It was past eight by the time we got into Brooklyn. The sun had sat a long time ago and for a bigger part of the ride, we spent the time dozing off in the dark, waiting the cars in front of ours to inch along. The roads were jammed pack with the evening rush hour crowd trying to get home from work and every now and then, someone would honk impatiently. As if that would help the situation. To kill time, I used a travel app on Jimmy phone to find the cheapest places in the NYC area and managed to book a pretty neat looking place overlooking the east river using her dad’s credit card. It was just within our budget (less than a hundred bucks a night) and seemed to pass all our requirements for a place to say (bed and airconditioning for Georgie, TV and internet for Taylor, and clean bathroom for me. Jimmy didn’t care; she told us she would sleep in the car if she had to.).
As soon as we got out of the jam, Jimmy hightailed it down the streets, cutting corners and zooming past unfamiliar neighborhoods at the instructions of the car’s GPRS (thank god for modern technology) and it wasn’t long before we arrived at the corner of India and Franklin St, where our B&B was located. We split into two rooms as we had done the night before, and I let Scooter shower first, knowing that he was dying to get into bed as soon as possible. The room was much nicer than the one we had at the motel and I spent some time browsing through the TV channels before settling on HBO, which was showing reruns of Harry Potter. Scooter came out just as Harry was battling Lord Voldemort in an old graveyard, naked except for the towel wrapped around his waist. He yawned as he dug inside his duffel bag for a pair of pajamas and then shrugged nonchalantly and threw himself onto the bed, sans clothes.
“Gross, dude! Put some pants on,” I said.
“I will – if you find me some,” he yawned again.
“You’re an asswipe,” I said as I threw a pair of sweatpants at him.
He didn’t reply, instead just thrusting his legs into the pants without so much as an inch of embarrassment for his nudity.
“Shameless bastard,” I mumbled as I turned away, but not fast enough to escape a scarring glimpse his butt.
I jumped into the shower, grateful for the hot water gushing over my head, and thought about everything that had happened so far. We had accidentally attended a funeral, met a waitress who was dreaming big dreams to escape from her current life, and even helped an estranged pair of brothers get back together. We’d pretty much seen and done all kinds of interesting things, with the exception of one glaring fact: we still hadn’t managed to find Nirvana. And to be honest, we were getting tired. It was all good fun for a while, but being cooped up in the car for two straight days had taken a toll on all of us. Just look at Scooter, whose snores could be heard even through the bathroom door and the sound of water pouring out from the shower. Or Georgie, who had somewhat lost her sassy attitude towards Jimmy and was basically just trudging along after us. I’m betting all the cash in my wallet that she was zonked out on the bed right now, just like Scooter. And don’t even talk about Jimmy and I. Instead of becoming closer to her, all I’ve done so far was to mess things up.
What we needed right now, I decided, was a break. Take some time out to stretch our legs and breathe fresh air for once instead of the car’s air conditioning. Maybe go to a park. Maybe see the city. That would be fun! We could do all kinds of touristy things like go up the Empire State Building or drive along the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe feed some ducks in Central Park. If they were even there. I wasn’t sure when their migration season was. And I’d call my mom, I decided. Tell her I’m alright. Maybe even talk to my dad. By the time I got out of the shower, I was feeling much better. We were in New York City alone, unsupervised, we were young, we had a car and a credit card at our disposal…it would be alright. Heck, it would be more than alright, it would be great! It was going to be our adventure! Our epic last summer as high school students!
I sat down at the writing desk and grabbed a pen and a blank sheet of paper from the notepad they provided us. Things to do in New York City, I wrote down. I underlined it twice slowly, giving myself sometime to think. Empire State, I put down as the first stop. Times Square, I added as the second. And then I continue putting stuff to the list as they crossed my mind. Rockefeller Tower. Cronuts. Central Park (Feed the ducks?). Met Museum. Guggenheim. Coney Island (theme park). Indie shops in Williamsburg. Radio City Hall. Madison Square Garden (check if there’re any games/shows). Strawberry Field, where John Lennon got shot. Broadway shows (perfect date place for Jimmy?). I chewed on the top of the pen as I thought about the last number on the list. How should I ask her out?
“Nate?”
I looked up. Scooter was still snoring away on the bed, so it could not be him.
“Nate, are you awake?”
This time, the voice on the other side of the door was accompanied by a knock, loud and unabashed, intended to wake someone up.
“Coming!”
I hurried to the door and pulled it open. Jimmy stood on the other side, basked in the orange glow of the corridor light hanging right outside our room. She was dressed in a white band t-shirt, The Beatles – I later realized, and her usual jean cut offs.
