“We aren’t supposed to be up here,” he’d said to her.
“Because the authorities won’t like it?”
“It’s private property.”
He had said this! “Private property”—moments after suggesting they reverse the spin of the Earth.
Lydia swung around and stepped from the landing through the plastic sheeting that helped keep the dust from one side from mixing with the dust on the other, and she entered the unfinished space that was—and was not—the sixth floor; a space without purpose or definition or a future.
“Lydia, come back, please,” he implored.
He remembers how there was a wind that collected pigeon feathers from the floor, creating small twisters at her feet. She was wearing a pair of brown shoes with a small heel. Size eight. Nine West.
The wind outside was constant and promised a storm but there was no smell of it yet; only the waft of car exhaust and the permanent sweat of vanished workers, the sweet aroma of rotting wood and sawdust.
There was a sense of height, too. There was no glass where the walls or windows should have been. Neither of them was naturally afraid of heights. Together, he and Lydia had hiked to the top of Mount Marcy, and even taken some rock-climbing classes at Cascade Lakes on grades of 5.3b and 5.4a. He wrote his father about it once in a letter. This place, though, scared him immediately. Marcus did not want to follow her closer to the absent wall, but he couldn’t talk to her if he didn’t. He needed to convince her. Of something. Somehow.
Even then he didn’t know what. But it was Lydia who had the plan. Lydia who had brought them there.
“Don’t make me do this anymore,” Marcus says to Sigrid. He looks up at her, craning his neck to keep his shoulders low, the gun hanging and heavy in his long fingers—“piano fingers” his own mother used to call them. “You can reach an entire octave,” she had said to him when he was nine. “Not your father’s hands. Not the hands of a farm boy. You are going to solve mysteries and problems. My little boy with the long fingers.”
Sigrid is still on the ground with her legs crossed. She is hot and exhausted from the long night, the hangover, the long day, the jet lag, the long memories, the stretch of time behind her.
“Irv is right,” she says to him. “You have to say it. I don’t know about reborn this or reborn that, but you need to do this for yourself, Marcus. You were on the landing. You followed her.”
“I thought you came here to protect me,” he pleads like a child.
“I did. And I’m now fairly certain that the only way to save you is to help you face yourself. If you don’t, if you pass this moment without speaking up the way you did last time, you will—in a very real sense—never truly live again. You followed Lydia. What happened?”
Lydia approached the empty space where the wall should have been. There, far above the city, she was exposed to the air and the light and the urban sprawl around her. Marcus saw her squint against the harsh light from the glowing smog above them. Her hands, he remembered, were twitching as if they were meant to be holding something. They looked to him like the hands of a sleeping child, grasping for a parent’s hand.
“Lydia, come back. I love you.”
Her neck jolted as though recoiling from a pungent smell.
“Look, Marcus,” she said, in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “Look at what you want to fight. Come here. It’s easy to see from here. We are not only us. We are part of more.”
Marcus crossed the room that was not a room to the window that was not a window to look out on the city he lived in that was becoming more unfamiliar by the moment.
She waved her arms and pointed. The city was still racially segregated, keeping people separate and unequal. She mapped out the voting lines and called out the streets by name.
Yes. He knew all this. So . . . what?
Was she demonstrating that America was economically divided and racially unfair? No one denied that. It was the analysis about why it persisted that was at issue. And surely the answer to that couldn’t be gleaned by a view over the rooftops.
If they had been standing on a hill in Alabama, wouldn’t they be able to look at rich whites and poor whites? Mansions and trailer parks? There’s economic inequality in America because America likes it that way. That’s how he always thought of it as a Norwegian. How can the winners prove that they’ve won if they can’t have more than the losers? That’s an American problem, he wanted to say. This is a place that has convinced workers that foregoing a holiday is noble and impressive rather than foolish and destructive. And honestly, what did any of this have to do with the grand jury decision against Roy Carman anyway? he wanted to ask. A black man might become president of the United States. Isn’t that evidence of America’s progress, promise, and potential?
“Lydia,” he eventually said, clearing his mind of these tangled ideas. He stepped closer to her and reached out his hand. “Lydia, you can’t abandon us. You can’t leave me behind. Lydia, please. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I can’t be alone anymore. I need you. I love you. I love you so much. We can get through this together. Please,” he said, reaching out both arms to embrace her, “please come to me.”
Marcus did not know how close to the edge she had been. There was no frame behind her to judge the distance. There was an illusion of endless retreat. Lydia had not known either. She couldn’t have