Chapter 21
Sometime late in summer, in the early morning hours I always sleep through, Hal barges into Tara’s and my bedroom and flicks
on the lights.
I moan and burrow back into my pillowcase, the cotton slicked with sweat or drool, probably both.
“What’s going on?” Tara asks groggily from the bottom bunk. “Is there a fire?”
“Something close,” Hal says. “Just found this in our mailbox.” She’s waving a sheet of paper, too fast to read even if my eyes were working so soon after waking up. “An
eviction warning from the landlord,” she elaborates.
Tara springs up in bed to examine the notice.
“That’s why you shouldn’t check the mail,” I say, still half asleep. “Nothing good comes from it.”
“Then I guess you won’t care about this other one addressed to you,” Hal replies. There’s a small envelope in her other hand.
“It’s handwritten.”
“That’s for me?” I ask, blinking my eyes open.
I can’t remember the last time I received mail that wasn’t a bill, a brochure, or a letter from a scammer.
This one will probably be a frilly invite for my niece’s first birthday party, planned months in advance.
Or maybe a wedding invitation from a college friend, someone who knows I’ll decline but expects me to send a present anyway, having heard I’m living in New York City and thus jumping to conclusions about my ability to buy the whole registry when I actually can’t afford anything except a toxic rubber spatula, plus two coffee mugs if I’m stretching.
“Bushwick” doesn’t mean much back in Michigan.
Its antithesis to Manhattan is unknown and unwanted.
No one wants the curtain lifted on their glitzy dreams, the gritty truth exposed.
Leaning over my top bunk, I reach out for the letter. Hal doesn’t hand it over.
“Not until we’ve come up with a game plan for the apartment,” she says. “We’ve been short on rent the past three months. Larry’s
turning on us, even with the extra weed I got him last month.” She huffs at the injustice of our landlord’s immorality. “EJ,
don’t take this personally, but you’re the weak link as far as the finances go. Me and Tara have been covering you for a while
now.”
“You haven’t had an actual income in years,” I scowl to Hal.
“True, but I’ve mastered the art of winning entrepreneurship grants,” Hal says. “It’s not much but covers costs.”
“I give you all my profits from driving Uber and working at Kora,” I say. It’s nearly correct, after you deduct the portion
I spend on healthcare and gas and food and drinks and subway fare and myriad other costs of keeping yourself alive as an adult
in this day and age. “And I nearly always cover the tab at the House of Yes. You’re penalizing my generosity.”
“I don’t want to get into the weeds of it all,” Hal says. “You just need to find a way to contribute your eight hundred per
month. Can you do that?”
It feels like a threat. “Or what?”
“Or Astrid will move in to fill the difference,” Hal says swiftly, like this wasn’t a spontaneous ambush at all. Like it was
a planned coup. If Tara didn’t look so disoriented, eyes all puffed and wide, I’d think she was in on it too. “Your pick,”
Hal says.
“Eviction is expensive for landlords,” I say. “And the law is on the tenants’ side in New York. His threat is empty. We’ve got a few more months at least.”
“Maybe,” Hal says. “Maybe not.”
“I don’t mind the Astrid idea,” Tara says. She’s operating from fear, imploding too soon. “We’d have four of us again.”
“That’s out of the question,” I say, and then go on to suggest that we start charging Astrid for when she stays over, thirty
dollars a night or something like that. “It’s peanuts compared to the billions of dollars that your start-up will be worth.”
Hal bites back, says the business isn’t out of stealth mode yet. “We won’t be revenue-positive for another twelve months at
least,” she says. “Empires aren’t built overnight, EJ.”
“I’ll pay the eight hundred,” I say, after a few more arguments that loop around my waist like Hula-Hoops, falling to the
ground with a rattle. “I just need a little more time.”
“It’s August nineteenth now,” Hal says, arms folded. “You have until the thirty-first.”
“No problem,” I say. “I’ll speak with my financial advisor about having some funds transferred from my investment accounts.”
“You don’t have a financial advisor,” Hal snaps. “Or investment accounts.”
“Sure I do.” Accidentally, I think about Chris and how I used to think he’d be there to help me with my taxes, my least favorite
thing in the world. Loss presses into me again, like it’s leaning on me for balance. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe
I need the sorrow to stand, to fill the space that’s been singed. “I just don’t want to liquidate my assets given the current
bull market dynamics in US equities,” I say.
