I nodded because he was right, and I waved to him when a black car with a driver whose face I could not see pulled over to let him in.
I walked through the palaces of ash, and more than once I had to hide because the men who lived there were a restless lot. Bearing the heads of pigs and dogs, like those cursed by Circe for crimes against her, they came out of their houses and crept into the windows of their neighbors, but their wives, I saw, roamed not at all. I giggled as a man with a parrot head somehow got turned around and climbed into his own window, making his wife shriek in anger and distaste, and I moved on.
The stars were fainter here than they were in West Egg, but I tilted my head back and drank to them anyway, letting the demoniac give them voices to tell me their secrets. Stars didn’t talk like people did, and I couldn’t listen with my ears, but when I closed my eyes, they appeared to throw moving pictures across the darkness.
The stars showed me a neat town of wood houses, not grass-sided huts like I had always pictured. A woman with her hair cropped like mine, her face round like mine, shook her head at Eliza Baker, shook it again and again before turning away, and I saw Eliza with a packet of money in her hand and a confused look on her face.
I was meant to love her, you know, I told the stars solemnly.
Oh? Which?
It was confusing to me, so I asked for something else, and after some thought, the stars offered me this:
Nick’s great-grandmother died just as the war was starting. She was a tiny little lady, and age had put camouflaging wrinkles on her face, turned her sleek black hair white, and given her such a stoop that no one was much able to look at her straight on anymore. In her old-fashioned dresses and her small and elegant apartment in Milwaukee, almost no one in St. Paul remembered that she was foreign.
I remembered what Nick had said, that she was born as her missionary parents came off the Carmine on the Gulf of Siam. I wondered if I had seen some kind of family resemblance in his face after all, whether his dark hair was more like mine than Daisy’s, whether there was something kept hidden somewhere in his easy handsome features. I didn’t think so. I only considered the thought because of what I knew now, and then when his grandmother held up a pair of scissors in her hand, looking straight at me with a solemn look, I realized I knew something else too, and maybe had for a long time.
No wonder I like you so, I thought, and then I put it straight out of my mind.
“Can’t you show me something important?” I asked the stars. “Drinking this much demoniac may just kill me, and I would like it to be a bit grander than old family secrets…”
The stars considered and then the ground in front of me lit up, the starlight catching on every bottle cap, scrap of metal, and lost bolt. Curious, I followed their winding path through the palaces of ash, and I came at last to the billboard west of Willets Point.
T. J. Eckleburg disdained the glorious city of ash below his eyes. They were closed tight, and while a sensible part of me told me that I only misremembered, that they had always been closed, I knew that that was not true.
I took another sip from the demoniac, thinking that it was rather shabby of Gatsby to give us one only partially filled. Surely I hadn’t drunk enough for it to feel so light in my hand. I glared up at the billboard, frustrated with its silence, and frustration opened up into a childish fury.
“Well, come on,” I said loudly. “Speak. You see so much, what’s the point of you if you don’t speak?”
The eyes stayed closed, but then I realized that I was trying to get water out of a stone.
“No mouth,” I said to the stars. “I can fix that.”
Off to the side there was a skinny ladder, and after I discarded my flimsy slippery shoes, I used it to climb up to the narrow walkway ledge that stretched from end to end across the billboard. I paced back and forth in front of it for a moment, but no further inspiration came until I looked down at the bottle in my hand.