One Station Away

by Olaf Olafsson

  “This isn’t a good time. I’m out in the street . . .”

  “She worked for Lloyd Gimstead,” he said proudly. “You remember him, don’t you?”

  I glimpsed a free cab turning the corner.

  “Wait,” I said, half running toward the car so as not to lose it, shooting across the street at a red light, past a man who had appeared from nowhere, apparently with the same intention as I, waving my arms furiously at the driver before leaping in the moment he slowed to a halt.

  I don’t know whether Vincent had heard me, because he was in the middle of listing Lloyd Gimstead’s achievements when I placed the phone to my ear again.

  “. . . and then of course he had a chain of hotels, and a car dealership . . .”

  I interrupted his monologue and asked how he knew I was on my way to the BBC recording studio.

  “Oh, it was Kathryn who told me. I think they’d given up on you so of course she’s delighted that you changed your mind.”

  I was going to correct him, to point out that I had never refused to be interviewed, however inconvenient it was for me, seeing as I was rather busy, but I let it go.

  “Of course they want to describe our family life,” he said. “Apparently talking about art isn’t enough, people’s private lives have to come into it, too, whether they like it or not. As you can imagine, we both talked about how proud we are of you, how you were always so good at school, how well you’ve done in your career, and about your research, although naturally we are mere laymen and only understand a fraction of what you do. But the brain is a maze, made up of so many parts, so much that is mysterious, Magnus, my boy—you of all people should know that—so much we don’t understand, even about the actions of those closest to us. Margaret has a natural gift, which should now be clear to everyone, but she isn’t perfect, no more than anyone else, no more than you or I . . .”

  We were stuck in traffic at Columbus Circle; it was ten minutes to nine. I was getting anxious, although less so than might be expected. I was half thinking that I wouldn’t mind if the traffic came to a standstill, because that way I would have a perfect excuse for missing the interview. I became lost in thought for a while, before the car eased forward again and I gave a start.

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” I heard Vincent say. “Obviously, they realize how unfairly Margaret has been treated all these years, but they don’t see the effect it had on her. Indeed, they are astonished by her lack of bitterness, how understanding she is, and the fact is she hasn’t said a bad word about anyone in the interviews. Of course we know life wasn’t always a bed of roses, Magnus, my boy, but it’s not easy always being one station away. For anyone, no matter what their aspirations in life. But now she’s there. Now she’s finally made it . . . As I say: let sleeping dogs lie. I trust you’ll agree that your memories of Allington are mostly happy. I hope so anyway. Both Margaret and I talk about how much we miss you. In the program, you see. About how far away you are. And about grandchildren—how we hope we won’t have to wait too long. Although of course we don’t mention that you still haven’t introduced us to your sweetheart, and why would we . . .”

  “Here?” the cabdriver asked, pulling up outside a tall building.

  “Yes.”

  “What?” Vincent said.

  “I was talking to the cabdriver,” I said. “We’re stuck in traffic. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I hung up, paid, and got out.

  When I saw a food truck on the sidewalk across the street from the studio, I realized how hungry I was. I looked at my phone—it was already nine o’clock. But then I turned it off, got on line, and ordered a bagel with eggs and bacon and a cup of coffee. I found a bench to sit on and tried to forget the producer who was waiting for me.

  When I finally got up, I saw a motorcycle go by out of the corner of my eye. It wouldn’t be worth mentioning, if I hadn’t jumped at the sight of it and hurried down the street. It was black, and the young female passenger had her arms clasped around the driver whom I all of a sudden believed was none other than Thomas Stainier, the genius who decided to disappear. When they came to a halt at a red light, I saw of course that this wasn’t him. I turned around, perplexed that I had thought of him after all these years.

  I took the subway two blocks away to 125th Street, then caught the train up to the hospital. The weather was brighter to the north of the city, and when we reached Connecticut the houses beside the tracks were bathed in sunlight and then the fields as the buildings vanished.

  I walked briskly from the station and was still thinking about how tasty my breakfast had been when I pushed open the doors to the hospital.

  Chapter 41

  Saint-Saëns, Mendelssohn, and Chopin; Rachmaninoff, Scarlatti, Mussorgsky, and Schumann. Seven CDs in a luxury edition just as Vincent had said: gold lettering on a blue background, a portrait of Margaret, seemingly recent. The packaging seemed unchanged, despite my comments. At first glance the discs seemed to have escaped undamaged in the post, and on closer inspection it was possible they had stuffed the boxes with more paper to protect them. Vincent had included a little card with the delivery. On it was printed: “With best wishes,” and his signature underneath. I noticed his handwriting was shaky.

  I was about to insert the Mussorgsky into the computer when the department secretary tapped on the door to tell me Simone and Anthony were waiting for me.

  “I tried calling you,” she said, “but you didn’t pick up.”

  My cell phone was still off after my trip to the BBC studio, and I had no intention of turning it back on.

  “They’re in the basement,” she added. “I don’t think it’s going too well.”

  I had no choice but to follow her, although I dreaded meeting my colleagues.

  Simone was standing next to the microphone when I got downstairs. She switched it off the moment she saw me.

