We Are Here (2 page)

“You left a trail,” the other man said. “Deliberately?”

“Of course not.” He wasn’t sure if this was true.

“They’ll be turning the house upside down tomorrow, or by the next day at the latest.”

“I cleaned up.”

“They’ll find something. Then they’ll come looking. Eventually they’ll find you. Wherever you run.” The man’s face turned cold. “You fucked up, Edward. Again. Always. Always with the fucking up.”

The man on the bed felt dreadful fear and vertiginous guilt mingled with relief. If he was caught then he could not do it again. He would not find himself returning to the same Chinese restaurant night after night, hoping for a glimpse of one of the other customers, a young single woman who worked in the bank across the street and sometimes came to grab a cheap bite at the end of the workday, though with infuriating unpredictability. He would not gradually come to know where she lived—alone—and where she went to the gym, where and when she shopped for groceries, or that her basket always included at least one bottle of wine.

The man on the bed shrugged, trying to feel glad that something like this could not happen again, though he knew every single moment of it had held a terrible excitement and that there could be other such women in other towns, if he chose to keep driving down this road. “They catch me, they catch you.”

“I know that,” the man in the chair said. He opened the matchbook. With effort he managed to get one of the matches out. After a couple of pulls along the strip, he got it lit.

The man on the bed noticed, too late, that he’d piled all the other matchbooks on the bedspread of the bed that now blocked the door. The bedspread was old, not to code, flammable. Very flammable, it turned out.

“I’m not going to jail,” the other man said as he stood up from the chair. “I’d rather die right here.”

He dropped the burning matchbook on the pile.

It didn’t happen fast. The man on the bed, whose name was Edward Lake, had a little time to escape. He was far too drunk now to move the heavy bed from the door, however. He was too drunk to understand that the dead tone from the phone by the bed was because the other man had unplugged it while Edward crashed out.

By the time he got around to trying, he could not get past the flames to the window. He was too scared, and the truth is that the only real and meaningful thing Edward had done in his entire life was kill a woman, and there’s no good way forward from that. So it’s also possible that, deep inside, he did actually just want to die.

As his former friend burned alive, the other man watched from the parking lot. He knew the moment when Edward died, and was surprised and awestruck by what happened next.

The death of the girl back home had felt powerful. But this … this was completely other. This was something else.

He felt altered, very different indeed, and knew in that moment that he was finished with following, even if by the end he and Edward had been traveling side by side and hand in hand.

People who walk alone travel faster. It was time for new horizons and bigger goals.

Everything would be better now.

To mark the occasion, he glanced up at the motel sign—lit by flames as the remaining rooms of the structure caught alight and the owner choked to death in his bed—and renamed himself. Then he turned from the blaze and walked away up the road into the darkness, savoring with every step the solid feel of the earth beneath his feet.

Even with the immense degree of will at his disposal, it was a long and very tiring walk. The dawn found him sitting exhausted by the side of the road. A passing salesman, who’d risen early after a bad night’s sleep and was running early and of a kindly disposition, stopped and gave the man a ride. The man realized what it meant to have been seen by a stranger, and he got in the back of the car with a faint smile on his face.

After fifty miles the salesman glanced in the rearview mirror to see that his passenger had fallen asleep. In this rare moment of defenselessness, the man looked pale and worn through.

But this all happened five years ago.

He is much stronger now.

The number of people here who think alone, sing alone,

and eat and talk alone in the streets is mind-boggling.

And yet they don’t add up.

Jean Baudrillard

America

It should have been a wonderful day—a day to photograph and frame, to Facebook and Tweet, an afternoon to cut out and save in that album of updates and keepsakes you return to in daydream and memory; the pressed flowers of our lives that we’ll hold up to God or his gatekeeper when our moment comes, to prove we are worthy of entrance and have not merely been marking time.

It should have been one of those days.

And until the very end, it was.

