Cult Classic(41)

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By the time I looked up, I could see the reflection of the fluorescent lights in the windows. I could hear cars honking their way into the Holland Tunnel, followed by the sound of the cleaning cart being rolled off the elevator in consecutive thuds. A vacuum cleaner switched on. The cleaning woman jumped when she saw me, holding her hand to her heart.



* * *



Near the Second Avenue subway station, children were playing an intense game of soccer under bright lights. They were running back and forth over the yin-yang printed on the Astroturf, intermittently stopping to accuse one another of cheating. The air had grown sharper. I leaned on an iron fence, picking leaves from an azalea bush and folding them between my fingers. They made a satisfying crack. As Clive had explained, I was the magnet (preferable to “hole”) within a liminal space and that magnetism was concentric. The Golconda worked mostly through the power of suggestion, but Clive also had the members put energy out with the goal of “reeling it back in.” Like a tide rising and then receding from the shore, who knew what debris would be dragged my way? I’d spotted Dave Egan, stuck in the sand over on Canal, farther west. I figured I had about the same chance of running into an ex here as I did outside the Golconda’s front door, where I would be on camera.

So I stayed put, watching commuters return home, watching tourists get turned around, watching a hunched man carrying a cloud of cans so expansive, it made a mockery of the population’s wastefulness. It seemed to me that Clive could accomplish his goal easily enough with a few illusionists on the payroll. Formalizing it all with cult-like rhetoric was preying on people’s need for meaning, ethics notwithstanding. Amos had not called Clive a charlatan for nothing. Still, I concentrated on emitting my own vibrations. My own pheromones.

I only managed to make myself sweat.

Clive had said that there might not be a chronology to the next couple of weeks. I’d dated Amos after Willis, and Dave before either of them. What he did know was that this would work via emotional impact. That’s what the social media monitoring and the meditation had in common. Love leaves a neurological footprint. A search history of the soul. It was therefore unlikely that I’d run into any one-night stands, as neither party could be triggered to revisit the other. No amount of planted advertisements for the boysenberry body wash I’d used in 2012 would be effective on such a man. Beyond that? Everyone was fair game.

My pupils stayed vigilant, both fearful of and desperate for recognition. This awareness was draining, reminiscent of spending too long in a museum. Every second of our lives is pressed from two sides—the present and the past—like coal. Mostly we don’t notice it. We don’t notice we’re in a continuum. Other times the pressure gets so intense, it turns all existence into a diamond.

And then I heard a voice call my name.

My shoulders went stiff. I often heard my name in public, or a piece of it, in slow or hola, words exchanged between people on the street. I’d trained myself not to react. But then I heard it again. This was a woman’s voice.

Narrowing the gap between us on the sidewalk was Adella, a friend of a friend. I was never quite sure what Adella did for a living. What I did know was that she was on the board of a women’s folk art museum in Mexico City because I was on the email list despite repeated attempts to unsubscribe. I resigned myself to the fact that Adella would pass through my mind, monthly, for the rest of my life, harmless as a shooting star.

“Lola, I thought that was you,” she said, as if my ruse had failed.

I’d never gotten to know Adella because there was no need for me to get to know Adella—I could count our interactions on one hand. We were peripheral people for each other. But even if I’d been desperate to crack her code, she maintained too upbeat a demeanor. Everything was always fabulous. Work? Great. Family? Great. Friends? Manifold. Apartment? Redecorated. Shattered tibia? Healing at record speeds. Only once did she mention the time she’d been held at knifepoint in Buena Vista, blindfolded and forced to make withdrawals from several banks. Then she started talking about an app for haircuts.

But right now, Adella was a gift. I kept losing focus on her, keeping a lookout. Adella soldiered on, releasing information like she was blowing bubbles. She’d had outpatient surgery for endometriosis. She’d hired an assistant she loved. She’d moved back to the city from Chicago, with her boyfriend whom she also loved. (I had not realized she’d left for Chicago in the first place.) Her inquiries about our mutual friends required my participation, but I hadn’t seen these people in years. I didn’t have much in the way of answers. So she resumed the bubble-blowing: Her boyfriend had inherited “part of a floor” of a building in the East Village. The twinge of real estate jealousy snapped me to attention.

“His great-grandparents ran a canning business out of it,” she explained. “Dumb luck, right?”

“Completely stupid.”

“His dad lived there but he died. We live on the fourth floor, which is actually—”

“Wait, what did they can?”

“Sorry?”

“The grandparents. What did they can?”

“Oh … some kinda fish, I think.”

“Herring?”

“Yes! How’d you know?”

There was a clanging of bells in the distance as Adella’s boyfriend exited a hardware store across the street. She waved at him with violent cheer as he darted across the street to meet his current girlfriend, her—and his college girlfriend, me.