Never Enough Time, page 8
Jae shakes his head at me, warning me to stay silent. So I do.
Because tomorrow, he and I are going to have a long talk about all this.
Because tomorrow I’m going to be right here on Ludlow Street, living in apartment 5B, working out the best way to exit my unwanted career as a motherfucking sellout financial analyst, but doing it in the nicest way possible, not burning any bridges or destroying any relationships or insulting any of the other sellouts as I leave.
The cycle of sevens stops here. Now.
Because tonight I’m not going to go to sleep. At all.
Ever. Ever. Ever.
Chapter 25
Marie gives me another hug as I exit her apartment while over her shoulder I see Min-Jae, who’s staring at me as though he knows something. Well, tomorrow I’m going to find out what he knows.
The cupcake is helping my plan. Sugar keeps me awake, and the cupcake was nothing if not sugar sugar sugar. I’m hyped up, both by the séance and by my plan to stay awake. As long as I do so, there’s no way the journey of the hellish sevens can continue, is there?
I seem to be tricked while I’m asleep, if the experiences of the last two nights constitute a reliable pattern. So the solution to this journey/path I’m on is to stay awake. Obviously.
If only I’d known this two nights ago, I would never have gone to sleep and now I’d still be with Raj. Because no matter what Sara and Ryan say, Raj and I would’ve been able to get past the arranged marriage his parents planned for him. I’m sure of it.
For about an hour I pace around my apartment, or maybe it’s more like five minutes, since it’s a very small apartment and I have to be careful with my pacing since the neighbor downstairs—who might very well be someone who was at the séance—is no doubt asleep. After all, they get to wake up in the real tomorrow, not in the seven-years-later day-fucking-mare tomorrow.
I need caffeine. But not only is there no caffeine in the apartment—do I get takeout every day on my way to my swank Wall Street office, if I have an office and if it’s on Wall Street?
Never mind. This is New York City. I’ll just go for a walk and within a block of here there’ll be like fifty or a hundred and fifty stores open where I can get some coffee or tea or dark chocolate.
First, though, I search around for a flashlight, which my thirty-year-old self has stashed in a cup in the bathroom. Why there? I wonder, but at least I’ve got a flashlight. One of those slim things that you twist to turn it on. Fortunately for me, the batteries aren’t dead. At least there’s that.
On my way down the five flights, I shine the light on the walls, waving it back and forth until I’ve convinced myself that I am in a horror movie. Then I stop. Because my life—and particularly tonight—is starting to seem too much like a horror movie, since there’s no one around and the streets are so dark they’re making suburban lonely Westchester look like downtown Tokyo.
After walking ten blocks in one direction, turning a corner and walking ten in another, I realize the fallacy of my thinking. My not-thinking. There’s no electricity. Absolutely zero stores are open.
Fuck this. I’m going to have to stay up without caffeine, without my phone, without electricity, and without anyone to talk to.
On the way back into the building I think of visiting Jae and Marie, but there’s no noise inside their apartment when I put my ear up against the door, and I don’t want to wake them up. For someone who’s run through fourteen years in two days, I’m awfully goddamned polite. Anyone else might be a screaming lunatic at this point. Not just the regular lunatic I am.
Back in my apartment I pace around some more. Quietly, I mean, without shoes on, and after a couple of rounds I get where the creaky boards are and I avoid them.
If only the phone would work, I could at least play a game or read a book, assuming I have books on my phone. But it’s dead and there’s no way to revive it. Why the fuck didn’t my thirty-year-old self have one of those instant-recharge devices? Too busy analyzing the finances of some miserable corporation to have time left over for shopping?
Pacing gets old really fast. Maybe if you’ve got more space for it, it works out, but here in this one-room apartment, it’s not happening.
So I sit down. I sing songs in my head—can’t wake up the neighbors—but it doesn’t do anything for me. I work out the multiples of 7—why not?—and stop when I get to 343. Because it takes me practically no time to get that far and it’s just too fucking depressing. Unless my name is really Methuselah.
