Chapter 1
“Fuck Salman Rushdie!” She hurled the heavy book onto the hardwood floor. “Fucking Hindu stole my name!”
With the eyes New Yorkers usually reserve for bums who urinate in public, the denizens of the sunny café stared at the thin, angry girl, but she met each gaze until it returned to the rim of a double latte or a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Several young, Armani-suited women looked at their shoes in embarrassment while older lawyers pretended to examine the famous authors painted on the walls.
“Actually, he’s a Muslim.”
“What?” People looked up again at her shout.
“Rushdie. He’s a ‘fucking Muslim,’ not a ‘fucking Hindu.’”
The girl’s friend, perhaps a foot taller and several shades darker, looked menacing in spite the gentle irony in his calm, West Indian voice. Carefully tended dreadlocks topped a young, scarred face; the scars followed an intricate, ritualized pattern, but none of the businessmen dared come close enough to see what it signified. His body was so loose the girl wondered how it stood upright. His T-shirt, screaming “Anarchy!” flopped over ripped cargo pants. His clothes and his body could have used a wash, but his grin was almost charming.
“Oh, fuck you too, Z.” This time the girl’s voice was quieter, the curse almost a caress. Her appearance was little more reputable than his. Her black hair was cut short, almost to the scalp, and her long black skirt and yellow Moroccan blouse suffered from more than a few rips. Even so, her face was not only clean, but well made up. That morning, like most mornings, she had gone into Sephora in Times Square to take advantage of their free makeup samples. She had put on some very expensive eyeliner. She thought it made her nose look smaller — or maybe it just drew attention to her green eyes, strange in such a dark, Arabic face.
“No, really.” She picked up the book from the floor, making sure that she had not broken the spine. “The narrator. He’s named Rai. He! Yeah, whatever, so he’s Indian and it means something else, but it’s a girl’s name and it’s mine.” When Rai pouted, she looked about 16 — almost two years younger than she was. “Rushdie thinks he’s some big shit just ‘cause the Ayatollah wants to kill him, but would Tolstoy ever plagiarize my name? I don’t think so.”
“And I thought you’d sworn off swearing.” Z smiled that charming grin again; Rai could never decide whether it was endearing or maddening.
“God, there are exceptions!” The day before, Rai had concluded that the teenage habit of prefacing every word with a vulgar adjective was just dumbing down her vocabulary and damaging her quest to be “a bitchy New York Pushkin,” a project she adopted from time to time, though she had never gone beyond sketching an outline for a short novel. She had forgotten her vow almost before it left her mouth.
“So much for our low profile.” Z covered his amusement with am exasperated sigh. He liked Rai’s outbursts, even when they got in the way of their plans for the day. The truth was that he didn’t like anonymity any more than she did. If a tall black punk wants to remain invisible, he doesn’t come into the Barnes and Noble Café, pile philosophy texts around him, and then look around the room like Mercurio tweaked out on crank. Even as he lectured Rai about the need for a low profile, he loved to make a scene. It made him feel alive.
Rai, on the other hand, knew that her life would always be a scene. Living on the street, she was always in someone else’s gaze: the cops’, some social worker’s, a businessman who wanted her out of the way or a sleazeball who saw an easy lay. In her months of homelessness, she had become a connoisseur of distrain, and she had learned that anger at her intellectual provocations was infinitely preferable to pitiful eyes that gazed down on a street kid.
“Street kid.” Though Rai had been trying to revitalize the word “urchin” — she thought it sounded brutal and nineteenth century and romantic — most people just called them gutter rats or punks. Social workers, thinking they were being kind, seemed to prefer the term “homeless adolescent.” Rai and Z knew all the names; they heard them each morning when they stuck out their hands to beg for small change. Even if they didn’t fit the homeless stereotype — Z certainly didn’t feel like Oliver Twist — they slept on the street, ate on the street, begged on the street, annoyed the bourgeoisie on the street, and read stolen books on the street. In a strange way, Rai was proud of it: she’d suffered through the worst that the world had to offer, and she could still raise the hackles of every yuppie in the bookstore.
“He even mentions it. Bastard. Plagiarist,” she continued, sure that Z would know what she was talking about.
“The music.”
