* * *
I took Nick’s car and drove west towards the city. The sun set below the edge of the world, and the shadows came out, longer and sharper than they had been during the summer. I wished I had a few sips of demoniac to hurry things along, but it was past summer now, so certain things would be easier.
I pulled over at Willets Point and bought a candy bar from the general store. I nibbled it hungrily, because I hadn’t had anything since the start of the day, as I walked along the edge of the road. The rubber marks from the coupe’s tires were still visible, faint and dim, on the road, but then the sun sunk a little lower and they disappeared as well.
I didn’t have to wait long.
One moment I was alone on the slick grassy verge, and the next, Myrtle Wilson rose up out of the ditch beside me. Her pale face was perfect, her hair gleamed like a stoplight, her small feet were bare, and unless she left, she would be the Willets Point ghost for a generation or more. I was leaving. I didn’t see why she had to stay.
She started for me, a dire look in her eyes, but I shook my head.
“You want Daisy, and you want Tom, one or the other,” I said firmly. I sounded like Aunt Justine. “They’re going to Barcelona. You could meet them there.”
She looked at me, flat-eyed, pale, and dead. I reached into my purse and gingerly gave her a twenty-dollar bill. It wasn’t much, but it would get her started.
As I drove away, I saw her in the rearview window, gazing towards oncoming traffic, and thumb crooked for a lift.
As the city grew up around me, as the noise and the brutal indifference of it took shape, it hit me all at once that I would be leaving it soon, and for the first time, I had no idea when I would be back. The thought was like a broad hand slapped across my chest, but the pain after that sunk in almost comfortable, like something I could live with until I learned to banish it entirely.
Shanghai first, I thought, because after all, I had been invited, and then Vietnam. It was, I could already tell, going to be a journey full of awkward pauses, terrible humiliations, and so many places where I couldn’t be anyone but myself, but I thought I would survive it well enough. It was full dark by the time I made it to the city proper, and I stopped at a small drug store just as the weedy-looking young man was getting ready to close. I smiled and flirted until he opened back up for me, and as I made my way through the aisles for home goods, I wondered slightly giddily if this might have been one of Gatsby’s, where there might be anything under the cashier’s counter from demoniac to guns to other destructions no less seductive.
I overpaid for my purchase, and in the car again, I unwrapped it with care. Under the sodium streetlamp, I held a gleaming pair of delicate embroidery scissors. I admired them for a moment, their utter sharpness, their ladylike prettiness, and then I clicked them open in my hands.
I brought the blade to the pad of my left ring finger, and before I even felt more than a slight pressure, a dark drop of blood welled up from the cut. It was darker than I was used to seeing, and it ran molasses-slow down to my palm. I considered it for a moment, and then I lapped it up, tasting the copper, and under that the heat of something else.
I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or not, awake or not, but I caught a glimpse of something shining and gray just beyond my eyes.
I was on Gatsby’s pier in West Egg, and if I turned I would see the green light from Daisy’s dock. Instead, I stared at Gatsby’s beautiful house, which hadn’t fallen to pieces like everything else he touched. It stood, locked up and lonely, but I could see it wouldn’t always be that way.
The sky spun over my head, sun to stars, slowly at first and then faster. The grass grew, the roof fell in, people came to gawk and stare at the site of such a tragedy. Some children threw rocks through the windows; a pack of teenagers, the girls with their hair tied back and the boys in workman’s dungarees, forced the door and then ran out shrieking.
The sky spun and the stars shifted. The west side of the house fell down. The lawn grew even wilder, and sometimes deer and things that looked like deer picked their way across the grass, as sweet and dainty as the starlets that had once stumbled from the doors. A pair of men with still faces and long hands came to stare up at the broken windows, and they stood there, as still as I was on the pier, for seven turnings of the sky and were gone. The house was on fire. Burned. It was rafters and beams and char, and there was nothing gold in the black.