranesport and her parents and a family called the Erzoglus; about RISD and Roger, though she didn’t tell me all about Roger, not then or for weeks afterward. And she learned about Jean-Georges and my Mom and my gang-time with Tox, though I didn’t tell her about the smack, not then, nor how close I came to going the Downtown route in Tox’s wake. She told me about Project II, and a Mac-based program she’d heard about that would edit the videos real-time in reaction to how the audience was moving physically. She told me about Caer Ys, and her theory about drowned cities, though she didn’t tell me about Dahut, not then. What was most important, I wonder? What we said? What we chose not to utter at that point? Or the fact that we were engaged in a process of both hiding and revealing, an iteration old as humans, and our wars with other tribes, and our secret stashes of dried berries and smoked elk? Early man, early woman, who also needed at times to rest—to kill their codes, let down their guard, to tell the truth for once so as not to feel so goddam alone.

I told her I was studying to be a heuristic sociologist, someone who, unfashionable as it might be in the 21st century, sought to understand the invisible patterns by which people lived. Catalyzed by what Frucht had said in the last class, I even told her that I was interested in how power structures fashioned a deliberate falsehood meant to reassure both rulers and the ruled. I kept clear of other aspects of Frucht. I did not mention his belief that the symptoms of those structures lay most clearly in attitudes to death, and its perceived opposite, life; and that the need for power, as Frucht repeated, stemmed from the uncertainty which the invention of death in the palaeozoic era had visited on our species, our world.

I kept clear in general of my firm and Fruchtian conviction that how we perceive death shapes how we view our living. I did not say, for example—we were eating at a Bengali café on Sixth Street, and gasping over the fiery curry gave me time to think, time to avoid saying too much—I did not say that it was possible, even logical, to see all of society as a mechanism to help conscious organisms cope with the fact that for all their glittering hopes and uniqueness they too must die. The Egon Furchtbar book claimed that religion long ago coopted that role, using both fear and hope to impose its own power structure. And then in more modern times the state stepped in with its implied promises of safety and care; over fifty percent of U.S. government expenditures—so says The Thanatos and You—go to services that are supposed to keep us death-free. Even as I yakked, and chose carefully what I yakked about, I was conscious that by withholding certain data I was also creating a power structure, in the sense that information is power and hoarding it therefore stores potential power, the way not using a battery hoards electricity. I was turning Frucht’s theory into practice, converting our rapport into a mini power grid that I might perhaps control and thus, inevitably—because as Jean-Louis says, as soon as you try to control something, you kill it—bring it closer to its dissolution.

But again, I made damn sure none of this waffle flipping around my brain passed my lips. And what I was also very conscious of was the fact that these subjects, these relationship data, were only important the way concrete is important in building a bridge, as filler; the real strength lay in rebar and steel beams and I believed at the time these underpinnings were present in other stuff. The pre-existing willingness to talk, and listen; the way we were respectful of each other’s words yet eager to hear more—those already existed. And the way her mouth recreated in my mind, stronger every time, the quiet sunlit room that sheltered me. How when she sat at table, and when she wasn’t thinking about what she was doing, she tried to hide her freckles by keeping two fingers balanced on the bridge of her nose, across the Milky Way of russet dots extending horizontally across her cheeks. How she did not store phone numbers on her cell, but wrote them in ballpoint on her wrist between the raised white threads of scars she did not talk about. The way she walked, her hips sliding against each other like those greased plates upon which tractor and trailer meet; and the mauve circles under her eyes because she worked so hard, and the fact that unlike the yuppie hordes surrounding us she cared for something apart from bling, which meant that blingless geeks like me might stand a chance. And the delicacy of her wristbones, and her steady, oak-colored gaze, and the way her waist was thin and long—all were important. The slightly stripped quality of her voice, like Billie Holiday before the smack really got to her. She had a laugh like water from a rubber hose splashing into a kaolin vase, which was funny in itself and made me laugh with her. Frucht says humor is a close cousin to death because its role, like that of death and sex, is to destroy old links and forge new, unexpected ones; all humor, at its heart, is black. I’m not sure I agree with Frucht about that. But I do think laughing is a crucial signpost to how we fit down deep.