I think of all my favorite movies and sort of replay scenes from them in my head. I’m glad I never saw The Magnificent Seven or The Seven Samurai. But I have seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and I drive myself batso trying to name them all. I keep missing one, going back over them, trying to envision their faces, and finally I satisfy myself that I do have all seven, even if I don’t. What the fuck.
I pace some more. Sitting down is making me kinda drowsy. Outside—I look out the window—it’s still darker than it’s ever been even in suburban fucking Westchester, where it can get horribly dark, in every way imaginable.
I sit down again, lean back into the wall. Force my eyes to stay open. Replay the séance in my imagination.
The cycle of sevens is not to be ignored.
You are guided by the ancient spirits.
Those who are chosen must remove the veil.
I don’t understand any of it, and especially not the last one, but I say these things to myself a few more times as I rub my eyes, slap my arms, conjure up the image of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, and wait for the sun to come up.
Chapter 26
When the sun finally does come up, I open my eyes, then close them again.
I guess I have to work on that paper today, figure out a theme, get organized. Graduation isn’t that far away. But, you know, how do they expect us to have any interest in doing anything at this point? Well, expect me.
“Del! Are you still asleep?” says a voice from out there somewhere.
This is definitely not my mother’s or father’s voice. Not that my father would wake me up. He wouldn’t. He gets up and leaves the house way before any time that a regular human being would wake up. He’s an important businessman, you know.
I feel around me and stretch out in this big, luxurious bed. And it was so small just yesterday. Well, not yesterday. Yesterday? What day is it? I open my eyes again, just a little.
Oh. My. Fucking. No. This isn’t Westchester—how could I have thought that?—and it’s not Raj’s dorm room or Ludlow Street either. Fuck!
How the doomed hell did I fall asleep? Delaney Archer, you bloody idiot! You were supposed to stay awake! Hell hell hell fucking hell.
“Are you?” says the voice from the other room. “Still asleep?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m still totally asleep.”
“Get up,” says the deep male voice. I recognize it but I can’t place it.
“Raj?” I say. It doesn’t really sound like Raj’s voice, but I can hope, can’t I? Wait. It sounds more like someone else I know. “Laurence?”
“Get up, Del. You’re dreaming again.”
“But I don’t want to get up,” I say. The truth is stronger than anything. I believe in that. Well, most of the time.
The covers are pulled off me and the side of the bed sinks as the owner of the deep, masculine voice deposits himself there.
“Delaney Archer, get your ass out of bed. You’re going to be late again.”
“So what?” I say.
“Hey, it’s your job. Doesn’t mean a damn thing to me if you get fired.”
“Good,” I say. I have no idea what the voice is talking about and don’t care. I want to drift back, back, back.
I want it to be last night and I want to stay awake. How the fuck did I let myself go to sleep?
But I can kind of picture it—me sitting on the comfy Ikea chair and nodding off a little and telling myself it’ll be for just a moment. That I need to rest and then I’ll get back at it, resume the vigil, save myself from another step on the journey or path or cycle of the sevens or whatever the fuck sevens it is.
“Just make sure you can come up with your half of the mortgage payment after you lose your job,” he says.
“Ha ha ha,” I say, just as I realize I know who the voice belongs to: Ryan Fitzgerald, Sara’s boyfriend. What’s he doing in my bedroom? Do we live in the same building now?
A building not on Ludlow, because I take a squinting look out the window right next to me and all I can see is sky. Not to mention that this room is larger than my whole entire apartment on Ludlow is/was.
Sara should’ve come over to wake me up. This is pretty rude to send Ryan. Especially since I notice that despite my having fallen asleep last night with a full complement of raiments, I don’t have a fucking stitch of clothing on at the moment.
I open my eyes completely, against every instinct I possess, see the equally naked Ryan sitting next to me on the edge of the bed, and grab for the covers to, ah, cover myself.
“Ryan! What the hell are you doing here?”
“Getting you the fuck out of bed, like I do every morning,” he says.
