“I’m trusting you then.”
“Well, that was always your first mistake. Now get some rest, or those nurses will never let you out tomorrow, and Sara will have a meltdown.”
Jacob leaned down, and Irene kissed him goodbye. She watched his frame fill the hospital doorway and recede down the hall. It had always been his first mistake too. For Irene had no designs on making it to Thanksgiving, for a crown roast she couldn’t chew and an icebox cake that she couldn’t taste. No, she had only one wish left—and that was not to die in a hospital room with pink walls and teal plastic trim. If she was going to go, then she was going to go. All week she’d been working on the plan.
Around two a.m. Nurse Moira began her rounds, beginning with the rooms down the hall, and Nurse Darren entered prescriptions into the computer at the main desk. Nurse Bethany would still be changing into her scrubs. Irene had been watching, carefully, as they adjusted the IV pumps and monitors all day, to learn how they could be switched off without sounding any alarms. It took about thirty seconds to get free, including plugging up the PEG tube and locking it down flat with some medical tape. Then she put on her red coat and some booties that Sara had knit for her. They had been in the closet covering a large pile of medical supplies that Irene had been gathering that week, in preparation for a final art project. She wouldn’t get the chance to finish it, but there was a detailed sketch on top of the pile so Juliette and Abeba could assemble it after she’d gone.
Irene smoothed her hair in the reflection of the elevator door. When the elevator came, it was empty. The doors shut, and she began to descend through the hospital. What gives out first? she wondered. Heart, lungs, or legs? She didn’t particularly care so long as it happened before they dragged her back to that plastic room. She wouldn’t die on 11 East. She simply would not.
“’Night,” she said pleasantly as she breezed by the guard at the front. He looked up at her for a moment, and then she was past him.
Cold, fresh air blasted her face like a frozen kiss. She crossed the slippery street, and from there it was just a few steps to Central Park. Soon she was in a dark, open meadow, the individual icicles of grass pushing up through the loose weave of the booties and crunching under her heels. On the far side of the meadow was an oval patch of dirt, still reddish beneath the gray frost. She went a little farther and then paused under a tree, taking time to watch the shadows dancing there in the dark, unlit heart of the city.
Trudging into the chilly valley between two baseball diamonds, she thought back on the years she’d lived with her grandmother Fiona—the only time she’d ever really felt at home as a girl. An inveterate smoker, Gramma Fee had developed emphysema (to no one’s surprise) just after Irene turned fifteen.
For a year Irene had watched her grandmother dying, bird thin and wisp haired, an oxygen tube hooked beneath her nose. Each time she saw the doctor she’d swear to them she’d never smoke another cigarette, so help her God . . . but by the next day she’d be puffing away, tugging the little wheeled oxygen tank behind her like an impolite puppy. Irene remembered the big diamond-shaped warning sticker on the side of the tank: WARNING: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. DO NOT OPERATE THIS TANK NEAR ANY OPEN FLAME. Every day she’d watch the cigarette burn slowly down until it was barely an inch from the little nozzles that stuck up into her Grandmother’s nostrils. It was like living next to a bomb that might go off any second.
It had been good practice, Irene thought, as she came up the other side of the valley and toward a grove of dark trees, feeling all the while as if Gramma Fee were just beside her. She could almost hear the creak of the little wheels on her tank. Smell the sweet, forbidden smoke. See the outline of white hair and white nightgown at the edge of the dark.
• • •
Nurse Moira stood at the main nurses’ station with Irene Richmond’s forms in front of her. The emergency contact number was for Sara Sherman. She punched the numbers into the phone and checked her watch again, hoping she could wrap up the call in time to do her rounds before her boyfriend called. Someone half-asleep answered. “Ms. Sherman?” she asked. “I’m very sorry to wake you, but Irene has slipped into a deep sleep. She’s only breathing now with the help of a respirator.” They could keep her on it and she would remain alive, but she wouldn’t wake up. “My advice is to go back to bed,” the nurse said. “She’ll be the same in the morning.”
