fiction by blake hammond

A City Inside

Apparently, some travesty happened last week not far from where I live. It was probably on the news, but I don’t watch the news. My father told me not to when I was a child, when he was on the news all the time for having lied to his investors. I don’t talk to my father anymore, anyway. Not because of what was on the news, but just because we never got along and I don’t need money from him anymore. He always said a girl shouldn’t live alone past twenty-five, but I have my own money, and an apartment next to Washington Square where the students recognize me on the sidewalk and take pictures of me. I can see them now through my window, protesting whatever happened last week, gathered around a young man in a parka with a megaphone. They’re shouting, I watch their mouths move, but I can’t hear anything. I’m too high up. 

I’m supposed to go shopping, but I don’t think my driver can make it through the mass of people. Maybe I’ll walk. I’ve spent the morning reading some awful book by the daughter of a work friend, some terrible kind of thing where everybody is smoking cigarettes and the sex is glossed over. She thinks I have publishing-type connections, that the people I know care about what I think. It’s never my brain that they’re interested in. 

I resolved a long time ago to never tell anybody what I’m really thinking. It’s a promise I made to myself. I did it once, and they put me in a room with no shoelaces for a few months. All by myself. Partly, I think just because my father was tired of me and wanted to teach me a lesson. Really, he told me to get a job, and I said no. Then I threatened to do some terrible things to myself, things which I never would have done anyways because I could only imagine what I’d look like when they found me. I always knew what I was going to do for a living. I always knew I would be fine, and to be patient. Things were easy for me, and I’m not ashamed of it. Harder than you might think, but easier than most. I think about that sometimes at the gym, on the stair machine. The gym where I made them take the mirrors down for me in my own little corner, so I don’t have to judge myself. I paid extra for that. 

*

When I get back from shopping the new houseboy is standing in the lobby. The doorman looks all apologetic at me, like he’s expecting me to yell at him which I’ve never even done, and says the young man is waiting for me. I tell him that’s true. 

The boy looks pathetic. I met him in the train station last week, and the poor thing was so confused I couldn’t help myself. He was standing with his bags, just arrived in the city. First, he asked me for directions, then I was given a puppy-dog story about his dreams of being a comedian. There wasn’t the slightest thing funny about him. Men who are that unattractive need to be funny, and usually are. He wasn’t even desperate, just lost. Said his name was Carl, and he looked awfully vanilla.   

Mainly I took pity on him because he was wearing a brown belt with black jeans. In and of itself, that’s not that bad, but he even had his oxford shirt tucked in. Finish that off with an overgrown crew cut, dulled pomade, and clearance Chelsea boots; like he was trying really hard for the MFA-cowboy look, but not quite there. You can tell from a mile away when a person doesn’t respect themselves. I thought maybe I could help him, but also my previous cleaner had just quit. There’s a big turnover on fake jobs in Manhattan.   

“He’s mine,” I tell the doorman. I bring him up into my apartment, and I show him where the brooms and organic cleaning products are. He seems taken with the decor, none of which was my idea. Right now, every painting on the wall is in black and white. The couch has the most color and it’s a deep khaki, like the occupation of Africa. Every year someone comes in and rearranges the place, but they never put bookshelves in. I just go to the library, that’s my little secret. I put his email into my phone so I can share grocery lists with him. 

“How often should I walk the dog?” he asks me. 

I pause, “I don’t have a dog.” 

“Oh,” he says. “That’s too bad. I thought you had a dog.” Then he looks over the grocery list, really seriously. He might’ve even read it twice. “You want any particular flavor of Greek yogurt?” 

“Just plain. Thank you.”

Going back to my book, I listen to him sweep the floors. I don’t allow vacuums in my house. Or carpets. Rugs are okay sometimes. There’s one in my living room, given to me by some Maharaja I met on an elevator in London. It’s the only furnishing that’s really mine, that remains constant. Terrible looking, but worth being able to say “Maharaja” to the journalists who want to interview me in my home, so I can sound like I’m from an EM Forster novel. I don’t know anything about India besides one book by a white man. Why should I know anything else? I live in Manhattan. 

