“Can’t sleep.” Michael spoke huskily, out of the dark.
“Me neither. Our clocks are still wonky. But you don’t really expect to sleep, at my age.”
“You don’t sleep anymore?” the boy echoed, aghast.
“I just mean you can’t make it happen when you want it to. So you get used to lying awake sometimes.” Attempting—though Noah didn’t say this—to be at least slightly grateful not to be dead yet.
VI
The Law of Closure
In the dazzling sunshine, over a late breakfast, watching a fat pigeon pecking at a pizza crust in the gutter, Noah found the whole spy theory almost comically implausible. Really, who kept documentation of her own war crimes in an envelope with random snapshots of trees and streets, and passed it on to her daughter?
“How long are you going to live?”
He blinked at the boy. Did Michael expect every adult in whose care he was placed to keel over, or was he just curious about the aging process? “Quite a while yet, I hope. My father died at seventy-nine, so from Monday morning I could be considered to be in overtime. But my mother lasted till ninety-two. If I’ve inherited more of her DNA than his, I still have plenty of time to start a business or something.” Repair the world, Noah thought ruefully.
“Don’t we get half of each?”
“Mother and father? It’s more like shuffling two packs of cards together and dealing enough for a new pack. Also, some cards get dropped, duplicated, turned the wrong way or a corner folded down…”
Michael looked a little unnerved by this.
“The unpredictability’s half the fun.” Noah finished his croissant and drained his coffee. Such luxury, forbidden in New York, to light a cigarette at the table. Today was remarkably warm, for February; sunshine was burning through his left sleeve. “Actually, I’m a lucky man to have lived this long already. I think life expectancy when I was born in the ’30s was under sixty.”
A grin. “So you should be dead?”
“Statistically speaking, I’ve already beaten the roulette wheel, just by being on this side of the grass.”
Michael objected: “Grass doesn’t have two sides.”
“It means above the grass”—Noah sketched a gesture—“rather than under it.”
The boy’s eyes lit. “Like, ‘Your ass is grass.’”
“That’s what you say for death?”
“It’s a threat: ‘Your ass is grass and I’m going to mow it.’”
That made Noah chuckle. He tapped ash off his cigarette and drew on it.
“Dying a bit faster now,” Michael commented.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“So what about me, what’s my life expecta-thingy?”
Noah tried to remember the current estimate for American males: about eighty? “I’d have to look that up.”
“Do it.”
“But your odds are better than some kids’, remember, because you’ve already made it to eleven.” Noah logged into the café’s Wi-Fi and tapped in “New York life expectancy borough.”
There was Brooklyn on the chart. Noah clicked on a link to break it down by neighborhood. Then looked incredulously at the figures for Michael’s notorious area. Seventy-four years, as compared with the city average of eighty-one. He read silently: “Contributing factors are thought to include: environmental lead/mercury/organophosphates, nutritional deficits, violence, tobacco, alcohol, substance abuse, mental illness, substandard healthcare, chronic stress.” What a cornucopia of unnatural causes. It was like some horrifying tale in which you bargained with a goblin and lost seven years of your life. Noah couldn’t bring himself to tell the boy. “Ah, can’t seem to find an exact figure,” he murmured. “And remember, you have some of my mother’s long-lived DNA, through Victor.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, Noah heard the stupidity of that remark.
Michael spoke low and hard: “Didn’t do shit for him, did it?”
Noah struggled for words. “I believe drugs are very hard to shake, once they get hold of you.”
Seconds went by. Then the boy said, “Vic did get clean in the end, though.”
Noah didn’t want to say that wasn’t true at all.
As if he had heard, Michael added, “He gave me his maroon chip.”
Noah reran the phrase in his head. “What’s a maroon chip?”
Michael dug deep into his pants pocket and held out a small purplish disk on his palm. “The last time I saw my dad, he asked me to keep it safe for him.”
Noah picked it up. Plastic, marked NA.
