“Bobby?” she whispered. Her face was almost touching yours. She was breathing your breath, and you were breathing hers, malty from fear and lack of sleep. It was Sasha who found you. Ten more minutes, they said.
“Bobby, listen to me.”
Sasha’s green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. “In Naples,” she said, “there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they’d been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will.”
You tried to ask which kind Lars, the Swede, was, but it came out a mush.
“Listen,” she said. “Bobby. In a minute, they’re going to kick me out.”
You opened your eyes, which you hadn’t realized were shut again. “What I’m saying is,
We’re the survivors,”
Sasha said.
She spoke in a way that briefly cleared your head of the cloudy things they were pumping inside you: like she’d opened an envelope and read a result that you urgently needed to know. Like you’d been caught offsides and had to be straightened out.
“Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She lay alongside you, every part of you touching, like you’d done so many nights before she met Drew. You felt Sasha’s strength seeping into your skin. You tried to hold her, but your hands were stuffed-animal stumps, and you couldn’t move them.
“Which means you can’t do that again,” she said. “Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Do you promise me, Bobby?”
“I promise.” And you meant it. You wouldn’t break a promise to Sasha.
“Bix!” Drew shouts. He charges up Avenue B, boots clobbering the pavement. Bix is alone, hands in the pockets of his green army jacket.
“Whoa,” he says, laughing when he sees from Drew’s eyes how high he is. Your own high is just beginning to waver. You’d been planning to take that last pill, but you offer it to Bix instead.
“I don’t really do this anymore,” Bix says, “but rules are for bending, right?” A custodian made him leave the lab; he’s been walking around for two hours.
“And Lizzie’s asleep,” you say, “in your apartment.”
Bix gives you a cold look that empties your good mood. “Let’s not get started on that,” he says.
You walk together, waiting for Bix to come onto the E. It’s after 2:00 a.m., the hour when (it turns out) regular people go home to bed, and drunk, crazy, fucked-up people stay out. You don’t want to be with those people. You want to go back to your suite and knock on Sasha’s door, which she leaves unlocked when Drew isn’t spending the night.
“Earth to Rob,” Bix says. His face is soft and his eyes are shiny and bewitched.
“I was thinking I might go home,” you say.
“You can’t!” Bix cries. Love for his fellow creatures radiates from within him like an aura; you can feel its glow on your skin. “You’re central to the action.”
“Right,” you mutter.
Drew slings his arm around you. He smells like Wisconsin—woods, fires, ponds—although you’ve never been near it. “Truth, Rob,” he says, serious. “You’re our aching, pounding heart.”
You wind up at an after-hours club Bix knows about on Ludlow, crowded with people too high to go home. You all dance together, subdividing the space between now and tomorrow until time seems to move backward. You share a strong joint with a girl whose bangs are very short, leaving her bright forehead exposed. She dances near you, her arms around your neck, and Drew shouts in your ear over the music, “She wants to go home with you, Rob.” But eventually the girl gives up, or forgets—or you forget—and she disappears.
The sky is just getting light when the three of you leave the club. You walk north together to Leshko’s, on Avenue A, for scrambled eggs and piles of fried potatoes, then stagger, stuffed, back onto the groggy street. Bix is between you and Drew, one arm around each of you. Fire escapes dangle off the sides of buildings. A croupy church bell starts up and you remember: it’s Sunday.
Someone seems to be leading the way toward the Sixth Street overpass to the East River, but really you’re all moving in tandem, like on a Ouija board. The sun blazes into view, spinning bright and metallic against your eyeballs, ionizing the water’s surface so you can’t see a bit of pollution or crud underneath. It looks mystical, biblical. It raises a lump in your throat.
Bix squeezes your shoulder. “Gentlemen,” he says, “good morning.”
You stand together at the river’s edge, looking out, the last patches of old snow piled at your feet. “Look at that water,” Drew says. “I wish I could swim in it.” After a minute he says, “Let’s remember this day, even when we don’t know each other anymore.”
