Prayers of the Empty

In New York, my uncle visits—the one who dodged the Vietnam draft by making himself so skinny his ribs poked out like hooks, and he could hula hoop with a bangle bracelet. He takes me to a restaurant on Arthur Avenue and chooses the special: linguine with lobster. I watch as he chews his way through pink knuckle meat, as he patrols the perimeter of the platter in wait, his fork held like a KA-BAR knife. The old glint in his eye tells me he has a taste for killing after all. I listen to stories of how he used to be an acid bum, how really, he lived so hard he shouldn’t be alive.

In New York, I lose my virginity in a Hilton Garden Inn to an overly freckled married man who believes there are three kingdoms of heaven. We arrange our bodies around spots of browning blood on white sheets and I floss my finger in the space between his front teeth. We joke that the cleaning lady will become faint at the sight of the blood; it will drive her to fling herself out the window. He tells me, eyes downcast and sheepish as a schoolboy, that I’m so pretty it hurts him to look at me full-on. He warns me though that my prettiness is conditional. He’d rather I not lose any more weight. On his way back to Utah, he smirks like he knows something I don’t, says, God is a lot more forgiving than people think. At least until the Second Coming.

In New York, a Bangladeshi boy offers me a cup of molly water. I drink from his hands like we are doing something holy. In the winter, the boy gets suicidal and starts bringing strange men in twos and threes back to our place. Next to them, he looks like a corn husk doll, disappearing first them, then himself, under the crack of his bedroom door. Never does he tell me who these men are or how long they stay. Besides these fairy-tale giant men and the diaphanous voice of Florence Welch, the boy’s only friend is a spider in the corner of his ceiling, who he desperately tries to keep living.

In New York, I hold my breath from the stench of Madonna lilies during Mass at the Church of St. Francis Xavier. I feed homeless people square meals. I donate children’s books to a literacy nonprofit. None of it makes me feel like life isn’t something just stuck to my teeth or plugging up my pores.

In New York, my body loses all the weight it can. Meanwhile, I think of traveling like a priest, rolling a coin of host across my knuckles, and consecrating the leftover sauce sitting unattended in restaurants. I pretend I’m part of the Korowai tribe on the hunt for “long pig.” I pant listening to the woman on Oprah who ordered a three-tiered wedding cake and ate it all in one weekend with a gallon of milk so cold it stung her teeth. In good dreams I snip off my plait with gold nail clippers and barter hair for black marlin at Dorian’s. I’ll honor the whole fish—eyeballs and viscera, dagger-like bones, and all.

In New York, I meet a little Persian gargoyle whose mouth is always stained red. The mouth tells me how much it wants to shove an apple between my teeth, to gloss my nakedness with “that good Irish butter,” and spit roast me. The mouth smiles gummily and licks its own enamel. It commands me to tie a leash around my neck and walk on all fours.

In New York, self-preservation is also self-harm. I learn the body always keeps score.

In New York, my younger sister who models has learned, like me, to keep quiet in our discomfort. At her smallest, her kneecaps remind me of that urban legend, how if you sneeze eyes wide open, they’ll pop out of your sockets like champagne corks. If asked, we’ll sit shoulder to shoulder in a pot of boiling water. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. And when chef pokes his head in to ask about the temperature, we’ll say, Just add salt. She and I are doing just fine.

In New York, I am haunted by a shit job I had driving to people’s homes to wash and watch over their bodies for shit money. One woman, Wendy, had cerebral palsy. She wore pink nightgowns, and her hair was always greasy; she had gin blossom nose. Joel Osteen blared from the television, and she’d give what little she had to needy folks on infomercials. She rarely left her four walls, which were covered with wooden crosses carved crudely, as if by a child. And then she crawled to get around her apartment. Her food was stacked in miniature cathedrals on the floor or on the bottom shelf of the fridge. She even rigged the sink by tying a long piece of cloth to the faucet. The last time I saw her, I broke one of the knobs on her stove by accident. She screamed and I cried for the pity of it all. I kept going back to punish myself for what I had done.

In New York, I attend synagogue on high holidays to smell the hunger off all those who are starved.

In New York, there’s a pain scale for everything but emptiness. 

In New York, my twin discovers Tinder is a cure-all for low self-esteem. She punches her ticket on the Metro-North or New Jersey Transit—depending on who all she’s seeing that night. Once, a man masturbates next to her as she watches television, all the while praying he stops. Another time, she meets someone who is 36 to her 19. She sleeps with him for revenge on an ex. The ex stalks her and watches their dates through a periscope. The ex is an alcoholic and a cheater who tries to sell his ass for sex on Craigslist. The ex has an assault rifle. The ex threatens to kidnap and rape her. The ex spits on her face in front of a family.

In New York, a homeless man walks around with chains tied around his legs and feet, chewing on a miniature statue of Christ.

In New York, a woman unravels her hair from a bun each night. She plucks at the hair in the middle of her scalp with gold tweezers. One by one until there is a naked hole on her head, clean and shiny as a cue ball. Each morning, a woman braids her hair into a plait. She wraps the hair into a bun to hide the hole.

In New York, the not uncomplimentary sounds of opera, masturbation, and a fistfight make their way through the bedroom wall to my stomach. I draw on a cat’s eye with Lancôme pencil, wrap myself in linen shroud and gently step into a hermetically sealed tomb. Everything reminds me of the toad I skewered as a child because the neighbor boy asked me to do it. Everything reminds me of the white bird I tried to hold in vain and in doing so, yanked out its feathers. In all the time I’m in New York, I never let myself come. I’d rather give spontaneous birth to toads and white-feathered birds and set them free outside my window.

In New York, I learn not to trust hungry things. I learn to trust nothing with teeth.

In New York, I dare to swallow sneezes whole like pills, eyes bulging as I receive blessings. I eat hulking slabs of fat-veined bacon at Peter Luger, hunt and hork rainbow bagels, pay forty dollars for a popsicle in a wine glass, and eat cold lobster rolls on piers where I can pretend to be elsewhere. I do all the things I am supposed to do.

In New York, bodies ugly the city. They stretch out like crucifixes twisted with rigor.

In New York, there are cabaret shows on Dover Street at midnight. Girls in outfits of cascading green feathers dance between never-ending rainfalls of pink confetti. I listen to a conversation between women, one of whom tells her friend she fucked one of the Boston Marathon bombers. The friend makes a little red “o” with her mouth and orders a gin martini with blue cheese stuffed olives because she hasn’t had dinner.

In New York, rats are put in cages with levers that, when pressed, induce the feeling of orgasm. The rats spend so much time pressing the lever, they forget to eat and starve to death.

In New York, I work in publishing. I sit next to a cardboard cutout of Edward Snowden whose eyes have been removed with a pair of gold scissors. My boss meditates to a tiny statue of Buddha. A higher-up makes sexist jokes at the assistants’ expense and gifts us his leftover lunch. The assistants and I order coconut margaritas after work and flirt with men who aren’t our boyfriends. The assistants and I gum cocaine dust off Victoria's Secret credit cards in jungle-themed bathrooms. One day, instead of doing our jobs, the assistants and I sit slack-jawed watching Notre Dame burn to the ground.

In New York, two women perform ancient voodoo rituals and bond while eating each other’s blood. In New York, someone snorts tequila off a spoon. In New York, there’s a pain scale for everything but emptiness.