The woman with the pink hair doesn’t apologize as she muscles her way in front of Kyle with her boyfriend in tow, the oldest trick in the book since most men are more likely to move aside for someone with tits. Her boyfriend is younger than Kyle—and everyone else at the show—by at least two decades. There’s something achingly familiar about the lanky frame that he presses against Kyle as he passes, hard, almost aggressive, leaving a musk of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed hair in his wake. With his biker jacket and shaggy haircut, he looks straight out of 2004. What’s old is new again, thinks Kyle. The boy catches his eye and gives him a taunting little nod. Why? Maybe because the boy is closer to the stage, maybe because he has a cute, pink-haired girlfriend who will probably let him try whatever he wants later, maybe because the boy is in his twenties, and it’s a Tuesday night in Manhattan, and his life is unspooling ahead of him, a golden highway of youthful opportunity, and Kyle is a withering middle-aged soon-to-be divorcé with a bad knee.
By the time the crowd reorganizes itself, Kyle is staring at the pimpled back of a six-foot-two bald guy’s neck. He should have come earlier. If Cass were here, they would have been the first to arrive, would have already hit up the merch table and have a comfortable view from the throng of superfans at the foot of the stage. Instead, he’s crammed by the sound booth, his sightline blocked by an oversized Billy Corgan clone.
Vertigo, the voice of an anxious generation—once so young, barely older than he was when he first saw them the October of his senior year at Middlebury.
He’d purchased the Vertigo Fresh Kills twenty-fifth anniversary tour tickets last year, when Cass had still been in the picture. They were her favorite band. They are her favorite band, but she isn’t here, next to him. She’d packed her things three months ago and went to her sister’s up in Westchester. Kyle kept expecting her to call, at least to ask about the extra ticket, but she never did. Now he was at the Bowery Ballroom, being slowly crushed to death by middle-aged indie rockers.
A warm hand on his midsection. Sadie, with drinks. Sadie is what his father would call a “good time gal,” with her dimples and the curly mop of hair that bounces when she laughs. A simple girl, the kind that’s happy so long as she has a cold beer and a song to dance to. It dawns on Kyle that this was a sexist thing for his father to say, and for a moment he feels a flush of shame that he simply let his dad go on like that, let his nasty little classifiers delve into his psyche and color his world.
“They were out of the IPA, so I got you a lager.” She hands it to him and the cold froth spills onto his hand.
It is only their third date. Sadie was the one who insisted they come, downright begged him to bring her along when she found out he had tickets. He’d been planning on selling them. She’d been obsessed with Vertigo since she heard Asher Trilling, the lead singer, do guest vocals on a track by a pop star whose name he vaguely recognized. “I don’t usually go for nostalgia acts,” she’d added.
Kyle had done his best not to take offense. The Stones were a nostalgia act, as was that cash-grabbing Grateful Dead tribute group. Vertigo was just a regular old indie rock band that had stayed together. They’d put out a new record four years ago, for crying out loud, and all the band members had thriving side projects. He forgave Sadie, though, eight years younger than him. To her, they were old man’s music.
He sips his beer, nearly spilling it as the crowd presses forward toward the stage. He’d forgotten how rabid Vertigo fans were. Cass had once gotten a black eye from a crowd surfer at a Pianos gig. He’d thought they would mellow with age.
“How many times have you seen these guys?” asks Sadie.
He thinks back. There was the free show in Central Park three—no—five years ago. He and Cass had gotten there early and waited for hours in the sweltering sun before they finally let the fans onto the asphalt amphitheater. There was the Oblique Strategies tour, where Asher Trilling had been so drunk he lay down in the middle of the stage as the band played “Concrete Daydream” and the crowd screamed the lyrics he was too inebriated to sing. There was the Asher solo show at City Winery. Definitely at least a dozen when they were up-and-coming, playing Williamsburg and Lower East Side venues. And then, of course, that first show at Middlebury, where he and Cass had met two decades ago.
