Night Owls: Chapters 9-13

He had not meant to give up the anecdote about his obsession with The Mummy in his interview.

A few texts from Daniel, some not-so-subtle attempts to get him to spend next Shabbat with him in Washington Heights, an effort to convince Boaz that he, too, would find joy and purpose and opportunity in the fishbowl of Yeshiva University, surrounded by a not insignificant number of his high school classmates.

The man looked down at the moldering half shawarma.

No desire was inconsequential to the dead.

“You can have the shawarma!” he shouted over the ghostly din.

All but one, the man with the fedora, who beckoned Boaz over.

When he’d put a full block between himself and the police officer, he quickly pulled up Google Translate, and after a few tries, keyed in the best approximation of what he’d heard the man say.

“Doesn’t matter. But you should figure out who is either so fluent in Yiddish that they could threaten you in it or who is technologically competent enough to do a Google search.”

Her sister’s hair was still up in its usual prissy bun, but Molly could see the monster, just beneath that thin mask of humanity they both wore.

Molly remembered the building from when it was new and had still been a hotel and speakeasy.

She’d gone to a handful of parties there not long after her first death, when she was always ravenous and East Tenth Street was “uptown.”

Half the room was covered in posters and playbills from Broadway shows (Anat’s half), and half was a series of artistic renderings of the periodic table and a poster for something Anat said was called Doctor Who.

She looked pale and a bit pinched, and her forehead shone with a thin sheen of sweat.

That face got her a job in the first factory she tried, stitching shirtwaists.

And when she earned her first role, Lena was the first person she told, racing to her battered tenement in the waning daylight.

“I’m a much better time than that factory girl you’ve been so keen on.”

There were plenty of directors who would turn a blind eye to her, actors who knew better than to throw rocks in glass houses, who had affairs and passions of their own they kept discreet.

The thing she’d wanted, the thing she dreamed of, belonged to her and was better than anything she could have fathomed.

When she returned to the theater, she felt better. Invigorated.

He struggled for a moment with what to do, swinging the door back and forth and inadvertently wafting his scent straight at Clara before at last settling on closing the door, then plopped into the seat.

“I’m very sorry about that. I was not myself. A moment’s indiscretion. It will not happen again.”

And that was, he ventured to guess, far more than Molly or Clara had ever managed.

It was a large storage room, with most of the available floor space taken up by the haphazard rows of chairs, some of them theater seats, and others that Boaz realized must have been old props, all covered in various levels of dust.

Molly gave in the second time Anat attempted to maul Boaz.

Well, at least he could drop the pretense.