LITMIR.BIZ

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this is it,” Pinky said, gesturing like the emcee of some third-rate road show.

      A small stairway lit by a single bare bulb led to the basement of a boarded-up redbrick building, remnants of smashed windows shining on the top floors. A stenciled sign on the door read, HIT SIGN. WIN SUIT. Music played from behind a battered steel door.

      “How did you find this place?”

      “I found it is how I found it,” Pinky said. “After you.”

      The Catbird Seat was little more than a repurposed fallout shelter in the basement of an abandoned bottling plant, torched by arsonists in the seventies. The brick walls had been painted in vivid purple and gold and hung with garish abstract paintings bracketed by candelabra fashioned from parts of industrial machinery. They entered the low tin-ceilinged room, blue with cigarette smoke. A group of students, wan artist types, sat laughing around a long table beneath an antique billboard that read, ASTRAL OIL: “SAFE AND BEST.” One of the students had thick sideburns shaped like the state of California. Another wore an army jacket with the word CRASS scrawled in black marker on the back. A girl with blonde pigtails and glitter on her cheeks laughed. The room was lit only by candlelight. Stone took a seat at a small table nearby and noticed in the flickering yellow light the drawn faces of the students. A GREAT INDUSTRIAL CITY, another vintage sign read, and Stone imagined they were the great industrial workers worn down by coal dust, asbestos, ashes, and gas.

      “I’ll get you a double from the well,” Pinky said, lighting a cigarette.

      This was not a good idea, Stone thought. These people looked like the walking dead themselves. Dry-mouthed, he wished only for a glass of water. Pinky lingered at the bar, leaning close to the red-haired bartender, whispering something that would have been drowned out by the music.

      As he sat alone at the table, Stone’s thoughts drifted back to his father, to the funeral, to the horrible sound of the dirt clots rattling against the coffin lid. It was past one in the morning, and the Judge would still be there in the ground, all night long and all the next day, and all winter long, and all year long, and there he would remain, or, at least, his remains would remain, until he was completely forgotten, mourned by no one. The thought was almost too much to bear, and Stone gasped for air. He wanted to go home, but Pinky was already making his way over to the table, a crooked smile on his face.

      He slid a glass of clear liquid across the table and raised his own. “L’chaim. To life!” he said, and emptied the glass in a single gulp.

      Stone did the same, but whatever rotgut Pinky had brought him rushed back up his throat. He swallowed it again, eyes watering, empty stomach burning. “What the hell is this?”

      “Vodka, my man,” Pinky said. “Not the top-shelf stuff, but it does the trick.”

      “I think I’m going to throw up,” Stone said.

      “You really are a pussy.” Pinky laughed, but Stone didn’t think there was anything funny in Pinky’s words. “Put on your man pants and take it.” When Stone managed to regain his composure, Pinky ruffled Stone’s hair and said, “Straight up, no chaser. That’s the way to do it, my friend.” Pinky was no friend but Stone, hit hard by the double shot of vodka, felt maudlin, the urge to talk overwhelming his desire to leave Pinky and rush back to the relative comfort of his bare mattress.

      “Have you ever imagined what happens to you when you die? Really thought deep on it?”

      “Honestly?” Pinky said. “No.” He fiddled with his thick gold chain, tucking and untucking it from his New York Jets shirt.

      “I was there when he died,” Stone said. “He was there, and then he was not. Something and then nothing. I was with him, and then I was alone. It is almost impossible to understand how one can be and then not be. Do you know what I mean? He was alive. He lived. And now . . .”

      “I hear you, brother,” Pinky said. “But seriously.”

      “Seriously what?” Stone said.

      “I mean, I get it, like life is an illusion and we don’t know if we’re here or we’re not here, like maybe we’re all somebody’s dream or the earth is just some cosmic giant’s ball of snot flying through space and we’re like ants or something just running around like it matters when it don’t. We all die in the end. That is the capital-T truth.”

      By the light of the candle, Pinky’s sallow, pasty-white complexion was even more repulsive than it was under the bright light of day. Stone wanted to pity him but he knew the unexamined life was a contented life, and for a moment he wished he could switch places with Pinky to know what it felt like to be a happy idiot preoccupied with only the basest concerns. He stared at Pinky in disgust for a long moment, but he needed to talk, just to hear the words out loud, to make them real, to find a proper place to put his emotions.

      “You know he died—just like that. The Judge. His heartbeat was replaced by a rattle in his throat. You know the death rattle is real? And then the rattle stopped. He looked the same at first, except the eyes maybe, but he wasn’t in there. And soon, I don’t know how long, he was just gone. No life at all. Where does it go?” Stone said. “Where does it go?”

      “I don’t fucking know,” Pinky said. “You want answers, go see a priest or professor. I’m here to show you a good time.”

      “I’m not much of a good-time guy right now,” Stone said, regretting his attempt to open up to Pinky.

      “You’ll feel better. Just give it time,” Pinky said, craning his neck around and pointing toward a skinny girl with red, bee-stung lips. “Check out fuck-mouth over there. Why don’t you start with that?”

      “I want another drink,” Stone said. He didn’t care what Pinky brought him; he just wanted to be alone again with his thoughts.

      “Okay, but the next round is on you,” Pinky said, rising from the table. “I’m just bustin’ your balls. It’s on me, buddy.”

      The dark, flickering room pulsed like a heartbeat, bodies pressed so closely together that Pinky was quickly lost to Stone’s view. Every mouth burned like an orange star as cigarettes were drawn and then exhaled. A song by Nico, which Stone had listened to on repeat one weekend with his girlfriend as a freshman at Wesleyan, played from the darkness. It was an acoustic song, sad and beautiful, the simple strumming of the guitar, her voice breaking and dropping, that accent, low and full of disappointment, then rising with hope through the strings. Not ten feet away, a tall skinny girl in a green wool hat and dark sunglasses mouthed the words. Points of ginger hair poked out of the bottom of her hat against her pale cheeks. She was almost flat-chested, wearing loose black peasant pants and a ripped gray cardigan. Stone thought she looked like a boyish elf when she sucked her cheeks in to draw on her cigarette. The girl danced almost without moving, a molasses-slow gyration. Her eyes were closed behind her dark glasses, but she was singing to him.

      It would be obscene, vulgar, to pursue a woman now, considering all the things his father would never do again.

      “Mind if I join you?”

      Stone had not noticed the man approach, and without thinking he told him he was welcome to sit. The bar was packed, after all, and it would have been rude to refuse him a seat. The man wore a suit that looked out of place in the Catbird Seat. He was ten or fifteen years older than Stone and of a trim, sturdy build—he must have been an athlete once. He wore a neat goatee and had an olive complexion with a dark circular birthmark high on his right cheek. His battered nose appeared to have been broken numerous times. His eyes were small and brown and intense. Stone turned away. But the girl was gone now.

      “Looks like you blew your chance there.” The man neither smiled nor frowned, his face inscrutable, blank. But there was something in the way he moved as he lit a cigarette off the candle, tilting his neck to one side as if he were working out a kink, which brought him into focus for Stone. The man had been at his father’s funeral, on the grassy knoll, telephoto lens pressed to his face. He had been too far away for Stone to make out his features, but the way he kept stretching his neck was his

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