“This isn’t new,” I assured him. “I’ve been crying since I was born.”
He looked at me blankly, then down at the magazine he was holding. On the cover, a girl was smiling and holding a very expensive purse. It didn’t seem like the kind of magazine this guy would read on the train, but then I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me either, or he would never have asked if something was wrong.
“Oh,” said the guy.
“Yeah,” I clarified.
“I was just checking, you know.” He’d been reading an article about what looked like luxury travel in Thailand. There was a glossy, color-saturated photo of an elephant; one of a beach with many reclining chairs.
“Right. So you were being polite, is that it?”
“I mean, yeah.”
At this point, I punched him in the nose. Not hard, I’m not very strong, but his eyes still filled with tears that were nothing like mine. He started to turn blotchy and scrabbled at his tacky suit. A few seconds later, the train stopped at Wall Street and I slipped off while the people around him were just beginning to notice. He was screaming something ugly but not very creative. Maybe women curse better; last week I tripped a girl in the office for reporting me to HR, and she used words I’d never heard before.
On the street outside, I bought myself three waters from a hot dog stand. I put two in my purse and opened the third to drink. Then I emptied one honey and one salt packet into the bottle: natural electrolytes. I always keep the little packets stockpiled in my purse from various fast-food establishments. Be prepared.
It was 8 p.m. on a Thursday and Wall Street stood hollow, emptied out. I used to come down here to do drugs with a guy I met at this truly terrible comedy show. He was the only human I’ve ever known who lived in the Financial District. His grandmother died and left him the place: wall-to-wall pink carpet, even in the bathroom. On 9/11, he walked thirty blocks uptown covered in ash. It was caked in the corners of his eyes, inside his nostrils. At the barrier on Fourteenth, they asked him for his ID and he said Leo because that was his name, and then he just kept saying it when they asked him anything else. Leo. Leo. Leo. Leo.
I took a deep breath and it smelled like outdoor cooking, which was new. Then I remembered they were camping down here. I’d heard those guys bitching about it on the train. They were camping down by Wall Street in that little pedestrian park, cooking outdoors and managing their urine and surviving.
I come down here, too, whenever I need to feel survival. At three in the morning, the Financial District looks like how I imagine Europe: beautiful because of what it has endured. I come here to touch stone walls and iron gratings somebody forged once by hand. I’m careful to avoid the bull statue. I do a bump and go to after-work bars and order tonic with lime, a drink I like nowhere else but in bars. I get lost, trusting I’ll find the Battery, and eventually I do.
The only time I didn’t cry was immediately after being born. I just slid quietly from my mother’s birth canal and slept for a day. When I woke up, I was crying. I haven’t stopped since. It’s slow, though, more like a dribble. It can take all night to wet the pillow through while I’m sleeping.
They ran tests, of course, all inconclusive. One doctor said I was “chronically moist.” Another called me “very productive,” and a third chalked it up to salinity, said this was my body’s way of restoring equilibrium through unusual stimulation of my parasympathetic nervous system to reduce blood salt levels. I believed him the most because of his language. He had names for things, and I like names. I kept seeing him into my teens, but he never had anything new to offer, and so I stopped.
There’s this myth I can’t remember where there’s a woman and she has a brother or a lover or a brother-slash-lover like they did back then, I guess. Anyway, he dies, violently. He’s some kind of prince. He’s killed, and she mourns. She weeps. Everywhere her tears fall, a flower grows. Or something about the weeping brings her brother-lover’s empty body back to life. He does living things again, like exacting revenge. She weeps, so he’s brought back to life.
I used to run my hands across the illustrated pages of my children’s books to feel the glossy bodies underneath, like all those bears and dogs and things had been alive once. I’d sit on our building’s stoop and angle my crying so the tears plopped onto the sidewalk, directly onto the tiny bodies of ants I’d just killed. No flowers grew. Nothing ever happened. The ants stayed dead.
When Shaina died, I tried it on her casket, even though I knew my tears couldn’t penetrate wood, and her body was already embalmed. I tried anyway. I had to. Shaina. Shaina. Shaina. She stayed dead.
I finished the bottle of water with honey and salt and rubbed Tiger Balm from my purse into my knuckles. They hurt, even though, like I said, I hadn’t hit him hard at all. The tears slowed to a trickle, and I looked around to see where I was: Broadway and Pine, outside Trinity Church.