  “She doesn’t reply to anything,” she said.

  I walked over to the screen, as if hoping to find some answer there, and the technician pulled up an abstract of the morning’s progress, tapping rather heavily on the keys, it seemed to me. Simone hadn’t been exaggerating; the patient had shown no response at all.

  Of course, I wished I could have told them about what had happened the evening before, talked about the patient’s responses, compared notes, and discussed her progress and the next steps. But I had given her my promise—an unqualified promise, which had been the reason why she trusted me—and I couldn’t betray her. Besides, I was convinced that I had no choice if we wanted results; she had proven that beyond any doubt by her silence that morning.

  “Maybe you’ll have more luck,” Simone said, stepping away from the microphone, needlessly as there was plenty of room next to her.

  She stood back against the wall, and for some reason my thoughts returned to that evening in Liège. Perhaps it was her gestures, or her expression that betrayed disappointment and despair. I paused for a moment, gazing through the window at the MRI scanner and the patient’s feet beneath the white sheet, unable to look Simone in the eye.

  I was relieved when our patient didn’t reply. I repeated the instructions twice before switching off the microphone and saying in an impassive voice to Simone and Anthony that we should meet in my office when they had a moment.

  They followed me, but instead of sitting down, Simone stood by the door, arms folded. I avoided her gaze. Anthony wasn’t accustomed to having to do most of the talking when the three of us were together, but he didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. On the contrary, he seemed to enjoy the attention, and took the opportunity to go over the research in detail, drawing conclusions and speculating with an equanimity that surprised me.

  Finally, we agreed that we should take a break and meet again in the morning. Simone took her leave at the first opportunity, but Anthony glimpsed the Mussorgsky CD on his way out and paused.

  “Have you listened to it?” he asked.

  “No, not yet.”

&nb
sp; “A magnificent recording. Mussorgsky has never been performed so well.”

  I didn’t say so, but I was grateful to him. It was as if his comment somehow compensated for my backsliding that morning.

  Like the day before, I waited until they had gone home before setting to work. The same two nurses, the man and the woman, helped me to take the patient down to the basement. They didn’t question these comings and goings, and I indicated that we had been having problems with some of the equipment recently, and were behind schedule.

  She instantly showed responses both in the motor cortex and the parahippocampal gyrus, and so I began my questions without any preamble. I was careful to avoid asking her again about her family situation. I could wait till later to try to get her to confirm the assumptions I had already made.

  I started off slowly. She confirmed that she could hear me, recognized my voice, and knew where she was. Did she enjoy listening to the music I had played for her? Yes, especially the Schubert. What about the Mexican CD? She didn’t think much of it. What about One Hundred Years of Solitude? Yes, it was fine.

  She was quick to answer, quicker than the night before. I had brought along the CD player and the discs with me, and I played the beginning of each work to find out how she felt about them. I was astonished at how swiftly she responded, within fifteen or twenty seconds, and how strong her opinions were. It immediately occurred to me that she wanted to get these questions out of the way and move on to something that mattered to her. Even so, I decided to take things slowly, because I didn’t want to risk her withdrawing the way she had the evening before. I broached various trivial subjects, but sensed only her increasing impatience.

  Gradually, I made the questions more personal. I discovered she was from Venezuela, that she had just turned twenty-eight, and had arrived in the country shortly before the accident.

  “Legally?” I ventured to ask.

  I got no response and decided to repeat the question. She refused to answer.

  “This isn’t a police interrogation,” I told her. “Anything you say remains between us. I gave you my word and I won’t let you down.”

  Silence. I cleared my throat.

  “Should we talk about your reasons for being in the States?”

  No.

  “About the accident?”

  No.

  “They left you for dead. Your companion on the motorcycle didn’t lift a finger to help you. He probably disappeared with the driver of the car. Is there any point in me asking you what happened?”

  No.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said, unable to hide my disappointment. I was expecting her to place more trust in me than this.

  I stood staring at the microphone for a while before resuming in the same vein.

  “We must try to find out something about your circumstances. We need to contact your family.”

  She replied instantaneously.

  No.

  “Do you have a family?”

  Yes.

  “They have no idea what’s become of you. We have to let them know.”

  No.

  “Do you have parents who are living?”

  Silence.

  “Children?”

  Silence.

  “All right,” I said, and tried a different tack. “I don’t even know your name. The doctor in New Mexico called you Adela, arbitrarily, of course. Let’s start with the alphabet. Does your name begin with A, B, C, D, E, F, G, or H?”

  Silence.

  I repeated the question and received no reply.

  “Should I take this to mean that you don’t wish to tell me your name?”

  Yes.

  “Not even your first name?”

  No.

  I was beginning to see where things were heading, and I missed not having Simone there with me. Would she carry on or end the conversation, I wondered, take a break until the next day, say good night, reflect on what course to take?

  I glanced around, at the chairs where my colleagues should have been sitting, at the machines they should have been operating. Through the window I could see the MRI scanner, her feet beneath the sheet, the dark opening.

  I couldn’t stop now.

  “Is something on your mind?”