• • •
Sara hung up without saying goodbye. Go back to sleep? Her whole body was shaking as she got up and threw her clothes on. She was already half dressed by the time George realized what was going on. “It’s happening?” he asked her. She didn’t respond, but he knew it was. He was still getting his shoes on when he saw her running out the door. It took him a moment to realize that she wasn’t waiting for him. He made it down to the street just in time to see her get into a cab. She was gone before he could shout for her.
• • •
Irene wandered up and down the hills of the park. In the winter wind that whistled by her ears, she heard whispering. In the gusts that came this way and that, she felt a firm hand on her back. In the city, the wind usually blew in an easterly direction, out to sea, but strange cross-currents were pushing her west, to the far edge of the park. Maybe the dead became winds, just areas of pressure, moving this way or that. Sometimes a breeze, sometimes a whole continental front or a wicked storm. Sometimes a great and sticky stillness. Traveling the globe by indiscernible patterns. Clumping into clouds and vanishing through the ozone layer. Maybe heaven was just the air all around. Maybe this cold wind around her was her grandmother. Maybe it was some other ghostly presence. Maybe it was Achilles, though she hoped it was Hector. The city was so alive that simply walking around in it was a life-support system. Its pulsing avenues flooded her veins; its streets flushed her arteries; its people burst this way and that like the valves of her heart. On the other side of Broadway, the road sloped sharply downward, and it became even easier to go on. She felt as she had wanted to feel all along. As if she were falling, steadily, toward the wide, dark river.
• • •
George caught a second cab, and from there he called William, and William called Jacob. Afterwards, with nothing else to do he stared out the window at Central Park, its paths and lawns shadowed and quiet. Then, just as he was thinking of trying Sara, he saw, bobbing above the treeline, the outline of Spiderman, and—he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming—Ronald McDonald. It took him several minutes to piece together that these must be for tomorrow’s big parade. They arrived at the hospital just a few minutes apart, sometime past three-thirty. Sara had already set Nurse Moira straight. They wouldn’t be waiting until morning. They wanted to go to the ICU immediately, where Irene had been taken for closer monitoring. Nurse Moira said she’d get it figured out and then disappeared. They waited a long time. George found some coffee. William and Jacob watched an infomercial about a new device that ensured your socks would never again be separated in the wash. Eventually Nurse Moira came back with forms for Sara to sign, and a doctor had to sign off, and though they’d been through it already six or seven times before, there was the usual confusion over why Sara, no relation to Irene, was the one listed on all the forms.
Finally, someone named Dr. Ramos took them to see Irene in the ICU. She was laid out under some white sheets, fast asleep, mouth stretched open around a plastic breathing tube as thick as a tennis ball. Sara began crying immediately, and George barely registered that Dr. Ramos was quietly explaining to him that they would need to wait a bit longer. He couldn’t actually take her off the respirator. He was Catholic, and while he in no way judged them, he couldn’t morally take a living woman off life support.
Sara and Jacob and George all yelled at him at once. William watched, silently, as their raised voices registered no movement whatsoever on Irene’s still face. Dr. Ramos left, and everyone cooled down. They waited almost another hour until the second doctor could be fou
nd. Dr. Hanks came around five a.m. to begin the proceedings.
• • •
Irene entered the long, thin park along the river, not sure exactly how to get across the West Side Highway on the far side. There the Hudson coursed mightily, its purpled surface forever lit by the coast of New Jersey. Near the river, the winds began to push in different all directions. Up toward the distant spire of a cathedral by Columbia. Back toward Broadway. Deeper into the park. Then up on the hill, she spotted something. Tall, white Greek columns reached up through the night, supporting a great marble dome on the top. It looked like some kind of lighthouse, or a tomb. Had she been here before? A long time ago, maybe? She thought she’d have remembered it better if she had. Though it was only fifty or so feet up in the air, it looked like Mount Olympus with the Pantheon on top. All the winds now seemed to be pushing her this way, as if they too wanted to have a word with the gods.
