‘NYC, 2007’
I wrote this short story last year as some bait for Hollywood. Met a great producer with it. It went around to some big writers, but never hit. Giving it some life here...
The mini jukebox is dipped in silver and filled with old 45s. I drop a quarter in and hit B2 as the sound of Donovan drifts over the formica tabletop. I’m an addict. Coffee, nostalgia, kidding myself that things will get better – vice is my life. My boy Radim comes in outta the rain. He looks the part, knockoff Fendi hip bag, Fila jumpsuit, Christ almighty around his neck. I skip the weather talk.
“You got my stuff?”
Even with inflation, the price of pure Oh-7 is astronomical.
“You got my stuff?” He’s got the face of a lifer.
I swap him twenty k wrapped in stacks the size of a meatball hero for an itty bitty baggy of pills. He counts it because he doesn’t know my ass from Adam. Doesn’t know what my damage is. I shove the pills in my pocket and he shimmies out the booth. The deal is done and the levee breaks. He sees my partner, Victor, out on the cold, wet street with the other raincoats. He books it for the kitchen. He’s not making me pancakes this morning though, he’s running. He moves pretty good for a guy in a tracksuit who’s probably never set foot on a track. Surely, they covered the back door, surely. Of course they didn’t. He hits Chambers street and jukes right. I’m hoping he’ll stop for Wetzel’s Pretzels but he cuts through the playground and heads toward Tribeca. I’m jumping puddles when I smack my head on the top of a slide and it dawns on me that I might be the one who’s out of shape. I give up and that’s when he’s hit by an NYPD cruiser and thrown into a hot dog cart. I don’t even get to Mirandize him because I’m so out of breath.
“Pure O.G. Oh-7. This shit should be in a museum.”
Victor’s enamored as he inventories our bust back at the precinct. He’s powered by his sixth coffee of the day. He never seems to piss either. Super impressive.
“For a drug dealer, Radim was very reputable.”
“I see this shit and I can remember where I was when I first watched the keynote.”
Victor’s talking about the unveiling of NYC, 2007, our little white office mates currently being counted out in a nice little row for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Street name Oh-7. The very first synthetic drug created by AI.
“Me too,” I say. “I was playing handball in Yauch park and this dude was like ‘Holy shit, they made a time travel drug.’”
That was only half true, I watched the actual keynote on the can later that night after eating bad sushi. Domo.
“I thought the same thing,” he says. “I thought you literally went back in time.”
2007 was when Google Street Maps first debuted. It was the oldest visual record for the engineers of Oh-7 to train their AI models on. The startup behind it, Sesame, basically recreated New York City, 2007 in pill form. Pop one and drift off into the matrix for eight hours. Everyone was hooked until they learned why the world felt so real, so personal. Sesame had turned a blind eye as their AI went rogue, scrubbing 30 years of everyone’s encrypted photos and video from their favorite privacy-first tech companies in the name of verisimilitude. Privacy advocates went nuts, there was a run on Oh-7, and it was promptly banned and criminalized. The FBI estimates there’s less than a thousand pills of pure Oh-7 left out there. Hasn’t stopped the street pharmas from cutting it and re-synthesizing it.
“Why do I only count seventeen pills?” I ask Victor.
“Because we only recovered seventeen?”
“The deal was for twenty-five. I counted twenty-five.”
Victor gives me that look. The are-you-fucking-with-me?
I’m not.
“What are you trying to say, Sean?”
“Chain of possession?”
“Fuck off, man. Everything you gave me is there.”
“Alright...I guess I was still spinning.”
It’s wild how your partner becomes like a sibling. Like you know they’re as fucked up as you are, but it’s fun to pretend you’re somehow better. He’ll hate me for the rest of the day and love me tomorrow.
“So where were you when you first heard about Oh-7?” I ask.
Victor smiles, his turn.
“Dude, I was in–”
“–Shit, look at the time. I gotta get home.”
I love fucking with him.
The 6 train to Chinatown is packed and I’m in such a rush to get home that I fall for the empty subway car. If every subway car is packed and you see one that’s magically empty, you’re not lucky, there’s a reason it’s empty. He looks like the Michelin Man sitting there, his pants filled with his own shit and piss, layered on top of itself down to his boots. The smell is like being in his socks. Despite this, I’m so excited f
or tonight I could dance through this car like Fred fucking Astaire. We barrel south and I can hardly contain the wad growing in my pants.
I make an early dinner and pour myself a glass of cabernet. I eat more spaghetti than a guappo from Bensonhurst. I need a full stomach. When I’m done, I take the needle off the Coltrane and empty the contents of my pocket. Eight pills of Oh-7. I line them up on the table, admiring the tiny worm holes – vessels into the crevice between time and space. I put them in an old plastic film canister, all but one. That one I take.