By day, the churchyard is usually swarming with French tourists in lightweight down jackets who always seem disappointed by how new American history is. They sigh and shake their heads. Their kids kick the ground, scuffing headstones with the toes of their leather sneakers. But at night, the discount designer stores, law firms, and sushi shops sit dark, and that survived feeling seeps up like groundwater. They lock the churchyard gates to keep the riffraff off Alexander Hamilton’s grave. But I figured out how to get in years ago. I even told Leo, but I don’t think he ever tried. I wonder what happened to him.
It’s like my therapist used to say before I stopped seeing her because she wouldn’t shut up about Klonopin: Your body knows what it needs. So I felt in my purse for the Ziploc and gently cradled it in my palm. Then I took Thames West down the alley, which is always full of trash and guys smoking on their break from the sub shop. New York is disgusting, but I’ve never wanted to leave. Where else can you comfortably weep in public without anyone hassling you? Train guy wasn’t from here; New Yorkers know better.
I turned left on Trinity Place and thought about what I believe, which isn’t easy to articulate these days, if it’s anything at all, and it might be nothing. What I used to believe was that Christ was three parts: human, God, and the spirit between. I used to like the feeling of that certainty. It allowed me to move through my life as though always seen: from above and below and on all sides.
I’d started attending the Lighthouse off Route 33 one Sunday when the Pitts from upstairs had to watch me while Mom worked. They made me promise not to cry too loud. I told them I couldn’t promise, but I’d try. Mr. Pitt narrowed his eyes and said I’d better try hard. They had me put on my favorite dress––blue plaid with a weird collar. Their son, Kevin, wore his too-small suit, and we all walked together through the parking lot right. I turned to watch the cars tearing past us on Route 33. Then Mrs. Pitt grabbed me by the hand and pulled me inside.
The church was huge. We entered and I craned my neck to look up at the ceiling. We took our seats in a pew. Up at the front stood a guy Kevin whispered was Pastor Mike. When the music stopped, Pastor Mike howled like I’d never heard anyone do before, gesturing with the whole of his arms right down to the fingertips. My mouth kept falling open as I craned my neck back to watch the sunlight fill that crazy ceiling. Finally, I leaned so far back into the aisle that I fell flat on the floor––like Saint Paul falling off the horse in wonder, Pastor Mike told me a few years later during Bible study.
The fall hurt. My blue plaid dress got mussed, and I would have cried if I hadn’t been crying already. Mrs. Pitt grabbed at my arm, trying to pull me to my feet, but my crying deepened. Pastor Mike looked around, then right at us. His voice boomed across the Lighthouse. Someone gathered me up and brought me forward. Pastor Mike held my head between his two huge hands.
Every Sunday after that first one, I stood before the congregation and wept. Pastor Mike said I wept like Mary, Mother of God. The whole congregation answered praise for this sign of our suffering, and I took collection, passing the plate and gathering the love and terror of my brothers and sisters. I went to Bible study and Youth Group, and when I turned thirteen, Pastor Mike announced that I’d be offering personal blessings on behalf of the Lighthouse: individuals $100, families $300. Word spread and they came. Every Sunday, from Delaware and Pennsylvania and even North Carolina, to see the girl touched by Christ’s sorrow. They came and they paid, and I wept for them.
A decade later, when I finally agreed to come home for Christmas, my mother decided the time was right to corner me about the Lighthouse. I’d been living on my own in the city for five years by then, paying for my shitty studio with a front-desk job at a law firm. The pay was decent; they didn’t mind the tears. I unnerved people, softened them up for the lawyers. I was actually doing OK.
But my mother had been watching stories on the news about the Catholic Church. One night after dinner when I was washing dishes, she grabbed my arm hard by the elbow and held it suspended over the sink, the sponge in my hand dripping soapy water. Her blurry eyes searched me and she hissed, Did he ever touch you? That preacher, whatshisname. Did he ever lay a hand on you anywhere he shouldn’t have?
She looked so terrible I just told her the truth, my tears a slow ooze. He didn’t, Ma. He never did.
She released my elbow. After a minute more of dishes, she asked me for the first time, as if it was only just occurring to her: Then why’d you leave? Why’d you stop going?
Shaina, I said simply. Shaina got me out.
