Black Light

it smelled of rotting fish and urine. An ancient cage elevator bore us up, cables shrieking, and finally opened onto a big seemingly empty room its bare plank floor coated with a layer of cigarette ash so thick it looked as though it were upholstered in gray velvet. In fact, there were a few people already there—it would be a stretch to call them guests, since they seemed to be in the process of crawling away from a terrible accident which had occurred somewhere just out of sight. Two women wearing silver Lady Godiva wigs and little else sprawled in a corner, one of them frowning as she dabbed at a series of small bloody puncture wounds in her friend’s arm.

“You think a doctah, maybe?” she asked, but her friend was silent. “You think a doctah?”

In the middle of the room a boy lay groaning, his blue jeans black with grime and hiked so low on his hips that I could see his pubic hair. My parents could see it, too, but they only raised their eyes to the ceiling (not much of an improvement) and hurried me to the next room.

Here there was more of an effort at the holiday spirit. The walls were painted black and hung with multicolored lights. A scrawny Christmas tree bowed threateningly close to the floor. Beside one wall there was a table where a woman in a sequined halter dress played bartender. The stereo blared “Come Stay with Me” while a few dozen or so people flopped around on a sectional sofa.

“Well,” my father said, arching one bristly eyebrow. “Will they let us join in any of their reindeer games?”

“Leonard! Audrina!” A man in a Nehru jacket and harem pants crossed the room to greet my parents. “So glad, so glad—”

While they exchanged hugs and my mother’s Tupperware bowl of homemade whitefish dip, I wandered over to inspect the Christmas tree. It was devoid of lights or Christmas balls, instead was covered with marijuana cigarettes, hanging from wire tree hooks. I eyed these dubiously: Were they even real? If they were, wasn’t anyone afraid of the police? In addition to the joints there was a half-hearted attempt at a decorative chain, orange thread strung with pills—Miltowns, black amphetamine capsules, a few Saint Joseph’s Baby Aspirin thrown in for color.

“Looking to see what Santa left for you?” a babyish voice piped behind me. “You look like you’ve been good.”

I looked around, embarrassed. A girl stood there, as old as some of the New Canaan girls who baby-sat for me. But this girl’s patrician features—dark brown eyes, retrousse nose, sharp chin—were all but lost beneath a patina of nicotine and mascara. She was terribly thin, with boy-cropped black hair, her face so thickly smeared with kohl it looked as though she’d just woken up and knuckled the sleep from her eyes. She wore a very short electric blue dress, sleeveless, and long dangling earrings shaped like fish. Her hands were small and dirty and yellow-stained, with nails so badly chewed they were like ragged bits of cellophane stuck at the ends of her fingers. A patchwork bag was slung over her shoulder. As she leaned toward me I caught a whiff of something sharply chemical, like gasoline or paint fumes.

“Hey, you know what, this isn’t a very good place for a kid.” She smiled, showing small white teeth. “I don’t want to bum you out. But maybe I could call your mother or father to come pick you up?”

I pointed across the room. “That’s them there.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool.” She fingered one of her earrings, and seemed to forget about me. After a minute I shrugged and turned to walk away.

“Bye,” I said.

“Oh!” She looked up, stricken; gave me a meltingly apologetic smile. “Nice talking to you! Bye-bye.”

She waved, a teensy little-girl wave. I thought she would leave, but she remained where she was, in the shadow of that pathetic tree, and scowled ferociously at her dirty bare feet.

“Charlotte! Oh, Charlotte, there you are—”

I looked up guiltily as my mother draped an arm across my shoulder. She was offhandedly elegant in black charmeuse, plastic champagne glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Lit, honey, will you be okay for a little while? Because there’s something your father and I have to do…”

It turned out that my parents had been corralled into going upstairs with a few others of the chosen, to watch Axel’s most recent opus. This was an underground film of a play inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhauser. It had played briefly in a MacDougal Street storefront before being loudly condemned by Cardinal Spellman, among others, and finally closed by the New York City Department of Health.

And now, despite her laissez-faire attitude toward other aspects of my education, my mother had no intention of letting me see it.

“Sweetie, I know this is awful and you’re bored. We should have thought to ask Hillary to come with us. I don’t know why we never think of these things. I’m sorry—”

She sighed, smoothing back my hair, and smiled briskly as a producer we knew wandered past. “But we do have to see this, Axel thinks it could be a real movie and apparently there’s a part in it for your father though god only knows what that could be, I think the whole thing’s done in the nude. Here now, have some of the whitefish, we brought it so we know it’s safe, and maybe you can just curl up in a corner and read for an hour, all right, sweetie?”

She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the brow. “There! Bye now, darling—”

So I was left to wander the Nursery by myself. After a few minutes my unease dissipated. I just grew bored, and sat dispiritedly on a cinder block beneath a very large painting of a woman’s shoe. I’d been to enough grownup parties in Kamensic to know that adults behaved strangely on their own, but I was also young enough to have no real perspective on what I was seeing.

And what I was seeing appeared to be some grimy street scene, complete with bums and teenage runaways, that had been miraculously picked up and then plonked down some ten stories above the Bowery. Neighbors from Kamensic floated past, like well-dressed puppets moving across a dirty stage. For fifteen or twenty minutes a band played, deafeningly loud guitars and a cello held by a bearded man in a pink dress. Later I saw the bearded man fondling a woman while someone else filmed them. I sat on my cinder block, watching the door through which my parents had disappeared the way a cat will watch a mousehole. Around me, the crowd swelled until it seemed impossible that anyone could move. Then, abruptly, the place emptied. I was alone, and frightened. Had the other guests somehow been forced to leave? If so, were my parents being held hostage somewhere in this bizarre maze of rooms and bad behavior?

The thought terrified me. From somewhere far away I heard laughter, the shivering echo of breaking glass. With a cry I jumped up and headed for the door where I had last seen my mother.

It led into a narrow corridor: bare concrete floors, walls and ceiling painted black. There were other passages leading off this one, all crooked doorjambs and rotted sills, some of them strung with Christmas lights and one with barbed wire. I started down the first hall, almost immediately found myself entering a room where the floor was covered with writhing bodies. In one corner a thin young man in a black-and-white striped sailor shirt stood behind a Super 8 camera and trained a blinding spotlight on the proceedings. As I hesitated in the doorway he looked up at me.

“Hey,” he said, and frowned. “You’re early…”

I turned and fled.

Further down the passage there was more of the same: darkened rooms illuminated by 100-watt bulbs, handheld cameras grinding away as people danced or coupled or just sat vacant-eyed in the middle of rooms that were uniformly devoid of furniture. I had no idea where I was, and my anxiety was now full-blown panic.

Where were my parents?

My hands were sweaty; I had wiped them on my velvet dress so much it began to feel like damp suede. My short hair, neatly cut and combed for the holidays, was now stiff with dust, and stank of cigarettes and pot. Every room I passed seemed crammed with strangers. But except for a peremptory nod from one of the figures behind a camera, no one acknowledged me at all. I could feel the tears starting and I bit my lip, desperate not to cry, when in front of me the nightmarish corridor abruptly ended.

“Oh, please,” I muttered.

There was a door there, tall and painted with the same glossy black enamel as the rest of the Nursery. I stood a few inches away from it, held my breath, and listened: silence. Behind me slurred voices called out, names