I can prove none of this, of course. I’ll tell you another theory, then shut the fuck up, which is what I ultimately did with Annabelle. I first read it in a sci-fi book by Gus Hawkley, and it struck a chord with me. Here’s the theory: the mysterious yet absent Dark Matter of which ninety percent of the universe is formed actually consists of all the time humans spend waiting to connect on the Net, or on phone-hold.

Here’s my version of that theory: dark matter is actually a pool of pure form into which two people, if they are lucky and certain basic conditions are met, can plunge, psychically, at the same time. It is a place where no mass or power exists between them or anything else. This is called, in the demotic, “falling in love.”

I would never have used the “L” word so early in a relationship, maybe because of the Breton darkness that tends to doubt what isn’t gray, granite, and grim. But I took Annabelle to dinner at Lucien’s and because he’s a pal of Jean-Louis’ he offered us stuff he doesn’t give other customers and when she didn’t flinch at the fromage de tète gribiche and then ordered the boudin noir sauce pommes/airelles, I felt as if that dark matter had soaked me so thoroughly I was leaking something cold and black in a pool around my seat. Americans are still cowards when it comes to alien foods and though I could tell she was unsure she took the offal plunge without hesitating and that is what I’m talking about here: her guts. As I watched her eating, wielding fork and knife with those thin paint-stained fingertips, I felt the zoom-zoom wash over me with all the strength it had when I first felt it, and then some. Yoshi Yamamoto, who also hangs out at Chez Louis, came in and Lucien put on Yoshi’s CD, which is a blend of recorded city sounds, koto riffs, and clavichord; not good for partying but right, somehow, for looking deep into the ocean of a woman’s eyes to find what new, strange forms of benthic life might exist there. Annabelle liked it; she even asked who wrote it, and I could point to Yoshi—who is very fat and shaves his head and always wears flipflops, even when it’s snowing—and claim that kudos. I was blessed, I thought, Oh we were blessed. I went to Roger’s for cigs and bought a three-pack of condoms that I stashed in my wallet—Roger looking at me with that knowing half-smile of his. Approving, I thought; wondering, in his sheik-of-the-clan way, who the girl was, if it would work for us. Or maybe he was just glad, on a male fraternal basis, that I might finally be getting laid again. After two bottles of Cahors, Kill ‘em All showed up and made a beeline for our table. He wanted to jumpstart our old argument. He got one look at Annabelle and to prove what a Boer Kommando he was started getting real aggressive about Mideast wars. He wanted to call me out and I almost went along with it because I happen to know that the extent of his martial arts training is kung fu films and a sixteen-hundred dollar aikido course that he dropped; and as we began the “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” rite of male defiance she took my hand under the table, her fingers slipping into mine, her thumb locking over my thumb joint to preserve the touch.

Though it didn’t happen till much later that night the way we slid so easily into that touch, through the anger and the rhythms and the wine, was duplicated by how our tongues slid over and under and into each other’s mouths, on the concrete violence of street corners; how I slid between her opened legs in the roaring darkness of my room, into the ease and warmth and provisional trust of fucking.

And none of that was death-related. I think of death all the time and yet despite what I’d said to her before—despite what I believe about life and love and Annabelle now—thoughts of dying and the structures around them never touched me that night when Annabelle did.

She made love quietly, unlike Laurie, or Lizzie. She made love like a WASP breadboard, like your typical stick-up-the-ass girl from the stockbroker belt; like Stacey from Greenwich, who I slept with freshman year. She was passive, she said nothing.

