This, flanked by I LOVE MAXINE and CALL YOUR MOTHER, on the wall of the phone booth you find yourself in moments later, while attempting to end your own life, on the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue A.
There are ten bright seconds when you forget there was an accident. When you think you can respond to SAMO’s scrawl like you always do, a tradition you’ve kept up for years now: a battle — or was it a sort of courting dance? — of scrawls on walls and on arms.
You’d write: LUCY OLLIASON IS A WHORE.
And yet you have no hand to write with: your ten bright seconds are gone. There are only these four dirty walls, this phone with no one on the other end, these pills.
The pill bottle is one of the many things in the world that is made with the idea that the person who will open it will have two hands. One to hold its little orange body, one to press down on and tear off its head. You smash its head into the silver box of the telephone until the cap breaks off and the pills fly like little white marbles to the floor of the telephone booth.
You pick them up one by one. You swallow them.
Your throat is lined with sand.
When the wavy feeling of the pills brushes at your cheek, you notice something. A little blue box — perched like some mechanical tumor on the top of the phone. It is the little blue box that Arlene had told you about so long ago. You hear her muscley voice: It means the phreaks have hacked it. Once you have the secret number, you can call anyone you fucking want for free.
You can call anyone you fucking want for free, and your heart squirms, and your mind is only a smooth wave.
Your heart squirms and there is a dial tone and then the rattle of a real ring, and you are there with your sister, under the kitchen table, tying your parents’ shoes together.
Answer. Please answer.
You are there with her. She is whispering a secret recipe into your ear. A recipe that makes kids into adults and adults into kids.
Cigarette.
Please answer.
You are there with her, and she is pretending to be asleep. You are pretending to be asleep, too. Each of you knows you are doing the other a favor. Pretending to be asleep but not actually being asleep. If you were actually asleep, it would be considered a betrayal.
Please answer. You are the only thing that’s left.
When she picks up she will gasp, even before she hears your voice. She will know it’s you because she always knows it’s you. You will both be silent at first and then it will be sudden, the way she returns to you, you’ll be children in matching corduroy pants, with parents, dinner, the light coming in, black-and-white cartoons, forts made of bed sheets, the stories your mother tells, hours of Loba de Menos, small shoes, city flowers, trinkets brought home from Italy or Russia, your father’s Beatles record on the record player, your mother dancing in her bell-sleeved dress — somewhere in there, the tango, somewhere in there, the nothing to lose—your even breathing as you pretend to be asleep for each other, the flicking of your toes, which promises you are not.
But there is only ringing, and you curse the little blue box, which doesn’t seem to be working properly, does it? And you rip the little phreak box from the top of the phone and throw it to the ground and yell, to no one, motherfucker!
And why would she talk to you if she had picked up? After you had abandoned her for so long? Why would you expect her to show up for your tragedy when you had never shown up for her, not even to hear her big news? And why had you called her anyway? When nothing meant anything? When everything meant nothing? Why had you turned to her when the world was ending if the world was already ending, whether you got a hold of your sister or not?
The coins bang back into their clanky chamber at the bottom of the phone. The white shape of that man’s suit jacket blazes under your eyelids. There are exactly six more pills — there had been twenty-five to start with — and you take them all in one swallow, slumping onto the wet floor of the phone booth on Tenth Street until your sister tucks you under a blanket of nothingness. Go ahead, Raul, she whispers. Disappear off the face of the earth.
You are there with her, crouching over her crate of broken eggs, the remnants of the terrible accident.
You are there with her, shoving a piece of her good cake in your mouth, resenting her, thanking god for her.
But you hadn’t said thank you. You hadn’t ever said thank you.
You have to call her back, but the phreak box is on the floor now, a pile of blue and red wires.
It’s okay, she says, stroking your cheek with her potato chip fingernails. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.
White suit, moon glow, smooth wave. Take her to see what you’ve made. Prove to her that you have made something. Show her why you left her, show her how it was worth it.
Exit the phone booth, lumber back down Second Avenue, your eyes heavy as loaves of bread. On Bond Street again, toward the well-lit room where everyone is saying your name. Show her the heads of the people who are saying your name. Show her how they move so easily on the necks of the people who are saying your name.
Show her your slide show, Señor Romano’s big belly shadow in the way of the projector.
Slide one: all blue. That wonderful, original void.
Let your body dissolve into millions of particles, let them hover together in a fog, then dissipate.
A blue square. A hard stoop. Let your eyes close all the way.
Change slides: black, then white, then black.
Change slides: Yves jumping from the eaves.
You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay. Just fall asleep now, to the sound of the sirens and the dogs and the trucks on the cobblestones, their metal roofs clanging.
How can one man be dragging garbage while another man…
You’re okay.
Sprinkle yourself among the sounds of the city, like a dust with a finite place to fall.
Change slides: the artist falls toward the pavement below, toward death in the name of art.
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
Everyone who was anyone: that was the phrase certain people, probably the people who were not anyone, might have used to describe the attendees of the Raul Engales show at the Winona George Gallery. Lucy had watched them file in from her perch in the corner: the collectors and the critics and the never-ending stream of Winona’s personal friends, who managed to cover Winona’s powdered face in lipstick marks before the wine was even uncorked. Rumi was there, her big hair expanding to fit the space, and some of the same people from the Times Square show — Lucy recognized a couple who only dressed in head-to-toe red, and a lanky man in a baseball hat that read, in blue embroidery, ART IS MY HELL.
All of their friends from the squat were there, too — Toby and Regina circulated like a two-headed insect, wearing one long scarf that was tied around both of their necks; Horatio and Selma trailed them, Horatio in checkerboard pants he’d spray-painted himself and Selma in a shirt that looked to be made of cellophane, revealing the shape and shadows of her small, ubiquitous breasts. But though Lucy had spent the summer reveling in their grimy genius, emulating their curiosity and their conversation, she knew now that they were not her real friends; they belonged to Engales. Engales would not want her to tell any of them about his accident, she knew, and so the terror of it would be hers alone to bear, while she attempted to avoid the artists, clinging to the periphery of the party with the paintings, her back toward the room as she studied her lover’s subjects.