“I mean, it felt like a dream,” says Sammy. “Or not like a dream dream—my actual dreams are much more boring: losing keys or teeth falling out—but like I’d entered a slightly altered or alternate reality.”
“Right,” says Ryan. They’ve got drones watching Devor’s apartment and scouring the streets. Even his girlfriend, Kate, seems unaware of his whereabouts. It’s unlikely that they’ll find him tonight.
And by tonight he means this morning. An hour ago, the sun was a dim, lovely golf ball. Now it’s pure terror, coming in through the blinds and coloring the stragglers carcinogen orange. Ryan can see them through the plexiglass, cuffed in folding chairs, one trying to sleep, while another, a clean-cut guy roughly Ryan’s own age, snaps awake and registers a half-second shock at his surroundings. Ryan thinks: Don’t you have a job? But of course the man doesn’t, and of course that’s why he’s here.
“Does that make sense?” asks Sammy. “I guess what I mean is it didn’t feel unreal so much as untethered. The Funeral had this morbid energy with the caskets and the Mardi Gras band, and I swear I felt a ghostly or apparitional presence. Like those nineteenth-century spirit photographs where the light illuminates a face that isn’t there, you know? Only in this case, instead of a face it was, like, a building-sized grim reaper, or something, that no one could see but that we could feel.”
“Grim Reaper?”
Ryan tries to focus. He thinks: If I were Devor, where would I be? He pictures a steaming jacuzzi.
“And I remember there was some drama with the elevator because we couldn’t all fit. It was a big elevator, but we couldn’t all fit, and you needed an elevator key to ride up to the penthouse, and there was only one key, so one group had to wait for someone to come back down and return the key. And I remember that, for whatever reason, it felt essential that I manage to squeeze in with the first group. So I kind of pushed my way into the elevator, and there were a lot of us in there, and someone turned the key and the elevator started to move but then sort of paused, like it was considering our collective weight.”
Ryan discreetly checks his phone. Nothing.
“We went up super fast until suddenly the doors were open and we were deposited. That’s the word that went through my head as it was happening, deposited, because I was sort of narrating in my head, like I was describing it to someone else, even as it was happening. And there was this inkling of a feeling—and I’m not sure where it came from, like, I’m not religious at all—but this feeling that maybe the person I was describing it to was God. That, for some reason, God couldn’t see through the roof of the building into this room, and he, or she, or whatever God is, needed me to describe it, not out loud, but in my head.”
“Plausible,” says Ryan.
“So I tried to narrate in clear and concise language, phrases like the man in the orange T-shirt hits the man wearing the striped tie three times in the forehead and ear with something that looks like a drum major’s baton, like I was taking notes, and there’s blood coming out of his ears. And I kept on doing this, this narrating, like I, myself, wasn’t in that room but was now, myself, the ghostly presence hovering over the scene, the grim reaper or whatever, God’s grim reaper, a phrase that kept repeating in my head . . .”
Ryan checks his phone again. He has a text that is not about Devor. It’s something more interesting. A body’s been found at the Zone Hotel.
3.
Wendy said she was on her way, but it’s been an hour, so Michael googles F train service. Delay at Broadway-Lafayette. He can’t stand to be alone. Even though the detectives were more interested in his whereabouts than in offering condolence, Michael didn’t want them to go. He offered coffee and week-old Granny Smith apples, and the cops looked at each other like the offer was a sign of insanity. Where was all of his furniture? Why the deflated air mattress and empty drawers? Michael had to admit that the apples were too bruised to serve.
Now the detectives are gone, Ricky’s dead, Wendy’s stuck in transit, and all Michael can do is search for the missing cat, making his way around the loft, checking every nook and crevice, leaving open tins of sardines by the heating vents.
“Cat,” he calls, wishing it had a name, and feeling like, somehow, his failure to provide one has caused this disappearance. He imagines the cat traipsing out an open window and down the fire escape. He pictures Ricky’s body on the hotel bed, pillow-propped against the headboard, blood drying on face and neck, blood turning black and gluing bits of blackened brain to skin. The cat on Court Street, crossing Atlantic, licking spilled ice cream from the pavement. Ricky on the morgue table, naked and blue, the ME prodding with steel tools. The cat lingering in a doorway, petted by a friendly kid. The kid’s mother gets mad. The cat, scared, runs into the street, where she’s hit by a cyclist. Not dead, but critically injured, limping down Bergen, seeking a comfortable spot to expire. Ricky’s belly where the bullets went through, half an organ exposed: a tube of intestine, mixed bile and blood.
He tries Broder again. It goes straight to voicemail and the voicemail’s still full, so Michael sends another text. The detectives were more interested in Jay Devor. Michael told them the truth: that he’d seen Devor that morning outside Goldman Sachs; that he hadn’t seen him during the riot, but that Michael was drunk, and it was chaos. He told the cops he couldn’t imagine Devor killing anyone. A Lyft driver confirmed Michael’s alibi following the riot.
Michael tries to remember more. He should never have taken that pill. They
