Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Now the area directly under the cube is clear, and Peter shoots Arden a dazzling smile. “Ready?” he asks. “Go put your hands on that corner.” She does. He puts his hands on the next corner over. “Now push!” he shouts.

She does. At first she feels like an idiot, standing and pushing all her weight against an immobile steel slab, with her not-amused audience. But a minute later, with her pushing at her corner and Peter pushing the corner in front of her, the cube starts to rotate on its axis. Slowly at first, like it’s been stationary for a long time and forgotten that it knows how to spin. But then it shakes off the inertia and picks up speed, spinning so quickly that Arden nearly has to run to keep up with it. She notices that two of the punks have joined in, each of them grabbing a corner of their own and running. They whoop and holler. They are going so fast that Arden’s feet lift off the ground, just a little bit, and she holds on to her corner as tight as she can, because for a moment, she feels like she’s flying.

After a few minutes, they slow down, and the cube grinds to a halt. The punks sit back down and resume eating their fries. The homeless man returns to bed. And Arden and Peter walk off into the night. Peter seems a little unbalanced, from some combination of the alcohol and the spinning, she suspects.

“What did you think?” he asks.

“I loved it,” she says. “Now it’s my turn. Do you want to see something cool?”

“Sure.” He looks around. “What is it?”

“Come with me,” she says, “and I’ll show you.”





Arden goes back to the start

After forty-five minutes of walking, they reach Arden’s destination. It shouldn’t have taken quite that long, but Arden was navigating by the map on her phone and made a few wrong turns at the beginning. By the time they get close, her phone has died completely.

“It’s a grid,” Peter has said loudly, multiple times. “You know the streets are laid out in a grid, right? Do you want to just tell me where we’re going and I’ll find it?”

“Shh,” Arden keeps responding. She’s concluded that Peter is, in fact, drunk. Most likely quite drunk, when she thinks about how much she’s seen him imbibe over the course of the night versus how little he ate at dinner. He’s holding it together better than anyone she saw drunk at Matt Washington’s party, though.

At one point along their walk, Arden saw a small dark shape dart across the road before her, emerging from one of the piles of trash bags and then disappearing into a crack in a building facade. Even before she consciously realized what it was, she let out a shriek and grabbed hold of Peter’s arm.

“What?” he asked.

“That was a rat!” Still holding on to Peter, Arden hurried him forward down the road to get away from the pile of trash that seems to have been the rat’s lair—but ahead there is another pile of garbage bags, and beyond that still another pile, and Arden can’t run forever—she can barely run at all—and there seemed to be no place on the street that was safe from rats.

“Did it touch you?” Peter asked, confused.

“Thank God, no.”

He shrugged. “Then don’t worry about it. Did you know there are as many rats in this city as there are people?”

“Are you kidding me?”

Peter still looked unfazed. “Nope.”

Arden shook her head. “This place is horrifying,” she said. “I am horrified.” She kept hold of his arm as they walked on. Just in case.

And now here they are.

It’s a big stone building on Fifth Avenue, in amongst the department stores and steak houses, not too far from Times Square. The walls to the first four floors of the building are covered in windows, so passersby can see the displays.

“Here we are,” Arden says.