Beautiful Lies

leave to its own devices. It felt lawless and abandoned, except for tiny pockets like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, flowers of creativity that had pushed their way through the concrete. Here abandoned buildings stood like limping rebel soldiers against the encroaching wealth that would force the longtime residents of this neighborhood onto the streets. Here empty lots were littered with garbage, old furniture, stripped cars, and barrels filled with fire, surrounded by the city’s discarded people. The homeless, the junkies, the runaways, those among us who had somehow lost their way and had stopped groping for a way back. I walked, aware, but with my head down. It’s not the place where you want to call attention to yourself. You just move through as though you belong. And today I did belong. I was looking for Ace.

On Avenue D and Fifth Street, I came to the building where he’d told me he’d been squatting the last time I saw him. It looked better than most buildings. After World War II, there’d been a rush to put up as much housing as possible in the East Village for the boys returning home. The result was a great deal of shoddy construction, and now many buildings, like my own, were sagging in the middle, facades crumbling, pieces falling onto the sidewalks below. This one looked pretty solid, heavy white stairs leading to an entryway flanked by Doric columns. A black man the size of a refrigerator sat sentry by the door, his tremendous girth completely enveloping the chair beneath him, making it look as though he were levitating. He wore a New York Rangers jersey and a red baseball cap turned backward. His carefully faded denims were clean and pressed. His sneakers were a riot of color and wound up his ankle; he tapped his foot to an invisible beat. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at him. His eyes were already on me. I could see him sizing me up. Was I five-oh? He gave me a nod and his three black chins knocked against one another lazily, his eyes yellow and flat, revealing nothing.

There was a time when I would have judged this man, this gatekeeper to the hell behind him, in his pockets or hidden somewhere near him the stash of crack cocaine or heroin or whatever it was he was selling. I would have felt the hate rise in my throat like bile. But the relationship between the addicted and the dealer was so complicated, so delicate. Who was worse, the people who wanted or the people who supplied? What about the rest of it? The poor parenting, bad socialization, racism, poverty that created the pain that created the junkies and their dealers. Even I had my place in the chain as the enabler; in giving Ace money, didn’t I have some part in this? See what I mean? I did belong here.

“Whatchu want, girl?” he said, not unkindly. His eyes had narrowed and a smile that was more a reluctant turning up of the corners of his mouth puckered the flesh of his face.

“I’m looking for my brother. Ace.” My voice sounded foolish, naive even to my own ears.

He gave a little chuckle and his whole body shook. “If he’s in there, he ain’t your brother no more.”

There was a wisdom in that statement that surprised and hurt me. I felt my face flush at the truth of it. I walked up the stairs and his expression registered a mildly amused surprise, as if he’d expected me to turn away. I looked at him when I reached the top and he shrugged, apathy slackening all the features on his face.

This was not the first time I’d ventured into a building like this looking for my brother; once in a fit of worry I’d taken the train to Spanish Harlem. The streets seem harder above Ninety-sixth Street, the anger and the desperation crowd the sidewalks, dangle like legs from fire escapes. People are out, driving loud cars, hanging out windows, yelling. The danger is like the humidity in the air before a storm, no doubt that the sky will erupt, only a wondering of when and how and who will be left standing. The air in the East Village here seemed less electric, the violence lazier, slower to ignite. Still I felt a flutter of fear as I stepped from the light into the dark vestibule. The air around me turned stale but alive with the odors of human waste, too many bodies in a poorly ventilated area, and a ubiquitous smell of something burning, something chemical and poisonous. In the walls I heard murmurs, low groans, somewhere the sound of a radio or television, the cadence of a measured and professional voice delivering information. I made my way into the semidarkness and headed toward a staircase.

