11: New York

 
This is not a story about New York City. You left that town for good.


Upstate is a big place, it turns out, but then it does pretty much start the moment you cross the Tappan Zee, buildings and people replaced by fields and streams.

For lack of a better idea, you followed the Hudson, swimming upstream like a salmon, and here you are: “The All America City,” Albany.

Your office is on the outskirts of the city, the suburbs. It still feels weird having to say that word.

Your second day here you walked from one end to the other. You got lost looking for a bodega and wound up in a supermarket. You hadn’t seen the inside of one of those in years.

The people around here smile more, and the politicians are more honest about being liars. Nobody reads the New Yorker. There isn’t a decent Chinese place for miles.

It’s been a month now. You have a few clients, a few cases. Domestic stuff, not much.

It’s boring here, but better – you’d been doing the hard-bitten thing for too long.  The City had chewed you to bits, and you figured it was better to be spit out than swallowed up.


Everything went wrong a month and a half ago, the night something happened to the moon. The pattern was pale, so faint you almost swore it wasn’t there, but it was.

That’s when the Chinese women started disappearing, though nobody noticed that either, not at first. “Missing persons,” is what Escobar called them, like maybe they’d all just turn up in some municipal lost and found, like it wasn’t a case of somebodies becoming nobodies – they’d all been nobody all along.

You were still in the city at the time, holed up in your office above Wu’s noodle shop, but it wasn’t any of your business, not until your secretary went missing, not until she walked in.

“The Woman in White.” That was the first thing you thought. Well, the second, after you thought about how the hell she got into your office. Though, to be honest, you weren’t really clear on how you’d gotten to be there, yourself.

You were still wearing yesterday’s suit, you noticed, as you lifted your head off your desk. You dragged your hand down over your stubbly cheeks, breathing out, checking for cheap booze on your breath.

“I’m looking for a woman,” she said. She was beautiful, but you’d read the stories. Beautiful women are always trouble. Always.

“Is it my secretary?” you asked. “Because I was wondering about her, too.” You pressed the button for the intercom and heard the buzzer in the other room.

“It is not a person of this place.” She parted her deep red lips in a waxing crescent smile. Her eyes were black, a void reflected back.

“So they’re from Jersey?” You reached discreetly into your jacket pocket for your gun. It’s best to have your finger on the trigger when you sense a bout of crazy coming on.

She took a picture from her pocket, slid it across the desk. “I am looking for her,” she said.

You picked it up. It was a woman, all right, though the photo was grainy, taken who knows how long ago, when the whole world was black-and-white.

“I don’t suppose you can give me anything else,” you said. “Your name, maybe? Hers?”

You looked at the picture again. The woman in it and the woman in your office looked exactly the same.

She handed you an envelope, red as blood. “Happy new year,” she said.


You look around your office in Albany, at the piles of brown cardboard boxes. The only files you’ve dug out are the Woman in White’s. You haven’t hired a new secretary yet.

She’d given you ten thousand dollars, cash, and walked out before you could turn her down. You never did get her name. You never saw her again.

You call Escobar to see if he’s heard anything, but his partner answers, says something stupid about using the official channels. You never liked that kid.

You had a partner, once. Back when you were still on the force, when you were still looking to save the world.

He was a decent guy – a little burned-out and counting down the days. You’d expected something dramatic, like the movies, but in the end he just retired to California.

Life was like that. Anti-climactic. You stare out your window at the skyline. The buildings are gray against a washed-out sky, dull.

You hum a few bars of Charlie’s favorite song. This is the town that’s right for you.


It was around the time that the Woman in White showed up that the weather went crazy, a blizzard blanketing the entire country, snow falling like dust bunnies drifting down from the moon.

You spent even more time at Wu’s than usual, looking for patterns in your lucky numbers, staring at all the soon-to-be missing faces in the mystifying columns of cheap Chinese newspapers.

The new waitress kept the fortune cookies coming. You didn’t know her name. “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China,” you sang.

“Sorry?” She said, confusing her Ls and Rs. She didn’t speak English too well.

“Gimme the number 14. Extra MSG.”

“That stuff will kill you, you know,” Charlie said, sidling over, beer in hand.

