Breadcrumb #99

KATIE NAUM

To be agnostic in New York is essentially a given, at least in the circles I ran in back then. There was an expected trajectory toward agnosticism, from churchgoing or temple-going childhood to liberal arts education to arch post-college cynicism to a more or less comfortably settled adulthood, having netted some managerial role in some creative field and an equally enlightened and overworked spouse along the way. At some point, religion was to be shed like snakeskin, or like an astronaut suit after you’d come back down to earth. Unnecessary.

    Hardcore atheism was a little suspect as well, being the domain of incredibly earnest white guys who were sure you would be converted to their sociopolitical opinions if you just read their series of blogs explaining the subject. The ideal stance was secular but open-minded. Gestures could be made toward what might be called spirituality if it helped you find that most skittish of people: yourself. And of course the role of religion in the world made very stimulating material for intellectual debate at whatever gastropub had just opened somewhere downtown, about three or four drinks in, when everyone felt particularly moved to explain their stance.

     Let me open my story by saying I was tired. I was physically tired, worn out — I hadn’t slept more than an hour or two each night that week, thanks to a potent combo of work stress and personal anxiety — but I was tired in a larger sense as well. I was tired of New York, certainly. I was tired of paying $1,500 per month to sleep in 10 square feet in a good neighborhood, which meant a neighborhood where I couldn’t afford anything anyone was selling. I was tired of 24/7 work emails, texts, and tweets in the name of journalism, which lately meant writing up videos that showed rats doing something funny in the subway. I was tired of swiping left; I was tired of swiping right. And I let this exhaustion bleed over into all the values I associated with New York, all the things that had drawn me to the place where I was now unhappy. It no longer seemed the haven of diversity and inclusivity and creativity I’d yearned for after a childhood in the sticks. It was just another place for people to be cliquish and empty-headed, although those people were generally in possession of more degrees and better clothes than anyone back home. I was having another disillusionment about another Paradise.

     I’d been seeing a girl; it wasn’t working out. She was upset when I told her this. I was the first lesbian she’d gone to bed with, and I could see emotional baggage forming before my eyes as I told her over cold brews that it wasn’t about her at all, we were just at two very different places in our lives. She’d be fine, I thought. She was the type to wind up with a clean-cut guy in finance, I was sure. It’s really fucking hard to see a pretty girl cry, though.

     “But we’re supposed to go to Eamon and Kaspar’s wedding this summer,” she said, her face shining with tears. Her cat’s-eye makeup was holding up valiantly in spite of this. She was a makeup artist, she had a photo shoot to get to, but she seemed to have forgotten all about it, latching on to our travel plans as if committing to a destination wedding on the Riviera Maya was an unbreakable link in forging a lifelong bond. For a dizzying moment I felt an irrational surge of hatred toward her, toward all of it, everything I saw as tasteful and expected and meaningless.

     “Isabella,” I began, and I closed my eyes and sighed, in hopes of exhaling all my frustration on a wave of carbon dioxide. When I opened my eyes, she was gone.

     Everything was gone. I jumped to my feet, nearly falling over in shock. The bustling Manhattan sidewalk and breezy café seating had vanished. I was standing now in a vast, desolate landscape, broad and rocky and dark under a Crayola-purple sky and an indifferent, egg-yellow sun.

     I’d been sober for a couple years at that point, but my first thought was that I must have something in my system. I spun around wildly — emptiness in all directions. “Isabella?!” I cried out. Now I wanted her with me very badly. You could always feel her presence nearby, even when she was out of eyeshot. I hadn’t noticed how quietly comforting that was, to have someone compassionate nearby.

You could always feel her presence nearby, even when she was out of eyeshot.

     I turned again — more slowly this time — trying to decide what to do next. That’s when I saw the cathedral.

     I call it that, but it really didn’t look much like a cathedral if you gave the idea any thought. A strange, sprawling cluster of stone buildings, Romanesque and Gothic and Eastern forms taken seemingly at random. Most of its windows were dark, save one: an enormous honeycomb of rainbow colors that sparkled in the sun. All of this was weird enough to begin with. Then there was the fact that it was floating in midair hundreds of feet above me, effortlessly, impossibly.

     Was I high? Was I dreaming? Was I dying? How did I get here? And what the hell did it all mean?

     The building had no answers for me. It simply was, utterly convincing in its sheer bulk, its luminous form, the shadow it cast on the earth below. As I gazed, I thought perhaps I heard the sound of music from somewhere within its heavy walls. Not so much heard it as felt it, I thought a moment later. It was like stringed instruments rising and falling in both tone and volume. It was like breath, or the beating of a heart. It made the emptiness more serene, somehow. It reminded me of my mother’s last couple of days.

     Mom. That hospital room she was in at the end, crowded with people — me and my stepdad and her church friends and the priest I could barely keep myself from rolling my eyes at. (To be fair, he had a very low opinion of me as well.) I was a mess, all bloodshot eyes and unshowered sweat, but she was close to the end, and the peace she had awaited for so long was already upon her. I held her hand, and she held mine back, even when she couldn’t see me any longer. That’s who she was.

     She loved me. She always loved me, even when I stopped going to church, left home as soon as I could, forgot to return calls, drank more and more heavily, did more and more drugs. Hers was a goodness that didn’t square with what I thought I wanted. I was an arrow that wanted to fly off alone.

     She died before I went sober. She never got to see, well, everything I did with my life. Everything I got to be. The sadness I felt about that always seemed to thread its way through all my other anxieties and frustrations and angers, stitching them together where they might have fallen away. How much harder and worse everything seems to be when you feel alone in the world.

