Tim Murphy: Christodora

And as for Millicent, the short answer to a complicated question would be to say that she loved Jared, too. And that is how she came to live in the Christodora with him after college, when Jared’s father fully ceded the apartment to them, and also how, in a matter of about seven years, in a series of extremely random events that somehow all tied together, she and Jared ended up adopting an orphan boy named Mateo, which led to the three of them all living in the Christodora together.

There, as they all slept, Milly would often dream she was flying. She could feel it coming, a stirring, a vibration in her body. It was certainly the world’s greatest feeling, slipping off earthly weights. She rose up in the bed, stretched out her arms, and soon it was as though the bedroom were a body of water and she was swimming around in it with a delicious, slow ease of movement, Jared snoring on the bed five or six feet below her. She somersaulted languorously in the air, and then she sailed out the open window, six stories high, and into the warm city night. She watched their apartment building recede as she breaststroked her way higher and higher, until the Manhattan grid emerged below her and she was gently maneuvering her way around the corners of buildings fifteen, twenty stories high. Through windows, she saw neighbors sleeping, turning fitfully — so drearily earthbound! Up here, above the city lights, the stars emerged. She stretched out her arms and wiggled her bare toes, her nightshirt flapping around her thighs, her black curls whipping across her eyes.

The city twinkled beneath her, late-night cabs crisscrossing the grid— Like dumb toys! she thought. The Chrysler Building loomed before her, the chevrons atop its crown glowing like white thorns. It was fascinating to spy the crown so close, as she drew a broad arc around it in the air from the southeast. She treaded night air— so warm! almost steamy! and slightly opaque, a bit milky —to cut a clear path away from it. But— oh, good Lord . She seemed to be caught in a wind tunnel. Against her will, she sailed ever closer to those white-hot chevrons. And she was sailing much faster than she’d like. Oh, this was not good. She’d lost the freedom she’d savored a moment ago; it had all gone wrong. She was seconds away from the chevrons, trying to push back against the current with all her might. How bad would the impact hurt? Terror caught in her throat.

“Oh my God, help!”

She bolted upright in bed, her heart pounding. Oh thank God, she thought, gasping for breath, I’m alive. It was a dream.

Jared stirred beside her. He reached out — a repulsive and reassuring mass of warm nighttime body smells, foul breath, and oniony underarms — and pulled her close as her breathing slowed. “Were you flying again?” he muttered.

“Uh-huh. I flew into the Chrysler Building.”

He laughed in his half-sleep. “Fancy.”

That made her laugh a little, too. “It looked amazing up close,” she said.

He ran a hand through her hair. “Go back to sleep now, Millipede. It’s okay. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Predictably, Jared was snoring again in fourteen seconds. The jarring memory of the dream alone was enough to keep her awake, but now there was that. Milly took comfort under Jared’s arm a few more seconds, then wriggled and turned away. A stripe of light from a streetlamp outside fell across her night table, where a photo of her, Jared, and Mateo on the beach last month in Montauk sat in a new frame. She always had trouble getting back to sleep after these dreams; she stayed awake trying to remember the weightless arabesques of floating and flying and trying to shake off the horror of the inevitable crash.

She reached for her cell phone, charging on the nightstand. It was 4:07 A.M. She crept from the bed, padded barefoot into the bathroom, pulled down her panties, and sat to pee. There, taped to the bathroom door, was a drawing of a dinosaur that Mateo had done last Thursday, his first week back in school. She thought idly about the accuracy and sophistication in Mateo’s lines, especially in the tricky area around the dinosaur’s haunches and feet. When she finished in the bathroom, she poked her head into Mateo’s room, resisting the urge to step inside and watch him while he slept, lest she wake him. Tomorrow, she thought, it’s our morning together!

She sat in the kitchen, mulling over the crossword puzzle. Through the half-open window, she saw, on the sidewalk alongside Tompkins Square Park, which several years before had been bulldozed and landscaped into a treasure of velvety green knolls and winding pathways, some loud drunk kids stumbling forward. She thought about nights in the East Village — oh, eight, nine years ago, well before the unexpected arrival of Mateo — when it might have been her and Jared stumbling home at four in the morning. How radically their lives had changed in almost four years! Everyone else their age she knew were only now just having babies. And certainly nobody had adopted.

Milly sighed amid the gloom of the kitchen. Too often, she found herself sitting at this table in the middle of the night while the men in her life, as she thought of them, slept deeply. What did she need to get back to sleep? she asked herself. What? She must be strong and not go downstairs to the bodega and buy cigarettes. She’d gone nine days without a cigarette and she wouldn’t do that. But certainly she could go downstairs and buy, say, a juice? A banana-strawberry Tropicana. Noiselessly, she pulled shorts and a T-shirt out of the bedroom, pulled her hair back with an elastic, grabbed the keys, and slipped into flip-flops. In the hallway, the fluorescent lamps — those horrible lamps the co-op board needed to vote on to replace — buzzed lightly. Milly shuddered a bit at the rogue thrill of popping out in the middle of the night. She pressed for the elevator.

When it arrived, to her surprise and then mild alarm, there was a young man in it. He, too, seemed alarmed to see someone at the late hour and shrank back into the corner, his hands thrust into the pockets of his tight jeans. His short, spiky hair was gelled, his eyes were obscured by tinted Ray-Bans, his leanly muscled body was constrained only by a tank top, and one high-top sneaker was crossed over the other. He had one of those crown-of-thorns tattoos around his biceps that gay men everywhere suddenly seemed to have. He was clutching a cell phone in one hand, worrying it like a lucky stone.

She hesitated to get in the elevator. She’d never seen him in the building before. But he seemed to be shrinking away from her. Wordlessly, she got in and pressed the button to hasten the descent. She stood in the far corner from him, smelling his cologne and cigarette smoke and noting in the corner of her eye that he rapidly tapped his right foot.

Halfway down, she surmised that he was probably a trick of Hector’s. This was something that was starting to become a murmur in the Christodora, where everyone talked, that for the past year or so Hector had been having a parade of guys in and out of his apartment on the ninth floor at all hours of the day and night. When the elevator reached the lobby, the spiky-haired guy scurried from the elevator and across the lobby out into the night, hands thrust deep into his pockets.

Bora was on duty in the lobby, slouched behind the desk with his tiny TV on low, set to a soccer-game broadcast in a foreign language. Albanian, Milly figured. Bora was the college-aged son of Ardit, the super, and he had some accounting textbooks and a laptop spread out before him. Milly saw how he watched the tank-top guy exit the lobby with heavy-lidded, suspicious eyes.

“I’m just going to the deli to get some juice,” she told him. She felt the need to explain why she was up so late. “Do you want anything?”