Fear: and fear is in the air and fear is in the streets. Not far off over the low roofs fireworks are bursting and ricocheting through the narrow alleys glancing the windows and the second bursts lap the first and the third and they create the sensation of one prolonged, indefinite explosion: limbs flailing and hearts choking. The fireworks seem to be so close it’s unsettling that you can’t see any trace of them in the smothered dusk sky or down the impossibly-long slick shining streets. To one side is a three-story building with a stone facade and rows of columns and on the other is a row of shops and it smells like rain and wet leaves and what might be an Italian restaurant. You’d expect at least a spark of firework light on the sides of the shops or up on the columns but you can’t see anything and you don’t even know where to look because you can’t tell which was the original sound and which was the echo.
And the blood jumps: the young man coming out of one of the alleyways between the shops tries to walk through his unsettled blood and clings his black jacket to his body just as a stream of orange neon light flows down his forehead to his jaw to his knees. He walks from the alley and across to the three-story building and then towards the square and checks, habitually, phone and wallet, wallet and phone, because the square he can see is teeming with bodies – and the noise of the bodies – in the middle of it there’s an awkward-looking stage set up that probably looks fine from television cameras but from here it just looks awkward and only now does he hear the music coming from the speakers.
The crowd volume has been turned up by the sound system so the crowd they hear is louder than the crowd is; strange, he thinks. Strange that I only just now noticed the music. And strange that I can’t see any trace of the fireworks, not even a glance.
There is physical danger – all around him, sharp edges and hard rocks – a horrible night. He should have gotten a taxi back at the cafe he thinks – now he would be embarrassed to tell the driver where he’s headed because it’s less than a twenty-minute walk and he still has both legs and both arms. Also the longer he’s home the more time he has to make a certain phone call so all in all it’s best to be out, walking. And fear is after all a stupid thing to feel or to admit feeling to yourself if you’re not being bombed or tortured, he tells himself, again. And so he keeps walking through the bodies:
“...just fucking so many fucking guys who...”
“...no, it hurt, it hurt, but when he...”
“...oh, my God, cause when I went in...”
And he walks by an open door at the corner of a building on the edge of the square and out of the door a group of six or seven drunken teenagers with leather jackets and modern haircuts spills out, hands on shoulders. Their hair is high in the middle, too hip for the jackets, and this incongruity speeds the young man’s heart while he focuses on the speed of his breathing.
“Hey,” one of them says, malice and booze almost squeezing his eyes out of the sockets, “Got a smoke?”
“I don’t smoke,” says the young man, “Sorry.”
The teenager spits straight in front of him and exchanges a meaningful glance with someone over his left shoulder and is about to say something but the young man keeps walking and checks, phone, wallet, and for a moment he braces his fists and bends his legs a little more at the knees and readies his hands to come flying out of his jacket pockets and protect his temples like his dad had showed him. The teenagers move on and one of them howls and one of them throws a bottle and they move away, and then the young man realizes to his surprise, his hands becoming even tighter, that there are two girls with the gang – skinny with tight-fitting jeans and splices of bare lower back and even an ever-so-slight amount of string exposed to the eye. Or to touch, thinks the young man to himself but with the kind of internal laughter that makes him feel worse and empty.
And the night is still fear, just deepening and the moment when he comes home and takes off his messenger bag and brushes his teeth and stares out the window at the dark rooftops from the thirteenth story is a little closer and another firework goes off and the young man continues on into the square.
“Ridiculous,” he thinks, “but I’m a part of it, still a part of it. A part of it yet.”
Jack had come from the affluent suburbs, not from the city he usually said he was from, mostly for the convenience of it, nor one of the smaller towns and you could tell from how he walked down the street: he knew these streets well, but only in the way one from the suburbs could know them, without the cocky taken-for-grantedness that separated the city kids nor the not-embarrassed-to-admit-that-you’re-still-overwhelmedness the country kids had. With every turn, Jack’s gaze lingers a moment too long and it still goes a little too high but he tries his hardest to simulate the urban cockiness and that’s what always gives him away. And he’s walking, now, a little too fast through the pulsing square.
He had moved to the city because of a girl, he often told himself. She was beautiful (dark hair bright eyes), witty, lazy and terrible with money that usually wasn’t hers. But she would come into a party – any party – and the mood would change – because of her. She would adjust herself just a little for the occasion and act without apology and the party and the men and the women would change because of her – an amazing thing to watch and Jack had loved her for that. He could carry a party, too, when his mood was right, when he had the nerves and the energy to mold himself enough for the circumstances. But the way she moved her slim hips and carried her sparkling voice were of course something different altogether. If you took a picture of her and posted it on a dating site, some guys might fall for her. If you put her at the end of a well-stocked table, she could have her pick of the crowd.
