And then, ridiculously, she heard the sound of a guitar. And singing! So softly, to himself, as if she weren’t there. As if maybe he’d forgotten that he’d locked her in his own closet. If she squinted through the chink she could just make him out, a sliver, in profile, strumming, eyes closed, chin raised: “where have all the flowers gone, long time passing.” If Dana had been there too it would have been funny.
It occurred to her that he could forget about her. That nothing was stopping him walking away and leaving her locked up. Her pulse picked up the pace again and her heart felt tiny, a stuffed animal flung around inside a dryer.
Part of Inez had believed Dana when she’d said, her voice all embarrassing as it wobbled with the threat of tears, that she was going to die if she did this reckless thing. Maybe not quite die, but come right up close to the silvery edge of it. It was almost disappointing, then, how much this guy didn’t seem like the strangling type. But then what did a strangling type look like? She studied the photograph of his license again, the photograph of his photograph. He stared back at her, and the longer she stared, the sadder and stranger his face looked.
She checked the time again: just five minutes. Willed herself not to check it again. This would be the challenge, not to look.
And she did it. She checked only when he was ostentatiously noisy about the process of release—and there it was, a perfect hour. Clearing his throat, shuffling over to the closet, rattling the latch open slowly, perhaps so as not to surprise her, or to wake her if she’d fallen asleep.
“I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” he said, straining and failing to sound stern, and she nodded a bit, mute, not quite sure whether she was still meant to be in character at this moment. Maybe character wasn’t even the right word for whatever she was. Was she a specific someone to him, or a re-creation of someone now gone, a body for a ghost? Or just a girl, any girl, tied up, in his house. She told herself she didn’t care. Didn’t care if he wondered about who she was, what her life was, what she did when she wasn’t occupying this small dark space of his closet, knees under her chin. He helped her up, awkward and tender. This—him taking her tied hands to pull her up—was the only touch they shared, and it embarrassed them both.
“See you next week,” he said, the necessary words of termination. He lifted his hand in a stiff and small sort of wave. She made a noncommittal noise, shook the feeling back into a leg, stamped the numbness out, and then it was over and she was walking out into the currents of downtown Manhattan with a hundred dollars packed tight against her skinny rump.
The evening seemed to have grown bigger, everything enlarged, as if it were impressed with her, as if it were opening its mouth in some wide “woah” of appreciation. She realized her hands were shaking slightly, that her body felt hot and cold, but that this feeling was the opposite of weakness. There was a laugh inside her, a laugh at nothing. She felt it on her lips, an uncontrollable smirk. She hoicked up the noose of her headphones to clamp them down over her ears and turned up the volume, Atlanta rap juddering through her skull,
ear to ear.
She walked south down Bowery with such swagger that oncoming men opened their mouths and said things at her, things to be ignored, their walks widening into parentheses, a force field around her.
Here was the New Museum with its stupid massive red rose, like something shoved there by a giant teenage boy, and, beside it, the homeless mission. An African American man was sprawled sideways on the pavement on a flattened packing box, singing. His clothes, which were layered and many despite the heat, were the saturated noncolor of the chronically unwashed. Proper homeless, she thought. Not like the twenty-something crusties with their gross dreads and brutish, ugly dogs, sitting outside the Strand with cardboard signs lettered prettily enough for five-dollar greeting cards. If they could put all that effort into their signs, she’d once said to Dana, couldn’t they put a little more effort into getting a job? And Dana had told her that she was a terrible human being. This guy had no sign or serifs, just a force field of smell. One eye seemed not to see, screaming its glistening white, and the other eye swiveled and caught her. She pulled off her headphones.
“Spare dollar, miss.”
She had never given a homeless person money before. It wasn’t callousness, exactly. Or maybe it was. But Inez could still feel her mother’s hand in hers, the strong grasp more reproving than protective as they’d walked fast past a man and his upraised Dunkin’ Donuts cup one day, muttering to her that it was better to donate to homeless charities than to give to individuals in the street.
Well, fuck you, Mom, she thought cheerfully. Hello,
individual-in-the-street. This would be a first, a bold new act, and as she peeled a fifty—a fifty!—from the envelope she felt herself swell with her own munificence and the massive craziness of having been locked in that tiny space. She handed it over casually, a wave of a note, and he grabbed it like a man killing a fly, scrunching it into his fist without looking or halting his singing. She stared at him.
“It’s a fifty, dude,” she said.
He kept singing.
“God bless, God bless,” he sang in his madness, ignoring her words.
Fuck God, she thought, thank me.
“I just gave you a fifty,” she said, loudly, but he wasn’t listening.
Surely fifty dollars was huge—day-changing, week-changing. And he didn’t even notice. She slammed her headphones back on, thumbed the volume higher, and now she was singing deaf and loud, tripping down the subway steps that would take her east into Brooklyn, oblivious to the premature fireworks, the first whine and burst of them in the still-light sky.
3
Bill woke up, stared into total darkness, and for a half second of hot terror he thought, almost calmly, Oh, here it is. That it had finally happened: he was in one of those black holes of boozed memory loss, actually inside it. Bullshit, of course. He was conscious, albeit with no idea where he was or how he’d got here. Gradually he began to make out very small lights above him, acknowledged that those lights were stars, that the ground beneath him was damp grass, that below that was solid earth, and that this was, yes, the real living world of Earth. With these discoveries made, it was time to roll onto his side, vomit voluminously, and then wipe his face on the ground like an animal, prostrating himself on his elbows. The bright tang of grass cut through the puke stench. And night air! Good, clean, glorious night air that he took in eagerly as he made his way onto his knees.
Taking its time, the world began to calibrate itself around him, tilting all its planes until they finally aligned. Okay, Prospect Park. He’d woken up in Prospect Park, and in this sick-drunk, fucked-up state, the name of the place struck him as hilarious. Prospect Park, in the dark. What prospects. Ha.
Time to piece it together. He’d been at the rooftop barbecue of an eminent former magazine editor—a pewter-haired, old-world fox, more scribbled sketch of a figure than man. There’d been mini lobster rolls, clam chowder served on ranks of porcelain spoons, and everyone drinking the same elaborate geranium-scented cocktails—his insides protested now at the memory—ostentatiously shaken by gym-bunny men in tight white shirts. Later, that party in the garden of a Park Slope brownstone. A small group of young teenage boys staring at him from a garden corner bright with fairy lights, brown eyes steeped in reproach, faces hushed like tiny monks. Shorts and ashy knees, baggy T-shirts and bony elbows.
And then? Fuck knows. But here he was.
He was clothed, at least, although barefoot. The darkness continued softening into gradations. Stars on the ground there—reflected, yes—a lake. He was near