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  -Hrmph.

  The elevator drops. Mr Kim’s toenails curl around his toes and he needs to wedge the clippers beneath the curl and cut the curl before cutting again. The numbers above the sliding door count backward to (7) where Lil lives. Lil and I have shared the same building since she arrived in ――. Lil doesn’t like the building very much. She thinks Ms Tupelo will be dying soon and doesn’t know what happens when a landlady dies without an heir and without a will.

  -Maybe we get to keep our rooms, I told her.

  -Don’t be stupid, she said.

  The elevator stops at (7). Mr Kim lowers his curled foot and gives me two dead-pupils and a stern handshake.

  -Goodnight, Mr Kim.

  -Hrmph.

  An identical floor spreads forward and I hook in the direction of Lil’s room. The doors on (7) are all chipped blue with rotting silver numbers and rotting silver eyelets. I find Lil’s room and fondle the handle but the lock holds still. I knock.

  -Just a minute, Lil calls.

  It is usually just a minute with Lil. She needs time to polish the corners of her bedroom for dead skin and pick the spent fabrics up off the floor. It is not something she does particularly quickly. There are tiny rubber weights attached to her blood vessels. Tiny sacks of mass looped around her platelets that keep her from moving very fast. She loses extra hours this way, effectively condensing her days. She tries on the same outfit five times in the mirror. She fixes her hair.

  -Thank you for waiting, Lil says finally, opening the door.

  -It’s no problem, I say.

  Lil nods. She’s wearing a bath robe with her hair tied up under a towel. Her face looks like she’s been washing it with rubbing alcohol for several days.

  -Thank you for coming, she says gently.

  -It’s no problem at all, I say.

  She turns back inside. Lil’s room is bigger than mine, but she pays less rent for it. It is not uncommon in ―― to pay less rent for larger rooms. There is a certain luxury to less space here.

  -Something to drink? Lil asks.

  -Do you have any apricot juice?

  -I meant with alcohol.

  -Apple then?

  -You’re hopeless, Y.

  -Very true, I say.

  Lil collapses into the big iron-cloth sofa and sighs. She drinks red wine from an old carafe. She sighs loudly enough to echo, and I look away.

  The most defining feature of Lil’s sitting room is the oversized, waist-high drumkit standing across from the sofa. The drums are not rock drums, but a kind of double-wide neon bongo set with a melodica hewn into the wood. The melodica mic curls up like a broken finger. The drums are very loud in all ways and take up half the room. Their neon sidings are not electric but glow anyways in strips of red and blue and green down the frontside of the drums. Like traffic signs without arrows on them. Lil only plays when there are people around. I am not exactly people so she probably won’t play. Besides the drums, the room is orange and the walls feel very thick.

  -I broke up with Sam today, Lil tells me.

  -Yeah?

  -I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. Do you think I’d lie for fun?

  -I didn’t say ‘yeah’ because I thought it wasn’t true. I said ‘yeah’ because I thought you might go on about it.

  Lil frowns. Her bathrobe is lemon-yellow and there’s a black towel tied around her forehead. The towel curls up like a flattened snake, three shades off from the shadow of her skin. She crosses her arms.

  -Are you surprised?

  -Not really, no.

  -You’re not surprised?

  -No.

  -Even after the engagement?

  -Especially after the engagement.

  Lil frowns again. Her lips are thin and ruddy and beneath their curtains, I’m sure her pearl teeth are wine bled and drooping. The relationship was a very mediocre thing. Lil is capable of very mediocre things.

  -You don’t believe in me at all, Y.

  -It’s hard to believe in people, I say.

  -Is it because of Lucy?

  -No.

  -Is it because of Jacob?

  -No.

  -Is it because of Ruby?

  -No.

  -Then what is it? she asks. Am I a pattern to you? Like hound’s-tooth or tartan?

  -Like Chinoiseries, I tell her. She glowers.

  -No one ever knows what the hell you’re even talking about when you talk, Y.