When I said I was addicted to nostalgia, that was just poetry. The reality is I’m addicted to Oh-7 and the cavalcade of dopamine as it hijacks my head and my heart. It’s a trap and I know it. I tell myself not to chase the past, that this is purely recreational and I’m just doing it for kicks. Don’t chase the past. Don’t chase the fucking past. On NYC, 2007, you’re a god, but there’s still consequences. Just because you get to go back and fuck the one that got away, doesn’t mean you can’t also get your throat curb stomped into your amygdala if you’re not careful. It’s New York City, 2007. You get The Strokes, but you also get Nickelback.
The drift catches me off guard. In real life, my body has just fallen asleep on the couch. In my mind, a view of Central Park is slowly coming into focus. The drift is a foggy state that Sesame designed to highjack your parietal lobe. No idiot outside a neurologists office knew what a parietal lobe even was before all this shit came out. It’s the part of the brain that controls your five senses and in here, everything you see, touch, and hear is compliments of the drug. You’re on your own for smelling and tasting, but you’d be surprised how much your brain fills in the gaps.
I see the tops of the trees in the park because this is where every day begins in NYC, 2007 – a minimalist penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side that belonged to one of the Sesame founders when they first created the drug. Here in my brain, it’s all mine. It’s your spawn point if you will, a safe space where you’re not going to pop out of time and space in someone else’s not-so-safe space. The walls are painted flat black and there’s a pool table and arcade games, modern pop art on the walls. Real man child shit. When the DOJ learned they were training their AI models on people’s real photos the bust was swift and Sesame went bust too, I wonder who owns this apartment in the real world now. There’s always a money clip with credit cards and cash in your pocket. There’s a pack of American Spirits in the other pocket, back when you could still smoke in this city. I don’t smoke, but I do take a pull of the bottle of Glenfuckitall sitting on the counter. I head for the elevator where the ride is the longest part of the day. It’s the cab ride home with the hottest girl in the bar. The bon mot on the tip of your tongue. You can’t wait. Excitement can’t begin to describe it.
Reaching the street, it’s always like coming home from war – not that I’d know. Mid-aughts Chevy Impalas, fixed gear bicycles, Michael Clayton playing at the Lincoln Center Theaters. There’s a little different rhythm with each trip and every day is just vaguely late summer. I walk to the Mercedes dealership on Fifth Ave where the secretary does a terrible job of keeping the keys locked down. Her name is Clarinda and I pity her because of her dumb name, but also because of how hard she tries to get attention from the sales guys. I help myself to the S class keys. It’s a smooth and sensible ride, not too flashy, what I aspire to be. Getting in the car, I pull out of the garage and wave to the valet like we’re old friends because we’ve done this before. He waves back because I look like I belong, despite the fact that I was only ten in 2007. I drive down the FDR and over the Brooklyn Bridge, back to the old neighborhood, the place I can’t afford to live anymore, Brooklyn Heights, America’s first suburb. The brownstones never change and neither does the rubbery squelch of car tires on cobblestones. Black nannies, white babies, Ann Taylor fucking Loft. Dylan sang about Montague Street in the 60’s, but now it’s just a place for Wall Streeters to hide their families from their mistresses. Cultural atrophy be damned, I still love the refuge it offers in this concrete maelstrom. Peaceful, quiet. I do need to find a gun though.
First things first and second things second, I pop by the liquor store on Clark Street for a six pack. Traffic was light so I’m early, but they don’t open for another ten minutes. I don’t like to waste time so I decide to compromise on the gun of the day. I wish I had my own Easy Andy with a suitcase full of steel, but I’m not Travis Bickle and hand guns are a little harder to come by in 2007. On one trip, I wasted a full day doing home invasions to source gun options in the neighborhood. I felt terrible scaring folks, but I remind myself that while everyone here existed in real life 2007, this is not real life and they won’t remember me tomorrow because they don’t have one. It’s not real, it’s a drug. Having a gun just removes a lot of roadblocks and I’m here for a good time, not a long time. I walk across the street and down the lane to a carriage house with an open casement window above a desk where a geriatric lawyer keeps a loaded Beretta unlocked in his desk. I shove it in my waistband and head back to Robert Bradley Wines just as its namesake and his wife are rolling up the shutters.
“I picked up a wino wandering into traffic on the GW bridge one night,” I have told this shopkeeper the same joke probably fifty times and it never gets old.
“You gotta be careful with those guys,” he says.