My mother left the kitchen after that, and I took an early train back to Penn.
The door guy at the Trinity parish hall looked up for a second, then nodded me through like they always do. I’m an OK-looking white lady in professional attire, and I’ve found a surefire expression that’s halfway between a knowing smile and the annoyed squint of someone with somewhere to be. I stopped by the parish hall bathrooms to refill my water bottle and squeeze out some more honey and salt packets, all the while feeling that sense of belonging. It’s the shortest sentence in the Bible, the most clear and to-the-point: Jesus wept.
A pedestrian bridge arcs about twenty feet above street level across Trinity Place, from the parish house’s second floor straight to the back door of Trinity Church. They built it in the ’80s to narrow the odds that some churchgoer would get mowed down by a city bus as they jaywalked after services to the parish hall. Trinity is built on a hill, so the bridge just hangs there suspended above traffic, looking like a postcard of ancient ruins. Being from New Jersey means you tend to collect useless facts about New York City to prove you belong.
At the pedestrian bridge’s midway point, I paused with my face to the wind, soaking up the smell of car exhaust and damp leaves. Then I turned uptown and found the glow of camp lamps off to the right where the tents must be, where the people were surviving. I wondered what they were doing: cooking dinner together or playing songs on a guitar or writing speeches. I had a pretty vague hippie notion of the whole scene, but it sounded all right actually, on a night like this.
I always enter the churchyard with real reverence because I feel very useful to the dead, very friendly. I don’t believe any more that my tears will revive them, but I think I believe that they appreciate a good cry. I believe somehow I’m remembering them, missing them, even the ones I never knew. I believed all this, standing there and staring at the moon over the church steeple, and I hadn’t even had my bump yet. Then again, in my nervous system, the coke serves mostly to stop the crying and clarify sensation. I sometimes don’t even get high.
Suddenly, I heard a noise that was definitely human and not rat. A shadow moved behind a tombstone.
“Hello?” I whispered. A person stood then, outlined against the streetlights.
“Hey,” the voice said quietly, holding out a hand with its palm facing towards me. I knew it was a woman right away, just that gesture of placation. She asked who I was, and I asked her right back.
She paused, wary. “You don’t, like, work for the church?”
She was coming closer and I could make out her hair and the shape of her clothes, like something a recent college graduate would wear to backpack across Europe. I’ve never been to either college or Europe, but I know the look. She had those jelly Lance Armstrong sort of bracelets on her wrist and some bead-y thing that might have been Kabbalah. She was holding out her hand, palm towards me. As her face resolved into features, I stopped breathing because she looked so much like Shaina, my dead Shaina who I believe sometimes all the tears are for.
I meant to lie, but I was too much in shock. “No, I don’t work for the church. It’s OK.”
My cousin, Shaina, who wore Lip Smackers around her neck and taught me about good music. Who took me to St. Marks Place the summer before she turned eighteen because she couldn’t wait any longer to get tattoos around her scars.
“I just come here sometimes,” I said. “There’s never been anyone here before.” The girl’s head dropped to a skeptical angle.
“You just . . . come here?”
The truth poured out of me. “To get high,” I said, and she breathed a little laugh.
“Oh. Yeah, OK, sure. Sorry, I guess I thought for a minute you might call the pigs on me.”
And there she was again, my Shaina, spitting that funny hippie-feeling word at the feet of cops we passed on Sixth Avenue when we took the Long Branch line in on Saturdays. Screaming it at her dad when they fought after dinner and he was still wearing his security guard uniform. Pig, she’d holler, you fucking pig. She was right. Shaina was always right about everything.
It was dark, but I could tell this girl was smiling. The moon hung overhead.
“Go ahead, I don’t mind,” she said. “If you get high, I mean. Like seriously, I don’t care.”
“Thanks.” I found the Ziploc. “It’s coke, if you want some.”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging. I caught the scent of her unwashed hair on the near-cold wind.
We each took a bump off our pinkie fingers. Then I took another because my tolerance is high. Coke really is the only thing that stops the crying for a while. The brightness kicked in, evaporating tears against my cheeks.
Shaina used to wipe my face with one finger and then lick it, laughing. Salty.
