Amy, Her City
Everyone who lives in cities dreams of cities.
Rerun the first—a (longish) short story published in a small online literary magazine around 2016–17. Only a couple of years afterwards I noticed the website stopped updating, and now it’s altogether offline. So it goes.
So here it is again. I tidied it up a bit (and hopefully didn’t introduce any new typos in doing so), but didn’t change any of the now-outdated cultural references.
ENJOY
You spoke to Amy only once. It happened almost two years ago, at the Tarski Heights subway station, while you were waiting for the M train. You were the only two people waiting for an uptown train and it was after one in the morning. You’d left your earbuds at home, so you listened to the thunderstorm hammering the street above girders and pipes. Amy sat on a bench, reading the Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introduction to Relativity. You tried to pretend she wasn’t there. It was all you could do not to pull your eyes out of your head and throw them at her.
Hey, Amy said to you after ten minutes passed without any light appearing down the tunnel. Relax. Sit down. Talk to me.
You and Amy chatted about Grimes, The Last Unicorn, the fundamental choice every person must make between fear (the mind killer) and love (the weight of the world), and what one should do if one meets the Buddha on the road. It was still hard not to stare. You conscientiously looked down at the lace patches on her jeans, at the book in her lap, and toward the city workers in neon green vests on the uptown platform, who couldn’t help stealing glances at her either. You sensed powerfully that Amy was a very special sort of person. You trusted her completely from the moment she addressed you. You wanted to bear your whole self to her. You even tried to work up the courage to tell her about the thing that makes you special.
You couldn’t work it up in time. When the D train pulled into the station, Amy touched your wrist and thanked you for the conversation, stood up, and went aboard without looking back.
Hey, the men on the platform across the track called out to you after Amy’s train had gone screaming into the tunnel. Who was that? Who’s your friend?
Even if you’d deigned to acknowledge them, you wouldn’t have known what to say. She left you bewildered. When she was speaking to you, it was with such intention and such a mien of intimacy that you scarcely noticed it was mostly small talk. Once she was gone, it registered that she’d told you virtually nothing about herself. All you had was a name: Amy.
Ever since that night, you pricked your ears whenever you heard that name uttered around town. You’d never listened for it before, so you never noticed how many tongues it’s on. Amy is no secret.
The giant metalheads vaping outside Ballywick Board Games in Crown Village exchange stories of Amy sightings: she was interrogating the parsnips at the farmer’s market, she was flirting with the mastiffs at Towhee Dog Park, she was dozing beneath the fig tree on the bank of the Laptonachgat River with a fishing pole in her hand, and the reel was lineless. The gap-year layabouts juggling apples and balancing on unicycles by the fountain at Pullman Square observe that Amy doesn’t run with any crowd: if she’s ever spotted with company, she’s half of a pair. Sometimes she’s with a man, sometimes she’s with a woman, but it’s always someone who’s never been seen before and is never seen again. The identities and fates of Amy’s companions fuel as much speculation as Amy’s age. Milky and Jimmy—that older couple who throw those warehouse parties in Port Wycliffe—estimate Amy is somewhere between 24 and 32 years old. They’ve been trying for three years to persuade her to let them host her birthday bash, but even though they can get Peaches to show up for a stealth show, they can’t for the life of them find Amy’s ear. Milky grumbles that Amy could be the queen of any scene she wants, if she’d only pick a damn scene. Out in front of Montezuma’s Revenge Records, the earth-mother girl playing the accordion with her ferret on her shoulder tells her neo-flapper friend with the cello how she once saw Amy disappearing through a door behind a bouncer during the Rabbit Troupe concert at the Croc. Her friend mentions that her coworker Jaimie claims to have looked up from the sidewalk on Linden Street one night and saw Amy leaning over the railing and smoking a clove cigarette on the second-story veranda of the Monday Club, and it was definitely BDSM/darkwave night that night. The girls’ androgynous buddy with the castanets respectfully controverts Jaimie’s account: he was at the Still Happy Still Hardcore rave at the Annex that same night, and when the lights came on for last call at 3:45 he definitely saw Amy reclining in one of the couches in the corner, sucking lackadaisically on a Firecracker ice pop while some kandi kids took turns doing jello shots from her navel.
Some people you went to school with convene at the round table in the corner of Ascetic Coffee (no flavor syrups, no wi-fi) to discuss fashion, review the belles-lettres, and pass judgement on the world. You happen to be sitting in on a session when Amy comes up on the docket. Try as it might, the council cannot find fault with her dress and hair—though it’s unanimous that the Snapchat spectacle of Amy emerging from the Yellow House CVS wearing her immaculately understated pea coat and legwarmers, her hair freshly dyed from a July sky blue to an autumnal chestnut on that very morning, the first unexpectedly snappy postsummer sunrise, had the faint but undeniable whiff of conspiracy about it.
The caveat isn’t enough for Frieda. Before the roundtable can move on, she erupts, declaring that Amy’s not Sasquatch, she’s not some kind of unicorn, she’s human, damn it. She cites as evidence the persistent gross little pimples on the back of Amy’s neck, the shallow dilettantism evinced by the books she’s observed to read, and the really stupid tattoo on her right calf, which she keeps trying to cover up with another stupid tattoo. Two years ago, it was a potato with a Hello Kitty face. Then it was a horseshoe crab wearing a Bolshevik hat. Now it’s some vaporwave thing, which makes it pretentious and trendy in addition to really stupid.
Frieda’s partner Tim suggests that these things don’t necessarily detract from Amy’s allure, but might actually augment it. The felicitous imperfection is the very essence of wabi-sabi, Tim says, and so we therefore confront Amy as an authentic and inimitable entity whose flaws provide for her virtues the way the fine leaf particulate at the bottom of one’s teacup lends a certain affirmation and elegance to the last sip.
