slipping

by Isabelle Hughes

On the way downtown, the buildings rose so high they cut the gray sky into ribbons, and a fine mist blew around as if gravity had become a question. I don’t know why I traveled there except that I once knew a woman who told the future. She had brown pools for eyes. She let her hair grow long and thick until it knotted itself into a heavy rope. She lived here I think. I think I went looking for her. I think I went. I think.

Empty trash bins knuckle the sidewalk. They still smell of last night’s trash like longing. When you have nothing, even your trash can accumulate a sort of sentimental value. This is what the man told me somewhere on 14th street. He was down bad. He had an irregular foot pattern from an accident that caused the passersby to part around him. I asked him if there was an afterlife. There’s not even an after-tomorrow, he said. Then he ran his broken fingers through my hair and I left it unwashed so it held his tobacco smell. Tomorrow came.

When did everybody start hating America? If you hate America, you can’t love anyone who lives in it. Rules are rules. Somewhere near Port Authority I walk into a tattoo shop. The guys are eating halal and drinking forties with no condensation. It’s morning. I lift up my t-shirt and point to the hollow made by my ribs ending and my stomach beginning. I tell them, “Surprise me.” The guy, young guy, doesn’t wash his hands. He shoves one into a clear glove so I can see the turmeric-stained fingers. Nice, I think, nice, when the needle. I ask the tattooist if I’m the first person who’s asked for this. Happens all the time, he says. Only in America, he says. I ask him why he came here. He says bombs. I say yours or ours? He laughs but I don’t.

When he’s finished, he wipes my skin with a wet cloth and my blood leaves something like a face behind. I ask him if I can keep it. This garbage? he says. Yes, I say. I hold a mirror to my stomach. There’s a skull in my skin.

Downtown still the rain. Still, the ducks. Salt-cured and making foam with their feet in the Hudson. I toss fingerfuls of $1 bodega bagel and watch their bills dunk, lift, slimed. A sort of car oil film makes rainbows. I make a deal with God. Bring me the woman and I’ll believe in you again. Only I never stopped believing. I know this. He doesn’t. I’m always playing these games. A nice thing I do remember is I had a brother once who said you can make an offering and in return, God will reward you. So I say, give me the woman and I’ll give my last $20 to somebody who needs it more. The problem, I think, is you have to make the offering first to get the reward. But that seems risky. So I try this instead. And then would you believe it? The woman sits down on the bench next to me! She’s thinner than before and her hair is short. Her eyes are blue, but it doesn’t matter. It’s you, I say. She points to herself making a gun with her fingers, so I oh-so gently, humbly, fold the middle finger so it’s just her pointer doing the pointing. Been a long time, I say. My hand is still on hers. I run over the grooves made by time. I think getting older isn’t all bad. For one thing, if your wrinkles get deep enough, you could hide your valuables in them. Then again, as the clock runs out, you have no use for valuables, and that in itself is a gift. God is not the only rewarder.

Ok, so the buildings blow a cool wind. The water. A new honey locust uproots itself. I think I’ll try to find my brother. The way we left things must have been awful because I can’t remember. I remember everything. He had a way of telling you how wrong you were for your life choices, and the words would sort of lodge themselves, like a tick, into your heart. Ticks are amazing by the way! They insert their hypostrome, a needle with backward-facing hooks that anchor them into animals, people. The hypostrome pumps your blood like a straw, sucking you up. You don’t even feel it at first because they inject you with anesthetic to numb you. In other words, they don’t want you to feel pain. In other words, they get a bad rap. I ask the woman if ticks live in the city. She says in Central Park one summer, there were so many ticks that all of uptown caught a fever. The doctors were overwhelmed. They posted signs on their office doors saying, TAKE ASPIRIN. REST. Play dates were canceled and men called out of work. Families were families again for a little while. There was a surge of divorces, the woman says. What was that? I couldn’t hear her anymore for I pressed into my tattoo and the pain was deafening.

I didn’t have cab money, but I wanted to listen to the radio. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the radio in some time, and I liked the way the voices leaked from the speaker. Voices reach out to you even though you can’t reach back. You know how I mean? Of course, there is music, but I prefer the way talk radio can make your house feel full even when it's empty. Rain-soaked and shivering, I hailed a cab near Wall Street. Men in suits dashed from office buildings to delis. In with a dripping umbrella under one arm. Out with a wax paper-wrapped sandwich. They did this for some time—in, out, in, out, in—before a yellow cab appeared. I waved it down. I told the driver to take me to Central Park. What entrance, he says. I say, left. Can you turn on the radio? He turns to me through the plexiglass barrier. It warps his face. I reach out and touch the thick plastic. Radio, I say again, and he shrugs but his shoulder gets caught in the warping. Merges with the round of his face. He turns the dial and a voice cuts through, competes with the hard drive of rain against metal.

The radio says: You’re not really you. You’re made up of particles that don’t even touch. Aren’t even solid. Technically, on some invisible scale, a thing could move right through you.

Less fortunate people scatter on sidewalks, jeans darkening.

So what I’m saying is that if you held someone long enough, you’d begin to mix. Your cells and theirs.

The driver asks if I want music. I’m thinking I want my baby back. We settle on music.

