Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger

when I’d scurried away from him, when he thought he’d scared me off.
    “If anyone’s overstepping their bounds,” I said, “it’s me dumping all of this on you.”
    He hesitated another second. Then: “This friend of mine, he’s a detective,” he said, not looking at me but at his feet. “Someone I grew up with. He might be able to help.”
    If you’re wondering why he would be helping me, I didn’t know. But I was more grateful than curious. Men who are attracted to you will pretty much do anything, right? Right.

eight

    I went east toward the river. In this new skin, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but wander. Wandering is not new to me. I’ve done a lot of it and New York City is the perfect place to lose yourself for a while—permanently, if you want to. You could walk a hundred blocks and pass a thousand people and no one would ever notice you, even if, five minutes ago, your face was on everyone’s television, on the front page of every paper. That fast, you could become a ghost. I was already losing myself, slipping through the fissures that were suddenly appearing in the facade of my life. I was vapor. I wafted down Eighth Street toward Tompkins Square, past the newly gentrified tenement buildings that held within their walls the energy of generations of strife and poverty, now gutted and newly painted, fitted with picture windows boasting trendy East Village boutiques. In that gleaming glass I caught sight of a woman who didn’t know who she was anymore, who didn’t know from where or from whom she came.
    I stopped to look at her. She looked real enough, like flesh and blood and bone. But if you reached out to touch her, she faded like a hologram.
    I’d left my problems with Jake. He told me to take a break, get some distance and get my head together. So I left the question of my very identity at his doorstep like a bag of unwanted clothes at the Salvation Army. For the time being, I wanted to get as far away from the questions as I could. And yet as the East Village morphed into Alphabet City, unfortunately I realized that every time I caught my reflection in the mirror, I’d be reminded that I was suddenly a stranger to myself.
    Maybe you think I was overreacting. Did I really have enough information at this point? Hadn’t I felt guilty and embarrassed not even twenty-four hours earlier for having entertained these very thoughts? What can I say? This idea had wormed its way into my consciousness and was now burrowing and expanding beneath my skin. I wouldn’t say I felt shattered exactly. But I felt like one of those East Village tenement buildings, stripped to naked wood, gutted, old brass pipes exposed, wires hanging like webs, a shell of myself waiting for reincarnation.
    I found myself on Avenue C. This is the real Alphabet City. Not the one on Avenue A before Tompkins Square, packed with trendy shops and cafés, million-dollar co-ops, shabby-chic lofts, all struggling in their new opulence for the look of East Village grit that had seemed so undesirable when it was real. The money hadn’t made it down this far yet. It was as though once you passed the park, you’d entered a dead zone, a place that the city had decided to leave to its own devices. It felt lawless and abandoned, except for tiny pockets like the Nuyorican Poets Café, flowers of creativity that had pushed their way through the concrete. Here abandoned buildings stood like limping rebel soldiers against the encroaching wealth that would force the longtime residents of this neighborhood onto the streets. Here empty lots were littered with garbage, old furniture, stripped cars, and barrels filled with fire, surrounded by the city’s discarded people. The homeless, the junkies, the runaways, those among us who had somehow lost their way and had stopped groping for a way back. I walked, aware, but with my head down. It’s not the place where you want to call attention to yourself. You just move through as though