The Girl Who Would Be King(114)
I walk into the kitchen and dig out a bottle of vodka. I drink it all and then I drink the next one. All the while, Liz sits in her little dead pile and stares at the floor unblinking. After my third bottle I grab her by the wrist and drag her towards the loft’s edge. I pick her up and hold her for a moment, almost like I still love her. I touch her ear – the last ear I whispered into – and rip it off her head.
It comes off with surprising ease and I put it in the pocket of my robe.
I lift her over my head and launch her onto the concrete floor below, pieces of her breaking like expensive plates.
Gigantor stands below the loft, an automatic weapon in one hand and his other nervously clenching and unclenching as he stares at her broken body on the floor. He looks at me and then down, unsure if he’s going to be thrown too for witnessing the very private crime. “Get rid of her,” I say to him. “And make sure I’m not bothered for the rest of the day.” I add, walking away from the railing. I hear him scuttle out of the room to get assistance and I take as many bottles of vodka into the bedroom as I can carry, drawing the heavy drapes behind me.
I don’t know how much time has passed, but I’m lying on the floor staring alternately at Liz’s ear and the industrial-sized ceiling fan, when Delia shows up, looking all ghosty and pale, still in her green bathrobe, the edges charred, I guess, in homage to the fiery crash that killed her. She strolls into the room as if she’s never left, as if she isn’t the reason my whole life and everything in it is fucked in the first place. She stops mid-stride just before stepping on Liz’s ear and then draws back, a horrified smile on her face.
“Oh dear, Lo, I almost stepped on your BFF,” she says, dramatically stretching her leg over the ear and then spinning across to the other side of the room, facing me, hands on her hips. I toss an empty bottle in her direction and it flies right through her and crashes into the concrete. “That’s not very nice, Lo,” she says sweetly. “Don’t blame me for losing your temper and killing your only friend,” she says, reaching her hands to the sky.
I turn away from her, take one of the broken bottles into the bathroom with me, and slit my wrists.
°
I go to the depths of Inwood Hill Park – the oldest and most alone place I know of in Manhattan – and teach myself to fly. It takes nearly a day and much of it is really, really not pretty, but I finally get it and explode into the sky like I’ve been fired from a gun.
Hovering over the city I’m blown away by its beauty. It’s my city and I want to take care of it. I want to make sure Lola never touches it again.
Afterward I walk all over the city, reconnecting with it. Rebuilding a bond that I hadn’t even realized I’d missed. Long after sundown and deep into the evening hours something powerful calls me north. I’m downtown, in the financial district of all places, when it happens, but I take off in that direction as soon as I feel it, running at first and then, eventually taking flight mid-run. It’s fantastic.
A few minutes later, after weaves and turns throughout the city in an attempt to pinpoint the location, I arrive on a small, quiet block with an all-night corner-diner, its lights burning with a kind of loneliness, desperately beating back the night. The fire in my gut tells me this is it.
When I arrive though, there’s nothing.
No robbery in place.
No ‘bad man with a knife.’
Nothing.
Just me and a handful of other sad little souls sitting around, keeping the darkness at bay. The waitress nods at me and I smile to put her at ease. I sit at the counter and order a black coffee, because it sounds strong and dark. I sit quietly, head down, drinking, just like everyone else, trying to think what went wrong. Where was this bad sound that called to me from so far away.
What has gone wrong? I concentrate, see if I can seek it out. I hear the sound of a mother clicking her spoon nervously against a saucer, the sound of her child up too late and screaming out at odd intervals and squirming against the vinyl of the booth. The sound of a toilet flushing and a zipper being zipped, the unpleasant smell from the same room. The sound of a cough and the water faucet not coming on and hands not being washed. The sound of the waitress whispering ‘I love you’ into her cell phone and smoothing her skirt before coming through the swinging kitchen door to refill cooling coffees. The sound of the cook, way in the back, with nothing to cook so late at night, sitting on an overturned bucket and reading a book, his finger pulling at the page anxiously before it’s time to finally turn it. The sound of a couple in the very back booth, very much in love – or very much in the throes of making up – cuddling together on one bench, each with a strawberry milkshake in front of them, half-finished, their bodies so close it is more like seeing, hearing, feeling one person instead of two.