What was different from Stacey though was that this was not the power trip of the country club which these girls were taught, subliminally or overtly, from the cradle—the “you’ve got one thing they want, Meredith, so sell it dearly.” What was also different from Stacey was, Annabelle did not want to use a condom. She told me she’d been tested several times recently, and been found clean. She didn’t ask about me, although I happened to know I was clean as well, and when I wondered about that I realized she did not have to worry about HIV because she did not have enough time left to get AIDS. While I was figuring that out she pulled me on top of her and kissed me, hard. She latched her lips on mine, somehow, and sucked, and I forgot all about the etiquette of sex, safe or otherwise. Her hair smelled of nutmeg and oranges. When I lay on top of her she held me so tightly it actually hurt, and between her legs she was so wet it reminded me of the liquid dark matter I’d felt earlier, dipped this time from the galaxy’s star-torrents into the pearly nectar of sex. She cried out softly, as if it hurt her bad, which of course I thought it did. I remembered, suddenly, that this was someone who was sick, though I did not at the time know exactly where. It did not feel like I was forcing anything though, her insides were smooth and supple as the leaves of kelp you touch with your toes, underwater at Jones Beach. Her cunt was softer in the middle, and gripped me a little at bottom and top—it also seemed to bend leftward, slightly, at the top. I asked, Am I hurting you? And she whispered, No, please, no; there was such conviction, and such despair, in her voice that it reinforced the impulse I’d had earlier to tell all my secrets, to break down any barriers separating us, to kill solitude forever, for a second. And I came, too early, not meaning to: the orgasm was there suddenly, like a big cop breaking down an open door. I think my giving up sperm then was nothing more nor less than giving up the division, the power-trip of separation, for this girl I thought I trusted. And as I came, as I started to flood into her I saw clear as in a tidepool Annabelle in a room with green wallpaper; a kitchen full of men. They had the swagger and rudeness of power, and outside, through the windows, their cars were lined up: an antique sports car and a fancy new luxury convertible and a crowd of black Mercedes. One of the men carried x-rays in an open briefcase. He was flipping through them one by one and telling jokes. Annabelle was laughing with them, that way she had, like water playing in kaolin.

There was one other woman in the room, an older woman with frosted hair who was going through a bag as well. It was her handbag. Over and over she repeated, I can’t find my keys. Where are my keys? I will never find my keys again. And as I came, I left the room where we were laughing, and separated myself also from this strong feeling I had; that the way we moved together, even from the start when we walked by the river, slid both over and under other thoughts, other realities—that how we moved was life itself, in crudest form. Like a strong acid that cuts through anything, even what was wrong with me, and them. And I remembered what I was, and how I was, and how I had no shadow of a business risking what independence I had left, nor condemning some gormless fetus to a cruel, far longer bondage—

She pushed me away. Her arms were strong, from painting I guess. She twisted her hips up and left so that I spilled out of her even as the come was spilling out of me; crying No dammit no, Sebastian! Later, more softly, as she held me hard, as the tricked sperm glued our navels together: I can’t get pregnant now. Don’t you see that? A newborn baby, what could she do, I mean, make ga-ga sounds at her mother’s funeral? She started to giggle, and held me even tighter. I said, I know, I know, because I did somehow, just as I had felt I was seeing things through her eyes at the very cusp of orgasm. What we had told each other and what we hadn’t said rose thick as puke in our throats.

When I woke she was up and making coffee. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts, it was my Jackknifed Tractor Trailer one, and in the long light I noticed again the scars up her left wrist. They formed a ladder pattern, above a phone number she had inked in ballpoint just over the base of her hand; they were short and parallel, pink and nano-thin. They did not look like tracks. Anyway a junkie, even an almost-junkie like me can smell hop a mile away, and Annabelle did not put forth even a whiff of junk. The shirt did not quite reach to her crotch and I saw it in daylight for the first time; she had a low mound, which dipped suddenly where her legs parted, like a stream going underground. Looking at her made me get hard again. My head was aching and my stomach was unsettled from all the wine but the rest of me felt good. I felt the crystallized come, the sheen of her wetness nacred on my stomach. I thought—this was a beam from the airshaft of pure hangover—maybe I’d got her pregnant anyway. Maybe, as at Little Big Horn, though the main army of sperm ended up dying on the sheets, a scout still got through. I wouldn’t mind that, I thought. I wouldn’t mind marrying her though she was dying, though I barely knew her. I thought that those men I saw were wrong and there must be ways to fight and beat what was happening to her.