Carl works hard, I’ll give him that. He cleaned the inside of my cupboard doors. Nobody’s ever done that for me before. Softly, I unclip my wallet in the bedroom, and I take out a hundred. When he leaves, I’ll pass it to him. It gathers sweat between my palm and the spine of the binder I’m reading that terrible book in. In the end, the main character tries to kill herself, but she fails and she’s happy that she failed, and she realizes that just because she’s a woman it doesn’t mean she should let people tell her what to do. Nobody had to explain that to me. 

“Thank you! I’ll see you tomorrow!” he calls out, leaving. 

I rush to the front door to give him the money, I cascade into the hall in my robe but he’s already in the elevator. It dings, and the hand on the wall moves down the numbers like a clock because it’s an old building. Why risk living in some awful place that’ll look kitsch in ten years? I abhor moving. There’s only so much they can do to the outside of a building.  

I can see him down on the sidewalk out my window. There’s a group of other kids waiting to meet him across the street. Some girls, too. They’re not protesters, they look too happy. I can tell by the smiles on their faces that nobody told them they had to feel bad about somebody else’s pain today. They look ready to have fun. I wave the hundred at him through the window, but he doesn’t look up. 

Why did he think I had a dog? 

*

The worst thing that ever happened to me was when my father threw a plate of salmon mousse over a balcony. It was back home in Bryn Mawr, before the room where they took my shoelaces. I was maybe fifteen. I could hear the plate shatter down below on the patio because the balcony wasn’t that high up. Maybe ten feet. The mousse looked like a melted brain. Like they’d opened the ark of the covenant somewhere close by. My father didn’t yell. Very casually, he’d picked the plate up and tossed it over the railing, then put his puffy hands over his face, ran them over his scalp where the hair was thinning. I know it doesn’t sound that bad. I know some people get locked in basements, or hit with a belt, or waterboarded. I’ve read about POWs. But you didn’t see the faces of all the other people in the restaurant. Even the waiter. At nice restaurants, the waiters are snobs too.  

My mother put her hand on my father’s shoulder, very concerned. Very earnest and she leaned forward and whispered into his ear so that I wouldn’t hear. And the staff was running velvet ropes around the patio down below, belting off the fragments of china. They all had matching white shirts and red ties like a political organization. The way they dealt with the mess, I was expecting hazmat suits.

What bothered me wasn’t that the people in the restaurant were looking at all of us, or at my mother, or at him. They didn’t watch the staff cleaning up the mess. They were watching me; I could tell they felt bad for me. Because when my eyes met theirs, they didn’t look away embarrassed. They maintained eye contact, and the women pouted their lips, and the men would give a slight nod and not try to look down my dress or at my legs as I crossed and uncrossed them, nervously. I would’ve preferred getting hit by a belt. I read about a POW that got locked in a small metal box for days. But nobody saw him suffer, and I bet if his mother was there, she might’ve tried to free him. 

*

I get home late from a shoot, and Carl is still there. It’s raining, so all the windows are closed. The kitchen smells like onions and I pray it hasn’t wafted to the rest of the house. Few people understand how tiring it is to be photographed all day. To sit in a small room with a stylist, picking out different jackets. I just spent forty-five minutes in a raincoat, with the AC broken, under hot lights. The photographer was Turkish and I couldn’t understand him. Now there’s the pop of a frying pan. I look over it to see what’s cooking, but the grease leaps up at me. It burns my nose and I check the front of my shirt for stains. 

“What is this?”

“I’m making chicken française,” he says. “My mother always made it for me at home. But you didn’t have any lemons, so I’m using onions.” 

“But—”

“It was either that, or apples,” he said, throwing up his hands. 

“You’re making yourself dinner?” I ask him. 

“No,” he looks mortified. “I’m making it for you. You worked so late, I figured you would be hungry.” 