The place is green with black and white checkerboard floors. The register is on a platform 8 inches higher than everything else. Either this place used to be a pharmacy or he’s got a complex. I grab a six pack of Yuengling from the cooler. Robert Bradley’s wife, Marie, runs this place, but he works the till. She’s always hunched over the edge of the counter like she’s hanging on his every word. I keep talking.
“I told the wino to get in the car. He looked at the paper bag wedged between the seats and asked me ‘Whatcha got in the bag?’ So I told him I got a bottle of wine for my wife.”
Robert’s smile tells me he knows a story from a joke.
“He said, ‘Ohhhh, good trade.”
Robert and his wife laugh like they’ve never heard it before, because they haven’t. When they recover, I pile on.
“Please don’t judge me for buying booze at ten A.M. I have a condition,” I say to wit. Robert always has the same comeback:
“Some people are content with a good morning. You wanna make it great.” I always laugh even if I’ve heard it fifty times back. His wife smacks him for being a rascal and I just kinda wing it until I nearly wear out my welcome, which has only happened once before. Some people make talking more fun than others. I could stay in this time capsule all day, but I don’t.
I walk down Pineapple Street with my beers. The first one is always the best, because it’s already eighty degrees by ten A.M. which makes it ninety with the asphalt. I always consider putting on shorts, but I’m not an animal. I walk west until I run out of cobblestones and the oaks and honeylocust give way to a view of the East River and lower Manhattan. People love the promenade, but I don’t bother. The view just makes me nauseous.
I head south sipping my second beer. I walk east, I walk south, I walk west. I stop at the house with the big spire on Pierrepont Street and walk right in to use their bathroom because everyone’s always upstairs. I walk out and write my initials in wet cement before the muni worker can yell at me. I don’t know why it’s so satisfying, I’m like a child. It’s almost 10:30 and I have somewhere to be. I see a tall, gangly young man emerge from his basement apartment. I know this guy is a famous actor in my time, but here he’s a nobody. One time I stopped him and told him about how famous he’d be one day and I could tell it really messed him up, because he knew it was true and where the fuck did I come from?
I walk by P.S. 8 just as the recess bell erupts. This is where ten year old me goes to school. I stand outside and watch the kids trickle out. A chubby, little shit in a Rangers tee shirt comes out and runs for the handball court. He makes me cringe. Think of how much you hate your own voice, now imagine putting a face to it. Little me has a lot of friends, but the person I care about most is Sophia. I see her and imagine that if I had a daughter, she’d look a lot like her. She’s eleven years old and walks on her tip toes like the world is bouncy. I have to remind myself not to stand there staring because I’m a thirty something dude outside an elementary school soaking up the majesty of youth, which doesn’t look great to the skeptic. I walk to the end of the block where there’s an unlocked Buick with really comfy seats. I sit in it and take a stick of gum out of the glovebox. Sophia and her friends are always at the same table, usually trading Pokemon cards or making friendship bracelets, today it’s the latter. The girls flank her evenly, she holds court in a Da Vinci-like tableau. They’ll play until the fifth grade boys fly a hand ball through there and swarm them like bees.
The kids hurry back inside, Sophia’s among the first to go and that’s my cue to leave. I get out of the Buick and walk back towards Henry Street when I see a familiar face at the other end of the playground.
“Yo, Kenny!”
Kenny Garber went to high school with my dad back in the day. Here in Oh-7 we could be the same age. My dad was a total hard ass, for whatever reason he had a soft spot for Kenny. I guess the guy had a fucked up home life.
“Hey, what’s up, man?” Says Kenny.
He has no fucking idea who I am. This is one of my favorite games. I’m never the first one to break.
“Where you headed? I’ll walk with you.”
Kenny saunters down the street at the speed of nowhere to be.
“How you been?” He asks.
At this point, I get a kick out of people. They’ll do anything to hide the fact they don’t remember someone. They either do it to hide the fact they might have grandma’s memory or they do it because they don’t want to embarrass the other person for the same implication. Only the true psychopath asks “Do I know you?” And Kenny isn’t that obvious.
“I been better,” I say. “I don’t know if you heard, but I’ve had a rough go of shit lately.”
“Sorry, man. I didn’t know.”
People can’t help themselves when you say you’re recovering. It’s a defense mechanism, they wanna avoid the same fate.
“What happened?” He asks.
“Well, my wife got sick a couple years ago.”
“Oh man.”
“Yeah it wasn’t good. We’re not sure what it was.”
“Cancer?”
