A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [81]
She spoke in a way that briefly cleared your head of the cloudy things they were pumping inside you: like she’d opened an envelope and read a result that you urgently needed to know. Like you’d been caught offsides and had to be straightened out.
“Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She lay alongside you, every part of you touching, like you’d done so many nights before she met Drew. You felt Sasha’s strength seeping into your skin. You tried to hold her, but your hands were stuffed-animal stumps, and you couldn’t move them.
“Which means you can’t do that again,” she said. “Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Do you promise me, Bobby?”
“I promise.” And you meant it. You wouldn’t break a promise to Sasha.
“Bix!” Drew shouts. He charges up Avenue B, boots clobbering the pavement. Bix is alone, hands in the pockets of his green army jacket.
“Whoa,” he says, laughing when he sees from Drew’s eyes how high he is. Your own high is just beginning to waver. You’d been planning to take that last pill, but you offer it to Bix instead.
“I don’t really do this anymore,” Bix says, “but rules are for bending, right?” A custodian made him leave the lab; he’s been walking around for two hours.
“And Lizzie’s asleep,” you say, “in your apartment.”
Bix gives you a cold look that empties your good mood. “Let’s not get started on that,” he says.
You walk together, waiting for Bix to come onto the E. It’s after 2:00 a.m., the hour when (it turns out) regular people go home to bed, and drunk, crazy, fucked-up people stay out. You don’t want to be with those people. You want to go back to your suite and knock on Sasha’s door, which she leaves unlocked when Drew isn’t spending the night.
“Earth to Rob,” Bix says. His face is soft and his eyes are shiny and bewitched.
“I was thinking I might go home,” you say.
“You can’t!” Bix cries. Love for his fellow creatures radiates from within him like an aura; you can feel its glow on your skin. “You’re central to the action.”
“Right,” you mutter.
Drew slings his arm around you. He smells like Wisconsin—woods, fires, ponds—although you’ve never been near it. “Truth, Rob,” he says, serious. “You’re our aching, pounding heart.”
You wind up at an after-hours club Bix knows about on Ludlow, crowded with people too high to go home. You all dance together, subdividing the space between now and tomorrow until time seems to move backward. You share a strong joint with a girl whose bangs are very short, leaving her bright forehead exposed. She dances near you, her arms around your neck, and Drew shouts in your ear over the music, “She wants to go home with you, Rob.” But eventually the girl gives up, or forgets—or you forget—and she disappears.
The sky is just getting light when the three of you leave the club. You walk north together to Leshko’s, on Avenue A, for scrambled eggs and piles of fried potatoes, then stagger, stuffed, back onto the groggy street. Bix is between you and Drew, one arm around each of you. Fire escapes dangle off the sides of buildings. A croupy church bell starts up and you remember: it’s Sunday.
Someone seems to be leading the way toward the Sixth Street overpass to the East River, but really you’re all moving in tandem, like on a Ouija board. The sun blazes into view, spinning bright and metallic against your eyeballs, ionizing the water’s surface so you can’t see a bit of pollution or crud underneath. It looks mystical, biblical. It raises a lump in your throat.
Bix squeezes your shoulder. “Gentlemen,” he says, “good morning.”
You stand together at the river’s edge, looking out, the last patches of old snow piled at your feet. “Look at that water,” Drew says. “I wish I could swim in it.” After a minute he says, “Let’s remember this day, even when we don’t know each other anymore.”
You look over at Drew, squinting in the sun, and for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of “you” at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel it—what you’ve seen in people’s faces on the street—a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something