“You need to triple shut up.”
“I’m doing it.”
“Then I’m going.”
“Oh, come on.”
But Dana was actually getting up, actually gathering her things, frosty and fumbling.
“I’m going to e-mail him,” Inez sang, “I’m e-mailing him now.”
She felt the look, felt her friend waiting there, and kept her waiting. She could sense Dana stooped and motionless in the doorway, backpack slung over her shoulder, gripping its front strap tight, as if it were a parachute harness, a fist over her heart. Pull in case of emergency. Inez faked something conclusive—a forefinger’s smack of the return key.
“Sent!” she whispered, lying.
“I really,” Dana said, “really don’t think you actually want to do this. I mean, I think you’re fucking with me. Which is whatever . . .” Dana’s voice was shining now and she blinked a few times, fast. “Oh, just do whatever you want—get yourself killed.”
Inez had learned the trick this summer, doing it into her iPhone’s camera, reversed so the screen mirrored her face: a minuscule muscle tensing. That shrinking of her eyes’ lower corners that made them loom larger and lovelier, made some mystery out of them. And then, if you tipped your head forward a little too, so you had to raise your gaze just a few extra millimeters . . . She willed the radiation of hot, grave attention into Dana’s waiting gaze.
“What?” Dana blurted, shifting her bag’s strap.
“I have to ask you for a favor,” she said.
“What?”
“When I go missing,” she said, and now she felt her own smirk breaking through and cracking her solemnity with something she hoped was wicked, “you have to make sure the Post uses a really hot picture of me.”
And then, a private flourish, she conjured the sight of her own strangled body dredged from the East River, eyes open and sightless, lips parted, her face shaded beautiful lifeless blues. Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks.
“Oh, fuck you,” Dana said bitterly. “Seriously, fuck you. I’ll see you on the roof. Or not.”
And she left, knuckles tight on the backpack strap.
One further line of the ad that Inez hadn’t read aloud was this: “Include the word ‘real’ in your e-mail subject line.” This instruction seized her in a way she couldn’t explain. It set off a warped thrill, the idea of declaring her reality, over e-mail, to some stranger.
Creating another e-mail address, [email protected] (Maria was her grandmother’s name, but also just a name, millions of people’s name), turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. And when, from an in-box empty but for the rote welcome note, she clicked compose and typed the words “I’m real . . .” everything in her quickened. It was a kind of salivation, strung through with a taste of something bitter. There’d been a line in a movie she’d seen: something about how the best perfumes always had something rotten in them.
He’d replied in ten minutes, and she was astonished to be at his door fifty-seven minutes later, watching her own finger move toward his door buzzer. It sounded inside—a harsh and angry blare, all tired wires and ill will—and her muscles jumped to run as the door opened.
He nodded at her, uttered her grandmother’s name as a question.
“Hey, show me your passport,” she blurted back.
He faltered. “I don’t have one.” A small voice, nondescript.
“ID, then.”
And, silently, he complied, shuffling off to a nightstand to find his wallet, to draw out his driver’s license and come back to hand it to her. She felt him watching, without comment, as she took a picture on her phone and texted it to Dana: if I’m not there in three hours lol. She handed his ID back, told him what she’d done, and watched him slide it into his back pocket.
“Nothing funny,” he said, quite softly.
“Right.”
He wasn’t a monster; there are so few. He was, however, creepy-looking. A pointed face, a snaggle tooth, and, visible as he turned, a greasy braid that snaked, dwindling, down the back of his neck to end in a curled tuft held by a rubber band. It made her think of the My Little Ponies she’d played with as a kid, the meagerness of their synthetic manes and tails, the gorgeous clunk of the scissors, and then the lurch as you knew that what had been cut would not grow back.
If she and Dana passed this man on the street he would, Inez knew, bring to bear a pause between them. And the pause would be Inez waiting the one beat until he’d passed, just out of earshot, or sometimes not, to say to her friend, her friend who was gay, her friend who she knew already sensed these words coming, “Why’d you ignore your boyfriend?” And however many times Inez made the joke, applying it to whichever passing stranger qualified as sufficiently mad or stinking, Dana could never quite manage to not smile. Inez knew this, that she would always make her laugh. Even when the joke was cruel. Especially when the joke was cruel.
His apartment was one room that smelled of mold mingled with weed and incense. Tattered dream catchers hung in the grimed windows, trailing dusty feathers caught by cactus spines. Damp shoe boxes with bulging sides and collapsed lids were piled up against the walls.
With his gaze settling somewhere around her knees, he said: “Hold out your wrists.”
Not gentle, not gruff either. He had a tie, an ugly, paisley tie, with which he noosed her hands, knotting it tepidly, frowning with concentration, like a parent readying a child for school. There was a queasy tenderness to the process that made Inez snap her attention to one of those dream catchers in the windows and fix her stare on it. Nothing in the world but a dream catcher, twisting sickly, as if it were feeling out the contours of her fear—which was here now, sudden and too late, hammering.
When he opened the door to the closet she saw there was a fat pillow in there for her, an archipelago of stains—tea stains?—across one corner. He still didn’t meet her eyes as he murmured, softly, as if he hardly wanted her to hear it, “Just you try and get away now.” And then she was inside and as she looked up the door was shut and he was locking it with a fleet, efficient twist. She heard his face against it, muttering, in a tone almost kindly, “Now you just stay there till I’m done with you.”
Which would be precisely one hour later, the time stipulated, agreed, and paid for already in two fifty-dollar bills inside an envelope with “Maria” written on it in pencil.
Her eyes drank in the darkness, concentrating it to yield shapes and gradations, while her heartbeats became so violent that she wondered if some kind of permanent cardiac damage might be likely. With her back against one wall of the closet and her feet against the other, the hems of his shirts and jackets grazing the top of her head, she breathed in their marijuana residue as she listened for the inevitable sound.
He never did do anything. Or if he did, it was done silently somewhere, unseen. She hardened her jaw, swallowed, ran her tongue around her teeth, behind her upper lip, and thought about how in a few hours she’d be on the roof. She’d be there telling Dana she’d done it. Maybe she’d actually fling the bills in the air, make it rain. Rap video.
Her headphones rested around her neck, a silent, protective noose, and she slipped her wrists out of the tie—shackles like slips of cloud—took out her phone, and switched it to vibrate. Brightness thumbed right down low, in case light through the door-crack ruptured whatever illusion it was that he needed. She willed someone to text her and ask where she was so that she could reply, fingers electric with the relish of it, “Tied up in the closet of some guy’s basement apartment.” No one did. In her iMessages, the thumbnail image of a stranger’s driver’s license, delivered