“I can’t believe that some people still refuse to believe that we’re just different, men and women. Like, there are so many more male geniuses, guys who are truly exceptional, than women, just by their nature. No seriously, seriously – wait for me to finish. Women are so rarely geniuses. We just aren’t and that’s why there aren’t so many famous women artists or writers, not because of sexist institutions holding us back. Seriously. But then we’re hardly ever morons.” And she’d say it in such a way that even the white-capped frat boys would want a piece and the guys would lean in and the girls would wait for their chance to bring the attention back to their corner. That was the thing about Sarah: she always had the men leaning in and the girls leaning just a little out. And he came up on a group of pretty girls just as he was thinking about the first party he had ever seen Sarah at. Flashes of skin above the jeans, slim necks, dark eyes.
“If you had only seen me with her you might look up, at me,” Jack imagined saying to the 16 year-old girls gathered around a single ipod and taking pulls from two paper-bagged flasks but he knew they wouldn’t look up at him, because he wasn’t the kind of young man that 16-year-olds with an ipod and two flasks would up look at – he was the kind that had to earn the benefit of the doubt first.
And that was the paradox about Sarah – when he was with her he could, in theory, have the pick of almost any girl he wanted. Without her when he was, in theory, free but they didn’t look up. And they hadn’t been now for many months.
But Jack was still young and he could still comfort himself with the idea that he was interested in experiences and one just had to amass experiences and every day was a new experience even feeling like a fraud every time you walk into a bar. And, he thought, something would have to happen one of these days, something would have to happen sometime soon. Anything you saw or read about young men coming to the cities decisively proves that something would happen. First there is experience and then there are happenings and then you get to write about all you survived.
Just give me something to survive, thought Jack. Besides Sarah.
And now he was walking on through what he thought was a short-cut and the sounds of the square were receding and the sounds were being replaced by all the threats of bodily harm that could come to Jack as he walked, it filled the space up even more than the bodies on the square: cars veering, bits of building falling, manholes slipping, knives plugging his back.
He had come to New York for Sarah, that is true, but he had also come for the sake of his precious experiences. He had arrived in the city, still in love, but not having seen her in over a year.
Her emails had been strange: brisk, inconsistent, yet vaguely implying that what had been felt between them could still and would still be felt. It was a vagueness that hadn’t exactly bothered Jack because he had been busy and nervous on his own end and the emails were just something to be experienced just like Sarah, he was sure, would be later on. On one hand, he wanted to write back enthusiastically and gushing and pledge everything to her because he vaguely understood, even at that time, that she was being brisk because she wanted him to commit the move and promise his love and pronounce his intentions to be very serious – though Jack, still young, hadn’t paused to think about whether she would still want him after he had done all that she had asked. On the other hand, he knew he couldn’t promise her anything because he couldn’t pronounce the necessary words without feeling the cold clutches of doubt and feel, vaguely, like he was lying to her. So Jack carried on, writing back occasionally and promising nothing, just that he would someday get to New York City himself – being vague, inconsistent, and brisk in his own time.
“Hey, sweets, really haven’t heard from you in forever you naughty boy I’m just going out, again.” She wrote once.
“God, drinking as much as ever, I see? I bet you beat them off with sticks. I drank half a bottle of Jameson last night, and thought about you.” He responded, two weeks later.
His reasoning behind his lack of commitment, which had still seemed to him like a kind of a definite end, as if he would write Sarah that he was ready to commit and immediately they’re be having family night in with two young children on their Saturday evenings, was that he needed to dull himself to the urges he had beyond Sarah. If he could only be free from his own desires to drag off all of the girls who looked up at him when he was at the parties with Sarah, if only he could take the best-looking girl from the bar home by himself a few times and check his burning imagination that it wasn’t all as good as it was in those magazine stories and his daydreams right before he would fall asleep next to her, then he could make something very meaningful with Sarah. But not, he had convinced himself, not until then because the words would ring false.
He would be able to take Sarah up and promise her forever once he had “burned away the doubt.” “Lost the mystique,” was another popular phrase in his head, something gleaned from a literature class he had taken in college.
