Work Text:
Of metropolises, she once wrote in a competition-winning essay:
“The modern beast has no fur or fangs. It has bones of concrete and river-dirt blood; it has smog puffing out of its mechanical lungs and junkies coating the walls of its guts; it speaks no language, not even animal—its words aren’t roars but whirs and revs, egged on by accelerators. Its arteries glow orange at night, bright reds and yellows flowing through its vessels; its eyes are fluorescent lights blinking and bright, unnatural colors.
“The modern beast does not need to hunt for its prey—history has built it to be as gigantic as it is listless, waiting for an endless churning to fatten it, enlarge it. It lies lazily by the sea, sprawled across verdures and mountains and deserts, mouth wide open as motors hurtle toward its wooden tongue to carry meals down to its stomach. What it chews and spits out is no longer made of the weak and sickly-looking, it’s just made of the poor and indigent, regardless of structure and stature.
“Nature has lost against the modern beast; where she once made her monsters to populate the Earth now stand teeth of glass and cheek-to-cheek tangerine carpeting.
“In the before, men and women fled the beasts; they called it survival instinct . In the now, men and women alike rush inside the belly of the modern beast, hoping to be chosen and become its most aggressive bacteria, the kind that keeps a structure of flesh and bone fighting for another day.
“They forget the modern beast is not made of flesh and bone.”
The awarded scholarship took her all the way from Nowhere, Ohio to the belly of the beast (116th and Broadway).
Blue, the flicker. Indigo, maybe, but some type of blue for certain. She’s always liked blue, really—Harry’s eyes were almost that, liquid-lake and algae-soft, not quite sea-frothed or ocean-deep, but if she squinted or if he sat in the right light—
Blue, the glow. One word only on the sign: Tomorrow. No arrow pointing to a shady strip club, no cocktail symbol glimmering in the night sky, just Tomorrow in long, torturous strokes, a t leading to an o and gracious loops in the m, like Wang Dongling dipped her quill in neon blue light and traced it for her eyes only.
It wasn’t there yesterday, that blue. That word. She’s worked in that same cubicle for—god, how long now? seven years? since college? and the view out the window has always been the same. Smooth beige stone, burgundy-varnished oak, bicycles on the pavement, finance bros decked out in Hugo Boss, pretty socialites in flowing pink dresses, dogs—so many dogs—and their irresponsible owners. It’s a quiet part of town she works in, far from the razzle dazzle of Times Square and the glass-blinding offices of Wall Street—just a WeWork on West 15th street, so quiet you could almost forget it’s New York. So quiet this liquescent light staring at her from the brownstone across the street is jarring. Taunting.
There’s always a new fad in a city like New York; time here is a runny egg with its yoke threatening to burst at every sunset. Honey-drizzled pizza travelled from trendy, gimmicky joints all the way to her favorite corner pepperoni slice; wellness-branded menus popped up on Instagram, then in delis; bleached eyebrows were a thing for a while—less durable than hipsters but tougher than alien chic clown shoes. Tomorrow is likely just another one of these things New Yorkers like to do lest the city become another murmur of boredom in their heart—a pop-up shop offering gold-foiled and overpriced tarot cards, and pink Hamsa amulets designed on Procreate by white girls from Brooklyn, and fifty-bucks-apiece healing crystals that look suspiciously like pebbles picked up on Long Island beaches.
It is the way of the city; immutable in spirit, in power, yet ever changing in all the ways that make the mind lose its grasp, familiarity and authenticity painted over by the greasy film of ill-conceived innovation by con artists and capitalist pigs.
The blue flicker will go, and something else will take its place.
Pink, the light. Fuschia, so strong it turns the black sky purple. This time, it looms over the Far Rockaway–Mott Avenue station sign, written in stringent, copy-pasted, and cartoonish letters. T O M O R R O W. There’s nothing beneath but trash floating in the wind and the hurried footsteps of commuters rushing to work; none of them seem to notice the sign blaring with colours on the wall; they walk the way metropolitan carcasses do: quickly and single-mindedly. It’s hard to blame them—she’s like this too, hard-knocked and citrus-pressed by a city of millions with too little space and no quiet to shelter her. In a place like this, bodies are an encumbrance that litter the sidewalk and coalesce until they, too, turn into the runny egg whites that shape time and space in the city—no longer individuals, but a collective sludge that sticks to the skin like sweat in the summer and frostbite in the winter.
Pink, the glare. A burn on the retina. If she closes her eyes, she can see it printed on the back of her mind. Tomorrow…
Tomorrow what? Tomorrow—
Green, the luminescence. A light she would not have noticed had it been red; her lodgings are nestled deep in Chinatown, where the lanterns taunt the night skies after dark and colours dot every door and every wall. Lime green, tomorrow spelled out in futuristic, alien letters: that sticks out, even in the chaos all around her.
