Shift at the new salon done. Late February. The wind is the kind that frightens you, weak light. Amaltheia shoulders her bag and makes her way to the monstrous CVS down the block. Entering the store, she feels herself flatten under the overhead lights.

Alexander, her son, is trying whippets for the first time with his friends somewhere north of Fourteenth Street, but Amaltheia doesn’t know this, Amaltheia doesn’t know shit, thought Alexander, who has recently taken to calling her her legal name. All she knows is hair dye and divorce. Alexander knows the dappled terrain of a human nipple, odd, extraterrestrial—the slope of girls’ breasts he couldn’t believe he was squeezing a hand into, breaking past that jailer of a fuchsia-colored bra. He is invincible. His mother is neutered. At least, that’s what people tell him.

Amaltheia feels the energy of two people behind her. She turns around and beholds a mid-twenties couple in all their acuity and cliché; bodies ramming up against each other nervously, bad haircuts and sex in spades. The girl is an elfin thing, her cheeks seem to be pulled up by the hands of some invisible and youth-favoring God, and Amaltheia wonders how the people who float through pharmacies unscathed are chosen.

“Oh, uh, excuse me,” the girl says. She reaches out her lilac, manicured nail towards Amaltheia. “Do you work here?”

***

The nozzle of the Reddi Whip can feels strange in Alexander’s nose.

“Farther in, farther in,” Delaney chants.

Alexander doesn’t entirely like Delaney. The two met at the conservatory’s Orientation. She is cruel, insistent­––a cellist, but really an actor’s kid. Her highlights are blocky. They remind him of that woman his father brought back home once, back in California: her name was Cherry. She apologized to Alexander the next morning when she ran into him in the kitchen, for what he wasn’t quite sure, his fifth-grade dick flaccid like a sprained wrist in his Hanes white briefs. But Delaney is a force. She radiates. Being with her would confer something unto Alexander, he knows this.     

So, he inhales.

Blood fucking rush to the head, and he leans back, and then they’re taking the train with the gray, flat benches to something called Greenpoint, and when they stop by a fast-food place Alexander palms someone else’s order without paying, not to be funny, like his school friends think, but because he can’t pay.

“Oh. This is near where my mom works,” he says, dumbly, to no one, as he undresses the stolen burger. One of Delaney’s cronies talks about some show at a Polish-YMCA-type-venue. Salinas was better, Alexander thinks. There were birds in Salinas, and white-hot parking lots that looked like heaven in Salinas, and there were roads so big they had their own names––“Avenues.” 

***

The plastic white and red bag twists tightly around Amaltheia’s fingers and she feels so plain, just a woman returning home from work. An awful feeling. The sky has darkened; is pregnant with rain. She passes by an inconspicuous building with a crowd of people younger than she has ever been snaking around the side of it, Modelos in paper bags. A delicious sort of rhythm can be felt working its way under the pavement. She enters.

An antiquated ballroom––dark, wine-colored. A band plays. She ducks into the ladies’ room, desperate for a reprieve from her oneness against the throngs. A little pack of high school girls congregate before one of the speckled stalls: pale blue eyeshadow, stringy hair, the blacks of their pupils delirious and large and an affront to everything she thought she knew about what teen girls do when the church bell on St. Marks rings out at four P.M.––when they are released. Their appointed leader stalks up to one of the runts, “Oh my god, do you have my Puff Bar?” and the little one rummages through her canvas tote bag.

Amaltheia hurries into a stall. She briefly suspends herself in air, hovering over the toilet seat. She lets her haunches drop tremendously: finality. The white plastic adheres to her under-thighs, and there’s the relief of coming into contact with something.

***

Back in the main hall. The music gets under her fingernails, burrows into the balls of her joints. It makes her remembers she has a body. She does not entirely welcome this feeling. And so, she weaves through the crowd, sidestepping punks and beauties and freaks. “Sorry, sorry,” she chants in the smallest voice she can. She must leave. Dank body odor attacks her; a young couple is entwined just to her right. They look silver––vibrational.  One of their elbows hits her, and she is about to offer apologies when she registers Delaney. The girl has let her blonde hair grow out to an ashy brown. Her eyes are reptilian even in profile, her nose wide and straight. She looks impossibly young. And the hand of Alexander is the hand gripping the girl’s neck now. Really gripping.

