“Here I am,” I said.
She closed the door behind her and took in the scene: the third floor walk-up, efficiency apartment with its one framed Monet. The small table with the dead flower and the magazines fading into the furniture. A half of an apple caved in on itself, a tarnished flute. The unmade bed and blankets that smelled like someone’s home.
“Are you ready?” she asked me, taking off her coat.
“I’m not. Not yet.”
She looked at me briefly, appraisingly. She nodded, her coat halfway down her arms, her white uniform gleaming dully.
“No I guess you aren’t. Well then,” she shrugged, and started to pull her coat back on.
“Wait?”
She did.
“Can you stay for a minute?”
She finished the motion of putting on her coat.
“Not today. I will though. Friday? I’ve got a lot of people to see today.” She opened the door and stepped through, turned back to me. “Should I lock the door?”
I shook my head.
“I really don’t think anyone is coming.”
She nodded curtly, and smiled.
“Friday then.”
“I don’t know how I’ll fill the time,” I said, truthfully.
“You’ll figure something out. You always do,” she said, and closed the door.
So we walk around, not bothering to cross the street to stay away from each other any more because there’s less and less of us. The pigeons are fine and fat but they’ll run out of trash soon. Until then I love their grey, their rainbows, their rings and angry eyes. I feed them what I can out of the bodega. One day Tony was there and then he wasn’t. I waited at the counter for an hour before I made myself a prosciutto and mozzarella. I put the money in the till myself. I worked in a place like it when I was a kid.
And the days are lovely here, in that high spring when everything has bloomed just a week ago. The trees and power lines teem with stunned squirrels who can’t believe their luck. We gather in the parks below them and talk about things that happened, sitting on benches next to each other just like normal people do.
One day I sat on this bench, I remember. I remember sitting on this bench but I don’t remember being here now, getting here now. But I remember sitting on this bench one day and thought someone was playing a prank, because my legs no longer reached the ground.
I walk along St. Mark’s Place and read the signs in the windows of locked doors. When I moved here of course, the city was wide and tall and alive, the anthill neighborhoods teeming, the doors open all day in cold and wind and rain and sun. I wrote my children frequently, but they never wrote back. I showed their pictures to whoever I could. All of us with our kids so far away and our wallet-sized photos. We would visit them but the city is so wide, and we have everything we need here. We would visit them but no-one can find the edge of the city. And then one day it began to be that we couldn’t find each other, and we know that one day that we will disappear to ourselves. And when we’re gone, will the city go too?
On Friday, she stands in front of me looking down with the light behind her head.
“Oh come on,” I drawl.
“It’s true,” she says. She says things are slowing down, and that soon she won’t be doing house calls.
“But that would mean…”
“It’s just about over.” She kneels in front of me on the bed. Her eyes are kind and rueful. “You’re gonna hate to hear this but you look like shit.”
“And I do, I do hate to hear it.”
She smiles, stands up, the ceiling light once again behind her head, making it hard to look at her. “Come on. How tall are you today?”
Fourteen inches. “I haven’t checked.”
“I checked the bathroom. You’re too small to flush the toilet. I can’t make you do anything. But I can suggest. Strongly. Strongly, Frank.”
“You’ll take me somewhere peaceful?”
“Somewhere you’ll be well.”
“A nice farm in Vermont where I can play with all the other tinies?”
“Where you can feel better, Frank. Where you can get some sleep. When was the last time you slept the whole night?”
“Last night,” I lied, obviously.
She sighed, turned to walk to the door.
“I’ll go soon,” I said. “Callie, did you hear me? I said I’ll go soon.”
“I know you will.” She turned back to me and her eyes were shining. “I want to take you.”
“You will.”
She took a step, two, all it took to get across the apartment. She kissed her finger and pressed it softly to my forehead. I reached up and held it. She looked at me, closed her eyes, nodded.
“What did you do before you came here?” she asked.
“I was a projectionist. Then everything went digital.” I shrugged. “How about you?”
She walked back to the door. “I was a dancer. I still am. Ballet. Modern. Some very modern.” She unzipped her bag, hanging with her coat, pulled out a pair of ballet pumps, worn, spotted, very old. She walked back across the room and left them on the foot of the bed. They looked like she had twirled through barbed wire in them.
“What’s this,” I asked.
“I’ll be back for them. Be ready,” she said, and shut the door behind her.
Because we were all dying, there was nothing to be done. Because there was nothing to be done, we kept doing everything we did. Until we stopped dying, there were things to do. There were things to do when there was nothing to be done, and we did them in the cities of the small and smaller dead.
One by one we dwindle away in the city where ghosts in full daylight brush against you on the subway. One by one we shrink away from each other. One by one we dwindle as our children’s children’s children forget our names. This is the city I was born into with all the other people who died when I did, and where I live remembering while I am remembered, and where when I am no longer remembered I will be gone. The day is coming. As the last pages of the books of our names are finally written and curl into dust we dwindle and every day, the subway forgets another stop. On the field of my bed I stand and run and sing, tumbling into the impression left from my larger body. Where the bottom sheet is softest and smells most like me, I sleep. In the morning I grab hold of a ribbon from her ballet shoes, and pull and groan and pull but they are heavier than lead.
“People said Abraham Lincoln was very wise.”
“They did, this is true,” said Callie.
“One day someone decided to ask him a bullshit question to see if they… actually I don’t remember why.”
“They were starved for entertainment in those days.”
“This guy asked him, how long should a man’s legs be?”
“And?”
“He said, long enough to reach the ground.”
“They were really starved for entertainment back then.”
“Callie, my legs aren’t long enough to reach the ground.”
She shrugged, not unkindly.
“Can I see you dance?” I asked.
“It will be the last thing you ever see,” she said, laughing.
“No, I know.”
She looked down on me, smaller than her thumb, perched on my pillow. Her smile was sad, and real. She got up and opened the window. The city was silent but for the pigeons. The air smelled like leaves and buds and flowers too new to fade. She kneeled and unfurled her hand before me.
“I’ll dance if you’ll dance with me.”
“I can’t dance.”
“I’ll teach you.” She beckoned me with the fingers of her open hand. When I stood in her palm I looked at the lines and they all went on to infinity. Dance diagrams were tattooed there in light. She curled her fingers and lifted me up, held me to her chest. She crossed to the radio and turned it on. “Oh, come on, right?” she said to me and smiled when she heard what was playing. The break ended and we spun and dipped and she taught me one dance until I learned it until the DJ disappeared and “Do You Wanna Dance” played over and over, until she shut the door.