But Annabelle had a schedule and she did not leave me time for stupid fantasies and that was how we spent the next four days, just as we’d spent the last one—working in and out of her agenda. It was a little frustrating at the time because what I wanted to do was lie in bed with her and talk and smoke and fuck and hold each other and then start the cycle over, but she had stronger plans. The first day I was hung over and also a little amazed still about that scene I saw of the Mercedes men. What I never said, to anyone, was that I usually saw something when I fucked, when I came, but with Stacey, with Lizzie even, it was always just wisps of scenes. I saw landscapes, refineries, castles, rivers, always vague as an image from a TV show that comes in, just, over a pirated cable box when the TimeWarner’s been disconnected. And sometimes I could imagine a link between the images and what I knew about the girl, and most times not.

That scene with Annabelle, though, was ten, twenty times stronger. And I had a very clear sense that it had some connect to the truth. I didn’t believe in spirits or telepathy—or magic, except as a creative metaphor—but I had a disquieting sense that in this vision I had seen something that should probably have been closed to me.

I told her none of this. I was shit-scared of that kind of talk because of how she’d reacted when I told her about my seminar. Somewhere after our second bottle at Lucien’s she asked me directly about the necrology course and I soft-pedaled it. I didn’t lie; I just, in the spectrum of interpretations you could apply to any given set of realities, gave it the lowest reading possible. She said, You promise me, Sebastian, that’s not why you’re interested in me? And when I replied, I know what I said earlier sounds like I am a first-class bullshitter but it was the truth, I swear to you. We were a couple of Cahors down, as I mentioned; what I can’t swear to is the exact language but that was the gist of it and I meant every word.

I was determined to avoid the slightest hint of the necrology part of my life because I was less and less prepared, as the days went by, to risk losing her for the sake of a greater openness between us. I thought—this is the classic mistake a lot of men make—that I might conceal a small and inconvenient truth from her so that later, when we were more strongly linked, I could admit even that. And we would be so powerfully connected then, that this new openness would bond us further in the risk it represented. What I remembered from those four days was so far removed from necrology in any case that I just don’t know how what happened, did. How I made the mistake; how, as Frucht might say, I let the fell unconscious perrrform its work. What I remember was walking her to and from her places—her studio, galleries, the Catholic Worker. Those walks were good, and fast—God, she was healthy then—and so as to avoid talking about heavy stuff I went back to that first reflex, when we walked by the river, telling her about my city, what I knew of it. That’s what Jean-Louis instilled in me, a love of how things had been. He told me a lot about New York and I looked up more myself. We’d walk to the Greenmarket at Union Square and I told her about Lozier, the con artist who set up a fake scheme to join Manhattan to Brooklyn by rowing the island across the East River. It was 1823, the Erie Canal was being dug, and people were primed to believe huge projects could work. 20,000 people showed up on the appointed day at Union Square, ready to man the sweeps with which he proposed to stroke Manhattan into Wallabout Bay, but Lozier, prudently, had gone into hiding by then. I had always imagined what they looked like, those thousands of marks slowly realizing how beautifully, how pathetically they’d been conned—Klaus turning to Giacomo turning to Seamus, looking at each other and saying “Well, fuck me,” in their different accents. And Annabelle laughed, that splashing laugh of hers which showed the sharp fish-crunching teeth at the edge of her mouth.

