“I see her,” I say to him, covering my sudden irrational panic. “It’s not a problem.”
“We can reach her, if your nana needs to be reached,” the psychic explains with apparent impatience. “If she has something in this world holding her back.”
“Told you,” Tyler says to me.
“What, you saying my nana’s not at peace, and it’s my fault?” the girl’s voice rises.
“I’ll take care of it,” I say to Tyler.
“No, no,” the psychic backpedals. “That’s not what I meant.”
“You can trust Madame Blavatsky, sweetie.” One of the mom types tries to soothe the girl with the baby. “But you should let her get started.”
The weird crawling sensation spreads across my neck again, but I can’t rub it away because I’m busy climbing back around the periphery of the room to reach the girl with the satin bow. She’s just standing there, not talking to anyone, looking down at her hands. My heart is tripping along so fast, I’m having trouble catching my breath. I don’t want to make her feel weird or anything. I also kind of hate talking to people. But more than that, she’s . . .
“Yes, we really can’t wait any longer,” the woman in the turban says. “Spirits only have limited time, once summoned, to resolve their unfinished business. If we don’t act quickly, we risk damning them to an eternity in the in-between.”
The medium’s starting to get pissed off. I’m not positive, but I think Tyler’s paid her for letting us film. Which we’re not supposed to do for workshop, but whatever. She sounds really annoyed. I don’t blame her. I’m kind of annoyed. At Tyler, mostly, for dragging me along to do sound when I could be working on my own film. Should be working on my own film, especially considering how much is riding on it. In fact, all I want is to be working on my own film. But I find myself pulled into other people’s stuff a lot. I get caught up.
“What do you mean, limited?” asks the guy in the Rangers jersey. “Like, they on the clock or something?”
Tyler thinks he’s going to be the next Matthew Barney. He’s doing an experimental film of people in what he calls “transcendental states,” using all different film stock and filters and weird editing tricks that he’s refused to reveal to me. I don’t think we’re going to see much in the way of transcendental states in a palm reader shop upstairs from an East Village pizzeria. But we already spent the afternoon with the AX1 filming drummers in Washington Square Park. I think he’s running out of ideas.
“Or something,” the medium says, and when she says it, a sickening chill moves down my spine.
The girl with the satin bow on her dress is standing on the opposite side of the room from the camera, not far from where I stashed the mike, looking nervous, like she’s doing her best to blend into the wall. She’s awkwardly close to the edge of the table. Nobody seems to notice her, a fact that causes my ears to buzz.
Now that I’ve seen her, I feel like she can never be unseen. She looks . . . I suck at describing people, and beautiful feels especially pathetic. But the truth is, I don’t understand how I haven’t been staring at her the whole time we’ve been here. As I edge nearer, my blood moves faster in my veins and I swallow, a fresh trickle of sweat making its way down my rib cage. I can feel her getting closer. Like I can sense where she is even when I can’t see her. She’s not paying any attention to me, her head half turned away, looking around at the walls with interest.
The girl is so self-contained, so aloof from all of us, that she seems untouchable. Watching her ignore my approach, I wonder how you become someone that other people make room for, whether they know it or not.
She’s wearing one of those intense deconstructed dresses they sell in SoHo. My roommate, Eastlin, is studying fashion design, and he’s got a sweet internship in an atelier for the summer. He took me to the store where he works one time and showed me this piece of clothing, which he said was a dress, which was dishwater-gray and frayed around the edges, covered in hooks and eyes and zippers and ribbons. I couldn’t really understand what the appeal was. To me it looked like something I’d find in a trunk in my grandmother’s attic. When he told me how much it cost I dropped the sleeve I was holding because I was afraid I’d snag a thread and have to take out another student loan.