That’s when I start trembling. Because not only am I naked in bed with naked Ryan—well, he’s just sort of sitting on the side of the bed next to me, but he is nude—but I’ve failed myself, not staying awake last night.
And to make matters worse, I’m having an affair with my best friend’s boyfriend. Wasn’t it bad enough that I’m a sellout investment analyst? Now I’m a disloyal friend and a philanderer—do they call women that?—a manizer?—as well.
And the room we’re in. Damn! It’s a huge motherfucking room, and I’m in an even huger motherfucking bed. The kind of bed they have in movies about people with terrible taste and lots of money to spend on it. The sheets are so soft they’re practically melting around me.
I gather the creamy covers and clutch them to my chest like I’m in some French New Wave film while I half admire Ryan’s fine, fine body, although it’s not the body of a trim grad student, which is how I think of him. Instead it’s the body of a nearly forty-year-old man.
No no no no no no. No. Might as well think all seven of the nos.
Because it’s clear that the path of the sevens is continuing onward. Which means that I’m thirty-seven.
I don’t want to have to look at myself in the mirror today. Or ever again. It’s just going to get worse. Seven times worse every fucking day.
Chapter 27
“Ryan,” I say. “Is there a reason you’re still here?”
I mean, if we’re having an affair the least he could do would be to go back to Sara before morning. Isn’t that how these things work? Or maybe she thinks he’s on a business trip or staying out late with his pals in one of the outer boroughs.
Fuck. I hope I don’t see Sara today. I’d have to either confess or lie, and I’m not good at either of those things. Or at least I wasn’t. Maybe I am now. Maybe on top of being a bastard financial analyst and uncaring, what-the-fuck mistress I’m also a first-class liar and sneak. They all seem to go together, so I think it’s possible.
Wasn’t I getting a degree in philosophy just a couple of days ago? What the fuck have I turned into?
Ryan reaches out and pulls down the covers a little and I pull them back up.
“Not now,” I say. Not ever again, I say to myself, although I admit that I’m a little regretful that I couldn’t’ve had sex with him just once—or maybe what I mean is just once that I’d remember—since despite his having aged, he’s still probably the best-looking man in New York State. And extremely very a lot sexy.
“Come on, Delaney,” he says. “I’ve been horny as hell lately.”
“Really?” I say. “I’m hungry. What about breakfast?”
“It’s the same thing every morning,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I married you.”
He married me? I look down at my left hand, which is sporting a gigantic yellowish rock on the finger of the marrieds.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say. “I’m going to take the day off.”
I want to establish that right now—to myself. I’m not going to go play the part of a financial analyst, since I don’t even know what they do or why in fuck they’d do it or more to the point, why they’d do it again much less repeatedly after having done it once, and I don’t have any more time to waste.
I’m thirty-seven, my life is slipping away from me, I’m married to my best friend’s boyfriend, and if I don’t stop the cycle of sevens today, I’m going to go completely fruitcake with icing and arsenic on top.
“You take too many days off lately, Del,” Ryan says as he gets up and goes into the bathroom himself.
I follow him into what looks like a bathroom in an ad for luxurious bathrooms. The whole place is clad in marble, there’s a clawfoot tub under the floor-to-ceiling window that looks out over some river, and Ryan is getting into a shower stall that’s large enough to accommodate the New York Yankee infield.
Is it baseball season? I wonder. Maybe I’ll go up to the stadium and see a game today, if there’s a day game. What better way to spend the only day I’ll have being thirty-seven than eating peanuts, getting sunburned, screaming my head off, and watching a field of beautiful athletes bat, throw, run, slide, and catch?
The screaming-my-head-off part is the most appealing one of the lot. And at Yankee Stadium, no one minds if that’s what you’re doing . . . because that’s what they’re doing. Assuming they’re not arguing about the stats of 1927’s Murderers’ Row or buying another round of beers and ice cream or complaining about the sorry state of the bullpen.