So he had known the girls with the ipod wouldn’t look up, and he knew what it would be like if he went into a bar right now, and it dawned on him – right here and there on this side-street in the wet fall air – that maybe he hadn’t lost Sarah because of his inability to commit but that maybe he never really could have had her. Even if he went out and bought a ring right now – right now, in some 24-hour jewelers down one of these impossibly-long slick side streets – she wouldn’t want him and he would still have the doubt about her and about the prettiest girls in the bars. And it was all even more confusing than that.
The street was dark: out of it rippled voices: and gleaming apartment windows on the second and third stories. And in the dizzy shadows the voices gradually gave way to more bodies, sitting on the curb and smoking. There were so many objects around that could hurt you.
For example, the guy holding the bottle in the sack could hurt you with the bottle.
Broken, it hurts more. The group of big guys to his left could hurt him in numbers. And the brunette he sees on his right, so bored standing there smoking with tired-looking eyes that will look very ugly a few years from now but at this moment don’t detract from the legs she has under the tight black mini-skirt and she’s just looking straight forward and smoking. You want to talk her to her but there’s nothing to say, so you continue on, hating that those slim legs hold any sort of power over you.
Sarah has some boyfriend in Boston and Jack had just come to the city to see if his plan would work or if it would fail and now it was all failing. And every day he left the house, expecting something to happen to him. It was New York City, and there was always the chance that he would meet another mostly-pretty girl like he did back in the suburbs and he wouldn’t be that excited about it but she would be and it would all be fine for a few weeks and then it would be bad for a few weeks and then he’d be going to bars alone again. The mostly-pretty girls were usually a little thickish, and they couldn’t hold down the table or the dinner table or the bartable like Sarah with her crystal laughter and her telling a group of stupid men that girls weren’t usually geniuses – these girls were usually the ones leaning out. But then again, Sarah isn’t everything, he told himself as he took another turn down a street and felt the fall night wind on his face and squinted as some leaves kicked up, she wasn’t everything – she was skinny, but not healthy-skinny and had a little wobbly pouch of a stomach that was conspiring to plop out in concentric waves of bellyfolds sometime in her thirties. She was pretty, he thought, but not as pretty as she thought, and she was weak, very physically weak, if we had children, the children would be poor athletes and he screwed up his eyes because that was such a stupid thought and wanted to drive his head through a pane of glass. Sarah was probably on the phone with Boston right now. And this was good, because it left Jack without Sarah. And that was good because it would be best if I could live without her.
He turned down another street, one that he would walk down if he got the bus up to the stadium, and he considered stopping in the bar for a whiskey but it didn’t seem like a good idea, it was a holiday day, and there was probably a baseball game on, and it would be crowded and he wouldn’t be able to get a drink at the bar and sit and drink it. This street looked strangely like the one he had come out of the alleyway towards the square onto: row of shops and the bar on one side, three-story encolumned building on the other.
It’s good she’s on the phone with Boston, he thought, but goddamn her eyes....
Her eyes were nice –since he had gotten to New York they had fucked four times, and each time Jack had tried to be revolted, he had tried to think of her wobbly belly and how much guilt he would feel about it the next day or the mess of her apartment or how she’d probably ask to borrow money afterwards or back to the wobbly stomach but he would slip off her skinny little panties and feel her fingernails in his hair he knew they were painted red and he would look up her stomach and put one hand on her thigh with the fingers glancing in on the skin and her eyes would catch him right there and he knew he wouldn’t regret it he knew he would feel numb and want more of her eyes and the taste on his tongue as she said “yes, yes, eat me, Jack.” And he would end up remembering the eyes, goddamn it, when there were so many other things to be remembered.
If only she knew what I think about when we’re at parties, he thought, with a little grin, glad it was too dark for the people behind their bright third-story windows to see this ridiculous gesture. But then, he added, and almost stopped walking, what if that’s what she’s thinking, too? and just at that moment, almost stuttering as his legs took up the thought and spun it out to his toes and shoulder-joints, he passed a 30ish brunette on her cell phone. She looked stupid: her voice was stupid when she said, “oh my God, I’m going to get you for that!” and that was stupid to say (of course women are rarely geniuses) but he knew that even though he thought she was stupid there was no way he could impress her, there was no way he could have the stupid bobbed brunette and then leave her, and this depressed him greatly. So he walked faster on and resolved what he wouldn’t think about.