“Probably. So many tests, but nothing was conclusive. We were down at Brooklyn Bridge Park once night and she just collapsed.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Passed away in the hospital a couple days later.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Kenny doesn’t know my name. I’ve played this game with him so many times that I’ve learned to slowly dole out information about myself to put off his admitting he doesn’t know me.
“Yeah so, we had a funeral and that night I get a delivery. A puppy, if you can believe it. The note attached says. ‘John – I’m sorry I can’t be there for you, but you still need something, some one, to love.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, pretty heavy.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
“So she knew she was sick and arranged to have this dog delivered?” He asks.
“Yeah, but that’s just the beginning. You see I also had this car. A ‘69 Mustang.”
Don’t worry, he won’t see John Wick for another seven years. We walk up to Henry Street Ale House and I can’t help but ask him:
“You wanna get a beer?”
The bar is buzzing with the after Wall Street crowd and my story has gained a few hangers on. Kenny’s rapt, as is the table next to us, and behind us, and in front of us.
“So what happened?” Asks Kenny.
“I somehow dragged myself into a nearby vet clinic and stitched myself up and that was the end of it.”
I never saw John Wick Part Two.
The Ivy League bro at the table next to us, chimes in.
“You were in a vet’s office. It’s like things came full circle.”
“There was a pit bull there that was scheduled to be euthanized.”
“You didn’t...” Says the guy.
“I adopted her.”
Everyone lets out an audible sigh of awe. I finish my beer and leave them wanting more.
“I should probably get going,” I say.
I’m feted with my exit and Kenny follows me like a dog into the humid night.
“What are you up to now?” He asks, sort of pathetic.
I hit the ball back to him. “I dunno, surprise me.”
Big idea guy, he throws out smoking a joint at his place.
The first time he suggested this, I thought he wanted to fuck me, but he just doesn’t want to be alone.
That’s how I get him.
My partner Victor tells me he loves his kids the same amount but in different ways, and even though I don’t have kids I’ve come to understand the logic. I understand because I have two favorite moments when I come to NYC, 2007 that could not be more different. One is when I pass by P.S.8 to see Sophia and the other is when I kill Kenny Garber.
By my count I’ve ended him sixty-two times by different means. Consumer advocates had massive qualms with Oh-7 when it debuted because they said it would enable our worst fantasies, that whatever damage violent video games were doing to young people’s brains, the reality of people living that depravity with all five three senses in NYC, 2007 would be far, far worse. Do people take Oh-7 to have a place to rape, torture, and kill without consequence? Undoubtedly. Do I lose any sleep when I kill Kenny Garber? I do not. It’s therapeutic at this point. He represents all my unsolved cases back in reality, all the ones that got away. He might be the most important part of my day and so I let him invite me over to his apartment, the piece in my belt burning a hole in my patience like money in a kid’s pocket.
He tells me to sit down. His apartment is minimalist 80’s with pastel accents and cubed divider walls, every bit the American Psycho. The only difference I could find is that Kenny doesn’t own a single mirror. Instead, he has a poster of dogs playing poker above his bathroom sink. That’s self loathing. He sits at his coffee table and pulls out a cigar box like it contains some kind of deity – dope smokers are so ritualistic. I excuse myself to take a leak. I go into his bedroom and open the nightstand where there’s a drawer full of stuffed animals. I help myself to a giraffe.
My day is almost done and I have to wonder if I’m not growing a little tired of this place. Some nights after this I’ll go to the village and catch a comedy show. Other nights a concert, but mostly I just feel helpless. This world doesn’t exist for me anymore and never will. I can’t control that. Maybe that’s why I come out of the bathroom and control what I can. I hold up the stuffed giraffe and tell Kenny I’m taking it.
“What the fuck dude?”
He says this because I stick a gun in his face.
BANG!
Sometimes I see if I can hit the far wall with Kenny’s brains. The angle of the bullet is like a paintbrush. I shoot down and he crumples, a pool of blood forming around him like a lily pond. Today’s not a Monet though, I fill the walls with his old thoughts like a Jackson Pollock. I can’t stay long enough to enjoy it because the neighbor calls the cops and they actually show up in this part of Brooklyn. I let myself out and lock the door behind me, knowing that nothing is permanent. I regret not setting him on fire. I did that once. My brain invented some burning flesh scent that stuck in my nostrils for the rest of the day, but it was worth it for the suffering. I’m not a sadist, I just play one in NYC, 2007. None of this will matter tomorrow. Kenny’s already lived tomorrow and the next day. I’m the only one stuck in the past.
I walk back to Clark Street station holding my stuffed giraffe and take the old elevator back down below the street. I’m headed back to Manhattan, back to real life. I hear soothing robotic voice of the “Northbound two train to Wakefield 241st street.” The third chime’s my cue as I step in front of the train and wake up in my bed.
