KZ feels good in the house, the survivor said in my head.
In the lobby of the building, a bamboo-lily fan beat. A group of grizzled middle-aged men played dice around a kidney-shaped coffee table. The floor was rubber, checkered black-and-white. This place felt like Florida and Poland and Addis Ababa.
Barbra waltzed through the lobby. The schmuck greeted the gamblers. A sign on the wall read No Guests After 10.
‘There’s a barber on the seventh,’ Barbra said, opening a door to the stairs. ‘And a club where we watch films. You can get a cheap phone on the ninth or the tenth.’
I did not need any phone. I needed to fuck her.
Go easy, warned KZ. Tread carefully.
I followed Barbra into the stairwell. The schmuck trailed behind me. It smelled in this stairwell like the residue of meat. I wanted him gone. I knew she wanted him gone, too. Even my father wanted him gone.
That kind of want may be falsehood, interjected SZ.
I saw ink on her fingers. She slashed the wall as she climbed.
‘Don’t worry, not the penthouse,’ Barbra laughed as if everything were fine.
Careful, KZ whispered. She’ll take everything in your mind.
SZ: Golden shackles are still shackles.
KZ: Baruch Hashem.
I looked way up in the hallway. I had a backload of sweat. I saw Barbra’s L-shaped bare legs high up through a grate. She exited the stairwell. The schmuck sprinted behind me. Rosy panties. Jewish girl. Jezebel. I continued to climb.
It was stuffy inside the fourteenth-floor hallway. An old air conditioner was lodged at the end of the hall underneath a cloudy, pentagon-shaped stained glass. My heart beat rapidly. I needed to concentrate. Barbra waved at me from an open door. The schmuck lingered in the hallway like a turtle, duffle bag on his back. He lit up that same South American pipe. I glanced upward at the prickly beige stucco ceiling. That pentagon-shaped window was soldered shut. In this high-rise, I realized, there were no fire alarms. I heard radio static, plates cracking, a human rasp. I shuffled forward, swatting the schmuck’s smoke from my face.
KZ: A man cannot fight another man when he’s weak.
SZ: Men need to join arms or just lie down to die.
KZ: You know, that’s offensive in this context. We did not go like sheep to the slaughter.
SZ: Sorry, my brother, I don’t mean to cause harm.
I wanted to smash the schmuck out of her system.
He reached out his arm to me: H’bayit shli, oo h’bayit shlach.
Horror is a planet, KZ whispered. We live in its system.
SZ: You must wander through horror to rescue what is good there.
KZ: I will if you do.
SZ: Let’s go in and see.
I could not plug my ears to the voices.
KZ: A hereafter that’s not here and not after.
SZ: Jew-boy, we’re glad you understand.
I entered a little hotel room for a good-girl model orphan. I saw a dome-shaped silver headboard behind a pink kingsized bed. The silver-domed headboard was embedded with hooks. Rubber pulleys looped from those hooks up to hooks in the ceiling. The ceiling was the same as in the hallway: spiky dirty beige.
I felt angry. I felt trapped. An outmoded cockroach. Why’d she lure me up here again?