wrote back, “solutions are always possible, and the limits of the truth far exceed the limits of human understanding.”
“Enough with my fucking platitudes,” he wrote back. “Consider everything I said a lie, a mistake. I was wrong, and I regret every word of it. The only true thing is pain.”
I fell asleep watching
Murder, She Wrote
. No one knew about Jessica Fletcher’s past in England as George Cukor’s ne’er-do-well maid.
When I woke up Tracy was sitting on the edge of my bed. She was young again, fifteen, but had a knowing look on her face you don’t get before thirty or forty. She sat on the bed with ease, like a woman, not a child.
“The things you don’t know,” she said, “could fill the ocean.”
I looked over the side of the bed. My apartment had flooded sometime during the night. Black water trickled around the floor, the trickles connecting into an ocean.
The ocean rose.
“The things you don’t see,” she said, her Brooklyn accent sharp, “could light up the whole damn sky.”
I looked up. The sky above me was filled with stars, glittering gold and white. They swirled around to form new constellations: the Parrot, the Key, the Gun, the Ring. Then the stars rearranged themselves into a solid white wall.
We were on the subway, steel ceiling above us. The constellations were now graffiti: a knife, a can of spray paint, a pigeon.
On the walls of the subway were words. Thousands of them;
ocean
and
storm
and
boot
and
dagger
and
mission
and
Nevada.
Tracy sat across from me. We were on a double R subway from the mideighties. Next stop, Atlantic Avenue, transfer to the—
“And with the words you forgot,” she said, “you coulda solved the whole damn mystery already.”
From the pocket of her jacket she pulled out a paint pen and wrote more words on the wall.
Truth. Key. Bird. Ring.
“Which mystery?” I asked.
“All of ’em,” she said. “Remember. The Case of the End of the World.”
She snapped her fingers and I sat upright in my bed, awake.
12
Brooklyn
January 3, 1986
“D ID SHE TAKE HER KEYS ?”
It was 1986. Chloe and Reena were Tracy’s friends. They were a few years older than us—Chloe was eighteen and Reena, nineteen. Reena worked at a vintage clothing store on Seventh Street. Chloe worked for a filmmaker named Ace Apocalypse. He paid her almost nothing, but she loved the job. She wanted to make movies herself someday, or so she said.
Chloe and Reena lived together on Fifth Street near Avenue A. Tracy had met them one night about a year before in Sophie’s, a bar down the block from their apartment—the bar where we now sat with warm beer in front of us. Chloe and Reena liked Tracy and treated her like a kid sister: Reena gave Tracy a discount in the store where she worked; Chloe invited her to clubs and gallery openings and performance art nights around Alphabet City and Brooklyn.
Tracy, Kelly, and I were detectives. According to Silette, we’d always been detectives, of course, but we’d recognized that fact a few years ago and we’d been solving cases ever since. We’d started off in our neighborhood in Brooklyn and, as our reputation spread, started taking on cases around the city. Who’d planted the answers to Tuesday’s quiz in Dori’s locker? Who’d stolen Jamal’s weed? Who was Janelle’s real father? Being girl detectives in Brooklyn made cases easy to come by, but solutions were rare and troubling.
It was Chloe who disappeared. With her keys.
Tracy got the call late one Monday night. It was January, after the holidays but before school had started again. The next afternoon Tracy, Kelly, and I met Reena and Alex, her boyfriend, in Sophie’s. Reena and Alex looked exhausted and hungover, with dirty hair and circles under their eyes. Their hands shook and they chain-smoked. The time for heavy drinking had passed; instead, they each nursed a big mug of draft beer. Reena wore a fake leopard coat with a wide collar, coat wrapped
“Enough with my fucking platitudes,” he wrote back. “Consider everything I said a lie, a mistake. I was wrong, and I regret every word of it. The only true thing is pain.”
I fell asleep watching
Murder, She Wrote
. No one knew about Jessica Fletcher’s past in England as George Cukor’s ne’er-do-well maid.
When I woke up Tracy was sitting on the edge of my bed. She was young again, fifteen, but had a knowing look on her face you don’t get before thirty or forty. She sat on the bed with ease, like a woman, not a child.
“The things you don’t know,” she said, “could fill the ocean.”
I looked over the side of the bed. My apartment had flooded sometime during the night. Black water trickled around the floor, the trickles connecting into an ocean.
The ocean rose.
“The things you don’t see,” she said, her Brooklyn accent sharp, “could light up the whole damn sky.”
I looked up. The sky above me was filled with stars, glittering gold and white. They swirled around to form new constellations: the Parrot, the Key, the Gun, the Ring. Then the stars rearranged themselves into a solid white wall.
We were on the subway, steel ceiling above us. The constellations were now graffiti: a knife, a can of spray paint, a pigeon.
On the walls of the subway were words. Thousands of them;
ocean
and
storm
and
boot
and
dagger
and
mission
and
Nevada.
Tracy sat across from me. We were on a double R subway from the mideighties. Next stop, Atlantic Avenue, transfer to the—
“And with the words you forgot,” she said, “you coulda solved the whole damn mystery already.”
From the pocket of her jacket she pulled out a paint pen and wrote more words on the wall.
Truth. Key. Bird. Ring.
“Which mystery?” I asked.
“All of ’em,” she said. “Remember. The Case of the End of the World.”
She snapped her fingers and I sat upright in my bed, awake.
12
Brooklyn
January 3, 1986
“D ID SHE TAKE HER KEYS ?”
It was 1986. Chloe and Reena were Tracy’s friends. They were a few years older than us—Chloe was eighteen and Reena, nineteen. Reena worked at a vintage clothing store on Seventh Street. Chloe worked for a filmmaker named Ace Apocalypse. He paid her almost nothing, but she loved the job. She wanted to make movies herself someday, or so she said.
Chloe and Reena lived together on Fifth Street near Avenue A. Tracy had met them one night about a year before in Sophie’s, a bar down the block from their apartment—the bar where we now sat with warm beer in front of us. Chloe and Reena liked Tracy and treated her like a kid sister: Reena gave Tracy a discount in the store where she worked; Chloe invited her to clubs and gallery openings and performance art nights around Alphabet City and Brooklyn.
Tracy, Kelly, and I were detectives. According to Silette, we’d always been detectives, of course, but we’d recognized that fact a few years ago and we’d been solving cases ever since. We’d started off in our neighborhood in Brooklyn and, as our reputation spread, started taking on cases around the city. Who’d planted the answers to Tuesday’s quiz in Dori’s locker? Who’d stolen Jamal’s weed? Who was Janelle’s real father? Being girl detectives in Brooklyn made cases easy to come by, but solutions were rare and troubling.
It was Chloe who disappeared. With her keys.
Tracy got the call late one Monday night. It was January, after the holidays but before school had started again. The next afternoon Tracy, Kelly, and I met Reena and Alex, her boyfriend, in Sophie’s. Reena and Alex looked exhausted and hungover, with dirty hair and circles under their eyes. Their hands shook and they chain-smoked. The time for heavy drinking had passed; instead, they each nursed a big mug of draft beer. Reena wore a fake leopard coat with a wide collar, coat wrapped
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