I’d like to throw it on the tracks and hold you as we wait for the train to run it down. There’s a reason it’s cracked and there’s a reason you left it in your basket at the bookshop that day. Deep down, you know you’d be better off without it. Nothing good comes from that phone. Don’t you see? You do see. Otherwise you’d treat that phone well. You’d have put it in a case before it cracked. You wouldn’t stand here fumbling with it and letting it dictate your life. I really do wish you’d throw it onto the tracks and go offline and turn your head and look over at me and say, “Don’t I know you?” And I’d play along and we’d talk and our song would be engine, engine, number nine on the New York transit line, if my train runs off the tracks—
“Can you please stop singing?” You growl, but the dude can’t even hear you over the singing and pissing and singing and pissing and you whip your head around too fast and damn it you need to not lean back like that but you do.
It happens so fast.
You reach out your arms but you’re wobbling. You drop your phone and you lunge to grab it and in the process you misstep—“Aaah!”—and you slip and trip on that damn shoelace and you fall splat and somehow you land the wrong way and you roll off the yellow danger zone and down into the actual danger zone. You scream. It’s the fastest slowest fall I’ve ever seen and you’re only a voice down on the tracks now, a shriek and his singing doesn’t stop, engine engine number nine, and it’s the wrong soundtrack for what I have to do now, bad back and all. I run across the platform, look down at you.
“HELP!”
“It’s okay, I got you. Gimme your hand.”
But you just scream again and you look like that girl in the well in The Silence of the Lambs and you don’t need to look so freaked out because I’m here, offering my hand, ready to pull you up. You’re shivering and staring down the tunnel and your head’s filling with fear when you need to just take my hand.
“Omigod, omigod I could die.”
“Don’t look that way, just look at me.”
“I’m gonna die.”
You take a step forward and you know nothing of railroads. “Stay still, half the shit down there can electrocute you.”
“What?” And your teeth chatter and you scream.
“You’re not dying. Take my hand.”
“He’s making me crazy,” you say and you block your ears because you don’t want to hear if my train runs off the tracks anymore. “That singing, that’s why I fell.”
“I’m trying to help you,” I insist and your eyes pop. You look down the tunnel and then up, right into my eyes.
“I hear a train.”
“Nah, you’d feel it. Gimme your hand.”
“I’m gonna die.” You despair.
“Take my hand!”
The homeless dude croons as if we’re a nuisance he’s got to outsing pick it up pick it up pick it up and you cover your ears and scream.
I’m getting impatient and an engine will come on these tracks eventually and why are you making this so hard?
“You wanna get killed? Because if you stay down here you will get run over. Take my hand!”
You look up and now I see a part of you that’s new to me, a part that does want to be killed and I don’t think you’ve ever been loved the right way and you don’t say anything and I don’t say anything and we both know that you’re testing me, testing the world. You didn’t get off that stage tonight until the last person stopped clapping and you didn’t tie your shoelaces and you blamed the world when you tripped.
Pick it up pick it up! Engine, engine, number nine
I nod. “Okay.” I reach down with my arms, palms up. “Come on. I got you.”
You want to fight. You are not easily rescued but I am patient and when you are ready, you wrap your hands around my shoulders and allow me to save you. I hoist you, loose sneakers and all, onto the yellow danger zone and then roll you onto the dirty gray danger-free concrete and you’re shaking and you hold your knees to your chest as you scoot backward into the part of the green pole that faces inward, the safe place to sit, to wait.
You still don’t tie your shoelaces and your teeth chatter more than ever and I scoot closer to you and I point at your useless, flat, nonathletic sneakers. “May I?” I ask and you nod.
I pull the laces tight and tie them in double knots the way my cousin taught me a hundred years ago. When the train sounds down the way, your teeth stop chattering, and you don’t look so scared anymore. I don’t have to tell you that I saved your life. I can see in your eyes and your glistening, grimy skin that you know it. We don’t get on the train when the doors open. That’s a given.
