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                                                                                                  The Goodness of All the Blue World

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The streets were flooded with twentysomethings—with shining, distracted bodies and faces like bells ringing at noon. Their voices, like deconstructed music, radiated from Canal Street. A group of them made their way up Essex. Some of them were recognizable, NYU students, just like Myra. Where was she?

            Alfred wondered as he stood on the corner, watching hordes of latenight vagrants kick stones across the common, trampled ground. Alfred was waiting for Myra, but he was not her boyfriend. When he returned to the city at the beginning of the winter semester, coming off a stint of self-inflicted agony in rural Ohio, he was behind in his coursework. So, Myra agreed to teach him Derrida—“to save another soul from post-structuralism,” she explained. She would run her hands up his sweatshirt in the hazy dormitory hall when they got high with her friends. Everyone on her floor thought they were dating. He spent nights in her room, his body crushed between the wall and her twin-sized mattress. Alfred listened to Myra’s slow breathing, watched the unconscious movements of her body and waited for the night to bring them together, for the closeness to get closer, but the moment never struck, and the match went unlit.

            Then Myra met Liam, who had come to NYU from Sherman Oaks on a partial track scholarship. Liam was as jewel-green as the Southern California that sprung him. While Liam’s father was flying jumbo jets all over the world, Alfred’s own father was loading lumber somewhere in Colorado and ignoring his son.

            Losing Myra to Liam was a blow from which Alfred doubted he would recover. His whole life there had been something in between him and the rest of the world. He could only see from afar, as though his own life was a scene he was viewing from behind ruby-encrusted opera glasses—so garish and extreme was his sense of alienation. Even when he made an effort to participate in the drama itself, he felt still like he was half pretending. Myra was supposed to have been his passage into normal life. There would be no pretending with Myra.

            Now, spring was settling on New York, and the city was a wicked contraption, where, presently, Myra had lost her keys. While she searched for them inside of a cramped bar with a pressed-tin ceiling, Alfred watched a group of young people run through the jet of a busted fire hydrant. Girls, in black mesh blouses and silk slip dresses, frolicked, their clothes sticking to their skin, while guys mucked around in gabardine coats and crisp sneakers and became heavy with water. A girl broke away from the group and held up her phone. She drenched the others in a stripe of white light, and from the world the moment was split with the lightning quick strike of an instant. And for years after their shining faces, rendered blank and unaware with time, floated on tiny screens across the nation. Everything we create betrays us.

            Myra emerged from the bar and walked toward Alfred, beaming with a special quality Alfred could never quite name. Once, without knowing whatsoever what it meant, he described it to himself as “jouissance.” But to the rest of the crowd, Myra was indistinguishable from the other trust-fund kids who run amok between 6th Avenue and Broadway, except that nestled in her gestures was a kind of coarseness completely at odds with her downtown milieu. Her hair waved behind her like stems of wheat in a summertime wind. There was in her the presence of something hard and found, powerful and nonchalant—like the sharp inclining mass of a mountain. Of Myra’s coarseness Alfred saw none. Her presence reminded him instead of the acceptance he had felt after Myra, inevitably, found the painful tracks that travelled from his wrists up his forearms, the lines that sent him first to the hospital and then to Ohio. The only time Alfred could remember feeling normal was when Myra had told him that it was okay, that he was going to survive.

            As Myra and Alfred traced the arteries of New York, they became bound in the particular blue of the moment. The 2008 financial collapse hung over the city. But Myra, in the manner natural to the young and disoriented, absorbed only the celebratory fever of the moment. As she walked, she noticed Barack Obama’s campaign posters as they turned to pulp against lamp posts and news stands even months after his inauguration. To her, his election signaled progress. She had an essay due the following week on contemporary political messaging. She noted the poster’s blue backdrop and solemn tone with the detached self-seriousness of a critic. But all she really saw when she looked at the poster was herself—her dreams, the promises she had made to herself in a different country, under a different sky.

            So, she took on, with unencumbered synchronicity, the brightest facets of American idealism. Her optimism, wise though she would have been to hide it, permeated her every movement. It was in her gesture, in her voice, in her body glowing under the amber streetlights, in her arms, which motioned forward as she spoke, reaching into the darkness as though into the open spirit of the West.

            It was into this same optimism that Alfred wished he could vanish. Myra’s presence had a way of transforming his surroundings, rendering them suddenly and miraculously hospitable. At once, the streets shined with the profound beauty of proletariat humanity, and insignificant passingbys symbolized the goodness of all the blue world. In the gutter as they passed onto Mercer Street lay a triad of streetfindings: a Lucky 7 scratch-off, an empty Jameson whiskey bottle, a black umbrella. This scattering of objects appeared to Alfred an encapsulation of the complex wonder of life itself. From his lungs an easy laugh found its way to Myra. Without knowing why, she laughed too. So, the two of them created the myth of the New York night.

            When they arrived, Washington Square Park was brimming and lively. The skaters, the dancers, the maniacs dominated the scene so that the trees, the ground, the benches seemed distant and apart from the important world of people. Gossamer fog hung in the air, and, in the middle of it all, Alfred and Myra searched for their group of bong-hitting plaintiffs.

