a change, and they made out a bit before she decided she wanted to go to his place.
They left the party, and from upstairs in the hallway they heard the music calling to them and during a break on the track they heard fifty voices from the party next door scream, “Release. The. Savage,” and they looked at each other.
He lived on the fifth floor of a walk-up on Second Avenue between Seventh and St. Mark’s, and he watched the girl’s bare red ankles as she tromped up the stairs and then started kissing her before they walked out of the stairwell and into the living room. She’d already started taking her top off and had nothing on beneath it, and his hand glided across her lower abdomen and down around her hip bones to her cunt, two fingers easing into it. Kissing her, he kept tasting lip gloss, which took him back to high school, to a Dairy Queen on Route 19 where he thought he’d lost his virginity to a girl named Kate but wasn’t sure anymore because Kate had run away from home and hadn’t left a forwarding address. He leaned the girl against the wall and started fucking her really hard, looking into her face when he was coming.
It was later that she went into the living room while he slept and lit one of his clove cigarettes and, still holding the cigarette, stole his black leather jacket, which held his arrowhead, and then put it on, smiling. She went to the refrigerator and took out a jar of hummus and smeared it all over the wall and then stalked away, down the stairs, into the night.
JAMIE WOKE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, December twenty-something, dried blood all over his face, on top of damp sheets. The sun was low and coming through the window, hitting him in the face, and his arm, which was numb, reached for his iPhone on the nightstand, but the phone was dead, disconnected from the charger. He connected the phone and charged it, which took two minutes, and checked his text messages. He got out of bed, knocking a Burnett’s bottle over onto some books from his last semester in college, and then walked into the living room looking for a lighter. He found the note written on the whiteboard and the hummus on the wall and then saw his jacket was gone and panicked but then had to stop and stare at the hummus some more because it didn’t make sense; he couldn’t understand what it was until he noticed the empty container on the floor. He tore the room apart looking for his arrowhead and then went to the sink and splashed water on his face. He couldn’t even think about how the girl from last night came and fucked everything up because everything was already fucked. His father had been dead five days—no, six—and still hadn’t been laid to rest because his family hadn’t done it. That had always been their way. Time passes and people die and every day leaves you with less to say about it all. But Jamie could feel a clot of anger growing in his body. Gone for almost a week and still no funeral? His father deserved better. More than anything, or, to be honest, he felt sorry for his mother and sister: they were naive, and they obviously weren’t taking anything seriously. They should’ve been planning the funeral.
But his sorrow didn’t stop him from waiting six days to start looking for a flight. He wasn’t a complete shit about going home, but there was something there that was holding him back, some reservation, some fear. It was almost Christmas, so he started thinking about Christmases as a kid and how he and his sister would sit at the bottom of the little twenty-dollar tree from Walmart and it was usually one of the good times. They’d grown up poor, same as everyone who lived in the food-stamp hollers, but they always had presents from Walmart or pencils or a video game stolen from Blockbuster. But those days had gone long before his father died, so he knew if he went home it’d be one of the sad times. He was, in truth, afraid of how bad things had gotten while being away. After a while, what he wished was that it’d all stop mattering. No matter how much he tried, though, it never did.
There was something else, when he’d spoken to his mother yesterday, for a second time since his dad had died. She’d added a new detail that she hadn’t mentioned earlier, when she’d called with the news, something his sister hadn’t mentioned when he’d talked to her a couple of days ago either. She’d said they couldn’t bury his father because the cops hadn’t found the body. And Jamie got frustrated with her. If it was true—and why would she make this up?—then how did they know his father was even actually dead? He thought about how he was getting older and how he kept losing things, things like his father, and how the more things he lost the fewer things he had, and he just wanted that damn arrowhead back more than anything. All he could think about was how he’d found it as a boy and how he’d promised his father he’d hold on to it forever, take care of it, never show it to anyone, and never, ever lose it.
He washed off in a long, hot shower with a washcloth and then went to the kitchen and swallowed a Xanax and looked out the window past the city, his eyes disappointed at the buildings, and superimposed on it, his own reflection in the glass. He had an extraterrestrial look about him that only emphasized his estrangement from West Virginia, a look acquired during the six years he’d lived in New York City. He had gaps between his teeth, which gave his face a childlike look, and there were acne scars on his left cheek, which gave him a predatory look, or it might’ve been his cheekbones that somehow seemed too protuberant. He got dressed—jeans, black ankle boots, a gray sweater, a ceremonial trench—and then he left the apartment.
Walking north along Second Avenue to the fashion design student’s apartment, texting, Facebooking, he wondered at the reasons he’d come to New York. As a boy and later, too, he thought he’d been born far from home. As if the whole time he’d been following a map, trying to get back, tracing footsteps and showing his face one last time everywhere he went. He’d come after high school on a scholarship to NYU. Vaguely he’d wanted to accomplish some journey, wanted to live in a room above a coffee shop with a rumpled mattress in one corner, a cheap Sony laptop in the other. Many of the people he met had come from faraway places like Brazil and France, but none had come from farther away than West Virginia, and after some time they’d been absorbed into Manhattan, while he held on to something, or something held on to him. He’d come to a kind of world fundamentally different from the one he’d always known and he realized such a world would require a different kind of person. So he changed. He started taking sleeping pills. Only Ambien, just here and there, but even so. He’d spent his nights at clubs or college parties, trying to return to a place from which he could begin again. More likely he’d begun to believe all the things his father had spent years telling him: That’s your home now. There’s no coming back. This place will suck you deeper and faster than quicksand in one of them old Tarzan movies. You can’t come back.
Trust me, you can’t.
He cut a diagonal somewhere above Twenty-First Street and the wind picked up and he put his hands into his coat pockets, and the traffic light changed from red to green and the red hand lit up and told people they couldn’t walk, but he crossed the street anyway and then stopped outside the entrance to the fashion design student’s building and rang the bell and looked into the eye of the camera and the door buzzed open and he entered.
Drinks sat on every surface and two girls, young and white and blond, wearing long cardigans and Nikes, sat on the couch staring at him as he passed, not saying anything. There was music coming from above and he walked upstairs and down the hallway into a large room that seemed to take up the entire second floor, and he stood in the doorway and watched as the fashion design student got dressed. She pretended not to care, which made him feel like a ghost.
“Thought you left last night,” she said. “Fill me a bowl?”
When she said this, he turned away from her and she asked him what he was doing there and he asked if she knew the girl from the party. He took the weed off the nightstand and filled the bowl and gave it to her, and she started looking for a lighter and told him that the girl’s name was Sara and that she did kind of know her but she didn’t look at him.
“Well, Sara stole my fucking jacket, so…” he said.
