Never Enough Time, page 6
“They had one of those week-long affairs. In India somewhere.”
“Don’t hurt me,” I say. “You don’t have to make things up now. Just to hurt me.”
“Tell her, Ryan. She won’t listen to me.”
“Delaney, it’s been years. Just face up to it. Raj left you for a matchmade bride.”
“Why would he do that?” I say.
“Del, we’ve been over this so many times I’m sick of it,” says Sara. “Never starts right now.”
“Wait,” I say. “Just another moment of now before the inevitable never. Just tell me why he did it.”
“His parents insisted,” Ryan says in the same way he might say How much is the rent on Ventnor?
I get up, push aside the colorful money that Sara’s dealt out to me, run into her bathroom, shut and lock the door, and cry harder than I’ve cried since I was a toddler.
I could kid myself and you and say that it was the strain of having aged fourteen years in two days or not knowing what my life’s about or having amnesia or psychosis or time warpiness or whatever the fuck it is I’ve got, but instead I’ll speak the truth.
I’m crying because along with everything else I’ve lost, I’ve lost Raj.
Chapter 17
But at least I can win Monopoly. The universe gifts me with this very very small victory, yet it seems all-important. Like I’ve actually won all the real estate on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and not the ersatz estate on the Atlantic City of Monopoly, and like all the colorful bills that’re piled up on my side of the table are actual, real, true-green money.
I throw some of the stuff up into the air. “I love money!” I say. “And it’s so cute!”
Winning has definitely cheered me up. Somewhat.
Deep down I feel like jumping out the window, but instead of killing myself I’d probably end up jumping into a parallel universe where not only will I have lost the last fourteen years of my life and Raj opted for an arranged marriage instead of me, but I’ve also lost the Monopoly game and have bad hair.
Possibility #14: Parallel universe. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this sooner. This makes more sense than, you know, my being the female Jason Bourne, for example, especially since no one seems to be chasing me around the globe, wanting I-don’t-know-what from me, and shooting at all my friends while I cleverly, silently, amazingly, expertly kill every real and perceived enemy in my path.
“I love money too!” says Sara, who throws up what little money she has left in her measly stack.
“Let’s face it, we all love money,” says the broke Ryan, bankrupted by my devious play and his having landed twice on Sara’s hotel on Park Place—her former hotel on Park Place. It’s mine now.
“I know,” Sara says. “We all hung on an extra year just to get those MBAs. That’s how much we all love money. Wanna play again?” She gathers up all the money, including mine, puts it back into the little compartments in the bank, and starts shuffling the Community Chest cards.
The whole time we were playing, I kept hoping I’d pick up a card that said Get out of alternate reality free. But I didn’t.
“I’d never get an MBA,” I say, shuffling the Chance cards. “I’m a philosopher.”
I wouldn’t even consider getting a fucking M fucking B fucking A. They’re for, you know, businesspeople.
“The fuck you are,” Ryan says. “But if you want to continue to refer to investment analysis as philosophy, who am I to argue? I’m just a lowly stockbroker.”
“Investment analysis?” I say, turning over the top Chance card: Bank pays you dividend of $50. I push the card back into the deck. If this game is trying to tell me something, I don’t want to know what it is. Ever, as Sara would say.
My own idea of ever is a bit skewed. What’s ever against waking up two mornings in a row and being seven years older each time? Has ever been expunged in the process? Extended? Rearranged?
“You know, Del,” says Sara as she passes out the beginning-of-game money, “isn’t it time you got some perspective? You’re nearly thirty-one.”
“I’ve got plenty of perspective,” I say. If you don’t count the fourteen years of my life that I didn’t get to experience because I was drugged, kidnapped, alien-abducted, and having this overlong dream that I can’t bloody well wake up from.
“Really?” Ryan says. “Like, about Raj?” I’m beginning to think that despite his gorgeous looks, Ryan’s kind of a son of a bitch.
“How many times do I have to tell you to not ever bring this topic up around her?” Sara says to Ryan, acting like the two of them are alone together and having a private conversation, sans me. Well, at least they’re not screwing each other in front of me. I have that to be thankful for.
“I don’t care if I have no perspective about Raj!” I say. “And you could just be lying to me to make me feel even worse than I already feel!”
I’m about twenty times or maybe five thousand times furiouser than this, but I restrain myself. There’s no electricity, the city’s dead, and the only thing standing between me and a complete break-apart are these two people I’m pretending to know—yet I know them better than I know anyone else around here—and this Monopoly game, which would be no fun to play by myself. Who would I compete with?
“I’d say that’s pretty obvious,” Sara says. “You’ve never had any perspective about Raj. Think of it from his point of view.”
“I thought you were never ever going to talk about this again,” I say, hoping this’ll stop her.
I don’t really need to be criticized right now or, come to think of it, ever, but really not right now, not today. I feel like I’m about to disintegrate. My hands are kinda trembling again, and I’m still back there where Ryan said we all have MBAs and that I’m an investment analyst.
What the fucking hell-fired fuck? I stayed in school an extra year to get an MBA so I can be an investment analyst and make money?
