Cult Classic(66)

A few months ago, I had a writer pitch me a story on “reincarnated New York spaces,” on the city’s cathedrals-turned-condos. The most famous was the Limelight, which had undergone several heart transplants over the years—from Catholic Church, to Andy Warhol’s playground, to purveyor of cheap gifts, to high-end gym. The writer encouraged me to imagine barbells resting where empty ketamine bottles once rolled, the spirit of tinsel in the sauna. That space in particular would probably turn over yet again, she said, before she pressed “send.” My initial reaction to her pitch went something like: What’s so revolutionary about buildings that have been other buildings? But I wound up assigning the story anyway. Radio New York was in no position to kick hyperlocal clickbait out of bed.

“Where did you get this?”

“Google.”

“Wow.”

“No, not Google,” he said, snatching the paper back, punishment for believing him. “I looked up all shuls below Fourteenth Street, and there were two that had changed hands in the past decade, so then I called up the Department of Buildings to see if either one had applied for construction permits. Then I went to the public domain collections and then the Jewish Museum. They sent me to the Tenement Museum, which keeps records of, like, a ten-block radius. Let me tell you, everyone’s incompetent, no one knows who has what, and those who do know treat you like you’re planning on blowing up whatever you find because why else would you be asking.”

“You do kind of have ‘anarchist face,’” I said, waving around his head. “Also, you need a real job.”

He shrugged.

I looked at the map, turning the paper around to get my bearings. I superimposed the soggy Golconda entrance onto the “main holy hall.” It was like a satellite picture of Earth, factual but devoid of spirit, devoid of the idea that a human gaze would fill the map from the inside out with experience, that it would test the map’s authority against its own. Or like reading a review of a play written by someone who’d seen it with an entirely different cast. The women’s section was now the conference room. The coffee machine was in the men’s annex. The elevator blocked a sanctuary.

“Look,” said Zach, pointing at a series of narrow lines outside the “women’s entrance hall.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a staircase.”

I knew of no such staircase. I knew of the hall and its confounding wallpaper, the bane of housekeepers everywhere. I knew of the visible staircase. I knew of no secondary snack staircase.

“Are you sure this is the right spot? Maybe all shuls have the same layout.”

“You really are a bad Jew. This is it. What do you think?”

He took a half-eaten granola bar from his pocket and started grinning as he masticated the remains.

“Oh, no,” I said, pushing the map away from me. “No way.”

“I’ll take that as a thank-you,” he said, pushing it back. “Thank you, Zach, for helping me find a way to crack this capitalist clique that’s clearly holding a bunch of definitely illegal files on me and countless men.”

“Not countless.”

Zach shrugged.

“I’m not doing it. I’m not the B-and-E type.”

“You don’t even know what type you are,” he said. “Isn’t that the point? That you don’t know what you want? Freud said that a man who doubts his own love must doubt every lesser thing.”

“Freud thought women were dickless hysterics.”

“Irrelevant. Doubt is healthy until it eclipses knowledge.”

“Who said that?”

“Me, I say things.”

He wasn’t wrong. Religion, love, marriage—was there a single belief system to which I subscribed or submitted? What becomes of a person like that, a social heretic who can’t even keep a ring on her finger? One thing I did know was that my life was no surrealist painting. That was Clive’s life, Clive’s mission to bring the unconscious to the surface, to subvert reality. My life was more like a pointillist painting, distinct dots that formed a single image. None of which were meant to be counted, not one by one. None of which were then meant to be seen this close.

Zach was growing peevish and taking it out on the granola bar. Ever since he left my house last night, he’d been sending me texts. It was wrong for these men to remain ignorant of their participation in what amounted to an unregulated clinical trial. As for me? I was no better than a lab rat flinging herself into a vat of acid for the benefit of a pharmaceutical company.

“I’ll tell you what I do know,” I said. “I know I’m the type who doesn’t like jail.”

“Fine, suit yourself.”

For years, Zach had wanted to dissolve the threesome of me and Clive and Vadis as if we were a big bank. If confronted, he’d say he thrived on the idea of being the ostracized one, the reliable narrator, but at the granular level, he only ever wanted to be included. He only ever wanted to be invited into our cult of three, to dive into a conversation without a “who are we talking about?” I’d tried to break ranks for him on multiple occasions, felt it was my responsibility to do so, but the man couldn’t last five minutes without misfiring mating dances for Vadis or taking jabs at Clive.

“You barely care about my personal life,” I told him. “You want some convoluted Clive vengeance and you’re using me to do it. Or using me to get to Vadis. You don’t have to break into a building to show her what a big man you are. Just ask her out and see what happens.”