It’s three in the afternoon in Los Angeles, but she is home and answers the phone.
“Clara?” I say.
“What’s wrong this time?” Clara says.
I give her the symptoms, unintentionally leaving out a few of the most important ones, as YOU always do when speaking to any medical authority.
“I’m not a doctor, you know,” she says. “I just fuck one.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Why don’t you ask him to come to the phone.”
“He’s not here. He left for work. We’re both on the night shift.”
“Are the blinds drawn?”
She giggles. Nothing like a nurse or a dancer for sheer lustiness, both professions sharing a certain intimate understanding of the workings of the body.
“So you’ve got the chills and fever, right?”
“Yes.”
“And now nausea?”
“Yes.”
“And you feel weird all over?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds like the flu to me. Actually there’s been a weird one going around out here all month. From some Asian country. If it’s out here, I’m sure it’s out there. You know, the New York-L.A. incestuous thing.”
“Yes.”
“So keep yourself hydrated. People who die of the flu don’t keep themselves hydrated.”
“Die?”
“That’s right, honey. They still die of this stuff, just like they did in 1919, because their electrolytes become depleted beyond the body’s capacity to deal with it. So drink plenty of liquids, and try to eat some crackers.…”
“Yeah, yeah …”
“And relieve the symptoms. Go get some over-the-counter remedies. Mylanta, Tylenol, that sort of thing. Relieve the symptoms, and you give your body a little time to recover. O.K.?” Then, there is a pause and a sigh. “You know, honey, I worry about you. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t take care of yourself.”
“I’m sick, Clara,” I say. “Everyone gets sick from time to time. Even successful, independent types.”
“I’m just expressing my concern, don’t get defensive.”
“O.K., Clara. Sorry. And thanks.”
She sighs again and hangs up the phone, and in the silent minutes afterwards I feel worse. There’s always a melancholy tug when talking to old girlfriends. The road not taken, a whole different life. Perhaps that’s what infinity is for. All the possibilities.
4
THE NEXT morning, on Clara’s advice, I drag myself out of the apartment and struggle down to the F. It’s like walking in a dream. Though I give it all my strength, it seems I’m barely moving down the street. Nausea forces me to stop several times and vomit in the gutter. Finally I get the train into the East Village and go to my favorite Drug Loft on Second Avenue. I’m hobbling past a bewildering array of decongestants, one footstep at a time, when an attractive, plump woman in a conservative blue business suit turns down the aisle. I step out of the way, but she stops and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Are you all right? You look terrible,” she says.
I must stare for a full ten seconds to recognize the face.
“Jillian?” I say.
She smiles sheepishly. In her other hand is an E.P.T. early-warning pregnancy test. Our eyes find it at the same time. Weird possibilities flash into my mind. There is that story about the two lesbian lovers, the brother, and a turkey baster. Then Jillian does the unexpected. She blushes.
“Oh, well, things change,” she says, indicating the pregnancy test.
“So fast?” I say. It has been little more than six weeks since Chase’s funeral.
“Here,” she says, and takes my arm. “I think we should talk for a minute.” She helps me over to the row of five chairs where the old people wait for their prescriptions. A shriveled octogenarian wearing the type of cap that used to be known as a Sneaky Pete dodders over his cane on the second chair from the end.
“I wanted you to know that I felt pretty rotten about the way I acted at the funeral,” Jillian says as we sit. “I tried to call you, but I didn’t have your phone number. I was hysterical after Chase … died. Just freaked out. It seemed like I was headed for the same dive off the Manhattan Bridge if I kept going the way I was going. Poor Chase, she …” Jillian swallows hard at this and finds it difficult to continue.
I give her a moment to compose herself and lean back to get a good look. All traces of the anorexia are gone. She’s as plump and sleek as a German housewife, and the weight doesn’t look bad on her. She is süsslich, as the Germans say, rosy-cheeked. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling begin pulsing a hallucinogenic green. I fight down the urge to vomit and ask a few questions about her new life.