     I breathed in the memory of her from where it came humming down on high and felt it all around me and held it, and held it, and held it. I looked up at the cathedral and knew I’d never completely understand.

     And when I blinked again, I was back, and there was Isabella still gazing at me helplessly, still not right for me — I wasn’t stupid about these things, after all — but no longer required to be an object of scorn, somehow.

     “I’ll send you money for the travel expenses we’ve already made,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Isabella. I’d like to stay friends if or when you’re ready. Can I call you a car?”

    She left. Like I said, she was ultimately fine, although she surprised me and wound up with a really cute little dyke who works in IT.

     I told a few people about what I’d seen and heard and felt, which I don’t necessarily recommend doing. In return I was given a lot of uneasy looks, the name of a shrink in Flatiron, and a recommendation that I try this really effective detox cleanse. But one or two people listened and asked the right sort of questions — the kind of questions that made me ask further questions of myself about what was really important and work to find the answers. I spent more of my time with people like that afterward.

     I don’t have any explanation for what happened. It certainly wasn’t a tidy little come-to-Jesus moment. But I’m starting to think that explanations aren’t always essential. What’s essential is what you do afterward.

• • •

Breadcrumb #98

JOSH KRIGMAN

Leaning against a cement support beam in the atrium of the new Whitney, opening weekend, facing the door, as hundreds of tourists wrapped in puffy winter coats stream past and toward the registers behind me, parting and coming together like river water around a rock, and checking my watch, then my phone, and adding three minutes to the 12 she’s already late because through the large front windows I can clearly see three minutes up the street and she isn’t on it.

    Sitting on my hands in the theatre lobby, looking up whenever someone enters and hoping it’s her, and overhearing an old man near the door talk on his phone.

    “He was,” he says, “the smartest person I ever knew who wasn’t a reincarnated being.” 

    On Atlantic, waiting in front of her building, where she’s told me there’s no need to come up because she’s on her way down, and having stood there for seven minutes when a Hasidic man approaches and asks if I’m Jewish.

    “No, sorry,” I say, and realize it’s the first time I’ve ever lied about my religion, and that I’ve done it to a Jew, a Jew who immediately doesn’t care, and who’s off to ask another before he can register my surprise.

     At a table for two in a restaurant she heard has good ramen, near the end of my third glass of water, the server already less attentive to refills, and my back to the door to curb how often I look, how often I think every approaching form is hers, and instead facing the two women three tables over, the movement of their lips enough to fill in the words I can’t hear clearly.

    “That’s why our date night is always Thai,” she says. “Skylar can’t even step into a Thai restaurant. The air, he can’t breathe the air. He’s that allergic.”

     Aimlessly pacing a Chelsea gallery while she goes to the bathroom one last time before we leave, and eavesdropping on a young couple, his right arm laid long across her shoulders, and his left conducting an orchestra as he shares his thoughts on the show. 

    “I’m not,” he says, “trying to present myself as someone who knows, but the whole thing feels a little like throwing water into the ocean.”

    Watching a basketball game in the West Village, halfway through a slice, trying to stay aware of any vibrations in my pocket that’ll let me know she’s arrived to see the matinee at IFC across the street, and listening to an old man on my side of the fence make observations about no one in particular.

    “Most of them only got nickels and dimes,” he says. “But this guy here is the whole dollar.”

     Curled over half a beer in the Crown Heights bar where I’m supposed to meet her, my phone recently dead, the drinks from a birthday dinner still sitting inside me, and using everything I have not to pick at the paper boat of fries my neighbor left behind when the bartender, his button-down shirt unbuttoned to the belt, brings out a dog dish, fills it with Guinness, and slides it to the end of the bar where a man dressed like a dockworker lifts up his pug to join him for a drink.

...using everything I have not to pick at the paper boat of fries my neighbor left behind...

    In Washington Square, near the fountain, sporadically getting messages that say the trains are screwy and she’s on her way, and watching a man appease his superstitious girlfriend by walking across the park to knock on a wood bench when, finally, after what seems like longer than normal but is really just the same, she arrives, speed-walking across the square. She’s flustered, breathless, apologetic.

    “I’m so, so sorry,” she says. “Were you waiting long? God, and you don’t even have a book.”

• • •

Breadcrumb #96

D.C. WILTSHIRE

. I know Vancouver. I know how
to have a passport
qua marriage license; I know
the islets from the sky,
descending in sharp gray
to a land of indigenous masks
and rock-filled beach. I know
the stretched scope of UBC
at the tip of English Bay, the totem face
that gapes at thick midday clouds,
pregnant with 10-minute showers. 
I know the marshland and the evergreens,
the nightlights of distant ski slopes,
the backbone ridge of near mountain peaks
where Nature views aloft with serene and
pleasant, magnanimous gaze, allowing us
a brief dip in pacific wading pools. 
I have no prose for her,
none that wouldn’t disappoint.

• • •

Breadcrumb #95

RYAN EVANS

up the cracked steps yet again
to the house I know so well
so well I know to knock before walking in

and wipe my shoes then take them off
cross the little living room with pictures
turned away from the room on the mantle 

pictures reversed retched into my mind
that same old woven cane chair with one
leg a quarter inch short in the middle of the room

so when I sit in it and pick up that book I’ve read
a thousand times on sleepless nights with
the living room clock keeping time 

the chair tips back and to the left
just slightly
so it is impossible to settle in

reading the same words pried from my mind
set on the page for me to read
again and again

staring into the eyes of the pictures
or at the words
looking through me

again I’ve walked into a room of my own making
sat in the familiar furniture unsteady

• • •