He had been waiting in cafes, for example, for something to happen, he thought as he passed the cafe where he would get French bread if he was walking downtown. He would find a table after ordering a double espresso, sit back with his notebook and possible scenarios for sketch comedy routines or film plots – and even though he wasn’t trying he would strain his ears to hear the conversation between the two cute girls at the nearby table. He had sat at such tables at such cafes now for three months in New York, stretching out, pulling out, and coming back together a little looser each time, and he thought up all kinds of conversation introductions, like: “Hey, sorry, do either of you know who won the Yankee game today?” or “Pardon me, is that real sugar you put in your latte Holy Fucking Shit That’s Amazing” or “do either of you know a good Chinese restaurant in the area – I’m new here” but each time he imagined what that would sound like to him if he heard some lone guy at a nearby table saying that to the cute girls in the cafe and it made Jack cringe.
He took a deep breath and suddenly felt extremely disoriented.
And he looked up and he noticed that he was cringing just thinking about it – and he also noticed he was back on the square – he had turned right when he should have gone left and he was walking out towards the crowd again and the fireworks were subsiding but the music was getting louder. He still was thinking about what he might say in the cafe now catching a few more drunken askance eyes – he looked up to the chafed sky this hemmed-in sky of noise and wondered how he had gotten back here and how he should leave it.
The lone guy at the table! But how could that be him? After all, he had been with beautiful women. And he had been with Sarah and she would no doubt do well as an actress if she could only overcome her laziness. And clean up her goddamn kitchen.
The square surges, almost a parody of itself, as Jack turns and tries to pick his way out again, the singer sings to the audience so their cheering can be piped back at them so the people will listen to the singer because people are cheering for her. It hurts, to think ha ha ha – and if I’m so smart then why are those two blondes talking to that tall guy in glasses with the flipped-hipster collar and not me oh it hurts!
Steely, hand-crank night – and fear still on the streets the sweeping square of low buildings and all the New Yorkers under twenty seem to be out here, no, better to make no eyes contact, better to stop wandering, better not to go into the bar and just go home. Just get home and shower and sleep and tomorrow maybe something will happen. But God, to get past all of these people, again, the monotonous faces, the tobacco-spit eyes and short arms – But then the street that Jack needs get home quickest has been closed in the last twenty minutes it seems, he can see from far away the red-candy barricades set up and the three police officers standing guard, automatics at their side; cool, low, steely buildings to their other side.
And all on top of it this ridiculous music – and Jack wishes for a second that he could find something in it, that he could feel something in his body to hear the ridiculous canned beats and join them and be part of them –
And so: with a swallow and a half and a breath it’s off to where you just came from, back towards the cafe you sometimes go if you’re walking downtown for the French bread down to the side-streets: which are dark and dreary still but there’s nothing you can do about it but walk. Jack walks diagonal near the stage and passes five kids
- yeah, fucking, cause –
- no, totally fucking a guy, and –
And it’s on to the side-streets: deep, dark winding streets with higher buildings on either side: they’re not apartments, not shops, not offices, and not empty. This area is incomprehensible. Each successive block bears the mark of inhabitance but the odd signs you see down these streets read:
“Form 2138-02X for year 8-5”
“Center of center Right and Studies”
And this only hits Jack’s nerves harder – how did I get down here? – for a second he vaguely considers calling someone he knows to get out of this alley. Of course, anyone but Sarah. But he doesn’t know anyone in New York he could call from an alley and then ever talk to again.
He pulls out his phone after checking for his wallet and calls information.
“Information, what city please?”
“New York, New York.”
“One moment, please,” there is a brief antiseptic ring and Jack takes the moment to duck into a shadow, by a sign reading
“City Poliklinik 7”
And he thinks, maybe I should call Sarah? Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad to be down her pants instead of out here. But, no, he remembers, if I want to be down her pants I can’t get there. It’s only when I don’t want it that it happens but she convinces me I want it and she makes me seem like it’s all my idea and then it’s okay and I just feel numb.
“What listing please, for New York, New York?”
“I need a taxi,” he says, counting on his being able to explain his location by his surroundings. He looks for another sign but it’s dark.
“One moment please.”
“Thanks,” he wants to say but it’s already ringing through and the girl is gone and maybe she was free later on tonight.
More teens come and pass down the alley on the other side of the street. One younger girls in pig-tails but with a dirty, experienced look in hungry eyes that somehow seem different one from the other goes down the other side, strutting, with her palms up like she’s in a soda-commercial – three older men trail her, smiling with bags of fast food, and they’re definitely with her and they have baseball caps for various football teams and paunches over jeans and leather belts.
