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“Yeah, move,” I say.

  * * *

  My stove is a stranger. Finally I get down on my hands and knees and light the burner under the oven with my lighter.

  * * *

  I heft the tinfoil pan in my hands.

  “I made you lasagna,” I say.

  “Why?” he says.

  The ex-Ranger has a drawer full of plastic forks. While he eats he puts his hand on top of mine.

  “This is good.”

  “Everything I put in my mouth tastes like a different kind of nothing,” I say.

  He laughs. I pull the Glock out of my bag and put it on his kitchen table.

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  “You might,” he says.

  * * *

  I sit on the edge of a hotel bed with a large pink box on my knees. I look up at the guy who buys me things. I consider whether or not I would recognize him if we crossed on the street.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy takes me for ice cream even though it’s too cold. We sit on a bench along the wall. We’re the only customers. He gives me his overcoat and it drapes over my shoulders. A few times I have practiced stabbing melons. All I have is surprise. If a man wants to pin me down by the neck he will. I lick his chocolate. He licks my vanilla.

  * * *

  I have not been this cold in fifteen years. I go to Macy’s and buy a puffy coat that is only white. I was just fucking him, too, the Sheikh, no fee. He was my boyfriend. I hate that I’m thinking about the ex-Ranger when I’m alone.

  * * *

  The Sheikh wasn’t really a sheikh. He did not wear a kandura but one of three white suits. He taught me how to belly dance. He opened his white jacket and rolled his white hips.

  * * *

  I put a ten on the counter and look at the bodega guy. He wiggles his fingers at me. I put down four more. He hands me the cigarettes.

  10

  I get Rorschach nails.

  “What do you see?”

  “I don’t want to answer that question,” I say.

  The girl looks at the splotches she’s made.

  “Crows,” she says.

  * * *

  The stamp’s a one-way arrow. I make my face pissy.

  “Editorializing is the worst,” I say.

  “Whatever,” the delivery guy says.

  He walks away before I can shut the door in his face.

  * * *

  “Just give me a couple adjectives.”

  “Fuck adjectives,” I say.

  The bartender is offended.

  “Look, the way this place works is you describe what kind of drink you want and then I make you something.”

  He points to the chalkboard behind his head. There is a truly unhelpful list of words.

  “Just give me a Sex on the Beach,” I say.

  “So, vulgar and juvenile,” the bartender says.

  I find them on the chalkboard: VULGAR and JUVENILE.

  “Exactly.”

  “Two of those,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  I look at him. When I was dumb I felt smug when a man started to become susceptible to me.

  * * *

  The art guy has his camera out. He keeps trying to point it at me.

  “I’m going to throw it over the balcony.”

  “I’m going to throw you over the balcony,” he says.

  We’re in his glass apartment. I’m on his hard black couch.

  “You’re addicted to male attention,” he says.

  He takes off the lens cap.

  “Would you say that’s why you’re a prostitute?”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” I say.

  I stand up and move out of view.

  * * *

  The ex-Ranger pulls his fingers through my hair.

  “I want to take you out to dinner,” he says.

  I open my eyes and look at the skin of his chest.

  “Okay,” I say.

  * * *

  The cardboard tube in this roll of toilet paper doesn’t go all the way through. It’s cut in half. The rest of the roll is a mass of wadded white. It’s abnormal like a book where one of the pages is overgrown, where the machine missed it. It’s freakish. It’s always supposed to be the same. I have to throw it away because I can’t stop looking at it.

  * * *

  On the train I stare at the guy across from me. I start counting. He looks at me, twice, and then he sort of smiles. Seven seconds. I close my eyes.

  * * *

  I order a stuffed cabbage from the Polish diner. I make them deliver. I eat on the couch and listen to the building. The guy below’s chasing a girl around his apartment. I hear them running back and forth. Her light footsteps followed by his heavy ones. She yells help but not like she means it. Otherwise it is quiet.

  * * *

  I don’t see the guy who buys me things or the junk-bond guy. Instead we text feverishly. It’s Thanksgiving. For four days I don’t go outside. Heroin is a justifying drug. Whatever I decide to do or don’t do it agrees with me calmly.

  * * *

  “I have to go home for Eid.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I have to slaughter a cow. I promised my mother,” the Sheikh said.

  He waved his hand in the air and left it there. We were high, in the rush.

  “Okay,” I said.

  11

  In an Argentine movie a man gives something to a girl.

  “I’m going to give you something.”

  She is maybe his daughter.

  “Here,” he says.

  I never know what it is. I like this.

  * * *

  “Why can’t she take my order?” I say.

  “Why can’t I take your order?”

  In the Polish diner I position myself in my chair so that I am not looking at the waitress but the blue woman behind the register.

  “Mom,” the waitress says.

  “Mom?” I say.

  * * *

  I take a yoga class at the gym and at the end we do not lie on the floor for five minutes like we’re corpses. The teacher prays her hands. She bows over her lap.

  “Namaste,” the teacher says.

  I am irate. The TODAY girl is not in the locker room so I can’t ignore her.