She’s taken an entry-level job in her family’s PR firm, Sumner and Phillips, one of the top five on Madison Avenue. She’s going at the business from the bottom up as a management trainee and learning a lot about how the public can be manipulated through the careful use of images. She finds it all very interesting.
“It’s something I should have done right out of college,” she says, looking away. “Now it seems like all those crazy years were wasted. I was unhappy, addicted to one thing or another—to shooting heroin or eating or not eating, to fucking strangers on film for money, or whatever debauchery came along. And I wasn’t happy during any of it. Now, you know, I think I’m finally on the right track.”
“So you’re dating someone?” I say, a tinge of regret in my voice.
She blushes again and laughs behind her hand as if she is ashamed of it, like an old lady with bad teeth. “Yeah, my man Harold,” she says. “He’s an old friend of the family, nearly fifty, but shit, the guy can really put out in the sack.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a lawyer on Wall Street. Mergers and acquisitions, that sort of thing.”
A lawyer? Even in the depths of my sickness, I’m shocked. “What about Inge?” I manage.
Jillian shrugs. “We’re still friends. She’s going back to Germany soon.”
“How’s she taking all this?”
“Inge was always bi, you know. It wasn’t me she loved so much as that big dildo I used to strap on when we made love. Anyway, she always had a boyfriend—this lunkish proletarian type who works as a foreman in a coal mine in the Ruhr. Every month he wrote her these illiterate, passionate letters begging her to come home. Now she’s going back to him.”
“And now you’re straight?” I snap my fingers. “Just like that?”
Jillian thinks about this for a minute. “You could say that currently I’m into the penis.”
At this the octogenarian in the second chair leers up at her through his bifocals. “Or the penis is into you, sweetie,” he says, and gives a phallic thumbs up.
Jillian frowns. “Come on,” she says, and supports me up and down the aisles like an invalid as I complete my choices and fill my basket full of pricey over-the-counter remedies, going for the name brand over the generic every time. I will not skimp on medicines.
Fifteen minutes later, on the curb at the corner of Second Avenue and Third Street, we shake hands, and I stand for a moment, not knowing what to say. Her palm is moist as a sponge. The city is hot and insufferable today. The air quality is mud. A thin coating of grime covers every outdoor surface. The flat, stained facades of the tenements show their broken faces to Third Street. On the sidewalk a half block down, a man with no legs or rump, an actual human torso, begs from a board with wheels. In a moment he scoots off across the street and disappears into a bar.
“I’ve seen that creature before,” Jillian says idly, following him with her blue eyes. “He works the subway at rush hour. He’s amazing on that board, really gets around. A while back on one of the West Side lines, I felt something touching the back of my knee, and I turned and looked, and there he was, grinning up my skirt. I wasn’t sure whether to kick him or scream or give him a buck. I gave him a buck.”
There’s another long silence, but it doesn’t seem
our conversation is over. She’s got something else to say and is fighting for the words. Once or twice she opens her mouth but then shakes her head. I stand shivering in the heat, buoyed by her uncertainty. It is only this awkwardness that keeps me from collapsing on the sidewalk.
“I’m going to a therapist now,” Jillian says at last, “like every other unmarried thirty-year-old woman in the city.” She avoids my eyes; her long lashes touch her plump cheeks. “But that won’t last long. I’m already O.K. It was your séance. I had never admitted that stuff about my father at the beach to anyone.” She looks straight at me, her eyes brilliant blue stones. “I hadn’t even acknowledged it myself. I confronted him with the whole thing a month ago, and he cried and came clean. Turns out he was molested as a kid, and now he’s in a program for that sort of thing. It’s the same old story, I guess. But the night of your séance, something clicked, like a train connecting with a car that’s been idling on a side track for twenty years. I heard a scraping like rusty metal and then a solid clank—I literally heard this noise in my head—and it all came back to me. There was something, a funny pressure in that room. I don’t believe in ghosts, but …”
She bites her lip and shrugs, then reaches up to put the back of her hand against my forehead. “Shit,” she says, “you’re burning up. You better get home to bed.” Her voice has the ring of new brass. In her blue eyes I see the too-green lawns of her parents’ mansion. Somehow, I almost preferred the other Jillian, the depraved anorexic who had abandoned all certainties, who wore her rejection of middle-class morality like a scar. Now she glances at her watch, a new ladies’ Rolex, and takes a step toward the curb.
