Underwater New York

At Me Too Someone Is Looking by Alanna Schubach

When the greenish lights hit the smoke rising from the DJ booth, it formed a noxious cloud. If you dance inside it, you die, Alice decided. They were there at the behest of someone called Darien, a stick figure given life and stringy black hair. Elyse had sent him for drinks.

“He’s a millionaire,” she said. “We should pay for nothing.”

“How did that happen?”

“I don’t know, some Internet thing. He’s retired now.”

He returned with twin cylinders filled with neon.

“You know, Darien’s a town in Connecticut,” Alice told him.

“And also, my name.”

“How are you enjoying your retirement?”

“I don’t feel retired. I want to open a commune on City Island. I want to learn how to make my own compost—supposedly you need at least two years for everything to really ferment the way it should. I want to bring back the zine. Who can bear to read shit online? I’m concerned with the rise in intangibles. I really need to finish my screenplay. It’s a reimagining of Crime and Punishment, set in a Long Island high school.”

“I grew up on Long Island.”

“Qué fantástico.”

He spoke to her as though she could parse a thing he was saying. As if she wasn’t the sort of person for whom going to a club still held an odor of the forbidden. Everyone seemed older. There was the sense that they all owned the same kind of makeup, something you could only buy on the black market, something that filled in the crevices and caverns on your face, that smothered years rather than peeled them away.

Elyse asked, “Will you put your own shit in the compost?”

“Will you dance with me?”

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Tags: 1600 bars of silver, Alanna Schubach, Arthur Kill, Formica dinette, Shipwreck