“I don’t even know,” he tells Sadie. “Too many.”
“So jealous,” she says. She squeezes his arm as screams break out. The band has emerged. When Asher appears in a torn T-shirt and jeans, the fans become unruly. Asher puts on his guitar and strums it, singing in his signature gravelly snarl:
Spiraling through the city at night
White teeth gleaming
Kyle is jostled by the crowd and his drink flies out of his hand. “Omigod,” he hears Sadie yelp, “I’ll get you another one.” Before he can tell her not to worry, she’s flitted away. He has no idea how she’ll get back through the wall of fans, who are shouting along to every word.
Kyle realizes he’s singing along too. It’s Pavlovian, he can’t help it. Asher is puffier, more haggard looking than usual. He was once hailed as a genius, the second coming of a rock god of yore. Dylan, Reed, Bowie, Cohen rolled into one. It was a lot to of pressure to put on a blue-collar kid from Camden, New Jersey. Critics frothed over his soulful eyes, his gently rumpled hair, his voice far too deep and weathered for his age and small frame. Now, though, Kyle can see that the transformation from sexy, tortured poet to raving old drunk is underway. The band members, too, are showing their age. Drake Lee sports a white beard and his bass barely hides a subtle paunch, and the guitarist Lazarus Tucci’s lustrous black curls are speckled with gray, the craggy lines of his face exaggerated by the white spotlight. The drummer, a new guy, looks about twelve years old in comparison. Kyle runs a hand through his own thinning hair.
Vertigo, the voice of an anxious generation—once so young, barely older than he was when he first saw them the October of his senior year at Middlebury. It was his girlfriend Natasha who’d wanted to go, Natasha who’d dragged him away from Nicomachean Ethics because some depressed-sounding indie band was playing in the Gamut Room. Little did she know she was dragging him to his future, to Cass.
Cass went to Bennington, where Vertigo had played two nights prior. A true devotee, she’d followed the band up to Middlebury. It was Natasha who had struck up a conversation with her, Natasha who offered to let her sleep in her bed while she stayed over at Kyle’s. Natasha. Kyle’s stomach twists with guilt at the thought of her. They’d become something of a trio after that, with Cass spending weekends up on campus, inserting herself into their social circles. She told them that she didn’t get along with the other Bennington students, so earnest and pure. But after graduation, she confessed that it was because of her crush on Kyle.
He cranes his neck, looking for Sadie, but not actually looking for Sadie. He’s looking for Cass. Cass needed space, she’d said. Then she kept needing space. Time to work on herself. He’d seen it coming, even if he didn’t want to admit it. She’d been miles away, short-tempered, lost in thought. He’d ask her what was wrong, and she’d just sigh and shake her head and look at her phone, anything to avoid eye contact. The Vertigo anniversary tour tickets were a last-ditch attempt to break through whatever it was that was eating her.
After months of couple’s therapy, she concluded that all she saw was her old self when she was with him, and she hated it. She wanted a change. Kyle was too passive, always letting life wash over him, always looking backward, always waxing on about the old days. She couldn’t stand it. He could change, he told her, and tried his hardest to convince himself that this was true. He could be whatever she wanted, if she could only tell him what that was. But it was too late. She wanted a fresh start, something without all the ghosts. She’d used that phrase: without all the ghosts. There was only one ghost he could think of.
The air around him grows thick and hazy—the fog machine has been turned on. Smoke whirls in razor sharp beams of light. The crowd around him is a shadowy sea, roiling and black. Asher picks up an acoustic guitar and the sea roars as he plays the opening notes of “Pockets,” holding his mouth to the mic as if it’s a lover’s appendage, his voice barely louder than a whisper. Dread wells up inside Kyle. This is the not the song he wants to hear tonight. The keyboards and drums crash in as the chorus starts up:
And suddenly with you it all seems possible
An orange blossom sunrise over distant shores
Where I skip away my stones by the pocket-full
‘Cause you’ve caught me, you’ve got me, I’m all yours
This was their song, wasn’t it? Didn’t the world become only the two of them when it came on shuffle? Hadn’t she learned the chords on ukulele and serenaded him for his thirty-second birthday? He pulls out his phone and records. Surely Cass would want to see a video of this song, out of all the songs.
