The second coming, p.2
The Second Coming, page 2
She would carefully slick a sticker that first day onto the pebbled skin of her instrument case: This Machine Kills Fascists. A conversation starter, from the Bluestockings Bookstore on Allen Street. But the school’s cliques had formed long ago, and worse than being singled out, she drifted through the halls between periods like just another ghost. Back home, she drew her room’s blinds and lay prone on the bed in her underwear, smelling the brick dust kicked out by the secondhand window unit. Not that she had any right to feel sorry for herself; she wasn’t a civilian in Mosul (she knew) or one of those Mediterranean boat people just starting to haunt her newsfeed. She was young, white, reasonably privileged, with a whole afternoon—a whole life, really—ahead of her. But maybe this was the problem: all those years already in the rearview, all those hours weeks months spent in empire’s soft prison, had in the end boiled down to nothing.
At some point, she opened her iTunes. The Bach and Shostakovich pieces that had lit her up at seven or eight now seemed distant, historical, as if produced on toy instruments under a bell jar. But beneath her bed was a box of old CDs she’d long been avoiding. Now she dragged it out, plucked free a burned disc that had caught her eye once before. Other People: A Requiem, said the label, but when she put it in, the music for some reason wouldn’t play. So she reached for another jewelcase: Prince. The cover, though, featured not the purple lothario of legend, but a cropped blur loitering by a pile of junk in a turtleneck and big glasses, looking like nothing so much as that “Coffee Talk” lady from Saturday Night Live. The music was at first equally off-kilter, a looped drum and a cheeseball synth locked in combat with what could have been either a heart monitor or a dial-up modem. But if you hung around for a minute (and again, Jolie had nothing better to do), it was like you got sucked through a veil, into a rich velvet space of guitar and organ plus whatever was the opposite of falsetto, a tenor beamed back from the far side of apocalypse, recounting the addictions and afflictions and other hells you had to struggle through to get there. Halfway through the song, she pressed repeat.
She would wake to find the light murky and a note on the nightstand:
You seemed exhausted last night, sweetie, so I decided to let you sleep straight through. Had to go meet students but laid out some breakfast. Don’t forget to floss.
And indeed in the kitchen two packets of instant oatmeal had been left on the counter, along with an ugly banana and Mom’s frenemy The New York Times. What would seem telling in hindsight was the weird moment when, waiting for her gums to stop bleeding in the bathroom mirror, Jolie imagined the showercurtain being tugged back to reveal her own slumped corpse in the tub. But at the time, it was only a moment. After eating what she could and squirreling away the rest at the bottom of the trash, she shouldered her pack and headed to the train alone.
And this would become her routine in the weeks that followed: shuffle through the stations of her classes; avoid all common areas; spend the better part of the afternoon laboring through the bleary underworld of swim practice and then do the commute in reverse, a caustic chlorine scent in her nose. Showering seemed beside the point when you could go the whole day speaking only a few dozen words to actual human beings. The latchkey time in her room, working her way through the music collection of a grandmother she’d never got to meet, was the one thing she now looked forward to—the one thing authentically hers—but there are certain kinds of balm that only worsen the underlying injury. And as the leaves continued to scab from the trees outside and the little upload wheel to spin, she could feel a black spot blooming at the center of her head’s darkness, like a stain across a microscope slide. Or like someone out there had trained the sun on her through a series of lenses. Like some black/white queer/straight imp of the perverse had “produced, arranged, composed and performed” this Sign o’ the Times for her alone.
* * *
—
Then it was february, the last day before midterm break, and her school was holding another dance. The fall mixer, three months prior, must not have been a total wash, because this time some of the girls in her class did get asked by boys. Yet if you’d happened to peer at eight that night through the square windows of the gymtorium doors, you’d have seen the sexes stuck to discrete walls as if parted by a comb. You might even, if you were a feminist, have felt a certain vindication. On the Sojourner Truth–to–Paris Hilton continuum of feminism, Jolie graded herself somewhere around a Beyoncé: alert to the workings of patriarchy yet unable to get fully outside them. Which was practically the only Bey-like thing about her, what with the acne. The eyebrows. Still, she wanted to believe it was a sign of progress rather than of surrender that she’d agreed to meet up beforehand with a girl named Precious Ezeobi.
