Engales realized this bust was an opportunity for relief: finally the squat would stop taunting him from across the street. Finally he’d be able to sleep without imagining what might be happening over there, wondering what he was missing. For three weeks he’d been listening to the sounds of his old life seeping through the window’s crack — Selma’s cosmic howling, parties raging until the aching hours of the night, an experimental poetry reading during which everyone had yelled in unison: “VERY UNNERVING. VERY UNNERVING. VERY UNNERVING INDEED!” And now he could be free of that; if not peace of mind, there would at least be silence.
But he didn’t feel relief now, as he waited for his friends to be escorted out of the place they’d spent the last years turning into a manifestation of their dreams. He felt only deep, unexpected sadness, if not for their loss than for the fact that he could not partake in it. He had helped make the squat during the time he’d spent there — the kitchen shelves, the handwoven hammock, the studio walls — and so he should be there when it got destroyed. He should be there, mouthing off to the cops with Toby, standing in front of Selma so they wouldn’t cuff her. Instead, he was here, in his own private hell across the street, trapped with a bunch of drunks and lunatics and people with giant limps or missing limbs, watching his old life like a voyeur with an obsessive failed writer. How had this become him? How was this his life? Why, and how, was he here?
Because of Winona George.
Because of Winona George, Raul Engales had not died by way of painkiller overdose three weeks ago, on the night of the show that would have been his artistic debut. Instead, Winona had found him passed out and drooling on a stoop on Bond Street, while stiletto-stepping toward a yellow cab. She’d dragged him into the car herself and instructed the cabbie to drive with meteoric speed to St. Vincent’s.
“That cabbie didn’t have the slightest idea what meteoric meant,” Winona relayed after Engales’s stomach had been forcefully pumped at the same hospital where they had sewn up his arm. (Practically a regular here, one nurse tried to joke.) “But he still drove like hell,” Winona went on. “And thank god for that, or you would have been a dead man.”
“If only,” Engales had said.
“Oh, don’t say that,” Winona had said. “Things got bad there for a second, I know, darling. But there’s still a life to be lived. And you’re in good hands now.”
Whose good hands? Engales wanted to say. The hands of the handsome hospital doctors, whose capableness was a threat to Engales’s very being? Winona’s, whose mauve manicure made him actually nauseous? Some god’s? Who had already proved himself either nonexistent or evil? Good hands, Engales thought while gazing up into the hollow caves of Winona’s cheekbones from the hospital bed, did not exist anymore.
But Winona had disagreed. There was hope for Raul Engales yet — more life to be lived and more fame to be had, if only he got some help. She was adamant: he would be admitted somewhere where he could recover and rehabilitate; she would foot the bill.
And so it was because of Winona George that Engales was not sent home to François’s apartment but to the Rising Sun (or as the people at the squat had called it, the Rubber Room, both because it housed the neighborhood’s crazier set and because the clinic on the first floor gave out condoms for free). Here he was to endure the depressing aesthetic blend of homespun hospitality and medical sterility that he expected was common in New York City wellness institutions: peppy construction paper signage (IF IT’S YELLOW LET IT MELLOW, read one, in the communal bathroom), hospital-blue sheets, jail-thin mattresses, glass mobiles that reflected colorful light onto his face in the morning. He was to share a small room with an ex-alcoholic roommate named Darcy, who sang gospel before going to bed every night and shined his shoes after every time he wore them. He was to take orders and pills from a fantastically bitchy nurse named Lupa, whose Mexican Spanish was both lazy and lippy and whose nose was almost as wide as her face. And he was to attend therapy of all kinds: talk therapy with a man named Germond Germond, who had told Engales, absurdly, you can just call me Germond; art therapy (it couldn’t get more ironic) with Carmen Rose, who never once spoke but did an incredible amount of nodding and tempera paint mixing; and physical therapy with Debbie, a peppy blond sports trainer who attempted to train his left hand into a one-man show by making him turn the knobs of an Etch A Sketch. “It’s different with everyone,” Debbie said sweetly when Engales asked her how fucking long this was going to take. “We need to retrain your mind to understand your new body. It’s a process.”
But Engales didn’t want to understand his new body, or his new life, or undergo any process at all. He did not want to hear the sounds of a party at the squat while he tried to fall asleep. He did not want to do therapy, of any kind. And he especially did not want to be cooped up in a little room for hours with the awful images that triangled around in his mind: the terror of the white suit jacket, leading Lucy off into the night; his childhood house, empty on the other end of the phreak-tapped pay phone; the silver blade of the guillotine, slamming down onto his arm; Franca’s eggs, their bleeding yolk. And so he’d shut his eyes with force, but under the lids he’d just get a more jumbled version of the images that haunted him. Jacket, ringing, yolk/blood. Germond, Germond, yolk, jacket. Lupa’s nose, jacket, Etch A Sketch, blood. Meet me at the squat, midnight at the squat, four in the morning at the squat, never again at the squat. Hallelujah, white yolk, red yolk, THIS IS UNNERVING, Lupa’s cigarette smell, ringing, ringing, ringing, gone.
But then, on the Tuesday of his second week there, the hellish rhythm of his rehabilitation was interrupted, when a man showed up toward the end of visiting hours, covered in rain. Something about him was familiar, but Engales couldn’t place him at first. Around the cuffs of the man’s slacks, little moats formed.
“Sorry about this,” the man said, motioning at the dripping. “I lost my umbrella. Maybe I never had one? I never know with umbrellas.”
Lupa tucked her head into the room. “Thees is Meester James Bennett,” she said in her I’m-a-hard-ass voice. “Miss George lady sends him. Be nice.”
Engales’s heart flapped ever so slightly. James Bennett. That’s why the man looked familiar: Engales flashed on the New Year’s Eve party, when Rumi had listed off the important people on the balcony. He remembered Bennett’s slumped silhouette, his shiny head. He thought of Winona’s promise: an article in the Times, by the most revered art writer, all about his show. Engales bristled, first with the sort of hope he felt when he woke up in the morning: ten bright seconds during which a writer from the New York Times was here to write an article about him.