Kissing Delaney just feels like two mouths moving against one another, though Alexander knows it is supposed to feel different somehow. Like when he and Amaltheia toured the apartment on Vernon and the empty bedroom looked like heaven, but now it’s just a room with all his shit in it.

He doesn’t like it here in this venue. He doesn’t like the band, and he doesn’t like the kids pressed up against the barrier, clamoring for a scrap of them, either. They seem to him the afterimage of those people with cardboard signs around their neck, screaming at him and the rest of the commuters switching from the L to the 1 at 6th Ave. about rapture and redemption.

He doesn’t feel good. The bad kiss, the bad band. He’s taken to the bathroom and offered a line. The line looks scary but he needs to feel something besides what he’s feeling right now. So, he sniffs it, and in his gut it’s like he’s about to drop on that one Magic Mountain roller coaster and then it’s something more than that and he–––

***

Handsome would be too strong of a word for the bartender. He keeps tugging at his white t-shirt, determined for it to stop clinging to his round hips. Amaltheia is careful not to reach over the bar or try to catch his eye. That always demoralized her the most, back as a girl, waiting for a boy to choose her like a product off a glass shelf.

She used to want to be a theater actress, back when she was young and women with too much rouge would unearth her at the shopping centers sprouting up all over Athens: Rea, Minion, that mall with the cerulean-and-marmalade flooring where she performed oral sex for the first time. Now she sees how exhausting that would have been: she feels her and this bartender, this boy, are doing sex theater. Romance theater. Everything theater. The two try to muster up some sense of indulgence while stealing off to the East River before the boy’s shift is done, but the cold is biting, and the water looks dirty, and Amaltheia feels old. Desire has turned out to be a whole lot of work.

They played this game in Salinas—would you so-and-so, if you knew you’d make it out alive. Would you get hit by a car. Would you shoot yourself in the jaw. Alexander posited this question in the first few weeks at the conservatory.

“Like, if there was a pad under you or you were a stunt double or something,” he elaborated. “Or just, got a do-over.” He was met with silence.

After an hour, and a lot of walking about, Amaltheia enters the bartender’s room. She expects some great, mad disrobing. She imagines him pushing her onto the cotton sheets like those scenes from her teens and twenties and even thirties.

As Amaltheia undoes her brassiere there’s an arterial burst in Alexander’s right eye, but he doesn’t quite know this, and, besides, his tongue is elephantine in his mouth––he wouldn’t be able to say a thing anyhow. He’s conscious for a moment more, couldn’t even be called a moment in our terms. The girls are screaming, the boys too. This touches Alexander––the boys screaming. He thinks: Coney Island. He liked to take the 1 out there this winter, ride the Cyclone til he vomited and walk the blackness of the boardwalk until the halos of light gave out, until there was only the slapping of the sea left. And he doesn’t let himself go as much as he’s sucked back: a shell on a wet strip of sand, taken by the water.

At about half past two in the morning, the M train barges past the railroad apartment’s back window. The smell of semen, clean, astringent, has transformed the tiny bedroom. Amaltheia has the distinct sense that something is expanding, somewhere.

And then he’s with his mother and his friends—around them––atomized. One word comes to him, strange sounding, strangely shaped, spiky. It’s lodged in his teeth, this word that is not his. He’d never heard it before––

She sneaks to the restroom––mildew between the tiles, dampness of the toilet seat cover, bare bulb­­––and addresses herself. The face in the mirror, tired. She texts Alexander, instructing him to not be out later than 11PM. She thinks of Delaney. They were all talismans, all of it: the drinking, the girls, the parties. She was the only true thing. She was his mother. When would he understand––all else is a fugazi.

—it’s in Mom’s voice.