“Georgie fell asleep after showering and I’m hungry,” she said. “Wanna grab dinner? I saw a pizza place two blocks down. We can walk there.”
“Okay!” I said, a little too enthusiastically. She raised a brow at me, which made me flush. I cleared my throat and attempted a more nonchalant attitude. “Give me a minute or two.”
I pushed the door close as though I had all the time in the world, but as soon as it clicked shut, I ran around the room like a mad hatter, tripping over Scooter’s stupid towel on my way to the bathroom. I rummaged around the toiletry bag until I found his cologne and gave myself a good douse. Then I dashed back out into the room, hastily pawing through my backpack for a suitable shirt.
“Should have thought of changing before you took a bath in my cologne, dumbass,” Scooter muttered, still half asleep.
“Shut up, I – thought – you – were – asleep?” I asked as I pulled on a different shirt.
“Who the fuck could sleep through all that knocking and running? Just put your fucking shirt back on. It’s not going to improve your shitty personality anyway.”
“Fuck you,” I replied.
“Take a number, baby.”
I changed back into the shirt I was wearing before and grabbed my keys and wallet, pausing in front of my phone for a brief second. I decided to leave it on the table. Phone call to Mom can wait, I thought. I’ll call her in the morning. I looked in the bathroom mirror once more, just to make sure I didn’t have any half eaten food on my teeth, and then I headed straight for the door. As I was about to leave, Scooter stopped me.
“Hey, Nate?” he yawned.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t fuck things up tonight.”
I flipped him off and stepped out of the room. Jimmy standing along the corridor, one foot propped up against the wall, typing away into her phone. She looked up as I neared.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
“Sorry, I was talking to Scooter.”
“Oh, does he want to join us?”
“No, no! He…um…he was just telling me to make sure I get some…er…dinner. Yeah, make sure I get some dinner for myself and for you and for him. That’s all. Let’s go.”
“You’re acting weird again,” she said. But she followed me down the stairs out of the BnB.
We had dinner by a small pizza parlor on Metropolitan Avenue. It was cool and brightly lit, with glass windows that overlooked the busy street. The interior was rustic – old wood beams formed the ceiling; fake kerosene lamps sat along the windows, and old band posters hung along the brick walls. They served Jimmy’s pepperoni pizza with extra mozzarella cheese on a wooden board and my vanilla coke in a glass jar, and the chef, a young handsome Italian with long, braided hair, came out to chat with us for a bit. It was all very new, very Brooklynish, and I loved every bit of it. After dinner, Jimmy and I walked all the way to Williamsburg, where cool, artsy looking twenty-something passed us by without a second glance.
We went into a grocery store, got ourselves some chilled soft drinks, and sat down by the pier on East River Side Park, right where the ferries picked up passengers and shuttled them back and forth along Brooklyn. It was a humid night and the sweat from the walk made my skin sticky, but I didn’t mind. On the other side of the river sat Manhattan in all its majestic glory, the silhouette of the brick buildings and central park clearly reflected in the moving waters before them. Peeking over the park and the lower east side, was the tip of the Empire State Building, iconic even its fractionalized state. If I leant forward just a little on the bench, I could see the side of Williamsburg Bridge and the incessant stream of golden headlights flying along the length of it. It was perfect.
“I don’t think Georgie liked me very much,” Jimmy said out of the blue. She fiddled with the book in her hands, a ratty paperback titled Norwegian Wood by a Japanese author whose name I couldn’t pronounce. It was set mainly in Tokyo, she had explained to me back in the pizza place, and apparently there were a lot of sex and unhappy people in the book, with the protagonist going in and out of depression. I had no idea why she would want to read such a thing.
“Georgie can be a little protective,” I said. I took a glance at her. “But she’s not so bad when you get to know her. Or when she’s lying comatose on the bed.”
Jimmy laughed.
“No offense,” I said, hesitating a little before asking my question. “But why didn’t you ask your other friends to come along on this trip instead of me?”
“I don’t have friends.”
“Oh. Why not?”
“I can’t stand people sometimes. And they find me rude and annoying.”
“But don’t you care about what people think of you? I mean, I am under the impression that everyone want friends.”
Jimmy turned to look at me. “Of course I do. I don’t like to admit it, but I do. Everyone does. Everyone wants to be loved, it’s only normal that human beings craved acceptance.”
“Then…why do you do the things you do?”
“Like irritating your best friend, you mean?”