  I suppose Lil is right. I sit down on the sofa a good ways away and she flinches. She places the carafe on the floor and adjusts her head towel and doesn’t look at me directly. She is waiting on a question. Something to circle down the fractals of her mind like wet slips of paper down a bathtub drain. Lil has a hard time loving anything or anyone very fully or for very long, but she likes to run the string out on things as long as the other person is hanging on. Something happened to her a long time ago to make her this way but isn’t that the story of everyone. I feel bad for Sam as an engaging charade, but not much as an actual person. There are a lot worse ways to get to ―― than to fall miserably in love with Lil.

  -Do you feel bad about it? I ask.

  -Awful, she says. Sam was very sweet. It’s terrible when awful things happen to sweet people. More so than when they happen to the rest of us.

  She pours the carafe down her throat and I watch as her esophagus pulses. Her face is very dark in the gloom light of the sitting room. I think of tiny fishes swimming in the base of the carafe. I think of the tiny fishes they use to clean the callouses off people’s feet and wonder if they would develop fish to clean out the callouses in one’s insides. Tiny fish swimming through bile ducts, intestinal streams and chakra channels.

  -It’s not so awful, I say to Lil. It can always be worse.

  -Can it?

  -Absolutely.

  -Well I suppose that’s a good thing then, she sighs.

  Lil stands up from the sofa, swaying, and walks away back into the back rooms of her overlarge apartment. I sit alone with the neon bongo set and the faded campaign posters that cling to the soft orange walls. I think Lil used to be into politics, maybe. Months ago. She used to say things at meetings. She used to bang her palms against a podium board and point with her index fingers. I listen to the sounds now of fabrics rustling in the back room and hear Susa playing again, low and sober through the doorway. Lil hums sometimes and she is humming now, along with a jazz singer who is not Tuli.

  Lil re-enters the room in a white satin pajama slip and her hair sprung out. Lil has short neon peroxide hair that beacons in a crowd. In better lights, I have said the peroxide is for Lil like an old spinster lighthouse keeper, shining its spotlight out to avoid the mulish conclusion of ships in the night. A gesture of desperation.

  -Well? she asks.

  -Is it lighter?

  -No, darker, she tells me. My roots have been threating recently. I’ll need to dye it again soon.

  -I see.

  Lil nods.

  -Did you hear the one about Orion’s belt?

  -I didn’t.

  -It’s a big Waist of Space.

  -I see.

  Lil frowns again and slides back onto the iron-cloth couch and takes a heavy swig from her carafe. Some of the wine leaks from the edges and runs down the corner of her mouth. It gives the impression of a rotting fruit. Like the acceleration of a still-life painting. When the apricots and apples all turn to mush.

  -You never smile, Y. All the time I see you, you never smile.

  -It hurts my face to.

  -Does it?

  -Yes, I tell her. I have a plaster face and if I smile, it might all crack up.

  -You’re very annoying, Y. Did you know that?

  -Well.

  Lil touches the neckline of her slip. In the evenings, we used to sit together and memorize the names of small islands in cloudy Polynesian chains. We used to freeze strings of yarn into ice cubes and wear them as necklaces until our shirts were wet and our collarbones were shivering. Any
thing to break the time. And when she’s with someone, I would fade up into the 14th for a little while. Do jigsaw puzzles on top of road signs. Try memorizing sections of the phonebook. Lay in my hammock for days and wash my face in the sink and take long baths and think of all the things I would do differently again if I could. Lil and I have never really tried to be with one another, but I think we tolerate each other quite a lot sometimes or need to tolerate each other if we can. She knows we can’t, but still she waits around like harbor birds when in the interim of another abortive love. Lil thinks her clavicles would make great mallets for the drums. Mine too, she thinks.

  -Did you see that mystic yet?

  -No.

  -Y, you promised.

  -I know I did.

  -Don’t you want to?

  -Want is a funny word.

  -It might be nice if we could.

  -For who?

  -You don’t think it would be nice?

  I sigh. Lil continues to knead her clavicles.

  -Why don’t you play the drums? I ask.

  -I’m too tired.

  -Just for a little bit. You never play the drums for me.