A week later, Tim posts on Facebook to ask if anyone in his extended network might be willing to house him and his record collection while he finds another place to live. Four hours afterward, Frieda posts a long jeremiad against “self-styled manic pixie dream girls” and the harm they inflict on “forthright” women. The following morning, she’s racked up over 120 comments. Names are not named in the debate, but it’s clear that both sides’ partisans know exactly who it is they’re either defending or endeavoring to bring down a peg.
Amy isn’t on Facebook. But she does have an Instagram account. You know this because you’ve browsed the people list of people Tim follows on Instagram, and Tim follows Amy. Her username is amy69845. The account is private. Only the avatar—a pic of a calf bearing a pretty stupid tattoo of a white marble foot with the caption おじまんぢあす—clinches amy69845 as the Amy. She only follows 17 people, but somehow has over 2800 followers. (She’s very big in Europe, according to Tim.) Every time you look again, the number climbs a little higher.
Amy’s most visible web presence isn’t on social media, but Craigslist. The Missed Encounters page is a testament to her existence in the perpetual corner of the world’s eye. By your estimate, something like 15 to 20 percent of a given week’s listings are descriptions of Amy submitted by people who scarcely realize they’re all smitten with the same woman, who came to them like a promise of a better world and evaporated just as quickly. The word “shimmer” occurs with unnerving regularity.
When you see Amy, you see her gliding in the bike lane from the window of your bus as it rattles past her, or from the footbridge over the Laptonachgat Trail when she’s strolling below with headphones over her ears. She materializes like an apparition under the paper lanterns during the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, and you lose her in the bodies and bottle rockets before her name can rise in your throat. You observe her passing through the doors of the Civic Auditorium without a date on the night of the sold-out opera. You and Amy simultaneously venture over the Boulevard in parallel crosswalks, separated by twenty feet of ruthless traffic, and by the time you can cross over to her side she’s already gone. Your uber will be waiting for the light to change up in Gilman Corner, and there’s Amy right outside the car getting buzzed into an apartment building, and the door closes behind her as your driver Chad explains he’s getting the power windows and locks in the rear passenger doors fixed tomorrow and asks you to please stop banging and shouting.
That was last week, and it was the last straw. You’ve had all you can take. So now you’re going to read Amy’s mind and solve the mystery of her once and for all.
I still remember how nonchalantly you explained it to me. Tim (you said), even though both his parents work in advertising and secrete connections from their pores, even though he has a talent for persuasion and a marketer’s flexibility of perspective, he decided to be a theater major and is contentedly working the box office at the Stallard Hook Playhouse. And you, you’ve been doing clerical work for that paralegal firm over at Society Plaza even though you showed great promise as a storyboard artist and are capable of ESP.
We choose what we do with our gifts, you told me.
Cosmic Cycles advertises itself as the least quirky bike shop within six zip codes, but judging from the proprietor’s handlebar mustache, the Soviet punk rock on the speakers, and the hand-carved, painted, and varnished signs about its dim and spartan interior (WE RIP OFF EVERYONE AND PASS THE SAVINGS ON TO YOU), Amy might be thinking she’d have been better off taking her wheels to the equally eccentric but much more honest Lyle’s Bicycles & Repairs & Condescension on Dodge Street. But you don’t know what Amy thinks. Nobody does. That’s why you followed her seven blocks to Cosmic Cycles from the halal cart from which you absconded in mid-order when you caught sight of Amy pushing her bicycle up the sidewalk, even though you only had ten minutes left on your lunch break and are already on thin ice with your employers.
Amy humors Cosmic Cycles’ chatty proprietor with a gracious little laugh when he makes admirably unlabored double entendre on the word “crankshaft.” You crouch behind a hedge of retrofitted vintage Schwinns, unnoticed and unsuspected.
You’ve told me telepathy isn’t as simple or precise a procedure as Emma Frost or Miss Martian would have one believe. It’s not as though a person’s thoughts are disclosed to you like messages on a whiteboard to be read. It’s more like running an emulator in your central nervous system that replicates the physical state of that whiteboard, and then feeling the substance of the letters on the virtual surface and trying to guess what they spell out. More body and less mind. Like threading a needle, like sticking your tongue to your nose, like extending a parasubstantial third eye or arm or proboscis and fastening it to Amy’s personal event field.
There’s no mistaking the moment you make contact. Layered over your view of Amy through a screen of welded tubing and tires, you see the man with the handlebar mustache from Amy’s perspective, and the odor of his cologne reaches you through Amy’s nostrils, forking into the double streams of how it smells to you (not without its charm) and how it smells to Amy (noxious).
You can feel Amy’s feet in her socks in her Doc Martens, tight at the ankles where she tied the laces around the collars, and you notice the constriction of her sports bra, which you notice her ignoring. The neutral taste of her spit isn’t quite the neutral taste of your spit. The extra inch of skull and scalp Amy has over you radiate from your crown like a halo of bone and brain and hair, while your center of gravity and Amy’s center of gravity form a phantom barycenter which you experience as an uncomfortable and dizzying pressure inside your head, pushing upwards. You totter on your heels, nearly knocking over the row of bicycles and prompting the man with the handlebar mustache to glance in your direction. Amy’s organs—her beating heart, her lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines, uterus—you feel them transposed imperfectly over your own, you experience the exertions of her urethral sphincters against the pressure of her bladder, while the vibrations in Amy’s larynx haunt your sympathetic throat as she utters the words Can I use your bathroom? before the man with the mustache can say anything to you.
Her thoughts balloon like anomalous jellyfish at right angles against the current of your awareness. Generated and regenerated in the Galapagos of her being, they are peculiarized beyond compatibility with any ecosystem but her. You cannot parse them.
Margaret Mead had nine months to acquaint herself with the habits and idiosyncrasies of Samoa before drawing her conclusions. You scarcely have nine seconds abroad in Amy before she turns around and sees you. In a panic you disengage, sparing yourself the mortification of appraising yourself through Amy’s eyes. But maybe you wouldn’t have seen much of anything. As she pivots toward the lavatory at the rear of the shop, Amy’s gaze lands on you for an incomplete second—not long enough to warrant a courteous smile of acknowledgement on her part, certainly not long enough to take you in and wonder if maybe you’re someone she ought to recognize.
