Cult Classic(70)

Because I wasn’t allowed. Because I thought I might never see the inside of the Golconda again otherwise. Because Pierre’s presence meant the meditation was not total bullshit after all. Because Clive did not need to get rich (so sorry, wealthy) using me as raw material. Because the last thing he’d said to me the other night was “free will!”

And because who was the one with the map?

And so I watched, waiting to strike. When it got darker, Vadis and Jin left first. Then Errol and a handful of Golconda members, including Amos’s editor, Jeannine, carrying a tote bag over each shoulder. Then the two baristas, who shared a furtive kiss on the corner before rounding it. Ten minutes later, Clive emerged, pushing the door closed behind him, cross-referencing his phone screen with the license plate of a black car.

I waited to be sure no one came out or came back. Customers filed in and out of the bodega next door, looking almost embarrassed by their purchases of water or batteries, as if ashamed of addressing a sudden or lazy need. The plastic cat was still on the register, its paw visible from across the street. Perhaps it had not been indiscriminately waving at people, beckoning at random. Perhaps it had been trying to catch my attention this entire time.

I smoked half a cigarette and put it out. Then I pushed off the wall.



* * *



There was a dumpster in the alley next to the bodega. That was the hardest part—not the leap onto the fire escape ladder, which was already rust-stuck in a low position, or what to do when I got onto the roof of the building, but the fear that I’d fall into a dumpster filled with freshly severed human heads. Then I’d have to lean into the open necks of the heads in order to get out. Fortunately, the lip of the dumpster was wide enough to support this feline enterprise without requiring a tetanus shot, and inside was only a pile of splintered wood from a construction site. The rest was easier than I’d expected. From the edge of the dumpster, it was a modest leap onto the corroded ladder. As I climbed, I got high enough so that the people below looked to be the size of large dogs. Their dogs looked to be the size of rabbits.

I was not entirely ignored. In the days before social media, the joke about New Yorkers was that they could see someone walking down Broadway with a grand piano strapped to their back and not flinch. But those who spotted me did more than flinch. They took photos. But then they moved on, presuming bad performance art. Which I found insulting.

The roof was concave, its softer parts covered in tar and dotted with ventilation pipes, the tar still sticky from the day’s heat. I could see the top of the Golconda’s skylight, a glass pyramid coated in grime. A fan pushed a pigeon feather in circles, stuck to one of the blades. I walked over to the brick fa?ade of the Golconda, which I could now touch with my hands. From here, I had two window ledges at my disposal, which were marked on Zach’s map. I tried the first window but it was sealed shut, either locked or closed for so many years that the window and its frame were in a common-law marriage. I yanked until my skin went red and the veins in the backs of my hands puffed. But the second window gave after a few minutes of effort, with the whoosh of the frame sliding up on its tracks.

The map showed a small staircase, leading down from the attic into the hall outside what was now the meditation room. How hard could it be, I thought, to find a whole staircase? I held my breath and crawled inside, one leg at a time.

I put both feet on a foldout table beneath the window and hopped down, my shoes leaving indentations in the dust. This space was untouched by Clive’s renovations, most likely untouched by his security cameras. I knew, instantly, that he’d never been up here. Mostly, it looked like an attic: old furniture, defunct lamps, cardboard boxes, mousetraps, piles of books. The only difference was that the books were all the same book. And that being here felt more peaceful than being in any other part of the Golconda. Downstairs reminded me of a past I wasn’t living up to or a present that evaluated me. The people who used to worship at Congregation Beth Shalom had not been up here, nor had the people who worshipped Clive. This was purgatory. But the one rule of purgatory is that you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

I scanned the room, crouching along the perimeter, my eyes adjusting. Then, in the far corner, I saw what I’d come for—my ticket down. There was a square in the floor with a wooden contraption bolted to it. It was a collapsible set of stairs. I grinned. That’s why I’d never seen them before. Because they weren’t there. I hooked my finger into the loop, pulled as hard as I could, and the stairs creaked down ahead of me, touching down on the marble. I’d never been inside the Golconda when it wasn’t brightly lit and somewhat populated, at least without the hum of the espresso machine.

I climbed down, testing each rung to make sure it was fit for human weight. I could go back up. I could always go back up. The air was still, the chandeliers dimmed to the point where their bulbs appeared to glow. They reminded me of the phosphorescent bays in Puerto Rico. I’d been once, with Boots. He insisted on staying on the beach to watch the sunset, and so I let my feet plow into the sand, surveying sandpipers chasing the tide and then the tide chasing them back, while sand fleas devoured us. I didn’t want to seem like a bad girlfriend, an unfun girlfriend. Eventually, we scurried back to the hotel before our bites became too many and too painful.

It was an odd sensation, being on this floor with no one in sight. On the one hand, I shouldn’t be here. On the other, I felt like a teenager who’d forgotten the keys to her own house. In the dark, I felt along the curved wall outside the meditation room until my fingers touched cold metal. I paused for a moment, listening, scanning the ceiling for any blinking lights. I felt, for the first time in weeks, truly alone.