breathing comes ragged from exertion and fear. The only person I trust in the world lies on the floor beside me. I lean into him and hear that he’s still breathing but it’s shallow and hard won. He’s hurt, I know. But I can’t see how badly. I whisper his name in his ear but he doesn’t respond. I feel his body but there’s no blood that I can tell. The sound of his body hitting the floor minutes before was the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
I feel the floor around him, looking for his gun. After a few seconds I feel the cool metal beneath my fingertips and I almost weep with relief. But there’s no time for that now.
I can hear the rain falling outside the burned-out building, its loud, heavy drops smacking on canvas. It’s falling inside, too, trickling in through gaping holes in the roof down through floors of rotted wood and broken staircases. He moves and issues a low groan. I hear him say my name and I lean in close to him again.
“It’s okay. We’re going to be okay,” I tell him, even though I don’t have any reason to believe this is true. Somewhere outside or up above us a man I thought I loved, along with other men whom I couldn’t identify, are trying to kill us, to protect an awful truth that I’ve discovered. I am hurt myself, in so much pain that I might pass out if I didn’t know it meant dying here in this condemned building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There’s something embedded in my right thigh. It’s possibly a bullet, or a large spike of wood, or maybe a nail. It’s so dark I can just barely see the large hole in my jeans, and the denim is black with my blood. I’m dizzy, the world tilting, but I’m holding on.
I hear them up above us now, see the beams of their flashlights crossing in the dark through the holes in the floors. I try to control my breathing, which to my own ears sounds as loud as an oncoming train. I hear one of the men say to the others, “I think they fell through. They’re on the bottom.” There was no answer but I can hear them making their way down over creaking wood.
He stirs. “They’re coming,” he says, his voice little more than a rasp. “Get out of here, Ridley.”
I don’t answer him. We both know I’m not leaving. I pull at him and he tries to get up, but the pain registers on his face louder than the scream I know he suppressed to protect us for a few minutes more. If we’re not walking out of here together, we’re not walking out at all. I drag him, even though I know I shouldn’t be moving him, over behind an old moldy couch that lies on its back by the wall. It’s not far but I can see his face white and gritted in terrible pain. As I move him, he loses consciousness again and in an instant feels fifty pounds heavier. But I’ve seen all four of his limbs move and that’s something. I realize that I’m praying as I pull him, my leg on fire, my strength waning.
The way the couch is lying, it forms a crawl space against the wall just big enough for the two of us. I pull him in there and lie on my belly beside him. I pull an old crate over toward the edge of the couch and look through the wooden slats. They’re closer now and I’m sure they’ve heard us because they’ve stopped talking and turned their flashlights off. I hold the gun in both hands and wait. I’ve never fired a gun before and I don’t know how many bullets are left in this one. I think we’re going to die here.
“Ridley, please, don’t do this.” The voice echoes in the dark and comes from up above me. “We can work this out.”
I don’t answer. I know it’s a trick. Nothing about this can be worked out now; we’re all too far gone. There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I haven’t taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It’s hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.
“Six,” he whispers.
“What?”
“You have six bullets left.”
two
Until recently my life has been fairly uneventful. Which isn’t to say I was just plodding along when the single occurrence I am about to share with you turned my world on its axis, but now that you mention it, that’s not too far off. And yet I have come to believe that it was not one event precisely but an infinite number of small decisions that led me into the circumstances that have so changed me and those around me. People have died, lives have been altered, the truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again.
My name is Ridley Jones, and when all of this started, I was a thirtyish writer living alone in an East Village apartment I’d rented since I was a student at NYU. It was a third-floor walk-up in a small building on the corner of First Avenue and Eleventh Street above a pizzeria called Five Roses. With its black gated front door, its dim hallways and sagging floors, its ubiquitous aroma of garlic and olive oil, it had a certain kind of charm. And beyond that it was miraculously cheap at eight hundred dollars a month. If you know New York, you know that rent like that is almost impossible, even for an eight-hundred-square-foot “junior” one-bedroom that looks out over a back courtyard where dogs barked for most of the day, even when the only view is of the tenants in another building living their parallel lives with as much self-importance as I lived my own. But it was a good place and I was happy there. Even when I could afford something better, I stayed, just for the comfort of a familiar space and the proximity to the best pizza in New York City.
You might be wondering about my first name. My father, Dr. Benjamin Jones, a New Jersey pediatrician living in a quaint and comfortable Victorian house with my mother, a former-dancer-cum-housewife whom he has loved and who has loved him since the day they met at Rutgers University in 1960, has always lamented his plain last name. He thought of it as a name you give when you don’t want people to know who you are, like Doe or Smith. Growing up, he was almost embarrassed by the ordinariness of it. He was raised in a flat gray suburb of Detroit, Michigan, by ordinary people who expected him to live an ordinary life. But he didn’t think he was only ordinary, and when it came time to name his children he didn’t want them to feel that they were expected to be ordinary, either. He gave me the name Ridley after Ridley Scott, the filmmaker…he always was a bit of a film buff. He thought this was a very unusual first name for a girl, something special, and that it would encourage me to lead an extraordinary life. And he felt that as a writer living in New York City, I was doing just that.
Even before the events that I am going to share with you, I suppose in my own way I
But there was so much I didn’t know, so many layers hidden in a past that I wasn’t even aware existed. I don’t want to think that ignorance is to be held accountable for my relative bliss, but I suppose you’ll think that’s so. Certainly now something within me has changed. The world is a different place, and happiness, true peace, seems elusive. The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.
When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn’t been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It’s been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the sudden events that have affected your life. With most of them, wasn’t it just a matter of seconds one way or the other? Wasn’t it the little decisions that caused you to cross this street or that, to move yourself into or out of harm’s way? These are the things that get you in the end. Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised—yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil’s in the details.
Well, I’ll get to it then.
It was a Monday morning, autumn going on winter in New York City. The Indian summer had passed and the first chill had settled in the air. It was my favorite time of year, when the oppressive heat and humidity trapped within the concrete walls of the city lifted, leaving behind a place that was new in its briskness.
When I woke that Monday, I could tell by the meager amount of light that struggled in through my windows that it was a gray day. I could see that the glass was freckled with raindrops. It was this small detail that affected my next decision. I reached from beneath the down of my comforter for the cordless phone that rested by my bedside, checked my caller ID for the number, and then dialed.
“Dr. Rifkin’s office,” came a voice as flat and hard as a city sidewalk.
“This is Ridley Jones,” I said, faking a hoarseness in my throat. “I’ve come down with a bad cold. I can still come in, but I don’t want to make the dentist sick.” I added a pathetic cough for emphasis. Dr. Rifkin was my dentist, a tiny little gnome of a man who’d taken care of my teeth since I was a freshman at NYU. With a long white