He is about to hit send when he feels a rushing in his temples, and, through the haze, glimpses the guy in the leather biker jacket. He had one just like it, a relic from one of the vintage shops on St. Mark’s, before it had completely turned over to the NYU kids. The guy wears his hair the same way he used to, too—unkempt fronds curling down past the ears. The guy though—hardly a guy, more of a boy—is standing, swaying, nodding his head along with Asher.
The boy turns his head, and Kyle catches a glimpse of his profile. The rushing intensifies. He knows this person and knows him well, but from where he can’t place. A former intern, perhaps? Something compels him to move closer to where the boy stands for a better look. He worms his way between the two tall rockabilly chicks standing in front of him. To his surprise they yield. He’s close to the boy now, can smell the leather of his jacket.
There’s commotion onstage. Asher is yelling something at Lazarus for screwing up the keyboard part. Lazarus is shrugging him off, just keeps playing like it’s business as usual. The song ends. “Sorry everyone,” Asher says, slurring. “Some of us are a little rusty after twenty-five years of playing that song at every fucking show.” The crowd roars with laughter, screaming Asher. When Kyle’s gaze returns to the spot where the boy was standing, he’s gone.
What is he doing here? His knee is sore from standing, his ankles chafed from ill-fitting shoes. He should never have come, should have sold those tickets or given them to Cass. There was a time when Asher’s drunken ramblings had felt authentic, edgy. But now, with Asher pushing fifty, they are just sad. Asher is a mess. And the crowd: a bunch of enablers! Asher needs rehab, not a twenty-fifth anniversary tour. And all Vertigo does for Kyle is bring up old memories. He resolves to find Sadie and suggest that the two of them hit up Wellfleet down the street for drinks, but then he remembers that Wellfleet closed a decade ago, and he doesn’t know what bar is there now or if it even is a bar anymore. This part of Manhattan feels foreign to him, the restaurant supply shops slowly giving way to trendy cocktail bars and gleaming high-rises, the only constant being the lines of the unfortunate huddled outside the Bowery Mission.
He pushes through the swaying bodies, towards the boy and his pink-haired partner. She’s wearing a parka though it’s June and already sweltering. On her backpack is a collage of what look like band patches, most from the nineties and early aughts, ska and pop punk stuff that Kyle was never into but that Natasha would always have playing in her room.
Just then the boy and the pink-haired girl start making out in the middle of everyone, really going for it, feral and profane. The crowd, pretending not to notice, inch out of their way. In the wandering spotlight, he sees hands down jeans, up shirts, hears small, wet, sucking noises followed by moans and gasps.
The chords for “Concrete Daydream” sound. Phones shoot into the air. There’s nothing Kyle can do but move with the frenzied throng. They scream the words to the chorus. A spotlight bathes them in blue light.
I’m a false start, I’m bad art
I’m a losing bet, a wet cigarette
I’m nothing till you say that you want me
The boy is facing Kyle now, as the girl runs her tongue up his neck. He looks straight at Kyle, holds his gaze. Kyle can make out every detail of the boy’s face. The dark stubble, the scowl, the scar from an ill-advised eyebrow ring that, in high school, had gotten infected.
The boy is him: Kyle Richard Beaumont III, aged twenty-one. There is no question in his mind. He must be going crazy. Finally losing it. The stress of separation from Cass too much to handle. Boy Kyle grins at him, revealing what looks to Kyle like a mouth of pointed teeth, glistening brown.
Kyle stumbles backward, his fall broken by a couple of dudes dressed, inexplicably, in Western gear. Careful buddy, they say. Then he sees the curly hair, the dimples, his good time gal. Boy Kyle and the pink-haired girl are nowhere to be seen.