  * * *

  The dining room is the drawing room of what used to be a private mansion. The tables are huge and white-clothed and few and floating. There is a hush.

  “I want to punch you in the face again,” the calf’s brain guy says.

  I look across a swath of carpet at the couple closest to us and then I make a face. I don’t need an extra grand. I have enough money.

  * * *

  The art guy is out of town. I walk through Union Square. I stop in front of a street kid. His cardboard says WILL FUCK HOT GIRLS FOR GOOD DRUGS.

  “Are you in an awesome band?”

  “What?” he says.

  I kick his sign with one of my teacup heels.

  “That’s how that works.”

  He looks up at me and smirks.

  “Yeah, I’m the lead singer of Maybe You Can Suck My Dick but I Haven’t Decided Yet.”

  “You look more like the drummer.”

  “Fuck you,” he says.

  “You want to get a drink?” I say.

  * * *

  “As I’m sure you know, the universe is expanding, spreading thinner and thinner. Eventually it will spread too thin for physics. That’s when everything will pixelate.”

  He’s doing tequila shots. After each one he does a little dance.

  “Yeah, I know,” he says.

  “Then it will snap. The universe.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” the street kid says.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “You’re a pro, right?”

  I cross my legs. I feign disdain.

  “What?”

  “Do you know who’s going to rape you and steal your shit? Like
, do you get a feeling in your gut?”

  I flick my Cherry Bomb cup at the trash. He does half his dance and then stops.

  “No, you can never tell,” I say.

  * * *

  A woman in an abaya, a niqab, and gloves, all black, came up to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I pointed at the previously spotless sidewalk that was now spotted everywhere with my blood.

  * * *

  The bodega guy is staring at my black eye.

  “Remember when you guys sold coke in here?” I say.

  “Fourteen dollars,” he says.

  * * *

  “Maybe I should go on jobs with you.”

  I look at the ex-Ranger’s suit.

  “Like security?”

  He shrugs. He drinks his beer.

  “It’s not safe, carrying around cash like that,” the ex-Ranger says.

  In Dubai I had a driver who was sometimes the Sheikh. I wouldn’t make him wait outside while I got fucked. I would call him when I was done. But still he took too long to pick me up.

  “I thought you were going to take me out to dinner,” I say.

  * * *

  At three a.m. we eat ninety-nine-cent pizza standing on the street.

  “This doesn’t count,” the ex-Ranger says.

  When he moves his head a neon blur follows him.

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “I’m busy,” I say.

  * * *

  I leave the guy who buys me things at the fake orgy. A crowd of white-masked people runs past chasing a pregnant woman. I go the other way. Earlier there was a bar with shots sitting on it and I try to find it. Again someone grabs me. A woman in a long gown drags me into a small room. She whispers something portentous in my ear, pressing her tits into me. She’s an actress. I look at the real bed we’re sitting on.

  “Can I lie down?” I say.

  We’re at this immersive play and there are no seats.

  * * *

  Probably the junk-bond guy has lived in this apartment since before I was born. We are making out in the maid’s room and the floorboards are creaking and I have the awful urge to tell him this, that I was born just down the FDR at Beth Israel in the dark in the summertime.

  * * *

  “Where’d they take him?”

  “Beth Israel.”

  “Yeah, man, Beth Israel’s where everybody goes to die.”

  My battery is dead and I have to walk down the block without headphones. I look at the two winos as I pass by.

  “Mami,” one says.

  “God bless you,” the other one says.

  * * *

  I’m walking by Stuy Town when I see a woman who I swear is my mother. I turn around on First Avenue. I cut off a guy hailing a taxi.

  “Cunt,” he says.

  “Where are you going?” the driver says.

  “What?” I say.

  12

  “What?” I say.

  The calf’s brain guy stops looking at me sincerely. He resumes texting.

  “What,” he says.

  When the waiter comes the calf’s brain guy orders a hamburger, medium, with cheese, even though there is squab on the menu.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I say.

  * * *

  The art guy is wearing a Buddhist monk’s saffron robes. He’s fucking two Thai prostitutes in a hotel room with white tile floor so everything can be bleached. His head is shaved. It still is. I tap the space bar with the tip of my nail.

  “Don’t worry, I got what I paid for.”

  I look at him.

  “Even two of them weren’t as good as you,” he says.

  “Do you tell the hedge fund that you’re going to Bangkok to fuck bar girls and film it?”

  I run my nail down the opening in his shirt.

  “I’m not really as professional as you think I am. Remember when you said that? And that’s in Chiang Mai.”

  I button one of the art guy’s buttons.

  “Show me your Z-Pak,” I say.

  * * *

  I was terrified of the first man who paid me. I was eighteen. It was my first time overseas. He took me to a restaurant that I would learn to make fun of but only later. I was convinced they could tell, the driver, the waiters, the hotel staff, him. I wanted to appear professional. I was not terrified of the man who tried to kill me. I was thirty-two. For too many years I had escaped the bad luck of whores.

  * * *

  “In Dubai only men wear all white. Women wear black.”