  The screen lit up, not once but again and again. I saw her before me, hitting tennis balls with all her might, endless tennis balls, as if her life depended on it. It was strange how clear her image was in my head: she was dressed in white, moving swiftly around the court in bright sunshine, with a concentrated expression, determined not to miss a single stroke. Her features were so sharply defined that I was tempted to take her out of the scanner to make sure it was she and not someone else who had appeared in my thoughts.

  I resisted. The sunshine disappeared, and darkness took over. Darkness that enveloped her and would never disappear. And the question she wanted to hear but I could never ask echoed in my head, disappearing only when I instinctively clapped my hands to my ears.

  How futile. How meaningless. We had constructed a perfect machine for the sole purpose of enabling her to tell us that she wanted to die.

  I held her hand until the nurses came down. It was cold and clammy, and I made sure I stroked it gently.

  On my way to the train station, I realized I had never asked her if she could hear the sea when the windows in her room were open.

  Chapter 42

  I think I saw Monsieur Chaumont before my cell phone rang. I’m not sure, though. I remember that he glanced over his shoulder when the dog stopped next to a tree on the sidewalk and spotted me as I was closing the front door. I also remember thinking that he looked almost shamefaced, but not whether I answered the phone as I was leaving or after I had set off in the direction of Central Park West. I had been planning to walk the other way, because I felt like coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, and had been looking forward to sitting for a while at a table in the little café on Columbus Avenue. But then I would have been forced to walk past the Frenchman and his dog, which stood trembling next to the tree as though nervous about lifting its leg against the trunk.

  For sure, I was still thinking about Monsieur Chaumont after I had turned my back to him. I hadn’t forgotten our last conversation, and now he had deprived me of my breakfast, which I was in need of after a difficult night. I had arrived home from the hospital shortly after midnight, confused, sat up in my living room mulling over the conversation I had just had with the patient who wouldn’t tell me her name. When finally I fell asleep, my anxiety spilled over into my dreams, as my heart raced and I became drenched in sweat. I had reached a dead end, both awake and asleep.

  This time it was Vincent himself who called, not his assistant, on his cell phone, and he got straight to the point. I could tell from his voice that he was distraught.

  “Are you at the hospital?”

  “No, I’m walking to the subway.”

  “Magnus, we need to talk . . .”

  His voice was shaking. I slowed my pace.

  “. . . when you have time.”

  The program about Margaret. I was sure that was the reason for his call, and decided to speak first.

  “I didn’t make it,” I said. “The traffic was terrible and I was much too late. I don’t think they should be expecting me.”

  “What?” he said, before the penny dropped. “I’m not calling about the BBC.”

  I waited.

  “Some people can be so horribly nasty, Magnus. They’ll stop at nothing. And yet you don’t know what their game is. Everything is going smoothly, for once things are going smoothly, and then the next day you wake up and you’re under attack. Because this is nothing short of an attack. Not on me, I don’t matter, but on Margaret. After everything she has been through, all the struggles, the disappointments, the injustices, it seems some people can’t tolerate the fact that she has finally been vindicated; they can’t leave her alone. They pounce on her, an ambush of course, tearing her apart with shameless lies and slander.
”

  I had halted on the sidewalk and was pressing the phone to my ear in order to hear him properly. Despite being distraught, he didn’t raise his voice; it was as if he hadn’t the strength. I had only heard him sound so desperate once before. That was when he came to fetch me from his brother- and sister-in-law’s house in Ásvallagata.

  “He calls himself ‘pianoguru.’ He had already posted a few disparaging comments, but nothing like this. In fact, I was so astonished when Kleuber called me to tell me about this abomination that I literally couldn’t move, Magnus. I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor as though paralyzed. Thankfully, Margaret didn’t see me. By the time she got up I had collected myself. She knows nothing about this, and she must never know. It would finish her. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  I had let him talk without interrupting, but now he had slowed down and I seized the opportunity.

  “What happened?”

  I heard him sigh into the phone (“It’s so unfair, Magnus, so unfair . . .”), and then he forced himself to explain all the facts.

  At around midnight the night before, this so-called pianoguru had given an account on one of the forums of what he referred to as a “strange experience.” The post was brief but toxic, according to Vincent. In it, pianoguru described how when he had inserted Mussorgsky into his computer he had received a message from the iTunes database informing him that he already had this CD, performed by none other than Vladimir Ashkenazy. Pianoguru insisted that he tried several times to “correct” his computer, but without success, and in the end he had had no choice but to investigate the matter. He had played the two recordings simultaneously, and as far as he could tell they were identical. “Perhaps there was some mix-up at the company that stamps the CDs,” he had said, but there was no mistaking his malicious tone.

  “We must nip this in the bud,” Vincent said. “These sorts of aspersions can spread like wildfire on the Internet. How could he do this to her? What’s wrong with the fellow?”

  I believed I knew my father inside out. Every nuance in his voice was familiar to me, and always revealed to me what he was thinking, especially when he was trying to hide something. This time I had no doubt that he was telling the truth; the distress in his voice was genuine, the fear and disappointment palpable.