“I lost you,” she says, and hands him his drink.
“Sorry,” he says. “We can go if you want. I know these shows can be a lot.”
“No way,” says Sadie, grinning. “This is wild. I love it.” She puts her arm around his waist and Kyle decides that maybe it’s okay if they stay, the show can’t be much longer anyway. The important thing is making new memories, Cass-less memories. Boy Kyle was nothing but a trick of the light. Sadie holds him tighter.
Asher is illuminated in red, chugging a bottle of wine, the dark liquid streaming down his neck and staining his shirt as the crowd screams an endless crescendo. The room is airless and humid, the odor of weed smoke and BO thick enough to make Kyle stifle a gag. Moisture gathers on his upper lip and under his arms, collects in a slimy layer on his back. He gulps his lukewarm beer. If he’s here, he may as well get drunk as Asher Trilling. Just then Boy Kyle pushes between them, elbowing Sadie in the face. The pink-haired girl runs after him, tittering.
“Ow!” says Sadie. A jewel of blood is forming on her swelling lip.
“What the fuck was that?” Kyle says. He hastily puts a napkin over her cut. He’s shaking with rage. What is wrong with these people? Finishing his drink, he resolves to give whoever that kid is a piece of his mind.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, squeezing Sadie’s shoulder before briskly making his way in the direction of the bar, where he saw Boy Kyle and the pink-haired girl disappear, knocking into fans left and right, leaving a trail of hissed curses. One would think the crowd would be in a good mood, but everyone is a cantankerous asshole. A familiar backpack bounces through the exit.
Walking out onto Delancey Street is like stepping into a hot mouth. The air is rank with piss and French fries. Rats rustle through the piles of trash on the curb. It’s rained, and the sidewalks gleam silver in the lamplight. Somewhere, someone is screaming what sounds like rascals! repeatedly. He clocks Boy Kyle and the pink-haired girl in the awning of a hardware store with a metal grate pulled over its entrance. Boy Kyle playfully shoves the pink-haired girl into the grate. She’s shrieking with laughter, her lips done up in a slash of deep purple, the eyeliner—always too much, though he’d never told her that. It’s Natasha.
But it can’t be Natasha. Natasha is dead.
Senior year. Kyle was throwing a party at his parents’ cabin that bitter cold February weekend. Natasha had been chilly towards Kyle ever since he’d told her he was thinking about backpacking through Europe the summer after graduation. They were supposed to move to New York City together, where Natasha had received a coveted internship at a women’s glossy. Unlike you, I don’t have a job at Daddy’s firm waiting for me whenever I decide to stop dicking around, she’d said. He’d assured her he wasn’t planning on working for his father, who was an asshole. She’d just rolled her eyes. The weekend was supposed to be a chance for a change of scenery. To mix things up. And Cass would be there. They couldn’t fight in front of Cass.
A dozen people in the cabin quickly doubled and tripled, and Kyle realized there were strangers at the party, people he’d never seen before. Natasha didn’t seem to mind. She was on a mission. Kyle eyed her with disgust as she knocked back shots with some burly townies who had materialized out of nowhere.
“Who are those people?” Cass said, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“I have no idea,” said Kyle. “Let’s get some air.”
They put coats on and walked out to the porch. Snow was blowing in horizontal lines, and they watched it together, smoking cigarettes and shivering as the party raged inside. Kyle told her about the fight he’d had with Natasha.
“Most couples don’t last long past graduation,” she said.
“I know,” said Kyle. The thought of being alone made his stomach turn.
Then, somehow, Cass’s mouth was on his. He leaned into her heat, the back of his neck prickling from the cold. He couldn’t bring himself to stop, he wanted all of her. Cass was right, he and Natasha were basically over, she was probably hooking up with a townie right now. This was meant to happen.
Natasha’s shriek brought him back to the present, the wind, the numbing chill. Her eyes shone with rage, the fuchsia of her hair even more vivid against the snow.