You look over at Drew, squinting in the sun, and for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of “you” at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel it—what you’ve seen in people’s faces on the street—a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something you can’t quite see.
“Oh, we’ll know each other forever,” Bix says. “The days of losing touch are almost gone.”
“What does that mean?” Drew asks.
“We’re going to meet again in a different place,” Bix says. “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.”
“Where? How?” Drew asks.
Bix hesitates, like he’s held this secret so long he’s afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. “I picture it like Judgment Day,” he says finally, his eyes on the water. “We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We’ll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it’ll seem strange, and pretty soon it’ll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.”
Bix knows, you think—he’s always known, in front of that computer, and now he’s passing the knowledge on. But what you say is: “Will you finally get to meet Lizzie’s parents?”
The surprise lands cleanly in Bix’s face, and he laughs, a big, billowing noise. “I don’t know, Rob,” he says, shaking his head. “Maybe not—maybe that part will never change. But I like to think so.” He rubs his eyes, which look suddenly tired, and says, “Speaking of which. Time to head back home.”
He walks away, hands in the pockets of his army jacket, but it’s a while before it feels like he’s really gone. You pull your last joint from your wallet and smoke it with Drew, walking south. The river is quiet, no boats in sight, a couple of toothless geezers fishing under the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Drew,” you say.
He’s looking at the water with that stoned distraction that makes anything seem worth studying. You laugh, nervous, and he turns. “What?”
“I wish we could live in that cabin. You and me.”
“What cabin?”
“The one you built. In Wisconsin.” You see confusion in Drew’s face, and you add, “If there is a cabin.”
“Of course there’s a cabin.”
Your high granulates the air, then Drew’s face, which reconstitutes with a new wariness in it that frightens you. “I would miss Sasha,” he says slowly. “Wouldn’t you?”
“You don’t really know her,” you say, breathless, a little desperate. “You don’t know who you’d be missing.”
A massive storage hangar has intervened between the path and the river, and you walk alongside it. “What don’t I know about Sasha?” Drew asks in his usual friendly tone, but it’s different—you sense him already turning away, and you start to panic.
“She was a hooker,” you say. “A hooker and a thief—that’s how she survived in Naples.”
As you speak these words, a howling starts up in your ears. Drew stops walking. You’re sure he’s going to hit you, and you wait for it.
“That’s insane,” he says. “And fuck you for saying it.”
“Ask her,” you shout, to be heard above the howling. “Ask about Lars the Swede who used to play the flute.”
Drew starts walking again, his head down. You walk beside him, your steps narrating your panic:
What have you done? What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?
The FDR is over your heads, tires roaring, gasoline in your lungs.
Drew stops again. He looks at you through the dim, oily air like he’s never seen you before. “Wow, Rob,” he says. “You are really and truly an asshole.”
“You’re the last to know.”
“Not me. Sasha.”
He turns and walks quickly away, leaving you alone. You charge after him, seized by a wild conviction that containing Drew will seal off the damage you’ve done. She doesn’t know, you tell yourself, she still doesn’t know. As long as Drew is in sight, she doesn’t know.
You stalk him along the river’s edge, maybe twenty feet between you, half running to keep up. He turns once: “Go away! I don’t want to be near you!” But you sense his confusion about where to go, what to do, and it reassures you.
Nothing has happened yet
.
Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, Drew stops beside what might be called a beach. It’s made entirely out of garbage: old tires, trash, splintered wood, and glass and filthy paper and old plastic bags tapering gradually into the East River. Drew stands on this rubble, looking out, and you wait a few feet behind him. Then he begins to undress. You don’t believe it’s happening at first; off comes his jacket, his sweater, his two T-shirts and undershirt. And there is Drew’s bare torso, strong and tight as you’d imagined, though thinner, the dark hair on his chest in the shape of a spade.