  Lil shakes her head. She eyes the drumkit warily. She picks the carafe back up, now half-drained and keeps drinking. When she was with Sam, I would sit on my fire escape in the cold and listen to the drums four floors below pouring out into the night with the bleary whine of melodica weaving in between the thumps. She played slower for Sam than she did for Ruby and slower for Ruby than she did for Jacob and for Lucy she hardly played at all, but only tapped the edges so soft I could hardly hear them. This is when I first moved to ―― and thought the tapping was a silver bug that had gotten trapped beneath the floorboards. It would keep me up at night.

  -How do we know what’s ethical anyways? Lil asks me.

  -Don’t start.

  -I’m only just saying.

  -You always only just say.

  -But have you thought about it?

  -Of course I’ve thought about it. Why wouldn’t I have thought about it?

  -So you admit it might be nice then?

  -With you?

  -Who else?

  -There are other people, I say. Lil laughs dully.

  -For a person who doesn’t smile, you sure make some pretty good jokes.

  Poor Lil. That’s all I can think. Poor Lil. I stare at her head and the white glow and wonder if when she sees me, does she think: ‘Poor Y’? And I think she probably does. I am not good company anymore. Perhaps I never was. But there is a lot of bad company one will endure in ―― so as not to be alone. Maybe why Lil plays the drums so much. To chase out the ghosts. She tips the carafe. She wipes her mouth and sucks her legs up tight beneath her body. She swills the red remaining third in the fishless glass container.

  -Did you hear El went over Jersey?

  -No, I say. When?

  -Day or so back.

  -That’s really terrible.

  -It is. I feel bad for Ng.

  -They were close?

  -Very.

  -It’s a shame.

  -Truly.

  -Maybe it’s contagious.

  -Maybe.

  I think back to what I said in the bathtub and feel bad now. I should tell Lil I feel bad but I don’t. Lil rubs her forehead and runs her hands through the thicket of white where it shoots up close above her. She is sad for El and sad for Sam and sad for life in general. Sometimes before from the mouths of other people, I’ve heard it said that Lil is a whole host of horrible things, but she is not. Not really. To say so would be to buy the common misconception that people are the ways they are because that’s how they choose to be. Lil is her desperation just as I am. Just as we all are. Uncontrollably passive things.

  -What are you thinking? Lil asks.

  -I was just thinking about how we are all our desperations.

  -What the hell does that mean? What desperation?

  -There are a lot of desperations, I guess. Desperation is wanting without knowing what you want. Or wanting what doesn’t exit. Or can’t exist. Or won’t.

  -And you think I’m desperate?

  -Especially.

  Lil furrows her brow. The room is still and orange and quiet.

  -You shouldn’t tell people what they are, Y, she says.

  -Because I’m wrong?

  -Because you’ll always be wrong when you try to tell people what they are. They won’t believe you. People always think they’re experts on the subject of themselves.

  -I guess so.

  -And you never know all the facts.

  -I guess so.

  Lil is right. Lil is usually right when I try to say things bigger than the room and the day and the weather. The rim of her mouth kneads at its corners and her eyebrows fold.

  -It’s hopeless, Lil sighs at last. I don’t know why I called you down here, Y. You’re so horrible for cheering someone up. You’re always looking for things to be wrong about. You’re always saying those awful things.

  -I’m sorry, Lil. Should I be something else tonight?

  -If you could.

  -I’ll try then.

  -Likely.

  I stand up from the sofa in the main room and go into Lil’s bedroom in the back. The walls inside are plastered black and white with photographs of her and Sam smiling by the reservoir and at the aquarium. She makes faces and sticks out her tongue when the camera flash goes off in her palm and the fish behind her tap their noses on the glass. Sam looks at her with open eyes that suck Lil’s face inside them with love. There are odd lover’s objects still scattered in the room that make no sense outside of a dead lover’s language, hanging from bookshelves, pinned to cork board, littering the dresser top. Totems. I have seen these photographs before with different faces. There will be big black trash bags filled with memories soon.

