The phone was ringing. Now there was a huge mangled stain on the sidewalk, with still-moving parts, long, wispy antennae swiping around for signs of its own life. A second ring of the telephone. Mythical Chris Kelly. Third ring. I was rehearsing what I would say. An explosion echoed from down the block. An M-80 in a garbage can. The key sailed from a window, inside a tube sock, and landed near the garbage piling up because of the strike.
A voice came through the phone: “I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
It was true: I didn’t move here not to fall in love. That night, I watched from my roof as the neighborhood blew itself to smithereens, scattering bits of red paper everywhere, the humid air tinged with magnesium. It seemed a miracle that nothing caught fire that wasn’t meant to. Men and boys overturned crates of explosives of various sorts in the middle of Mulberry Street. They hid behind a metal dumpster as one lit a cigarette, gave it a short puffing inhale, and then tossed it onto the pile, which began to send showers and sprays and flashes in all directions. A show for the residents of Little Italy, who watched from high above. No one went down to the street, only the stewards of this event. My neighbors and I lined our rooftop, black tar gummy from the day’s heat. Pink and red fireworks burst upward, exploded overhead and then fell and melted into the dark, and how could it be that the telephone number for the only person I knew in New York City did not work?
I had asked Giddle if she knew an artist by that name and she’d said, “I think so. Chris. Yeah.”
We were on Lafayette, outside the Trust E Coffee Shop.
“I can’t believe it,” I said excitedly. “Where is he? Do you know what he’s up to?”
She tugged the foil apron from a new pack of North Pole cigarettes and tossed it on the sidewalk. I watched it skitter.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s around. He’s on the scene.”
The wind blew the discarded foil sideways.
“What scene?” I asked, and then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don’t already know, I can’t spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there might be reason to doubt everything she said.