            They found them sitting in a half-circle on one of the wide benches, talking in low murmuring tones and passing a joint between them. Saint passed the joint to Myra as she sat down next to Liam. Myra took a drag, holding the smoke deep in her lungs and breaking into a cough as she exhaled. Subtle laughter rebounded throughout the group as Myra tried to clear the ash from her throat and blink back the water that rose in her eyes. Liam removed his jacket and threw it over her shoulders.

            “Weak stuff, babe.”

            Liam wore square-toed loafers and a starchy white shirt. He had tried to shake the California off his skin but made the transition too abruptly and came off looking clownish. He pulled Myra closer to him so that, in the blurriness of the liquor and the fog of the night, the two of them looked like onething. What Alfred wanted more than anything was to pull aside the illusion of union and find Myra alone. The whole time she was here she was really half pretending. She was pretending to join in, pretending to love Liam, pretending to be a part of the world. They were both the same in that way, Alfred thought, both half pretending.

            “When I’m old and rich and retired, I’m going to buy a farm in Italy,” Dottie said. “I’m going to eat fresh basil and unpasteurized cheese. I’m going to butcher a pig with my own two hands.”

            “Gross,” Jacob said. “Why would you want to do that?”

            “You don’t understand. I was in Italy last summer with my parents, and I saw healthy pigs living on lush farms. People took care in butchering them. There were thick fatty cuts hanging to be dried and cured and made into prosciutto. Before that, food had never seemed so material and significant. Seeing the white ribs and red meat hanging over me was like looking at a chiseled sculpture. It was like seeing God.”

            “You’re full of shit,” Jacob said.

            “Don’t fight, guys, no fighting tonight,” Myra said, leaning closer to Liam, who pulled her in, further blurring any lines of distinction between them. Alfred glanced at Liam’s hand on Myra’s thigh.

            “Maybe we should all go to Italy and see the dead pigs Dottie thinks are God,” Alfred said, and everyone laughed, though he meant nothing like mockery by it.

            “Liam’s dad can fly us there,” Jacob said.

            “He’s going to teach me to fly,” Liam said. “Next summer, when I’m back in California, he’s going to help me get my pilot’s license.”

            “Then you really can fly us to Italy,” Dottie said.

            “Yeah, or anywhere,” Liam said. “That’s why I’m taking film production, too.”

            “Because you’re from California?”

            “No,” Liam said. “Because making a film is like flying an airplane.”

            “So are you saying film is an inferior form of art?” Alfred was surprised to hear himself speak. Heat rose to his face as all five pairs of eyes turned to look at him. The words had seemed to spill from his mouth into the darkness.

            “Actually, I think film is inferior to painting,” Saint said, who had been called Kayla from the time she was born in Connecticut until the first semester of her studio arts program. Her statement had the effect of neutralizing Alfred’s interjection. She continued:

            “Film is compiled through technological processes, while painting carries the weight of original creation.”

            “How long have you been holding onto that?” Liam said.

            “I’m just saying,” Saint said.

            “Look,” Jacob said before Liam could respond. “We can all agree painting is the superior form of art, but it’s obsolete today. Film is mass art, but it’s the art of our time.”

            “I get what you’re saying,” Liam said. “But I think film is the superior form of art exactly because it is more modern. Film creates meaning from a collection of images, and that’s how people experience life, as a sequence of moments. Film represents progress. Why do we require the weight of original creation? Why should we strive for contrived hierarchy when the greatest of all meaning comes from ourselves? Why do we require an art that transcends the self when the individual is the source of all meaning?”

            “You always have to one-up, don’t you?” Saint said to Liam. “You just can’t stand to be second.”

            “Isn’t it bitingly unfair!” Jacob said.

            “What’s unfair?” Myra asked.

            “That we can’t live multiple lives. That there are people who lived before The Astronomer was painted and others who will live after it has turned to dust. I wish I could be multiple people, live multiple lives.”

            That night, they were all desperate for something, Alfred: to be normal, Liam: to be like his father, Saint: to create something permanent, Dottie: to feel the heat of fame, Jacob: to break from tradition, and Myra: to find the missing thing that would pull together the disparate parts that life had become.

            Alfred sprung to his feet, agitated and alert.

            “Where are you going?” Saint said.

            “I don’t know,” Alfred said, shifting his weight and feeling the group’s collective glance on him again.

            “Let’s head back.”

            As they rose from the benches, Myra went over to Alfred.

            “You’ve got that look,” she said.

            “What look?”

            “Like you’re about to do the stupidest thing you can think of.”

            “I’m not going to do anything.”

            Myra sunk her eyes into his, and he shrunk with shame. He wasn’t going to do anything. He was going to be normal. He was going to pretend.

            Aching and hopeful, they wandered back to their dorms on East 10th Street.

