I feel an insane urge to laugh.
Manhattan’s defense against the siege of inevitability is a layered hodgepodge of increasing desperation. The base is professional: six-foot slabs of concrete mortared tight at the seams. The middle looks like a volunteer effort: freeway barriers stacked atop the slabs, their gaps stuffed with sandbags. And the top: plywood and tin. Frantic gestures of a panicked populace, about as effective as superstition.
The crash I heard was this layer collapsing under another wind-blasted wave. The force of this rush pushes the freeway barriers off the slabs, and the New York Sea spills into the street, its raging whitecaps darkening as they scoop up decades of human grime.
I open my mouth to scream Julie’s name, and it fills with black soup.
I tumble and spin, hands and feet flailing for purchase, but this is not a preliminary wave testing the defenses. This is the flood. As I spin in this icy void, I feel the presence of the wretch in the basement, but to my surprise, he is not laughing. He is not gloating.
Is this it? he murmurs sadly. Is this all you do with our third chance? A few friends, a few kisses, a few boards to build a home?
The water isn’t deep, but my disorientation makes it an expanse without bottom or surface. Garbage wraps around me like tentacles, dragging me down toward some vast maw.
It’s not enough, he says. You’ve barely touched our debt.
But I am not listening to him. I’m thinking about Julie, hoping she’s far away yet wishing for her presence. All the endings I’ve imagined for my third life, no matter how dark and violent, involved her at my side when I closed my eyes. I never imagined it like this.
Something hits me hard, and as the black water fades to a deeper darkness, my thoughts become wordless. Simple impulses of love that I howl into infinite halls, hoping someone hears and writes them down.
THE END OF IT.
I wake up next to a woman. I’m not sure which one. My eyes burn and my head throbs; even the pricey stuff does it. No matter how much you pay for the drink, you pay again in the morning.
“Hi,” the woman whispers, and I recognize the voice. My assistant. “Are you alive?”
I groan.
“Are you working today?”
I groan louder.
“Do you ever stop?”
I turn my head on the pillow. My assistant is giving me that look again, the one that feels like a home invasion.
“There’s a war,” I say.
“Is there ever not?”
I sigh through my nose, smelling my own rotten breath. “Don’t. Not right now.”
“I just wonder if you know you have a choice. Everyone does.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”
I watch her eyes withdraw from me. The tender curiosity gives way to the loathing that belongs there, and I feel myself relax.
With a stiff smile she starts touching me, and though I’m tired and sick and in pain, I respond. We kiss with flaky lips and acrid tongues. We rub ourselves raw. My stomach churns and my head pounds with each miserable thrust, but I continue. I am expected to continue. Expected by whom, I’m not sure, but I feel the imperative all around and inside me.
After much sweaty effort, I reach the goal. My brain gives up its reward grudgingly and in miserly portions, a few jolts of pleasure on par with a good sneeze, and as the sensation fades I grasp at it, reaching into the darkness of my mind to seize it and pull it back, unwilling to accept that this is all I get. But this is all I get.
I collapse onto the bed, eyes closed, mouth open. She is whispering something intended to be sensual, greatly overvaluing what we just did, but I am sinking through the bed. I am sinking through the floor and the ground and into a dark chamber full of dust and dead worms, endless shelves of damp, fungal books on paper and parchment and stone and clay, cuneiform lines and ochre smudges and unknowable pre-lingual scrapings.
I experience a different kind of climax. I vomit onto my pillow. Then I get up and go to work.
? ? ?
“I’m sick of it,” he says. “Working out of this old shit-hole surrounded by sandbags in the shadow of those midtown towers. Getting our asses kicked by a bunch of thugs in graffitied tanks. It’s fucking embarrassing.” He paces around the echoing expanse of his office, sipping Scotch from a crystal tumbler while I sit on the couch, swaying and sweating. “We need to expand.”
“Expand?” I swallow back the taste of acid. My face feels hot and sore. “I thought we’d already bit off too much.”
“No such thing as too much. You ever see a dog walk away from food? Everything in nature knows to keep eating.”
“We’re losing workforce. We can barely hold Manhattan. If the boroughs join together, they’ll outnumber us.”