We stood there in silence for a while. Small waves of sound lapped at the stone walls and low monuments of the church: car tires, distant sirens, subway rumble. The girl offered me some chips, stepping back a few paces to the headstone she’d been crouching behind and pulling out a hiker’s backpack. She handed me a mini bag of Doritos from a zip pocket stuffed with what looked like a value pack of them, the wrappers crinkling against each other in the dark. We munched quietly.
As if to administer one last cool test, she gestured to the backpack and blurted how she’d gotten all those chips from a single Gristedes dive and wasn’t that insane.
Impossible, but there she was again, my Shaina in the sunlight of the parking lot behind the ShopRite of Perth Amboy. Shinnying up the dumpster and sliding back down with an egg carton under one arm. Cracking the lid to show me a dozen pearly, unblemished shells. People will throw anything away, she’d say. Human beings are the real garbage.
The Dorito dust turned gluey in my mouth. I cracked open then, like that carton or more like one of the eggs inside. Beneath layers of white glop and cotton-poly blend suiting, I felt myself legible, the yolk of me still somehow intact.
“People will throw anything away,” I laughed through a mouthful of neon orange powder. “Human beings are the real garbage.” The tears were flowing now, pouring into my mouth to glom with the livid dust. Christ, I whispered without sound, oh my Christ, you have raised the dead.
The girl had noticed my crying, heard my little hics of breath, but she said nothing. Shaina would wait with me by the 7 Eleven until I reached a crying peak, then wink and run inside dragging me behind her, her face a mask of sudden terror. Oh my God, she’d scream, my sister just almost got hit by a car. Please help us. She needs water, please! She needs ice cream, please! We’d walk out three minutes later, our hands full of free Choco Tacos, and eat them on the curb a block away, eat them fast before they melted. Then we’d wait outside the liquor store and do it all over again.
When Pastor Mike started charging for my blessings, Shaina got some law books out of the library and wrote him this long letter, all about how if he didn’t cease and desist, illegal employment of minors, blah blah. I was thirteen, she was seventeen. Her dad and my mom got drunk together every Saturday night. But I never went back to the Lighthouse after that letter. Instead, Shaina took me with her to St. Marks on Sundays. Our Lady of Underage Piercings, of Falafel and Fake Prada. People use people, she said on the train ride home. And you’re more use than most. So don’t trust them. Don’t trust God or money or any of that crap. You’re worth more than that. Promise me.
Under car horns and the clattering of street-meat carts, there came a low human noise––like an echo in reverse, a single voice amplified in its reverberation instead of fading away. The girl told me as if I’d asked, gesturing with one hand toward the park nearby.
“It’s the People’s Mic. Some organizers brought it to the group yesterday when the pigs threatened to cite us for using bullhorns. One person talks, and the group repeats back what they say in unison.”
Everything seemed light and full of meaning. Shaina was telling me things she’d never known in life. Shaina was living in a tent for some political reason I didn’t understand but could ask her about now, I could ask her anything. So I did, and she answered. She’d come because she believed in it. Everybody was pretty cool, even if the guys tended to talk too much. She liked camping, always had. It seemed like they might really make some change together.
But I wanted to know more: Had she found that limited edition Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker? Had she gone to Morocco? Had her mom come home from the grocery store, finally? Had her nail grown back where it had shattered? Had she lived a hundred lives since I’d seen her go into the ground, and how many other people had she managed to become?
I was sobbing, and so was Shaina now. It was like that sometimes, like I gave her permission. I used to reach across the table at the all-night diner and hold her dry palm while we wept.
I did the same now, and I blessed the New Yorkers, living and dead, who had never asked me why. She would do the same here now, my Shaina girl. We listened and I held her hand and I held Shaina’s hand and she held mine.
If I believe in anything, I told her as we walked across Alexander Hamilton’s grave and left the churchyard for a hot dog, if I believe in anything, it’s the universal well of grief. There is a universal well of grief, and we each have our own personal bucket with its own set of requirements. Every person extracts their suffering from a greater collective body but fills and empties a unique bucket in individual time. It’s a kind of triangulation: you, your bucket, and the well you draw from. The bucket is yours, the water isn’t, and I don’t know who anyone belongs to, really.
I was starting to come down, getting mustard on my mouth and crying harder, swigging my water with honey and salt. When the girl and the hot dog cart guy wordlessly offered me a stack of napkins to wipe my face and hands and mouth, I thanked them over and over again.
***
Rumpus original art by Dmitry Samarov
