Authors: Garth Risk Hallberg
“It’s only been fifteen minutes.”
“The road’s pretty slick. And I had to stop for coffee. Sorry no car.” He never mentioned how terrible her chain-smoking was for his asthma, and she, reciprocally, now pretended not to notice him suck down a chemical lungful from the dorky inhaler. “My mom thinks I’m staying at Mickey Sullivan’s, which tells you what planet she’s on.” But Sam had already turned to where the track curved into darkness. A light glided toward them like a cool white slider homing in on the plate. The 8:33 to Penn Station. In a few hours the ball would drop over Times Square and men and women all over New York would turn to whoever was nearest for an innocent kiss, or a not-so-innocent. He pretended the tightness in his chest as they boarded was just caffeine. “Like I care what Mickey thinks anyway. That jerk won’t even like nod at me in the lunchroom anymore.” The three of them—Mickey, Charlie, and Samantha—should have been in the same class at the high school. But Sam’s terrifying dad, the fireworks genius, had sent her to the nuns for elementary, and then to private school in New York proper. It must have worked; Sam was only six months older, but had been smart enough to skip sixth grade, and was now at NYU. Whereas he and Mickey were C students, and no longer friends. Maybe he should have found someone more willing to serve as tonight’s alibi, actually, because if Mom called the Sullivans in the a.m. to thank them (not that she would remember, but if), he’d be in big trouble, a ripe steaming mound of it. And what if she found out where he’d gotten the money to cover two round-trips into the City? He’d be locked in his room till like 1980. “You got the tickets?”
“I thought you were buying,” she said.
“I mean for Ex Post Facto.”
She pulled a crumpled flier from her pocket. “It’s Ex Nihilo now. Different frontman, different name.” For a moment, her mood seemed to darken. “But anyway, this isn’t the opera. It’s not like a ticketed event.”
He followed her down the aisle, under fluttery lights, waiting as long as possible before reminding her that he couldn’t sit backward, on account of his stomach. Again, her face grew pinched; he worried for a second he’d already jinxed their (he couldn’t help thinking) date. But she’d pushed the door open and was leading him toward the next car.
The LIRR belonged to kids that night. Even the grown-ups were kids. There were few enough of them that each little band of revelers could leave several rows of Bicentennial red-and-blue seats on each side as a buffer. They talked much louder than adults would have, and you could tell it was meant to be overheard, as a means of preemption, a way of saying, I am not afraid of you. Charlie wondered how many Nassau County moms tonight had no idea where their kids were—how many mothers had simply granted them their freedom. As soon as the conductor had passed through, beers began to circulate. Someone had a transistor radio, but the speaker was cruddy, and at that volume all you could hear was a voice moaning hornily. Probably Led Zeppelin, whose Tolkienish noodlings had been the soundtrack of the carwash where Charlie had worked freshman year, but which he’d renounced last summer after Sam dismissed Robert Plant as a crypto-misogynist show pony. She could be like that, sharp and full of fire, and her silence now wrongfooted him. When a kid a few rows away pump-faked tossing a beercan their way, Charlie reached for it, like a jerk. The kid’s friends laughed. “Preps,” Charlie muttered in what he felt was a withering tone, only not loud enough to be heard, and sank back into the noisy pleather of his forward-facing seat. Sam had turned away again to gaze at the settlements of Queens glimmering beyond the window, or at her fogged breath turning them to ghosts. “Hey, is everything okay?” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s a holiday, you know. You seem like you’re not, like, real festive. Plus shouldn’t you be documenting this stuff for your magazine thingy?” For the last year, she’d been publishing a mimeographed fanzine about the downtown punk scene. It was a big part of who she was, or had been. “Where’s your camera?”
She sighed. “I don’t know, Charlie. I guess I left it somewhere. But I did bring you this.” From the army-surplus bag on her lap came a gummy brown labelless bottle. “It was all I could find in the liquor cabinet. Everything else is water at this point.”
He sniffed at the cap. Peach schnapps. He brought it to his lips, hoping there were no germs. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Did you know you’re the only person who ever asks me that?” Her head came to rest on his shoulder. He still couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but the medicinal heat of the booze had reached his innards, and kissing her—making her, R. Plant would have put it—again seemed within the realm of possibility. For the rest of the ride, he had to picture the wobble of President Ford’s jowls in order not to pop a full-blown bone.
