seizure, as I sat bored and antsy in the hospital waiting room, I thought about that night, how preternaturally calm I’d been in that insane moment of crisis. I don’t believe in God as a big, bearded dude surrounded by winged angels, but I sort of wonder if that night with Edie was the universe testing me, like, Can he handle it? Is he gonna keep his head and take care of her, or is he gonna lose his shit?
And I kept it together, made her tie my black hoodie around her waist to cover the blood, shhh’ed her as she fretted through the boogers and tears about getting her blood all over it, got the name of the hospital out of the all-business paramedic to whom I for some reason wasn’t really a person, showed up in a cab myself a half-hour later and sat politely in the waiting room, headphones blaring, snoozing on and off, occasionally wandering to the front desk to make sure I hadn’t missed her.
When she finally stumbled back into the waiting room, she looked dead; her eyes were glazed and unfocused, fucking freaky, and she stared at me for a moment like I was a stranger, like whatever was happening inside her head was reality and I was part of this TV screen inconveniently stretching across her eyeballs. I waited for her to snap out of it, but after a few seconds I realized it wasn’t gonna happen, so I grabbed her arm and led her through the door, and we stood in the blazing sun as I called the only cab company in my phone.
If it was a test, I’m glad I passed it because now I have Evelyn and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. But Edie. Fucking pity. For two weeks I felt like a hero, all the more noble for being a secret one, and then bang, a bullet took her down, blood pouring out of her like spilled wine a second time in as many weeks.
Not a gun—my gun.
What kind of idiot keeps a sometimes-loaded gun in a huge catacomb of open doors and drugs and booze with drunks wandering in and out like sleepwalkers? How was I such a fucking idiot? There was a feeling of trust, though, one I can remember but can’t bring up, everyone sort of hating but mostly adoring everyone else in this secluded little scene, good people who were trying to make art and putting up with all the grossness of our building and New York City and themselves and one another in order to get there.
I remember a huge snowstorm sidelined the city late in the winter, and through some collective osmosis we all agreed to lock the doors to the outside and open the doors to our apartments and thus began a forty-eight-hour rager, bands jamming and joints passing hands and at one point throwing my body with four other near-strangers against the door to the roof, then running out shrieking and throwing snowballs and making angels in the snow. Someone put together a snowman and stuck a cigarette butt on it as a dick. We were all idiots, hopped up on camaraderie in a mostly scared and scorning outside world. But I was the idiot who owned a gun.
I would lock the trunk, that was my big smart move. That was, I figured, close enough to a gun safe. Only when the gun was loaded, when it was armed and dangerous on August the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st, in the year of our lord 2009, fucker was out just waiting for me to put it away. I spent a lot of time thinking about that the first year, walking through it in my mind frame by frame: how I came home on the 17th and dropped my messenger bag onto my bed where it sat for a few hours; how that evening I got out the pistol and the box of bullets and carried them into the living room, prepared to lock them away; how Edie had been in there on her laptop, had said something when I entered and we’d started to talk; how I’d registered that the trunk was still locked and my keys were back in the room and I’d take care of it later; and that’s when the scene sorta fades.
So many idiotic microdecisions, so many times I could have prevented the whole thing. I like to think there’s an