Fuck my dreaming, abducted, amnesiac, dead-and-unknowing, vegetarian zombie self. I’m a goddamn creepy heinous despicable sellout. I deserve to be sent to every possible alternate reality and parallel universe there is and tortured into a far worse mood than even the one I’m currently in.
Chapter 18
“Well, I am talking about it,” Sara says. “Sue me. You, Delaney Archer, are a grown-up person, a person holding a job that other people would maybe literally kill for, a woman living a nearly enchanted life, here on the Isle of Joy, and you cannot let go of some jerk you dated in grad school like a hundred years ago.”
“He’s not a jerk!” I say, defending him, as though I know him, as though he’s worth defending, this guy who gave me up for an arranged girl.
“He was a jerk when you were dating him,” says Ryan, who’s opening a bottle of wine that he must’ve gotten when he went to the kitchen a few minutes ago, “and he will always be a jerk.”
“Give me some of that,” I say, reaching over to the bottle. He’s brought out only two glasses. I guess Sara isn’t drinking.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Sara says. “Ryan Fitzgerald. Don’t you dare give Del any wine.”
“I need a drink,” I say. It’s the adult thing to say.
“Del, you quit years ago,” says Sara, “and if you’re going to start again, you’re not going to do it on my watch.”
“I can’t imagine why I would’ve quit,” I say.
“You thought it’d get Raj to pick you instead of her,” the cruel, mean, yet still handsome Ryan says as he takes a swig directly from the bottle, staring at me down its length, then, for spite, pouring himself and Sara both very extra full glasses.
Sara turns to Ryan. “You really think that’s why?” They clink glasses, rubbing it in, showing me. We drink but you’re too fucked up to have the maturity for this activity.
“Absolutely,” Ryan says.
“You might be right,” Sara says. Ryan puts his hand on Sara’s thigh, and I understand that it’s time for me to leave.
“Thanks for the game,” I say. “I enjoyed winning.” Might as well be honest. If these two don’t mind where or how their words fall, then neither do I.
“You always win every game we play,” Sara says. Her hand’s on Ryan’s thigh now.
“So we expect it,” Ryan says, extracting his lips from Sara’s neck long enough to speak these four words before he dives back in.
“Did you get that report done?” Sara says as I edge toward the door.
“Which report is that?” I say. I have a report to get done? Some things seem constant, despite the huge changes.
“The one that’s due on Friday,” Sara says right before she makes a noise that no one should make when anyone other than their lover is present.
“Sure,” I say.
“I bet,” Sara says as she puts her hand inside Ryan’s fly.
“Oh, that’s soooo good,” says Ryan.
I flee the apartment. Maybe it’s their apartment. I should’ve opened the medicine cabinet if I wanted more information. Or the dresser, although I never made it into the bedroom.
The three descending flights go on forever. There’s that ever again, taunting me, toying with me. Telling me that no matter where I am, when I am, there’s always ever to balance it out, to make me feel like a first-rate fool.
When I get out onto the street, I start walking downtown. I’m on the Bowery. An ex-drunk like me should feel right at home here, or I would have a hundred years ago. Now the Bowery’s just another rich kids’ enclave. Although maybe I’m one of those rich kids. If there were electricity I could check up on that. But there isn’t.
New York City is having a party. Everyone’s invited. Bring your own theories about blackouts, sex, and life without electricity, lights, phones, and computers.
Strangers—well, at least I think they’re strangers—wave to me as I walk, and I wave back. Why not? Maybe one of them will take their magic wand out of their bag, touch it to my shoulder, and transport me to another world, one I’d rather be in.
Possibility #15: Enchantment. I’m living in a fairy tale and some wicked witch or goblin or evil leprechaun cast a spell on me and now I’m thirty goddamned years old, my lover deserted me, my friends disparage me, and I’m a motherfucking sellout, working as an investment analyst instead of as a philosopher.
Although, frankly, I have no clue what a professional philosopher would do every day. Yet I’m more than willing to find out.
“Mary!” someone says to me as they pass me on Division Street.
I have a different name now? Was there a Great Divide once I crossed Canal and now I’m Mary? Why the hell not? It’s not like I actually know who I am. Maybe I am Mary.
But then the guy who called me Mary meets up with the actual Mary, who embraces him, and I exhale a bit. I’m not completely crazy. Just partially nuts. I’m still Delaney Archer. Just not the Delaney Archer I was two days ago. Or even yesterday.
But tomorrow . . . tomorrow will be completely different. Because this has to stop. Now.
Chapter 19
I walk all the way down to South Ferry and am surprised to see the Staten Island Ferry itself is in operation. So I get on it.
I’ve never been to Staten Island. That I know of. That’s the kind of thing an abducted, zombified, enchanted amnesiac says to herself.
Fuck you, you fucking alien schemers. See what you’ve done to me? I’m on a ferry!
By the time the ferry docks, I’m half convinced they’re going to announce something about the afterlife, because in my experience the only people riding ferries are the dead souls who’re being transported to their final destination—and I do mean final—by Charon himself.
Possibility #10A: Dead and know it.
Instead, there’s no announcement at all. You’re just supposed to know that you’re dead and that this is where you get off. It’s not like you can ride the ferry in reverse and go back to life. Death is a one-way proposition. Except for the people who died, then came back to life.