She wasn’t alone. Not far away, on the ring of benches around the memorial, a man lay buried beneath a mass of unfolded cardboard boxes. He wasn’t moving, and Irene knew well that this night was too cold to sleep in, no matter the number of boxes you made into blankets. Her red coat was a muddy, stained mess now. If she couldn’t get up, then she too would freeze to death before morning. It seemed fitting, she guessed. To die in the cold like a homeless person, which was what she had always been, in a way. One of the thousands of people who were everywhere and nowhere all the time. To die here would seal it. And at the foot of this beautiful monument, in this stolen coat, in these soggy excuses for shoes—it seemed like an honorable place to lie down.
• • •
Nurse Moira stayed with them the whole time, but William couldn’t take it. He said his goodbyes and left just as they were about to begin removing her breathing tube. George and Sara went up together, hugging and squeezing and kissing her, but she barely moved. It was only when Jacob went up and whispered something in Irene’s ear that they all saw her smile slightly, around the sides of the tube. George and Sara demanded to know what he’d said, but he wouldn’t tell. Eventually Nurse Moira helped Dr. Hanks remove the tube from Irene’s throat. They all watched to see if she’d open her eyes again. If she did, they wanted her to see them there, stationed by her side.
• • •
Except death didn’t come. She tried to slow her breath and just let it happen, but it didn’t. She found herself staring up at the tarnished plaque embedded in the stone wall of the monument, which read:
ERECTED BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK
TO COMMEMORATE THE VALOR
OF THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS
WHO IN THE CIVIL WAR
FOUGHT IN DEFENSE OF THE UNION
Suddenly it seemed all wrong. She was no sailor; she was no soldier. She wasn’t Hector, and this was no war that she’d been fighting. On each side of her stood a marble plinth, carved with the names of fathers and sons who’d sunk along with their ships. Boys and men who’d drowned in icy waters, far from home. Must be nice, she thought, to die next to your brothers. What did they always say? Born alone, die alone? But who was ever really born alone? And why die alone if you didn’t have to?
She had caught her breath again. She got up and began to walk back across the street, past an idling truck dropping off stacks of the morning’s newspapers. The sky above was just turning to faintest blue. The family who had been there at her birth was now far away, but her other family, her real family, was there inside the warm heart of the city, asleep in an apartment that looked like a catalog page, with the table already set for Thanksgiving dinner.
• • •
Her chest rose and fell as she tried to breathe, but her eyes never opened. Little by little she changed. Her breaths became shorter until they could barely tell if she was breathing at all. It was like seeing a person walking away on a wide city street. Becoming smaller, and finally not disappearing so much as becoming the horizon. In the end none of them could put their finger on the exact moment it happened. But afterward they knew they’d all seen it happen together.
II
This is just the way of mortals when we die.
Sinews no longer bind the flesh and bones together—
the fire in all its fury burns the body down to ashes
once life slips from the white bones, and the spirit,
rustling, flitters away . . . flown like a dream.
—Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Robert Fagles)
Everything takes longer than you expect.
—Murphy’s Second Law
WHY WE LEFT THE CITY
We left the city for good reasons, or at least they seemed good at the time. We had more lives to live and couldn’t spare another hour waiting for the G train. We couldn’t keep paying more and more for the same square inches. We couldn’t keep asking the landlord to fix the same refrigerator. We couldn’t move into a twelfth apartment. We left over bridges and through tunnels, still hoping for our security deposits. Be gone, oboe practicer in the next apartment! Be gone, old couple across the street without curtains or clothes. Anywhere else we could own property. Anywhere else we could own cars! Anywhere else we might be anyone else, or maybe our long lost best selves were only a U-Haul ride away. We lay up at night, wondering, What sorts of people would we be if we were no longer nervous and frayed?