“The music. My music. Rai music.” She was becoming loud again, and several of the original viewers dared look up from their newspapers. “My music, and he steals it for this Sanskrit princeling shit.”
Several months before, Rai — then known as Helen — had heard Rai music for the first time. She and Z were at a free outdoor festival on the Lower East Side, and a fat old Arab woman was wailing away. Rai had held her ears.
“God, can’t they get a backbeat or something?” she shouted over the amplified music. The crowd looked like a bunch of deadhead college dropouts, but they were probably the next billionaires of Silicon Alley. Rai tapped the woman in front of her on the shoulder — she had never accepted the New York mores that prohibited strangers to exchange words or glances — and asked what “this shit” was.
“It’s wry,” the woman replied dreamily, clearly under the influence of too much cannabis or mushrooms. “From Algeria, or France. Someplace…” It’s difficult to appreciate the impact of that word: not “wry,” because she didn’t know if it was wry or rye or Rai, but “Algeria.” Urgently, Rai unplugged her ears. If it was from Algeria, she would like it. She would.
“Wry?” she asked. “Like ironic?” The drugged out woman didn’t understand the question, so Rai tried again. “Like, how do you write it?”
“It’s like R-A-I, yeah,” she spelled, then pushed deeper into the crowd.
In the course of five minutes, catalyzed by the word “Algeria,” the music had changed from “this shit” to the best sounds she had ever heard. Not only did Rai love the music, but in the course of the next several days, she stole several CDs by different singers, began to practice the vocal patterns, worked on her French, and decided that the dream of her life was to become a singer in Paris. A singer of Rai, the music of Algerian immigrants. And finally, after Z teased her for days, she accepted the music as her nickname.
Z didn’t have the courage to remind Rai that when she had been at the concert, Rushdie’s book had been on the shelves for months, making any plagiarism charge tough to defend. Then, watching his friend furiously read the book, he concluded his motivations were not quite so base. Maybe kindness, not cowardice, kept his mouth shut. He did not need to pound Rai over the head with a fact she already knew.
“We should prob’ly split, huh? Looks like a nice day.” Z shut his copy of Lenin’s What is to be done and placed it on the tall pile of unopened books. “You know what you wanna get?”
Rai had been leaning back in the chair; she let the front legs crash down with a satisfying smash. “Meet me upstairs in a coupla minutes, right?” She winked at him. Upstairs was the literature section, in which Z had no interest. She stood, then walked off in an impossible combination of stalk and flounce. Z watched in bemusement, thinking that the effect would have been much more powerful had she been a couple of inches taller. Or if her Doc Martin’s had heels.
Z had turned Rai on to both the pleasures and entrepreneurial benefits of literary theft, but he prided himself on being an honorable, Marxist thief. This phrase is not exactly the oxymoron it sounds: Z would only steal from multinational corporations. He would never take from small, independent booksellers, especially if they were financially on edge and theft might put them into the red or cause them to lay off employees. Perhaps they were part of the petite bourgeoisie, but they were serving humanity, and he saw no reason to punish them for it.
Fortunately, Z’s adolescence had matched the explosion of superstores from Borders or Barnes and Noble. In even the smallest city, he could find a bookshop with a good philosophy section, and he felt no compunction about stealing from them. In New York, where he could find an “evil multinational” bookseller on every corner, he never lacked for reading material.
Books had become a cottage industry for Rai and Z. They got two uses from them: first they read them — as publicly and pretentiously as possible — then they took them to Union Square or lower Broadway and sold them on the street. A carefully used hardback could fetch $15. All of it profit. Thus, Rai and Z guarded their books carefully. If they kept them in good shape, Rai could buy Swiss chocolate for the week and Z could subsidize his pot habit.
That morning, they had sold their books quickly in Union Square: One Dimensional Man, which Z had loved, for six bucks and Heights of Macchu Pichu, which had disappointed him, for eight. Rai had to use the hard sell to convince an elderly woman to buy Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but she was desperate. Though she had told herself the week before that a real intellectual should have read Kant, she just couldn’t slog through any more of the heavy hardback. A humiliation for her, but no worse than the average day.