Lucius doesn’t seem to have noticed. He stands behind her, a hand like hot coal between her shoulder plates, ramming in and out of her with only the obscenity an illicit affair can muster. And though she feels every part of him within—the every throb and twitch of his cock, the warm flesh of his palm on her skin, the intensity with which he’s itching to come (inside, always)—her eyes remain glued to the neon sign outside her studio apartment, beyond her haphazard piles of books, her record player burning through a Janis Joplin song, her seven tea mugs left half-empty and cold in odd places.
God, baby, you feel so good. She moans and arches her back to push into him further; maybe the sign is telling her she should leave him tomorrow. She’s been meaning to do that for 1,083 tomorrows now, but there’s always been a reason not to.
In a city as big as New York, everyone is invisible.
He was the first man to notice her after Harry. A real man, like they don’t make them anymore. Elegant, always a Rolex on his wrist and a silk handkerchief in his jacket pocket, sharply dressed in perfectly tailored Sartoria Voglio, commanding every room he walks in without saying a word, aristocratic and delicate in constitution and yet strong; unyielding—in short, everything Harry was never, and a perfect antidote for someone desperate to forget him.
A former hedge fund CEO turned billionaire retiree turned philanthropist, he bought out the start-up she’d been working in for the past few years and handed it over to his son to manage. Yet it was not his son but he who walked in that first day, regal, domineering, and stopped by every cubicle with a pleasant word and feigned-but-convincingly-genuine interest in all those who worked there. She was last, but he smiled at her the brightest.
That day, she found out she liked married men.
Green, the glimmer. Like Lucius’ shirt the day he snaked a finger below her skirt after hours and made her squirm.
Purple, the incandescence. Too blue to be mauve, too pink to be lilac. It stares at her from the wall across from her cubicle today, machine-typed (serif, ink blots and all), and no one around her says a thing about it. As if the sign had always been there, inching them towards tomorrow.
Can I see you in my office? He’s always here, more often than the son who purports to be at the head of organization. She used to think it was to keep a close eye on his kid, but it soon became evident he simply likes to have her within arm’s reach. To bend her over his desk, or to push her on her knees below, or to have her on his lap while he pretends to reply to e-mails. Time and the city have eroded her wonderment of him; on his lap, she’s a little girl without a mind of her own. On his cock, she’s velvet and supple, soft and malleable, an eye always tied to the ring on his finger, a liquid idea of who she used to be before New York corrupted her. My wife is going to see her family back in London next week; do you want to come to the Hamptons with me?
She says yes, not because of him, but because of the Hamptons.
Where the sign cannot follow her, and where the quiet finally reminds her of what she wants.
Purple, like Harry’s favourite hoodie, balled up in a corner of her closet.
Orange, the lustre. Orange is when she realises there is no life without a neon tomorrow blinding her; orange is when she understands this sign appeared out of thin air to scold her, to urge her to act. Tomorrow.
People from all walks of life come to New York because they want something. Money, power, sex, love. They sit in cramped apartments and drink barely-halfway-decent coffee from a blue-and-white anthora cup and they plot out their destinies. They move between Broadway and the Bronx, slink from the East Side to the West Side, never stopping, never turning to sludge, never missing a beat. She was like this once; now, she sits in the quietude of her choices, Sisyphean in her routine; there is a life in the bones of the city that she once hoped for, but she cannot quite remember what it looks like now.
For a while, it looked like she would make it: Harry on her lips, a PhD soon to be funded, a job in an exciting start-up looking to provide cheap, portable, and reliable water-cleaning devices. Who is responsible for the carnage? Harry leaving? Lucius walking into her life? The organization pulling the funding for her PhD? New York, for chewing her and spitting her back out?
Orange, the finger pointing at her. You.
The colours of the rainbow stare at her every day. Their electric ringing buzzes through her ears day and night, relentless and ominous. In the bodega. By the paper kiosk. In her deli. In the coffee shop. From her ceiling, or her bathroom mirror. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, an endless blink promising another day, another tomorrow, one when she doesn't wake in a bed of polyester sheets, working in a cubicle, bouncing on her boss’ cock and missing the love of her life? Tomorrow always comes, but never the way she wants it to; tomorrow becomes a light mocking her, I’m not at the end of the tunnel you dumb bitch. You built that on your own, made yourself tiny in the darkness. You want that light? Grab it.
Harry’s hoodie is cradled in her arms while her phone vibrates with Lucius’ requests to see her tits. One more time, baby girl, I just need them so bad. Have you seen what you make me do? I can’t resist you, sweetheart. You were made to fit me. Tomorrow, red and in Mandarin today, blending smoothly amongst the insignias of the buffet-style restaurant and tea shop sitting on the pavement.
She ignores her phone and slips below the covers. Maybe it's time to make a change. Maybe it is time to leave it all behind and call it quits on New York.
Tomorrow, maybe.