“Good luck,” I say.
“Right,” she says. “Got to get back to work.” Then she hails a cab and vanishes from my life.
5
THE NIGHT screams with sirens. My digital thermometer reads 103.5. I lie spread-eagled and nude on the flannel quilting of the sleeping bag, panting in the heat like a dog. Once again the rattle of automatic-weapons fire sounds from the Decateur Projects. I tried a cold bath but vomited in the tub. The over-the-counter remedies do little to alleviate my suffering.
With some effort I am able to turn my head to the TV. On the news they are showing a seventy-five-pound lobster caught in the nets in Boston Harbor. The thing is a monster, black as coal, its beady alien eyes milked over and blind from nearly a hundred winters at the bottom of the sea. There’s enough lobster here to feed a hundred people, the news commentator quips cheerily, though the lobsterman plans to save his catch and display it in a specially built tank in a popular seafood restaurant. For a moment the camera focuses on the creature, its antennae and claws moving with the jerky unreality of Gamera, the giant fire-breathing turtle of Japanese movie fame. What is this strange, bright world? the lobster seems to ask. Who are my cruel tormentors? And where are all the fish?
The digital thermometer now says 104. I think I am beginning to hallucinate. The walls are covered with a strange white sweat; the furniture wobbles like jelly. My pee in the toilet is black; my shit, when it comes, a single ghostly white nugget. I want to call my mother, to tell her I’m sick, but she died three years ago. I want to call my father, to ask for advice about my life, but he, too, is dead. I haven’t spoken to my sisters in years. We were never a very close family. The oldest is married to a naval submarine officer and lives on base in San Diego, California. The other, after two miscarriages and three divorces, moved to an ashram in Fairfield, Iowa. It strikes me only now that I am an orphan, and I begin to weep. Of course, it is the fever, but I weep until the news is over and I must struggle up to vomit into the bathroom sink. Out the bathroom window Manhattan burns like a nightmare, and behind the skyline I see a new darkness that covers the world.
When I emerge from the bathroom, I wobble straight into an odd cane-bottomed chair, placed at an angle to the door. It owes something to the style of early Quaker ladder backs, is obviously of the same era, and has an intricate woven seat. I do not own such a chair. I have never had a chair like this in my apartment. And just now, the back and seat and supports are haloed faintly in blue static.
I circle the chair with suspicion and make for the sleeping bag at the center of the room, but this, too, is gone, replaced by a sort of animal skin rug that I have also never seen before. Then I realize that the TV is gone, and the couch and the bookcase and the rest of my possessions are gone, replaced by unfamiliar heavy furniture of the late Federal period: a low horsehair settee; a bombé chest, its drawers hanging open and stuffed with gaudy shawls and petticoats. In the fireplace, where the ineffectual gas heater usually stands, a few coals smolder on an iron grate. At either side of the carved mantel drip ornate candelabra full of a half dozen flickering candles. The whole place reeks of tallow and smoke.
My panic is dulled by the fever. I can only gape at my apartment, which is now somehow not my apartment. Long drapes of worn brocade stand open over the windows. The floodlit facade of the power plant has been replaced by an ocean darkness. I make out the vague cross-hatching of the masts of sailing ships down at the river. The air is still and watery. Only a few lit windows dot Manhattan across the way. Then I hear a rustling like the sound of thick skirts dropping to the floor, and I turn to see a crack of yellow light shining past the door to Molesworth’s room, which stands slightly ajar.