We’re in that part of downtown Manhattan with the squat buildings, which are taller still than some blocks in other cities—places I know I’ve been to but can’t recall the names of now. Even here though, the clouds drop low, kiss the reflective roofs. Once, between jobs, I slept on a man’s couch somewhere near east Houston Street. It was that area where a narrow park runs parallel to the road and smoking men sell fish in large clear buckets filled with ice. From my bed (his couch), I could look out and see children swinging, and I liked to lay back so they sailed upward into view, into pure blue sky, then disappeared again. The man asked me to pay him $50 a week. I said I could do that, but he had to be patient with me. I said, let me call my brother. Sit with me, I said, and for a while we drank blackcurrant soda—which had a stronger smell than taste—and watched the hair flipping off the back of swinging children’s heads. When he wasn’t home, I’d go into the man’s room and pull the gun from his nightstand. I touched my finger to the barrel which was no wider than a nail’s head. I asked him, later, if he’d ever shot the gun. He said, why were you in my room? I said, looking for something. You can look for a new place to live, he said.

Today, as we race uptown, I look for the Greek diner between Grand Central and Times Square where I worked for a couple weeks. It was next door to a rehabilitation center and above it was a neat stack of offices owned by Scientologists. The diner was only loosely Greek. You could order feta on your burger, for example, and the french fries were dusted in oregano. Here I met a woman who drank coffee and seltzer water. She would tip the fizzing glass into her mug and stir it with a long finger until it became something new. She told me I would make a great mother. She said this just before the coffee-water lodged in her throat so it clutched, kicked. No one was around because it was a Friday in summer, and the workers are released early in a clump that filters toward the sea. So there she stood choking. She looked at me with wide cataracted eyes. I hadn’t noticed before, but the sun jumped off the building across the street, making the restaurant look temporarily spotlighted. I didn’t know the heimlich maneuver. I pushed her to her knees and stuck my fingers down her throat the way I knew how. It was warm and slick and it felt like it might drop very deep if my knuckles hadn’t prevented it. When it was over, I held the woman in my arms and admired the milky quality of her eyes.

My manager must have heard the commotion for he came down from his apartment above the restaurant. Later that day, when he fired me, he told me how badly he’d want it to work out. How I’d reminded him of an ill-fated niece he had once but lost. Something about redemption and all that gauzy idealism. He asked me up to the apartment which was newly painted and the fumes traveled up my nostrils all the way to my eyes, made my head swimmy. I sat on his velvet love seat. He asked me to lower my shirt, and I thought that maybe if I did this, he’d let me keep my job. But when I slid the straps off my pale shoulders and exposed myself, he began to weep. Tears stained his belly. My slack breasts didn’t feel like they belonged to me anymore. It mattered to me very little that anyone saw them.

Afterwards, I called my brother. He said he'd never heard of someone getting fired from a restaurant. I didn’t know how to tell him that I’d saved a woman’s life.

They took my baby away. It stopped raining. The cab swung to a corner on the southwestern most point of Central Park where the horses drop piles of sweet manure into buckets hanging under their rears. We hit a puddle. Sent a spray into a Clydesdale who, utterly unfazed, carried on shitting and waiting for the sting of a wet whip. Linda Ronstadt came through the radio signing:

And life's full of flaws

Who knows the cause?

Living in the memory of a love that never was.

The fare was $18. Impossibly cheap, and I wondered if the numbers were reversed. There was still the twenty in my pocket, enough to cover the cost and tip. “I can’t pay,” I said. I expected him to lock me in the van until I found the money, but there was a sudden assault of humidity after the storm and his windshield gathered a stubborn fog. He fiddled with the controls, gave up, dragged a sleeve down the glass until it was clear enough. I rolled the passenger door open and stumbled out into the world, dense with its own post-storm vapor. I waited for a yell to come from behind, but it never materialized.

It was too early for fall but the storm brought a sudden coolness. A suggestion of the season change. Wet green leaves suctioned the ground, surfed the small river weaving down and into the park. It was getting dark. Apart from the snow cone seller packing up his cart, no one was here. I walked toward him. I asked him for a cup of shaved ice. No can do, he said, and lifted the metal lid. Inside was a pool of cold water with flecks of dirt and a few twigs the size of a child’s finger. The man was soaked. His hair stuck to his face. He’d waited out the storm and it junked his supply. I got the sense that he’d look quite different dry and I wanted to know that. The truth of him. He said, sometimes I can make $50 after sundown, God willing. He said, I wait here by the edge of the park and catch the families as they’re leaving. I said, what about the people going in? He gestured to something behind me, laughed. But when I turned there was only fog collecting under street lamps.

I followed the walking path to a footbridge with some rotting benches beneath—all empty from the storm. I climbed into its eaves and spread myself flat. I tried to remember my brother, but the memories came in fragments, like sparking, and couldn’t find anything to light. There’s the scar on his left hand. We’re eating hamburgers beside a plastic playground that he watches while we talk. Grandma is dead. Mom is dead. I am smoothing the polyester lapel of his funeral suit. He brings me a foil-topped casserole after the baby is born. He holds the baby. I can’t see the face. Show me it’s face. My baby, I say, and the sound bounces once, twice in the cave beneath the footbridge. I hear sounds above me. An invisible world stirs. I think: sleep. I think about the orderly quality of dreams. How, in them, the world is logical and upright. Just before I drift, something crawls up my pant leg. The sensation drops off somewhere behind my knee. I can’t feel it anymore. I can’t feel it. I can’t feel.

Photo of Isabelle Hughes

BIO: Isabelle Hughes is an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Her short stories have appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Cherry Tree Literary Journal, and Eunoia Review. She lives in New York City but will always call North Carolina home.