Slonim Woods 9 Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Barban Levin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Pursuit” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Provincetown Arts (2011).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published materials:

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” from Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1963, 1967 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Factory Hollow Press: Excerpt from “Mutually Assured Childhood Molestation” from Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me by Mark Leidner. Reprinted by permission of Factory Hollow Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Levin, Daniel Barban, author.

  Title: Slonim Woods 9 / Daniel Barban Levin.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020047466 (print) | LCCN 2020047467 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593138854 (hardcover; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780593138861 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ray, Larry (Lawrence), 1960– | Levin, Daniel Barban. | Criminals—New York (State)—Case studies. | Manipulative behavior—New York (State)—Case studies. | Extortion—New York (State)—Case studies. | Cults—New York (State)—Case studies.

  Classification: LCC HV6248.R3914 L48 2020 (print) | LCC HV6248.R3914 (ebook) | DDC 364.15092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020047466

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020047467

  Ebook ISBN 9780593138861

  crownpublishing.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Alicia Tatone

  Cover photograph: Djrobgordon

  ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Daniel Levin

  Wed, Jun 19, 2013, 5:39 PM

  Dear Angela,

  I apologize for the delay in my response. My new life (amazing choice of words) is progressing happily! I’m working for the Department of Education for New York City now, so I am extremely busy, but completely happy.

  I have rather unfortunate news regarding your book and it is involved in something extremely disturbing which I have told very few people. I think it might be the last thing you’d expect to hear. I feel obligated to give you ample warning that I am going to share with you something terrifying and awful that I’ve experienced in my recent past and which I am telling you, if you choose to read it, in absolute confidence. I am only saying this because as someone who is very busy and probably has her own sense of the scope of our relationship, you should have every right to resign yourself to the notion that I just lost your book, take that as you may, and move on. However, I’ve been roiling over this for a few months because I could just have told you that, and not have to deal with talking about what I’m about to tell you, but I’d rather not lie and diminish my standing in your eyes in the defense of something which has already caused me enough pain and been detrimental to enough of my relationships. So I’m leaving the choice up to you whether or not to go on. I realize your curiosity is probably piqued but I’m really telling you this is something in which you’re probably going to feel obligated to get involved, and I would be completely amazed if you had any idea how to deal with it or even comment on it. However I want you to know that I am sharing this with you not just because I want a valid excuse for not being able to return your book to you right now but because I trust and respect you, and perhaps this is unfair to you, but I do not feel as if I could tell anyone else at this moment, certainly not in the hopes of getting some sort of helpful response.

  So, after that protracted preamble, here is the basic idea: I know exactly where your book is, but I absolutely cannot go retrieve it because it is at the apartment where I lived off campus during the summer after sophomore year, the summer after junior year, and the first semester of senior year. When I lived there I was a member of what I can now call a cult.

  THE ALARMS KEPT SCREAMING, and we ignored them. While we lined the path waiting for the all clear, Santos and I collected rocks, which we were piling to build a makeshift wall against the cliff outside our dorm. False alarms were frequent and familiar occurrences at Sarah Lawrence, and I’d grown accustomed to pretending a whole building hadn’t just begun to squawk when I walked past one on the way to class. Our dorms were called Slonim Woods; they squatted at the bottom of a cliff on top of which was a copse of trees—the “woods” for which the dorms were named. In the brisk New York autumn air, herded into the canyon formed by the buildings and the cliff, Santos and I constructed our wall.

  All the residents of Slonim were wearing what looked like costumes of our normal selves, having been rushed out of a shower or roused from an afternoon nap. Santos and I were managing a prodigious stack of rocks, what had turned out to be a surprisingly sturdy monument to our boredom. We had no way of knowing how long it would take the firefighters, who were probably as frustrated as we were, to identify which oversensitive alarm had been set off by some toaster crumb just large enough to have become kindling.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Santos said, handing me a rock. I considered the cliff for best placement. “What’s happened to them is insane. Talia looks like she’s this scrawny girl or something, but she’s the toughest person I’ve ever known. Growing up in the Bronx was nothing compared to some of the stories she’s told me from the shelter.” Santos and I had been friends ever since we’d been randomly assigned to live together in our first year. He’d been the best roommate you could ask for. He had tough, Dominican parents, which was why, I guessed, he cleaned our whole room practically every day. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t even really listen to music. I did every single one of those things, and tried my best to introduce him to them.

