Sixth Avenue.
You hit Sixth at a run. The couple arguing on the corner is still arguing. The man is pointing uptown. The woman is pointing downtown. You go with the woman.
North on Sixth. Two blocks. Three.
A black car is idling at the next corner. Engine on. Someone inside is looking at a phone.
You take the stairs down at West Fourth.
West Fourth.
The station is near-empty. A woman with a trash bag. A man asleep against a column. The fluorescent humming the way fluorescent hums in every station of this city at this hour.
You swipe through.
The platform has six people on it. You count. You do not look twice. One of them is a man in a suit who should not be alone at this station at this hour. He is not looking at you. He is looking at his phone. His phone is not lit.
Keep your face still.
You are sweating through the shirt. You are sweating through the bra. Your skin is alive in a way skin is not supposed to be when you are afraid — your body not yet told the difference between what is happening and what was happening last night in a bedroom on Perry. Under your hand the shirt finds the ribs, and the ribs find the tattoo, and below the tattoo the line wakes for one second under your fingertip and then settles back down.
You take your hand away.
You do not know when you put it there.
The train.
The A.
You sit. The car has four people in it. A delivery cyclist with his bike leaning across his knee. A man in a construction vest reading a folded piece of yellow paper.
The train goes under the river.
The document is in your bag. The key is in your bag. The photograph is in your bag. The envelope from Joe is in your fist and has not left your fist since the alley.
Your right thigh. The bruise is hot under your jeans. Third day. You know its edges without looking. A shape you did not shape. A thumb you can feel the pressure of in an afternoon hour you did not know was happening.
The TA's hand in the hallway. His shoulder in front of you when the wood split. The rug through your heel. He said your name like a warning and you did not stay.
The thing under that — the heat of being wanted, which you use and do not trust and have not put down since sixteen.
The train stops at a station and no one gets on.
The train starts again.
Howard Beach.
The AirTrain at this hour is empty. The turnstile reads your card. A camera reads your face. You do not look up.
You look up.
You wanted to see.
Four cameras in the low ceiling. One of them is turned fifteen degrees off the others.
You go through.
The AirTrain runs on rails that vibrate at a frequency that lives in your teeth. You sit. The window shows black with lights in it. The city is behind you. The ocean is to your right. The country is under the wheels of the train and you are leaving the country.
You do not cry.
You are not crying. You are keeping your face still.
Terminal 1.
A woman's voice announcing the same thing in English, then in another language, then in another.
Turkish Airlines. Counter 37. A man in a red tie who has been on shift for nine hours. He does not look at you. He looks at the passport. The passport says who you are. The system knows you are here the second he scans it.
A monitor behind him shows the scan. Your face, three years old on the page, looking up.
"One-way?"
"Yes."
"Checked bag?"
"No."
"Card?"
"Cash."
He looks at you. Not long. Long enough.
"Two thousand four hundred eighty."
You count the bills. You have been carrying this cash against your spine for eleven months in an envelope you did not tell Alina about. Today it is not an emergency. Today it is a door.
He slides the boarding pass across.
Gate B37. Boarding 01:30. Istanbul.
You read it.
You have forty-six minutes.
Security.
You take your boots off. The woman ahead of you is crying quietly and no one is stopping her. She is not a threat. Crying women are the terminal's weather.
The belt takes your bag. The bag has the key and the photograph and the envelope from Port Authority and, under the photograph, the pencil envelope from Joe.
Arms up.
The scanner hums. You are standing in the shape of a woman being searched. The agent looks at the screen. The screen shows your body without shadows. The agent's face does not change.
Your body is the decade's.
Arms down.
You get the bag.
Bathroom.
The bathroom has six stalls. Three are empty. You take the one on the end.
I lock the door.
I sit on the toilet without lowering my jeans.
I put my hand on the inside of my thigh where the bruise is. I press. It hurts the way it has been hurting for three days, which is to say less every day, which is to say the body is forgiving something I have not.
I take the hand away.
I stand.
My hands are shaking.
I look in the mirror over the sink. The fluorescent is not kind.
