by Dora Gelerinter
Inspired by The Great Gatsby
“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
She stood in that damn elevator, laughing. How could she laugh? It must have been the walls. Faux-wood walls incubated the girl from reality, plugging up her ears with white backpacks and other material nonsense. Every few inches, an irregularly shaped hole on the surface led into unknown darkness, as if former prisoners had tried to poke their ways out of there. It was a prison.
She wasn’t incapable of understanding; Dominique’s IQ declared her almost a genius. All she had wanted that evening was a new backpack for the school year. Such blissful selfishness dictated her daily life. Inside Dominique’s head, “voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes.” That was the problem. The jokes had never existed, yet she still laughed. Through her eyes, the whole city was bathed in “a block of delicate pale light.” She walked along the paved dirt roads, those made glorious by rebellion in the form of chewed-up pieces of gum and quivering stockpiles of spit. The “racy, adventurous feel of it at night” was all she needed to create optimism. Passing by strangers, the same shy cycle prevailed: look down, look up, look away. Feigning ignorance and blindness was hard work. Once in a while, the routine revolted. An anonymous young man would stare at her with a magical twinkle in his eye, and age was the bridge of their connection. “Anything could happen [if she] slid across this bridge.” Dominique was always so tempted to look backward after his retreating outline, but she couldn’t. The upkeep of indifference was an unspeakable rule in New York City.
But apathy didn’t create a vacuum. The energy of absolutely anyone and everyone in the city was there too, pulsating and yearning for greatness. It was as if they all shared some astounding secret, perhaps a unique gratitude for their home. Living in New York City was proof that man could overcome nature “with the city, rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish.” She giggled at European tourists frantically basking in the sight of the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, knowing the view was hers forever. Public parks remained neatly within their boundaries. New Yorkers had created a new manifestation of nature, a new reality.
Dominique was the child of “enchanted metropolitan twilight.” There was always so much to do in the city, and she intended to experience it all. Even when the lights of Times Square created dainty diamonds in the periphery of her transient tears, she was still liberated. I think this was where our paths diverged.
I never escaped. I could never look past the precautionary glares young white children gave me as I walked by. In the New York City I knew, threats lurked in the shadows and beckoned to me. Dangers reigned in the form of disappointment and pressure. Young people “wasting the most poignant moments of night and life” served me jerk chicken and escovitch fish. I was a stranger to success, part of a minority destined for sub-par treatment. I don’t know how she managed to break through the walls surrounding our neighborhood. I couldn’t. Lies were hidden in “a barrier of dark trees,” and the pressure to be someone special constituted their dark green leaves. I saw not the striking Victorian architecture she saw, but “a hundred houses, at one conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon.” The atmosphere already expected nothing from me, so I never contributed. Strangers walked past me on the street, running along metaphorical racetracks to their goals. I was ignored. On the subway, it seemed as if everyone knew exactly how to avoid temptation. But I couldn’t avoid the harsh artificial light, the second-class alternative to a strait-laced lifestyle. Who could blame me? No one ever gave me a glance filled with “wild promise.” I constantly feared that the end of my life would melt into the pavement like an abandoned ice-cream cone. In a city with so many incredible residents, I found it nearly impossible to leave behind distinctive footprints. Every day was “haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction.”
Maybe that’s why I did it. Maybe I was trying to borrow a bit of magic from her bliss to fill a void inside myself. Wonderful conversation flowed effortlessly between Dominique and her father. The city had done them good, and I wanted to share in “their intimate excitement.” So I succumbed to the shadows behind well-trimmed bushes, and then walked into the vestibule. It was about nine at night in Midwood. A gun burrowed a hole into my blue sweatshirt. When I finally shouted at her father, cursing and demanding and spitting at his balding scalp, Dominique just stood there and observed. What a coward. She didn’t even see that I had spared him until afterward.
She pushed herself into that elevator with her father, who was now short a few hundred dollars. Dominique started talking with a myriad of voices alien to her own: the “clear voices of little girls,” girls with far less comprehension of crime. She clutched the backpack in her small pink hand, and thought she was funny, and didn’t Daddy agree? Dominique laughed at her own joke. How could she laugh? What an idiot. Her father stared in disbelief. I watched her from my perch on the elevator ceiling, feeling more power and privilege than I had ever felt before. Finally, I left them alone with my presence, embedded in the security camera. I slipped on an orange jumpsuit.
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About three years ago, my father was mugged in the lobby of our apartment building. I was with him when it happened, and we had been returning home from back-to-school shopping. During and directly after the incident, I was in disbelief. Only when I started talking about it with my mom did I realize the gravity of something I had laughed off in an elevator. Later, my father claimed the perpetrator had a gun in his pocket, but I never saw the weapon myself. His report of the crime to the apartment building’s owners prompted them to install security cameras throughout the first floor, including in the lobby and in the elevator. Now, whenever I ride in the elevator, I jokingly greet the security camera above me, as if there were an actual person inside, watching me through the electronic eye. This habit is what inspired me to narrate from the perspective of the perpetrator, and to establish the security camera as his window into Dominique’s thoughts. Dominique is the name I always wanted growing up, and so my Dominique is an idealized version of myself: more carefree, more optimistic, and seemingly oblivious to danger. My perspective of New York City is a combination of both Dominique’s and the narrator’s. Like Nick, I am “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