  The rock I had just placed on the top of the wall wobbled, a little too big. “In my elementary school, we were building something like this at recess once, and two kids were carrying a heavy rock and it slipped,” I told Santos. “One of them had to have the tip of his finger removed. Everyone always made fun of him after that. I can’t remember why exactly. They said he smelled bad, I remember that. I think they said his finger was rotting or something, and that’s why he smelled.” The alarm continued to wail, muffled through our house’s brick walls. “Do you know Talia’s dad at all? I mean, have you met him?”

  “No, not besides what she’s told me. I know he was in t
he marines and everything, and he’s done some intelligence work. When they’ve talked on the phone, Talia’s put him on speaker with us. Me and Isabella.”

  I looked up. In the woods on top of the cliff was a ropes course no one used. Mostly people would just sit up there and drink or smoke weed as they watched people stroll by on the path below. In the summer before the school year, our roommate Gabe flew out from California a week early by accident. He tried to secretly camp in this little strip of woods until classes started. He barely avoided getting kicked out of school for that.

  “Larry’s really excited to see her again,” Santos continued. “Everything that happened to them is so unjust. He’s really, really smart and has battled through so much.”

  “Right.”

  “I think that’s why Talia is the way she is. She blows my mind sometimes.”

  “He gets here next week, right?” I asked. “He’s staying with us?” The wind blew stiff down the path, dislodging a couple of the more precarious stones. They clattered among the bright yellow leaves at our feet. The air was brisk enough to wear jackets, the sun hot enough to sweat underneath them.

  “Yeah, I think he’s going to stay for a little bit while he figures it out. They just haven’t seen each other in so long.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. I thought it did. I wondered how high we could build the wall before it would fall. I wanted to build something that would be here long after we’d moved into new dorms, or even after we’d left the school. The alarm stopped. The strange silence it left behind was broken only by the click of Santos placing one last stone on top, and then the clamor of everyone rushing back into their buildings to continue the day. In the year after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence, when I was still going back to visit, I chanced a walk down that path, and I saw the wall we built there, slumped into the cliff behind it. It had been picked apart, perhaps by other students, but it was undeniable evidence. We had been there. It had all really happened.

  * * *

  When I first arrived at Sarah Lawrence, I’d been placed with four other freshmen in Hill House: Santos, Gabe, Max, and Kyle. The suite quickly came to resemble a ruinous, burgeoning landfill. The layer of detritus on the living room floor was so thick you couldn’t see the blue carpet, and the smell in the kitchen never recovered after Gabe spent forty dollars on a deep fryer, used it once, then left the oil and batter to go rancid. Only the room Santos and I shared persisted as a haven of cleanliness.

  From the beginning, I felt out of place, constantly anxious, like I didn’t know how to embrace this new way of living. I wasn’t cut out for college, I knew that. I would often sit, legs hanging over the side of my twin bed, the standard-issue plasticky mattress originally designed for bed-wetters crunching beneath me, and think about how I had gotten here. A series of lucky breaks.

  One day, back in New Jersey, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, my mom was driving me home from high school. It was the spring of my senior year. Halfway home, the four-lane asphalt of Route 78 yielded to thick greenery, roads that dipped and curved blindly over hills and little stone bridges, fields dotted with horses, the woods where I spent most of my adolescence trying my best to get lost. Just like she did every day, Mom stopped to check the mail when we reached our driveway. “Something for you!” she exclaimed. She seemed genuinely excited as she handed the envelope to me in the passenger seat.

  It was from Sarah Lawrence, the eighth and final letter to come from the colleges I’d applied to. The first seven had all been rejections. With each notice of my failure I’d grown a little more numb. I couldn’t think about the future anymore; it didn’t exist. I took the envelope. It was thin. As I stomped up the stairs I hated myself for every day I had spent ignoring class, talking to my friends; for the months and then years of accumulating anxiety; for that one time I hid from a teacher under a cafeteria table and he’d found me, and the other times I’d managed to avoid my teachers, just slipping around corners or up stairs, because I hadn’t finished an assignment or written an important essay; and almost worse: all the time I’d spent thinking about girls who didn’t like me. What had it all led to? This thin envelope that weighed as much as every textbook I’d never read.

  My stomach felt like it was losing a fight with my other organs. I went straight into the bathroom and opened the letter sitting on the toilet. I read it three times. A handwritten note in the margin expressed the dean’s excitement to meet me on moving-in day. It was like a knife had been pulled out of my gut. I couldn’t tell if this was a good or a bad thing.