Ryan showers while I pee, then we trade. While I’m in the shower he dresses and calls in to me.
“I’m off,” he says. “Got an early meeting.”
“Have fun,” I say. Do stockbrokers have fun? Is Ryan even still a stockbroker? Whatever he is, that and financial analyst are paying very well, judging by this fantasy abode we live in.
The nice thing about today, I think as I stay in the shower too long, is that today I’ll have my phone, my computer, electricity, and I’ll be able to do research into myself and, if I have time, the world. Since I have no clue what’s going on, although maybe I don’t care.
And maybe it makes no difference, since there’s been something going on in the world for centuries and people have managed to survive it somehow. So far.
The important thing is to find out about the cycle of sevens and fucking stop it before it goes any bloody further. Or turn it around to go back in the other direction so I can be myself again instead of this thirty-seven-year-old who stole her best friend’s boyfriend and gave up on everything important in life.
The first thing I’m going to do after I get dressed is call Marie and Min-Jae. He has some kind of special knowledge. Maybe they can hold another séance for me and I can ask better questions this time.
Chapter 28
I get out of the shower and look for towels, but there are none. Instead, a blissful warm breeze dries me off. This really is quite the apartment. I’ll say that much for my thirty-seven-year-old self.
And it looks so neat, like the crew interviewing me for Financial Analyst Monthly could show up to start the shoot without my having to touch anything. Also, there’s not a whiff of Ikea in sight. I must have changed a fucking lot in the last sevenness.
I am excruciatingly hungry, so I find the kitchen, which is as swank as the bathroom, and pluck an orange from what looks like a display of oranges. Financiers Delaney Archer and the gorgeous Ryan Fitzgerald always have fresh oranges in their perfect kitchen.
I walk around the apartment, popping orange wedges into my mouth while I do. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I was able to find a pair of jeans and a sweater in a drawer in the world’s most neatly arranged, kind of professionally arranged, dresser.
That’s what I’m wearing. I intend to take the rest of the clothing to Goodwill if I’m still here tomorrow, since I wouldn’t be caught dead—or alive or alien-abducted or zombied—in any of the rest of it.
The apartment’s beautiful, but it looks like no one lives here. It looks like the place is perpetually ready to be shown to prospective buyers, and that the real occupants have been forced to put all their possessions into storage and leave behind only the most hotel-lobby-looking things.
You’d think that because there’s all but nothing on the premises, I’d be able to find my phone pretty quickly. Yet I can’t.
I’ve very had it with being scammed by the universe of sevens. First I leave my bag in the library, then there’s a fucking blackout, and now my phone is invisible or missing or lost or stashed in some unlikely place.
I can’t even find my bag. Maybe I don’t have a bag. Maybe I don’t need a bag! Hah! Maybe here, in twenty-one-years-after-I-know-anything-about-life people no longer carry bags. They don’t need them. Well, if they don’t, then neither do I. What the fuck.
I mean, I don’t need towels anymore, so maybe I also don’t need a bag. Maybe my wrist is tattooed with all the relevant information, although if it is, it’s an invisible tattoo.
Never mind. I’m going to go over to Ludlow Street first, because Min-Jae definitely knows—or maybe what I mean is knew—something. And he’s going to cough it up.
Assuming he and Marie, or he by himself—still live/lives there.
Sticking to the inside of the front door is the only human touch in the entire joint—a Post-it that says Buy new phone TODAY. Aha! My phone’s broken! Those sevenly travel agents are a fucking diabolical lot.
But vegetarian zombie, time-warped, reincarnated me is going to foil the sons of aliens bitches today.
I leave the apartment, the door closes and locks behind me, and I realize I may never make it back inside again. And I don’t give a fuck.
I admit that while I was getting dressed I thought of leaving the rock behind. It’s too goddamned large—I mean it weighs a lot and is fucking uncomfortable—and I’ve already decided that if I do nothing else today, I’m going to send Ryan back to Sara, where he belongs, because being married to Ryan is even more uncomfortable than this chunky ring could ever be.