“No,” I say out loud, “I am sick. This is the fever talking,” and to reassure myself of this fact, I take my temperature with the digital thermometer, which is still grasped in my hand. The thing beeps cheerily after a minute and reads 104.7 on the tiny screen. “Shit,” I say to the unfamiliar air, “tomorrow I’m going to the emergency room. To hell with the five hundred dollars.” Then I move purposefully toward the door to my bedroom, which seems farther away than it ought to be, but when I get there, I am relieved to find everything the same. I step inside and slip the latch and put my back to the door. The bedroom window gives out on the power plant as usual. Blue sparks jump between the transformers, and Manhattan blares like a jazz band of light across the river.
“You don’t know how much you miss something till it’s gone,” I say to my photographs and posters smiling down from the wall. After a moment I open the door a crack, and out in the apartment everything has returned to normal: my stuff in place, the TV blaring a late-night talk show. It’s amazing what fever can do. Then I close the door, turn off the lights, and, exhausted to my soul, fall to the mattress and am soon taken by nameless, shadowed dreams.
6
IN THE dark hours of the morning I sweat awake to a small scraping sound that is both familiar and dreaded. I refuse to open my eyes, but there is the odd weedy smell of a foreign cigarette and a voice gently calling my name. I cannot feel the fever or the nausea now, and a peculiar calm has settled down over my limbs. I wiggle my toes and cannot feel them wiggle. The voice calling me fades to a whisper, gets loud again. “Ned, Ne-ed …”
In a corner of my darkened room there is a phosphorescent glow. At the center of the glow, a human shape.
“There, that’s better,” the shape says when I open my eyes, and gradually I make out hair, a face, like tuning in a distant station on the UHF dial. Finally I see a young woman squatting in the corner, her back to the street wall. She’s barefoot, wearing a low-cut sundress and a cute hat, half baseball cap, half kepi, with gold tassels dangling jauntily off the brim. One elbow is propped on one knee. The smoke of her cigarette works toward the ceiling in an elaborate phantasm of human faces, some smiling, some laughing, like the comedy and tragedy masks of the theater. She’s charming, all elbows and knees, a gamine, a girl-woman. I make out the curve of her breast as she leans forward to flick a little ash off her tongue. Her face is celluloid-smooth and heart-shaped, like the face of a movie star of the twenties. When she removes the cigarette, the ghost of a smile plays around her lips.
“Hello, Ned,” she says in a voice like a golden bird.
“Who are you?” I say without feeling my lip
s move.
“I am a messenger.”
“A messenger from who?”
She shrugs, then stubs her cigarette out on my windowsill and rises in the way a marionette rises without any visible effort, as if the strings are being pulled from somewhere else. When she is up, she hovers a full foot or so above the floor.
“We’ve got to go,” she says. “There isn’t much time.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “Especially with someone who’s floating around in midair.”
Through a gap in the curtain I can make out a faint fluorescent star that I know is one of the lights of the power plant. I concentrate on this light, and a little of the pain and fever returns to my body, and there is a low buzzing that could be the sound of traffic on the BQE, busy as ever with speeding vehicles bound for the dark heart of America.
“Don’t do that.” I hear her voice now faint as a dream, and the phosphorescence that surrounds her body seems to grow dim. “Please. You will need all your strength to follow me.”
Then a sudden gust of wind, and the drape blows closed, and I am in darkness again with the apparition. Now she has lit up another cigarette, and the tragedy and comedy masks of smoke go revolving around the room like a carousel. “Neat trick, don’t you think?” she says.
I ignore this. In the next moment the bedroom door fans open on soundless hinges, and out there in low candlelit relief is the other apartment, to which more details have been added: On the wall a gilt-framed painting of a plantation house done in a naive style. Above the fireplace, embroidered in petit point, a coat of arms showing palm tree and crescent moons, bar sinister. Even from this distance and in the reedy light, I can see the place is a mess. Clothes lie everywhere; the floor is littered with squat bottles of blue glass, plates of half-eaten food. Hatboxes an uneven pile in one corner. A newsprint broadside thrown aside on the settee stands up like a tent. Its huge block headlines announce VICTORY AT CONTRERAS!!! and MEXICAN ARMY IN ROUT!!
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