I’m definitely afraid to touch this girl’s dress. Seeing how she wears it, though, I begin to understand what Eastlin’s talking about. Her neckline reveals a distracting bareness of collarbones. Her hair is brushed forward in curls over her ears in some bizarre arrangement that I think I saw on a few hipster girls in Williamsburg when Tyler took me out drinking there. She must sense me staring at her. Why won’t she look at me? But she’s finished her examination of the curtains, and if she’s noticed me approaching her, she’s not letting on. As I move nearer, near enough that I can practically sense the electrical impulses under her skin, she steps back, retreating from the edge of the table into the red curtain folds along the wall. I glance at Tyler, and he waves to indicate that she’s still in the shot, and I should get her to sit down already.
My heart thuds loudly once, twice. Up close, her skin looks as smooth as buttermilk. Milk soft. Cool to the touch.
I want to touch the skin at the base of her throat.
This thought floats up in my mind so naturally that I don’t even notice how creepy I sound.
“Hey,” I manage to whisper, drawing up next to her. It comes out husky, and I cough to cover it up.
She doesn’t hear me. At least, she doesn’t respond. My cheeks grow warm. I hate talking to people I don’t know. I hate it more than going to the dentist, I hate it more than taking SATs or doing French homework or stalling a stick-shift car with my dad in the passenger seat.
“When everyone is seated, we’ll finally begin,” the woman in the middle of the room says pointedly. A few eyes swivel over to stare at me trying to talk to the girl, and my flush deepens.
“Listen,” I whisper in desperation, reaching a hand forward to brush the girl’s elbow.
The instant my fingers make contact, the girl’s head turns and she stares at me. Not at me—into me. I feel her staring, and as the lashes over her eyes flutter with something close to recognition it’s like no one has ever really seen me before her.
Her face is pale, bluish and flawless except for one dark mole on her upper lip, and twin dark eyebrows drawn down over her eyes. As we gaze at each other I can somehow make out every detail of her face, and none of them. When I concentrate I can only see the haze of incense smoke, but when I don’t try too hard I can trace the curve of her nose, the slope of her cheeks, the line where lip meets skin. Her eyes are obsidian black, and when she sees me, her lips part with a smile, as if she’s about to say something.
I recoil, taking a step backward without thinking, landing my heel hard against the boom. The microphone starts to fall, and I fumble to catch it before it hits the girl with the gelled ponytail and the baby, and I nearly go down in a tangle of wires and headphones and equipment.
“Dude!” Tyler chastises me from behind the camera.
He’s laughing, and some of the people around the table are joining in. The guy in the Rangers jersey pulls out his phone and snaps a picture of me glaring at Tyler. The girl with the neck tattoo smiles at me out of the corner of her mouth and starts a slow clap, but fortunately nobody joins in and after a few slow claps alone she stops and looks away.
“It’s fine,” I mutter. “I’ve got it under control.”
“Whatever,” Tyler says, pressing his eye to the viewfinder and panning across the people’s faces. They’ve started to join hands.
Once I’ve gotten the headphones back on and the boom mike hoisted over my head, balanced unobtrusively over the table so I can pick up the soft breathing of all the New Yorkers in this second-floor room on the Bowery, I check to see if the girl in the deconstructed dress is still hiding against the velvet curtain.
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I don’t see her.
The woman in the turban has blown out all but the candles in the sconces on the wall, plunging the table into an intimate darkness with everyone’s face in shadow. In my headphones I hear Tyler whistle softly under his breath, and I imagine that the scene looks pretty intense through the softening filter.
“Now,” the woman breathes. “We shall invite the spirits to join our circle, if everyone is ready.”
I get a better grip on the boom, balancing my weight between my feet and settling in. The woman in the turban told us it would only take about forty-five minutes. But forty-five minutes can feel like an eternity, sometimes.
CHAPTER 2
Well, that sucked,” Tyler says. He pulls on the gelled tips of his faux hawk with irritation.
“No kidding,” I agree, fastening closed the audio equipment case with a final click. People are filing out all around us. Some of them look embarrassed. The banker guy was the first one out the door.