In jeans and boots, Drew picks his way to where garbage and water meet. An angular slab of concrete juts out, the failed foundation of something long forgotten, and he scrambles on top of it. He unlaces his boots and removes them, then kicks off his jeans and boxers. Even through your dread, you feel a faint appreciation for the beauty and inelegance of a man undressing.
He glances back at you, and you glimpse his naked front, the dark pubic hair and strong legs. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he says in a flat voice, and takes a long, leaping, shallow dive, slamming the East River’s surface and letting out something between a scream and a gasp. He surfaces, and you hear him trying to catch his breath. It can’t be more than forty-five degrees out.
You climb the slab of concrete and start taking off clothes, sodden with dread but moved by a wavering sense that if you can master this dread it will mean something, prove something about you. Your scars twang in the cold. Your dick has shriveled to the size of a walnut and your football bulk is starting to slide, but Drew isn’t even watching you. He’s swimming: strong clear swimmer’s strokes.
You make a clumsy leap, your body crashing onto the water, your knee hitting something hard under the surface. The cold locks in around you, knocking out your breath. You swim crazily to get away from the garbage, which you picture underneath, rusty hooks and claws reaching up to slash your genitals and feet. Your knee aches from whatever it hit.
You lift up your head and see Drew floating on his back. “We can get back out of here, right?” you yell.
“Yes, Rob,” he answers in that new, flat voice. “Same way we got in.”
You don’t say anything else. It takes all your strength to tread water and yank in breath. Eventually the cold begins to feel almost tropically warm against your skin. The shrieking in your ears subsides, and you can breathe again. You look around, startled by the mythic beauty of what surrounds you: water encircling an island. A distant tugboat jutting out its rubbery lip. The Statue of Liberty. A thunder of wheels on the Brooklyn Bridge, which looks like the inside of a harp. Church bells, meandering and off-key, like the chimes your mother hangs on the porch. You’re moving fast, and when you look for Drew you can’t find him. The shore is far away. A person is swimming near it, but at such a distance that when the swimmer pauses, waving frantic arms, you can’t see who it is. You hear a faint shout—“Rob!”—and realize you’ve been hearing that voice for a while. Panic scissors through you, bringing crystalline engagement with physical facts: you’re caught in a current—there are currents in this river—you knew that—heard it somewhere and forgot—you shout, but feel the smallness of your voice, the seismic indifference of the water around you—all this in an instant.
“Help! Drew!”
As you flail, knowing you’re not supposed to panic—panicking will drain your strength—your mind pulls away as it does so easily, so often, without your even noticing sometimes, leaving Robert Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader landscape, the water and buildings and streets, the avenues like endless hallways, your dorm full of sleeping students, the air thick with their communal breath. You slip through Sasha’s open window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small gold pagoda, a pair of red dice. Her harp in one corner with its small wood stool. She’s asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets. You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha’s sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of
I’m sorry
and
I believe in you
and
I’ll always be near you, protecting you
, and
I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life
, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face:
Fight! Fight! Fight!
Good-bye, My Love
When Ted Hollander first agreed to travel to Naples in search of his missing niece, he drew up for his brother-in-law, who was footing the bill, a plan for finding her that involved cruising the places where aimless, strung-out youths tended to congregate—the train station, for example—and asking if they knew her. “Sasha. American.
Capelli rossi
”—red hair—he’d planned to say, had even practiced his pronunciation until he could roll the
r
in front of
rossi
to perfection. But since arriving in Naples a week ago, he hadn’t said it once.
Today, he ignored his resolve to begin looking for Sasha and visited the ruins of Pompeii, observing early Roman wall paintings and small, prone bodies scattered like Easter eggs among the columned courtyards. He ate a can of tuna under an olive tree and listened to the crazy, empty silence. In the early evening he returned to his hotel room, heaved his aching body onto the king-sized bed, and phoned his sister, Beth, Sasha’s mother, to report that another day’s efforts had been unsuccessful.