6
THE cab driver was reluctant at first. I guess I would be too. We look crazy from the near death of it all. You’re a fucking mess. I’m so clean that it’s almost disturbing, pimp-clean to your whore-dirty. We’re a true pair.
“But the thing is,” you say, going over the recent events for the umpteenth time, your legs folded under, your arms flailing as you speak. “The thing is, at the end of the day, I couldn’t live if that guy wasn’t gonna stop singing. I mean I know I must have seemed crazy.”
“Nuts.”
“But I had a bad night, and at some point you have to set rules, you know? You have to say, I will not put up with this. I will die before I continue to live in a world where this guy will not stop singing and polluting a shared environment.”
You sigh and I love you for trying to spin this into some sort of strike against complacency and what fun it is to play with you. “Still, you were pretty drunk.”
“Well, I think I would have done the same thing sober.”
“What if he’d been singing the Roger Miller version?”
You laugh and you don’t know who Roger Miller is but most of the people in our generation don’t know and your eyes narrow and you stroke your chin and here you go again, for the fourth time. Yes, I’m counting.
“Okay, did you ever spend a summer working on a ferry?”
“Nope,” I say. You are convinced you know me somehow. You have said you know me from college, from grad school, from a bar in Williamsburg, and now, from the ferry.
“But, I swear I know you. I know I know you from somewhere.”
I shrug and you examine me and it feels so good, your eyes hunting me.
“You just feel close to me because you fell and I was there.”
“You were there, weren’t you? I’m lucky.”
I shouldn’t look away but I do and I can’t think of anything to say and I wish the cab driver were the kind to babble intermittently.
“So what were you up to tonight?” you ask me.
“Working.”
“Are you a bartender?”
“Yeah.”
“That must be so much fun. Getting people’s stories.”
“It is,” I say, careful not to reveal that I know you write stories. “It’s fun.”
“Tell me the best story you heard this week.”
“The best?”
You nod and I want to kiss you. I want to take you onto the tracks before engine engine number nine grinds to a halt and swallows you whole and fuck the drunk out of you until the New York transit line swallows us both. It’s too hot in here and it’s too cold out there and it smells like burritos and blow jobs, middle-of-the-night New York. I love you is all I want to say so I scratch my head. “Hard to pick one, ya know?”
“Okay, look,” you say and you swallow, bite your lip, redden. “I didn’t want to freak you out and be, like, this psycho who remembers every tiny little social situation she gets herself into or whatever, but I was lying. I do know how I know you.”
“You do?”
“The bookstore.” And you smile that Portman smile and I pretend not to recognize you and you wave those hands. Such small hands. “We talked about Dan Brown.”
“That’s most days.”
“Paula Fox,” you say and you nod, proud, and graze my arm with your hand.
<
br /> “Aah,” I say. “Paula Fox and Spalding Gray.”
You clap and you almost kiss me but you don’t and you recover and sit back and cross your legs. “You must think I’m a fucking lunatic, right? You must talk to like fifty girls a day.”
“God, no.”
“Thanks,” you say.
“I talk to at least seventy girls a day.”
“Ha.” And you roll your eyes. “So you don’t think I’m, like, stalker-crazy.”
“No, not at all.”
My middle school health teacher told us that you can hold eye contact for ten seconds before scaring or seducing someone. I am counting and I think you can tell.
“So true. Which bar do you work at down there? Maybe I’ll come by for a drink.”
I won’t judge you for trying to reduce me to someone who services you, who rings up your books and delivers your picklebacks.
“I just fill in there. Mostly I’m at the bookstore.”
“A bar and a bookstore. Cool.”
The cab rolls to a stop on West Fourth Street.
“Is this you?” I ask and you like me for being deferential.
“Actually,” you say and you lean forward. “I’m just around the corner.”
You sit back and look at me and I smile. “Bank Street. Not too shabby.”
You play. “I’m an heiress.”
“What kind?”
