How Did You Get This Number (10 page)

Now that you’ve blackened the box, you’re free to turn your focus outward. Roll down the window for the occasional breeze that kicks up when the traffic lights go green. As you rush past the sidewalks of downtown, you wonder why it is that you never see anyone you know from a cab. You rarely leave the house without bumping into someone on foot. Often you’re doing something very unappealing because you’ve become unconsciously dependent on strangers accepting and veering from your craziness. You should probably just learn to pull yourself together. Take care of that in the bathroom. Make eye contact with a mirror before you leave the house. Because how many times have you been caught in the presence of a coworker or a former lover, forced to explain away your picking and spilling and muttering? Where do these people hide when you are prepared for them? Who are these new faces waiting for the walk sign to change? Is there a formula to it? Speed + blocks covered ÷ weather = less awkward interaction. Or is it just one of the city’s little mysteries, like how no one has ever seen a baby pigeon? Maybe you just don’t have that many friends. That’s probably it.

Suddenly, you feel exhausted, thinking about your life. All this taking stock can take a higher toll than a trip to the airport. You look up at the lights of the hotels in Midtown and wonder if you shouldn’t just check into one of them. Tell the cab to stop right here, stop paying rent, crush your cell phone, deplete your bank account, stare at the wallpaper. Do not, by any means, check into the Pierre or one of the boutique hotels downtown. Staying in a great hotel when you’re happy is wonderful. Staying in one when you’ve worked yourself up into a taxicab depression feels fatal. The good news is, it’s started to rain. Pedestrians are putting their palms up to measure droplet frequency and reaching for the black umbrellas they just left in restaurant booths. Since you’re already cocooned in your banana chariot, you indulge in a little schadenfreude—the ultimate New York comfort food, surpassing even the cupcake.

The bad news is, now you’re trapped in traffic. There will be no keeping the frustration at bay when you look at your watch and realize that terrible truth: the subway would have been faster. Once this occurs to you, it cannot unoccur to you. You delve deeper into the fantasy of punctuality, speculating about what stop you’d be at right now. Underground You always moves faster than Aboveground You. Underground You always arrives at the platform just as the train’s pulling in and never has to contend with crowded stairs or construction delays. Force yourself to imagine the more realistic alternative. The one that has the would-be passengers, jostling and anxious, leaning into the dark tunnel. They’re hoping for a glimpse of a moving light, triple-checking to make sure the illumination in the tunnel is attached to a wall and not a front car. They look like synchronized pink flamingos—one leg up, leaning out with their long necks.

It’s not working. You know in your heart you’d have been there by now. Your driver starts openmouthed munching on potato chips or Cheez Doodles and you burrow a Care Bear Stare into the back of his head. You think: There are a finite number of nacho cheese Doritos in this world. He has to run out eventually. He doesn’t.

“This is good,” you say, a full block from your destination.

You’re no physics expert, but at the speed your driver has been going, there’s no way he can come to a full stop on command without killing you both. He taps the meter to make it stop. He faces forward, making eye contact only during the exchange of paper, the proof of your time together. You see his eyes in the rearview mirror. No matter how you pay—cash or credit, with a request for the overhead reading light or a request for a receipt—he looks vaguely disappointed in you.

You’re out of the cab, but you’re not done yet. Chances are, much like the Vomit that stank up your first cab, you’re going to have to come back out the way you came. Hours later, you step onto the street and walk up a block to the next major avenue. You raise your hand to hail a cab. You leave it up there, regardless of spotting available cabs. It’s a strangely lazy gesture, based on muscle memory more than effort. The rain has stopped, but it’s dark outside now. If you’re not drunk, you’re tired, and if you’re not tired, you should be. It’s been a long day. But there is good news. The Fates reward you instantly. The next wave of cars includes one with a bright light on top, like a glowing fez. It veers seamlessly toward you, having mastered the art of whisking. Inside, the cab is odor-free and clean. Or at least clean enough that nothing reflects or sticks or moves in the dark. You provide your home address, turn the TV off with your knuckle, and settle in for some AM radio and irresponsible texting. But don’t get too comfortable.

