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  “This is much more sensible,” I say.

  “Can I have my money?” the delivery guy says.

  I give it to him. I shut the door in his face.

  * * *

  “Tell me a story,” the Sheikh said.

  “In New York the heroin comes in bags with stamps that are pictures or words, like a bomb or BOOM, like a brand,” I said.

  “Like for children,” he said.

  * * *

  The calf’s brain guy is telling me about the famous chef. I’m not paying attention. This restaurant is claustrophobic. There are ten of us at a bar and the famous chef is behind it wearing a spotless suit. There’s no menu. We get what he makes us and that’s it. I feel the woman beside me is listening attentively to everything I say.

  “This is like a dinner party you have to pay for,” I say.

  “Okay, you can pay for it,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  I smirk at him. The famous chef slides white saucers in front of us, each with a single scarlet wafer. Then he steps back and tucks his hands in his vest.

  “I snorted a bag of heroin before I came here so I don’t really have an appetite,” I say.

  Then I laugh. The famous chef laughs, too. So does the woman beside me. I put the red wafer on my tongue.

  “Dehydrated pig’s blood,” the famous chef says.

  The calf’s brain guy forces a finger between two of my ribs. I swallow it.

  “Metallic,” I say.

  A feeling of illness lingers.

  * * *

  The art guy takes me to an exhibit of erotic nudes. I stare at a girl with her hands between her legs. She is skinnier than the rest, sallow and cat-faced, and just sketched, like she could be erased.

  “You can tell by the look of contempt on their faces that these women are prostitutes,” I say.

  He looks at me.

  “I read it on the wall.”

  “Mine too,” the art guy says.

  “What?”

  I slide my fingers inside his cuffs.

  “All of my models are prostitutes,” he says.

  * * *

  There’s a knock on the door. The ex-Ranger gets buzzed in.

  “Good morning,” I say.

  He orders a beer but he says nothing. It’s six a.m. We watch the weather on one of the cop bar’s TVs.

  “Who was that guy?”

  “Who?” I say.

  “The one you were with.”

  “Are you stalking me?”

  The ex-Ranger drinks his beer. My tongue tastes like all the chemicals of a Cherry Bomb. I will give him the chance not to start this with me.

  “Sometimes he pays my rent.”

  I look at him. He doesn’t look at me. He nods.

  * * *

  A kid does a backflip on the overhead poles and almost smacks a woman in the face. I’m on the subway. This makes me feel better.

  * * *

  On my phone I scroll through the pictures of my ass. I text an anatomical one to GBT.

  * * *

  The guy who buys me things tongs a snow crab onto my plate. The grand seafood platter is always three tiers. Not until we pull all the flesh from all the shells will we get to leave.

  “I used to want everything and now I don’t want anything,” I say.

  He snorts like he doesn’t believe me. I don’t know if I believe me.

  “You know how to crack that?” he says.

  I summon something deeper than contempt. I pick up the crab by a pincher.

  “Can you show me?”

  He is instantly pleased.

  * * *

  I ask the counter guy for Russian dressing.

  “You’re from New York,” the junk-bond guy says.

  “So?” I say.

  The pastrami is the same. I look around for the ex-Ranger but I don’t find him.

  * * *

  Cigarettes are fourteen dollars and it’s hard to get over it.

  6

  I get a lobster roll from a truck. I sit beside a street kid near the horse statue in Union Square. He looks at me.

  “I’m sorry to bother you but could you possibly spare ten dollars?” he says.

  “I read in The New York Times a bag of dope’s only six dollars now,” I say.

  He looks like he might laugh. I cross my wolf legs Indian-style and bring the lobster up to my mouth.

  “Cunt.”

  He gets up.

  * * *

  I meet the calf’s brain guy at a chartreuse bar on the Lower East Side with a bouncer outside. A waitress brings us two cocktails, yellowish and greenish, in dainty glasses.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “Is this a money-laundering operation or what?”

  The waitress puts her hands up. It is impossible to get drunk.

  “How do you clean your money?” the calf’s brain guy says.

  “How do you clean yours?” I say.

  “I work at Goldman Sachs.”

  I laugh.

  * * *

  I never thought of there being anything out here before. I never thought of it at all. It was an outer ring. I catch sight of us in a warehouse window. We’re wearing costumes.

  “Someone’s going to stab us,” I say.

  “Not anymore,” the art guy says.

  At a party there are people suspended from the rafters by hooks in their backs. Their flesh is stretched. I forgot this was even a holiday. The art guy brings a girl into the bathroom with us.

  “This is Louisa. She’s in some of my photos. The New York series.”

  She’s wearing a sweatshirt that says I’M A FUCKING ZOMBIE.

  “No,” I say.

  I can do bumps through the nose holes but I push up my mask so the art guy can see my face.

  “No doubles,” I say.

  “Why not?” he says.

  * * *

  I go into my building and the light’s out in the stairwell between three and four. There’s a guy coming toward me and I think about mugging him.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  I come out later and everything’s blaring again.