“Bacon,” you sass and a lot of girls would have gone blank.
We are here, at your place. You are looking in your purse for your phone that is on the seat between us, closer to me than you, and the driver shifts. We’re in park.
“Here we go again with me and the always disappearing phone.”
Someone raps on the car door. I jolt. The motherfucker actually knocks on the window. Benji. You reach across me and roll down the window. I smell you. Pickles and tits.
“Benji, omigod, this is the saint who saved my life.”
“Good job, dude. Fucking Greenpoint, right? Nothing good happens there.”
He raises his hand for a high five and I meet his hand and you are sliding away from me and everything is wrong.
“I can’t believe this but I think I lost my phone.”
“Again?” he says and he walks away and he lights a cigarette and you sigh.
“He seems like a jerk but, you have to understand, I lose my phone all the time.”
“What’s your number?” I blurt and you look out the window at Benji and then look back at me. He’s not your boyfriend but you’re acting like he’s your boyfriend.
I’m good, calm. “Beck,” I say. “I need your number or your e-mail or something in case I find your phone.”
“Sorry,” you say. “I just spaced. I think I’m still kind of freaked out. Do you have a pen?”
“No,” I say and thank God that when I pull a phone out of my pocket it’s mine and not yours. You give me your e-mail address. You’re mine now and Benji calls, “You coming or what?”
You sigh.
“Thank you so much.”
“Every time.”
“I like that. Every time. Instead of ‘anytime.’ It’s pointed.”
“Well, I mean it.”
Our first date ends and you’re going upstairs and fucking the shit out of Benji but it doesn’t matter, Beck. Our phones are together and you know that I know where you live and I know that you know where to find me.
7
MY thoughts are firing too fast (you, me, your tights, your phone, Benji) and when I get like this there’s only one place for me to go. I walk to the shop, go to the way back and unlock the basement door. I close it behind me and stand in the vestibule that looks to Curtis, to anyone, like a storage closet. I fish in my pocket for the true key, the key that unlocks the next door, the final barricade between the shop and the soundproof basement. I lock the door behind me and by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs I am smiling because there it is, our beautiful, enormous, beastly enclosure: the cage.
“Cage” really isn’t the right word, Beck. For one thing, it’s huge, almost as big as the entire fiction section upstairs. It’s not a clunky metal trap you’d find in a prison cell or a pet shop. It’s more like a chapel than a cage and I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank Lloyd Wright had a hand in the design, what with the stark mahogany beams as smooth as they are heavy. The walls are genius acrylic, unbreakable yet breathable. It’s mystical, Beck, you’ll see. Half the time, when collectors write fat checks for old books, I think they’re under the spell of the cage. And it’s practical too. There’s a bathroom, a tiny stall with a tiny toilet because Mr. Mooney would never go upstairs for “something as banal as a bowel movement.” The books are on high shelves accessible only by climbing a ladder. (Good luck, thieves.) There’s a small sliding drawer in the front wall, the kind they use at a gas station in a sketchy neighborhood. I unlock the door and go inside. I’m inside and I look up at the books and I smile. “Hi, guys.”
I take off my shoes and lie back on the bench. I fold my hands under my head and tell the books all about you. They listen, Beck. I know it sounds crazy, but they do. I close my eyes. I remember the day we got this cage. I was fifteen and I’d been working for Mr. Mooney for a few months. He told me to come in to meet the truck at eight sharp. I was on time but the delivery guys from Custom Acrylics didn’t show up until ten. The guy behind the wheel beeped and waved for us to come outside. Mr. Mooney told me to observe as the driver yelled over the roar of the engine, “Is this Mooney Books?”
Mr. Mooney looked at me, disgusted by Philistines who can’t be bothered to read the sign above the shop. He looked at the driver. “Do you have my cage?”
The driver spat. “I can’t get this cage in that shop. Everything’s in parts, guy. The beams are fifteen feet long and the walls are too friggin’ wide to get through that door.”
