CHAPTER THREE

       The thing had him afraid again. Nick lay in his bed, watching the computer screen. The screen saver, a loop of white dots whizzing across the screen, was simulating the view one might have on the bridge of a spaceship. There was a husky glow shadowing the walls. The gray light coming in from the window mixed on the blank space above his desk with the sagging blue of the wallpaper and made his small bedroom appear the color of flat grape soda. The window, to his left beside his head, showed him the moon through the dissipating storm clouds. The clouds were running across the sky briskly. They were moving on, towards the ocean.

            He thought of New York City at this time of year. He had seen in the TV Guide that the tree in Rockefeller Center would be lit on Monday. He planned on having it on the TV in Last Call. He remembered a couple of times he and Kit had gone down to see it; sometimes they got close enough to see it and sometimes they didn’t. But it was always there, every year, every New York Christmas. It was part of the New York City routine.

            Nick closed his eyes and simply missed everything. New York City, Kit, and Denis, his dead brother whose bed he was sleeping in. It was immense and tragic and on top of his head. And he couldn’t write. No matter how many pages he had promised Greg he would be able to peek at.

             He thought of something Denis used to say, usually when the two of them were playing chess down in their parents’ basement, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and the occasional joint (if there parents were gone for the night, to make sure they would be able to get rid of the smell). Whenever Denis, who was a much better chess player than he was, really had his shit going strong and Nick would move in a piece to help, in a really desperate situation, Denis would smirk and say it out of the corner of his mouth.

            “Call for backup. Gonna need some help here.”
            Hearing the words aloud made him feel fifteen again, all melancholy and idealistic and lonely. He needed to call for backup, all right. But there was none to be had. He didn’t feel like reading. He didn’t have a TV. And for the first time in three weeks, the apartment across the street that he had been watching was dark.

                                                                        ~

            As soon as she knew something was different, Dawn shot the top half of her body up into a sitting position. The sleeping bag she had zipped herself tight into last night (the apartment was not cold, but, sleeping on the living room floor, by the front door, there was a nasty draft) came up most of the way before being forced to unzip itself part of the way. Dawn helped it along, stepped out of it, and sat on the loveseat. She was still wearing her shirt from the night before, and her pack of cigarettes was still in it. She took one and lit it, and surveyed her new surroundings.

            The living room was rather small, with a door on each one of the four walls. One was the front door. Opposite the front door was the door to the kitchen and, subsequently, the bathrooms. This one was open a little, and Dawn peeked in a little to see the basic kitchen setup; a little table by the fridge, the bathroom in the back, and a huge houseplant by the two small windows where the fire escape was.

            Looking at the front door, Dawn saw that Gina’s room was to her left, and Caitlyn’s to her right. The living room itself was small, but cozy; there was a beanbag chair across from her and stereo and television in the corner. There were also a couple of sketches on the walls that Dawn figured must be Caitlyn’s. Gina had said that Caitlyn was quite a good artist and by the look of these samples (mostly abstractions), even through her scratchy eyes, she had been right. They were mostly pastels, but there were quite a few ink-on-newsprint paintings and even some small canvas boards.

            Dawn kneeled on the loveseat and turned around to see what was on the wall behind her. It was a huge collage (at least four feet by four feet) of photographs, magazine clippings, and postcards. She realized soon enough that every picture was of New York City. A few quick flashes were the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Central Park... from the Empire State Building observatory...

            Inspecting it closer, she saw that it had no backing. It was just random pictures taped to each other. There were gaps in it where the color of the wall, a sickly yellow, broke through like the moon having a bad day. Dawn was not surprised that Caitlyn had wanted to cover a lot of it up.            Dawn stretched her body up and found a dime-sized hole between three pictures and stuck her index finger through it. She felt the paper and tape give a little as her fingers brushed past it and tried not to tear anything, at least not anything that would be noticed.

            Dawn turned her head when she heard the door open. There was a woman her age standing in the doorway, head down, scratching at the back of her head through her choppy, messy, short brown hair. She was leaning with extended elbow against the wall and made a half-hearted attempt to look at Dawn.

            “You must be Dawn.”

