Elise’s seen that kid at the corner, carrying a giant laundry bag.
Neighbors and tourists make a shrine of candles, bouquets, and posters against the building. Strangers weep, and a coalition keeps an overnight vigil for the first few nights. Jamey stands in front of it one dawn, after work. Granted, he’s tired, but for a moment he sees the flower petals move like worms. He abruptly leaves, walks home as quickly as he can without running.
Then the news releases footage of the mother in shackles and an orange suit, face streaming with tears. I did it because I loved her, she screams.
He comes home, she wakes up. They make love in the shower, her hands splayed on tile. He finds a white Bible on their stoop. Elise gets her period. Jamey gets stuck on a subway car with British tourists—older ladies and gents all with identical bobs, mad gleaming eyes and snaggleteeth, completely decomposed faces—who sound like recently hatched birds. She comes home, he wakes up. She dreams of unfinished rooms, hallways leading to the sky. He watches rats forage in the subway track. She’s walking down the avenue, glances up to see a poinsettia on a sill.
The snow looks like thin felt when he peeks out the window. Jamey walks Buck on his leash down the stairs and feels the searing white radiant cold from the other side of the front door. He braces himself before turning the knob like before shooting vodka or diving into a chilly lake, with an extra heart thump and an earache on the way. He walks around the block grinning because his face is reacting to the sun-spangled panorama out here, and Buck prances through the blinding wonderland of his master’s world.
The city is emptied of its holidays, and Jamey feels the echo from his first Christmas away from his family. This is what he wanted. Now he wants to enjoy ordinary time with Elise as they go to work, come home, eat and drink and make love and sleep, instead of overthinking it or being anxious. But a merry-go-round still operates in his head. It starts up on its own, whenever it wants, music jangling, the animals (frozen in expression but mobile in their prescribed circle) beginning again….
It’s not like he ever thought about doing this; it just happens one day when Jamey and Elise coincidentally end up in the same subway car.
Pink graffiti reads PROPHIT, next to a spray-painted Doberman with satanic eyes and a diamond collar.
The way he saunters up, body swinging with the train, she has a feeling.
“Haven’t I seen you in the neighborhood?” he asks quietly.
“Maybe,” she says, twirling her hair.
“Let’s have a drink. At your place.”
She sinks her hands in the white fur. “But I don’t know you.”
An old woman gives Jamey a look of disgust.
He tails Elise off the train.
Why is she scared? She measures her walk like when she’s terrified for real.
“You’re following me,” she says without turning.
At the building, she smiles, thinking they can’t sustain this.
He smiles back, but not like Jamey, and follows her in, his breath steaming, unbuttoning his camel-hair coat as they mount the steps.
On the landing, he gets under her skirt, tears the pantyhose, not kissing her.
She’s stiff.
“Open the door,” he says gruffly.
Her hand shakily unlocks it, they walk in, door open, anyone can see— Jamey pushes her to the couch, bends her over…
And Buck lunges, fights him to the floor, roaring, snapping his teeth!
After a silence, Elise starts laughing. Buck’s lips still twitch over his black gums at Jamey. She soothes the dog and gently pulls his collar.
“You’re a bad man,” she says to Jamey.
“Buck,” he says, beseeching, only half in humor. “I was playing!”
They watch The A-Team and Miami Vice, stuffing their minds with helicopter crash landings and gold crucifixes. Jamey tells himself they were just experimenting. Right? He feels as if the guy he was, just a few hours ago, is still in the apartment, hiding in a closet with a baseball bat, ready to attack Jamey next time.
But Elise has drifted into television world without looking back, a liter of Sunkist between her legs, mouth slightly open, as she tracks the detectives on screen who stalk a man through a marina, pastel loafers glowing in the moonlight.
“He’s gonna fall in the water,” she says to no one.
In bed, Elise sends smoke rings into the lamp’s light.
“We’re on a gangplank these days,” she tells Jamey. “Way up, above everything.”
“Looking over the city,” he says. “I know.”
She imagines exotically infinitesimal buildings. Itty-bitty cars, people are fleas. Roofs glitter silver or black.
She puts her forehead to his and holds his face, closes her eyes.
“I want you to see what’s in my mind,” she says earnestly.
They press their skulls together, eyes closed, breath synched, the oil of her skin seeping into his skin. There’s the vague groan of a vault opening, a flood of green like a tornado sky, and then damp silt that moves in still water. Little dolls and cats and monsters in the shadows, the puppets of memory, almost emerge. Wet cement pouring into the cavern, and they drag themselves out before it dries, pulling skulls apart.
They look at each other.
“You’re a weirdo,” she tells him.
“You are!” he says, laughing. “That was your fucking idea!”
Terry and Simone, a couple who live a couple buildings down, knock on the door one evening. They’re ’70s hippies, cosmic, and high on heroin—and this week they’re selling vitamins door to door. Jamey and Elise always see them with their kids, Chloe and Star, psychedelic ragamuffins with knotted hair, on the neighborhood swing set.
“Hey, man, feel like getting healthy?” says Simone.
“Hell no,” Elise says. “But come in for coffee if you want.”
The couple put down their B12 samples and take off their boho coats. Jamey’s at work, so Elise pours Folgers into the machine and wonders what to talk about.
She doesn’t have to come up with anything, because Terry and Simone raspily relay every detail of their own lives for the next couple hours. Elise finally says she has to get up early, she needs to go to bed.
“Well, fuck, no problem! God, we got to get back to those sleeping babes, anyways,” Terry says. “Hey, let’s have dinner sometime!”
They leave her a vitamin E sample and some dehydrated garlic. If she wants to earn extra cash, they confide, she should talk to them about selling supplements. They won a waterbed last month for top sales in the hood!
Whenever Elise and Jamey walk past the Variety Playhouse, they look away from the guys hunting there like wolves, smoking, pulling a flask now and then. But why?
This time it’s her idea—she’s restless—she feels like pushing him—she whispers it in his ear one night.