It’s never love in Brooklyn. She slouched there with chipped burgundy nails wrapped around a gin and tonic, ice longmelted. Her mascara had that perfect smudge that cost either eight dollars or eight hundred, depending on whether it was by accident or design. The bartender knew her name. Tracy, he said. She nodded without looking up.
Tracy has returned to the bar and it’s about forty minutes later. There’s something different in her posture. The difference between before and after is always visible if you know what to look for. She orders a shot of something clear and knocks it back, then catches my eye in the mirror. I look away like a decent person should. Her eyes carry the particular vacancy found in bus station windows after midnight—reflective surfaces that have witnessed too much coming and going to maintain any sense of permanence. They’re the kind of eyes that have learned to look through things rather than at them. And now they’re fixed on me with the practiced calculation of a woman figuring out if I’m worth the effort.
Tracy slides down three bar stools until she’s next to me. “You’re staring,” she huffed.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It costs extra,” but there’s a hint of humor there. Not the laugh from earlier, but something authentic.
“I don’t do that sort of thing,” she said, meaning she doesn’t give freely what others value enough to purchase.
I don’t call her whore with the hollow bravado of wounded pride. I don’t want to buy her. I don’t want to save her. Both impulses disgust me equally. I want to know if she’s ever seen the desert sunrise from the Valley of Fire, where the rocks turn the exact color of living hearts. But that’s not the kind of question you ask.
She pushed her hair behind one ear, revealing a small tattoo—not dice or feathers, but a tiny constellation. Cassiopeia, I think. The queen boasted of her beauty and was punished by the gods. Forced to circle the celestial pole forever, alternately upright and upside down, a cosmic reminder of the price of pride. My sister had tattoos—thirteen of them, scattered across her body like landmarks on a map leading to nowhere. A blackbird on her wrist. Words in languages she didn’t speak crawling up her spine. Decorations or armor, I don’t know. Maybe both. She tells me the last one she got wasa simple line drawing of a keyhole on her inner thigh. When I asked what it meant, she laughed that peculiar laugh that never reached her eyes and said, “It’s where I keep all my secrets.”
Tracy’s fingers tap a rhythm against the bar, nails clicking. I recognize the cadence My sister used to tap her fingers the same way before a thunderstorm, before walking out the door to work. A physical telegraph of impending damage.
Tracy stirs her drink with one finger, burgundy nail polish catching the low light. “You know what’s fucked up?” Tracy says, “I have a master’s degree in art history. Specialized in the Dutch Renaissance. All those paintings of women in doorways? The ones that look like they’re just standing around looking pretty? They were advertisements. The painters coded them. Certain flowers meant certain services. Certain poses. The whole history of Western art is just a fancy menu for men to order from.”
The bartender slides her a bowl of pretzels she didn’t ask for. You want to know something true?” I ask Tracy. The bourbon is talking now, burning bridges as it goes down.
“The day after my sister’s funeral, I went to the corner where she used to work. Stood there for hours. I wanted to understand what she saw every night. What the world looked like from that exact spot.”
The wind carried fast food wrappers in lazy spirals across the street. Cars slowed as they passed, drivers’ faces turning toward me with expressions ranging from curiosity to hunger to contempt. A cop drove by three times. The third time, he stopped. Asked if I was selling. When I said no, he asked what I was doing there if not selling. Like that corner couldn’t possibly exist for any other purpose. Like she couldn’t have existed for any other purpose.
I stood there until my feet ached and my skin felt sunburnt despite the cloud cover. Stood there while the light changed quality, while the corner transformed from daytime banality to nighttime hunting ground. I wanted to hate the place for what it had taken from her, but all I felt was the overwhelming ordinariness of it—just concrete and asphalt and streetlights flickering at dusk. Just another stage where people played out the ancient dance of desire. The corner hadn’t killed her. It was just where she happened to be dying.
“And what did you say?” Tracy asks, her voice is soft but steady.
“I told him I was just waiting for someone who wasn’t coming back.”
My sister died in September. Not a poetic month for dying. Just hot enough to speed decomposition, just cool enough at night to make the medical examiner miscalculate the time of death. They found her in a drainage ditch off the expressway, still wearing one shoe. The other was never recovered. I sometimes imagine it washing out to sea, traveling the currents, and ending up on some distant shore where someone finds it and wonders about the missing foot.
The last time I saw her alive, she was wearing a dress the color of convenience store slushies, electric blue and chemically sweet. Her lips were chapped but covered in something glossy. She kept touching her throat like she was checking for a pulse. The air between us hummed with unasked questions, with accusations neither of us had the courage to voice. She’d been using again. I could tell by the way her eyes couldn’t settle on anything, like hummingbirds darting from flower to flower, never resting, never satisfied. When she hugged me goodbye, her body felt hollow, bird-boned, and fragile. I remember thinking she smelled like peach shampoo and something medicinal underneath. I didn’t know it would be the last time. You never do.
Tracy orders another drink without speaking, just a gesture to the bartender who nods in understanding. Her hands shake slightly as she lifts the glass—not the tremor of withdrawal or fear, but the fine vibration of someone whose nervous system has forgotten how to be still.
Combat veterans have the same tremor. Children who’ve grown up in war zones. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.
“Does it get any easier?” she asks, not looking at me.
Tracy’s phone vibrates on the bar. A text message turns her face blue in the dim light. Her features rearrange themselves; the face you wear when you’re about to leave your body behind while someone else uses it. As she gathers her purse (Dolce & Gabbana, 2007), she’s already halfway gone.
As she walks toward the door, I notice she’s slightly favoring her left leg. A small tell, a tiny limp you could miss if you blinked. I wonder what caused it—a rough customer, uncomfortable shoes, or something older, something from before this life. I wonder about the constellation behind her ear, what made her choose to wear the queen who boasted on her skin. I wonder if she ever saw the Valley of Fire at sunrise and if the rocks turned the color of living hearts for her too.
Through the bar window, I watch a man in a business suit piss against a building across the street. This city consumes and expels with equal indifference. Devours dreams and shits out compromises. Outside, the streets glitter with broken glass. Brooklyn wears its darkness-like costume jewelry—flashy and cheap and trying desperately to look valuable. Women like Tracy, like my sister, materialize in doorways and in corner shops. Men circle in cars with tinted windows, hunting for something they can’t name, something they believe exists in the negative spaces of these women’s lives. The moon is gibbous. It hangs bloated in the sky, watching it all with the indifference of something that has witnessed this same scene for millennia. It will still be hanging there when we’re all gone—the women, the men who buy them, the brothers who couldn’t save them, the mothers who mourn them. The moon doesn’t care about the names we call things or the lies we tell ourselves to make it through the night.
In the morning, someone will sweep up cigarette butts. Someone will hose down the vomit and piss from these stoops. Someone will collect the empty bottles, candy wrappers, and pregnancy test packaging from these gutters. The city will perform its daily ablutions, washing away the evidence of our collective desperation. And tomorrow night, Tracy will put on her working face and stand in some doorway, and men will slow their cars as they pass, and the whole dance will begin again.
It wasn’t love when I spotted her at the bar. It’s never love in Brooklyn anyway. It was recognition–one shipwreck survivor spotting another clinging to their own piece of floating debris. We both shared the same side of the Earth and dream in three-dimensions.
In my dreams, my sister still has both shoes. Her throat bears no bruises. Her arms show no tracks. In my dreams, she stands in the Valley of Fire at sunrise, watching rocks turn the exact color of her still-beating heart. But I always wake to the same truth: the dead stay dead, the broken stay broken, and the missing shoe never washes back to shore.