            Looking at Caitlyn for the first time, the first thing Dawn became aware of was her size. Although Caitlyn (and this had to be her) was probably smaller than her, she gave off the impression of being enormous. Something about her presence (her posture, thought Dawn) immediately made Dawn take notice of the fact that there was all of a sudden less space in the room. After a moment, Dawn took her finger out of the collage, turned the rest of her body around on the loveseat and gave a weary wave. “You must be Caitlyn.”

            “So let me tell you,” Caitlyn said, pausing to burp, “all the rumors are true.”

            Dawn smiled up at her, nodding with her cigarette in between her lips. “I hope so.”

            Caitlyn crossed the room. Dawn, pulling her knees up to her chin, noticed she had a proportionate, if a little lanky, frame, and solid blue eyes that screamed awareness. They were focused right in front of her limbs’ swaying movements, as if plotting a course for them. She wore green mesh shorts and an extremely faded black tee-shirt with SLAYER written across it in dying yellow, the exact color of the walls. Her hair was thick and messy and short and hanging in front of her face somewhat. Dawn could see through the brush that she still had traces of mascara on her face, and in streaky lines down her cheeks. Her mouth was small and curled up into what appeared to Dawn to be a permanent smirk, giving her face a weary, slightly tragic glint.

            Caitlyn did a lap around the room and ended up on the beanbag, rubbing her cheek. A silent moment passed between them as they made eye contact. Dawn, trying to gauge where Caitlyn was at as far as conversation went, got nothing out of her eyes but a slight annoyance. She decided it would be best not to say anything just yet, at least not until Gina got up. That’s if Gina is still sleeping, and not out of the apartment somewhere, she thought.

            “Was I wailing last night?”

            “Wailing?” Dawn asked, taken aback.

            “Yeah, like, shouting in my sleep.”
            “No,” said Dawn. “Not that I heard.”

            “Hmph,” said Caitlyn, nodding and smiling as if she had predicted it. “Yep. Good, good.”

            Dawn stared blankly at her.

            “Don’t worry, babe,” Caitlyn said, waving her hand in the air. “That’s just the leftover gin talking.”

            Dawn was standing all of a sudden. The first thing she noticed was that Caitlyn was looking up at her now, making direct eye contact with her, a curious expression on her face that Dawn felt had at least a smidgen of amusement in it. She remembered that she was going to go check if Gina was up, but stopped because she didn’t know if Caitlyn would perceive that as rude or not. Caitlyn looked away after a moment, looking like she had been through this before.

            “I have to use the bathroom,” Dawn said, gesturing through the kitchen.

            “Hey,” said Caitlyn, smiling. “It’s all yours.”

            Dawn left the room. When the bathroom door closed, Caitlyn stole one of her cigarettes.

                                                                        ~

            Gina woke up, sat up in her bed and rolled her bare feet onto the cold hardwood floor. Her screen saver, a pale green screen with the quote “No one here gets out alive” moving slowly across the monitor in dull brown italic text, was up and running, making her think for a moment about the electric bill. She pulled knots out of her long black hair with her fingers. The digital clock on her desk read 10:35 and the sun was coming in through her window, only half-covered by a dirty curtain. Searching for her cigarettes was the first priority, and before long her thoughts shifted to coffee.

            She walked into the living room, an unlit cigarette in her mouth, to see Caitlyn and Dawn standing in front of the loveseat, Caitlyn indicating something to Dawn in the New York City collage. Neither of them seemed to notice her presence right away.

            “It’s great, isn’t it?”

            They turned to look at her. Caitlyn, smiling, tossed Gina a lighter. “Thanks,” Caitlyn said. “I was just showing Dawn which photos were ones I took myself.”

            “This shit is amazing. You never told me she was this good,” Dawn said.

            “Must’ve slipped my mind,” Gina said, shooting a half-smile and a wink Caitlyn’s way. “Excuse me. I’ve got to use the can.” She walked past them to the kitchen and noticed that someone had already beaten her to the coffee maker. She poured herself a cup, left it on the counter and went into the bathroom.

                                                                        ~

            “So what do ya’ll want to do today?” Gina asked, emerging from the shower, her hair tucked up in a towel, making it resemble a turban. She held another towel around her curvy-if-a-bit-chubby frame with her right hand. Caitlyn was sitting on the loveseat, Dawn on the floor in front of her, staring at the collage behind her.