“Narcotics Anonymous,” Michael translated.
“I see.” On the back, Ninety Days. But anyone could get hold of a plastic token: buy them by the dozen online, pick one up off the sidewalk. It proved nothing, except to a gullible child. “And Victor seemed…all right, did he, the last time?”
Michael nodded.
Noah handed the precious disk back. Well, he supposed it could just possibly have been true: if ever his nephew had made a real effort to sober up, surely it would have been when he’d just sent the woman he loved to prison for five years, leaving his son motherless. An even bigger pity, if Victor had made it to the three-month mark before his final lapse.
“About my longevity,” Noah said, to change the subject, “I should have factored in something else: chemists have unusually high rates of death. A long tradition of blinding and scarring and poisoning ourselves.”
Michael perked up. “On purpose?”
“Sometimes suicide, but generally by accident. Lab practices were terribly casual till the ’70s. Not bothering to turn on the fume hood, sloshing mercury around, pipetting by mouth…”
“Huh?”
Noah mimed it with the boy’s straw. “We sucked up chemicals to transfer them between beakers.”
“That’s crazy.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “We were macho about it.”
“Show me something,” Michael demanded.
“What?”
“Anything cool. An experiment.”
“Hmm. Not sure I can think of anything to whip up in a hotel room…”
Go on, Joan incited him, impress the child.
But Noah had no supplies; couldn’t even turn a penny gold or do the burning-money trick. Making a Mentos-and-diet-soda fountain was guaranteed to be messy, and growing salt or sugar crystals seemed too slow to appeal to this particular kid.
Later, on the Promenade, Noah wrenched off his jacket. There were steps down to the sea, with a civilized blue railing, but Michael had vaulted that already and was running down the wall of slanted, mortared rocks. His ankles so skinny above his big, precious Jordans.
By the time Noah reached him, the boy was sitting down, smashing one stone on another, whack after satisfying whack. Shards were jumping everywhere. Like some busy young Cro-Magnon, devising the most useful flint by endless trial and error.
Beside him, Noah piled stones up, making a little cavern. Then a tall cairn, tottering on its base. Finally he covered his own bare feet with astonishingly hot pebbles. His favorites were the pale grays with rings of white. He thought of that time-management parable about how everything could fit in the jar if you made sure to start with the rocks, and only then add the gravel, and finally the sand. If it were granted to Noah to know how many years were left to him, he could estimate how many more pebbles he might be able to fit into the jar. Which reminded him of the announcement on the airplane: “It is easier to pack coats around bags than bags around coats.”
A family nearby with three little girls; Noah thought of Grace and the small cousins. The problem was that the woman had moved, he supposed; or maybe had her phone cut off if she hadn’t been able to pay the bill. But surely the tireless Rosa would be able to track her down one way or another?
These girls’ T-shirts said U DO U, OMG GOSH WOW, and LOVE LIGHT SPARKLE FOREVER respectively. Noah wouldn’t mind the French taste for English slogans on their clothes if the ones they chose weren’t so platitudinous.
Michael was watching teenagers on a parasail being tugged into the air by a speedboat. When the boat turned back on its track, the billowing balloon sank and dipped the youths briefly into the water before they soared again. “Is it getting higher?”
“Is the tide coming in, you mean? Maybe a bit, but the Med only goes up and down by a few feet, because it’s really more like a lake.”
Michael shook his head, impatient. “Is it true about the sea rising, everywhere? The ice melting.”
“Oh, the climate crisis? Afraid so.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Are we all going to drown?”
“It doesn’t happen quite that fast, but it is a disaster. The big disaster of our time.”
“It was fast in Japan.”
“You’re thinking of a tsunami. Rising sea levels, that’s over decades… New York will lose ground, for instance. Coney Island’s toast.”
“Me and Cody have a plan, we’re going to hide out in that new skyscraper on Flatbush Avenue that’s seventy-three stories high.”
“Michael. Use that excellent brain of yours. What does it matter how high the building is, if the lobby’s underwater?”
