* * *
—
He was walking through the Meatpacking District, toward their apartment on Washington Street, a simmering five-story tenement. He was carrying something impossibly heavy and hot in his arms. He set it down. Examined it. Slats. Buttons. FRIEDRICH. “Sasha!” he shouted upstairs. “Bhai! I bought an air conditioner. Help me carry it up.”
Sasha leaned out from their fifth-floor window, frizzy hair down to his shoulders, tortoiseshell glasses, pissy twenty-year-old look. “What do we need it for?” he shouted. “It’s September.”
“That’s when you get the good deals. Help me! I’m dying here.”
“I’m watching a Mets game.”
“Since when?”
“I discovered sports yesterday. They’re amazing. Oh, shit! You made me miss the touchdown. Stand there. I’ll throw down the garbage from the fridge.”
“No, I got to walk this up. Why won’t you help me?”
“Take the elevator!”
“We don’t have an elevator.”
“Of course, we have an elevator. What’s wrong with you?”
He dragged the air conditioner by the cord into the grimy vestibule. He felt like he was about to start having loose motions. He looked around the extinguished faux marble of the lobby. Fake gold chains, fake leather, fake marble. What a life he led. Everything was quiet except for the labored sound of his own breathing. He put his hand up to his mouth; there was no tube snaking out. The stairwell was to the left, but it was cordoned off with a sign that read STAIRS OUT, USE ELEVATOR.
And there was an elevator where none should have been, a thrumming little white box that made no sense in a five-floor walk-up of this vintage. He dragged the air conditioner inside by the cord and hit the floor with his elbow. “Hold the door!” a voice shouted. “Please, sir.” Vinod stuck out his hand to keep the elevator from closing. The door sighed as it drew back to reveal a large winded man in a Mets T-shirt. He got in and looked at Vinod with kindly eyes, “Uncle” eyes, Vinod thought for some reason. He took up most of the elevator, but Vinod felt safe with him around. He did not want to be in the elevator alone, that prototypical city coffin. “What floor?” he asked.
The man smiled, his eyes on Vinod. “What floor, sir?” Vinod asked again. He liked that they were using “sir” with each other. Formality in an informal land. An old-fashioned civility. The man did not answer, but began to approach him, slowly, slowly, slowly, a tiny half step at a time like a shy goat, until Vinod could smell the dense complicated sweetness of his reek. “I have to get upstairs now,” Vinod said. “I bought an air conditioner on sale.” But soon he felt the man’s stomach and breasts, each loose and inviting like pillows, leaning into him, pushing him against the wall, ever gently, but always insistently, as if he was trying to make an argument with his body. “Why?” Vinod asked. He heard the fullness of his accent. Vai. “Why are you doing that?” But the man kept pressing into him as the meager air pushed out of Vinod’s lungs, and he kept staring at him and smiling the sad autumnal smile of his, his lips within kissing distance of Vinod’s. He kept pressing into him, without desire but with his whole being, as if administering a vertical massage, and as much as Vinod tried to squirm out of the all-enveloping flattening mass, he could not. And as much as he wanted to protest, he could not. That was the most frightening thing of all: he could not speak. And he could not bring his hand up to his mouth to check for the tube. He realized, at the very last minute, that the elevator was moving downward, past the basement and into the core of the earth.
* * *
—
Four hands were directing him toward the bathroom. He was wearing a mask, but neither his lungi nor his Jockey underwear. He looked up. Karen and Masha had on their masks and face shields and in the dull red glow of the incandescent lightbulbs they resembled Martians. He shivered in fear, forgetting to be ashamed before Masha even as it swung like a metronome between his legs. “Did I have an accident?” he whispered.
“No, you’re okay, honey,” Karen said.
“Did you read the material I left?” he wheezed. “The MOLST and the articles? It’s notarized.”
“You shouldn’t be talking,” Masha said. “Concentrate on your breath.”
“That party,” Vinod said. “What happened at that party for Sasha? In Fort Greene?”
“I’ve arranged everything,” Karen said. “We’re going to get you well.”