            “I’m not sure,” Caitlyn said. “I have to meet a few friends at QE2 tonight, but that’s not until eight or so. My whole afternoon is free.”

            “What’s going on at the QE tonight?”

            “I’m meeting Turk and Marshall there. Low Down and Frenzy are playing, that I know, and probably a couple other shitty bands.”

            “Is Rob going to be there?” Gina asked, walking into her room.

            “Oh shit, you don’t even know. Crap,” Caitlyn said, laughing. Dawn’s head was moving back and forth, following the conversation. “It’s fucking over, man.”

            “What?” Gina asked, emerging from the room in the towel, brushing her hair. “It’s over?”

            Caitlyn smiled at Dawn and lit her cigarette as Gina went back in the room. “Yeah, we fucking had it out last night.”
            “Good for you,” Gina called out from her room.

            “Rob was my boyfriend. Emphasis on the word boy,” Caitlyn said to Dawn, provoking a small smile from her. “He’s in this band, The Hangover Project. They play out around here. They’re a real shitty band.”

            “Really shitty!” Gina yelled from her room.

            “Don’t listen to her, she doesn’t even like my music,” Caitlyn said to Dawn.

            “What’s your music?”

            “Hardcore, all the way.”

            “Ah,” Dawn said.

            “That’s not true!” Gina said, emerging from her room in a brown T-shirt and blue jeans, brushing her hair. She sat down on the loveseat next to Caitlyn. “I heard her listening to Pink Floyd the other day.”

            “I plead innocent. I was stoned and feeling nostalgic. Pink Floyd is classic.”

            “So it’s over, right?” Gina asked.

            “This time, no doubt.”

            “Right?”

            “Gina, I punched him.”

            “You what?”

            “I punched him.”

            Dawn looked at Gina. She was smiling and shaking her head, as if it was not unexpected. “You shit. Why’d you do that?”

            “He pissed me off. We were drunk, we both said some things we didn’t mean. He grabbed my arm, and I just punched him. It was instinct.” Caitlyn said.

            “He grabbed you? How?”

            “Oh, no, it wasn’t anything like that,” she said, and then smiling, added, “I probably deserved it.” She emitted a soft sound that sounded to Dawn like a sigh and a laugh at the same time.

            “I don’t get it,” Gina said.

            “Hey, Dawn,” Caitlyn said. “What do you want to do today?”

            “I dunno, what are our options?”

            “But what about the album? Are you going to get the album?” Gina asked.

            “Well,” said Caitlyn, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “Not much. We can go see a movie at the mall, get drunk at the mall, get lunch at the mall...”

            “What album?” asked Dawn.

            “Rob’s band had just signed to do an album for Troublesome records. Nothing major, but an album nonetheless. But Caitlyn was going to do the art layout for the CD.”

            “Smoke in the parking lot at the mall, window shop at the mall...”

            “What is she talking about?” Dawn asked Gina, pointing an empty palm at Caitlyn.

            Caitlyn smiled broadly. “Crossgates Mall of course! And yes, I’m still doing the album. Remember, Turk and Marshall were the ones who approached me about it, not Rob. And they gave it to me in writing.”

            “What’s Crossgates?”

            “It’s the big mall around here. About ten minutes from here. A little past SUNY,” Caitlyn said.

            “Great,” said Dawn.

            “It’s the only thing to do around here.”

            “I don’t mind,” said Dawn. “I kind of like wandering around malls stoned. Especially if I have money to spend on stupid shit, which I do.”

            “Caitlyn, that’s great,” said Gina. “Really. Everything.”

            “Well then, shall we, Dawn?”

            “Caitlyn, that’s progress,” Gina said, smiling. “What is the lovely Ms. Avery going to do for an encore?”

            “We shall,” said Dawn.

            “Find a man.”

            “Roll it up,” said Gina. “We’ll smoke, eat, and get the noon bus.”
            “We shall.”      

                                                            ~

            A significant portion of the bodies one might see on any given day in the city of Albany, New York did not actually live in Albany proper. There were two major entities in the city that, to a large extent, dictated the atmosphere of the city. The first was SUNY Albany, a mid-rank state university with a 13,000 student enrollment (graduate and undergraduate combined). The other was the collected offices of the state government, both downtown and at the office campus due east from SUNY. Most of the state employees, while they would show their faces around during the work week, actually lived in nearby suburbs and would hide out at their homes with their families all weekend. Combined with the fact that the City assumed, more or less, that the SUNY students would be too hungover to do anything on Saturdays and Sundays (not too far-fetched of an assumption, Caitlyn would think, sometimes), it added up to the weekends being a mind-bogglingly slow and inefficient time for the public transportation system.