“That, amongst other things,” I replied.
“I have my reasons,” she said. “Sometimes, I think about all the people that must hate me.”
“And then?”
“And then I pretend that I don’t care whether they hate me or not. When it gets too hard to pretend, I curl up somewhere and pretend I don’t exist.”
We were both silent as we thought about her answer. Or at least I was thinking about it; I never could tell the kind of things that went through her mind.
“Hey, Nate?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever think about growing up?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Oh yeah?” she said as she scooted closer to me, her legs crossed, palms propping her chin. “Tell me about it. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Erm…I don’t know. I guess I’ll get a degree of some sorts and have a job,” I said vaguely.
“Really?” Jimmy asked, scrunching up her nose as though she smelt something bad. “You wanna work in some stupid office, making coffee for a stinky boss?”
“You know it’s not that bad,” I said. “Some people are actually happy in their jobs.”
“Oh yeah?” she challenged. “Name one.”
“Uh…there’s…” I scratched my head. I couldn’t say my dad; he was always complaining about how the management was too concerned with making profits to care about the wellbeing of the staff, and how the work hours made it impossible for him to spend more time with us and how the pay was too low. My mother didn’t work, neither did my grandparents. “Well, there’s Joe.”
“JOE? The mechanic back in your town?”
I nodded.
“The only reason why Joes seems happy at work is because he got to get away from his wife,” she said.
“Alright then,” I said, handing her the Mountain Dew. “Tell me what you want to be when you grow up.”
“I’m never growing up,” she replied simply. “I’m going to be Peter Pan, and be young forever and ever.”
“Say you have to,” I insisted. “Say there’s something grown up you need to do. What would it be?”
“Something grown ups would do?”
“Anything,” I said solemnly.
“I need some time to think about it,” she said.
She lay upside down on the bench, propping her legs up on the back of it. The tips of her hair brushed the surface of the ground. Her shirt, which had been low on the front, slipped just so that I could see the soft swell of her breasts, pale and smooth under the moonlight. I gulped nervously and looked away. Manhattan watched over the two of us on the other side of the river, its neon lights never blinking, a city of sin that never slept. The waters on the edge of the pier lapped at the concrete. Somewhere behind us on the streets of Williamsburg, bars played indie music. I took a big gulp of Moutain Dew and glanced at Jimmy. She was so quiet that I thought she had fallen asleep, but she hadn’t. She was simply staring up the skies above with a frown, an arm lying across her forehead in a careless manner.
I picked up Jimmy’s abandoned book and tried forcing my attention towards Toru Watanabe who, come to think of it, was somewhat in a situation similar to mine given that he was also attracted to a girl he could never understand, but my eyes kept travelling eastward, where Jimmy lay, shirt askew, about my question. Naoko, the object of Norwegian Wood’s protagonist’s affections, had nothing on Jimmy Jacobs. Eventually, I gave up trying to read the book and just sat there, trying not to be too obvious about starting at her. It didn’t work.
“Take a picture, it last longer,” she said, still staring off into the skies. I grinned sheepishly.
“I would,” I said. “But I don’t have a camera.”
“I’ll make sure to bring one next time.” She sat back up. “I think I know what I want to do.”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Write a book,” she said. “I’d like to have written a book…a happy one.”
“Why?”
“Because the world is such a dumbass sad place. I want to write a happy book for all the sad people.”
“I thought you don’t like people?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I want them to be miserable, do I? I’d write it anonymously, so that I don’t have to deal with damn motherfuckers trying to talk to me about the book, and send out to all the depressed people over the world.”
“You’d have to print a lot of books for that.”
“I don’t want it on paper.”
“Why not on paper?”
“I don’t want to be responsible for killing a whole forest.”
“Says the girl who tears pages out of books.”
“Shut up.”
“Fine, so you want an e-book.”
“No, no an e-book either. I want something that transcends our lives and generations.”
“That sounds like an ad for an e-book.”
“Screw you. I’m serious though. I want to write something lingers in the air and the skies and on the leaves above long after I am gone.”
I frowned, realizing that she meant what she said. “How are you going to write a book that lingers in the air?”
She looked around, then clambered up to her feet so she was standing on the bench.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m writing my story,” she said triumphantly. She cupped her hands to her mouth.
“HELLO, BROOKLYN!” she yelled.
Ello…!
Ello…!
The sound echoed through the pier. A flock of birds scattered from where they had been hidden in the shadows of a tree.
“I’M GOING TO TELL YOU A STORY!”
“You’re crazy!” I laughed.