They arrived at Penn Station just after ten, on the kind of fall morning when it’s warm in the sun but chill in the shadows of the skyscraping monoliths; when the city feels pert and alert and struts with head high, marching to work with tightly specified coffees and a bounce in its step as if someone loosened everyone’s bolts in the night. David was in town not as some sightseer or nostalgia seeker, either, but for a meeting followed by lunch—the Lunch of Legend that people conjure in their minds to keep them strong through the months and years spent doing lone, heroic (or merely stoic) battle against the Blank Page of Infinity and the Blinking Cursor of Doom.

Suddenly, David was going to be published.

No, seriously.

He’d assumed they’d take a cab uptown, but the streets were so traffic-tangled—not to mention they were
very
early, Dawn having selected a departure time that allowed for everything from minor delays to a full-scale terrorist attack on the line—that they strolled the twenty-some blocks instead. David was struck by how unfamiliar it all seemed. It wasn’t merely that everywhere was much cleaner than ten years ago, or that he felt less likely to get attacked on any given street corner (though both were true). During his long-ago five months living in the city he’d simply been very unadventurous, he realized, sticking to the same haunts in a way that struck his older self as appallingly cautious. But when you look nostalgically back from thirty it’s easy to forget how much of your twenties were spent feeling awkward and lonely, weaving a cloak of familiarity around you like the armor it eventually becomes.

They spent the last half hour in a Starbucks on Madison, perched at the window counter withstanding bland jazz and fiddling with stirring sticks. Dawn kept quiet. David didn’t chatter in the face of anxiety, she knew, but gathered troops behind invisible walls. She people-watched instead, wondering as always who everyone was and where they were going.

At a quarter to, she escorted David the final block, kissed him, and wished him luck—and told him he didn’t need it. She waved as she left on a lightning strike up to Bloomingdale’s, a wide, proud smile on her face.

For a moment, as he watched his wife disappear into the crowds, David felt nervous for her. He told himself it was merely his own anxiety.

At 11:55 he took a deep breath and strode into reception. He told the guy behind the desk who the hell he was and who the dickens he’d come to meet, speaking more loudly than usual. The receptionist made few bones about not giving a crap, but a few minutes later someone young and enthusiastic bounced out of an elevator, shaking hand already outstretched.

David was whisked upward many floors and finally got to meet his editor, Hazel, a gaunt fifty-something New Yorker who proved fractionally less intimidating in person than via e-mail, though still pretty scary. He was given a tour of untidy offices and book-infested cubicles while a selection of affable strangers told him that his book was great, that
he
was great, that everyone was unbelievably excited and that it was all going to be just …
great
. A lot of hand-shaking and smiling took place, and people stood around with notepads clasped to their chests as if ready to jot down anything significant the moment it occurred, though evidently nothing of the sort happened, because nobody did.

Then suddenly they dispersed like birds startled by a rifle shot, and Hazel took his elbow and steered him firmly toward the elevator. “Lunch,” she muttered darkly, as if warning him not to put up a fight.

Dawn had just arrived back outside, and stood hurriedly. David’s agent, Ralph—another character he was meeting in person for the first time—was already in position at the restaurant two blocks away, an old-school grill and steak house that prided itself on serving cow by the slab in an environment of white linen, low lighting, and disconcertingly formal service.

David realized how nervous Dawn really was only when he saw her beaming glassily at the waiter, unable to comprehend a query concerning her desired genre of mineral water (fizzy or not). David squeezed her hand under the table, realized he was smiling at Ralph in exactly the same way, and tried to relax.

He’d told himself he wasn’t going to drink wine with lunch, but when it became clear that his editor sure as hell was, he relented, combating the effects with so much water that he had to visit the bathroom three times. Meanwhile, he and Dawn watched as the professionals gossiped about people they’d never heard of—feeling like a pair of venturesome kids, a Hardy boy and Nancy Drew on joint reconnaissance, ears pricked for intel about the curious new world they’d been told they would become a part of—if the capricious gods of market forces, key bloggers, and the zeitgeist willed it so.