Since Rai wasn’t sure what she wanted to read, she browsed aimlessly through the literature section, uninspired until Z made it to the top floor. It had taken about half an hour for him to arrive with two books: a biography of Che Guevara and a collection of Greek philosophers.
Without even waiting for a greeting, Z pointed to a blank space on the shelf behind Rai’s shoulder, filled only with a little sign: For works by CHARLES BUKOWSKY, please ask at the front desk. “You notice who they do this to? De Sade. Bataille. Abbie Hoffman. Jack Kerouac — it’s like they’re trying to make sure you can’t read a subversive book without buying it. Fucking conspiracy to keep the poor ignorant.”
“Maybe they’re just the books people steal the most.”
“Then it’s a conspiracy against me. Either way, I don’t like it.” He fumed for a moment, then looked at Rai’s empty hands. “You gonna get anything or what?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She slid a novel by Bulgakov in front of the offending sign, then walked back a couple of aisles and took a thin book from a low shelf. She handed it to Z. “Here. Maybe it’ll suck, but I’m uninspired.”
“Why don’t you give it a fucking break! Give up on these Russian idiots. I can’t even say this guy’s name.”
“Lermontov, OK? And Mike says it’s a kickass book, so just put it in the pack and let’s go.” To remind him that she didn’t take the argument seriously, she flashed him a smile. “If you’re good I’ll even read you some of it.”
He looked at the cover and shook his head in feigned disgust. “A Hero of Our Time. More rich fucks whining about how much it hurts their fucking fists to punch some peasant.” He seemed surprised with the alliteration.
Rai laughed. “Ya wanna look for something else, or ya ready to go?” she asked.
“Vamos. It looks like a nice day.”
They didn’t even need to discuss their plan; it was always the same. Sitting on the floor to hide from the security cameras, Z put the books in his Guatemalan backpack, wrapping them with their few clothes to hide the sharp corners. He browsed through the New Fiction section by the front door while Rai hung around the New York Books, only a couple of feet from the guard who monitored the electronic alarm. They both kept an eye out for people getting ready to leave the store.
They saw the tourists at the same time. Clearly from out of town, they carried enough shopping bags to fill a small mall in Peoria. Z stepped beside them, timing his steps so he would pass through the alarm at exactly the same moment they did. At the same time, Rai stepped up to the guard. “Could you tell me where the section on Tantric sex is?” she asked with an insistent voice. She’d already pushed down her blouse to show what little cleavage she had.
He turned a little red. “Um, second floor. You just–” The alarm sounded. The tourists stopped in a flurry of confusion and paper bags. The guard turned to the door; Rai tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention again. Z walked on calmly.
“Where?” Rai insisted “Left or right?”
“Uh, left. Left from the escalator.” Then he turned to the tourists. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to look through–”
“Thanks,” Rai said, and headed for the escalator.
“–your bags. Would you please step over here?” He examined each carefully; by the time the guard had searched the brown bag from Bloomingdales, Z was in the entrance to the subway station.
Around 70th Street, the groomed lawns of Central Park spin abruptly out of control, leaving a small area of real wilderness, with streams, valleys, thickets, and even the occasional small cliff. In the day, The Ramble, as the area is called, serves as the playground for adventurous children and druggies; at night, Rai and Z had found the forest to be a safe place to hide and sleep.
Unfortunately, reading her new book all afternoon had not tired Rai enough to fall asleep that night. Unfortunately, she had found only one solution to her regular bouts of insomnia. After her mind had spun through the same problem for the zillionth time, she would squinch out of the human burrito that she and Z made by wrapping a tarp around themselves as they prepared to sleep on the dirt of Central Park. Z would growl a vague, half-sleeping question, to which she always replied, “No, don’t worry about it.”
These words were Z’s cue to dance the now ritual steps: “What’s wrong?” “It’s nothing.” “No, seriously, what’s up?” “I said it’s nothing…” With each repetition, Rai’s lie would become more evident, and finally, Z would slither from the tarp, stand, stretch, and fish something out of his bag.
Z may not have realized that he was playing a game, but Rai did. She loved to see the concern creep across his scarred face, for though he would never admit to an emotion as banal as worry, he did really care about her. It just took a lot of work to force him to show it.