As children, we’d shared a bedroom wall so thin, I could hear Ace turn or sigh in his sleep. Our bedrooms had once been a much larger room in the old house, and as part of the renovations it had been divided into two smaller rooms with an adjoining bathroom. It was a separate universe from the rest of the house, and the master bedroom where my parents slept on the ground floor, overlooking my mother’s garden. A baby monitor left over from my infancy served as an intercom in case I needed my parents in the night. If I needed them, I could turn it on and call out. But when I woke in the night, frightened from dreams or thirsty or just lonely, it was Ace that I wanted.

I would slip out of my bed and walk softly across my carpet in the dark, through the bathroom that adjoined our rooms. I could see the shadow of the great oak tree dancing in front of his window, hear the heavy breathing of his sound sleep, see the outlines of his Star Wars action figures on their shelf, the pile of books on his desk; I could smell the scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo, which we both used long after we weren’t babies anymore. Pushing myself up onto his bed and into the curl of his body, I would always wake him.

“Ridley,” he would say, his sleepy voice a combination of annoyance and resignation and love. “Go back to your own bed.”

“I will,” I’d say as he draped an arm around me and fell back to sleep. “In a minute.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever slept that well again. You get too old for that kind of comfort, you know? That innocent physical closeness where all you want from other bodies is their cozy, gentle warmth, like puppies in a litter. As you approach adolescence and develop a sexual consciousness of your body, contact with other bodies becomes charged. It happened to Ace first, of course. He started closing the bathroom doors when he got up to pee in the night. The first time I heard him do that, I knew on some instinctive level that I couldn’t crawl into his bed anymore. Overnight we had lost each other in that way.

On the building’s second landing, the floor creaked beneath my feet in a way that made me feel unsafe. I felt it give just slightly under my weight. With every step I took, I half expected to go crashing through the floor and land in a crumbled pile on the level below. Ace had told me he was staying with a girl on the second floor, that she had a window that looked out onto the street. So I walked toward the door closest to the street side of the building and knocked.

“Ace,” I called. “It’s Ridley.”

There was only silence as the sunlight from outside filtered in through the dirty hall window; its gate was so rusted it looked as though a single touch might dissolve it to dust. A car cruised by outside and I felt the heavy bass of the subwoofers resonate in my chest and fingertips. The murmurs I’d heard on entering the building had quieted in the wake of my relative shouting. The walls and doors around me seemed to hold their breath. I heard a shuffle behind the door and could sense that someone stood tentatively on the other side listening out as I listened in. From the other end of the hall came an unmistakable squeaking, a scratching within a pile of rubbish that I could just make out in the dim light. I pretended not to see the rats as they skittered and rummaged. I knocked on the door again, this time louder.

“Ace,” I said, sounding nervous and desperate. “Please.”

I startled when the door opened and a wide blue eye peered out through the space allowed by the chain. Long strands of filthy blond hair hung before the eye, a woman’s eye that might have been pretty once. But now it was bloodshot and smudged black with fatigue.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Where?”

“What do I look like, his wife?”

I shrugged, not sure how to answer. The eye blinked slowly. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

I shrugged again, feeling at a loss for words. I gave a mild shake of my head to indicate that I didn’t know if she’d seen me before. The eye looked me up and down. I could see something living in the lashes, in the lines beneath. It was hunger.

“You’re the one who saved that kid.”

“That’s right. Look, do you know where my brother is?”

“You’re Ridley. That bastard. He never told me that you were his sister.”

I opted for shrugging again. It seemed like a useful, noncommittal gesture.

“He talks about you all the time,” she said. I heard the crackle of envy. It made me childishly happy to know he thought about me, had told this stranger about me.

“You don’t have any idea where he might be?”

She closed the door and I heard the chain release. Then she opened the door again, but not all the way. I could see a painfully thin leg, a sharp hipbone jutting against gray sweatpants that had been cut down into shorts, one breast flat and hard beneath a lavender cotton camisole, a collarbone that looked as if it could snap like a twig, and half of a gaunt gray face, square jaw, and that one wide blue eye. It was as if she wanted me to see exactly