The kid’s face contorted. “By then there’ll be…ziplines between the tops of the towers.”
Noah sighed, lacking the energy to go step-by-step through the probabilities of apocalypse. His eyes rested on something blowing along the beach. “Is that a diaper?”
“Ew!”
“No, it looks like a clean one—still folded. Want to grab that for me?”
“Are you about to piss your pants?”
“You wanted a chemistry demonstration. I can do something with a diaper.”
“I didn’t ask for an experiment with diapers.”
“Your call.” Noah pulled out his satchel, as well as that microfiber towel he’d bought for going to the gym and so rarely used.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Michael crunching along the pebbles to retrieve the folded diaper.
“I believe I’m going to brave a dip,” he said when the boy came back and dropped it on the pebbles.
“No way.”
“Way.” Noah unbuttoned his pants; he already had his swim trunks on. Odds were, this would be his last chance to immerse himself in the sea of his childhood; to go back to the source. Wasn’t there a poem, something about growing old and wearing your pants rolled? He lifted his shirt. “You coming? You can swim in your underwear, no one will give you a second glance.”
“Hell no.”
He can’t swim, Joan guessed.
Never had lessons? An alarming percentage of low-income kids didn’t. “Why don’t you come in just for a minute?” Noah suggested. “Maybe I could teach you how to float on your back.”
Michael gave him the finger.
“Water’s the most common molecule in the universe. And in us: it makes up two-thirds of your body. What a beautiful spring morning,” he added to convince himself, because the sun had slunk behind a cloud now. It struck him that the sea would have gradually lost heat over the course of the winter, so the water would be almost at its coldest point now. Noah pressed on regardless, shoes off, losing his balance on the knobbly stones as he unbuttoned his shirt. No sunscreen; he never bothered with that. There was a funny mole on his arm that Fernande used to nag him to have biopsied, but at this stage what was the point? “Want to paddle, even? Come in up to your knees? I’ll hold your hand so you won’t fall over.”
“You can hold your dick.”
“No need to be nasty.” These stones hurt so much to walk on; however had Noah managed it as a child? Something to do with the ratio of body weight to sole surface area. Or were kids just more distracted by the excitement of running into the waves? Or braver? Noah should have bought himself a pair of those water shoes the locals wore. Still, no turning back. In fact the beach sloped so steeply that he was beginning to lose control; he wasn’t sure he could reverse his tracks now even if he chose.
Joan’s siren call. Come on, Professor—if not now, when?
Oh, don’t you quote Primo Levi at me.
He thought of the chemist-turned-novelist, and the eleven months Levi had somehow survived at Auschwitz, and all who’d ended up in the camps. A great swirling vortex of hate that had sucked down the ordinary and the geniuses, the frail and the strong, the old and the young. The Marcel agents. Could it really have been Margot who’d had four of them sent to the camps, two of them to their deaths? If this was true, what was Noah meant to do with the information now?
His first step into the water, it was like piranhas nibbling his shin. But he couldn’t let himself cry out or squirm or shrink back, because Michael was watching. He set his teeth and made himself plunge farther into the numbing water. His feet felt damaged. The sea of my childhood, he told himself; the sea of my goddamn childhood. Another step. The incoming wave had a heft to it, and a bite. Noah couldn’t remember why he’d committed himself to this merciless immersion.
Boom! There went the noon cannon, making Noah jerk. A greasy stone slithered under his right foot, caved in, tipped him sideways…
Panting in the flood as it rushed up to his chin and locked his chest in an icy embrace, Noah wondered for a moment if he’d managed to fracture a hip.
Behind him, he heard Michael whooping.
Noah lurched to his knees, salt on his lips. No, nothing was broken, it was just the shock. Since he couldn’t stand up, better pretend he’d meant to do this. He lay sideways awkwardly, something between a clown and a cadaver; let the next wave take him as far as his cheekbone. A sound like a frightened hoot came out of his mouth.