Eventually the stupendous check was paid with reference to some protocol David didn’t understand but knew wouldn’t involve him. Everyone reemerged blinking into the sunlight, to part on excellent terms. Graphic artists were at work on a jacket design. Cover copy would soon be e-mailed for David’s approval. David had never “approved” anything before and was looking forward to the experience. He thought he might wear a special shirt for it. Everything was going perfectly, he was assured, perhaps even a little better than that.

“It’s all good,” Hazel kept telling him sternly, as if he were well-known for championing an opposing school of thought. “David, it’s
all good
.”

By then he was in no mood to disagree.

They wandered down Park Avenue until David had an idea and cut across to Bryant Park. Back in the seventies it had by all accounts been a place where, should you wish to score drugs, get laid on a commercial basis, or have the living daylights mugged out of you, the locals would have lined up around the block to oblige. By the time David spent his few months in New York, it had turned around to become one of the most amenable spaces in Manhattan—and he’d spent hours sitting in it with a notebook and dreams of a future that were only now coming true. The intervening decade had kicked it up further still. Not so much a park as a grassed plaza lined on all sides with trees, now there were coffee stands and walkways lined with planters, an upscale grill and bar to the rear of the reassuring bulk of the New York Public Library, and the only mugging going on involved the prices demanded for crab cakes and sauvignon blanc.

They took glasses of the latter to a table on the terrace and spent an hour excitedly going back over lunch. A voice in David’s head seemed intent on convincing him it was a mirage, that there were twenty other authors having the exact same experience this afternoon and all would be back to working their day jobs (and bitterly grateful for them) in eighteen months’ time. He even glanced around the park, a little drunk now, in case he could spot any of his fellow hopefuls.

He couldn’t, and this wasn’t an afternoon for doubt. It was for listening to the babble of conversation and to the warmth in Dawn’s voice as she told him how wonderful everything was going to be, and finally the muttering voice retreated to the cave in the back of David’s soul where it had lived for as long as he could remember.

Eventually it was time to leave, and that’s when it happened.

They were leaving the park and David maybe wasn’t looking where he was going—wrapped up as he was in the day and with yet another glass of wine inside him. The sidewalks were a lot more crowded now, too, as the end of the workday approached and people set off for home.

It wasn’t a hard knock. Just an accidental collision of shoulders, an urban commonplace, barely enough to jolt David off course and provoke a half turn that had him glancing back to see another man doing the same.

“Sorry,” David said. He wasn’t sure he’d been at fault, but he was the kind to whom apology came easily.

The other man said nothing, but continued on his way, quickly becoming lost in the crowds.

Penn Station was a total zoo, epicenter of a three-way smackdown between baffled tourists, gimlet-eyed commuters, and circling members of the feral classes that make transit depots their hunting grounds. Twenty minutes before departure Dawn elected to visit the restrooms, leaving David to hold a defensive position near a pillar. He felt exhausted, eyes owlish from unaccustomed alcohol, feet sore. He experienced the passing throng as smeared colors and echoing sounds and nothing more.

Until he saw someone looking at him.

A man wearing jeans and a crumpled white shirt. He had dark hair, strong features, and he was looking right at David.

David blinked, and the man wasn’t there anymore. Or he’d moved on, presumably. He’d barely been visible for a second, but David felt he’d been watching him—and also that he’d seen the man before.

“What’s up?” Dawn returned, looking mildly shaken by the restroom experience. David shook his head.

They made their way toward the platform via which they’d arrived at the station that morning. This turned out
not
to be where the train was departing from, however, and all at once they were in a hurry and lost and oh-my-god-we’re-screwed. David figured out where they were supposed to be and pointed at Dawn to lead the way. She forged ahead with the boisterous élan of someone having a fine old time in the city, emboldened by a bucketful of wine, clattering down the steps to the platform and starting to trot when she saw their train in preparation for departure.