Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby

      1

      Impossible to remember what she thought it would be, what she’d imagined it looking like, now that she was here. The door was brown, and Kate stood staring at it in a kind of paralysis, winded after three flights of stairs, a confusion of keys splayed heavy in her palm. Much like the new suitcase at her feet, these keys seemed to be an ugly prop, an aid to some kind of performance.

      The apartment was owned by her mother’s onetime best friend, off on the postdivorce cliché of an around-the-world, Thailand et cetera trip. A week ago Kate had stared at this stranger’s face on a Skype screen, a face fussed with earrings and silk scarves, glitching in the sputtering Wi-Fi, exclaiming: “Oh, honey, I can’t believe you’ve never been to New York!” And then: “Oh my god, your mom and I had such adventures when we were your age. Because you gotta travel! You gotta live, you know?” And Kate didn’t know. Didn’t know what live meant, in this context. She suspected, though, that it meant something you’d see on a Pepsi commercial: jumping into a waterfall in your underwear, piling into an open-top car to the beach, that sort of thing. But she’d said “Absolutely” into the screen like she knew, like yeah, she totally knew. As though she were the kind of person who was up for it and down for it. The kind of person who wouldn’t be troubled, for instance, over how those two semantically opposed phrases could have come to mean, in essence, the exact same thing.

      It was only now—a master’s degree completed dutifully, pointlessly; a commitment to a Ph.D. made miserably, uncertainly—that she realized the world truly did not give one single shit whether you’d done your homework. This skyline, for example: the extent of its indifference was operatic. She’d watched it through the window of the cab and heard blooming Gershwin and an earnest voice in her head, subsumed by its own parodies, saying, “He adored New York City, he idolized it all out of proportion.” The Empire State Building on the right, the Freedom Tower on the left, with its central spear naked on top. In the days before, Kate had nervously clicked her way around virtual maps, zooming in and out to learn the sequence of the bridges up the East River: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg. Doing her homework. But she hadn’t zoomed close enough to see that the struts of the Williamsburg Bridge were pink. Who paints a bridge pink? Those struts had come at her too fast, a metronome assault of pink flashes on blue.

      And now, here, these keys, this door. Its spyhole’s beady avidity. Too easy to imagine an eyeball pressed up to the other side, watching. The keys worked, a minor astonishment, and then the door opened. The apartment was small and cluttered, a sofa overpopulated with the kinds of throws and cushions that people describe as “ethnic.” Kate wondered what “Caucasian” cushions might look like, and the answer of course was these, because they were from IKEA, not Rajasthan, turquoise and purple and stuck all over with white cat hair, tufts of it spindled around the cheap sequins.

      Somewhere in here was a cat to be sat. She couldn’t bring herself to call the cat’s name. The name embarrassed her, but it was more than that. Speaking anything out loud, alone in this other woman’s apparently empty apartment, seemed like an audacity. Speaking anything anywhere, in fact, had come to feel like that. Lately, she could think the words fine, could sense their calm gray delineations in her mind, neutral and precise, but when she began to say them, to actually shape them into sounds to propel out of her mouth, the whole project seemed to fail.

      On the large bed under the window, a bed almost as big as the room itself, the cat was waiting for her, facing her, staring at her, paws tucked under itself, the pose prim and a little censorious. When she moved closer and reached her hand toward its head, it flinched to sniff at her fingers, then made a couple of twitches of its whiskers and looked away, disdainful.

      It didn’t need her. The self-sufficiency of cats! Their implacability! To be a cat. But then, she remembered they were sociopaths—scientists had said so. There seemed to be a problem with applying the human construction of “sociopath” to a nonhuman species. Wouldn’t that make everything nonhuman sociopathic, in human eyes? Could that be right? It seemed quite arrogant. The thing to do was to assert, both to herself and to the cat and to the apartment itself, that this was her bed now, her territory. When she placed her hands on the creature now it seemed to entrench itself further, as if suctioning its soft underside to the sheets. She wobbled it feebly from side to side, trying to get a grip without hurting it. The cat looked both offended and embarrassed for her.

      “Please,” she said in a voice barely getting beyond a whisper. Steeled herself and said it: “Joni. Joni Mitchell.”

      As if she had been holding out to hear her name, the cat leaped, slipped out of her hands and onto the floor, where it paused to flick its tail once, like an indignant flamenco dancer. Then the cat turned and stalked away, tail straight and high above a puckered, evil-looking anus.

      She put her hand on the warm patch it had left behind and lay down on the bed.

      

      The street was three floors down but the sounds she woke to were so rude and immediate that it seemed as though all the sidewalk tables of the café had levitated—that the whole tableau of chairs, plates, glasses was suspended right outside this window, with freshly showered men and women dining while their feet dangled happily in the air. That bright percussion of knives on plates, overlaid on the swell of voices, and this light through the window of a still-warm evening, reminded her of being small: British summertime in the suburbs, the plangent chimes of an ice-cream van several streets away. And now a female shriek from the sidewalk so loud that she flinched. Then a man’s voice, booming unbelievably, urgent with his own humor, going, “No, no, no, but that’s before he even met her!” and then laughter, outraged and delighted, slapping all the tails of these words. How weird that she could hear these people, hear their every syllable, and they had no idea she was up here, listening, or if they did, they simply didn’t care.

      She turned on her phone and watched it cast around for a signal, struggling. Eight thirty here, the evening just beginning, and one thirty a.m. in London, so late that it was already tomorrow. George would be asleep and oblivious. And her mother. Everyone, in fact, everyone who knew her was asleep right now.

      Everyone needs a plan. That was the sort of thing George would say, something he’d wield from his well-ordered arsenal of maxims. He was doing a law conversion, and she hoped he would not be converted, but suspected it was already too late. He’d made his decision. Like always, it had been made simply, swiftly, confidently, irrevocably.

      “You’re being crazy,” he’d said when she’d told him not to come, that she was going on her own. His words had an air of sensible finality, the genial confidence of putting this thing to bed: “You don’t want to do this.”

      And that did it. That was perfect. In telling her that she did not want to do something, in the laughably egregious condescension of telling her what it was she did not want to do, he had succeeded only in letting her know that she had no choice but to do it.