By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Forty-One
September 2
Dani was crying.
I tried to get her to stop. Wasn’t this exciting, she was moving to New York City! I was going to move here soon too, right? No, really, I wanted her to stop crying. The crying made me feel helpless and confused. It excluded me and pushed me away and then she actually physically pushed me away so that I had to sit on the bed across from her and watch her cry.
The crying had started because the bedroom in the apartment she was subletting didn’t fit her furniture, then she was crying because she hadn’t gotten a job yet...despite she says, sending out 100s of resumes (I don’t believe she sent out 100s; in fact, I’m not sure she sent out any). Then she was crying because she has no real friends in NYC.
But, after it had started, it had stopped seeming to be about anything. She had run incoherently through the catalog above, then stopped really saying anything; she was just crying and making noises. There was nothing there I could understand or sympathize with. No way to comfort her. No way to share or understand.
Nor had it registered that among her litany of problems, there was nothing about the fact that she was going to be HERE and I was going to be THERE. That we were to be hundreds of miles from each other. All of the things she had said were about her moving forward.
The apt. she was going to live in was all the way downtown; the view out her bedroom window was of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center; so large, so close, that it filled the entire window and, when I looked out of it, pulled my eyes towards it like a ferocious magnet.
There was more silence while I helped her pull things randomly from boxes, not really knowing what she wanted where, but feeling it was important that I look like I was helping.
Later, she asked me if I wanted to stop and get food...and I’ve never said no to eating even when I knew we were making no progress...so we went down into the incomprehensible maze of streets and hailed a cab.
The blocks went by and I tried to focus in on what I was seeing, on what stores or restaurants were on each block, but my brain couldn’t do it. Every block was a flash of colorful shapes and alphabetic squiggles, but nothing I could see or remember. My brain wouldn’t do it.
I was afraid and thrilled. What would it take to be able to understand the squiggles as they blurred by? What would it take to survive among the squiggles.
I have no idea where we ate and afterwards we went to a bar and had a drink and I have no idea what bar it was. She said it was all in the “West Village” and that would have meant more if I’d known how it attached to any other part of the island.By the time we got back to her place, it was almost midnight. We hadn’t been able to find her sheets so we undressed and lay down on the naked mattress. It felt strange, too slippery, but I was so tired that I fell asleep almost immediately.
Sunday September 3I’d volunteered to spend all the time between when we woke up...at 11am...until I had to catch my bus helping her set-up her apt. But she’d said no. She said that we should spend it in the city. That she’d have enough time to set up later.
So we walked all the way up Broadway and over to the East Village and stopped in the punk shops and the comic book stores and the clothing shops and I tried to take it all in and understand the signs on the blocks and the squiggles but it was still too much.
The East Village seemed like Disneyland and had every ride and every character I could ever want to take or meet. And, it seemed very raw and gritty and mysterious and mythic and all the other things that it was supposed to seem like. Weren’t these the same streets, the same Ukrainian diners and Jewish delis and punk stores of all the Beat, Punk, immigrant American stories that I had read and heard and listened to? They were.
But like everything in New York so far, I was out of time with it. It was moving faster than I was, so even when I stood still, it blurred by. How long did you have to be here to catch up with it, to lock-down the frame, to move past a 250th of a second?
It blurred right up to the time when I was supposed to go back to DC. Dani took me by cab to the bus station and I waited in line.
“You know you can buy a book of tickets for the shuttle; it’s pretty cheap,” she said.
“I’ll look into it,” I said.
“Just look into it?” she said.
“No, I’ll do it. I just don’t know how much it costs,” I said.
“Does it matter?” she said.
I knew to say no.
“Will you miss me?” she asked.
“We’ll see each other soon,” I said and drew away from her.
“DON’T go into the bathrooms downstairs,” she said as I walked off.
I did have to go to the bathroom though and how bad could it be, right? Strangely, ironically bad is how bad. As I got into the bathroom, two medics were lifting a waxy body off the toilet. The body was locked in a sitting position, the face was twisted so that it looked like a yin/yang symbol, mouth locked in a counterclockwise frown, forehead squeezing downward. How had she known? Did they find bodies here that often?
Five hours on the bus and I didn’t use the bathroom once, but I couldn’t get the face out of my head, the yin/yang symbol, the eyelids had been bulging and twisting.
I thought about my whole weekend and the face loomed over everything like some new moon. The twisted face above the blurred light and Dani crying. Dani crying. It was suddenly like a hole in my chest.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2006 Me Three
