Nothing makes sense.
Scott gets lost in the Subway and by then it’s almost midnight and no point going back, so he pays fifteen bucks for a filthy hotel room somewhere that might be Brooklyn and might be Queens and might be nowhere. Spends a few hours in a fitful half-sleep and dreams of a red-haired woman methodically eating the pieces from a chessboard as Scott tries frantically to memorize their positions, and then it’s morning.
Nothing is where it should be. The A leaves him at the museum of natural history, and the rocks and minerals are all shades of red. Alex would know why. Alex isn’t there. Scott tells the guard instead. The guard tells Scott to take his sunglasses off. Scott leaves.
Central Park is red, too, and full of people trying to sell him photographs of John Lennon. Scott pulls his coat tighter, walks until Strawberry Fields give way to familiar wasteland. Keeps walking. Every step is a jolt up his spine, a muted pulse in the back of his skull.
The city is broken. Scott watches his feet skim and step and stumble along the sidewalk all the way to 50th, where he stops at the railing to watch figures glide and swirl on the rink below, oils on water. He lets his eyes drift out of focus, rides the shifting blur until someone jostles him out of it, then shakes his head clear and stumbles off through the crowd.
Scott is broken. “Practice,” he mutters to no one in particular at the corner of 57th and 7th. Falls asleep on the 2 and wakes up in the Bronx and falls asleep again and dreams of a woman on fire. Wakes up somewhere else, on a different train. On the street, someone asks him a question, and he struggles for words and settles for an apologetic shrug.
The Village feels a little better, streets arching and tangling with no respect for Manhattan’s grid. Scott walks past the corner where the Coffee-a-Go-Go is three times before he realizes it’s not there anymore. Now it’s white and shiny, full of album-cover people made of angles and neon lights under a sign that pulses SUSHI. He walks past two more times just in case, and the too-sharp people all watch him, or they don’t, or they don’t care either way; and Scott tries to convince himself that he doesn’t, either, and wonders what happened to the waitress Bobby liked, the one who always gave them free coffee. Velda. Velma. Zelda. He can’t remember her face at all.
Maybe nobody in New York has a face anymore. Scott falls asleep on a bench and dreams that he’s falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and falling and then it’s raining and a woman in an unraveling sweater is asking again and again if he’s okay. Scott says some words without paying attention to what they are, waves a hand in the lazy universal gesture for “bother someone else,” and for once it’s enough. Gets on another train and this time he ends up in Flushing, surrounded by signs made of letters he can’t read and there’s a cemetery and there’s a museum and there’s a park and there’s a mall and there’s another mall and a restaurant no a bank no a funeral home.
He showers at the Y and paces the length of the F train, back and forth from Coney Island to Jamaica and back, over and over until it’s dawn and he’s on the beach with a beer he doesn’t remember buying that tastes like seawater. Scott pours it out and trades a crumpled dollar for a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste much better but burns its way down his throat and the pain jolts him sharper than he’s been in days. There are pay phones on the boardwalk; Scott puts his dimes in one by one and presses a button over and over but can’t remember the other numbers or the sound of the name he should be whispering into the receiver so he leaves it hanging and shucks off his shoes and drinks the rest of his coffee barefoot with the freezing January surf tearing at his knees until someone starts to yell. The sky is red and the water is red and the waves break into foam a lighter brighter red that speckles the red sand and Scott thinks that maybe he knows where he’s going after all so he puts his shoes back on and starts walking east.