“I went to a restaurant after the shoot,” I say. “But thank you. You can have whatever you make, I guess.” I put my things down on the counter, pointing to them, “And don’t worry about these, I’ll take care of it. Did you find the hundred I left out for you?” 

“I saw a hundred, but I didn’t know it was for me.” 

“It is,” I tell him. “Make sure you take it.” 

He pokes and prods the thin chicken breasts in the frying pan. There’s the uncomfortable blend of cream and onion, heavy butter gliding over the cast-iron and sending up fumes. Every thirty seconds he peeks under each piece, holding it up with a spatula. I know the grease must burn his hands, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He pours angel hair pasta into a pot of boiling water, then finally flips the chicken. It’s fascinating to watch him do this. 

“Were you close with your mother?” I ask him. 

“I still am,” he says. “She’s very much alive.” 

That was kind of funny, maybe. “Of course she is, I’m sorry.” 

“Are you close with your mother?” he asks me. Not looking up. I can tell he’s unsure of what’s more inappropriate, asking me this question or ignoring me. 

“We email,” I say. “Were those protesters still out there when you got here today?” 

“Oh, yeah. Probably be back in the morning.” 

I ask him where he’s staying. I imagine some room near Brownsville. Way deep down, where he’s just paying for the room in an apartment full of strangers. Where he doesn’t have to pay utilities, just the overpriced $800 and the rest on hair gels and unlimited cell phone data. Really, he lives in the East Village. I need to stop projecting. 

“I live with some friends of my girlfriend,” he says. “She goes to NYU, so it was pretty easy to find someone looking for a roommate.”

So, he has a girlfriend. Says her name is Ashley. I find that hard to believe, but I’m happy for him. Why else would someone like him move here? I won’t have to worry so much when I shower with him in the house. 

*

I bet he thinks he’s going to be with her for the rest of his life. I remember that feeling. Sometimes it comes true, and you meet those couples and they’re so happy and they’re so good at lying. Either to themselves or to each other. He goes to pick her up after school, that’s why he leaves at a different time every day. His schedule is built around hers. They get coffees, or smoothies, or the kinds of things people do in short films. Every moment feels so important. They sit on benches and watch chess hustlers. 

They have a special way of saying good-bye, something she started. And the more attached that he gets, the more he needs it every single time. Maybe it’s a kiss on each cheek, or a line from the first movie they watched together. And when she doesn’t say it, he worries something is wrong. 

I see her a day later from my window, waiting for him outside my building. I’m low in the window because she’s staring up, and he’s pointing out to her which floor I’m on. She looks impressed with him. Her hair is dark red, and her sneakers are so white. The semester must’ve just started, she must’ve just arrived. Otherwise, they’d be scuffed and ruined. I give it another month before he asks to introduce me to her, and I begin rehearsing what I’ll say. 

*

When men approach me at bars and don’t know who I am, they ask me what I’m studying in school. Terribly unoriginal, but I like that I still look that young. They expect me to say fashion, or dance, or Gallatin which is its own thing. I tell them how eager I am to get married, because it shocks them and amuses me. Sometimes I say worse things if I’m in a bad mood; I start barking like a dog or chortle. Nobody likes crazy girls, so they always back away, nervous. You can only get away with those kinds of things at the bars I go to, the bars where the maître d’ must know who you are before you even get there. If the men told the press what I’d said, they wouldn’t believe them anyway. 

What does Ashley say to men to get them to leave her alone, that she didn’t say to Carl? Does she study dance? Or art? Or at Gallatin? The only other thing he’s told me about her is that she likes 70s music, not the classics, the deep cuts. That means not only does she lack taste, she’s desperate for it. 