Hal appears pleasantly stunned. It’s always insulting how she thinks I don’t know anything about money and business. Even
if I did only learn this much from the financial podcasts she blares in the garden, plus some articles I read back when I
was trying to learn more about Chris and what he does all day.
“Look, I’m sorry for being harsh here,” Hal says. “I just don’t want us to have to move out of the Dunge Inn.”
“Me neither,” I say. The thought of having to relocate terrifies me. The Inn is where the Redstockings belong. It’s our headquarters.
“Good,” Hal says, turning to leave. “Oh, and here’s that letter.” She tosses it up so it lands on my messy sheets.
The handwriting is sticklike and scruffy, no return address label. The envelope is secured with little pieces of tape, as
if the sender didn’t trust the seal of their own spit. Opening it, I find a page of perforated lined paper. It looks to have
been torn carefully from a work notebook, folded exactly in half. Eyes skipping to the bottom, I see the signature. Chris.
Only then, once it’s confirmed, do I allow myself to backtrack to the hope that this might be him offering the olive branch
I was never going to give. It takes forever to decipher the note—not because I’m poring over each word or anything, but because
his writing is just chicken scratch.
It’s an apology but not a stellar one, just a few quick sentences about how he took his emotions out on me, and how that was
wrong and he hopes we can still be friends. I read it over a few times before making my judgment because I’m fair like that.
In the end, I decide I don’t like it at all, mostly because who writes a letter to someone who lives in your same city? It’s
a total cop-out. Also, if he actually felt bad, he’d write more. I mean, I churned out sixty-seven and a half pages about
him—not that I mailed them to him, but still. It feels like the bare minimum, just a wimpy little confession to ease his Catholic
guilt.
I head out for a walk to throw away the letter. No need for it to clutter up the Inn. Each garbage can and dumpster I pass,
I think about tossing it in, but I don’t like the idea of someone rummaging through the trash and reading it. By the time
I get to the Williamsburg Bridge, I still haven’t found a suitable disposal location.
I walk onto the bridge and halt when I’m partway across. It’s rare for me to be up this early. The tangy morning air with a newness you don’t get by noon. Crepe-paper clouds strewn about the baby-blue sky. The Manhattan skyline spliced by chunky rays of sun, or maybe the sun spliced by the skyline.
Cars rumble below, cyclists whiz past. It’s almost hard to tell if they’re the ones moving or if I am. The theory of relativity
can really get you sometimes, but the point is everyone’s rushing to get nowhere except me. I’m standing still to get somewhere.
I drink in the summer morning like a cold beer. It washes down easily, stirs in me some forgotten knowledge about the scale
and scope of the world and why I was dropped into it.
Not that there’s any greater purpose, any divine intention. I was randomly born, just as I’ll randomly die. Just as Luke randomly
died, leaving Chris with the memories and mutilations that come from loving mortals, from being stupid enough to attach ourselves
to other humans, delicate champagne flutes that cut us with jagged debris once they’re destroyed and we’re forced to keep
standing. Clinging to old cuts, tracing new ones just to remind us of what once was, what will never be again.
The impermanence of it all, the futility, makes me want to smooth things over with Chris. I type out a text and nearly send
it, but I don’t. I delete it letter by letter until no one will be able to prove it was ever there at all. Then, with the
quick flick of my wrist, I toss Chris’s letter over the side of the bridge, through the grated guardrails. It flutters, then
falls.
There’s a wrench of remorse for polluting the river—not that it really matters since the earth is being destroyed by humans
anyway. A single piece of paper isn’t to blame. One little person can’t wreck anything, can’t fix anything.
On the walk home, I pass one of my favorite street performers who always camps out on Knickerbocker Avenue, just outside the laundromat. Elijah is his name. He’s this older guy who wears the same Christmas tree sweater vest even in summer and plays the trumpet like he’s at Carnegie Hall.
The music hits extra hard today, or extra softly I should say, because it gives me the feeling that my bones are gelatin,
like I’m just learning how to walk again or something. I have to sit down on the cigarette-and-candy-wrapper-littered curb
to regain my balance. But Elijah’s gritty trumpet melodies keep knocking me over again, one note at a time.
The jackhammers and wind gusts and car horns try to drag the music away, but it has a hefty quality, staying put. Like it’s
trying to remind me of something I’ve intentionally forgotten and have no desire to remember. Because as much as I despise
the status quo, I guess I don’t like change that much either.