“I don’t know how they expect us to make an art film when nothing interesting ever actually happens here,” he continues.
“Tyler,” I mutter to him.
“What?” he says.
I glance pointedly at the woman in the head scarf, who can absolutely still hear us. She’s tidying up all the objects on her séance table, pretending like she can’t. The crystals clink together in her hands.
“Whatever,” Tyler dismisses me. “We should’ve done it on skateboarding. Those guys are always easy to find. And they love being on film. It would’ve basically directed itself.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. Because what the world needs is another student film about skateboarding as a transcendent state. That’s definitely the most interesting thing happening in New York City right now. As if.
“I’ll wait for you outside,” he says, shouldering a bag of equipment and pulling out his phone.
I nod, not looking at him while he leaves. I’m waiting for him to go. I want to try to talk to her. If I can work myself up to actually doing it, that is.
Some of the other people are loitering, too, like they want to talk to the woman in the turban. I know I should be going. We’ve signed up for the editing room tonight to work with Tyler’s digital footage, but it closes at eleven, and the sooner I can get this project finished, the happier I’ll be. I pretend to reach into the box to adjust the coils of wire inside. Really, I’m listening, and looking under my eyelashes to see where the girl with the hipster-curled hair is. One of the khaki mom types is talking to the woman in the head scarf in a low voice. The girl in the gelled ponytail eyes me, jostling the baby over her shoulder. I was pretty impressed that the baby didn’t cry, what with the dark and the chanting and everything. Especially when all the candles went out. That was a pretty cool trick. I wonder how the woman in the head scarf did it.
I glance sidelong at the ponytail girl, quick so she won’t notice. That girl has got to be like three years younger than me. That must really suck, having a baby in high school. She’s petite, and the baby is just a little guy, who’ll probably be small like she is. I let my eye roam down her body, which is tight and young. She’s in those uptown jeans, the ones that make a girl’s ass look really high, and she’s wearing huge gold hoop earrings. The baby has his fist around one of the earrings, gumming it. I guess I can see how it would happen. But even so. God. A baby.
“The hell you lookin’ at, huh?” the girl snaps, glaring at me. She shuffles the baby onto her other hip, freeing the earring as she does so.
Dammit.
“Nothing,” I mutter, looking down fixedly at the audio equipment box. “Sorry.”
“That’s right,” she says, turning her back to me.
Well, that’s just great. Caught checking out the unwed underage teen mother. I am an asshole.
My hands rush around to finish packing the audio equipment. I figure it’ll take Tyler and me about two hours to edit the digital footage into a rough cut tonight, and then over the weekend I can slap on some transitional music and headings or whatever, and he’ll get the 16 millimeter film back from the developer early next week and we can edit it in with the digital and then get this over with. Then I never have to see any of these people again.
“Busted,” whispers a young woman’s voice not far from my ear.
“Huh?” I glance up and find the girl with tattoos and Bettie Page bangs standing directly in front of me, her arms folded.
I struggle up to my feet, trying not to look at anyone. I definitely don’t want to catch myself looking at my accuser’s tattoos. She has starkly inked black laurel leaves coiling over her chest and up her neck, and the fold of her arms makes her breasts swell a little under her tank top. I swallow, looking fleetingly at her face, and then hard at a spot six inches above her left shoulder.
“Don’t feel bad,” says the tattooed girl. “I was staring, too.”
Someone pulls open a cheap velvet curtain, exposing the picture window overlooking the Bowery. The window lights up with the orange chemical glare of the streetlights below, tinted red by the neon sign advertising the medium’s services: PALMISTRY CLAIRVOYANT PSYCHIC TAROT $15. Outside, taxi horns, and the wet roll of tires through streets hot with tar.
“Bye, Madame Blavatsky,” someone calls on her way out the door. The bell overhead jingles.