“Not fast enough.” You cracked another cookie open. “’If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it's OK. But you've got to shoot for something,’ Confucius says.”

Charlie snorted. “I think what that’s supposed to say,” she said, “is that if your want to shoot the moon, you better be counting cards.”

She was a pedicab driver. The fastest one in the city, she said. Her name wasn’t really Charlie, but you had to call her something.

“For as long as I can remember,” you said, “there were four women at that table, playing mahjong like it was going out of style.” You pointed to the corner. “And this week they disappeared one by one, falling like dominoes.”

Wu was out of the kitchen for once, talking to the waitress in the back. Mandarin, maybe Cantonese. “What are they saying?” you asked.

Charlie was bobbing her head to some disco song playing on the chintzy jukebox. She didn’t answer, so you asked again. “Forget it, Jack,” she said. “It’s Funkytown.”

She got up to leave, flicked the brim of her cycling cap down. “I love you,” you whispered as she walked away. She didn’t hear you. They never do.

You opened up another fortune cookie. Confucius said: “When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines his finger.” What did he mean by that?


You have two calendars on your office wall in Albany, turned to March and February, 15 black Xs on the one and 14 red Xs on the other.

14 women in two weeks, then it ended just as suddenly as it began.

Your secretary had been number 7. Before her were Wu’s old waitress, two fashion designers, a masseuse, a couple students at NYU.

Number 8 was a translator for the UN; number 9 ran a blog.

10 through 13 were the mahjong ladies. Not even Wu could tell you anything about them. He had just looked at you curiously, and shook his head. “What women?” he’d said.

Number 14 you left blank. You were still hoping she’d come back.

You add them up again, and there’s still one extra character, an imaginary number that doesn’t fit, a name that doesn’t belong.


“How’s it going Charlie?” you asked.  It was late Monday morning, and she was leaning against her pedicab, arms crossed, hat brim turned down over her eyes.

“Excuse me?” The driver looked up, and it wasn’t her. It wasn’t a woman at all.

“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“Let me guess,” he said, and smirked. “We all look the same to you?”

“Give me a break,” you muttered, and started walking toward Wu’s.

“I saw her last night,” he called after you. “I gave her a ride.”

You stopped and he went on. “She was standing right here, looking up, dressed all in white. It was pretty late, and she asked me for a ride. I asked how far, and she told me ‘as far as you can.’ When we stopped, she handed me a hundred dollar bill and left without a word.”

“I went home to get some sleep, and put the money under my pillow, for luck, and when I woke this morning, I took it out,” he paused, and looked at you inscrutably. “But it was ghost money.”

You walked to Wu’s and tried the door, but it was locked tight. You knocked a few times.

You took a drag from your cigarette and tossed it in the gutter, a little white mixed in with the red and black of last night’s firecrackers. The big red lanterns were still hanging up, the banners swayed in the breeze, folds of crimson covered in Chinese.

You were almost at the bodega when you saw it, wheat-pasted to a wall – a picture of The Woman in White, standing on the moon.

“Shit,” you said. “That fucking bitch.”

You ran back to the shop, footfalls echoing in the empty street. The gunshot echoed, too.

You had the office key in your pocket, but your pistol was in your hand, so you had to shoot at something. When you opened the red envelope the pale ashes swirled out like snowflakes, fluttering like fat moths toward the sky.


It’s colder up here in Albany, quieter. The moon reappeared like usual and nobody said a thing.  It was as though nothing had ever happened.

Maybe nothing did. Maybe Escobar was right, for once. Maybe it just didn’t matter. You never knew her in the first place. But who ever really knows anyone?

You’re waiting for your order at another Chinese place, looking at the calendar hanging on the wall. It isn’t a square, but a circle. There are no numbers on it at all.

You peer at it, disoriented. The years spin around and around, rising and setting like the moon and sun.

The files are splayed across your office desk. A quick web search turns up the connection you’ve been looking for. You’d been looking at the wrong calendar all along.

You crack open a fortune cookie. “Ignorance is the night of the mind,” Confucius says, “but a night without moon or star.”

You close the files, put them back in the bottom drawer. You don’t want to read them again. This is not a story about New York City. Not anymore.