On the Bowery I recounted how an impresario used to organize buffalo hunts in mid-1800s-Manhattan, hauling the poor great critters east by train so a hundred drunken yahoos on horseback could chase them hell for leather, firing wildly, across what’s now Chelsea but was still farmland then. I was chattering the way I do when I get interested; talking too much, which was probably one of the reasons that what happened, did. At first I took pains to avoid stories that had anything to do with death but after a while I gave up the effort. The history of New York is varied and fascinating but like the story of any great city it is soaked in blood. On Washington Square I couldn’t avoid talking about how they set up the gallows here, and buried the executed in a potter’s field under what was now the fountain. There were still 20,000 corpses beneath this park, and City workers turned up skulls if they dug deep enough for repairs; they had turned up a whole crypt of them, a couple of Halloweens back.

I mean, I tried. I told her about the Astor Place riot, for example, which was just plain funny; imagine thousands of people running amok simply because, in a production of MacBeth, they replaced an American actor with an Englishman! But the hatred underneath, of Micks for Limeys, of immigrants for newcomers, was black and ugly, and 31 people were shot dead by cops in the shadow of what is now a Starbucks. Try as I might to emphasize the humor in the tales I told, despite my best efforts, death came riding in on the coattails. It didn’t bother me, I find the idea of death comforting on some level, because it offers perspective. The notion that everybody around you will die, from the strutting president of the United States to the lowest baglady, gives you a much longer yardstick against which to measure what goes on. The idea that the planet, with all of our hopes and fears and creations, will eventually toast to a cinder when the sun explodes makes me always look at people with a certain wistful affection. If we did not die—I really believe this—we wouldn’t care. If we were immortal, we would not give a shit about anything.

I did not say this to her.

Curiously, the night after I told her about Astor Place, we were sitting on St. Mark’s when a crowd of people dressed in capes and top hats came tearing down the street in convertibles, singing Verdi, hassling anyone who looked like a gangbanger or a crack dealer or a bum. The Opera Hooligans, she gasped. They were funny in their way, but a Dominican kid was killed a month ago running across Columbus Avenue to escape them. It’s strange how the city has a consistency sometimes. And it was the same evening—no, it was the previous night we came across a performance artist, a naked fifty-something woman covered with strung-together artichokes on the corner of Washington and Christopher Streets, which was the site of the Greenwich vegetable market in the 1700s. We saw her the next night, just across the street from the rebuilt CBGB’s that they call CB’s Reloaded, and apart from the multiple piercings—skinholes gone a bit brown and saggy with age around the ’90s studs and safety pins—I saw nothing there that connected her to punk, or post-punk, or even Streetfight music, which was a kind of punk-Bamako style that was big then. Maybe the fact that so many punkers ended up drug-addled vegetables when they didn’t wind up stone dead like G.G. Allin colored my perception. A trio of guys in shaved heads, biker tats and leather jackets watched her, smoking listlessly. A half-dozen French women dressed in leather pants and cashmere shawls bobbed in and out of a boutique they were decorating, nextdoor to what used to be a Bowery flophouse. They made nasty comments in French about cette pute peunk they hoped very meuch would be gone by the time they opened.

That night we doubled back down 2^nd Street, heading for Lucien’s again. I stopped to light a butt, sheltered from wind in the doorway of a store that sold antique vinyl records. It was late and the street was deserted. Suddenly we heard a clatter of cans spilling across the pavement. A slouched, ragged figure broke cover and sprinted ahead of us, pushing a stroller with one squeaking wheel, leaving in its wake a surf of rolling PBR cans and the wail of a baby. And I said, Isn’t that? And she called after him, Spike!

And I said: I wonder, Annabelle, if you haven’t got yourself a stalker.

Four days, four nights. We only made love one other time and it was sweeter and deeper and not as sharp as the first time. She wanted to see me naked and I lay there a little self-consciously, dick hard as a crowbar, as she checked out every inch, the way a sculptor might. Then she wanted me to do the same for her. And I fancied—though probably it was just a horny thought disguised as insight—I thought I understood something about her then; that she was interested in the interplay of shadows and light on skin because of how they reflect the spaces inside our bodies, what works there and what does not.

