2. Just Think How Sane We’d Be if it Weren’t for the Heat #2
“Bitch, he’s fine. He’s on acid, he’s practically invincible,” remarked Nessa, a paragon of sympathy.
Nessa used “bitch” with a freedom most people reserved for conversational pauses.
Sometimes I was grateful for the way she handled every situation unpredictably.
A reassuring consistency, that she always reacted inappropriately, which freed me to do the same.
Roro, an empath, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. “Are you serious? We just watched a man die, Ness—”
“So? Some bitch got killed last weekend. Some bitch is probably missing right now!”
“It’s true,” I said, having gotten yet another Amber Alert on my phone earlier that day. A blaring, unwelcome disruption to my midday nap. “These bitches do be missing,” I added, in a lilting imitation of Nessa.
“Weda, shut up,” she said. She was Filipina and Mexican, for the record, but apparently there was nothing whiter I could do than point out she wasn’t Black.
“I know that,” rasped Roro, “but he was right there! I mean, we could have stopped him—I spoke to him literally one second ago—”
Roro looked haunted, and what I didn’t want to admit was that I was oddly shaken, too.
I’d met his eye just moments before he’d stepped into the street, and there had been a look on his face, some strike of clarity, that made me feel like maybe I was the reason he’d made that choice.
Like he’d locked eyes with me and understood that this was his only move; that all that remained of life was emptiness.
He had an underfed look to him, long, ratty hair, scraped back in a bun with the strands pulled loose, like there had recently been hands in it, fingers grasping, probing, searching.
There was a wild calm in his eye, an unnatural stillness.
Should I have seen this coming? Should I have known that whatever he saw when he looked at me would propel him to his doom?
But when his eyes met mine, I hadn’t thought about how strange they looked. I hadn’t clocked the drugs or danger. I’d thought dazedly of how familiar they were. Like something I’d seen in technicolor before.
By now multiple people had pushed forward to try to help; a herd of drunken Samaritans bleated out in various shades of dismay. The bouncer was yelling for everyone to back up, and several people had already dialed 911.
So there were easily a dozen eyewitnesses to the moment when the man’s arm seemed to shoot outward of its own accord, like a skeletal hand bursting free from the grave, grasping blindly for the gutter from below the bus’s floor.
Roro gasped and clawed my wrist, biting her nails into the span of my forearm, yanking my own arm half out of its socket as she dragged me closer to the street.
I didn’t have perfect visibility—people stepped on my feet, elbowed me, no more accommodating than on the dance floor of the club—but I could see that the man had hooked a desperate grip onto the contours of the sidewalk and dragged his immobile bottom half out from beneath the bus, seemingly resurrecting himself by nothing but sheer force of will.
Someone stepped in front of me then—I missed it, the full motion of him rising—but when a window cleared again, it was like some kind of horror scene, the climax of a cinematic dream.
Blood was smeared across the full length of his face, and a bizarre protrusion of bone jutted through the top of his T-shirt, giving him the look of a hunchback.
It was Halloween grotesquerie, carnage too gaudy to be anything short of camp.
Impossible to tell what was bruise and what was road.
His hair was falling into his face, concealing most of it.
From afar it was difficult to catalog the full scale of lacerations—too much of his body was openly bleeding, including his nose, which had already been dripping prior to the crash, so if there was a primary source of injury, it wasn’t clear at first glance.
There was a vacant, half-conscious look in his eye as he stumbled, like the walking dead, around the front of the bus, taking off toward the opposite side of the street.
This time, he didn’t look at me. He didn’t look back at all.
By then the driver had gotten out with a primal yell and sprinted after him, a mix of rage and fear. We all lost track of the two of them immediately, our line of sight blocked by the bus itself, whose passengers were scrambling over each other to see where the man had gone.
“See?” said Nessa, after a collective beat of stunned silence. “Told you.”
“But…” Roro stared after him. “But did you see?”