            Public transportation in the city of Albany basically meant bus service. The service provider, the Capital District Transportation Authority, ran a network of about two dozen or so bus lines, their routes serving the cities of Albany, Troy, and Renselear. Service on the weekends would be spread out and sporadic at times, with most of the focus on the main malls in the area: Crossgates Mall, Colonie Center, Northway Mall, and Stuyvesant Plaza. Most of the routes ran either directly to or fairly near at least one of the four, and one could get to one from anywhere within the CDTA’s reach with (at most) one transfer. One of them, CDTA route number 17, the ‘Four-Mall Circuit’, simply went around and around in a huge circle, stopping at each one every time.

            The two route numbers that were of the most concern to Caitlyn, Gina, and Dawn as they stood out on the corner of Washington Avenue and Lark Street in the growing cold at noon were the #10 and #12. Last year, SUNY Albany, complaining of weak funds, had stopped running their shuttle busses over the weekends; students were forced to pay an annual $175 ‘transportation fee’ that gave them free rides, with SUNY ID, on the CDTA busses that ran to SUNY from Downtown Albany. Since both routes (the #10 and #12) also stopped at Crossgates, the weekend crowd became a strange mix of regular downtown Albany residents (who apparently were 30-40 year old, dirty, unattractive singles, Caitlyn often pointed out to Gina), either going shopping or going to work, and SUNY students, either going to campus or to the mall to shop on one of their parent’s credit cards. Caitlyn would also wonder out loud about the fact that every bus she had ever been on had carried a drunk/passed out SUNY student and/or an obviously homeless and/or decrepit, insane man, bottle in paper bag and all.

            The #10 came first, at 12:10, ten minutes late. Caitlyn and Gina had expected as much; they usually had to be at work at 12:30 on Saturdays and were familiar with the #10’s schizophrenic activity. It bothered them, however, that they could never figure out a pattern to its schedule. They would try and be at the stop a few minutes before noon religiously, but even if they were late the bus would not get to the stop until at least ten minutes after they arrived. Then there were times that they would get there a little early and they would find that they had just missed one. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it, and they had long ago stopped trying to guess. But they managed to avoid being late for work most of the time and as a result only felt a slight annoyance towards CDTA. 

             Dawn, sliding her dollar bill into the payment slot on the bus, didn’t mind at all. In Gettysburg, there was no public transportation at all, no large malls, and absolutely no night life outside the college. Albany wasn’t New York City, but it would do for now.

                                                                        ~

             “So what next, Senoritas Becker?” Caitlyn asked. They were at the Crossgates Mall Food Court. Caitlyn, sitting across the table from Dawn and Gina, had just finished her meal and was fidgeting with her straw, her droopy eyes nervously scanning the scene. Dawn and Gina looked up simultaneously, eyes wide, mouths full of food, chewing. Gina pulled her eyes towards the ceiling and swallowed dramatically and looked like she was about to say something, but nothing came. Dawn muffled a laugh and held her hand to her mouth, watching her food. Caitlyn smiled wryly, empathizing with the girls’ obviously very heavy high.

            “Well,” said Dawn, licking fried chicken grease off of her fingers in succession, “I’m almost done. I’d like to hit a bookstore if at all possible. My batteries ran out on the bus on the way here. If that happens again I’d like to have an alternative to Farewell to Arms for the third time.”

            “I don’t like this place,” Gina said. Over Caitlyn’s shoulder, employees of one of the Chinese food places hand out samples of teriyaki chicken on toothpicks. “I never have.”

            Caitlyn noticed Gina watching them. “Oh, that’s just because you got suckered into eating their nasty food.”

            “I had no choice. I’m helpless against free samples.”

            “No, I see what she means,” Dawn said, wiping her mouth. “This place is fucking crazy. Look at how many people are here.”

            Caitlyn waved a hand around. “The crowd is usually pretty thick on Saturdays anyway,” she said. “But now it’s Christmas season. Now they all come out. Up from under every rock in every suburb.”