I see her again while I’m parked outside of VFiles, waiting for them to shut the store down for me. It’s a small city, people don’t get that. I’m so bored I’m back at VFiles. And there’s Ashley, walking out of the store with her friends. She’s the only girl in the group of them that has her backpack slung over just one shoulder, with her hand in her pocket. Kind of an Annie Hall thing, but no stripes or anything like that. Just masculine, but pretty. More like a journalist going bowling, that’s how I’d describe her outfit. And a Pokémon bracelet. I’m disappointed at the lack of hair clips. Still the white sneakers, not awful taste. Not what I’d expect for Carl, but I’m happy for him. 

I go into the store once it’s empty and the clerk motions for me to come in, and I sort through the racks. I already know that I’m not going to buy anything. But I make the clerk run out to get me some orange juice, and I tip her nicely, and I look at every single piece of clothing, swiping them down the racks. The sound is like heaven to me. It’s the dip of an oar in the morning. I haven’t been on a boat in ages.  

“Those girls that were in here before me,” I ask the clerk while she pours the juice into a paper cup for me. “What did they buy?” 

“They all got that,” she points to a black tennis skirt on display in the window. “It’s on sale.” 

“I’ll get one of those as well,” I say, and they box it up for me. 

Someone must’ve let the word out that I’m here. Because when I leave, there’s people outside yelling at me, or pointing cell phones and taking pictures but I just get into the car. Ashley and her friends are there, and I can see her looking at me deeper than all the others, the only one of them aware I’m a person because she knows someone that knows me. As we pull away her friends freak out, but she remains calm. She plays it cool. I wonder if she’ll tell them, or already has. 

*

I let Carl make me dinner today. This time he has all the right ingredients, and we eat together at the kitchen counter, next to the dirty dishes. We don’t talk much at first. I tell him that the chicken Kiev is good, but he should use brie next time, not camembert. I won’t eat all of it, I just nibble and nibble. “Why don’t you become a chef?” I ask him. 

“I’ve always wanted to be a comedian,” he says. “I can’t just give up now that I’m here.” 

I don’t want to discourage him. He’s too young to be discouraged. That comes the closer you get to thirty, I think. Or sooner if you move to New York. Not that I would know. I’m getting close to thirty, but I was on covers by the time I was twenty-one. 

“I was thinking,” he begins, tearing up his piece of bread into small bits. Here it comes.

“Yes?” I say when he pauses. 

“You should come out this Friday with Ashley and I. She really wants to meet you.” 

“I should come out with you? What do you mean?” 

“I think it could be fun. Ashley’s a huge fan. She wants to be a model too, you know.” 

“Carl,” I say to him. “If you want me to meet her, you can bring her here. I don’t mind.” 

“It’s just,” he begins, then shakes his head and starts putting the little bits of bread into his mouth. “It’s just I don’t see you go out much, you know? You go to work and then you come home, and you’re always here reading or looking out your window. Or you go for walks or out to drinks alone and then come home al-”

“Carl,” I say. “I’m not nineteen. That part of my life–” 

“I just think it would be good for you,” he says. “I know you’re my boss, but it would make me happy.” He sips his glass of water. “It’s not like this is some office job kind of thing either, you know? It’s not that formal.” 

I don’t answer him. I don’t have to explain myself to anybody.

There is an awkward silence as we finish our dinners. 

“My mother is coming to visit at the end of next week, so I probably can’t work as much for those three days,” he says. 

“You can take those days off,” I tell him. “Just let me know when you’ll be back.”  

*

I never buy my books, I always go to the library. When my father was having business meetings at the house, that’s where my mother would take me, drop me off, then go have lunch with her friends. There’s an understanding that nothing bad will happen at the library. On my way there today, I see Carl and Ashley in Stuy park. I would recognize her red hair anywhere.

I wanted them to be holding hands, or curled up together on a bench. But she’s throwing her hands up. Then towards him, then back in the air. I can see that same little bracelet, just faintly. I roll the window down. Carl won’t notice me; he’s just staring at the ground. Another woman could walk by naked in front of him and he wouldn’t be able to look up at her, any more than he could look Ashley in the eye. I wonder what he did. Probably asked again about that special good-bye. Or he saw her with some boy from class, maybe a professor. Got jealous. Maybe he didn’t like that miniskirt. That probably wasn’t it, he’s still wearing the brown belt and black pants. Who is he to judge? 