“Whassup?” he asked carefully as they clawed their way out of the thickest part of the Ramble, where they had found a sleeping spot that not even the crackheads seemed to know about. She didn’t seem to hear, so he asked her again: “Whassup?”
“Why do you even ask? Same thing as always, I guess. That book I’m reading. It’s whack. I mean, way cool.”
“Dude. You looked like a dope fiend with a five bags of clean black tar.” He was glad to be able to lighten the mood.
“Yeah, but it seems like these books only exist to remind me how fucking boring and meaningless our lives are.”
“Quick reality check. This is boring?” He pulled his foot out of the mud that had tried to steal his shoe.
“Yeah, OK, it’s better’n being some banker whose life’s so empty he’s gotta piss on the poor to get off, but y’know, my life’s not… not epic or anything. Not meaningful. We sit around, we shoot the shit, we complain about oppression and capitalism and whatever else, but then we just sleep in the park with the junkies and the bums and then we steal some shit. Doncha get bored sometimes?”
Z touched her shoulder in a way he thought might be comforting. He knew he wasn’t very good at this.
“I dunno… It’s like it’s all so fucking pointless sometimes. Does anybody care what we do? Anybody ever gonna read about us? Or write about us?”
“Is that the point?” He helped her jump off the wall that divided the Park from Fifth Avenue.
“Like I know what the fucking point is. You don’t either, unless you’re hiding it from me. And those fucks–” she pointed vaguely at the blue lights pulsing from the apartments above them “–don’t have a clue. But I’d kinda like to know if it’s all really worthwhile before we go through another winter, y’know? Fuck, even another night.” As she talked, her body had begun to calm, in paradoxical counterpoint to her voice. “But whatever, huh? You’ve heard it all before. I’ve said it all before. Little Helen Miller looking for the meaning of life. Maybe someday I’ll even get used to my own angst.”
That last word, a little code to show that she was indeed smart, seemed to clean the bile from her system. She took Z’s hand and led him across the avenue.
Burnt out streetlights failed to disperse the warm, thick night. Though she saw no one, she consciously changed her gait to something more businesslike, making it appear that they had somewhere to go and a reason to go there. Even though it was midnight, they were in public again, and public spaces demanded a façade.
Rai dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Doesn’t this feel like Dostoyevsky to you?” She waved off his dismissive look. “Seriously. I mean, the tight walls, the stench of the city, the sense of impending doom?”
“Would you just keep a fucking eye out–”
“Yeah, you’re right, it would be a hell of a lot colder, and we’d prob’ly be a pair of nihilistic aristocrats instead of…”
“And we’d be white.”
“That too. But doncha feel it? God. Fucking cool.”
“You drag me out at midnight to…”
“OK, so maybe it’s not Dostoyevsky,” Rai interrupted. “Dude was a fascist sometimes, so maybe–”
“Enough with the fucking Russian novel shit, before I…”
Rai stumbled before she could hear the false threat. Her feet had kicked into something soft and immobile, throwing her to hands and knees. Z nudged his shoe against the body she’d tripped over, then reached down to help her up. She quickly stepped away from the fat, bearded and badly dressed corpse; it reeked of alcohol. His chest was not rising or falling.
“Yuck.” Rai backed away quickly, brushing off her skirt as if to clean the death from it.
“Up here, too. It’s not like we’re on the Bowery or something.”
“I don’t care how many of these we find. It always freaks me out.” She brushed off her skirt again and picked the grit out of her scratched palms. As she looked up at her friend, streetlights picked up the scars on his face, sharp as a street map of this part of Manhattan. Once again, she wondered where they had possibly come from or what they meant.
In spite of her best efforts to preserve an atmosphere out of Dostoyevsky, Z’s purposeful eyes and loose stride banished all thoughts of Prince Myshkin. He had seen through her game and was looking for what she needed. As it always did, his intensity flowed into her, and she felt the childlike enthusiasm she wanted from their midnight jaunts.
She looked over at Z, thankful his presence permitted her to ignore the dangers of the city. He didn’t have the slipping strut of the classic gangsta, but no one would confuse him for an easy target. On her own, even this safe part of the city would scare her, but with Z, she could play the naïf as much as she wanted. With another glance around to appraise and dismiss the few pedestrians on the street, he signaled Rai down 82nd.