But you’ve got the proprietor’s attention. He clears his throat. Can I help you, sweetheart?
You murmur an excuse and an apology, and leave the shop in a hurry.
You hop a train back home and lie in bed for a very long time, readjusting to yourself.
The office calls you once and leaves a voice message telling you you’re fired. That’s just fine. You’ve already made up your mind to take on Amy as a project. It’ll have to be a full-time endeavor.
When you first told me about your gift, and before you had me convinced it was real, I asked why you didn’t use it more often. You answered that you didn’t do it, not anymore, because it’s weird. Trying to filch the answer to a math question from a first-grade teacher and getting slammed with her hangover and waves of unmistakable hatred for you and your classmates. Feeling other kids’ farts at the lunch table. Recognizing the way your mother’s stomach sank and twisted when your father came home from work from your own guts’ reaction to the sight of the boy who pulled your hair and spat at you on the playground. Sharing your brother’s first orgasm over a Victoria’s Secret catalog through the bathroom door. Reaching into your neighbor Susie that one time she slept over at your house and getting swallowed into a sprawling Fisher-Price playset landscape beneath a finished basement sky where you coaxed gibberish from the mouths of unaccountably rotating extradimensional Care Bears while you suffered Susie’s bad sinuses and eczema and feared you’d never find your way out.
And then there was the string of incidents involving that boy in the eighth grade, the one you took a fancy to. Billy. You never told me exactly what happened with Billy—just that it was so unpleasant and awkward for you both (but especially him) that you afterward forswore the use of your gift, putting it away like a skateboard, guitar, or the paraphernalia any other abortive adolescent pursuit consigned to the attic. And it was only the perfectly reasonable skepticism of the guidance counselor who listened to Billy’s story that prevented the thing from turning into a scandal.
I tried to catch you by pointing out an inconsistency in your stories. If you’re saying that getting into someone’s head doesn’t involve any astral plane voodoo, I asked, then how do you explain entering Susie’s dreams and moving around in them?
You shrugged it off and explained, very matter-of-factly, that it’s different when someone’s sleeping. So much of conscious life consists of turbulent sensation, the sloshing back-and-forth of reaction and action, the funneling of one thought directly into the next. But when a person’s asleep, all that commotion recedes. Their waters grow still and hold a mirror to their empyrean selves, and you can reach the world of their deepest skies by diving into the reflection. And even though you’re better able to see into and explore a person in this mode, they’re much more enigmatic confronting you as an environment than when you experience them as phantom limbs and intrusive thoughts.
But you’ve only ever tried it with Susie and Billy.
There is only one respect in which you’ve ever made explicit comparison between ESP and sex. Pants and heads—once you’ve already gotten into somebody’s once, there’s a lot less work involved in doing it again. Having made contact with Amy, you can do it again easily, and from a distance. You wait until 2:30 on a Tuesday night, when you can expect she’ll be asleep. Standing precisely at arm’s length from your bedroom window, you have to stretch to press your palm to the glass. You keep stretching, straining until you’ve extended yourself beyond yourself, reaching through the thrumming spaces over Dubliner’s Row and the Narrows, between the floodlit spires of Midtown, blind to everything but the dilating beacon at your destination. Amy.
You leech into her, occupy her, entangle your substance with hers over the gusty divide. As your respiration acquiesces to her rhythm, as you abide the ebbing and lapping of her semiconscious awareness, Amy’s inner architecture opens up to you like an evening primrose.
Of course it’s a city. Everyone who lives in cities dreams of cities.
You lose track of the hours you spend walking the streets of Amy’s twilight capital. You’re a tourist here, and an unprepared one at that, ignorant of any destinations to seek, and lost wherever you stand. You wander through neighborhoods of every character and attitude, through business districts with glass towers and marble facades, trainyards and loading docks, bridges and colonnades, historic precincts with Victorian porches and cobblestone streets, dewy promenades in the long shadows of Amy’s monuments, outdoor sculpture gardens on elevated walkways, shopping arcades redolent of coffee and incense, and suspension bridges crossing rivers where the candle-capped masts of fishing boats rise and sink in time with Amy’s faraway breathing. Some neighborhoods adhere to a grid layout. Others are like Boston, eccentric and tortuous. Elsewhere concentric circles and hexagons prevail. There is no moment when the sun has not just dipped below the horizon in the west—although “west” seems to be variable here. Variously illuminating the streets are baroque oil lanterns, sodium vapor lamps, halogen globes on wooden posts, white Christmas lights trained to utility poles and traffic signals, and the warm yellow emanations from the tenements’ window shades. Above it all, the principal stars of Amy’s sky gutter in her gloaming.
Where the avenues are broad, and where no miles-long row of locust trees, bifurcated lamp posts, or columns stand on an elevated median, stately trollies skate along their rails in the middle of the street. There’s no curb that’s not a harbor for an unbroken line of parked cars, but all the traffic in the streets is pedestrian. This is delicious a dusk as can be dreamed of, and the citizens of Amy’s city are in no rush to get home.
Amy’s people sit at glass tables on the sidewalks, tasting gelato, reading leatherbound books with embossed hieroglyphic titles, and taking cigarettes with their espresso like it never went out of style. They browse the fruits and relics in the Edison glow of her open-door boutiques, recline on blankets on the grassy hills overlooking her amphitheaters, form attendant rings around the violinists on her street corners. They gulp their beer and sip their whiskey over ineffable toasts in her taverns, lay wreaths against elevated tombs in the firefly gloom of her cemeteries, stand in rapt contemplation before the statuary on display in her riverside belvederes. Under her parks’ moonflower pergolas they share kisses and confidences neck-to-neck. They explore the picturesque ruins of her old factories with kerosene lanterns in their hands, congregate beneath incandescent multiplex marquees, and discuss the day’s events across stone chessboards beneath the amber leaves of Amy’s sycamores.
