Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

The trio stopped cold when they reached the next floor. They stood in a glass turret: a huge gazebo on top of the building, its sides rising like a crown. Ten stories below, the city spread around them. The Empire State Building, distant but massive, stern like an indifferent giant out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Beyond it, the elegant Chrysler Building. Southward, the city swept away toward the white pillars of the Trade towers. To the east, the frilly Woolworth Building, City Hall. Farther east was a blanket of lights--Brooklyn and Queens. Opposite, the soft darkness of Jersey. Through the glass of the domed ceiling they could see low clouds, glowing pinkish from the city lights.

"She's out--my roommate," Rune explained, looking around. "She's playing Russian roulette in a singles bar. If I don't find her back by this time, eating ice cream from the carton and watching sitcoms, that means she got lucky. Well, that's how she describes it."

Rune pulled off her jacket; it went on a hanger, which she hooked onto the armature of a bulbless floor lamp that held an ostrich-feather boa and a fake-zebra-skin sport coat. She unlaced her boots and set them on the floor next to two battered American Touristers. She opened one, looking over shirts and underwear, which she smoothed, adjusting away creases, refolding some of the wild-colored clothes, then took off her socks and put them into the other suitcase.

To Richard she said, "Dresser and dirty clothes hamper." Nodding at the suitcases.

"You rent this?" the Woodpecker asked.

"I just live here. I don't pay any rent."

"Why not?"

"Nobody's asked me to yet."

Richard asked, "How did you get it?"

Rune shrugged. "I found it. I moved in. Nobody else was here."

He said, "It becomes you."

"Being and becoming ...," Rune said, recalling something she'd overheard a couple of guys talking about in the video store a week or so ago.

He lifted his eyebrows. "Hey, you know Hegel?"

"Oh, sure," Rune said. "I love movies."

The circle of the floor was divided by a cinder-block wall, which she'd painted sky blue and dabbed with white for clouds. On Rune's side of the loft were four old trunks, a TV, a VCR, three futons piled on top of one another, a dozen pillows in the corner. Two bookcases, completely filled with books, mostly old ones. A half-size refrigerator.

"Where do you cook?" asked the Woodpecker.

"What does it mean, cook?" Rune replied in a thick Hungarian accent.

Richard said, "I feel something epiphanic about this place. Very watershed, you know." He looked in the refrigerator. A bag of half-melted ice cubes, two six-packs of beer, a shriveled apple. "It's not turned on."

"It doesn't work."

"What about utilities?"

Rune pointed to an orange extension cord snaking down the stairs. "Some of the construction guys working downstairs, they let me have electricity. Isn't that nice of them?"

The Woodpecker asked, "What if the owner finds out, couldn't he kick you out?"

"I'd find someplace else."

"You're a very existential person," Richard said.

And the blonde: "I want to start our party."

Rune shut the lights out, lit a dozen candles.

She heard the rasp of another match. The flare reflected in a dozen angled windows. The ripe raw smell of hash flowed through the room. The joint was passed around. Beer too.

The blonde said to the Woodpecker, "Play the movie, the one you picked out."

Rune and Richard sat back on the pillows, watched the blonde take the cassette from the Woodpecker and open the plastic container. Rune whispered to him, "Are you two like an entity or something?" Nodding at the blonde. Then she thought about it. "Or are you three an entity?"

Richard's paisley eyes followed the blonde as she crouched and turned on the VCR and television. He said, "I don't know the redhead. But the other one--I met her last year at the Sorbonne, I was writing a thesis on semiotic interpretations of textile designs."