  Sarah Lawrence was the college my mom went to, which was why, I was pretty sure, I’d gotten in. Her class was the first to go officially co-ed. The campus, I knew, was adorable: steep hills adorned with oversized dormer cottages and black squirrels scrambling up gnarled willow trees, a place families from the tri-state area used to send their daughters for a slightly more progressive education than they would receive at Radcliffe or Wellesley.

  By the time my mom started there in 1968, things had changed. One of the new male students rode his motorcycle onto the middle of campus and circled the stone cottage in the middle of the quad. In 2009, the legend on campus was that Joseph Campbell had held meetings in that cottage to talk with students about the hero’s journey, developing his theories of comparative mythology. By then, the cottage had been repurposed into a teahouse, that motorcycle-riding student was a history professor at the school, and the student body was a collection of weirdos, punks, performance artists, and the like, mostly the offspring of liberal coastal elite parents who wouldn’t bat an eye at the fact that their child was studying at a school with no majors where they might split their time between philosophy and painting.

  I was just one of many kids who had grown up with house-poor parents; disaffected, I blundered my way through a fancy high school I couldn’t handle and which my parents couldn’t afford, and landed at SLC. When I entered my “first year studies,” a home room led by a teacher who would be my “don”—Sarah Lawrence lingo for an adviser—it became clear that I was one of the least weird people at the school. I was a little boring by comparison. The unofficial school slogan was, after all, “We’re different, so are you.”

  My first year studies was a poetry workshop. I had chosen it because it sounded easy, and because I had written some poetry for English classes in high school. It was one of the few things I did that seemed to make teachers notice me. When I’d graduated high school and flipped through the commencement program listing preppy kids lauded with awards endowed by their families, announcements about Ivy League acceptances, and superlatives for the beauty of their eyes, the only recognition I received was for writing poems.

  On the first day of college, I got lost on my way to the workshop. Luckily, I had left early. I’d printed out my poems at home in New Jersey, and jammed them among clothes and toiletries in the bag I’d brought to college and unpacked the day before. I gripped the papers sweatily as I wandered the back roads of Bronxville. I knew from the brochures that the student population at this school was three-quarters people who identified as female. Someone had also told me that “at Sarah Lawrence, poetry is like football.” I didn’t have a chance in high school, but here, maybe, I would matter. As I walked down the road lined with towering houses sporting impossibly tall, tapering shingled roofs and impeccable lawns shaded by gnarled oaks and maples, I was reminded how small I was. I turned a corner, saw a building with a Sarah Lawrence sign outside, made a lucky guess, and went in.

  The class took place around a huge circular table in a wood-paneled room. The fireplace in the corner was cold and dark. I sat and waited among the other students, with whom I would be spending the whole year. A girl next to me with dyed red hair and the palest skin I’d ever seen turned to me and said, “Hey,” drawing out the end of the word through a voice that sounded like it was polishing gravel. “I’m Moriel,” she said, just as la
nguidly. On my other side, another girl leaned across me, practically bouncing in her chair, and exclaimed, “I’m Hailey!” Before I could introduce myself, the door creaked open and in rushed our teacher, wearing a soft blue blazer and thin gold spectacles. His beard looked more suited to the face of a Confederate soldier than that of a poetry teacher.

  It turned out Moriel and Hailey both lived in Hill House, so after class we walked back along Kimball Avenue together. It was a straight shot home, which didn’t help how stupid I felt for having brought my clutch of poems—the class was just supposed to be for introductions. But the teacher, seeing the stack of copies in front of me, had insisted we read one of the poems and talk about it.

  “I liked the part about the golden telephone,” Moriel said, lighting up a cigarette she’d rolled with dried lavender the moment we stepped out of the building, saying, “I’m trying to get off nicotine.” As we walked, Hailey explained that she was at Sarah Lawrence mostly for modern dance. Later in the year, on a midnight run to pick up munchies, I would find her on a lawn where she had arranged fallen cherry blossom petals into a huge circle. “It’s a dance ring to honor the moon goddess,” she said. I shrugged, dropped my things, and danced interpretively with her lit by nothing but the full moon.

  As freshman year progressed, I became close friends with Santos. He’d met Talia and Isabella in class, and they started hanging out all the time, clustered on his bed in our dorm room. At some point, he and Talia started dating. All I really noticed was that Santos and I hung out less, because there swiftly wasn’t a “Santos” anymore; it was always the three of them, and Talia and Isabella stressed me out. They constantly wanted to talk about serious things, about our responsibility to justice, to truth, and it made me want to lie down, so I let them all, including Santos, drift into the periphery.