I’d accept that. Sure. Possibility #10B: Dead but brought back to life.
So I wait for them to let us board again, having seen enough of Staten Island to satisfy myself—enough consisting of the ferry dock and the outside of the terminal building, which is closed up, a Blacked Out of Business sign pinned to the front door—and get back on.
On the ride back to Manhattan I convince myself that now that I’ve been to the other side I’m going to have returned to my normal, real, suburban Westchester life when I get to Manhattan.
I mean, I won’t be in Westchester—of course I’ll be in Manhattan—but I’ll be me again. The proper age for me, nearly seventeen, and rescued from this dream that from now on I’m going to refer to as a fucking nightmare because dream makes it sound like I’m having a great old time, which, with the exception of part of last night, I most certainly am not.
Chapter 20
I start walking up the five flights in my building on Ludlow.
The key opened the front door, so I have to assume that nothing at all has changed, that I’m still thirty old years old, that I’m still an investment analyst who got the day off work because the markets are closed and the elevators don’t work and there’s no computering to be had—and that riding the Staten Island Ferry to and from the underworld did utterly nothing to transform my current situation.
“Hey!” says a head that’s sticking out of a door on the third floor.
“Hey!” I say back. For all I know, this is my dearest friend in the building. Or the world.
“Sorry,” says the head—the head of a very tall Korean guy. “I don’t know your name.”
“Delaney,” I say. “You?”
“Min-jae. But everyone just calls me Jae,” he says. “Aren’t you in 5B?”
“Yeah,” I say. At least I think that’s the number of the apartment. I just know where it’s located in the hallway, actually.
“You work too hard,” he says.
“Fuck yeah,” I say while I think I work so fucking hard that a neighbor who doesn’t even know my name knows that I do? What the grindstone fuck is that about?
“Wanna come to a séance?”
“Awesome!” I say, and he looks at me kinda funny, like maybe no one has said awesome in a decade, which is possible. Maybe they haven’t.
“Admission price: one candle,” says Jae.
“I should be able to scare one up,” I say, keeping with the séance theme and hoping to hell there’s a candle somewhere in my apartment.
There’s just enough daylight left in today for me to look around and find zero candles anywhere until I reach into the back of an overhead cabinet in the kitchen and find a box of multicolored birthday candles, you know, the kind you put on a cake or a pie or whatever they’ve got now, since my knowledge of social customs is a bit stale.
I take out two candles and leave them on the counter, since maybe I’ll need some when I get back to my apartment later. After the séance. After I commune with the spirits. Hell, maybe I’m one of the spirits and that was Jae’s way of inviting such a spirit to the séance.
Possibility #16: Visible spirit. Probably not. Today I’m leaning more toward serial amnesia, a condition I just invented. It’s still listed under #6, since it’s just another name for amnesia. I could become both patient zero and discoverer zero.
I romp back downstairs as though I do this every day—live on Ludlow Street, argue with my friends, take the Staten Island ferry, and go to a blackout-inspired séance. But, more to the point, I romp downstairs as though I have every day instead of just one day every seven fucking years.
This really does have to stop, and tonight’s the night to do it. Starting with the séance.
I knock on Jae’s door—3C—and a tiny small Latina answers it.
“Delaney!” she says. “Come on in! The séance hasn’t started yet!”
I play it cool. Maybe this girl knows me and I know her.
“I’m Marie,” she says, and we shake hands. Damn excellent. No need to play it cool.
“Jae’s wife,” she says, and I’m so happy to meet someone and not have to pretend to already know them that I feel like hugging her.
“I live in 5B,” I say. “I love the blackout.”
“Everybody loves the blackout!” says Jae, who looks even taller standing next to his wife, who must be at least a foot shorter than he is, maybe more. “Did you bring a candle?”
I hold up the pack of birthday candles, and Jae and Marie have a good laugh at the birthday candles’ and my expense.
“We were hoping for something a bit more substantial,” says Jae, “but these will have to do.”
“I have all these Our Lady of Guadalupe candles,” says Marie, “so we really don’t need any more, even though I was saving them for a party I’m planning. You’re invited!”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll be there. When is it?”
“Next month,” says Marie. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know. I’ll slip a note under your door.”
I don’t dare tell her that the odds of my being here next month are between minuscule and nonexistent. But, you know, maybe I will be here next month. I mean, it’s only happened twice, really.
It’s not like every day I wake up is seven years after the previous day.
It’d better fucking not be.
Chapter 21
Jae and Marie introduce me all around, and I nod and repeat all the names: Patrick, Ivan the Terrible, Lady Di, and Mary, Queen of Scots.
Not really. I mean I don’t remember any of the names as they’re being said, so, other than Patrick, whose name sticks, I’ve given the other people at the séance names I already know. Lady Di, by the by, looks utterly nothing like the dead princess. I just like the name.
Jae and Marie’s apartment, in the C line, is lots bigger than mine. They’ve got a huge round dining table where we’re all seated, all seven of us.
“Lucky seven,” I say, counting us all up.
“I was born on the seventh,” says Marie. “Very lucky!”
