Chapter Twenty-Seven: Midtown

Peter Nguyen lived with his boyfriend Moises Cruz and their friend and former lover Promethea Donne, in a studio apartment in a 25story glass and ceramic building on the corner of 40th and Eighth. It was a run down building in a bad area but it was cheap, not unimportant to three unemployed actors working in restaurants. The amphibatrain stopped at 42nd and Eighth. The short walk filled Felix’s brain with badly needed oxygen.

Crowds of people wandered over sidewalks crammed with shacks and jerry-rigged structures with walls of paper or cloth, and roofs of corrugated composite and sometimes just faded, patched sheets of composite pulled from dumpsters. Vacuum lights and hissing gas lanterns, strings of naked light bulbs, oil fires and diodes dangling off of wires made a weird orange glow that filled the air.

The booths sold food, or hosted a crap game or a game of cards. People hawked drinks out of coolers, unlabeled beer bottles and jugs of whiskey for two dollars. There were tents for fucking, and overthe- counter drug sales.

The waitress left to catch a PCP home and Peter threaded through the crowd with Felix in tow, distracted by everything. He watched red, blue and yellow-feathered darts knock into a board. Beer foam gushed over the sides of mugs. Strange smells called after him. Clove cigarette. Smoking brazier. Meat grilled on little skewers over an hibachi on the sidewalk, for a handful of coins. In two blocks he saw more of life than in twenty years. On a dark stretch of stoops, concealed in the shadow, he saw a man sprawled out on his back snoring loudly, two crutches on the ground, his right leg cut off at the knee. The stump was raw.

Felix had always known that the world was ludicrous but until he met Veronica he had suffered this knowledge alone. It was a feeling they shared between them but didn’t reveal to others. Neither had any inkling that an entire subculture rooted in this perception even existed, that in fact the world’s absurdity was a commonplace in some quarters, to be debated, celebrated, agonized over. They had lived like solitary rainforest creatures, adapted to the trees, nocturnal, staring out with big round eyes into the arboreal dark, oblivious to the Bohemian beetles down below, busy churning up the dung and the earth.

Bags of rotting garbage were piled in front of the building. The steps were white with pigeon shit. Graffiti covered the door and walls, fat bands of black, cartoonish drawings, crude genitalia dripping red. There was a careful rendition of an eye with teeth for lashes. The lobby of the apartment was dark and dirty. It smelled like fresh urine. Peter yanked a croaking metal door open and they entered a narrow hall lit with blue and orange glow balls. At the end was an elevator, difficult to discern from the wall, due to the continuous scrawl of invective. They got off on the twelfth floor and went down an identical hall to a door and entered a tiny square room in a haze of smoke. Obscured by this haze were two people seated on folded floor cushions watching what appeared to be a knot of naked humans, engaged in an orgy: greasy reared bottoms and recumbent bodies with raised legs, multiple penetrations of all genders and holes, a fist rhythmically pounding a thigh.

“I’ve brought a friend,” Peter said.

The woman shrieked and the man, in a nasal, preternaturally sarcastic voice said, “Turn it off, quick.” The vision of Sodom faded.

Felix hid behind Peter, wet and dirty from sleeping out in the rain, afraid he was intruding, feeling lost and miserable. Why had he ever consented to come here? With his bartender of all people. A man he didn’t even know.

The woman was sultry, not terribly tall, a little heavy but not fat, in her late twenties with thick, disorderly hair, the color of dark antiques. Her half closed eyes were somber and her lips were thick and sensuous. She was tired and wasted; sprawled on the cushion, head against the wall. In her left hand was a square glass and in her right a cigarette. It was hard to see how she could tilt the glass into her mouth at that angle without spilling it down her chest.

The man was a little younger maybe, with a wavy pile of chestnut hair, high cheekbones and a prominent cleft chin. His mouth was fixed in a mischievous smile and his eyes were open warily with surprise. He was seated upright on his cushion, back straight, smoking, drinking from a square glass. In the middle of the room was a low, black, wooden table. On it was an ashtray bulging over with cigarette butts, an ice bucket and a bottle of cheap gin. They were dressed for bed, the woman in a pair of black cotton shorts. Her large, fleshy breasts lay flattened against her like old balloons. The man wore black bikini underwear. His body was like an ice sculpture, perfect musculature and no hair, but somehow it didn’t fit his face at all, which was a little coarse and very expressive. There was a third nipple in the center of his chest, which he rubbed back and forth compulsively.

The room was hot. A ceiling fan spun furiously and a window fan buzzed and roared but both to no effect, the smoke was just too thick.

“Are you watching that shit again? I thought you had to bring the equipment back to Edsel.”

“It was just the live feed from Fallopia,” the man said.

“We had to watch Zeke perform,” the woman said.

“You two are obsessed,” Peter said, angrily. “So, this is my friend Felix.”

“Oh, hello,” said the man, looking Felix over with increasing interest. The woman sat up, abruptly aware of herself, and covered her breasts. “Hand me a shirt,” she said, a little languidly, looking at Felix and then at Peter and the man. On the floor a number of shirts, bras, pants and skirts lay in a heap around a full laundry bag. Peter tossed her the first shirt he laid hands on, a black tank top. She smelled it and made a face but put it on. “Hello, Felix,” she said.

“This is my boyfriend, Moises Cruz, and our friend Promethea Donne.” They shook hands without standing. There wasn’t much room on the floor. Promethea made room for Felix on the cushion and nervously, stiffly, he sank down on it. Moises went into the galley kitchen and returned with two glasses into which he spooned some ice cubes and poured gin.