Around this time, the driver blows straight past your street. It’s after midnight on a school night. Sure, there’s a possibility this is one of those nights where you’re ready for round two, perhaps off to a secret bar or illegal gambling club or something too fantastic for words. In those cases, you might have provided an incorrect address. But tonight chances are you’re going home. This is the new, more wholesome New York, after all. Most everyone’s going home. When you point this out, your driver ardently insists that you gave him the wrong address all those many traffic lights ago. You are annoyed, bars above your head spiking. You may not know much, but, like a kindergartner, you know where you live. The seconds feel alive as you move farther away from your actual destination. Why, you wonder, is it always home they miss? In the daylight, when you’re late to some activity you’d just as soon skip, they practically memorize the floor and suite number. Practically drive you up the side of the building. But when all you want to do is curl up so that you can start afresh tomorrow, you find yourself on an unsolicited tour of your own neighborhood. So you say something nonsensical, like “Why would I have gotten my own address wrong?”

Don’t do that.

You’re right, of course. But there’s no way you’re going to win this argument. All he needs is an excuse to yell at you. He doesn’t know you. He’s seen one hundred other people today just like you. What he knows is this city. He is what keeps it in motion. He is the roller ball. The way you think of taxis, he thinks of people. He hears the slamming of doors, the losing of stray things, the charming beginnings and frustrating endings of relationships, our worst selves and our best. We are a blur of sliding butts and straddling legs and leaning elbows. Of “Can I smoke in here?” and “Can I get five dollars back?” All set to the soundtrack of receipts sputtering out from the taxi hull in a million tiny waves, breaking over every borough, white curls crashing down at the edges of a concrete and canary-colored ocean. And his hearing, like your sense of smell, is impeccable.

W
hy not just call it shit? ”

I have been staring out the window at a blur of wildflowers, and this is the first sentence to leave my mouth in forty-five minutes. A high-speed conveyor belt of daisies and Arctic violets is pulled through my field of vision as we zip along a desolate Alaskan road. In the backseat of an SUV headed south on the Kenai Peninsula, I am as much out of place inside the car as outside of it. A seven-year inhabitant of Manhattan, I am woefully unfamiliar with what the rest of the country drives. It’s difficult to be in any vehicle without staring suspiciously at the dashboard, keeping an eye on a meter that’s not there. Like a limb long since blown off in some unnamed war, but which I persist in scratching. No one in Alaska notices me doing this, and they wouldn’t—inhabitants of the “Lower 48” are notoriously suspicious and amusingly paranoid, mistaking mountains for glaciers and asking dumb questions about avalanche triggers. Why should my reaction to a family-sized vehicle be any different? They’re probably amazed I didn’t try to lick the tires or get in through the windows. I’m a little amazed myself.

The only reason I even know I’m in an SUV is because when I retell this story to friends back home in the weeks that follow, I describe the vehicle as “like a van but nice.”

My friend April, in the passenger seat, twists around.

“Why not just call what ‘shit’?”

“Bear poop.” I giggle, pushing forward into the gap between the front seats.

I am more like a child in Alaska than I have been in years. Probably more like a child than when I was a child. Everything here is new and tremendous, and this feels like vacating in a way all other vacations have not. Not only am I physically dwarfed by the scenery, but going to Alaska seems like something my family would have done in the ’80s but never did. Do people fly across the country just to see it anymore? To tour the homes where presidents were born? Do they go to the zoo and buy plastic visors? Make pilgrimages to houses made entirely of corn? They should. American appreciation vacations have become the purview of the very local or the very foreign. Which is a shame. The song doesn’t go “If you can’t be with the one you love, leave the country.”