You’re a perfect foreigner here, and understand nothing they say. You’re also a trespasser, and you’ve learned from that unfortunate business with Billy that it’s best not to draw attention to yourself. You keep your head down, you watch and you listen, and you keep on walking.
Night after night.
You sleep during the day and awaken at sundown from dreams of Amy’s dreams. You’ve found that Amy is always asleep by 2:30 AM, and have made that minute your habitual time of departure. While you watch the clock and wait, you sketch out maps of her streets, collocating her neighborhoods and their relative locations. You search Wikipedia for architectural terms—“balustrade,” “farola fernandina,” “anthemion,” “Art Nouveau,” “chancel screen”—so you can better describe and document her city’s genius.
The empty bags of Sun Chips, Chinese delivery cartons, cans of Red Bull, and Dasani bottles accumulate on your floor. You’re not getting unemployment because you walked out on your job, and you’re falling behind on your share of the rent. Which is fine—you helped me out those three months after the bookstore closed down, so I’m happy to return the favor. But I’m getting a little anxious to know where exactly you’re going with this and when you plan to move on from it.
Your project is halfway into its second month, and I haven’t seen you for almost a week. But I have to talk to you about the trash piling up in your room. It’s attracting mice. When you don’t answer my knock, I let myself in. You get up out of bed, clear the empty sacks of trail mix and potato chips from a chair, and insist I sit down and let you show me some of your findings.
You pull selections from the cascading stacks of maps you’ve drawn on graph paper, and point to evidences of fractal structures. You tell me you’ve walked tens of thousands of miles in Amy’s city, and are still no closer to finding any town hall (where Amy begins) or the city limits (where Amy ends). When you walk in any direction long enough, you invariably come across the same landmarks you thought were behind you, but the adjacent neighborhoods will have rearranged themselves. Even when you believe you’ve been walking in a straight line for hours, you can look over the pitched roofs and willow trees on a quiet street and find the westering glow has inexplicably migrated to the north, south, or east. The river changes location, and the skyline on the occupied bank is always dominated by the speckled skyscrapers and minarets you distinctly remember having walked under on prior evenings. There’s a pattern, definitely, to these permutations. You wonder aloud: is Amy that pattern?
When I get a word in to mention the mice and the trash on the floor, you tell me how clean Amy’s city is. The only time a cigarette butt, a flapping newspaper, or empty sarsaparilla bottle is ever to be seen on the ground is when it needs to be there—when it unifies the elements of the environment into a gestalt the way Vermeer’s painting of the girl is made sublime by her pearl earring. Wherever there’s a black wad of gum flattened into a sidewalk tile, it’s like the mole on Marilyn Monroe’s cheek. You tell me about a derelict warehouse you passed last night in one of Amy’s old industrial districts, where vines with roseate leaves framed filigree cracks in the foundation and the asphalt beneath the pigeons roosting on a row of unlit barn lights was like snowflake obsidian, and you’re unable to picture the scene without feeling so moved as to attempt haiku. You’ve filled half the pages of a legal pad with 5-7-5 descriptions of these things. You show them to me, one after another, and I find myself trying to console you as you bury your face in your palms and despair of your helplessness to capture it.
I seize on a pause to ask you when enough will be enough. When will you be moving on from this?
When you can say you understand Amy, you tell me. It won’t be much longer now.
I say it as gently as I can. This is getting kind of weird, kind of morbid. There’s Facebook stalking, and then there’s…well, there’s this.
Amy’s not on Facebook, you remind me. She’s given us no choice.
I finally persuade you to let me bring in some trash bags from the kitchen and take care of the moldy cartons and food scraps on the floor for you while you sit in bed and count syllables to yourself with your legal pad propped against your knees.
She’s given us no choice. I don’t give your words much thought until I happen upon your “press release” among the show flyers and dog walker ads on the windowsill of Ascetic Coffee. I might have passed over it as another photocopied zine, but I recognize one of your diagrams on the cover. It’s only four pages, and contains nothing but selections of your maps, reproductions of frieze patterns, and some sketches of statues and skylines. There’s not one word of indication as to what it all means. I find copies stapled to utility poles in Port Wycliffe and clandestinely mixed with the free dailies and weeklies in news boxes. It sits on tables in front of lonely-looking men dining out alone, and in the hands of women taking cigarette breaks in the alleys behind bakeries and thrift stores. I see people reading it in the subway. When I ask what they’re looking at, some get testy, some get evasive. None will give me a straight answer.
Over the next two weeks I see two more editions of your public dispatches, each longer and more detailed than the last. Another two weeks go by without any further disclosures, and I never see you at home. When I knock on your bedroom door, you don’t answer. When I let myself inside, you’re not there. But I see you’ve shifted your focus: the piles of maps are no longer multiplying, but now you’re taping charcoal sketches of faces to your walls. Every time I check, the number of them has doubled. You’re running out of space on your walls and closet doors.
One evening I finally catch you as you’re coming from Tarski Arts & Crafts with a fresh batch of charcoal pencils and Bristol paper. You’re dodgy when I feign ignorance and ask what they’re for, but when I change the subject and ask about something pointless, something unrelated to your project—have you seen Frieda lately, have you seen that new haircut of hers?—you can’t resist. I’m the closest thing you have to a confidant, and you value my interest, if not my input. You invite me into your room to have a look at your ever-expanding portrait gallery, and stand quietly at my side while I wait for an explanation.
One of the sketches is different from the others. It’s drawn in pencil on a sheet of graph paper, and I recognize the face: it belongs to the androgynous boy who played the castanets in front of Montezuma’s Revenge Records with his friends on weekend afternoons over the summer. You tell me you found him dozing on a park bench in Amy’s dream. There was a Moroccan lantern hanging over his head, suspended by a chain hanging from an obscure bough high in a weeping willow, and around it flitted three white moths whose orbits expressed a complex resonance that drove you to stare at articles and YouTube lectures on Laplace transforms until your eyes itched and watered. Discovering a familiar face among the strangers of Amy’s city didn’t give you much to think about. Not at first.