They rounded the corner; two cops emerged from the shadows of the side street. The first cop seemed as surprised as Rai and barely kept from running into her, but his face quickly donned a suspicious mien.
“Oh, Officer, I’m so sorry!” she declared with exaggerated courtesy and no trace of her street accent, having paused barely a second to catch her breath and recover her calm. Rai noticed that the older officer’s partner, a tall Hispanic woman, was looking at Z in a definitely unfriendly way. Rai felt her heart beating furiously and knew that sweat poured out of her armpits, but she forced calm into her body.
Since the year before, when New York City criminalized homelessness, Rai and Z had found life much more difficult. In an effort to get bums off the street, the police had selectively begun to enforce long forgotten laws against loitering, public urination, littering, and sleeping in public. For Rai and Z, these new policies had been a nightmare. To any policeman, the smallest detail of their life merited prosecution. At three in the morning, the odds were even worse. Generally, Rai and Z assiduously avoided police interest, but after attracting it, only Rai’s quick mind could keep them out of jail. She had been assigned the task of talking, because she feigned politeness better; even more importantly, both her face and her voice could sometimes pass for white. In the wake of the torture of Abner Louima and the murder of Amadou Diallo, Z was glad to defer to Rai in all dealings with New York’s Finest.
The cop Rai had almost run into, an older man with a graying moustache, looked Rai and Z up and down. Though Rai’s words may have calmed his first suspicions, his eyes showed he was not pleased. Though no law explicitly forbade it, a tall black kid with dreads and a young woman who looked as Arab as Rai should not hang out in the East 80s at three in the morning. Fortunately, Rai’s abject apology convinced him to test the waters before he demanded their IDs or did a frisk search. “It’s late for you kids to be out,” he said with the policeman’s false courtesy Rai had come to hate.
“I know! It’s horrible.” Rai’s voice craved commiseration, a tone she had found hid fear well. Exhaustion had replaced enthusiasm in her body language. A thought flashed directly to her tongue, bypassing her mind entirely. “The thing is, Merril Lynch sent out a sell order on us last week, and the stock’s falling through the floor. We’ve been up 24/7 trying to get the 2.0 version of the website on line, but… “ She let her voice fade away. “I almost wonder why I got into this whole dotcom thing.” The cop’s softening features gave her the guts to go on. “Then, we have to be back at the office in NoHo by seven tomorrow morning to prepare the presentation for the Bear Sterns people. I’m exhausted.”
“You should get home, then,” the woman said kindly. Her face had changed completely. Rai’s words had shifted the category the officers had put them into. The ragged clothes and hair no longer said “poor and dangerous,” but “fashionable, tired, and maybe very rich — at least until the next NASDAQ crash.” Their young age didn’t signify delinquency, but Silicon Alley. Rai prayed a quick thank you for the confluence of street fashion with 7th Avenue and the nascence of the baby-faced e-glitterati.
“Good night, officers,” Rai smiled in relief, though she hoped the cops wouldn’t read it that way. “Thanks for keeping the streets safe.” She rather enjoyed the taste of hypocrisy on her tongue. Z respectfully nodded his head, and they passed down 82nd Street with tired, late-night steps.
Once they were out of earshot, Rai released her held breath. “Shit. That was close.”
Z shivered, then tapped the bulging pocket of his cargo pants. “They open this, and we’re fucked.”
“So let’s do it fast. Before anyone else sees us. C’mon, let’s try 83rd. A bit farther from those two.” She gestured back to where the police no longer stood. They turned right on Park, completely deserted, and then left on 83rd. Within only a few steps, Z saw what he had been looking for.
“Perfect!” He reached into the deep pocket on his thigh and pulled out a small cylinder. “Be quick. There’s too many people on the street tonight.”
She pulled the top from the can of spraypaint, then swept along the whitewashed wall from right to left. No one else would be able to read the flowing, stylized letters, but she saw her name there. She stepped back, admired the broad strokes, and passed the can to Z.
“Think you can sleep now?” Z asked, the lines on his cheeks bending into a faint parabola.
“Yeah. I almost feel like I exist.”