But back to the poop. After a hike in the woods outside Anchorage, I have learned that bear feces is called “scat.” Actually, “woods” is a bit of a misnomer. The strip of trees in my parents’ backyard, that sacred burial ground for our pets, is “wooded.” The voodoo-stick-doll-sprinkled camping grounds of
The Blair Witch Project
are located “in the woods.” I, on the other hand, was tripping on the root structures of spruce trees taller than my apartment building back home, trying to avoid poisonous plants the size of my toilet.

That’s where I spotted the sign that (a) taught me my new word for the day and (b) warned me against “engaging a bear,” should I cross one’s path. Since the latter bit of information was easily dismissed (I get it: the bear wins; I’m not going to ask it to play poker), I chose to focus on the scatological. At the time I did not make the connection between the adjective for “prevalence of shit” and its abbreviation in noun form. Perhaps this is because, for longer than I care to admit, I thought “scatological” was an adjective for “all over the place.” On countless occasions, I had accused other people of being “scatological,” meaning “mercurial; please try to focus.” When in fact I was accusing them of being full of shit. This explained a lot. And if you believe something for a long enough time, it’s hard to replace that belief, even if you know it’s wrong.

“I think it’s because it’s not just feces,” says Jeff, my friend’s fiancé, in the driver’s seat. “It has something to do with the percentage of the shit that’s actually in scat. There’s fur in there. Other fur.”

But of course.
Other fur.
Why not? Only a few days in and nothing surprises me about Alaska. It is a land of casual extremes, a place located not only on the fringes of the planet but on the fringes of all normalcy. A place where you could wake up one morning to a caribou giving birth in your backyard and you’d go to work anyway. You’re not even sure where your camera is. Life is both worshipped and expendable in equal doses. And the human population is as serious as the scenery.

Here is a list of the six types of Alaskan residents, not including native tribes:

When I boarded my flight to Anchorage in Chicago, I went to wedge my trashy magazines into the polyester pouch in front of me. There was something more substantial than usual in there between the SkyMall catalog and the safety card. It was a library book. I was intrigued. It was like finding an abandoned toy in a random bathroom stall, but less creepy. I let the pocket snap shut before opening it again. On the spine in big, bold letters, it read:
The Amityville Horror: A True Story.
Nope, just as creepy.

Passengers were still streaming down the aisle, clutching their boarding passes and looking above the seats, as if trying to remember the alphabet. I quickly shoved the book into the pouch to my right and tried to forget about it. My seatmate turned out to be a state-builder Alaskan. His grandfather had a small bay named after him. He was on his way home to visit his mother, who made custom shotgun cases.

“She does
not.”

“Well, no”—he looked at me thoughtfully—“she doesn’t make the cases themselves, but you should see what she does with them.”

I imagined this man’s mother in a floral muumuu, beating the shit out of a sea otter on the front porch.

Apparently, what she actually does is decorate the cases. Causing no small amount of pride in her son, she was recently commissioned to make one for a Jerry Falwell—like figure I should have heard of but hadn’t. At the base, she Krazy Glued a bleeding crucifix of red rhinestones and her logo:
A Case of Class by Melina.
He handed me her card.

“I’m Earl,” he said, stiffly shaking my hand in such close proximity to his chest, it gave the illusion of palsy.

“Sloane.” I shook back, trying on the the-less-you-talk-the-harder-you-are theory of man-speak.

“This your first time going to Alaska?”

“It is.”

“Well, she’s a beauty.”

“Is she prettier than a boat?”

Earl opened his pouch, took one look at
The Amityville Horror,
shrugged, and saw it as a repository for chewing gum.

“Prettier. But she has a dark side. Weird stuff goes down. I don’t think people think of Alaska like that.”

“That’s more or less exactly how they think of it,” I said, and proceeded to index every ax murder I knew of on my fingers.

“So, Earl, you can see how the stories become geographically dense and objectively creepier as you move farther north and west.”