My mouth looks like a mouth that wants to be kissed and cannot tell the want from the fear.
I wash my face.
I walk out.
Gate B37.
01:08.
You sit. Row C, second seat from the end. A family across from you — two children asleep on their mother, the mother awake, the father gone. A businessman on your right, laptop open, a spreadsheet lit blue on his face.
Above the gate-counter a TV plays with the sound off. HALLORAN INQUIRY DEEPENS — PRIVATE-INTELLIGENCE CONTRACTORS NAMED reads the chyron along the bottom; a man in a charcoal suit is photographed walking up Capitol steps. The chyron means nothing to you. You look once. You do not look again.
Three seats down from the spreadsheet, a man in a grey jacket. He is looking at his phone. He is not scrolling.
You look at the jet bridge.
When you look back, he is scrolling.
You do not know if he is him.
01:14.
The phone in your pocket vibrates. You do not look.
It vibrates again.
You take it out. Your mother. A text, not a call.
Mom — Where are you. I am at Alina's. Ty ne odna. Tell me you are alive.
You are not alone.
Your mother saying the sentence her mother said.
You look at the message for a long time.
You do not write back.
You press and hold. Power off. The screen goes black.
01:19.
The envelope from Joe is under the photograph from Port Authority. You move the photograph aside without looking at it — you know what is in it, you do not need to see it — and you take the second envelope out.
Creased. Business-size. The kind that lives in a pocket for days.
You slide your finger under the flap. The paper gives.
Inside: one page. Folded once.
Pencil. Not pen. A hand that presses hard enough to raise the paper on the other side.
01:22.
You read.
Yelena Marković. Beyoğlu, Kameriye Sokak 14/3. Nina will meet you. Do not call her first.
That is all.
You read it again.
Yelena Marković is a name you have never heard before in your life.
Kameriye Sokak is an address you do not know in a city you have not been to.
Nina will meet you.
Do not call her first.
01:25.
I fold the page.
I put the page back in the envelope.
I put the envelope inside my jacket against my ribs on the side of the tattoo.
Two envelopes on that side now. My grandmother's hand. Joe's hand. My skin between them.
Joe from the bar. The one who reads. Who has been watching, who knew, who had a name and an address and an instruction before I knew I was going anywhere. Joe who has been in my restaurant three years. Joe who never ordered the same thing twice. Joe who tipped in cash.
I did not see him.
A terminal is a place where people go to become other people.
The lights do not go out in a terminal and the music does not stop. If the lights went out you would see where you are. If the music stopped you would hear what you are doing.
I am in the room.
I am leaving.
01:38.
The gate agent says the row numbers in a voice that has said row numbers for eleven years.
You stand.
You walk to the jet bridge line.
At the trash can outside the gate you take the phone out of your pocket. You crack the back with your thumbnail. Alina showed you the first week you moved in. Alina knows things.
You pull the SIM. You bend it. It snaps.
The phone into the trash. The SIM into a different trash twenty feet away.
No one sees you do either.
The man in the grey jacket is not at the gate. Was not. Has not been for the last ten minutes and you did not notice him leave.
The agent scans your boarding pass.
The door.
34A.
Window seat. The plane is half full. The businessman two rows up has already reclined.
You put the bag under the seat in front.
You sit.
You pull the envelope out of your jacket.
Not the Port Authority one. The one from Joe.
You hold it in your lap with both hands.
The engines start. You feel them through your thighs, through the bruise, through the seat. The plane taxis. The lights on the runway are small and yellow and the runway is very long.
The plane stops.
The plane waits.
The plane goes.
I am leaving the country I was born in.
I am holding a page with a name I do not know.
I am twenty-three.
Outside the window the lights of the city are shrinking and the lights of the airport are shrinking and the water is a black surface with the moon laid flat on top of it.
The envelope in my lap is warm from my body.
Somewhere east of here, in a city I do not know, a woman I have never met is waiting.
Somewhere west of here, in an apartment on East Seventh, my mother is sitting on my bed.
I sleep.