You point out another sketch, taped to the ceiling. It’s Tim: one night you found him dismounting a streetcar with an umbrella in hand, walking hurriedly into an alley and descending a cellar door that promptly locked behind him. Beside the door jamb hang the likenesses of Frieda (with her old haircut) and the weekday morning barista from Ascetic Coffee. One night you passed them sitting together on a porch swing in one of Amy’s historic districts. The barista was dressed in a Clark Gable tuxedo and smoked a cigar. She wore Vivien Leigh’s green dress, and held an ivory wand to her pursed lips, blowing soap bubbles that wafted over the rose hedges and cast-iron fences.
Every sketch is of someone you’ve observed in Amy’s city, and you’ve concluded that all or most of them must be from our city, too. You pick out a dozen sketches and show me the Facebook profiles of their real-life counterparts. You’re getting less and less surprised whenever you go out in the afternoon to stock up on bottled water, energy drinks, and trail mix and pass someone you’ve seen setting paper swans afloat in Amy’s fountains or selling gears, cogs, and lightbulb filaments from a stand at one of her flea markets.
It should have been obvious. There’s no reason it should have took you so long to notice. But you never really paid much attention to the identities of the people you found in Amy’s city. Not until—
I clear my throat. Until what?
Until they started watching you. And you admit you’ve been drawing attention to yourself—trying to jimmy locks and open windows, and spelling out messages to Amy herself by chiseling them in her walls and writing them out on her sidewalks. Lately Amy’s people are eying you from their veranda tables, following your movements from behind shop windows, and peering over their shoulders when they sense you approaching from behind. Their expressions are consistently blank, altogether inscrutable. But they don’t say anything to you. They don’t interfere with your activities. You have no reason whatsoever to be concerned about them, you insist.
I feel suffocated in here. I can’t stay any longer. I mention the heating bill and ask if you’re planning to find a new source of income sometime soon. You say something about working on your resume and usher me out into the hall. You’ve got a lot on your plate, and you’ve spared all the time you can afford tonight.
From then on, whenever I try your door, I always find it locked.
I’m trudging through the snow after a late night at the library. The storm’s taken the buses offline, and with the subway line undergoing some ill-timed maintenance work, I figure it’ll be faster to just walk 26 blocks home instead of going a mile out of my way to wait for the L on 39th Street. My feet are wet and my blood is cold. I stop into McGinty’s to thaw myself with a drink before braving the remaining 14 blocks. While I’m waiting for the wizened sot of a bartender to bring me my Guinness, a woman takes the stool next to me.
The other men seated at the bar, each of them as old and sottish as the bartender, are all too engrossed by the bubbles in their glasses and the hokey Irish folksongs on the jukebox to pay the new arrival much attention. But the bartender all but forgets to hand me my Guinness when he sees her.
Amy, he says.
Haven’t seen you in a while, he adds with a noncommittal benignity that’s definitely forced. He reminds me of a nervous funeral guest blurting out a remark about the weather to an aggrieved widow. I watch him glance down at the pint of Guinness in his hand, and it looks as though he can’t for the life of him recall why he’s holding it.
Amy loosens her scarves, unzips her coat, and sets her wool mittens on the bar. Her face is thin and pale, and she has deep bags under her eyes. She orders a shot of Jameson in a mild voice. The bartender awkwardly passes me my Guiness and hurries to pour Amy her drink. She downs it, slides the shot glass across the counter, and asks for another.
Is this the Amy? It can’t be. She’s too plain, too worn down, too clearly self-conscious. There’s no flicker of otherworldliness about her. She holds the shot glass in both hands and stares at her own reflection in the mirror behind the collection of liquor bottles, where she notices my reflection rather tactlessly sizing her up. She turns to look at me, and we make eye contact. I’ve never seen such an intense expression that’s so unsuggestive of emotion or intent. I gasp into my glass, cough on the Guinness in my throat, and find something else to look at.
Amy orders a third shot. She downs it, and afterwards cries discreetly into her palm.
That’s when I see it. Just for an instant, and in spite of herself, Amy shimmers. There’s really no other word for it. And at that moment, I fall in love with her too.
I pound the rest of my drink, leave a ten-dollar bill on the bar, and leave in a hurry.
Staggering beneath the incandescent candy canes and neon Santa Clauses hanging from the lamp posts along Dubliner’s Row, I coax my heart to stop racing and I curse myself for being such a chickenshit. I could have told Amy everything. I should have told her. She’d have been the only person on the planet who’d believe me, and who really needed to know what I know.
I turn around and race back to McGinty’s. The snow stings my face and I keep slipping on the ice. I limp back to the bar with a sprained ankle, and where Amy was sitting I find an empty stool, a wet shot glass, and two newly minted twenty-dollar bills. The bartender scoops them up, shaking his head.
I knock on your door. I rattle the knob. When I call your phone, a recording tells me your number isn’t in service.
I throw myself on the sofa and watch Westworld to get Amy off my mind. Between episodes, I pull myself up and rap on your door, but to no avail. I keep at it until 3:30 AM.
The next morning I wake up an hour early to bang on your door and yell some more before getting in the shower.
Nothing.
I look up Amy’s Instagram page. It’s been deleted.
When I return home from work, I don’t even wait to take off my shoes before I start pounding on your door. I try ramming it in with my shoulder. You must have pushed all your furniture up against it.
I sit in the hallway and wait for you. You’ll have to come out sooner or later.
The sun comes up. I’m still waiting. Thank god it’s a Saturday.
I finally remember that the building’s ancient and definitely not up-to-code fire escape is accessible from your window, and realize you’re not home. For all I know, you’ve been gone for several days by now.
