01/1978
How long is three minutes when every second commands your attention, and every one of them ends up being relived over and over, until it has become a pattern in your DNA?
My first impression was that she was either coming from or going to a party. There was an element of theatricality about her, which was down to her eccentric choice of clothes: a plain black dress in a knitted fabric that was too small for her, even though she was slim, the contour of the dress obscured by a brightly colored waistcoat that was, by contrast, too big. They could have been clothes grabbed spontaneously from a theatrical wardrobe, or else they were not her own. Her hair was black and straight, chopped unevenly so that the longest parts traced her jawline down to her chin, and the shortest parts had the punk quality that only blunt kitchen scissors could impart.
Her feet were bare.
All this I discovered in one brief glance in her direction at the sound of her voice behind me.
Her face was expressionless. We were less than a meter apart, alone on the street under artificial lights that stripped the color from her skin. In daylight, that skin might have been milk white, but under the sodium street lamps, the milk had been skimmed, giving it a pale blue opacity like Ming porcelain.
Looking closer, I was struck by how light on flesh she was, the bones of her forehead, cheeks, and nose quite pronounced in a handsome rather than pretty way that bordered on androgynous, with eye sockets the size of dessert spoons, framed by penciled black eyebrows and the purple bruising of acute iron deficiency. The eyes themselves were dull and withdrawn.
“What did you say?” I asked pleasantly.
Her lips barely moved. “Give me fifty dollars.”
It wasn’t the voice of a Jersey girl, or a stray from Brooklyn. It was the voice of
a girl from New England, where you would expect her to have been taught to say “please,” so what she said was made all the more surprising by the way she said it. If, like me, you come to believe that all behavior is driven by biological imperatives, then you will understand why my response was initially uncomplicated. In the years since then, I have had many reasons for reexamining my actions that night, but the starting point always remains the same. She was a girl in her early twenties, dressed for a party, and I was a thirty-something man. My instinct was to check her out. So, I chuckled with fake amusement at the baldness of her question and looked away, as if in search of a Candid Camera.
Why didn’t I, as many have suggested to me since, just reach into my pocket for whatever money was there, hand it to her without a word, and walk quickly away? “Don’t even wait for her to count it’-“ was the advice Michael gave as soon as he heard about it. “And if my pockets were empty?” I asked. “Fuck it, this is New York—just run!”
It is exactly the advice that I would now give to someone else in the same circumstances.
It was hardly a full second before I looked back at her. In that time, the dull, flat disinterest in her eyes had been transformed into piercing lucidity.
“Why would I do that?” I asked, deliberately inflecting the English accent I had found so useful in placing distance between myself and others since coming to New York.
She didn’t answer, but slowly lifted her left hand, in which she was holding a small clutch purse. Without taking her eyes from mine, she appeared to proffer the purse towards me, then drew it back to her chest. I leaned closer. It was a well-worn, cheap bag covered in silver sequins, now mostly missing, with a short wrist strap and a white plastic clasp. With her right hand, she undid the plastic clasp and tilted the bag towards me. What I saw when I looked down was not what I expected to see, and for that reason, I was not sure that I had truly seen it. I lowered my head closer, then stepped back sharply. The bag contained a small black gun.
I remember the moment as completely silent. There are no street sounds in my memory, no scuffing of shoes or inhalation of air. My sole focus was on her right hand as she reached inside the bag and took hold of the gun.
I realized in hindsight that I had clearly seen the lesions on her inner arm, and the chewed and torn quick of her broken fingernails, but all that came back to me later. In that moment, all I could take in was the primary focus of my fear: the gun.
When I moved my tongue to speak, it stuck to the roof of my mouth, and the short expletive that was forced out of me collapsed into a dry croak. I want to believe that I was making an instinctive attempt to “tend and befriend,” and that is what caused me to try and speak. What I’ve learned since is that fight and flight can collide, leading to momentary inaction. I have never been certain what it was that I said, but I know I froze.
Once the gun was in her hand, we both looked up, and I’m sure that what she saw in me was someone who had chosen to disappear, playing dead like a scared rabbit, for why else would she have decided to smile? Lips that seemed etched in ink spread outwards beneath a strongly molded nose that might have been shaped by a sculptor. But these lips parted wide to reveal the mouth of Medusa—Medusa, who made herself so ugly that all who saw her were turned to stone.
I reeled back at the blackened stumps of teeth, smashed, jagged, and suppurating—teeth snapped in half and barely visible in swollen gums yellowed by disease and pain. It was a smile that would haunt me. And though I can still feel and hear the explosion as if it had just happened, will I ever know what really happened next?