  * * *

  I watch the ex-Ranger. I watch him walk into the cop bar and decide to sit down beside me.

  “Listen, I can’t pay your rent,” the ex-Ranger says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “How many other guys pay your rent?”

  “Four.”

  He laughs. I hold my face in my hand, looking at him.

  “Right now,” I say.

  The bartender comes up and leans on his forearms in front of us. The ex-Ranger takes his phone out of his pocket. He puts it on the bar. I feel happy. Like this is what I wanted to happen. I light a cigarette and point it at him.

  “Cherry Bomb for me and whatever this alcoholic wants.”

  * * *

  The ex-Ranger lives in Queens, which is truly mystifying. He lives in one room above a store on an avenue. His apartment’s almost as empty as mine. The closet is locked. When he kisses me everything sucks away, as if we are the only things in space. It makes half of me hate him.

  * * *

  Once in the snow, at two or three in the morning, I saw a toddler struggling to stay upright, trailing after his grandmother, who was half a block in front of him. This was in Chinatown in the 1990s.

  * * *

  I snort another VERSACE bag. I think how I will see snow again. If I had a baby I would kill it. I would kill it before it was born because it’s the right thing to do.

  * * *

  At Agent Provocateur a salesgirl laces me into an elaborate corset.

  “You can take off the hip panels if you want.”

  I look at myself in the mirror. I touch the two half-moons jutting from my waist. They make me seem more like a machine than a girl.

  “No, I like them,” I say.

  While he’s signing the receipt I stand beside the g
uy who buys me things but with a good whore’s etiquette look the other way.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy lives in a classic six. We’re in the maid’s room off the kitchen. He uses it as an office. He smokes in here and when my face is close to the couch it smells deliciously like cigarettes.

  “You look like a mean doll,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  7

  I can’t stand having my feet touched. In the pedicure bath I cringe and flinch and what I want to do is kick the girl in the face. It makes me feel unguarded, like she could murder me. On my fingernails I get upside-down hearts, matte black like chalkboards. The points of my nails are their tails.

  * * *

  This wallpaper is marbled like meat. The bathroom we were in earlier was banana-patterned. It was scratch-n-sniff. I rub coke on my gums and teeth. I touch the wall and the club’s bass goes through my palms and into my arms. I flip my hair. I look over my shoulder at the calf’s brain guy. I have an obsession with symmetry. I think it is completely misleading. I smile at him.

  * * *

  Behind black theater curtains the gallery is all screens. On every screen there is a different person playing a different instrument in a different room of a decrepit mansion. I watch a woman playing a harp in a library.

  “There are stars exploding around you and there’s nothing, nothing you can do.”

  I look at him.

  “That’s what they’re singing. I read it on the wall,” the art guy says.

  “Well, that’s true.”

  In the middle of the gallery there are two screens where they are all on the porch of the house, singing together, but then they sound cacophonous. That’s true, too. I think I’m the only person who has spent every second of my life with me. Inside of me the heroin turns a little and I think I might vomit.

  “I’m hungry,” I say.

  * * *

  I drop my bag on the ex-Ranger’s floor and stumble over to the closet and try to open it.

  “Why is this locked?” I say.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “I want to hang up my coat.”

  “Why?”

  I tug on the door handle.

  “What’s in here?” I say.

  “Stop.”

  “Bodies?”

  He cages me. He backs me up against the closet and puts his hands on either side of my head.

  “Guns?”

  “No,” he says.

  I let my fake fur slide to my wrists.

  “I know what it is,” I say.

  “What?”

  * * *

  I have my legs over my head. The wax lady blows on a wax-dipped Popsicle stick.

  “Where do you find so many white outfits?” I say.

  “Macy’s,” she says.

  * * *

  I ride the escalators of the Time Warner Center with the guy who buys me things. Because it is a shopping mall it reminds me of Dubai, but lacking the grandness of vision. The restaurant is behind a heavy door. There is a treetop panorama of Central Park. I think of it as unreal, as a projection for our visual entertainment. The waiter presses his palms together. He looks at me with complicity.

  “Good afternoon. Sparkling today?”

  “Yeah,” the guy who buys me things says.

  When my UAE residence visa expired I could have bought another one, like I had always done before, and a labor card, for a job in an office I never showed up for, but I didn’t.

  “I don’t want water,” I say.

  * * *

  At the exact speed the junk-bond guy licks a line up my pussy I arch my back and moan for him.

  * * *

  Around the earth are four dead rings of deserts, hot and cold, and the Arabian Desert is just one of them. It’s a waterless ocean where storms of only wind blow the sand into waves. When I was in Dubai I expected to die out there one day, any day, of exposure and dehydration, as much as I expected to live.

  * * *

  I get my teeth bleached. I watch a tiny TV while a blue light shines into my peeled-open mouth. I think of the Sheikh and half of me hates him, too. The same half that hates the ex-Ranger.

  “You can only eat white food for twenty-four hours,” the dental assistant says.

  “I’m just not going to eat at all,” I say.