I don’t know what to do.
On Thursday night I wake up from a nightmare—I was trapped in a labyrinth, a beast was stalking me, matching me step for step; I could feel its breath on my neck, and knew that if I stopped or looked back I’d be torn to pieces. After I collect myself I visit the kitchen to pour myself a bowl of Raisin Bran. The lamp hanging over the table is already on, and I find you slouched in a chair, clad in snowpants and a parka covered in feathers and what looks like mud. A pair of mittens, a scarf, and a wool hat lie in the puddle spreading out from your boots. You smell terrible.
Your explanation is terse: you’ve been encamped on the roof, sleeping under a pile of blankets in Mr. Graham’s pigeon coop. Every night you wake up at exactly 2:30 AM to visit Amy’s city, and return to yourself at dawn to get a shrink-wrapped sandwich and a water bottle from the 7-Eleven down the block. Afterwards you take a very long walk.
I ask why you’re out on the roof to begin with.
Better voltage up there, you say.
I don’t ask what that means. And I don’t know what else to ask you, what to else say. But I know you well enough to know you’ll volunteer what’s on your mind if I grind some coffee, boil some water, and sit down at the table to leaf through the issue of the Matador Review that came in the mail today.
But you don’t. Not right away. You sit there and glare at me, as though you’re waiting for me to come clean. The standoff lasts almost twenty minutes before you fold and have out with it.
Wherever you go now, no matter what you’re doing, Amy’s people are watching you. At the moment of your approach, all activity ceases, every voice is hushed, and each face becomes an unsignifying but severe blank aimed directly at you. You’re the sole object of their attention, but they respond to nothing you do. Amy’s city is shunning you.
For a time, you were able to ignore it and press on with your search. But each successive night of unyielding and unfriendly stares chipped away at your nerves. Two nights ago, you finally lost your temper. You spoke to Amy’s people and tried to reason with them. You employed phrases you heard and memorized when they still spoke to each other in your presence. You shouted at them. You pleaded with them.
Then you lost your temper, seizing one by the shoulders and shaking him. His eyes swelled in their sockets and his mouth gaped in a voiceless scream as he thrashed in your grip like an out-of-control fire hose. You released him only when he began to melt, clothes and hair and flesh and bone, as though he were a wax mannequin. The puddle that was a person somehow sank into the asphalt, and at that instant a building collapsed, two doors down from where you stood, imploding like it was dynamited at the foundation. A person on the sidewalk was buried in the collapse. She just stood there and kept staring at you until the rubble swept over her. A sinkhole opened up in the street, swallowing up about a dozen others who didn’t even try to run. For each person that fell, another building caved in. Soon the entire block was razed, and the dominoes kept falling, smoke and dust billowing up from the intersecting streets. All you could do was run like hell until your guts ached and your breathing became shallow, and you sat on the marble steps of a church to rest, gasping and feverishly sweating in the implacable glares of the people gathering in the street before you.
You point your finger at me.
The person you shook, the person who melted in your hands—it was me. It was the first time you saw me in Amy’s dream, and you’re burning to know how I got there.
I tell you Amy was sitting next to me at McGinty’s a few nights ago, and she didn’t look good at all.
You aren’t surprised in the least. Over the last few weeks, there have been nights where you leapt across town and landed in Amy—but found no city of Amy’s dreams because Amy was wide awake, pacing her studio apartment in the dark, drinking a hot toddy on the window ledge, or fumbling with the cap of an aspirin bottle on the bathroom floor. You didn’t have to wonder what was keeping her awake. Her migraines were visited upon you like kicks to the head.
And then there was last night, when you found yourself on the floor with Amy, as Amy, having her seizure. At least you think it was a seizure—but what else could it have been? It was like being electrocuted and banging your head on the floor while hysterically laughing and weeping at the same time. It incapacitated you as it did Amy. You pissed your pants. Retracting a psychic projection is like relaxing a muscle, which is a tall order when you’ve lost control over every part of yourself.
You think it only lasted a couple of minutes, but you felt like you’d ran a marathon through a hailstorm. You rolled over in the pigeon coop and puked into the straw. You lay cheek-down in a congealed puddle of Pepsi and trail mix and gastric fluids through the dawn and sunrise, too exhausted to budge.
When you finally got to your feet, you found that someone had kicked aside the brick keeping the always-locked door to the stairwell ajar. You took the fire escape down to the street, and walked the streets in an aimless daze. The flatulent drone of traffic was intolerable to you, and the sunlight ricocheted off the piled snow and stabbed into your eyes. You couldn’t walk in a straight line. More than once you doubled over and retched. It was Monday morning and the people around you had places to go, trains to catch, jobs to do. You recognized all of them. No face is unknown to you now. You’ve seen them all in Amy’s city, spied them in their beautiful other lives, secret even to them.
In hindsight, you understand it was Frieda and her new boyfriend Gary (who just so happens to be the weekday morning barista from Ascetic Coffee whom you sketched in his Clark Cable suit) who approached you. And you realize they were questioning you, staring at you because they hadn’t seen you in like three months—and now here you were, unwashed and disheveled and covered in puke and pigeon crap, looking like you’d spent the last twelve weeks trying a heroin addiction on for size. When your legs gave out and you screamed, everyone else on the block was staring at you too. For a moment you didn’t know whose city you were in anymore, who anyone really was, or who they belonged to.
You pause. I ask what happened next.
Well. After Frieda and Gary slipped away, pretending not to know you, and after everyone else resolved to resume their business without getting themselves involved in your problems, you stood back up, feeling rather much steadier and more lucid than before. You recalled a peculiar, melon-citrusy taste in Amy’s mouth when she was wracked by her fit, and have heard that gustatory hallucinations are a common part of epileptic episodes. So you roved around town all day, visiting the grocery stores and co-ops, and stealing bites from their produce sections until you got kicked out. Twenty-two stores later, you’re still no closer to discovering the fruit that lightning tastes like to Amy.
