Getting kicked out of the sex club

It’s the warmest January New York City has had in years. The sky is hard, the plants are quiet in slumber and iced dreams. There’s a grainy sort of worry that comes with unusually mellow winters, how much longer do we have left? 

The harsh bustle and nervousness of the city is lost in lukewarm, asphalt days and I’m neck deep in some kind of episode, running half dreamily on as little sleep as I needed to keep my organs functioning. My surroundings melt and run together like watercolors left out in the rain.

At seventy-seven pounds I’m the lowest weight I’ve ever been in my adult life. I hate absolutely everything about my appearance. I’ve gone down an entire bra size, none of my clothes fit me anymore. I run my fingers over my bones, feel my ribcage, feel my wrists, feel my collarbones, feel my sternum and shudder with distress. I pick and pick at my acne, spend hours staring at my teeth in my phone camera and practiced harmonizing in the shower. My hair is fried from all the bleach, a shocking, hideously bright shade of blue that looks more violet and turquoise. I think about calling my hairstylist and screaming at her, about the awful shade, about the hair damage, about the jacked up figure on the bill. Apparently three hundred and fifty-seven dollars didn’t mean shit. 

The bareness of my life is showing on my body. Something has to give.

But the dark, glowing hunger for new beginnings that January brings is simmering in the crevices of my brain. I try, I really do. I make a New Year’s Resolutions bingo. I’m gonna start brushing my teeth regularly, read the newspapers, watch more Bengali movies, maybe even pay off my medical bills. But I feel like an automaton, head down, hair falling over my eyes unless something jerked it back up and I flash a painted smile. While my sisters came to visit me, I put teeth into my laughs, whether we were getting dressed for the opera or wandering around Jackson Heights on the hunt for paan, any taste of home.

Tuesday, 7:26pm

It’s dinnertime and I’m seated alone in a crowded restaurant in Flatiron. 

It’s almost 50 degrees outside. I’m wearing a t-shirt under my jacket. No sweater, no gloves, no scarf, no heavy overcoat. The reasoning that had brought me here is perverted and difficult to follow. 

I have a vague toothache on the left side of my mouth. It’s making me delirious. I had called my dentist that morning. The receptionist was unnaturally rude to me. She had a thick accent, I could barely understand what she was saying. We were very impatient with each other but she gave me an appointment in two days anyhow.
Things are getting bizarre. 

I’m half-crazy, at the pressure point where my thoughts were muddled like the tail of a tornado, but I can still mime the machinations of daily life enough to avoid suspicion from the lazy observer. I call my friends lazy and callous for not noticing the warning signs. At the same time I hold my symptoms close to my chest, pushing down any giveaways with such force that my hands burn bright red from the strain. 

The Abilify is working overtime. I feel like an animal that had its furry little tail sliced off. Something has to give, something has to give. I force myself to go to social functions and stand in the corner, sullen, overwhelmed and unresponsive. I spend hundreds of dollars shopping online and leave the packages unopened, a dusty cardboard mass next to the front door. I put Audrey on a very strict diet, very suddenly and very adamantly. She is not on board, and screams at me day and night. After a single dinner with a friend who’s a lawyer, I decide to reevaluate my entire career in design. At some point I think about getting antipsychotics and sleep medication from a drug dealer. Yeah I don’t want any heroin, but do you have Seroquel? I imagine them laughing in my face. 

The Translated Kafka Diaries event at Rizzoli Bookstore I went to earlier that evening hadn’t given me the dopamine rush I wanted. As I wander down the dark, wet streets, I catch pieces of what must have been a splendid sunset in the reflections of windows and cracks between buildings. It’s too nice out to go home just yet. I find myself in Flatiron, and the streets begin to look very familiar until I realize I’m near Club L, a sex club. I need the validation badly. So badly that I was ready to wait the two hours it would take till the club opened. So I set up camp at Oscar Wilde for dinner, a bar I had been meaning to try for a while now. 

I order calamari. I had been forced to try it once in LA because I was so hungry and I didn’t hate it. I narrow my eyes as my brain jumps back in time. The place had been a lot like this one, a bar with a dining area, too fancy to card you. We were out on the last day of the semester with our professor. Snippets of conversation and disembodied faces bobbed by, apples adrift a ripple of waves after someone had dunked their face into the barrel.

“Everything alright?”

I snap back to attention. “Yes.”

The waitress smiles at me, refills my water and walks away. 

“Wait!” I flag her down. “Can I get a vanilla latte with a thing of simple syrup please?” 

“Like on the side?”

“Yes.”

“Got it.”

“Thank you.” 

My phone is almost dead, at 12%. I crack open the hefty volume of the Kafka translation. I run my thumb down the Sharpied note the translator had left me with pride, To Rushtri, with my best wishes, Ross B. Kafka’s thoughts seem as muddled and wounded as mine. I know Kafka as a moody writer, preserved in the ache of intellectualism, but some of his lines made him seem more human and less metaphor. I also sleep well and wake badly, and want to hurl myself through the window, splintering wood and glass. Or perhaps I’m projecting, seeing things that weren’t there. 

Time swirls slowly, painfully slowly down the frothy dregs of my coffee. I almost give up and go home several times. I contemplate getting drunk. But I knew my psyche couldn’t tolerate alcohol in this state. The last time I had a drink was when we were at Marquee and it had made me feel stranger in my body than ever. No, I need to stay rooted, my fingernails making red crescents in my palms from the strain. 

11pm and the walk to Club L feels like the edge of a bridge, with inky waters swirling below my feet. It’s a disaster. I’m the only single woman there and I’m stone cold sober, my heart beating frantically against my ears. It’s Tuesday after all. The vivid pornos on the TV screens and empty leather couches are exactly how I remember it. Eventually the talk runs bawdier and bawdier and the clothes come off swiftly and suddenly. I get told I’m pretty enough times that my brain reorients itself long enough to scream, what the hell are you doing here? I pull away from the man who has his hands on my hips, whose name I don’t remember and go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror until the weird red lighting washes my face out completely. It feels like two traffic lights have been pressed against my eyeballs. My surroundings dissolve softly. It’s like slipping into bathwater.