I sleep like I’m back in the womb after a day in Oh-7. Up and at ‘em at 7am. I could go to the gym or go for a run. I won’t, but I could and feel pretty good knowing that fact. I make coffee when there’s a knock at the door and Victor’s standing there.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
He’s here for my hide. It’s all over his long face.
I caffeinate.
“You want a cup?” I ask.
He follows me into the kitchen as I nonchalantly pocket the little plastic film canister filled with Oh-7 on the counter.
“You see the news today?” Now he’s got the voice to match the face. I look at him. He’s not here for me, but the last time he showed up, our friend Reggie had been shot in the line.
“I don’t read. You know this about me.”
“They’re releasing him.”
“Who?”
I stare at Victor and know this slow roll means the worst possible news.
“Kenny Garber. The federal AI clemency program determined the DNA wasn’t his. It’s like one of those one in a billion type situations, but it’s pretty convincing. He might’ve been a pedo piece of shit, but it looks like he’s innocent of this.”
The ground gets shaky beneath my feet and my knees wanna buckle like I’m some damsel. For the past thirty years I have been certain of two things: my sister Sophia is dead and she was murdered by Kenny Garber, the pocket pool pedo of Pineapple Street. The evidence was circumstantial, but it was strong. He’d been picked up for attempted kidnapping of a minor two years before Sophia was killed. Parents had complained about his presence outside P.S. 8. They found one of my sister’s stuffed animals in his apartment. I stand there staring at Victor as my heart shrinks two sizes.
“Do they have a new suspect?”
Victor shakes his head.
“Take a couple days off,” he says.
I’ve never lived anywhere else so I only know what transplants tell me about life off the island. They say that life in New York is a shared experience. That we’re all privy to the same energy, a collective breath through good and bad. It’s still raining and there’s a cloud over the city. I can’t help, but feel it’s all for me. I cross the street to the Mount Sinai Assisted Living building, careful not to step on the slick Con Edison grates. I shake off my raincoat at the automatic doors.
My mother lives on the fourteenth floor of the circular building. It was built in the seventies for people living with dementia. The point of the circle was so patients could walk the floor and even if they forgot where they lived, they’d eventually end up back at their own door. Today I’m envious of anyone without a past.
I could go in, I have a key, but I always knock so as not to startle her. Sixty-seven years of memories on this earth and her mind has conspired to erase nearly all of it. Still she always answers the door like a brand new model.
“Hello, young man.” She smiles that same smile, but the eyes are different.
“Hello, Marie. It’s me, Sean, your son.”
She smiles widely.
“Of course! Come on in.”
“Have you been down for breakfast already?”
“Oh yeah, I’ve been up for hours. I had a muffin with the girls.”
She’s having a good day.
“Shall we walk and get a coffee, mom?”
We walk down the hall to the common area where I pour us a couple of tepid coffees with creamer.
“This is my son,” she tells a young black man who runs the canteen. We do this every couple of days. I smile at him.
“What’s up, Jamal?”
“Tryin’ to stay dry,” he replies. Everyone talks about the weather in here. Anything more just isn’t worth the effort.
“Have a great one.”
We walk slowly and sip our coffee. It’s probably more precarious than sitting, but the doctors insist that walking and talking is the best brain exercise there is. I wonder what would happen if I slipped some Oh-7 in her cup.
“Where’s your sister today?” She asks. Oh God, do I envy her.
“Sophia’s family’s in Europe on vacation, Mom.”
“No shit?” That’s how she talks.
“No shit.”
I wonder if Oh-7 would take her back to before she was robbed of her memories. I wonder if she’d know the difference between now and then. I like to imagine her showing up to work at the wine shop and stepping up onto the platform with my father. Cracking jokes about the state of her beloved Mets as she shoves a bottle in someone’s hand. She walks to P.S. 8 at two-thirty and meets us kids after the bell rings. She curses at the ice cream truck driver for parking outside the school, tempting us kids. She squeezes Sophia’s palm – the only twelve year old who still wants to hold her mother’s hand.
I watch the room numbers until we get back to 1412.
“We’re back at your room, Mom.”
She knocks on the door and looks at me.
“There’s no one home,” she says. I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me.
I let her into the small safe space away from the world. There’s no going back to how things were for her. There’s no magic pill tricking her brain into believing she’s a god who can bring judgement to a perverse world.
I leave her with a kiss and tell her I’ll be back tomorrow. But first I have to go back to yesterday. I need to go back to Oh-7 and solve whatever happened to my sister and I won’t stop looking backwards until I do.