But at Penn Station, Sam’s restlessness returned. She hustled through the hot-dog-smelling crowds, faces moving too fast for the eye to distinguish. Charlie, by now well-lubricated, had the impression of a great light beaming from somewhere behind him, setting fire to every dyed-black hair on the back of her head, her several earrings, the funny flattened elfin bits at the top of her ears—as if a film crew was following, lighting her up. Of light not reflecting off things but coming from inside them. Inside her.
They hopped a lucky uncrowded Flatbush Avenue–bound number 2 express train, and as they racketed through a local station the train seemed to echo the conductor’s garbled syllables: Flatbush, Flatbush. Sam turned in her seat. Girders on the elongating platform strobed the light into pieces. Charlie noticed for the first time a small tattoo on the back of her neck. It was like a king’s crown rendered by a clumsy child, but he didn’t want to ask her about it and thus remind her of all the things about her he apparently no longer knew. He let go of the bar he’d been holding and shoved his hands in his pockets and stood trying to absorb the jolts—Flatbush, Flatbush. It was a game she’d taught him called “subway surfing.” First one to lose his footing lost. “Look,” he said. When she didn’t, he tried again. “Play you.”
“Not now.” Her voice had none of the maternal indulgence he was used to, and once again he felt the night faltering, like the light of the bypassed station.
“Best three out of five.”
“You are such a child sometimes, Charles.”
“You know how I feel about that.”
“Well, stop acting like a Charles, then.”
It shamed him, how loud she said it. Anyone who didn’t know better might have thought she didn’t even like him. So he threw himself down onto the opposite bench, as if he’d decided on his own that this was where he belonged. At Fourteenth Street, one of the doors jammed, leaving only the narrowest space to exit through. And of course, being a gentleman, he let her go first, not that there was any kind of thank-you. Then it was onto the local for one stop and up at Christopher Street. Before he’d gotten busted, they used to hang out here eating ice cream and ’ludes and drinking her dad’s whisky. Half-bombed in the afternoon, he’d goof on the homos passing into the sex shops, as away to the south, buildings rose like kingdoms. The sky that had stretched over them like a great throbbing orangeblue drumhead was now flaking off in little pieces and falling. And he was burning up in his double-layered pants. He told her he had to pee.
“We’re on kind of a schedule here, Charlie.”
But he ducked into a pizzeria toilet with a sign. With the door locked, he stripped off his pants and pajama bottoms, wadded the bottoms into his jacket pocket, and put the pants back on. The counter guy glared as he made his way back outside.
“You know, if you’re going to be like this …,” she started.
“Like what?”
“Like this. I can feel you like beaming anxiety at me. And would you pay attention? You’re blocking the sidewalk.”
As indeed, he saw, he was. The crosstown blocks, West Village to East, were jumping with tourists and freaks and other NYU kids. But when had she ever cared about courtesy? “Sam, I feel like you’re pissed off at me, and I didn’t even do anything.”
“What is it you want from me, Charlie?”
“I don’t want anything,” he said, dangerously close to whining. “You called me, remember? I just want to be buds again.”
She thought about this for a second. If there had been some sign he could have given her, one of the recondite handshakes of third graders, spitting in a palm, inscribing a cross, he would have done it. “Okay,” she said, “but let’s just get where we’re going, can we?”
Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery, its columned portico swimming with graffiti she would once have insisted on photographing. The line spilled out of a side door, and they took their place at the back, under an erratic streetlight. A safety pin winked at Charlie from the face of a tall guy a dozen spots ahead; he resembled an ogreish friend of Sam’s he’d met once, not far from here. Charlie became conscious of his hat. He wanted to take it off before the guy, if it was the guy, could spot them, but the light had cut out. When it buzzed back on, he nudged Sam. “Hey, don’t you know him?”
She looked around edgily. “Who?” But the safety pin had been swallowed by the building, and her gaze fell on another man, the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator, who opened and closed the steel fire door without appearing to see the people passing through it. “Oh, that’s just Bullet.” She seemed almost to collect these obscure connections with older men. This one was heavily tattooed—blades of black ink that extended from his neck all the way out onto his toffee-brown face, like warpaint—and dressed head to toe in leather, with an earring shaped like a shiv. “He’s the bouncer.”
“I don’t have an ID,” Charlie hissed.
“What do you need ID for? Just be cool. Follow my lead.”