Precious was a year further along in school and a head taller, not to mention preternaturally poised, with one of those voices that made you realize acting was eighty percent voice. In the fall production of Into the Woods, while Jolie dutifully sawed away in the orchestra, Precious had played the baker’s clever wife. It had been hard to tell from the pit whether her high-waisted apron had done more to hide her curves or call attention to them—but probably hide them, it seemed, for Precious had now swept back in from off campus in a tight black-and-white wrap dress and her hair done up in a dozen mini Afro puffs. And the one thing Jolie could do to prevent a sense of gawking was to push into the gym.
Which is to say, the auditorium with no show running. The stage lights at the far end bore colored gels, she noticed, and in place of the fluorescents overhead, Christmas lights snaked through the winched-up basketball goals. Seeing Precious take a sodacup from a table and go lean against the lip of the stage, Jolie did the same. Between speakers opposite, a laptop had been loaded with the kids’ requests, Rihanna, Diplo, Weezy…or possibly it was just Pandora, working subtle variations on the theme of mononymous pop.
Five or six songs drifted past like this. Then, as if at some invisible signal, a cluster of girls from the wall crossed to a cleared space near the jump circle. They started shifting back and forth without looking at the boys, yet with a listlessness that seemed directed at them, somehow. Was this what Jolie was supposed to do, too? She couldn’t unsee the image of chickens from a certain movie from her childhood: stop-motion hens, scratching and stupidly pecking. Yet saying so out loud wasn’t going to make her feel any happier—only meaner. And when Precious, after a few minutes’ thoughtful watching, got up and moved toward an exit, Jolie hoped they’d fulfilled the minimum required attendance and could bounce out of here altogether.
The plan was for Precious to spend the night at the apartment where Jolie lived with her mom, uptown. (There was track work in perpetuity on the C train, and cabs to Brooklyn could be a pain in the ass, even to the gentrified parts where families like the Ezeobis had gut-renovated brownstones.) It was this sleepover element, in fact, that had sold Jolie on the dance. But Precious was now tacking around the corner to a seldom-used faculty bathroom. She scanned the hall, put her ear to the door. Then, with a regal jerk of her head, she beckoned Jolie inside.
Far from the little Versailles you might imagine, it was a glorified student john, the same smell of bleach and brown paper towel. The only perk was a deadbolt set high in the door. “Tell me if that still works,” Precious said, meaning the transom window above the lone stall.
“Okay, but dude, what are you doing?”
What Precious was doing was shooting the bolt, dumping her Coke into the sink, then running the faucet to rinse the cup. Her overnight bag thumped to the counter. From its depths came a squarish bottle Jolie failed to register much of, save for some woodland creature in full affront on the label. Perhaps she was distracted by all that liquid inside, throbbing faintly with the bass through the foot-thick wall. “My sister left a stash in her room when she took off for Barcelona,” Precious explained. “The middle one I was telling you about. Grace.”
As always, the mention of Precious’s sister brought a tiny, jealous pang. “You stole it?”
“ ‘Stole’ is such an ugly word. Anyway, I had a hunch we might need to liven things up.” As the tempo shifted, Precious measured out a practiced draught and knocked it back without visibly flinching. Then she refilled the chalice and held it out.
Jolie sniffed. She’d never had anything stronger than Manischewitz, unless you counted the gin her Nana had let her dip a finger in that one time. She’d been warned since of various hereditary risk factors, but again, wasn’t that just a copout? It’s not like one measly drink could ever change anything…or at any rate, a close-quarters hang with the most interesting girl in eighth grade hardly seemed the place for scruples. She took a demo sip, trying not to breathe through her nose, and swallowed as quickly as if it were her own spit. The result was controlled fire. Survivable burn. The second time the cup came to her, though, Jolie miscalculated, so that a whole hot finger of whatever it was was now making the slow transit of her throat. She thought of a PET scan she’d had to undergo once to check kidney function—contrast dye lighting up her gag reflex. Then the booze touched some deeper opening, the rupture she’d been doing her best to rise above. And Oh, she realized.