            “Doesn’t this place strike you as creepy?” Gina asked Dawn, poking a white plastic fork around the remains of her pork fried rice.

            “What about it?”

            “Just like the general feel of the place. It seems like everyone’s annoyed.”

            “Gina, isn’t that that chick from the computer lab?” Caitlyn asked, pointing. “Over by Arthur Treacher’s?”

            “Which one?” Gina asked, turning. And then: “Oh, yeah. Shit.”

            Dawn turned.

            “Don’t be too obvious,” Gina said, righting her self back in her chair, pulling Dawn with her. “Just peek.”

            Dawn inched her head to her right, stretching her eyes to widen her peripheral vision. “Which one is she?”

            “Black shirt, blue jeans. Dark, curly hair.”

            Dawn picked her out. She was standing with her back to their table, looking around her. She was with a blond, frat-ish looking male in a leather coat. “What about her?” she asked.

            “Just this girl I always see in the LCs.”

            “LCs?”

            “Lecture Centers,” Gina said, pausing to take a sip of her drink. She held the straw between her teeth and continued talking, her head tilted down slightly. “Its where most of the big rooms for the lectures are. The computer labs are there too. I do work there sometimes. She’s always there, doing IRC. Usually, she’s there when I come in, and there when I leave. It’s creepy.”

            “She’s not kidding either,” Caitlyn said. “I see her whenever I use one of my friend’s Albany account.”

“Oh, God, not you too?” Dawn asked incredulously..

            “Once in a while.”

            “Whatever, don’t listen to her. She’s not as bad as I am, but she likes it.”

            “Anyway,” Caitlyn said.

            “Anyway,” Gina continued. “Mostly its college kids. But anyone can access it, so there are a lot of people from foreign countries, normal people, housewives and shit. But mostly college kids. A lot of high school kids have been finding out about it recently, too. But anyway, you can get lists of who is on from any given school, if you have that school’s domain, their e-mail address or whatever. Including Albany. So sometimes I check who’s on from Albany, if any of my friends are on or whatever. And I always see her on. I’ve talked to her before. Sometimes we’re on the same channel.”

            “It’s good to see her getting some fresh air. Or some fresh-er air, anyway,” Caitlyn said, pulling the straw out of Gina’s teeth. “You shouldn’t be surprised to see her, though. You’re always bound to run into someone you know in this mall.”

            “Yeah,” said Gina. “This city’s strange like that. It’s not big enough to be anonymous and its not small enough to be completely familiar with everyone. What usually happens is that if you go to a semi-crowded public place on a kind of busy day you’ll usually run in to someone you... not know, but are somewhat aquatinted with in some vague way. Like you’ve seen them. Like you know their face.”

            “That’s the weirdness factor of the mall, especially the food court,” Caitlyn said, holding her fist to her chest, trying to tighten a burp. “It’s the convergence of all the people who are stuck in this city for the weekend. College students, single moms from Troy who can’t figure out what else to do with their kids, teenage punks from Guilderland. And the food court is where they all come to re-fuel halfway through another day of doing nothing. It is creepy.”

            “It does have a kind of nervous, jittery feel to it,” Dawn said, trying to soak in the atmosphere. They had been wandering around the mall rather sluggishly, wading in and out of the dense holiday crowd, not really feeling the need to do much of anything except window shop. Dawn recommended going to get something to eat because she thought the food court would be a good place to sit down, munch, and just be stoned for a while. Gina and Caitlyn agreed.

            The food court was packed; they knew immediately that finding a table for three would be difficult. They split up at the entrance. Dawn, lured in immediately by the fried chicken, was the first one to get her food and set out on the task of finding a table. She balanced her tray, giving extra finger support to the area of her tray under her extra-large soda, and weaved in and out of the tables, stepping over backpacks and J.C. Penny and Filene’s Basement shopping bags. Soccer moms and fifteen year old raver chicks, sometimes at the same table, would make disgusted faces when she would bump into the backs of their chairs, which Dawn noticed were regularly pulled much further out than they needed to be. Just when she was about to give up and begin looking for Caitlyn or Gina to help out, a four-person table opened up about twenty feet to her right, smack-dead in the middle of the seating area (in which there were no rows or aisles). She made eye contact with two guys in white shirts and Sigma Phi Epsilon hats, holding their trays at their chest, their eyebrows sloping slightly, standing at the end of the Wendy’s line, scanning the area. She got a quick first step and made her way, unimpeded, to the table. When she sat down and waved to Caitlyn, holding a tray with two slices of pizza dripping over a paper plate, she felt an exhilarating feeling, similar to, she thought, a runner’s high.