“I hope you like gin,” he said, handing a glass to Felix. “It’s all we have.”

Peter took off his shoes and Felix stood up abruptly and did the same, bending over and nearly falling as he did so. Once they were more or less settled in comfortably around the table, within arm’s distance of each other, Moises and Promethea looked at Peter, awaiting his explanation.

“Felix is a regular at Les Jardeen. He’s had a terrible personal tragedy and I told him he could spend the night with us.” He said this as if he were summarizing a play he had just seen and as if Felix were not seated right there, close enough to smell their breath and sweat. Inside, Felix squirmed around, expecting a tremendous fight to erupt. He searched for a means of escape, but it was too tight, he was trapped. Promethea became terribly concerned about his personal tragedy and said, “That sounds just awful. Do you mind my asking–”

“Ew, Promethea, don’t pry,” said Moises. The way he peered at Felix expectantly, Felix knew he would have to tell them something. He looked at his bag, by the door, feeling the distance between himself and the remnants, or remains, of his former life. But it had only just ended, hadn’t really ended at all. There were two trajectories now, the one his life was supposed to have taken and the one it was actually on. The real died into an ideal and he was left to live out a grotesque fantasy.

“No gory details,” Peter said, glaring at Moises.

“It’s o.k.,” Felix said, his voice low but rooted. He had no trouble speaking. “My wife died, very suddenly. Then I got fired from my job and evicted.”

Moises opened his mouth dumbly and said, finally, “Oh my god.”

Promethea shook her head. “Just awful.” They drank up in silence and Moises poured another round. Felix waved off the ice cubes.

Peter asked, in a tone suspended between sarcasm and disgust, “So, was the live feed from Fallopia all you were going to watch?”

“We couldn’t agree on a movie and then we remembered about Zeke,” Moises said.

Peter sighed miserably. “Zeke’s gonna need a renovation if he keeps it up.”

“Zeke’s got buns of steel, and you know it.”

“He’s Dorian Grey.”

Promethea turned confidentially to Felix and mumbled, “Zeke’s been a live porn star for as long as anyone can remember. He just never seems to age.”

“Well, he used to be in the theater,” Moises said.

“Oh, but he was never a leading man,” said Promethea. And then, to Felix, again in confidence, “He did stand up as well.”

They fell to theater gossip then, throwing around names of people and places that bewildered Felix as much by their speed as their obscurity, but he was flattered by their apparent instant acceptance, and felt as if he had always been sitting next to Promethea and across from Peter and Moises. Even the odor of their bodies was sinking in, becoming familiar.

“Do you see many shows?” Moises asked.

“Well, we have a subscription to Broadway Inc.”

“They’ve taken over everything,” Peter said. His face became dark and bitter. Felix had only seen his face at work, when it was pressed into service and betrayed his thoughts and moods fleetingly.

“But Milt Spahn is a genius,” Promethea said. “Without him there’d be no viable commercial theater.”

Moises made a loud dismissive noise almost like the braying of a donkey. “Milt Spahn doesn’t know his Holinshead from his Henslowe!”

Peter said, in a voice a little louder, “There was more work when the independents were operating.”

“And the plays were better,” Moises added. “Did you see the Antony and Cleopatra?” he asked Felix.

“I did,” Felix said, trying to remember the night. He and Veronica had seen the whole season.

“What did you think?”

Felix took a breath. His thoughts scattered like pigeons, just out of reach. He and Veronica had discussed it at length on the amphibatrain, but he only saw the image of them in a bubble of conversation, cut off from the other passengers. What they said was swallowed up by the feeling of sitting with her. “They were all quite good…the actors I mean. But, well, I’ve always seen Augustus as the villain, and they made him the hero of that production, it seems to me anyway.”

All three of them nodded. Peter said, “Unsurpassed stupidity.”

“It’s worse than stupid,” Moises said, “It’s intentional.”

“Well,” Promethea said. “I’d better make up the guest room.” Felix briefly searched for this other room and then understood by the chuckles that the guest room was the third, inflatable mattress she pulled out of the wall unit that covered the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. The room was just big enough to accommodate the three mattresses, a double for Felix and Moises, and the two singles for Promethea and Felix. The little table folded up. The four of them silently made up the beds with sheets, Moises and Peter along one wall, with a little space, and then Promethea’s along side, against the opposite wall. Felix’s was perpendicular to these, beneath the windows and the t.v., his head not far from Promethea’s feet. After another drink and another round of cigarettes in the dark they went to sleep. Felix felt himself shrinking. He was small, a small hunched creature hiding in a tree. Even the discordant waking breaths abating into rhythmic unison were menacing. His eyes adjusted and he lay there watching the lights throb on the ceiling. He got up, stepped up the narrow aisle between the two beds and brought his bag back to the bed and draped his arm across it and tried to sleep. But even with his eyes shut lights burst on the lids and the distant hooting and howling of the city seemed to go on forever. There were sirens, and screams and the sounds of things breaking, glass, cracking wood. There was water rushing. And agony. The constant sound of human agony, the kind that sows no empathy. Rather it was the kind of self-lacerating agony that germinates contempt. It was as if by night the destruction of humanity went on, a municipal project of long duration, like the building of pyramids. Drifting in and out he was vaguely aware of movement and realized that Peter was humping Moises.