I also understood, or thought I did at that moment, how much we take for granted by not waiting. By not appreciating every minute before it’s gone. She lay with one knee up, smiling a little. It was good to see her without the layers. My eyes caressed her as my hands might, looking for shadows, feeling the valleys between her ribs, the arcs of her long waist, the dimples in her knees. In the darkest place her pubic hair was light, and under that thin shade I saw her sex clearly. The line it made from her mount twisted slightly, in a shallow S like her smile on one side; it parted only a tiny bit, resembling a small purse full of rich, folded silk, to reveal the coral of the inner labia, and a quick sheen of silver at her cunt. When I lay on top of her and opened her knees—when I drew my dick up till it opened the purse with its tip, and felt the nature of her; liquid, warm, drawing in by impulse what was dry and hard; the shock as perception went from visual to tactile was like a blow. My head was swatted sideways, down by force.

She smiled more as we began to move together, and clutched me tighter and tighter. The story I saw then was different. It was still strong, and like the fucking both deeper and less sharp. I don’t want to talk about it now, or write about it, or read it objectively on my laptop, because I had once more taken her to my apartment that night. Not to Chez Louis or the common room above the restaurant—you understand the difference. But my studio, with its posters of Pointe du Raz and the twisted black Fender from when I played with Jackknifed Tractor Trailer, and the original Edward Gorey print which is the sole piece of artwork I have ever bought, and the furniture I’ve scavenged from every dumpster in the East Village: a barber’s chair, a giant metal desk with a manual typewriter bolted into a well in the middle. A dented samovar, a medical cabinet, a dentist’s lamp. Everything handled by the great artist Gotham, that smacks and scars its objects in the image of itself. We ended up there because we were high again and had been kissing and touching each other all the way from Broome to Houston till we couldn’t stand it anymore. Her panties were soaked and my hard-on was actually hurting. We were dying to fuck, I speak for myself and also for Annabelle, we wanted to be inside and outside each other and then go out in the streets, smelling of come and cunt juices, into the rose sunup, the cringing dawn. Which was when Annabelle asked to look at me. And I remember thinking, only someone who has so little time left could value it so much as to draw it out to this extent.

She fell asleep before me. She had a way of sleeping on her side, holding the sheets knotted up in both her fists, close to her chin. Like a kid, I thought, too old to sleep with her mom, or a teddy bear even, but still needing something or someone to clutch in the dark.

I woke up late, hours after dawn. I woke up and she had already gotten up. In fact, she was not there anymore.

I looked for her scarves and cardigans, and they were not around. It was awhile before I found her note, which was scrawled on the back of a letter I’d left on the desk. The letter that read:

Dear Sir;

The Office of the New York City Medical Examiner is pleased to inform you that we are holding the post of assistant sanitary aide (Level III) at the Forensic Laboratory (Manhattan) open for you at a payscale of CS 3 from February 1 on. We would appreciate it if you could respond before…

Her words—Annabelle’s, I mean—read as follows:

You lied to me, Sebastian. I can’t believe how badly I misjudged you. (And, lower down, almost as an afterthought): I never want to see you again.

I must have sat there for five minutes, stunned, staring at the note; reading and rereading it, trying to find a loophole.

There was none. She was gone, gone, I knew she was gone. Even this room that only held her for a few hours had been subtracted fully and a dozen times over by the lack: lack of her long coat hanging on my door; lack of her surfeit of shawls and petticoats and scarves, nested like a litter of acrylic kittens on the armchair; lack of her long dress, and her panties pooled where she let them drop beside my briefs when we held each other naked at three a.m., while the city breathed in, and out, awake, asleep, as backdrop to what was going on between these two citizens of its deep uncaring night.

C14

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Necropolitan (excerpt)