            Adrenaline... she thought.

            “Dawn?”

            Caitlyn and Gina were looking at her, smiling.

            “Oh,” Dawn said, blushing slightly. “Was I saying something?”

            “You just had that far away, stoned look,” Gina said.

            “Nervous. Jittery,” Caitlyn said, then they all burst out laughing, drawing looks from several tables and more than a few whispers, snide, underground.

                                                                        ~

            “Wasn’t I saying that I wanted to go to a bookstore?” Dawn asked, placing her tray on top of the garbage pail.

            “Good luck,” Gina said. They were walking towards the escalator to the first floor, surrounded by white paint and glass and video games and fake plant life and automatic teller machines and theme restaurants (Ruby Tuesday’s, Hooters, Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse) and pay phones and thirteen year old girls without breasts smoking outside and video cameras in the corners where the wall met the ceiling under speakers playing instrumental Christmas music and white baseball hats and transplanted Long Island coeds and Greek letters and the sound of plastic swiping and minivans and screaming, dirty, white-trash children wearing hand-me-downs and the smell, the odor, of failure.            

            “Good luck? Why?” asked Dawn, feeling for her cigarettes, just to make sure that they were there.

            “There used to be three bookstores here. Two closed. The worst one, Lauriet’s, is the only one left. And it sucks.”

            “What happened?” asked Dawn.

            “Nobody reads anymore,” said Caitlyn, turning her head as she stepped onto the escalator. “At least not in this town. There are one or two decent used shops downtown. But that’s about it.”

            “It’s true. The literary scene in this town is pretty much dead,” said Gina, squeezing the escalator’s looping black rubber handrail.

            “What’s the open mic scene like here?” asked Dawn.

            “There are a lot of open mics, but all the poets suck,” said Caitlyn.

            “In Gettysburg,” Dawn said, following Caitlyn and Gina towards the exit, “there’s only one real good open mic in town, but the quality of the work is really good. There’s this one girl I see a lot there, at this coffee shop called The Hill Tower, that gets up and will totally freestyle these long, epic pieces. She’s amazing. There’s a lot of that element down there.”

            Caitlyn flung the double doors open with both hands. “I’d think Gettysburg is probably more of a pure arts scene. The artists that would chose a college like that, in a small town, isolated, are probably a lot more free with their stuff. The repression factor is high in a city like this. A lot of government, a lot of poor people, and the rest trying to avoid being one or the other. It doesn’t make a good scene for self-reflection and insight.”

            Gina fished around her cigarette pack. “Let’s walk through the parking lot and smoke the rest of this joint.”

            “So what’s the immediate outlet?”

            “Music,” Caitlyn said without hesitation. “A good, intense, local music scene.”

            “Lots of anger, I bet,” said Dawn.

            “Yeah,” Caitlyn said, smiling. “You could say that.”

            It was overcast. A blurry, hazy sun just barely shone sharp orange light through a thin layer of clouds; it made it seem, Dawn thought, even more far away.

            “C’mon, Gina,” Caitlyn said, noticing her fumbling with the roach. “Get that thing lit.”

            “Is that where we’re going tonight?”

            “Where?” asked Caitlyn.

            “To see a show. Your friend’s band.”

            Gina jerked the lighter away from her face. A thin line of smoke emerged from a tiny white nub of paper between her index finger and her thumb. She inhaled deeply and held it in, her face frozen, wincing. The cold city blew at her face.

            Right. We are going. There. A little while.

            Zoom. The pressure built up inside. She pushed it all out of her, little drops of moisture gathering in the pink corners of her eyes. Her face, contorted, squinted, and the parking lot blinked in front of her. Each car a cursor, blinking across her screen, circulating, sustaining. She passed the roach to an anxious Caitlyn and exhaled, spitting her joy into the city’s face, not completely knowing why she was deeply afraid.