It doesn’t count as a swim unless you go all the way in, Joan reminded him.
Noah grimaced, locked his eyes and mouth, and put his head under the next wave.
Afterward he clawed his way up the slope on hands and knees, the icy sea alternately yanking his shanks back in and bashing his ribs on the stones. Like the self-punishment of a pilgrim. When he got to his feet, he almost fell over again; he had to paw at the sliding pebbles with desperate hands.
He finally limped back to the little towel spread out above the water line.
Michael seemed content as he held up his cracked phone. “Caught the whole thing. Want to see yourself?”
“No need,” Noah gasped.
“How was it? Like, cold at all?”
Noah lied, shaking his head, licking his lips. “Saltier than the Atlantic,” was all he could get out.
For lunch he took Michael to one of the clubs on the beach itself, under the blue parasols, even though it cost double for the privilege. He was feeling shattered by his swim, but also buoyed up.
Michael looked askance at every item on the menu. Finally Noah begged the waiter for some pasta with just butter and cheese.
While the boy tried to fake out his Twenty Questions ball by lying to it, Noah buried himself in Père Sonne: A Life’s Work. He propped the book open between the pepper shaker and the salt, but its pages flapped loose to show a photo of Josephine Baker floating on her back with her face lifted in ecstasy.
“Who’s that?” Michael asked.
“Josephine Baker. Dancer, singer, film star, had this famous costume made of bananas?”
The boy’s face was blank.
“Well, that’s her swimming right here.” Noah gestured out the window. His grandfather—in his sixties by then—must have waded waist-deep into the water to get the extreme close-up. Water dripping from one of Baker’s perfect lobes made a pendant earring. Was it an echo of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring?
“Oh, a visual pun,” Noah said, reading Harstad’s paragraph below. “See the drop of water, like a pearl? Well, Baker was known as the Black Pearl.”
“Pretty hot, for back in the day,” Michael conceded. “When’s my spaghetti coming?”
“As soon as it’s cooked. This set of photos is called ‘En Fête’—partying, basically,” Noah translated, “celebs goofing around on or
near the Prom. Here’s the first female tennis star, Suzanne Lenglen.” Ermine coat, bob in a jeweled bandeau, champagne flute in hand as she strode out of a casino at dawn. “See that homeless guy asleep on the bench behind her?”
“What about him?”
“It strikes me that Père Sonne would have had to set up the shot carefully in advance,” Noah said.
“Unless he paid the guy to lie there.”
“True.” The camera did often bullshit, and not just since digital. “Do you know, the first faked photo dates from 1840?”
“Huh. They even had cameras back then?”
Noah nodded. “It was a selfie, too—the guy posed himself as a drowned man.”
“I do that!” The boy flicked through the camera roll on his phone and held it out. “There’s one.” Michael as a corpse on the grass, eyes shut, tongue lolling, head sideways.
“Very dramatic.” Noah fingered the small screen, fissures showing through its tattered-edge tape.
“Give it.”
“I’m just looking at your photos.”
“Yesterday all you did was bitch about them being out of focus.”
There was a freshness of approach in the composition of one or two; more than a touch of wit. “This one taken out of our hotel window—was it?—of the little guy with the big dog, that’s not a bad photo at all.”
Michael grunted and reached for his phone.
Noah went back to the biography and paged through the playfully framed faces. The Thurbers, the Stravinskys, the Hemingways, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle.
“Nice car.” The boy was assessing it upside down.
Noah turned the book to show him the shot taken inches from the grille. “That’s a writer called Aldous Huxley in his Bugatti.” Diaghilev on the next page. Pavlova, Valentino…
“They all look high.”
“On life, or fame. But very possibly the other kind of high as well, or drunk at least,” Noah told him. “You’ve heard of Pablo Picasso?” In bathing trunks and a Stetson, the painter was captured graffitiing a wall.
Michael studied the picture. “Definitely high.”
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