Oh.
As a city girl, born and raised, Jolie liked to fancy herself sophisticated, but her cheek, when next she touched it, had a gauzy quality. The air held either more or less oxygen than normal. Precious said something funny, and she heard herself do this horsey sputtering thing. A Pez-hued pack of American Spirits appeared on the counter, and for once she had to give props to the fell power of DNA; were even a bag of angel dust to be produced, she saw, she would immediately have tried to snort it, or smoke it, because what did nasal passages matter, what did kidneys or lungs (or for that matter heart), when the disease was life itself?
But now the bolt rattled near her ear, followed by a knock. A voice came from outside, male, teacherly. “Hello?”
Shit, Jolie would remember thinking, just as Precious said, “Shit.” And louder, in the same register she’d used to tell off her baker husband: “¡Es ocupado, señor!”
Then she slipped down off her wedges, climbed nimbly atop the commode, shoved the bottle with its fiery remnant through the transom. Jolie braced for the sound of breaking, but Precious must have pre-positioned a receptacle on the street below—or anyway, you wouldn’t have put it past her. “If somebody asks,” she hissed, “you got your period and the dispenser in the girls’ room was out.”
“But what are you doing here, in this scenario?”
“I’m your moral support—duh.” And before Jolie could wonder why it had to be her period: “Is he gone yet?”
Jolie put an ear to the door, unsure how a person was supposed to detect signs of life over all this echoey percussion. But when she slotted the bolt back and peeked out into the hall, there was just an old couch and some half-spooled volleyball nets and a red stripe spanning the cinderblock wall, its stenciled exhortation: EAGLES!
What came next she would experience less as a seamless tracking shot than as a series of stills stuttering forward at the brush of some cosmic thumb. Yet the overall impression was of the darkness starting, finally, to wane. Like, here was the sheen of sweat at Precious’s neck where the hair had pulled it tight…and here they were, dancing. Here was a chubby girl whose prettiness she’d never noticed before gliding closer and pumping a fist to Jay-Z. Here, at the start of a tribute spin of “Billie Jean,” were dud clouds of dry ice courtesy of the Physics Club—and here was an Asian boy effecting an uncanny moonwalk. Another boy whipped out a phone to memorialize the memorial while the fat girl whooped with a knowingness that couldn’t quite hide her genuine delight.
The deejay-slash-algorithm must have decided to bypass any slowdance, though, because at ten sharp, amid the audible chock of levers being thrown, a blue light kindled in the overhead cages, and teachers too clueless to avoid chaperone duty were shouting idle threats about getting locked in over the break. Cool air gusted from doors that led to the street, where the faces of the older parents, glowing, gathered. A few bigass cans of Arizona iced tea lolled on the floor.
Jolie’s own mom’s omniscience no longer seemed to extend to public transit, or really to anything below about 110th Street, so she and Precious would set out for the subway unobserved. They didn’t actually stagger, she didn’t think, but she would later retain an inordinate amount of sidewalk in the B-roll, a fatal dazzle of mica under the streetlights—unless this was just the glitter in the moonwalking boy’s hair. “I think he’s into you,” Precious said.
Jolie wondered if her brain had gone audible. “What? Who?”
“Peter Yang, with that whole Thriller routine.” She was just unpacking the finer points of the crotch-grab when a hand touched Jolie’s arm.
“Hey, you two want to slow down for a minute?”
Jolie felt Precious trying to pull ahead, but her own reflex in the face of beseechment was still a shameful obedience. She turned to see a leather jacket, then a head of floppy blueblack hair a few inches below where she expected it to be. It was Mr. Koussoglou, who taught Exploring Cultural Richness and had recently taken over the literary magazine.