Her mouth hung open. If mine didn’t, it was only from a place of shock. Everything had happened far too quickly for me to process it, to even know how to react.
I just kept thinking about his face like something I hadn’t done, a task I’d left unfinished.
What was it? Like the line you can’t quite remember, the punchline to an old joke.
It would come to me, I knew, unhelpfully, at three in the morning, or in a conversation a few days from now.
Where I knew him from. I felt sure I had seen him before.
But there also comes a point in the night where you clock the fact that you’re too drunk to see things properly.
Or just too drunk, period. Inevitably you become struck by the gutting awareness of how pointless everything can be, and then the solution is either to slouch more destructively toward oblivion or simply cut your losses and go home.
“Come on, Roro.” I patted her on the shoulder, channeling the archetype of sensible best friend. It was, demographically speaking, the role I was most likely to make a living on. “Let’s call it.”
“But we came here to dance.” Sometimes I found Nessa’s casual narcissism to be admirable, like a piece of armor I wish I had. Other times it edged too close to nuisance.
“Then dance, Nessa. I’m taking Roro home.
” That was enough to do it. Nessa hates being left out.
So we all trudged into an Uber, relaying the facts of the night—the Uber driver, too, suggested the culprit was probably bath salts—and then, after stopping at Roro’s to make sure she and Nessa made it up the stairs, I went home and struggled to sleep.
“He’s dead now,” Nessa had declared matter-of-factly in the car.
“He probably only got up right away because his body was in shock.” Sometimes, Nessa found ways to inadvertently remind us that she was the most gainfully employed among us.
She was an ER nurse, and therefore probably correct, which with Nessa was always the least tolerable outcome.
“Nessa, stop. You’re making it worse.” Roro, who had an artistic temperament, was whimpering.
Her fingers were flying while she texted her boyfriend, an entertainment lawyer who did things like send a delivery guy to her apartment with pints of ice cream if she said she was on her period or order new batteries for the Ring camera he’d bought.
(Her packages kept getting stolen; he couldn’t abide the riffraff underfoot.) Maybe she’d thought that if she seemed distressed enough, he’d come over. Or maybe pay her rent.
I didn’t find fault in any of this, for the record. I’d been considering it too, the concept of transaction. That simple exchange, the labor of pleasure, for the freedom more broadly to live.
It hit me around four in the morning, just before I finally drifted off—those eyes, the thing I’d been trying to remember.
They reminded me of William de Witt in a movie he starred in, years and years ago.
Young William de Witt, who’d played a version of Death, dolled up in a black suit—give him darker hair, longer, and that was exactly what the man had looked like.
But it certainly hadn’t been William de Witt throwing himself in front of a bus. He was in his forties now, I was pretty sure, and probably not suicidal. Definitely not a time traveler.
Funny, then, what the brain holds onto. What you remember and subsequently forget.
The next morning, I was waiting to hear about a callback for a minor part in a feature.
An up-and-coming studio was making it, small budget but hot and buzzy, film festival stuff.
Given the conditions of the industry, it would pay me almost nothing and I’d probably have to travel somewhere obscure, but exposure had its perks.
Another rung on the invisible ladder. My agent said I’d be perfect for it if I used the headshot where they’d made my eyes look slightly smaller and pulled my hair back tighter for a more severe effect and stuck a lotus pin behind my ears, as if to more adequately point to something—anything—Asian.
If I was lucky, I’d play the girlfriend who got dumped in favor of the tragic, forbidden romance with the lead actress, Sydney something.
I was supposed to hear whether my original callback time slot had been successfully rescheduled, but because I had not yet been told and it was already ten in the morning, I went in for a shift at the store.
My cousin JR was in tow, much to my mother’s chagrin.
Which brings me, circularly, back to the pigeon. JR, as I mentioned, had recently come into possession of one. There were many things to be said about this, so I will begin with what I actually said while I attended to the boxes in the storeroom: “Explain to me what’s happening with the pigeon.”