The phone keeps ringing, and then:
“You have reached Amadarin Amadakhba. Leave me a message.”
Jack pauses even though the message beep has long beeped.
“Amadarin,” he finally says, “my name is Jack. Look, Amadarin, I’m in the alley by Loobin Square next to Poliklinik 7. I’m wearing a black jacket and I need you to drive me home.”
And he walks further down the alley and almost turns left, but then remembers if he goes right he make it through the park a lot easier.
And he realizes it’s all close to collapsing, this city, it’s all close to winding in around him and bursting into flames so hot they burn the skies and he would be a part of its ash. Someone could strangle the lights out of me right now and what could I do about it?
Jack takes the left and briefly considers calling Sarah.
Fuck Boston, he thinks, and fuck these side streets and fuck the smell of fresh-cut park grass in the fall and cool nightly moisture and fuck the fear that I’m definitely feeling. He takes a right, and then a left and finds himself on a larger-looking street which, he thinks, is the right direction to go but he can’t see the street name. The sudden weight of all of these portents hits Jack square in the stomach: fear, danger, and he thinks again how easy it would be for some drunk hobo with a knife or a loose piece of scaffolding or a piece of ill-fitting glass to stop his little heart. But that isn’t the half of it: it’s the city air, the air that hits his lungs every time like those inhalers that expand everything and leave you dizzy O God, he thinks, I’m fucking lost.
He walks past a street lamp, and then another. Then a bus stop and two old ladies sleeping on the bench, facing each other.
“It’s not that cold,” he thinks he hears one say, “it’s not that cold at all. Last year – h” But the wind picks up.
O, God, bleakness, O, God, get home. And don’t call Sarah, please, for Christssake, don’t call her because she’ll just tell you you interrupted a call from Boston and she’ll call you back sometime and she’ll love that you called her though she won’t call you back.
He decides to pull out the map that’s in his backpack – and it’s a desperate move, being from the suburbs to pull out a fucking map. And he unfolds it awkwardly, standing there in the wind by the bus stop near the two old women and he unfolds it awkwardly, and tears one of the corners. He looks at it for a long while because the light is dim and his hands are shaking.
He hears giggling behind him – fast feet, clothes in the wind. Sounds like two of them.
“Hey, hey you,” a voice rings out, clear and girlish and liquid and surprising after hearing the old woman speak and he turns, slowly, careful with the map.
It’s two girls he’s sure he’s seen before, somewhere back on the square somewhere but he can’t place it exactly and he doesn’t have long to think: he has to react with his face and his voice. It’s the blonde who spoke, she has a rectangular face with some pock-marks and huge dull eyes even when she giggles, which she does again, and she looks at the girl next to her slyly and holds her by the arm and then looks back at me, “Hey,” she continues, advancing with the girl still by the arm, “do you know how to get to the China Town Underpass?” and she giggles even more. Her knees sway against each other slightly and she’s wearing jeans but there’s something under there. The friend, looking straight at her, is a short brunette in a tube-like dress, and they laugh a little more. They must both be about 16.
“I was just trying to figure that out myself,” says Jack for lack of anything else to say because he does have to say something and he watches the knees sway. “I think you just take this next right down there.”
They both look at him smiling because he didn’t answer the question.
“And would you happen to be heading down there yourself?” asks the brunette in a big-girl voice, her face still frozen in a mask of amusement, the blood pinched out, and the blonde smiles as her friend says this without giggling and Jack can feel something approaching him from behind and he feels it tighten his fists and his groin. The fists crumple the map at the edges.
And he feels for a second, what it would be like to have his tongue on the brunette.
“Sorry, I’m headed the other direction,” he says quickly, and moves: stepping away: and he’s already on the street and the solid black ground. He doesn’t look back but he knows – the girls are both standing with their mouths spliced open almost like clowns he hears giggling more giggling just don’t look back but he can’t see their mouths moving and the sky will crash down the sky will crash down and burn this all to ash and him along with it.
And then they are off, arm in arm, in the other direction, they disappear into the sudden fog of the night and the dazzling brightness of the slick distance while he crosses the street in a jog and checks behind him again: there wasn’t anyone else there. There was nothing there. He pauses, feet on pavement, and feels the wind, and feels the months of his life in the city.
Oh God, there is nothing for me here, and now the waiting just begins again.
And he hurries off towards home, where he showers and sleeps.
What I just told you was a true story. I didn’t want to tell you that but it is – I just altered the names and the city and a few meaningless details that don’t change anything, at least about me. I am a coward.
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