A Small Amazon Promise

I sat in a New York skyscraper once and watched butterflies spewing out of a building next door; they’d been part of a restoration project — the details were never made public — but birds were going bananas picking the butterflies out of the air, and then a minute later I noticed the jagged arcs of bats. It was night. They were caught in the reflection of the building lights. I turned from the window. I nodded. Sarah put the pipe up my left nostril and blew ashed nicotiana rustica across my skull. I winced, clenched my fist, gripped my knees. My eyes began to drip. She put the pipe in the other nostril and blew. I’d gone to interview her uncle, a music executive, for a story about algorithms deciding people’s music preferences. But he didn’t read the email closely; he thought I was a friend of Sarah’s trying to make it in the music business — “wanting to talk” — and to his immense credit, he took the time to find and listen to an entire album I cut with a band in my twenties. He explained tours used to sell the album but now the album sells the tours. That kinds of thing. And later, because it was that kind of day, I was running between trains, rounded a corner, and pulverized this twenty-something kid in a herringbone peacoat checking his phone and I felt satisfied, I mean I obliterated him, I had fifty pounds, six inches and velocity, and he went flying, his limbs all spread apart, and I barely apologized because my distraction was superior to his; and Sarah and I were coincidentally in Manhattan at the same time so we sat cross-legged on the white carpet in her uncle’s fancy living room, a white carpet so dense you wouldn’t feel a truck crash; and as my eyes dripped I watched Sarah blow the stuff into her own nostrils. I almost said I loved her. Right there. Maybe it was her unkept hair, or that she made my best friend happy, or that she’s beautiful, or that I really did love her, I don’t know, and the urge began to overpower me but Sarah leapt up and vomited in the sink.