I tell the driver to pull over. I can hear Ashley continue yelling, but not loud enough to make out what she’s saying. Then I see her walk away, and when Carl’s head falls into his hands I roll that window right up and get on to the library. I spend two hours there, in the same stack, and read the first half of a book where nothing happens. That seems the most realistic to me. Anything with a point immediately becomes a fantasy. I read once, somewhere, that sentimentalism is an American fiction. Intellectualism is a European one. Farther East, they believe in the spirit, I think. 

Of course I’ve loved someone before. I think he loved me, too. But that’s not the point.

*

I go to an interview the day after. They’re doing a feature on me. We meet outside, but I want to go inside because it’s hot and there’s New School kids smoking across the street. Not even those nice Japanese cigarettes that have a hint of lime to them, they’re smoking the awful cheap ones you get on 14th street for a few quarters. I buy the journalist a juice, pressed asparagus and celery. I know it tastes disgusting, but I tell her it’s healthy and I watch her pretend to enjoy drinking it in front of me. 

She asks me what I think of the protests, and I say I stand with them. I say I don’t believe in violence, or oppression, or anything like that. I say exactly what she wants me to say, exactly what they tell me. I read my own Instagram before interviews like a script to follow. Really, I have no idea what the protests are about. Then we get more personal. 

She asks me if there’s anything I’d never wear, and I say yes. A black tennis skirt. They should always be white, always be perfectly, angelically, white. I tell her, “Be sure to print that.” 

I want her to ask me if I’ve read anything good lately. I want to show her what I got at the library. Ask me, I’m thinking. Ask me, ask me please, ask me. She doesn’t even finish the juice. 

*

I like to walk around in the evenings. It’s safe enough around the NYU campus, right near my apartment. It’s not like the ‘70s. This part of Manhattan is like a huge hotel now, a huge college campus. I carry a taser anyways, and I’m always home before it gets too dark. Head down, wrapped in a babushka, counting the dark patches of dried gum on the sidewalk, and imagining who chewed them. I can’t chew gum because it’ll make my face wider, the muscles on my jaw bulge out. There are certain things they can’t edit out without making it look too fake. 

Like the look in my eyes: they can’t edit that out. I had to work on that empty stare. I had to work my whole life to get that down. When they take my picture, I think of my father hiding his face in his hands. I think of the whole world looking at me, trying to understand what went wrong.

When I get East a few avenues from my apartment, by Dimes Square, there’s this little Asian place. The food is horrible, but they serve minors, so it’s always popular. Usually there’s a line, and a smoker’s congress by the front door, so I avoid it. But now, it’s cleared up. There’s an empty yolk of sidewalk, and a girl hunched over by the street. A girl in a black tennis skirt, her hair dark red, a little bracelet on her wrist. White sneakers. 

Her arms are crossed low, over her stomach. I pull myself towards her. Something feels off, the weekend veneer is peeling away. It’s just any old day. The night’s going to be longer on this patch of sidewalk. It’s 80 degrees and she’s shivering. Her head is hung so low. There’s two lines of blood down her leg. One has reached her sock, and the other is moving slowly right beside it. When it reaches her knee, it bends over the curve of her joints and joins the other stream. I’m dizzy, nauseous. I hate blood. 

“Ashley?” I say. But the girl doesn’t answer. The people in the restaurant look out the window, concerned. Some of them are laughing, and don’t notice. Nobody gets up to help her. 

“Ashley?” I say again, and I touch her shoulder. The girl looks up, but it’s not Ashley. It’s someone else. I don’t know who it is. She’s been crying, her eyes are red. The ends of hair that hang over her face are wet and sticking together. 

“I’m so sorry,” I say to her. “I thought you were someone else.” 

The girl looks quickly away. Back down at the sidewalk. 

