Forget what we’ve said up to now. Perhaps this is where the story should begin: in the prototypical darkened room, located in a boarding house, or in what was once a swank hotel from the end of the last century fallen into disrepair. It is the kind of room full of abandoned furniture from other places; beds that no one sleeps in anymore, lamps that no one lights. There is a painting on the wall, but it is too dark to see it, and even if it could be seen, it would draw no eye, painted, as it probably is, by a machine; it is a scene reproduced so many times it represents nothing in particular, a framed visual cliché executed entirely in thick shades of umber brown and sickly ochre.
In short: it is the kind of room in which someone may once have met a professional escort for unconventional sexual relations, or spent several days bingeing on alcohol or drugs, or hiding away from creditors, professional debt collectors, loan sharks, and the like, prosecutors of one sort or another, with or without the backing of the law. It is the kind of room to which a person retreats to "assess the situation," or simply to sit, staring at the wall or floor for uncounted hours on end, until the “situation cools,” but seldom, if ever, does he go anywhere near the window.
Here such a person will take a time-out before returning to the world and facing whatever judgment awaits, or, as is sometimes the case, they may not return at all, making this room the scene of a Last Judgment, the site where the surrender is signed, and the sentence executed without further appeal.
What is paramount to note, above all, is the temporary and provisional nature of this sort of room, which can be anywhere, really, or just as easily nowhere, for temporality is the key here, wherever “here” happens to be, as no one can stay in such a room for long, put a name-plate on the door, have their mail delivered here. Consequently, this room, like all such rooms, hardly go unnoticed by the police, who visit, or even, on occasion, inhabit them, on a fairly regular basis in pursuit or perpetuation of criminal activity.
Neena arrives by way of the stairs—the elevator, or lift as it might be more accurately called in this case—no longer in service (merely fallen into disrepair or deliberately sabotaged?). The stairwell she climbs is littered with beer cans and newspapers, syringes and used condoms and other urban detritus familiar to us from the usual depictions of this scene from innumerable movies and television dramas. Inevitably, one of the landings is inhabited by a hollow figure, huddled in a filthy overcoat of indeterminate color, a ripe and festering mound, alive with lice, from which no head rises to watch her silent passage.
Neena is in formal couture, wearing an elegant black cocktail dress, which leaves her shoulders glimmeringly naked; it is the kind of dress held up by her "natural endowments," although Neena is not particularly well-endowed, naturally, being but modestly developed, perhaps a 33 or 34B, if even that, and varying with her time of month. There is nothing unusual in any of this, nor do we mean to imply there is. The dress is not made out of velvet, but it might be mistaken to be velvet from a distance, and even close up, even to the touch. One imagines it must be some sort of special Vietnamese sweatshop blend.
In spite of her barely modest endowment, the décolletage of the dress nevertheless reveals the provocative cleavage formed by two plump breasts of flawless white flesh, pushed up by the hidden under-wiring of a specially constructed bodice built into the dress, which seems intended to suggest, and not merely vaguely, a selfless offering of first fruits, proffered with her own hands.
It isn't the case, or perhaps it is, but Neena could be coming from an opening night concert at Lincoln Center, Mahler, maybe, or Dvorak on the program, neither of whom she likes, or would like, if she weren’t, in fact, mistaking them both for Liszt. She imagines she’d prefer Shostakovich, who she’s never heard, but whose story she has read about, and with whose struggles with love and Stalinism she feels some natural sympathy, or imagines she does.
If she has gone to that night’s performance at all it would be for the benefit of an absent companion. She would be wearing a pair of impossibly delicate high-heeled sandals, silver, with the thinnest sole possible and no ankle strap, thus easily lost in a scuffle, a Cinderella-situation waiting to happen. They would be the kind of almost-disposable shoes one wears once and never again, leaving one to wonder, but what one wonders in this context is too complex, or, rather too idiosyncratic, to untangle at the moment. Suffice it to say, she must not be planning on walking very much or much longer, at all.
There is a small handbag over her left shoulder, no, her right shoulder, discouraging the use of her right hand, now that we have determined she is right-handed. It is a small handbag, approximately the size of a 4x6 inch postcard [seriously, Pinker, isn’t that too small? What would she be able to fit inside it, besides a postcard?), black, of course, no, silver again—make that of silver spangles, like a snakeskin, or a dragonskin(!). The bag is suspended from her shoulder by a silver link chain of intricate delicacy and Cabbalistic design.
Yes, the purse is indeed small, obviously, even pointedly, too small, but it is big enough to hold the most essential personal items: a tube of lipstick (scarlet, of course), a folded twenty-dollar bill, an unidentified key, and compact mirror. It also contains a foil package (empty) for a black, ultra-sensitive, ribbed condom, and a prescription bottle, an expired prescription bottle holding 150 Xanax tablets, each one milligram. The name on the smudged label is illegible, but whatever it might read, it clearly does not read “Neena.”
In the end, she will not need any of the aforementioned items in her purse, except, it’s still remotely possible, for the lipstick, which she may or may not use to freshen her mouth during the proceedings still to come.
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