“Ah, but you already know that,” she said, smiling at me. She looked away. “HELLO WORLD! BE HAPPY, BROOKLYN! BE HAPPY, BE HAPPY, BE HAPPY!”
And she repeated it for a good five minutes, until someone from one of the buildings overlooking the park screamed at her to shut up. The wind carried her voice away, spreading the octaves and decibels between each syllable until they became no more than the whisper of the leaves brushing against one another, until they became the sigh of river caressing the stones beneath it, until the words became the wind, and the wind became nothing more than Brooklyn itself. It wasn’t a long story and it wasn’t even very good (what kind of a book would contain only two words: be happy? And who would want to read such a book?) but she was done, I felt as though she had changed the entire city. It was completely ridiculous, of course, there are going to be hundreds and millions of unhappy people waking up the next morning but at least for now, they had heard someone telling them to be happy in their dreams.
We decided to walk back to Greenpoint, a journey which could easily give me half an hour more with Jimmy, if we walked slow enough. And we did. We walked out of the park, past the hippie cafes that were still open at one in the morning, where skinny guys with ripped jeans and black Dr. Martens stood by the curb smoking, and back down towards the U.S post office building I had seen previously. We paused by a heavily graffitied warehouse and I helped Jimmy snapped a few photos with the walls, laughing as she pouted comically. Then we came upon a small restaurant. It was dimly lit, with orange lanterns hanging over the doorway. Two Buddha statues sat on either side of the entrance, their bronzed face holding some kind of secret smile. Above them, in green bamboo letters, was the word Nirvana. Jimmy and I exchanged a glance. Then with a grin, she walked in. A tall, boho looking guy was sitting behind the reception area, reading a book. He looked up as we came in. He had tattoos on his neck and his hair was long and braided into a long rope that hang over his shoulders.
“Table for two?”
“No…actually we’re looking for a restaurant by the name of Nirvana,” I said. I paused as Jimmy pulled the photograph out of her pocket and showed it to him. “Is this the place?”
The guy frowned and flipped over to read the back. “Holy shit,” he said. “Wait here.”
He disappeared behind the curtain I assumed was the kitchen. A few minutes later, he came back out with an older gentleman. The old man’s hair was white and fluffed up, his brown suit a little too loose on his skinny frame. He walked with a slight stooped and his eyes were watery as he squinted at us.
“This is Mr. Wilson, the restaurant owner,” the hippie guy said to us. “He’s the man in the photo.”
“He’s the man?” I asked incredulously. It can’t be! The man in the photo was young and dark and smiling. This person before us was old and withered, like a flower who had stood too long in the sun without water.
“My name is Howard Wilson, and that was me twenty years ago,” he said. He peered up at Jimmy and I, his blue eyes clouded with cataract and age. “How did you come by this photo?”
“I found it in a book,” Jimmy said. “The Great Gatsby. My mother bought it for me from a secondhand bookstore and we’ve been looking for you ever since. Please, sir, we just wanted to know what you meant when you wrote to your daughter telling her to find Nirvana.”
“Ah, The Great Gatsby,” the old man said. “I remember that book. Of course, I remember my daughter too.” He chuckled to himself. “Please, sit.” We sat down at the nearest set of table and chair. The hippie waved a waitress over and ordered drinks for us.
“Mr. Wilson maybe old, but he has a great memory,” he said. “I’m Don, by the way.”
“Her name’s Jimmy and I’m Nate,” I said. “We’re from North Carolina.”
“North Carolina?” Howard Wilson said. “My, my, how far books travel. Almost more that the owners themselves, don’t you think? Books last longer than all of us could hope for, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes.,” Jimmy said. “We’ve driven all across the country trying to find you.”
“Have you? Just to find nirvana?”
“We wanted to know what you meant when you wrote you daughter.”
“Ah, that. She was a troubled girl, my daughter. Very troubled. Towards the end, my wife and I tried everything to make her happy, but of course it didn’t work. The book and the photo was one of the things I gave her in hopes of trying to connect with her, see. But she didn’t work on the same frequency as us, she was too different.”
“Funny,” I said. “Someone once said to me about…” I glanced at Jimmy. “…a friend.”
“They did?” Howard Wilson nodded. “They did, of course, they did.”
“Is your daughter here?” Jimmy asked. “We’d like to meet her.”
“She’s gone,” Don said quietly. “She died twenty years ago.”
“A few months after I gave her that photo, actually,” Howard Wilson said. “Chasing after her own nirvana, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “We don’t mean to bring up the bad memories. We just –”
“How did she die?” Jimmy asked.