Some of us tried to fight it, desperately ordering more drinks past last call. We divided and subdivided, putting up drywall to turn one bedroom into two. Taking second jobs and thirds. We pushed farther out. Greenpoint was the new Lower East Side, until Bushwick became the new Greenpoint and BedStuy became the new Bushwick. All the people we’d displaced on our way out there looked up to find us coming for them again. When does it end? they asked. We’re sorry, we answered. We don’t know how to stop. Then we looked back over our own shoulders and said, Already?
We spoke knowingly about interest rates. We asked no one in particular what the value of our time was. Anywhere else, it seemed, it would be more. Other cities, other towns promised us benefits, made better offers. We could always come back, couldn’t we? We’d had everything we wanted here, once. Hadn’t we been told that now we’d made it here, we could make it anywhere? Only none of us could say, exactly, what it was we’d made.
So desperate to succeed and in such hasty enterprises! Once we knew someone who worked at the same place for nine years. Another had nine jobs in one year. We dreamed of being fired. Let us go! we cried. There were so many things that we would do differently next time. We began to hurt each other and insult everyone else. Black clouds moved with us wherever we went, and friends recommended a new yoga studio, less gluten, window-box gardening. Doctors prescribed things to help us sleep, smile, function. We were afraid to go on vacation because we didn’t know if we could take coming back.
It was time. Time when our bartender knew our turtles’ names. Time when a girl on Franklin Avenue threw up kale tacos on our shoes. Time when a panel of tin fell from the bar ceiling and smashed our pitcher of Negronis. Time when we recognized the opening act’s lead guitarist from where he panhandled by the Met Foods. Time when that eighteenth stroller pinned us in at brunch and refused to let us out. They were finding bloody sheep’s heads in the park. In Midtown there was a place where a burger cost twenty-nine dollars. Now we knew our flood zones. Our boss had joined CrossFit. There was another new old museum and another new Disney musical and another convention for home picklers. The L train wouldn’t be running for the next nine weekends. The price of a MetroCard was going up again. We hardly noticed, and that scared us more than anything.
It was remarkable how easily and insensibly we’d fallen into routines, beating the same track from apartment door to office elevator, stopping midway only for the same pain au chocolat and coffee and the same café with an ever-rotating staff. For lunch there were the same endless salad bars and armies of chilled sandwiches. Now we ordered our dinners with the click of a button.
The same button, the same dinners. No need to speak to anyone. The bars were the same, the drinks were the same, even the new ones (especially the new ones), and afterward we took cabs home and didn’t even look out the window.
There were parts of the city we hadn’t seen in years. They reminded us of people who had left us, and we excised them from our maps before they could spread. It’s not the same, we said, it’s just not the same. It’s not like it was, before. We never said before what, but it was understood. We resented those who left almost as much as we hated those who stayed, because they weren’t enough. Like old wood, we splintered apart at the slightest touch until we were nothing but slivers stuck in each other’s fingertips.
How worn and dusty were the places we had been holding on to. Deep in the ruts where everything settled. We wanted to rise up and out. See the moonlight amid the mountains. Breathe dry air and drink soft water. We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they’d carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already.
ZUGZWANG, WARD III, 2010
JANUARY
During his first year working at Anchorage House, Jacob had stepped off the bus each day in front of Winston, the daytime guard, with satisfaction. While others rode on to their frictionless white office towers, he had but to give Winston a quick sarcastic salute to make the imposing wrought-iron gates creak open. Up and up the gravel driveway he’d climbed, past semicollapsed stables and yawning gray oaks. In a former life it had been a convent to the Bonnes Sœurs de la Grande Miséricorde with a giant statue of Jesus on the front lawn. Now it was a 125-bed private psychiatric facility accepting Blue Cross/Blue Shield, United Healthcare, and Medicaid, for adolescents who were persistently suffering from a host of mental ailments or required rapid stabilization in a “secure twenty-four-hour therapeutic sphere.” Jesus had been hauled around to the back, near where the nuns were still buried.
Why We Came to the City Page 25