  Love doesn’t go anywhere when it dies. Maybe that’s why I’m so uncomfortable being down here. Many times in ――, there is only a thin film or shell surrounding what’s truly painful. Vacuoles of memory waiting to burst. Lil is so much more courageous about it than I am. She is pretty courageous about that kind of thing. Or reckless. But it’s painful to be in proximity either way.

  After Lucy, I rode with Lil out to the docks and flung the trash bags into the harbor. They floated in the water with the other trash and became indistinguishable. Lil was very sad that day. I thought someone might try and stop us. A policeman or someone from the City. No one did. Soon the walls will sprout new photographs of a different person that will all smile in the exact same way with the exact same set of eyes and faces. Lovers always feel the need to spread their disease like that. Diseases always feel the need to replicate themselves over again, using the plans of new bodies to repeat the same patterns on their skin.

  It should be noted now that a cat does not drown in a trash bag because the trash bag sinks. A cat drowns in a trash bag because it begins to claw, letting in the water through tiny claw-sized holes in the bag.

  I pick Lil’s radio up from on top of her bed, from the tangled and tearstained bedsheets. Her radio is a silver box with speakers on either side of a cassette mouth. I lift it from the yellow sheets and the gentle bleed of fairy lights and bring it back into the hall. I don’t like seeing the bed where Lil has laid crying and tangled beneath dead photographs for so long. It is not a place that makes much sense to me. Why she would go back and rehash it.

  I flick Susa back on and its silent static and breathing. Lil tilts her head around as I drape the radio onto the sofa. The carafe is all gone. It is a small glass body. Lil is too tired to sit anymore and so she rises like a trash bag in the harbor, bobbing and sways into the bend of my arm.

  -Are we dancing now? she asks me.

  -No, I say. Not yet.

  Her head sticks to my collarbone as we wait through Susa’s breathing. Her face is hot with wine that has not yet boiled over into tears. My hand makes a shelf for her fingers in the air as she places her palm on the small of my back.
br />   -Thank you, she says.

  -It’s no problem.

  The music drifts on with radio crackle. It’s Tuli again. Her voice is thick and violet and I move Lil in a slow sweep over the floor. She fits clumsily in my arms like a used conjunction, leading off to another dependent clause, half-submerged down a bathtub drain.

  The past tides through Lil’s body in an unrelenting ache as we dance. I don’t remember in ――, or I try not remembering in ――, but now the wavering shadow of what was seems to seethe through Lil’s shoulder blades as we dance because Lil remembers too much and it’s all infectious. All of what’s before floats, trapped in plastic, like cats in trash bags along the surface of my brain. One of Lil’s many diseases. I remember red tears in abandoned shopping centers on the tired parking lots of the gray Southeast. I remember losing people, people I loved, I think, maybe, sometime ago. I remember patiently staring out of melting windows, waiting for the day to arrive and having arrived, to end. I remember leaving and never knowing how to leave, and always having left, or being in the anticipation of leaving, and when the leaving came, looking to leave again. That is the way it is in ――. And none of the dead loves or dead lives make sense to the living, like Aramaic or the languages that ghosts speak. It’s easy to tire of repeating the names of past lovers to current lovers on the tired pile of tear-dry bedsheets, as Lil does. But she does it. There is always more than one reason to move to ――.

  Lil’s feet cut across mine unevenly and eventually I pull her up to stand on my shoes and sway her like a curl of smoke. Her clavicles are likely made of glass, I think.

  -Can’t we be murderers? she whispers into my chest. Just this one time?

  -It’s a very bad habit, I tell her. And probably a hard one to break.

  She nods. She smells like a pollen in a sewer grate. The nature of the curse is hard to imagine and harder still to explain and there are many who doubt that it’s true. I don’t ever doubt that it’s true because I see them at night, circling around the hammock and asking questions in languages I don’t understand.

  Sex is also very lonely in ――.

  Outside, a siren wails. The siren wraps up several floors of tenement loft to remind us now how there is someone always dying here. The police in ―― typically exist to call the paramedics and the firemen work more to contain than to save.