“Jimmy!”
“How?” she asked again, ignoring me.
“Suicide,” Howard Wilson said. “Knife to the wrist. It was terrible. Her mother and I had just split. Her mom moved to Pittsburg. I stayed here in New York. Nobody asks here. Nobody bothers me. I like that.”
“We’re sorry,” I said again. Howard Wilson nodded, his old head bobbing gently.
“It is alright.”
“Are you surprise that we manage to grab hold of the book?”
“Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“What about Nirvana? Why Nirvana?”
“It is a term I learnt when I was a young man. I was in Asia for a quite a bit, you know, and they have pretty strong roots in Buddhism. While I was at a temple in Thailand, a monk taught me that when Buddhists pray, they seek nirvana. Do you know they believed that emotions are the trappings of life? Passion, happiness, desires, sadness, anger…the teachings of Buddha are meant to help people escape from it all.”
“Human beings without emotions?” Jimmy frowned. “Why, then they wouldn’t be humans at all!”
“Exactly,” Howard Wilson said. “That’s exactly what they want. To not be human.”
“Well…but…then what would we be, if we are not human?”
“Nothing. That’s what nirvana is: nothing.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Jimmy said standing up agitatedly. The chair she was sitting on fell backwards with a loud clatter but she didn’t care. She was too busy fuming at Howard Wilson. “I don’t understand what kind of crazy people would pray to be nothing. I haven’t come all the way here to learn that you’ve told your daughter to find hope in nothing. It makes me want to die.”
“You are too young to want to die,” Howard Wilson said. “Please, sit.”
“No! This is bullshit. Nirvana was supposed to give me peace!”
“Peace is something you work for,” Howard Wilson said. “It is not given.”
“Fuck you,” Jimmy said. “Fuck you and your ideas.”
She dashed out of the restaurant.
“Jimmy wait!” I turned back towards Howard Wilson and Don. “I’m really, really sorry,” I said. Then I ran out of the restaurant as well.
I chased Jimmy down the street. A light drizzle had started, easing the heat of the summer. The droplets grew steadily, then just as we passed the post office, the skies opened up to a thunderstorm.
“Jimmy!” I called. “Wait up!”
She stopped.
“Wait – ” I panted as I reached where she was standing still. “My god, Jimmy. What happened in there?”
“What if there is no nirvana?” she said. She stared at me. Her eyes were wild and bright, that of a madwoman. She laughed. For the first time since I’ve known her, I felt very, very afraid for the both of us.
“Jimmy –”
“What if there is no nirvana?” she repeated. “What if everything was a cycle, and we were all just doing the same things, doomed for the same eternity? How boring that is, Nate! How silly!”
She spread her arms, letting the raindrops pelt against her pale skin. Her white top became see through as it clung to her body like a second skin and I could not help but to stare at her.
“What if the rain meant nothing, and the clouds are just clouds, and we are just humans, aware of our impending death but incapable of doing anything about it?”
She tilted her face up towards oncoming raindrops. Her pale skin, lit by the street lamp and moistened by the rain, glowed from beneath her wet top like an apparition. She was someone’s idea of a beautiful ghost, haunting the streets, presenting herself only to those she wanted to.
“What if every single thought we’ve ever had is just like nirvana – meaning nothing? What if Howard is right and we are nirvana, and we meant nothing at all?”
“Jimmy, come on, you’re getting wet,” I said. “Let’s just go a café nearby and sit down.”
“We are nothing, Nate.” Her voice was suddenly muted, almost inaudible through the sound of thunder overhead. She shook her head sadly and repeated her words. “We are nothing.”
Whirling around, she dashed on to the street and my heart stopped.
“JIMMY, WAIT –”
I chased after her but it was too late. Headlights came glaring out from the dark streets. Tires screeched against the rain washed road. There was a dull thud, followed by a second one. The next thing I knew, I was flying, five, ten feet in the air. I hit the ground on my side and pain burst through my hips, sharp and burning. The world darkened and lightened. Someone screamed but it sounded far away. Lights dimmed and brightened. I blinked, and saw Jimmy on the road beside me and her lipstick so red, it looked like blood.
I heard Georgie and Scooter arguing, and Jimmy telling them to shut up. She was always telling people to shut up. Faces, shoes, the sound of Jimmy laughing, my mom in the kitchen, rain pattering on and on…the world weaved itself around me, closing in tighter and tighter, until all I could focus on was the road and how red the rainwater seemed to be as it flowed down towards the drains.