Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby
But no shoes. And the part of his mind that should explain to him where and why and when he’d taken his shoes off was miraculously missing.
“Where are my shoes?” he said out loud to the lake, a madman mumble. His feet were stuck all over with black wet bits of grass.
As he got closer to the lake, the dank reek of weeds and duck shit rose up and rolled toward him. But there was the moon on the water, the little rippling sonnet of it. He stood there, hearing the susurrus of the crickets, and thought about how he might possibly be the only human being in the park right now. One man, alone, in a massive dark park. The clock on his phone said 03:33. He also had this thing on it, an app costumed with a quaint rendering of an old-fashioned compass, which quavered and found north when he asked it to. This way, then, northwest. He tried to think of himself as intrepid.
Small pinecones underfoot, pieces of twigs, dry and crumbled leaves, damp cool grass, and then the cold metal serration of something, an upturned beer bottle top, so quick and vicious that he yelped, came down in a clumsy drop, took his foot in his hand, and pulled it toward him for inspection. Like a cookie cutter in dough, the bottle top had left an indented ring on the mound of his flesh and he rubbed it, mute and dumb.
Sitting there, on the damp ground, holding his own naked foot in his hand like some kind of forsaken mental patient, he became aware of a thing glowing against the base of a tree in front of him, a bright shape that he didn’t understand. His vision and his mind ran over and around it, but still the thing didn’t yield itself. He stood and limped closer and the shape became brighter. It had legs, four slender legs tucked beneath its body, like an image of motion suspended, a perfect Muybridge gallop, but the space where its head should be was empty. This was what his mind had struggled with, that miss-
ing piece; it was a goat, a baby goat, but also couldn’t be, because it was headless. There was something medieval in the image, but here it was, lying tenderly at the foot of a tree in Brooklyn.
There had been local news items about the mauled corpses of domestic animals. The mutant wildcat theory was popular, he remembered—some ungodly offspring of an escaped zoo beast and a stray. More plausible, and more ghoulish, too, was the psychopath theory, that some sick, sad human being captured the pets of moneyed Park Slope families and dismembered them here in the middle of the night. The headless kid seemed like a warning light. It said the space he moved in was just one layer, that there were so many more layers through which he moved obliviously, and that he’d just trespassed into a domain that was not his, like the sudden opening of elevator doors onto the wrong floor, into the wrong world.
Feeling foolish and afraid, he drew his phone out, held it up, and took a picture. As he did so every tree screamed with the assault of the flash, their branches like lightning rods in its sterile strobe, and he was suddenly hot with shame, as if he’d committed a dreadful impiety. He ran, an undignified scrabble, fueled by a boy’s fear of monsters, sprinting now, belting in bare feet until he hit Prospect Park West. The low stone wall marked park from street like a mythical boundary, separating nature from the realm of emptied trash cans and functioning streetlights and alternate-side parking rules. It was a relief to feel smooth paving stone underfoot, to look up and see stately, pale apartment buildings gazing out placidly over the darkness behind him.
He checked his phone for the photo, wanting to see that headless kid, wanting to know if he’d really seen it. The image was just a blare, a white blare. He stared, just one second, then deleted it.
He retched viscous bile onto the clean sidewalk and wiped some cold streaks of bird shit from his feet. With a stitch in his side, he began to shuffle northeast, to Grand Army Plaza, where beneath the huge, illuminated arch he summoned dignity, and then a cab. There were so many gaps in his memory, stretches of time that he’d efficiently wiped out with vodka over the years, a tidal wave of it sweeping away the substrate. You really could kill time. Killing time drinking was not spending time, was not whiling time away, it was serving it up to oblivion. It felt at times like cheating death, playing death at its own game.
At home, dawn already creeping in like the sick joke it was, he rattled four Advil into his palm, downed them with half a glass of tepid tap water, and then looked at her bedroom door. Shut, which meant Inez was home. Good. He stood there for a moment, as if he expected her to wake up, sense him, and open the door, to sweetly welcome her father home at five a.m. He stared at the door a moment longer, turned, and went to bed.
4
The best thing about the apartment, Kate realized quite quickly, was the fire escape. Beyond the bedroom window and above the street you could nest there, held halfway between the inside world and outside world, suspended and sequestered. Today, she’d carefully furnished the space, made a small universe of select things: iced coffee, pack of cigarettes, cushion, book. Things to hold on to, to make you feel you were held on to. Which was a lie, of course. She was catastrophically unheld, and at the same time terribly conspicuous. That, maybe, was the worst thing about being lost: everyone could see you.
She’d had to ask for this iced coffee three times, as if she were speaking an entirely different language. Even before she’d opened her mouth, she had seemed to palpably discomfit the honey-haired barista. When she’d finally made herself understood and Honey-Hair had turned to shovel ice into a plastic cup, Kate checked her own shoes, left and right, and confirmed, definitively, that her soles were unshitted.
Everyone is invincible at eighteen. In that first year of university, in the weeks before she met George, Kate had experienced the sensation of being at the center of a web that tilted with her as she moved, as if the world were yielding to her, as if she were putting it in motion. Everything was smaller then. Now when she thought of Cambridge, she thought of the city’s model, on the raised circular plinth, about half a meter in diameter, on the edge of Market Square, the colleges cast in bronze, blocky and smooth as chocolate. You could loom over the model and put your forefinger on the street you were standing on. Just remembering this brought on a rush of claustrophobia.
She met George when their colleges shared seminars. His college—bigger, grander, more photogenic and famous—hosted. Two dozen of them sat around a huge round wooden table, where dead canonical poets had sat before them, soft January light pouring in through the windows. The second term was the seventeenth century. The first class was John Donne. They’d all bought the same edition, Everyman, handsome in its black-and-white jacket, the thin scarlet ribbon of a bookmark as proper as a Savile Row necktie. Only, the book in George’s hands was different. It was the first thing she noticed, his large hands holding that book, a charcoal-black volume with elegant silver lettering down its spine. He read aloud without hesitation, as though he already knew these rhythms. It was at least four months later that she realized the book in his hands was the same version everyone else had. He’d just taken the dust jacket off.
A few weeks ago, before she left, they’d gone to a friend’s dinner party. The friend—more George’s than hers—had just bought a West London flat, or rather her parents had, and the evening was an elaborate performance of adulthood. There were canapés from Fortnum & Mason, and place cards bearing names in careful calligraphy, a strict boy-girl-boy-girl seating plan around the table.
“Champagne?” the hostess kept saying to people whose flutes had been diminished only by a sip or two. She looked, bottle and eyebrows raised, as if she were about to strike a dainty bell.
George had sat opposite Kate, and as the dinner progressed he seemed to be drawing in the air around him, tightening it.
Who knows how the conversation reached the place it did. But one young woman called Annabelle began talking about pornography. She was petite, fine-boned, and her high voice seemed to undulate erratically, as though subjected to its own tiny weather systems, little breezes and quick currents over which she had little to no control.
“Ugh, it’s disgusting,” she said. “Just so degrading to women.”
And then something rushed into Kate, some renegade idea riding on a red-wine crest.
“Why do you think it’s degrading?” she heard herself say. Every eye around the table stared at her face. Her words had been strangely loud. Without looking at him she could