  She unclips my blue bib.

  “Good plan,” she says.

  * * *

  I have always given myself a year to quit: heroin, whoring. Again and again on a different day I wake up in New York.

  8

  Mondays I have the calf’s brain guy, Tuesdays the art guy, Thursdays the guy who buys me things, Fridays the junk-bond guy. I tell the ex-Ranger I can only see him on Wednesdays.

  * * *

  At the gym I take a dance class. At one point all the girls around me drop onto their hands and pop their pussies in the air. I stand there with my hands on my hips. I have stripped out of necessity, as a means to an end, and that’s it. The TODAY girl is there. She’s in the locker room.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Not today,” I say.

  * * *

  “I want to punch you in the face.”

  In a nebulous way I wait for this. I cross my ankles behind the calf’s brain guy’s head.

  “It’s an extra grand.”

  “Fine,” he says.

  The best way to brace yourself is to think of something else.

  * * *

  I sit on the railing of the crooked balcony. He’s in a puffy coat lounged in the lawn chair in the long-haired AstroTurf. We’re both wearing sunglasses. Mine are so pink. He grins at me.

  “I want to take pictures of you,” the art guy says.

  I grin back.

  “No,” I say.

  * * *

  “Yo.”

  The delivery guy tilts his head.

  “Your eye,” he says.

  “I got in a fight.”

  He scrunches up his nose like something smells horrible, like serious dog shit.

  “You’re white.”

  I shut the door in his face.

  * * *

  Bruising is an unpredictable thing. The design is never the same. This time I have one Cleopatra eye. A purple Cleopatra that is shiny with Bacitracin.

  * * *

  At the cop bar the ex-Ranger dances for me. He feeds five dollars into the jukebox. I turn around on the stool and spread my legs. I lean back on my elbows and cock my head.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I say.

  The bartender throws a dollar at him. The ex-Ranger wipes his thumb across my cheekbone.

  “Is that a shiner?”

  I look at my concealer on him.

  “Fucking MAC,” I say.

  “What?” he says.

  “My makeup.”

  * * *

  The ex-Ranger does not have a bed. I get up from his futon. His bathroom feels unheated. I avoid his mirror. When I come out his locked closet is open. He’s standing beside it with a black pistol in his hand.

  “You know how to shoot a gun?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  He goes over to my bag and puts the Glock inside.

  * * *

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Your cock,” I say.

  The guy who buys me things smiles. I stand in front of the hotel room’s full-length mirror wearing only the earrings he bought me. They’re heavy. They brush my collarbone. I’m smiling at myself. Because he’s right behind me.

  * * *

  I smoke in the maid’s room with the junk-bond guy. I cross my legs on top of his.

  “Why do we all go on living?” I say.

  “I don’t know. Inertia.”

  “Accretion.”

  I twist one of my big earrings. The junk-bond guy laughs.

  “Like in a financial sense?” he says.

  “No, because we’re just adding days, not value. Every day we’re ali
ve makes it harder to die.”

  There’s a pause. Unlike strippers, who should be happy, prostitutes should be sad but not too sad. It holds the attention longer. He pats my knee.

  “I’ve got to kick you out soon. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  I was with a Siberian girl in a bathroom doing coke. We were doing one of those parties where the next day our thighs would burn too much to use stairs.

  “Did you think you were going to be a nanny?” she said.

  Her English was fucked-up but that’s what she meant.

  “No,” I said.

  * * *

  The weekend is back to Saturday and Sunday. When I first arrived in Dubai it was Thursday and Friday, and then after five or so years it was changed by the government to Friday and Saturday, to be more Westernized. The weekend is for wives and real girlfriends. I clean my makeup brushes and hang them upside down on coat hangers with rubber bands because I care what happens to them.

  9

  In black-hole theory if someone fell into one, like an astronaut, he wouldn’t feel a thing until he hit the bottom. That could take seconds or lifetimes. It is unlikely he would realize just before he was crushed to nothing that he was strung out like a string. I realize it, theoretically.

  * * *

  I’m in Duane Reade and I can’t decide. I feel paralyzed. A woman walks up beside me. I want her to force my hand.

  “Should I get the spicy tuna?” I say.

  “I don’t think you should eat that,” she says.

  I grab the salmon instead.

  * * *

  “You look good,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” I say.

  Our waitress brings over a birdcage filled with fried chicken.

  * * *

  I’m shivering on the art guy’s crooked balcony. It’s morning. The skyline’s missing. It’s so foggy that across the river it’s like Manhattan is gone, totally obliterated. Our building, when I was a kid, had a mezzanine floor that smelled like cabbage, like that was what every apartment’s cooking boiled down to. A few weeks ago I asked the art guy what happened to Stuyvesant Town and he said “mezzanine debt.” Maybe now it smells like something else.

  * * *

  I want to kill everyone in Whole Foods. This girl in front of me doesn’t know how to walk. She’s blocking the fresh ricotta. I ram my cart into her. She gasps. She turns over her shoulder, looking outraged.