Free You Must Go and Win: Essays by Alina Simone

here mid-game. Clearly the place had never been meant for residential use. One could easily picture hundreds of dusty boxes full of indoor fitness apparel or stereo components lining its walls. But now Sarah and I were lining its walls, and paying an astonishing amount for the privilege.
    When Sarah told me how much the room was renting for, I giggled. It was just that kind of number. You couldn’t say it without giggling. Later, when Ben and Eugene asked how much I was paying, I giggled when I told them and then they giggled in response. “Oh, God,” they giggled, repeating the number. “Wow. You’re paying that much? For … this? That doesn’t make any sense!” After a while, I realized that the number actually had a tonic effect on people and even considered adding it to my email signature: “My monthly rent is $—. Have a Happy Day!” In truth, the room cost only two hundred dollars per month more than the one-bedroom apartment in Red Hook, but now instead of a furnished apartment all to myself, I was getting a bare futon
in a room without a closet whose only light came from a Virgin Mary statue with a lightbulb screwed into its head. And, of course, I had a new roommate. Or rather, as I would soon learn, roommates .
    That first evening, after I’d deposited my meager pile of books and clothes in my new bedroom, I went over to the art gallery next door. It was having an opening and Sarah had suggested we meet up there after work. I got myself a plastic cup of white wine and loitered awkwardly against a back wall, waiting for her to appear. There was a painting of a dog fucking a pig with an American flag drawn on its belly and another painting of a girl giving a clown a blow job. But mostly, I was surrounded by dozens of sketches of badly drawn penises. I don’t know if it was the wine or just my frayed nerves, but as I looked around the room, the penises seemed to wobble threateningly toward me. They wagged their misshapen heads, ululating softly like some deranged Greek chorus, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing here? Here in Brooklyn? Here in Williamsburg? Here on Hope Street? Any idea at all?” And then Sarah appeared in the doorway.
    “Hey, you!” she called, and then waved at the room, drawing a wreath through the cigarette smoke around the pigs, the clowns, and the penises. “Don’t you just love this?”
     
     
    Sarah’s old roommate, Becca, hadn’t completely moved out yet, and she had invited another friend of hers to stay over too, so now there were two people staying in Sarah’s room and this other girl, whose name I didn’t know, sleeping on the couch. My friends giggled even more when they considered the amount I was paying to share a bathroom with three other people. But real hilarity ensued a few days later, when I began noticing swollen bites dotting my arms and legs each morning. My first thought was mosquitoes.
But it was December and this was Williamsburg, not Cambodia. There was also the fact that I was getting bitten only in bed, while sleeping. So after three nights of waking up itchy, I finally stripped back the sheets and found them there: an entire village of black fleas, pogoing merrily across the futon’s white surface.
    After work that night, I gave Sarah the news that I had fleas.
    “I guess it’s not that hard to believe,” she said. “You know those sheets of cardboard under the futon? Becca dragged those in from the dumpster.”
    The futon officially still belonged to Becca, who was leaving for California in two days, but we decided it was better to throw it out right away, before the fleas spread. Together Sarah and I dragged the futon outside to the curb, and then I went down to the Atlantic Terminal Mall to find a cheap air mattress. When I returned later that night, Becca and Sarah were both in the living room and it was clear from the chill of silence that greeted my arrival that I’d just interrupted something. As soon as I’d slipped into the