Year Zero by Rob Reid Read Free Book Online

something completely unconnected to my puppy-dog fascination with her to discuss when we cross paths.
    We live in Murray Hill—a hill-free neighborhood whose minute claim to fame stems from its being the site of the Ricardo household in
I Love Lucy
(it’s a fancy way of saying “the East Thirties”). Our apartments are in a prewar building with maybe forty units on its eight floors. It has clunking radiators, gothic-looking water towers on the roof, and an old-school elevator with a sliding steel gate. The chummy doorman gave me an unsolicited
Knicks update when I entered the lobby (they’d won, but there was a key injury to fuss over). I thanked him, and took the elevator to six—the floor that both Manda and I live on.
    By then, the two of us had caught up for semi-spontaneous dinners or drinks thirteen times since she moved in (and yes, that’s an exact count). She lived just two doors down from me (another exact count). So if I timed it right (and I really did my best), we’d cross paths at least briefly maybe twice a week. In the interim, I’d developstockpiles of quips and pithy observations to weave into our conversations. I’d prepare little
insights that could help her in her paralegal work. I’d also listen to any albums or songs that she might have mentioned in passing, so as to be informed and opinionated if they came up again. I once even read three kitschy romance novels by one Robyn Amos, because I mistakenly thought she was Manda’s favorite author (who in fact turned out to be some Brit named Martin Amis). 1
    When I got to Manda’s door, I paused before knocking. I could faintly hear some humming, and some stop-start strumming on an acoustic guitar. She was working on a new song. I stood at the door and listened, hating the thought of interrupting. Manda had told me that she holds all the parts of a new piece in her head at once—even if she’s just playing a simple chord. If I knocked now, I feared that they’d scatter like the tiles of a detonating
Rubik’s Cube, because her songs are intricate, almost baroque. Each has multiple synthesizers and at least three guitar parts—one of which hammers out rapid arpeggios that wrap the music in ornate, almost percussive textures. Add drums, bass, and several vocal tracks, and there’s a lot going on.
    After about a minute of listening I started feeling like a stalker. But I still didn’t want to interrupt her, so I shuffleddown the hall to my own apartment while pecking out a text:
    I’m back! Drop by/call whenever you feel like it—I’ll be up really late!
    I paused at my front door and read it over. Friendly is good, but this bordered on goofy. So I surgically replaced the exclamation points with periods. The goofiness was gone. But now it seemed almost … chilly. Didn’t it? So I reinserted the second exclamation point, leaving the first one out.
Better
. It now ended with a little crescendo of enthusiasm, but without that Ned Flanders vibe. The only problem now was grammatical fussiness. I
mean, the slash was a bit much—wasn’t it? I certainly didn’t want Manda thinking that I was some kind of dork who obsessed over punctuating texts. So I dropped the hyphen, replaced the slash with an “or,” and kept the final exclamation point. That done, I courageously hit Send and entered my apartment.
    I flipped on the lights. My setup is nice enough—your basic one-bedroom that’s furnished maybe a half cut above Ikea. But it’s clearly the work of a heterosexual man who works long hours and has no design sense. A couch and a fifty-inch plasma screen dominate my small living room, predictably arrayed against opposite walls. The one hint of style comes from a gorgeous rosewood bookshelf that I splurged on when I first joined Carter, Geller & Marks. My
plan was to gradually fill it with hardbound copies of only the very best books that I read in my new life as a New Yorker—ones that truly moved me, or made me think. They’d be first