“Both doors open,” said Mr. Mooney. “And we have all the time in the world.”
“It ain’t about time.” He sniffed and he looked at the other dude in the truck and I knew that they weren’t on our side. “With all due respect, we usually put these babies together in backyards, mansions, big open spaces, ya know?”
“The basement is both big and open,” said Mr. Mooney.
“You think we’re getting this fucking beast into a basement?”
Mr. Mooney was stern. “Don’t swear in front of the boy.”
The guys had to make at least two dozen trips, lugging beams and walls out of the truck, through the shop, and down the stairs. Mr. Mooney said not to feel bad for them. “They’re working,” he told me. “Labor is good for people, Joseph. Just watch.”
I couldn’t imagine what the cage would look like when it was done, if it was ever done. The beams were so dark and old-fashioned and the walls were so transparent and modern. I couldn’t imagine them coming together until Mr. Mooney finally called me downstairs. I was in awe. So were the delivery guys. “Biggest one ever,” said the sweaty driver. “You keeping African grays? I friggin’ love those birds. They talk, so cool.”
Mr. Mooney didn’t answer him. Neither did I.
He tried again. “Your shelves are wicked high, mister. You sure you don’t want us to move ’em down? Most people want the shelves, like, in the middle.”
Mr. Mooney spoke, “The boy and I have a lot of work to do.”
The driver nodded. “You can get a shit ton of birds in here. Pardon my French.”
After they left, Mr. Mooney locked the shop and told me the delivery dolts were no better than the wealthy sadists who keep birds in cages. “There’s no such thing as a flying cage, Joseph,” he said. “The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can’t fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly. Only a monster would lock a bird in here and call himself an animal lover.”
Our cage was only for books and Mr. Mooney wasn’t kidding. We did have a lot of work to do. Workmen installed sealant in the walls that rendered the entire basement soundproof. More wo
rkmen came and built and expanded the back wall of the shop so that the door to the basement opened first into a vestibule that contained the real door to the basement. We were building a top secret, soundproof clubhouse in the earth and I woke up so excited every day. I assisted Mr. Mooney as he wrapped dust jackets in custom-fit acrylic cases (gently, Joseph), before placing the jacketed books into acrylic boxes with air holes (gently, Joseph). Then he put that box into a slightly larger metal box (gently, Joseph), with a label and a lock. When we had ten books or so, he would climb a ladder in the cage and I would pass him the books one at a time (gently, Joseph), and he would set them on those wicked high shelves. I asked him why we had to go through so much trouble for books. “Books can’t fly away,” I said. “They’re not birds.”
The next day, he brought me a set of Russian nesting dolls. “Open,” he said. “Gently, Joseph.”
I popped one doll in half and got another doll and popped that doll in half and got another doll and so on until the final doll that could not be popped in half, the only whole doll in the bunch. “Everything valuable must be hidden,” he said. “Or else.”
And now you pop into my head and you’re more beautiful than a doll and you’ll love it in here, Beck. You’ll see it as a refuge for sacred books, the authors you love. You’ll be in awe of me, the key master and I’ll show you my remote control that operates the air conditioners and humidifiers. You’ll want to hold it and I’ll let you and I’ll explain that if I wanted to, I could jack up the heat and cook these books and they’d turn to mold and dust and be gone, forever. If there’s any girl on Earth who would appreciate my power, it’s lovely, unpublished you in your little yellow stockings with your dream of writing something good enough to get you inside this cage. You’d drop your panties to get in here, to live in here, forever. I drop my own drawers and cum so hard that I go deaf.
Fuck. You are good. I try to stand. I am dizzy. Gently, Joseph.
It’s almost time to open and I catch my breath and I go upstairs. There are only two of us who work here now that Mr. Mooney is retired. There’s Curtis, a high school kid, kinda like I was back in the day. He does stupid stuff just like I did. Heck, when I was sixteen years old, Mr. Mooney gave me a key, and of course, one night I forgot to close the cage.