“I’m sorry!” said Cass. She was shaking, on the verge of tears.
He remembers an ancient Garfield cartoon he watched as a child, how the orange cat spoke with unmoving lips. Was he telepathically connected with Jon, his owner? Or was it all in Jon’s head?
“Of-fucking-course,” was all Natasha said, putting her unlit cigarette hastily back in its case and pulling her keys from the pocket of her parka.
They both begged her not to go. It was snowing. The roads were treacherous sober, and she was far from it. But Natasha was a stubborn drunk. She gripped her keys tight, locked the two of them out of the car, nearly ran over Cass backing out of the driveway. They stood, helpless, as her taillights disappeared into the storm.
The townies found the car a mile down the road as they were leaving, after Kyle had kicked everyone except Cass out. She’d skidded on black ice and crashed into a boulder, dying instantly. His parents were livid, though Kyle was sure it had more to do with the trashed cabin and the rare bottle of Macallan that had been consumed from their wet bar than the death of his girlfriend. There would be no backpacking through Europe that summer, they said, not on their dime. Kyle would move to the city after graduation, work for his father and learn a thing or two about responsibility. And that’s what he did. What he was still doing.
At the funeral, he and Cass played their parts: he was the grieving boyfriend, she the distraught friend. He sat with her family, holding her mother’s hand as she wept. All he could think of was Natasha’s face in the porch light, distorted with pain and betrayal. She’d taken that hot ball of rage to her snowy grave.
Whatever Boy Kyle is planning on doing to Natasha, it can’t be good. He grabs him by the jacket and pulls him off her. She gazes at Kyle, her purple lips pursed in a bemused expression, as if he’s just said something clever.
“What the fuck!” snarls Boy Kyle, in a hoarse voice that seems to be coming from elsewhere, since Boy Kyle’s mouth is closed. Kyle can only stare, slack-jawed, still only half believing his own eyes. He remembers an ancient Garfield cartoon he watched as a child, how the orange cat spoke with unmoving lips. Was he telepathically connected with Jon, his owner? Or was it all in Jon’s head? Or was it all in Garfield’s head, Jon’s responses strictly rhetorical, the way you mutter to a pet without expecting a response?
“Are those fucking Dockers?” says Natasha, pointing at his pants. Her lips, too, remain still. She sounds as if there’s a clod of dirt caught in her throat. “Who dressed you, your drunk mom? Or was it your lying skank wife? Oh, wait . . .”
“Who are you?” Kyle asks. It’s all he can think to say.
“Who do I look like?” Her parka is open and she’s wearing a low-cut tank, her skin bluish white in the halogen glow. Unwittingly, Kyle feels desire well up inside of him. His phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out. Sadie is wondering where he went off to.
“Your good time,” says Boy Kyle. “Will you go to her, or will you stay out here with us?” He stares darkly at Kyle.
“He’s staying here, obviously,” she says, in that bratty way of hers. She steps closer to Kyle and his sweat turns icy. “Aren’t you?” she whispers into his ear, emitting no breath.
He’s shivering now, teeth chattering. He wraps his arms around himself in a feeble attempt to keep warm.
Natasha laughs hysterically, her cackles turning to bestial howls. He sees her own set of glistening brown teeth, her oil-slick eyes. Rascals! Rascals! Rascals! echoes through the streets. A car backfires. Natasha pushes Kyle, hard enough that he stumbles over and falls backward, wincing with pain as his tailbone hits the sidewalk. A crew of babbling stiletto-heeled twentysomethings gingerly step over his feet—Kyle is just another minor obstacle on their way to the party. They don’t ask if he’s alright and are already marching across the street by the time Natasha straddles him and holds his shoulders down while Boy Kyle kneels at his side, quivering with sinister fits of giggles. Kyle tries to squirm away, but she is surprisingly strong, or maybe he is just weak, or maybe he is just letting it happen, letting them sink their incisors into his gut, his shoulder, his neck, until he sees only snow.