He tugged the fur hat down over his eyes and forced himself to stop slouching. His efforts to look grown-up turned out not to matter; the bouncer was lifting Sam off the ground in a bear-hug, his face splitting into a broad, pink grin. “I thought we weren’t going to see you tonight, sugar.”
“Places to go, people to see,” she said. “You know how it is.”
“Who’s the beanpole?” He nodded in Charlie’s direction without looking at him.
“This is Charles.”
“Charles looks like a narc in that hat.”
“Charles is cool. Say hello, Charles.”
Charlie mumbled something but didn’t put his hand out. He was a little scared of black people in general, and in particular of this man who, if he’d taken the notion, could have snapped Charlie over his knee like kindling. If indeed he was black and not super-swarthy, or Turkish or something—the tattoos made it hard to tell.
“Listen,” Sam said, leaning in. “Has anybody been asking for me?”
“For you?”
“Yeah, like … did someone ask you was I here? Preppy guy? Good-looking? Thirtyish? A little out of place?” She seemed to tremble, glossy with snowmelt, expectant. Charlie did his best to keep his own face blank. Never let them see you bleed, Grandpa had said, before disappearing into a DC-10 a week after the shiva.
Meanwhile, something like pity, a Where are your parents? look, had slipped the bouncer’s jovial mask. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’ve been on since eight, and, like I said, I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“Charlie,” she said, “can you just hang here with Bullet for a sec while I go in and check on something?” So he waited, shifting from foot to foot, trying to edge away from the bouncer. Pigeons brooded on the streetlight’s bent neck. A person dressed like a mime, only needing no makeup to chalk her face, blundered out of the door and fell on the icy sidewalk. She laughed and laughed, and Charlie wanted to go to her, but no one else moved. The bouncer shrugged, as if to say, What are you going to do?
Which, what was he? That Bicentennial summer, the summer of Sam, had arrived like a glass-blue wave, picking up his godforsaken life in one steep rake and thrusting it forward at such an angle he’d had to look up to see the shore. But as all waves must, it had broken, and anyway, he’d always been scared of heights. He’d seen her once afterward, from the passenger’s side of the station wagon his mom would no longer let him drive. She was sitting at a bus stop in Manhasset. And maybe she’d seen him, but something in him had held back, and something had held her back, too—the part of her he now saw had stayed out here, riding a redoubled wave, testing the city to see if it was strong enough for her. Be cool, he told himself. Just be cool.
“Charlie, listen to me,” Sam said, when she re-emerged. “If it turned out I had to run uptown, would you be all right on your own for an hour?”
He would have done anything for her, of course. He would have missed Ex Post Facto, if she wanted, or whatever they were calling themselves these days. But what happened when what she wanted was for him to do nothing? “What the fuck, Sam? I thought you wanted to spend New Year’s with me.”
“I do, but I’m going to feel like absolute shit if you miss the first set, and I just … there’s a problem here I can’t put off any longer.” Beyond the baffle of the warehouse wall, a struck drum signaled a shift from recorded music to live. “It’s starting. You’ll be okay?” She turned to the bouncer. “Bullet, can you look after Charlie here?”
“He can’t look after himself? Charlie feeble-minded or something?”
“This is fucked up,” Charlie said, to no one in particular.
“Bullet—”
The bouncer reached out and, pincering his massive thumb and forefinger, lifted the brim of Grandpa’s hat so Charlie could see his eyes. “You know I’m just playing with you, boss.”
Charlie froze him out, focused on Sam. “What happened to ‘I need you, Charlie’?”
“I do need you, Charlie. I’m going to need you. Look, if I’m not back by eleven, come and find me. You can meet me at a quarter to twelve on the benches by the 72nd Street IND station. You know where that is?”
“Of course I know where it is.” He had no idea where it was.
“Either way, I swear, we’ll ring it in together.” The flat of her hand between his earflap and cheek was like a cold pool on a hot day. Then she walked away backward, and for the first time since the LIRR platform, she seemed to actually see him. Despite the secrets she was plainly still keeping, he wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe it was possible for this wild free creature to need him. But she was gone. The bouncer, Bullet, swept open the door. Charlie thought of a car with open doors rolling through the parking lot at school, surging out of reach even as voices from within said, Come on, Weisbarger. Hop in. But that wasn’t real anymore—nor was it real that he’d kissed Sam already, back in the basement of that weird house on East Third Street all those months ago. What was real, in the vacuum she’d left, was the memory of her skin on his skin and the music now blasting from the maw of the club.