until after they were gone, that when she’d first arrived, she’d opened all the doors along the hall. But when the bulb went out, they’d all been closed.
So, who had closed them?
4
Going Gently Into That Good Night (Iniquitous Darlings)
The first thing she did was situate the cactus. It went on the turret’s ledge in the den, where at least some sunlight filtered. It was Saraub who’d named him. About a month after she moved to his place on York Avenue, he’d written “Wolverine” in neat, black pen on a swatch of masking tape, and stuck it to the side of the orange planter. “Little guy needs a name,” he’d told her, like he’d been worried about the prickly member of their family for a while now and had finally done something about it.
With Wolverine securely placed, she painted the far walls in both bedrooms. She’d decided to go with Calvin Klein metallic white; cheerful, but not ridiculous. After that, she hung her drafts along the hall. Most were sketches of the mourning garden above the Parkside Plaza office building on 59th Street that she’d been working on since she’d started at Vesuvius. It was coming along more slowly than anyone had anticipated, which nobody at the office was happy about. Tomorrow morning was the next status report, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. There was the distinct possibility that heads would roll, or at least shamble to the unemployment line.
After unpacking, she camped out on an air mattress in the den and flipped to the TBS Classic Television Marathon. Somebody was still paying the cable bill, which was handy, if unsettling. Clara had killed her family in July.
Out the turret window, couples and large groups scurried toward their destinations. A crowd spilled out of the Columbia hangout The Hungarian Pastry Shop, where grad students carved oh-so-deep aphorisms (“God is dead!” “Let the river run, let all the dreamers take the nation!” “I text: therefore I am” “Rick Wormwood Will Light Your Fire!”) into the pine tables. She was too high up to hear their laughter, but she could see their distant smiles. She looked at her watch: 7:30 on a crisp fall Sunday night. The kind of night so alive that you can almost hear the city’s beating heart down in Times Square. Here she was, all moved in.
And it was very quiet.
Living with Saraub, she’d gotten used to low-level background chatter whenever she was home. He talked on the phone with Los Angeles a lot. Producers, agents, studio executives, secretaries, and crazy people, who tended to encompass all of the previous. For as long as she’d known him, he’d been trying to get financing for his documentary about the privatization of natural resources, Maginot Lines.
Last she’d heard, he was close. But that was Hollywood, he’d once explained. Even the shoeshine guy thinks he’s close to a green light. He paid the rent by directing commercials freelance. I New York was his biggest account. He’d been doing it for years now, and the thrill had worn off, but they both agreed that it was significantly better than shoveling coal.
She repositioned Wolverine. This time his name tag faced east. A stained-glass bird caught her attention. Its red eyes were disproportionately small, beady. “You’re weird,” she told it. “No offense.”
Her hands were spattered with paint, and she chewed on the cuticle of her left index finger. It tasted, well, metallic.
What was Saraub doing now? Had his mother set him up with another Indian dial-a-bride? Was he getting drunk every night alone? Or maybe his best friend Daniel, who never slept with the same woman twice because he didn’t want her getting clingy, was taking him to strip clubs.
Did something bad happen here? The mover had asked…How had he known?
She wished she had a little hash. Make that a lot of hash. Old school, three fatties a night back in Nebraska hash. Instead, she turned up the volume on the television—where Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw was explaining why sleeping with strangers is awesome, and sat Indian style on the inflated AeroBed, with her laptop balanced between her knees. Somebody close by had a wireless account (BettyBoop!), so she Googled “Remaining examples of Chaotic Naturalism.”
On the television, Carrie wore a washcloth for a dress and wondered whether men liked freckles. Online, the first entry that popped was a reprinted Cambridge University psychology thesis in a critical journal called Extrapolation:
Diary of the Dead: Casualties of Chaotic Naturalism