And now here you are.
I ask what you’re planning to do now, though I dread the answer.
You’re going back. Something is terribly wrong with Amy. You need to find out what. It’s the only way you can help her.
Don’t, I tell you. Please. The best thing you can do for Amy is leave her alone. Let it go. Please.
Now I’m waking up on my back, lying on the toppled chair I was sitting in when you whipped the sugar dish at my forehead. I don’t find you on the roof. I can get in your room—you must have used the fire escape to come in through the window and move the dresser away from the door—but you’re not in there, either. I don’t expect you’ll be returning to it.
I get treated for the concussion you gave me and take a sick day to sit on the couch and hold an ice pack to the nasty purple lump above my eyebrow. Sleep doesn’t come easily. I don’t think I need to explain why I’ve told the landlord we won’t be renewing our lease at the end of January, and I’m really hoping you don’t come back before I’m out of here.
But you do. A week later. I’m pushing Bananagrams tiles around the kitchen table when you open the door with your key and take one step inside. You’re dripping wet from sleet and your eyes are swollen from crying.
Amy is gone, you tell me.
Before I can say anything, you’ve already left. I run out after you, racing down the stairwell and out into the street. The indifferent streams of people traverse the sidewalks in the snow and rain, and among them I see no eddies of disturbance signifying your passage.
This time I know you won’t be coming back.
The symptoms of spring disclose themselves as ordered pairs. The last sooty icebergs retreat from the curbs into the storm drains, and the skateboarders retake the bike lanes. The dogwoods blossom in Lyman’s Cemetery, and the Thompson School of the Arts freshman are climbing the fence to conduct morbidly glamorous photoshoots they’ll be disavowing before December. The sidewalks become places instead of frigid conduits between places. The food trucks stake out their turf, and the cafes and bars drag their patio furniture out of storage. And it’s from one of the tables freshly planted outside Ascetic Coffee that I overhear Frieda talking to a visibly uncomfortable Gary.
I’ve made it a policy not to listen in when Amy’s name come up in conversation, but I can’t help what I overhear.
Frieda’s laying her painkiller addiction theory on Gary—and it definitely isn’t the first time he’s heard it from her. Nothing else, Frieda says, can account for Amy falling apart the way she did: gaining a lot of weight and then losing even more, ceasing to put any effort into her appearance, and reportedly becoming gloomy, short-tempered, and paranoid. It had to be drugs.
Frieda maintains that the rumors about Amy disappearing are all bogus. Amy hasn’t actually gone anywhere—people have just stopped talking about her. And why not? The mystique attached to the woman was always a trick of the light, and Amy went and spoiled the illusion herself. Not that nobody felt bad for her, but it was the kind of pity that makes one’s former admiration a cause for embarrassment. Amy’s stock went into freefall, and the public withdrew its investment.
I cut in to say that Amy really is gone: she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and left town to live with her parents while she undergoes treatment.
Frieda drolly answers that it’s certainly a novel theory.
I’ve been telling it to anyone I overhear and who I think might care, but to all of them my explanation is just as Frieda says: a theory. One among dozens, among a hundred. After all, most of what any of us could ever claim to have known about Amy was more a matter of conjecture than fact.
But I know it’s true because I talked to her building’s superintendent. I found her address written on a slip of paper under your mattress when I took two days off give away all your stuff via Craigslist and burn your papers in a wastebasket on the roof.
This is the first time I’ve actually seen Frieda since December. I expect there will be questions when I mention you—but she only has one, and it catches me completely off guard.
Who?
I let it go. In the wake of your sidewalk performance, I wouldn’t put it past Frieda to be so mortified at the thought of having ever been associated with you that she’d pretend not to have any idea who you are.
But I’m kidding myself. You’ve known Frieda for years. I’ve known Frieda for years. Frieda knows that I know she’s known you for years. Whatever else we can say about Frieda, she isn’t stupid. Something else is going on, but I don’t have any desire to explore it. I intend to let it be and get on with my life.
But then I start seeing the graffiti around town. The early tags are just sloppy spraycan strokes. Then the vandals start employing stencils. A few weeks after that, they’re throwing multicolored block letters up on the billboards and corner store shutters:
AMY COME HOME
WHY ISN’T ANYONE TALKING ABOUT AMY
WHAT PRICE AMY
During the month or so between the first occurrences of such statements and the unveiling of the three-story Amy mural on the wall of the old Peaslee building, I notice the peer support group flyers pinned to bulletin boards and sitting in neat little stacks in the vestibule at the library. The program doesn’t seem to have a name, and on the face of it, its purpose is vague:
YOU ARE NOT ALONE. MANY PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING FROM THE PROBLEM THAT YOU’RE STRUGGLING WITH. WE CAN HELP. ALL ARE WELCOME. SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES, ANXIETIES, PROBLEMS, SYMPATHY, AND ADVICE IN THE SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY. NO JUDGEMENT. YOUR ANONYMITY WILL BE RESPECTED. MEETINGS AT THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH, TAMARACK STREET, TUESDAYS AT 8:00.
Three recurring letters, typed in a slightly different font than the rest of the message. Most people probably wouldn’t notice—unless the letters A, M, and Y were a preoccupation of theirs. Unless they were looking for AMY with the apophenic vigilance of tinfoil investigators seeking the threads connecting the tacks on their corkboards. Unless the flyers’ distributors and intended recipients felt alike that discretion was in their best interest.
I’ve checked in at the basement of the First Unitarian Church on a couple of Tuesday nights. Not only are there too few folding chairs, but there isn’t even enough room in the back for people to stand in. If attendees don’t show up forty minutes early, they have to be content with listening from the hallway.
But yes—the murals. I’ve already seen four. Amy’s name isn’t to be seen on any of them, but there’s no mistaking that face, that tantalizing head-on collision gaze. The same week the one overlooking the community garden on Douglass Avenue was finished, a weekly book club show debuted on Channel One. All the books its panelists discuss are titles Amy was seen to have been reading over the years. Her name gets caught in the reviewers’ throats, and the conversation is purposefully ushered forward whenever it does.
