Muhammad Ali. The silk and satin of their uniforms, the hair spray and air kisses and twenty-dollar bills rolled into their bustiers. That’s what he’s taken from them.
They knew death was inevitable. Once they started with the needles, being surprised by death would have been like being surprised when you come to the other end of a piece of string. But he took their stories and changed the shape of them. Janes 1 and 2 share their greatest regret: that once they are found here, in the marsh, this will be the only story anyone will ever tell about them.
LILY
I GOT THE INTERVIEW AT the spa for one reason: my father worked as an electrician at the casino before he died and people still remembered his name. My mother made a phone call to a friend of Dad’s from the union, who put in another call to the facilities manager, who forwarded my résumé to the hiring manager, Deidre. We set up my interview for a Friday morning, two weeks exactly since I boarded a Greyhound bus from Port Authority and got off in Atlantic City, my eyes red from crying, my suitcase filled with a few things from the apartment I’d shared with Matthew. My future, which had once felt sturdy and assured, a ship I was steering, revealed itself to be much more fragile than that: a candy dish that I had mishandled. Now I was sweeping the pieces back into my hands, trying not to get cut.
The day of my interview, I stopped at the bar near the penny slots. It was only 11 a.m. but the bartender didn’t bat an eye when I ordered a vodka and soda. A slumped-over man two stools away glanced at me in a slow, side-eyed way that reminded me of a lizard, and the sweat from my palms left a stamp on the bar top. Already slot machines whirred around us. The lights’ glow brought out the crevices around gamblers’ mouths, the circles under their eyes, the sagging skin around their chins. Every now and then, some coins crashed out a metal chute or a cocktail waitress clicked by in her heels with a tray of screwdrivers, but mostly there was just the empty, meaningless dinging and the lethargic dim of a large room designed to keep out natural light.
The vodka stilled my nerves, which had been shot since I left the city. I checked my emails while I sipped my drink and saw that another blogger had written me, to ask for a comment on Matthew. I deleted the message. I had plenty to say about Matthew, but those were private, jilted thoughts, and I figured the only way I could salvage even a shred of dignity from the whole situation was to say nothing. The art world loved nothing as much as a controversy, but I’d retreated home for a chance to be someone else—a reprieve from humiliation as the central fact of my life. The week before I’d clicked on a link someone sent me to an article in Jezebel, only to be greeted with a photo of myself crying, my mouth hanging open in a dumb gape, mascara running down my cheeks in thick rivulets. Is This Art? the titled asked. I closed the browser window before I could read another word.
The vodka was cheap and had a sharp, medicinal taste, but soon enough its blunting warmth crept into my throat. I wasn’t worried about the job interview, but it was unsettling to be in Atlantic City again—coming home had filled me with an inarticulate dread. It was in the atmosphere, suggestive and hazy. In the feral cats that flattened themselves to shimmy through gaps in boarded-up storefronts. In the empty casinos that loomed along the boardwalk with darkened windows and chains slung across their doors. It was in the patrons lugging their oxygen tanks behind them on little wheeled carts, clear tubes running into their noses, and the tattered posters on the telephone poles pleading for information about a missing teenage girl. The entire town was like a dreamscape tilted toward nightmare.
I wanted a second drink but knew that would likely lead to a third, and whatever pity was being extended to me would evaporate if I showed up to the interview drunk. And, as much as I hated to admit it, I needed the job, needed the money if I was ever going to start over. It was only my second week back home,