“You ladies looked like you were having a good time back there,” he said, eyeing Precious through his architectural glasses.
“Oh, you know,” sputtered Jolie. “I don’t know. It was fine.”
Mr. Koussoglou was one of the younger members of the faculty, and they’d thus far been on good terms. In the fall, he’d let her linger in his classroom well into the lunch hour, perusing the ethnologic bric-a-brac, the long shelves of academic paperbacks that recalled Mom’s study at home. The rumor was that he’d dropped out of grad school during a bad breakup before coming to teach; hence the faint hipsterish air, like his necktie was a prop he couldn’t quite get behind—though now he was really inhabiting the role. “I saw you out on the dance floor. It looked like a lot more than ‘I don’t know.’ ”
“What’s your point, Mr. K.?” Precious had a way of making nonchalance seem almost flirtatious, but her face tightened as he went on.
“I know that was the two of you in the faculty restroom. I assume you have an explanation?”
“It’s kind of a personal question, no? And for you to be dogging me this late in the game—”
He wasn’t dogging anyone, he said. “In fact, I’ve been trying to stay out of your way, Precious, but when I go to take the recycling out and find this on the dumpster lid beneath the window…” He pulled something from his jacket. A light rain was falling, adding to the general mistiness, the mingled clouds of their breath, but Jolie didn’t have to look too closely to see the defiant stag logo, dragging everything behind it into clarity.
And naturally a merchant across the street would choose exactly that moment to start cranking the security grate down over his storefront: half a minute of graveyard rattle. More excruciating still was the silence that followed—or what, on the northern fringes of Manhattan’s East Village on a Friday night in winter, passed for silence: ambulances screaming their heads off, housing-insecure pigeons winging darkly overhead.
“It’s mine,” Jolie blurted. “Precious has nothing to do with it.”
She waited for her new friend to jump in with some matching feat of nobility, but Precious just said, “Everybody knows you have it in for me, Mr. K., but I’m not in your class anymore, we’re not on campus. So unless you’re ready to bring a proper accusation”—her top-notes of litigiousness were pretty much unmissable—“my date and I will be going. Let’s book, Jolie.”
The clomp of Precious’s wedges on the sidewalk had a bracing authority, but Jolie couldn’t get her own feet to budge. She seemed to catch a flicker inside Mr. Koussoglou as he turned the bottle in his hands, a disappointment out of all proportion to the offense. Like he’d glimpsed whatever she had, the hole at the back of the universe, and still couldn’t get past it.
“This is yours?” he said. And when she didn’t answer: “I’m surprised at you, frankly, Jolie. Drinking on school property’s a serious violation of the honor code—though right now it’s your safety I’m more concerned about. How were you proposing to get home?”
“It was just a couple of swallows, Mr. Koussoglou. To see how it felt. And I told you, Precious is sober, you saw her. The train’s right there.”
“You know I’m going to have to contact your parents nonetheless,” he said.
“My mom lets unknown numbers go to voicemail.”
“So we use your phone to call her.”
“It died.” Which was true, actually. She held it up.
“An email, then, and let’s see what comes back.”
The lit face of his phone lit his own fine face as she watched him thumb-type the letters of an address she felt helpless to withhold. Then he stopped and frowned. “Jolie, this isn’t going to end up in some dead account, is it? Like a fake number someone gives out at a bar?”
She was used to people in official positions wondering why her last name failed to match her mom’s. Even on her birth certificate, she was the only Aspern. “You got me, Mr. K. I’m a total criminal mastermind, and this is all just a really long con.”
“Because it’s easy enough to go back to the office and pull your mother’s contact card. And let’s cut the sarcasm, shall we, given the circumstances?”
“The university email’s the one synced to her phone…It’s Kupferberg because she never took my dad’s name, okay? I was four the first time he got arrested. And then like ten when they made him go to rehab.”
His eyes seemed to swim slightly behind their lenses, unless it was the booze making her see things. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Why would you?”