            They crowded into Saint’s room, where, on the desk, sat a green-tinted wine bottle. It was empty of liquor and instead held a bouquet of pink tulips. Around its base lay fallen petals, some brittle crescents, others fresh and as delicate a pink as ballet slippers. Short of this one decorative item, the room was empty. Its concrete walls hung bare. There was a short string of lights wrapped around the headboard, a plug-in pot resting on the bookshelf, and, beneath the comforter, a ragged teddybear.

            Dottie opened the window and climbed onto the fire escape. Alfred followed after her. Myra’s eyes caught the back of Alfred’s shoulders as he ducked out the window. She moved to follow him. Liam put his arms around her waist.

            “Let’s stay in here.”

            He pulled her onto the bed, where Saint and Jacob already sat loading a video on a laptop.

            “I’ll be right back,” she said, getting up.

            Myra climbed out the window and onto the fire escape. Dottie lit a cigarette and passed it to Alfred.

            “Nice night,” Dottie said.

            The three of them gazed into the streetactivity nine stories below, tapering in the lull before morning.

            “Actually, I shouldn’t say the night is nice,” Dottie said, laughing. “That’ll give Alfred ideas.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean?” Alfred said.

            “Yeah, what’s that supposed to mean?” Myra said.

            “Nothing,” Dottie said. “He’s just always starting shit. It’s fine though. I think it’s funny.”

            Myra looked from Dottie to Alfred.

            “I was joking, Alfred, really,” Dottie said. “I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

            “I didn’t take it as an insult,” Alfred said.

            Myra and Dottie glanced at each other.

            “I guess the party’s out here.”

            Liam poked his head through the window and then climbed out to join them. Myra kissed him. Dottie extinguished her cigarette and threw the butt over the railing.

            “Dottie said Alfred starts shit,” Myra whispered into Liam’s ear.

            “She shouldn’t have said that,” Liam said.

            Alfred tried to act as though he had not overheard their conversation, but he was starting to feel restless again. He climbed onto the railing so that he faced them. Myra’s eyes darted over to him.

            “What are you doing up there?”

            “Oh, you know, the view,” Alfred said, gesturing.

            “Well, get down. The railing doesn’t look stable.”

            “I’m good,” he said.

            “C’mon man, get down,” Liam said.

            “It’s fine, guys,” Alfred said.

            “No, it’s not,” Liam said. “Listen, we all know what you tried to do.”

            “She told you?”

            “Yeah, she did, and I think you’re being a fucking asshole by trying to scare her.”

            “Stop it, Liam,” Myra said.

            “Yeah?” Alfred said, glancing over the railing at the ground, which swam beneath him in a blur. He turned back to see their frightened faces.

            “I’m sorry,” Alfred said. “I’m sorry I tried to kill myself. I’m sorry.”

            He watched their fear turn to pity.

            “Get down, Alfred,” Myra said softly.

            The fire escape shook as Liam climbed up next to Alfred.

            “C’mon man. You’re not going to do it. Let’s just go inside. You’re making us all nervous.”

            “If you’re scared get down,” Alfred said.

            “I’m not scared,” Liam said.

            That he was lying, Liam knew. He was scared of what Alfred might do; he was scared of what Myra might think. He was scared of the rickety apparatus on which he sat and that with every subtle movement threatened disaster. But under the incendiary pressure of Alfred’s derision his fear was mere debris. His father had instilled in him to never back down from a challenge, so he swung his foot onto the railing and hoisted himself up, grasping with his hands the underside of the grille stairway above. He stood, body stretched between the railing and the stairway.

            Saint and Jacob crawled through the open window and joined Myra and Dottie on the landing. The four of them stood watching Alfred and Liam.

            “Okay?” Liam said; his voice shook. “Who’s scared now?”

            Alfred dropped his gaze. He didn’t know how any of this had happened. He didn’t know how to fix it. He felt as though he could not move.

            A touch embraced his left hand. He looked up to see Myra. Guiding him off the railing, her movements bonded easily to his.

            On the landing, Alfred turned around to see Liam with his hands free. Panic swept through the others. A wave of relief passed through everyone as he grasped the stairway again. Steadying himself, he moved to jump onto the landing.

            As he let go of the stairway, it seemed as though he sensed too late that he did not have his balance. He swayed. Then, he fell back. His body disappeared into the darkness. His life was reduced to a vibrant red streak across East 10th Street.

            Horror engulfed the others.

            Later, when they were back inside, Saint alone retained the sense to call emergency, and, as she hurried to find her cellphone, she knocked over the wine bottle filled with flowers that sat on her desk. For weeks after, she continued to find tiny green fragments of glass all over her room, until she broke down, and her parents brought her back to Connecticut.

            In the immediate aftermath, Myra ran to the railing as though she could pull Liam back from over the edge. Alfred followed behind her, but Myra, having looked over the railing at the ground, turned and buried her face in Alfred’s chest.

            In the years to follow, Myra would have trouble believing Liam dead. Again, she turned over in her mind what she had seen when she looked over the railing, but the memory confused more than it clarified. He fell, and—that’s where Myra got lost. She never saw him hit the ground.