The Nix(105)

And suddenly your nights are sleepless and agitated as you fantasize about seeing Bethany again and you worry about not screwing up what is obviously your very last chance to capture her heart. It’s like you are living the plot of the Choose Your Own Adventure books you loved as a child, and it’s up to you to make the right choices. This is all you can think about until the very day you leave: In New York, if you do everything right, if you choose correctly, you can get the girl.

To go to New York, go to the next page…





You drive from Chicago to New York, stopping once in Ohio for fuel, again in Pennsylvania for sleep, checking into a shabby hotel you’re too amped up to actually sleep in. Next day, well before dawn, you drive the rest of the way and stash your car in a parking garage in Queens and take the subway into the city. You walk up the stairs from the subway station into the mid-morning light and crowds of downtown Manhattan. Bethany lives on one of the upper floors of the building at 55 Liberty Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, which is where you are right now, at this moment, in 2004. Where the towers once stood is now a well-cleared and poignant hole in the ground.

You walk its perimeter, past street vendors selling falafel or candied nuts, guys hawking purses and watches laid out on blankets on the ground, conspiracy theorists handing you pamphlets about 9/11 being an inside job or seeing the face of Satan in the smoke of Tower Two, tourists on tiptoe craning their necks to see above the fence and holding their cameras aloft and checking the picture, then doing it again. You walk past all this, past the department store on the other side of the street where European tourists taking advantage of the weak dollar and surging euro load their bags with jeans and jackets, past a coffee shop with a sign that says NO FREE BATHROOMS, down Liberty Street where a mom tugging her two children asks “Which way to 9/11?,” until you’re there, Liberty and Nassau, Bethany’s apartment.

You know all about this building. You’d looked it up before coming. Built in 1909 as the “tallest small building in the world” (due to narrow lot size), with a foundation going five stories down, unnecessarily deep for a building that size, but the architects of 1909 didn’t yet understand skyscraper construction, so they overdid it. Was built next door to the New York Chamber of Commerce, which has since been converted into the New York office of the Central Bank of China. Just across Nassau Street from the ass-end of the Federal Reserve Bank. Teddy Roosevelt’s law office was among the first tenants.

You walk through the front doors, past a wrought-iron gate, and into the golden lobby, tiled floor-to-ceiling with polished cream-colored stone slabs pressed so close together you can’t see the seams. The whole place feels airtight. You approach the guard desk and tell the man sitting there you are here to see Bethany Fall.

“Name?” he says. You tell him. He picks up a phone and dials. He stares at you while he waits. His eyelids look heavy from sleeplessness or boredom. It seems to take a long time for someone to pick up, long enough that the guard’s stare becomes uncomfortable and so you break eye contact and pretend to look around the lobby, admiring its austere tidiness. You notice the total lack of bare lightbulbs, as every light source has been cleverly hidden inside recesses and alcoves, making the space seem less like it’s lit and more like it’s being thoroughly glowed upon.

“Miss Fall?” the guard finally says. “Got a Samuel Anderson to see you?”

The guard keeps staring. He has no expression whatsoever.

“Okay.” He hangs up and does some motion under the desk—turns a key, flips a switch—something that makes the elevator doors open.

“Thanks,” you say, but the guard is staring at his computer, ignoring you.

To go up to Bethany’s apartment, go to the next page…





On the way up to Bethany’s apartment, you wonder how long you can reasonably wait in the hall before she’ll think you’ve gotten lost. You’re feeling like you need a minute to compose yourself. You’re having that hollowed-out nervous feeling like all your insides have fallen into your feet. You try to convince yourself that it’s foolish to feel this way, foolish to feel so nervous over Bethany. After all, you only really knew her for three months. When you were eleven years old. Silly. Almost comical. How could someone like this have any sway over you? Of all the people in your life, why does this one matter so much? This is what you tell yourself, which does very little to calm the riot in your belly.

The elevator stops. The doors slide open. You had been expecting a hallway or corridor, like at a hotel, but instead the elevator opens directly into a blazingly sunlit apartment.

Of course. She owns the whole floor.

And walking toward you right now is someone who is definitely not Bethany. A man, about your age—late twenties, maybe early thirties. Pressed white shirt. Skinny black tie. Perfectly rigid posture and down-his-nose gaze. He’s wearing an expensive-looking watch. You consider each other a moment, and you’re about to say you have the wrong apartment when he says, “You must be the writer.” And there’s something about the way he inflects the word writer that carries an edge, like he doesn’t believe writer is a real profession and so he says it like someone might say, “You must be the psychic.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” you say. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for—”