Donny and Rachel meander up the path, performing slaloms and quarter-twirls, both in that good state between buzzed and full-on wasted that’s nearly impossible to maintain. They don’t notice the man sitting on the front stoop. Michael does.
Even in the rural dark, beneath only dim starlight and the hundred-watt glow of the house’s front lantern, he can tell that Broder’s in bad shape. He can tell from the lack of bag or suitcase, and from the way that Broder sits: head against door, legs hugged in a fetal ball. He can tell because a person who wasn’t in bad shape would have rung the doorbell and would be sitting in the living room drinking herbal tea with Lydia. He would have returned texts, attended the funeral, come to the Grub and Grog.
“Who the fuck is this?” Donny says, having finished urinating in Lydia’s rose bush and noticed the man blocking his path to the fridge and more beer.
“Broder,” Michael says, taking Broder’s hand and helping tug his former DJ to his feet. Rachel gets the door open and they stumble inside, Broder mumbling something Michael can’t understand. He thinks he’s asking for water.
The lights are off in the foyer. Broder walks on his own, but Michael holds a hand to his back just in case, guiding Broder to the kitchen and filling a glass from the tap. With effort, Broder removes his coat and lowers himself into a kitchen chair. Michael hands him the water. Broder drinks.
“I’m Donny,” Donny says, having already pulled two beers from the fridge and popped their tabs. He hands one to Rachel.
“He has magnets in his wrists,” Michael says to say something.
Broder nods. He holds out his empty water glass and Michael refills it.
“Would you like to see?” asks Donny. When Broder doesn’t respond, Donny waves his hand over Lydia’s pocket mirror, which was on the kitchen table. Nothing happens.
“That’s glass,” Rachel says. “Magnets only work with metal.”
“Shit,” Donny says. He tries again with a bread knife. The knife jerks a little but is finally a no-go.
“Too heavy,” says Rachel.
Panicked, Donny removes a credit card from his wallet and shows Broder how it clings to his wrist.
“Whoa,” Broder says, to which Rachel responds, “He speaks.”
“I speak,” Broder says.
38.
To say it feels surreal to poke her head through the sunroof of a driverless limo that’s stalled in traffic on Seventh Avenue between Times Square and Penn Station and look up at her billboard through the visor of an AR helmet that enlarges the image to Thanksgiving blimp proportions and animates the models while the slogan Work Will Set You Free! flashes above their heads, and fireworks explode, leaving rainbow trails that shoot above the Chrysler Building into starry, augmented heaven, is not quite right. For an experience to be surreal, there must be a baseline reality to compare it against, and ever since she and Michael were diagnosed with bedbugs and Wendy began hallucinating insects—giant ones climbing from sewers and drainpipes; tiny ones sprinkling from faucets and showerheads; bugs of all sizes crawling inside her clothing—that baseline’s been absent. In its place is a universe where the only constant is the speed at which things shift, movement impossible to track to the point where one second you’re at A and the next at C or F, and now Lucas stands beside her in a helmet of his own.
“Isn’t it surreal?” he asks Wendy.
“Totally,” she says.
39.
The kitchen is not what inspires Quinn’s envy, though he likes the breakfast nook, and he could cook something nice on the stainless-steel range, his grandma’s schnitzel, say, for an eat-in third date, if he ever has another. It’s not the warm light pouring through the south-facing windows, making hopscotch squares on the pinewood floors. These windows would be worthless to Quinn, who leaves for work in the predawn dark and returns after the streetlights have flicked on like a thousand near moons, sending shadow into alleys and blurring the sky. It’s not the height of the ceilings, though the tall detective does feel unrestricted moving through this open space as he pretends to search for evidence alongside his partner and their precinct’s cheapo search drone which resembles, in its appearance and inefficiency, an old-fashioned Roomba. It’s not the ample closets, or the outdoor patio, or even Donnell’s collection of sports memorabilia.
What inspires Quinn’s envy—a violent envy that makes him want to smash windows, spray-paint racial epithets across the kitchen cabinets, and poop on the walls like the kids at Gunther’s school, because who does this doorman think he is, some kind of Kardashian?—is the master bathroom with its human-sized bathtub and ample room in front of the toilet so someone sitting on the throne can stretch his legs. Quinn’s own bathroom is so tiny that the door must be left open when he’s pooping so his legs are free to edge into the hall. His shower is no shower, just a drain and a showerhead. There’s not even a curtain rod. And look at this place.
Not that the neighborhood’s ideal, east of Morningside Park, beyond gentrification’s greedy reach. Quinn’s own apartment may be humble, but at least it’s in Brooklyn, that magical borough filled with fixed-gear bikes and rhubarb popsicles, where tattooed art chicks wander the streets like horny zombies. Oh who is he kidding? That Brooklyn is a fantasy culled from trend pieces and quarter-life dramedies and reports
