Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

Yet, now, here, my body in the place it had longed to be in, I feel cold and underwhelmed, unmoved. My stomach stays in place, static. I stare out of the window, waiting, willing myself to feel … something. I have to. How else is the city going to carve me out anew?

The cab pulls up at the apartment I’m staying at – a tiny, neat Airbnb on the Lower East Side between a Chinese take-out and a dry cleaning store. From the window of the perfectly square white kitchen, with its perfectly round white table and two matching chairs, it has a view uptown, of the Empire State. To the right of the kitchen sits an efficient two-seater sofa, in what could never really be described, truly, as a living room. Then right again lies a green bathroom, with a bath built out of tiles, and a plastic divider rising out of the edges of the bath to protect whatever modesty might be on display. Through the final door lies a bedroom with a bed close to the floor on slats, and a TV on the wall dominating the room.

I know from their Airbnb bio that a PR girl lives there with her boyfriend, apart from the times they rent it out for fistfuls of quick cash. I try to glean clues of their existence from the flat, which is spick and span, precise and controlled. There’s no room between the furniture and the walls. Your movement is dictated entirely by the shape of the apartment and the objects that have been placed in it, mapping your way. Could they not dance in the kitchen if they feel like dancing? Where do they hold each other? Where do they laugh?

I walk out of the flat and go to the bar on the corner, sit on a high stool at the bar and order a pint of beer from a weary bartender, scratching his beard. I imagine that, hearing my accent, the other person at the bar – a dark-haired man in jeans deliberately designed to look dirty, and a leather jacket – will turn to me and ask me about myself. This is how New York will go for me. How it goes for everyone when they arrive. He doesn’t look up from his phone. There are a handful of couples in the bar – a bar that I will come to know well. None of them glance my way.

For a second I wonder if I’m invisible. Do I exist here? With these people? I watch them talking, touching hands, fingers, elbows lightly. A brunette with black-rimmed glasses and a single tattoo laughs. The Strokes play. I feel like I’ve walked onto a stage play where they’ve just finished blocking out the painted scenery, a member of the audience who’s taken a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of the action, against all the rules, ruining all the work that has already been done. Disrupting the flow. I drink. Stepping outside, the world shifts around me and wobbles, waves coming over the Williamsburg Bridge. The yellow traffic lights are perfectly in position, the rectangular street signs nestling next to each other, pointing off in different directions, like an air traffic controller bringing us, them, home. Yellow taxis, horns honking, a bodega cat arching its back in the doorway, trash on the street corner already rotting and spewing itself into the air, the cigarette smoke that billows and jets past, carried along on a thin-legged stride.

The familiar and alien jostle and jut against each other. My head swims and I close my eyes, astonished that the picture, the stage remains set when I open them. I walk the block and a half back to the apartment, a performative walk. I feel I’m being watched, being assessed. I get into bed, even though it’s not yet dark, I turn on the TV and lie under the covers as the commercials rush through the adverse side effects of whatever medicine is being sold: heart attack, excessive sweating, impotence, baldness, rash, blisters, stroke, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, kidney failure, cancer, coma, death.

My first week at work begins the next morning. The sense of otherness and emptiness has followed me from the apartment to the office I sit in. I look out through the one window onto the floor at the people whose heads barely pivot to mine. The hours drag and contort in front of my eyes. I feel as if I’m on display; they watch to see what I’ll do, how I act. Every arm stretch for the phone, every word scribbled down, feels contrived, unreal.

Most of the women I’m working with have been excruciatingly rude and unfriendly so far – a highlight is being told ‘I won’t stab you in the back, I’ll stab you in the front’ on my first day. Several of them wanted my job, it would seem, and are furious they didn’t get it. Conversations end when I enter a room. Direct questions are ignored, no matter how many times I ask.

I go to the bathroom. I want to disappear, if only for a second. There’s no toilet seat on the bowl and I sit cross-legged on the floor, my hands clasped over my ears so I can lock the world out, enjoy the muffling and the woolly noise.

I’m not sure how long I’m in there, but it’s long: too long. The lights turn off, presumably because I’m not moving, my muscles tense and hold, my hands still and tight over my head. I sit in the dark and feel terrified. I become convinced that someone has turned the lights off and is waiting outside for me to emerge, feeling my way, delivering myself into their hands, their patient violence.

My breath quickens and deepens, the tingle reaching my limbs, my head, as I sit like a statue, frozen and taut. Seconds pass, minutes pass as I sit there;