A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty Three, Pt. 2
“The long-run is a misleading guide to current affairs; in the long-run, we are all dead.”
— John Maynard Keynes
every story ends the same way: every story ends.
(nothing ever really ends)
Zoe, forty-five years old, sat back against the same greened steel hood above the Astor Place station that she’d sat back against at twenty-four. She was the dangerous kind of drunk a person only became when they needed booze as an excuse to weep and sob and scream. She had a switchblade, a can of pepper spray, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey on her. She felt ready to use any or all of it.
Twenty years had passed. How had twenty years passed?
Astor Place was a fucking Chase Bank now. When had that happened? How hadn’t she noticed?
The NYU kids had manifested their destinies all across Alphabet City and had reached Avenue C before their wave broke and crashed back again. Tompkins Square still played host to a revue of indigents, but the streets and avenues ran more rampant with cops than crust-punks. At some point, she guessed she’d stopped leaving Murray Hill. Everything had changed, unobserved. How? And why?
Jill had killed herself.
The story read like this: during her lucid hours, Jill slowly realized that the frequent visitors who came during her non-lucid states were Malleus agents. Medical staff, employed by the Winters-Armitage corporation, dismissed her subsequent paranoia as a further symptom of her alleged psychosis. Jill didn’t want to talk to Malleus, didn’t want to tell them whatever they wanted to know, and so she’d spent her lucidity working on a spell. Nobody in the company knew how long it had taken. One day, a nurse walked into the room to discover Gillian Briar freed from her restraints and hanged with a bedsheet.
The psych facility specifically selected bedsheets that lacked the tensile strength to break the cervical vertebrae. They weren’t even supposed to be able to hold up a human body. The chances that Jill could have pulled it off were something akin to one in six hundred and seventy thousand.
Sometimes magic looked like that.
Maybe the story would have ended differently if—if—if—
But it hadn’t.
The story read the way it read and it ended the way it ended.
(you will never be free of this)
Zoe pushed herself up, wavering on whiskey-legs. “It isn’t that we’ve gotten old,” she muttered to herself. “It’s that the world stays young.” She snorted and took a slug of whiskey from a paper-bagged bottle. A group of people half her age passed her on the crosswalk. One of the men glanced at her overshoulder and she glared back. Say something, she thought. Go ahead.
He turned away a half-second later, talking to one of his friends.
Zoe headed east. Why?—hell with it, why not?
The walk felt right-now familiar but the landscape had transformed. Everything became something else, eventually.
Passing Tomkin’s Square Park, she saw a ragged, chewed-up man pacing frenetically around the playground. Every few steps he stopped and turned toward the buildings crowding around the park’s fence. “Fuckin’ yuppies!” he shouted. “Fuckin’ yuppies pulled the rug right out from under me. Pieces of shit. Pieces of fucking shit yuppies. Hey, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
He howled at the brownstones, at the apartments, at the pedestrians. His voice had the feral quality Zoe associated with people who had suffered homelessness so long that they’d forgotten civilization entirely.
Taking another slug of whiskey, she watched him scream for a while. Where else was she going, anyway? She wondered how many addicts roved the surface of the Earth searching for thread to keep themselves stitched together even as reality razored them apart.
She kept walking. A dozen college-aged kids wearing outfits that could never be mistaken for rags muttered to each other by phone light, standing outside of a bar.
Beyond the bar, Alphabet City reasserted its crusted heritage. Beyond Avenue D, the indigent reigned. Would she drift into that heavy darkness? Would she seek out the trouble so easily found in the crevices of its dilapidation?
She didn’t see why not.
Until she saw a row of phone booths.
It shocked her, this bygone monument. Three phone banks waited, garbed in graffiti and reeking of piss, like the statued legs of Ozymandias. Zoe stood for a long time, weight wavering from one leg to another, brown-bagged bottle hanging loosely from her fingers. Taking another gulp of whiskey, she walked over. She tried not to breathe through her nose.
She fed the machine some quarters and dialed a number. The number lived inside her head. She’d thought about punching it into a keypad so many times she’d memorized it. Setting the brown bag and its contents aside, she put the grimy handset to her ear.
“Hello?” Shoshanna Winters mumbled, sleep-voiced.
Zoe felt like her mouth was a loaded gun and she had to empty the mag all at once. “I think, last year, when you said your brother made all the political decisions, that you’d given that up for science, I think you lied to me. I know you did.”
A pause.
“This is Zoe, by the way. Zoe Briar.”
“Yeah, I know. I only gave this number to three people.”
“My sister is dead. Nobody set her up, nobody did anything besides follow SOP and she’s dead.”
“You sound drunk. And you know how stupid it would be to look for revenge.”
“I’m not.”
“Or justice.”
Zoe snorted. “I’d have as much luck hunting Santa Claus as I’d have looking for justice.”
Another pause.
“What is it you want, then?” Shoshanna asked.
“I want in.”
“In on what, exactly?”
“Whatever you’re doing. Whatever you’re doing while the world thinks your brother is still in charge.”
“There is no ‘in.’ I’m sorry.”
“Don’t hang up on me,” Zoe snapped.
“Tell me what you want. If it’s not justice or revenge, then what?”
“Come on. You know.”
“Tell me.”
Zoe peered behind her. A scarecrow vagrant shuffled down the sidewalk.
“I have to be up early tomorrow,” Shoshanna said. “I’m sorry, Zoe. Goodb—”
“I want to change the world,” Zoe confessed.
(look at me)
(and he did)
(I don’t c—)
“Call me when you’re sober.” She could almost hear Shoshanna’s grin. “Use a different payphone—but use a payphone, not a burner. Maybe we can set up a meeting.”
Zoe opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Good night, Zoe Briar.”
Shoshanna hung up.
Zoe put the gross handset back on the receiver and picked up her whiskey from the ground. Turning around, she saw the scarecrow vagrant again only a couple yards away. “Hey,” she upnodded to the lanky man, approaching. “Free whiskey.”
“Huh? Wha—oh, shit, thanks.”
He said something else but she’d already continued walking.
“As above, so below,” she whispered to the night.
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