I look more curiously at this girl’s face. Under all the eyeliner and black lipstick and tattoos she’s actually pretty. Younger than I thought at first. My age, basically, so, like, nineteen. She has a snub nose and pale eyebrows, which suggest that the black dye in her hair hides an agreeable dirty blond. The red light from the neon sign makes her skin look creamy and pale.
“Yeah,” I say, because I’m really smooth like that.
More of the people are filing out around us. The guy in the Rangers jersey left like ten minutes ago, never looking up from his phone. I glance over the tattooed girl’s shoulder, searching for the girl with the deconstructed dress. I haven’t seen her since the lights came back on. I don’t know where she could have gone, since Tyler’s tripod was blocking the only other door.
“So what did you and your friend think?” she asks.
“Um . . .” I hesitate.
The truth is, I thought it was a waste of time, and I’m pretty sure Tyler thought so, too. Everybody held hands and chanted, and the medium said some stuff and then all the candles blew out. But then there was a long wait and as far as I can tell nothing happened. One of the moms started crying. Then the medium busted out some matches and lit all the tea lights again and then there was a little more chanting and then it was over. I didn’t see anyone in what Tyler might call a transcendent state. The atmosphere was spooky. I was ready to be freaked out. But then, nothing.
I’m on the point of saying this to the punk girl, but I stop myself. What if she comes here all the time? Maybe she takes it seriously. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I peer at her face, probing it for clues, trying to read what she wants me to say. But besides a lip piercing that I didn’t notice before, all I see is a girl’s warm smiling goth-made-up face.
“I guess it was interesting,” I hedge. “I mean, I hadn’t been before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. But it was kind of cool, I guess. I liked when the candles all went out. That was freaky. What did you think?”
“Eh.” She shrugs, hoisting an army surplus backpack over her shoulder. “I don’t really care. I just come here to sleep.”
“What?” I blink.
“It’s okay,” she says, taking my elbow. “Madame Blavatsky”—she gives the name ironic emphasis—“never remembers me.”
I was going to ask the medium to sign the release form that Professor Krauss told us to use for any projects that we want to put on the web—and I know Tyler’s going to put this on his Vimeo, because he won’t shut up about it—but this girl is dragging me by the elbow and anywa
y the medium’s busy talking to the girl with the baby. I hesitate. I don’t want Professor Krauss to tell us we can’t use the footage without the release. But then I think, Screw it. It’s just a summer school project. Nobody cares. It’s not like anyone’s ever going to see it anyway, besides at workshop.
“I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t remember you,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t.
The tattooed girl gives me a coy smile over her shoulder, takes my hand in hers, and leads me to the door. I’m dragging my feet, because I haven’t seen the other girl yet, and I really wanted to talk to her. I thought for sure she’d . . . I mean, the way she looked at me, I thought . . . But I guess, if she wanted to talk to me, she’d have stuck around.
I’m weirdly disappointed. I mean, I didn’t even talk to her. Not really.
“That was a nice line,” the girl with the bangs says as she drags me down the stairs to the street. “Almost like you didn’t even plan it. Come on. I’ll let you buy me a slice.”
The first floor of the psychic parlor’s building houses a no-name pizzeria, one of those places with Formica counters and fluorescent lighting and a good-size plate of garlic knots for a dollar. I spot Tyler on the sidewalk outside, our camera equipment heaped around his feet while he looks at his phone. He hasn’t noticed us come out.
“Okay,” I say. Pizza is good medicine for disappointment.
It’s a hot night, damp from summer rain, and the pizzeria doors are propped open to the street to capture any passing breeze. I don’t even realize how hungry I am until the smells of cheese and garlic hit me. Saliva springs to my mouth, and I’m instantly starving.
We spend a minute staring slack-jawed at the menu board overhead, and then we’re at the front of the line and a guy in a stained apron is yelling at us. He chucks our slices into the oven, jerks his thumb at the lady behind the cash register, and by the time she’s taken my ten bucks the slices are out, paper plates and puddles of orange grease and fistfuls of tissue-thin napkins.