“I’m so sorry,” I say, and I rub her arm. She doesn’t pull away. I can sense she wants to lean in. Does she recognize me? “Please, let me buy you a cab. Do you need to go to the hospital?” 

Three other girls come around the corner and rush up to her. When they get there, the girl starts bawling her eyes out. She feels safe now. None of her friends are looking at her, they look away or over her shoulder while they hug her. One of them hails a taxi without even asking. They tell him to go to the hospital. Faster than ordering an Uber. They pile in with her. 

“You’re lucky to have friends like that,” I say to her while she’s getting into the taxi. “You’re really lucky,” I say. But she doesn’t hear me. One of them does, and she nods to me. Knows that I stood with her friend, and that at least she wasn’t alone out there on the sidewalk. They don't care who I am. 

I think about if the skirt had been white. About if it wasn’t black and able to hide the blood before it started down her leg. Maybe more people would have noticed, maybe those people looking out the window might not have been so confused. Maybe someone might have helped sooner, but the girl was probably happy that her skirt was black. I don’t know who she is. I walk home. 

*

When Carl comes back to work, he seems the same. I get home from a shoot expecting to find his work lacking, but it isn’t. He’s got the whole place cleaner than I’ve ever seen it. I ask him how it was seeing his mother, and he says it was good. But he’s obviously on edge. I make a point of not asking him about Ashley. He says he’s probably not going to be in New York much longer. It wasn’t really what he expected. I expected nothing less.  

“Have you gone to any open mics?” I ask him. 

“I went to one, but I was too nervous to go onstage.” 

“You can stay here in the guest room if it’s money that’s the problem,” I tell him. It might be nice to talk to somebody sometimes.  

“Thank you,” he says. Genuinely. I see him smile in the kitchen, dry the last dish, and pull his rubber gloves off to start sweeping. “I’ll talk to my mom about it, and see what she thinks. I’m just so torn.” 

Then he keeps avoiding me, and looking down. I can barely walk past him without my chest sinking.  

“Carl?” I say to him in the kitchen. “What is it?” 

“I fucked up,” he says. “I was cleaning the drawers in the living room, and there was this thing stuffed into the back. I got Lysol all on it, and it seems kind of old,” and he holds up an old, folded notepaper, blossoming moisture at the corner, drying up slowly and wrinkling the paper further. “I don’t know if it’s important, it was just stuffed back there. But I wanted to tell you.” He’s just holding it up to me, looking like he’s going to cry again. I’m glad he doesn’t, if he did, I might have kicked him out. 

I take the paper from him, and unfold it. There’s that old poem about me, something with meter. At the top it says, “I Took a Picture of You.” A boy had given it to me a long time ago. He wrote his name on the bottom: “with love,” it says, and then his name. I knew I’d stuffed it somewhere, somewhere hard to find and easy to forget. 

“Is it important?” he asks me again. 

“Just something I tried to kill myself over, that’s all. It’s one thing to move here for love, it’s another thing to leave because of it. Just worry about yourself for a while. That’s the only way to survive.” That’s what I think about saying, but I remember my promise to myself, and the room where I was all alone. I know being honest can’t do any good.  

“No,” I say. “It’s not important. You can put it back.” 

I watch the news when I’m done reading for the night, once Carl’s gone home and I can forget about everything. It feels nice still, to disobey my father. They talk about last week’s travesty on the news, and the protests. It was a refugee from Afghanistan. He was deported for hopping train cars. Nobody had heard from him since. The journalists talk to the protesters, and a woman from the local mosque, who knew the man. They say they won’t stop protesting until he’s home. But they don’t talk about the girl in front of the sake bar, or my father. I am thankful for that. There’s a lot of people that watch the news. There’s a lot of people in this city. It’s enormous, bustling, and huge. There’s a city inside of me too. A city where nobody lives.

Blake Hammond is a writer from New England, currently studying creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His work has appeared in The Offering, been recorded by WORDTheatre, and been performed by the Exit Dance Theater.