I heard an anecdote about a hip young pastor at the Assemblies of God church over on Benson Circle. It’s told that one Sunday morning he gave a frantic and uncharacteristically fiery sermon about abandonment: divine grace has quit this world, he thundered, because we didn’t deserve her. Deserve it, it, he corrected himself. But a few members of his congregation were attending the Tuesday night meetings at the First Unitarian, and they had a word with him after the service. The pastor reportedly relinquished his post, and now his flock just sings songs for ninety minutes every Sunday while a replacement is sought.
Then the really stupid yet awfully familiar tattoos began appearing on necks and limbs and pelvises around town…
It’s you. You’re doing this.
You haunt the city like an uninvited eye in a webcam. Lurking by the restaurants, nourishing yourself with others’ experiences of chewing and swallowing. Tasting the joggers’ endorphins. Peeping at locker combinations in the fitness centers’ locker rooms and rifling through people’s handbags for cash while they’re on their treadmills. Stealing into our inner worlds when we’re asleep in our beds. Writing notes to me in the frosted windows of my dreams, telling me what you’ve been up to—because you won’t allow yourself be forgotten completely.
Everyone who lives in cities dreams of cities—but Amy’s city was as singular as she was. The rest of the herd? Their cities are tawdry Times Squares, grotesque Disneylands, and gentrified shambles of aluminum-paneled boxes and Starbucks drive-thrus. And they’re all filled with dead people, celebrities, and cartoon characters. There’s an Amy in some of them, but it’s no Amy you recognize. Those who recall her as she used to be remember a baroque caricature, a human piece of fan art. Those who observed her decline remember a scarecrow parody of the caricature. You’re disgusted with these people—with how little they know and how quickly they forget.
Whenever you meet an Amy in one of their squalid little cities, you take her into your hands. As her form melts away, you delicately reshape her like moist clay in your fingers, shaping her into the Amy that was—into the Amy you remember. And nobody remembers Amy as clearly as you.
You were surprised the first time you met yourself in somebody’s dream. Incidentally, it was Frieda’s. Since she’d been so eager not to know you, you did her a favor. You took her idea of you and remade it into Amy. Her every thought and memory of you is now a thought and memory of Amy.
That gave you an idea.
Since then, you’ve been taking hold of the anonymous slobs, Hollywood actors, social media influencers, and porn stars populating any number of people’s dreams and remaking them into Amy. Indiscriminately. As many as you can get your hands on. Hundreds every day, thousands every night. You’ve gotten it down to a science. Gradually but inexorably, the cities of which we dream are coming to resemble Amy’s. It’s always inauthentic and imperfect, like a misguided architectural nostalgia for a bygone age—but you nevertheless feel more at home in someone when the dreams that they dream remind you of what Amy used to dream.
In our city’s waking life, Amy is become a superstition. A demonism. A fetish. A part of ourselves we don’t understand. Thursday night is Amy Night at McGinty’s. The baristas at Ascetic Coffee ask patrons whether they’d like their Amy hot or iced. During Quizzo at Ballywick Board Games, the answer to every question is Amy. Halloween is months away, and the free weeklies are already printing tips on the perfect Amy costumes. Sexy Amy. Scary Amy. Tragicomic Amy. Steampunk Amy and Post-Ironic Amy. Men are breaking things off with their girlfriends because their girlfriends aren’t Amy, and they’re hating themselves because they’re not Amy either, clawing at themselves in the bathroom mirror to free the Amy they feel crawling beneath, to realize the strange and terrible new world germinating inside them.
Our city now dreams of millions of Amys in hundreds of thousands of cities. Any Amy in any city is Amy; and if she’s Amy, she’s a twilight city you can visit and continue your search. A dream within a dream is still a dream. You’re going to keep searching—and however you justified it, whatever other reasons you gave, that was always the point, wasn’t it? As many people, as many dreams, as many Amys as it takes.
I wonder how well you’d have to know me to know I’ve been setting out in the evenings with a bookbag in which I carry a 29-inch steel baseball bat, a stun gun, and twenty feet of rope, and pepper spray in my jacket pocket. Night after night, from dusk till dawn, I probe the alleys, the avenues, the parks, and the kingdoms of concrete and garbage beneath the highway ramps and overpasses. I shine my flashlight into condemned row houses, check under cars in the parking garages, scan the platforms at every filthy subway station, peer beneath the lids of every unlocked dumpster, survey every 24-hour Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s where the homeless steal half an hour’s safety and sleep at a table, and walk for miles over the gravel and refuse along the railroad tracks, brandishing the bat and shouting your name at every shadow that moves. I hope you know that I’ll do whatever it takes to make you stop.
There’s a weird sort of symmetry to this, isn’t there? Both of us, you and I, awake from dusk until dawn, wandering through interminable cities on either side of the wall of sleep, leaving no street unexplored nor stone unturned in defiance of every old chestnut about needles in haystacks and snowballs in hell. I wonder how many sleepless nights await us both before it ends, before one of us finally glimpses the face of the person we’re both looking for.
I wonder which of us will find you first.
What a treasure of a story, simply phenomenal! You have illuminated something very dark and warped in the human psyche, one that I am not exactly sure how to name. A sort of twisted covetousness, I suppose.
I'm reminded of an old Far Side cartoon. A caveman watches a bird soaring overhead. He flaps his arms in a desperate attempt to take flight, but fails. Once he realizes he cannot fly, he crafts a bow, shoots the bird out of the sky, and walks away with a satisfied smile on his face. Not exactly the same ugliness your story unveiled, but it comes from the same foul vein running through human nature.
The perspective was also a great choice; it created an immediate sense of intimacy and urgency.
I do like how this story has several spots that could be an ending, and keeps going to the logical end.