Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby

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СКАЧАТЬ hung in the grimed windows, trailing dusty feathers caught by cactus spines. Damp shoe boxes with bulging sides and collapsed lids were piled up against the walls.

      With his gaze settling somewhere around her knees, he said: “Hold out your wrists.”

      Not gentle, not gruff either. He had a tie, an ugly, paisley tie, with which he noosed her hands, knotting it tepidly, frowning with concentration, like a parent readying a child for school. There was a queasy tenderness to the process that made Inez snap her attention to one of those dream catchers in the windows and fix her stare on it. Nothing in the world but a dream catcher, twisting sickly, as if it were feeling out the contours of her fear—which was here now, sudden and too late, hammering.

      When he opened the door to the closet she saw there was a fat pillow in there for her, an archipelago of stains—tea stains?—across one corner. He still didn’t meet her eyes as he murmured, softly, as if he hardly wanted her to hear it, “Just you try and get away now.” And then she was inside and as she looked up the door was shut and he was locking it with a fleet, efficient twist. She heard his face against it, muttering, in a tone almost kindly, “Now you just stay there till I’m done with you.”

      Which would be precisely one hour later, the time stipulated, agreed, and paid for already in two fifty-dollar bills inside an envelope with “Maria” written on it in pencil.

      Her eyes drank in the darkness, concentrating it to yield shapes and gradations, while her heartbeats became so violent that she wondered if some kind of permanent cardiac damage might be likely. With her back against one wall of the closet and her feet against the other, the hems of his shirts and jackets grazing the top of her head, she breathed in their marijuana residue as she listened for the inevitable sound.

      He never did do anything. Or if he did, it was done silently somewhere, unseen. She hardened her jaw, swallowed, ran her tongue around her teeth, behind her upper lip, and thought about how in a few hours she’d be on the roof. She’d be there telling Dana she’d done it. Maybe she’d actually fling the bills in the air, make it rain. Rap video.

      Her headphones rested around her neck, a silent, protective noose, and she slipped her wrists out of the tie—shackles like slips of cloud—took out her phone, and switched it to vibrate. Brightness thumbed right down low, in case light through the door-crack ruptured whatever illusion it was that he needed. She willed someone to text her and ask where she was so that she could reply, fingers electric with the relish of it, “Tied up in the closet of some guy’s basement apartment.” No one did. In her iMessages, the thumbnail image of a stranger’s driver’s license, delivered to Dana. His hollowed cheeks, a gaze that seemed to register some kind of exhaustion or disappointment (this again?), like most mug shots do. Reaching up into the jackets, she fingered a pocket in the darkness and pulled out a piece of paper, a ragged envelope, folded in half, a shopping list written in pencil in the same cramped and irregular letters that spelled out her grandmother’s name on the envelope he’d given her: “milk, oranges, oreos.” Something about this list made her feel shame. The intimation of the smallness of a life. She put it back quickly, as if it were infectious, as if something bad might seep into her fingertips.

      And then, ridiculously, she heard the sound of a guitar. And singing! So softly, to himself, as if she weren’t there. As if maybe he’d forgotten that he’d locked her in his own closet. If she squinted through the chink she could just make him out, a sliver, in profile, strumming, eyes closed, chin raised: “where have all the flowers gone, long time passing.” If Dana had been there too it would have been funny.

      It occurred to her that he could forget about her. That nothing was stopping him walking away and leaving her locked up. Her pulse picked up the pace again and her heart felt tiny, a stuffed animal flung around inside a dryer.

      Part of Inez had believed Dana when she’d said, her voice all embarrassing as it wobbled with the threat of tears, that she was going to die if she did this reckless thing. Maybe not quite die, but come right up close to the silvery edge of it. It was almost disappointing, then, how much this guy didn’t seem like the strangling type. But then what did a strangling type look like? She studied the photograph of his license again, the photograph of his photograph. He stared back at her, and the longer she stared, the sadder and stranger his face looked.

      She checked the time again: just five minutes. Willed herself not to check it again. This would be the challenge, not to look.

      And she did it. She checked only when he was ostentatiously noisy about the process of release—and there it was, a perfect hour. Clearing his throat, shuffling over to the closet, rattling the latch open slowly, perhaps so as not to surprise her, or to wake her if she’d fallen asleep.

      “I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” he said, straining and failing to sound stern, and she nodded a bit, mute, not quite sure whether she was still meant to be in character at this moment. Maybe character wasn’t even the right word for whatever she was. Was she a specific someone to him, or a re-creation of someone now gone, a body for a ghost? Or just a girl, any girl, tied up, in his house. She told herself she didn’t care. Didn’t care if he wondered about who she was, what her life was, what she did when she wasn’t occupying this small dark space of his closet, knees under her chin. He helped her up, awkward and tender. This—him taking her tied hands to pull her up—was the only touch they shared, and it embarrassed them both.

      “See you next week,” he said, the necessary words of termination. He lifted his hand in a stiff and small sort of wave. She made a noncommittal noise, shook the feeling back into a leg, stamped the numbness out, and then it was over and she was walking out into the currents of downtown Manhattan with a hundred dollars packed tight against her skinny rump.

      The evening seemed to have grown bigger, everything enlarged, as if it were impressed with her, as if it were opening its mouth in some wide “woah” of appreciation. She realized her hands were shaking slightly, that her body felt hot and cold, but that this feeling was the opposite of weakness. There was a laugh inside her, a laugh at nothing. She felt it on her lips, an uncontrollable smirk. She hoicked up the noose of her headphones to clamp them down over her ears and turned up the volume, Atlanta rap juddering through her skull,

      ear to ear.

      She walked south down Bowery with such swagger that oncoming men opened their mouths and said things at her, things to be ignored, their walks widening into parentheses, a force field around her.

      Here was the New Museum with its stupid massive red rose, like something shoved there by a giant teenage boy, and, beside it, the homeless mission. An African American man was sprawled sideways on the pavement on a flattened packing box, singing. His clothes, which were layered and many despite the heat, were the saturated noncolor of the chronically unwashed. Proper homeless, she thought. Not like the twenty-something crusties with their gross dreads and brutish, ugly dogs, sitting outside the Strand with cardboard signs lettered prettily enough for five-dollar greeting cards. If they could put all that effort into their signs, she’d once said to Dana, couldn’t they put a little more effort into getting a job? And Dana had told her that she was a terrible human being. This guy had no sign or serifs, just a force field of smell. One eye seemed not to see, screaming its glistening white, and the other eye swiveled and caught her. She pulled off her headphones.

      “Spare dollar, miss.”

      She had never given a homeless person money before. It wasn’t callousness, exactly. Or maybe it was. But Inez could still feel her mother’s hand in hers, the strong grasp more reproving than protective as they’d walked fast past a man and his upraised Dunkin’ Donuts cup one day, muttering to her that it was better to donate to homeless charities than to give to individuals in the street.

      Well, fuck you, Mom, СКАЧАТЬ