  The wax lady pats my thigh with her white-gloved hand.

  “Legs over your head,” she says.

  * * *

  I assume before I knew him the ex-Ranger was all muscle. His full weight is on top of me. I can breathe but I feel like I can’t. He could hurt me but he won’t. I wake up with him again.

  * * *

  I’m on the Barneys elevator with puffy-lipped women. They look at me dismissively. They are highly contoured in an out-of-it way. But one time someone must have told them: marry a dentist in Jersey and just be happy. I imagine my mother saying that—dentist, New Jersey—and then I laugh. They think I’m laughing at them. The guy who buys me things is behind me. His hands are on my waist.

  “Excuse us,” he says.

  We get off on the expensive floor.

  * * *

  The junk-bond guy and I both sleep through the movie. When we come out it is snowing. He is walking and I’m standing there. He looks over his shoulder.

  “Kasia,” he says.

  * * *

  I take a new series of photos of my ass. At best I have ten years left. A middle-aged woman is a mother. A middle-aged whore is walking the streets or dead.

  * * *

  “Ooh, HERMÈS.”

  I grin at the delivery guy. He nods at my eye.

  “My mom used to hide us in the bathroom and when my stepfather tried to take the screws out the knob she’d stab a knife in the doorjamb.”

  I nod at him.

  “That’s smart,” I say.

  13

  This girl is known for copying artists. The appointment before me gets cows and hibiscus flowers. When it’s my turn I put my hands on the table.

  “I want fifty randomly placed points connected by straight lines,” I say.

  The nail girl looks this up on her phone.

  “Insanity,” she says.

  “No, it’s not. It’s logic.”

  * * *

  He grabs me by the ankle.

  “How much for a month?” he says.

  I shrug at the calf’s brain guy.

  “I don’t do that,” I say.

  * * *

  I’m sucking off the art guy and he’s being an asshole and not coming so I sit back on my heels for a second and look at Manhattan. Cities are inert and don’t have feelings. I am the one with feelings.

  * * *

  The ex-Ranger’s ceiling is pressed tin and though it’s muffled by decades of paint the pattern is still there. It was rare to be anywhere in Dubai without a pattern. There were dense Islamic patterns everywhere. Mosques are empty patterned buildings. The Muslim girls could charge the most and they had henna tattoos that crawled up their arms like delicate, intricate snakes.

  * * *

  At a dermatologist I get a B12 shot in my ass. I try to feel fucking great.

  * * *

  I almost buy myself this leather jacket. It has long fringe down the back.

  “It’ll last you forever,” the salesgirl says.

  I put it back.

  * * *

  The Dior store has a room with a fireplace. Tendrils climb the walls to the ceiling in 3-D. The guy who buys me things sits on a couch. I stand in front of him with my legs parted.

  “I want you to fuck me on this carpet,” I say.

  “We’ll take the furry one downstairs,” the guy who buys me things says.

  The salesguy is discreet in a corner.

  “Right away
,” the salesguy says.

  The guy who buys me things buys a purse I dislike that I will try to remember to carry most but not every time I see him. A good whore is an empty pattern like me.

  * * *

  I have not been in the living room before. In his living room the junk-bond guy has a baby coffin. It is in the shape of a Nike sneaker and it is painted red.

  “Amy got it in Ghana.”

  His wife is a collector of weird art. I think I know many things about many wives.

  “It’s a coffin,” the junk-bond guy says.

  The lid is open.

  “I know,” I say.

  I get fucked on the floor and not the couch. I assume the logic is that he sits on this couch with his wife. Logic is always evolving.

  * * *

  After the Sheikh disappeared I let a Qatari man buy me for one year. He rented an apartment that I never left. When he wasn’t there I would lie on the bed, in the air-conditioning, with the curtains open, and think of the sun out there, just burning somewhere. One time I thought this was true happiness, and maybe it was.

  * * *

  I watch a circle circle.

  14

  The ginger that came with this Duane Reade sushi is kind of fucked-up, withered. I eat it anyway.

  * * *

  There’s a line for the showers. The TODAY girl is just ahead of me. She turns around though she has no reason to.

  “Are you following me?” she says.

  “Please,” I say.

  She’s following me. In the shower I find the mole on my rib cage that I am sometimes sure is cancerous and I almost black out.

  * * *

  I get my hair cut. In the mirror I watch my face shift infinitesimally. Eventually I shouldn’t be able to recognize myself. I should become one of those words that are suddenly foreign. The Arabic of the Gulf was like music because I never understood. I moved through sound.

  “Can I take a photo for my Instagram?” the hairdresser says.

  She’s done. I still see myself.

  “No, thank you,” I say.

  * * *

  The calf’s brain guy is back to being cold to me. We’re in a restaurant with a perfect view of Jersey.

  “I’ll have a Fernet-Branca. She’ll probably have a milkshake.”

  The waiter looks at me. His face looks like it could go either way.

  “Milkshake,” I say.

  The dessert comes with a gold-leaf dove perched on its crust. I put the whole bird in my mouth for him.