Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  I was to disembark at Charles de Gaulle Airport, take the RER B line to the Luxembourg station. The pickup was scheduled for 1400, which I understood to mean two o’clock, at the Jardin du Luxembourg, in front of the bust of Édouard Branly.

  I arrived in Paris at 10:00 a.m. on February 15, nearly a full day after my departure. I had taken Benadryl on the plane to help me sleep, but I had only managed to get in a few hours of shut-eye before the gal in the window seat decided to have an attack of diarrhea that required my letting her in and out of the aisle every fifteen minutes.

  I was ragged and smelly when we landed, and I had roughly four hours before the pickup and nowhere to go in the meantime to nap or shower. I bought a map from the stationmaster at the Charles de Gaulle metro station, and a city day pass, and decided to make the most of my €2,000 to do a little sight-seeing.

  I started at the Louvre and joined the line of anxious tourists all craning their necks to see the Mona Lisa, which is about the size of a dressing table mirror and impossible to see above the heads of the camera-happy lemmings. I got lost looking for Aphrodite and found myself in a half-deserted wing of the museum showcasing Dutch and Flemish painters.

  The smell, the look, and the air there took me back to my high school summers working in the antique shop with my father. I even recognized the names of one or two of the painters as names that had passed through our store at some point in the hazy past.

  I wound my way past Ingres and de La Tour and Van Eyck, numb to the splendor looming all around me and feeling like one submerged at the bottom of the ocean. I found myself on a bench, staring up at Van Thulden’s rendering of the Resurrection and thinking what a colossal hangover Christ must have had, being awakened so suddenly from the deepest of sleeps, eternal sleep.

  I was awakened in much the same fashion sometime later by a docent of the museum, explaining to me in French that there was no lying down on the benches.

  It was a quarter to two. It took two trains and thirty minutes to get to Luxembourg Gardens. The park was across the street from the station, but it was bigger than I expected, so I found myself wandering around looking for the bust of Édouard Branly, whom I did not know from Adam.

  I saw the red cooler before I saw the bust. And then I saw the woman. She was reclining in a green patio chair, one of the hundreds strewn about the park for sitting in and sunning in and smoking cigarettes in.

  She was reading a book, and I cannot recall now precisely which book it was, except that it was a French translation of an Agatha Christie novel. The woman wore a woolen hat pulled down over her ears (it was forty degrees Fahrenheit, and snow still lay in patches on the ground) and a long gray overcoat.

  She was the woman. The woman from Seoul. The woman with the red cooler.

  And here she was again, with a cooler at her side, looking like she had come for a picnic lunch.

  When she saw me, she laid the book in her lap and motioned to the empty chair beside her. I took it.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You know what to do with it, I suppose.” She indicated the red cooler.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Okay, then,” and she stood up to leave.

  “Hold on!” I interjected. “Didn’t I see you in Seoul?”

  She faced me squarely. “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

  “Why did they send me there to find that cooler,” I asked, “if you were already there?”

  “Rowan thought I was dead.”

  “Who is Rowan?”

  She looked at me, a bit surprised, and then shook her head.

  “Never mind,” she said, “I have to go now. Good-bye.”

  She started down the dirt path that led to the entrance of the park. I called after her.

  “Is it another turkey sandwich?”

  “Roast beef,” she answered without looking back.

  And then she was gone.

  I was cold and tired and hungry, and I figured I just as well ought to head home as try to make something more out of this trip. So I caught the metro to the airport, had a McDonald’s dinner while I waited for my plane, and slept like a baby all the way back to the good old US of A.

  This time it was a kid who picked up the cooler. We met at a coffee shop in the Ferry Building around noon the next day. I was about as worn out as I’d ever been, and I looked a mess when I showed up with the cooler at Mike’s Café wearing the same clothes I’d been wearing the day I’d left for France, my hair a rat’s nest, and dark circles under my eyes.

  “What is it this time?” asked the kid. He looked to be about eighteen or nineteen. And then he just popped the lid open. “What is that, roast beef or something?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “roast beef.”

  “Humph,” mumbled the kid, crinkling his nose. He poked at the sandwich a bit and then took it out of its plastic wrapper and took a bite. “Still good.”

  “You got my money?” I said.

  “What?”

  “You got my money? My payment?”

  “Oh yeah,” said the kid. He took a fat envelope out of his backpack. It was wedged between a copy of Molecular Cell Biology and Wisner’s Advanced Genetics. I’d seen both those books before.

  “You go to Berkeley?” I asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  I had never had this much communication with one of my correspondents before, and I was feeling like trying my luck.

  “I was a Berkeley grad,” I said, “oh-six.”

  “Oh yeah?” said the kid, zipping up his backpack. “What’d you major in?”

  “Business.”

  “Sucks for you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There are no jobs for business majors in this economy.”

  “Well, I do fine,” I said, holding up the envelope of cash.

  “I bet you do,” the kid said. “What’s Rowan paying you?”

  That name again! Rowan!

  But I knew better than to ask outright who Rowan was. I had seen how quickly the woman in Paris clammed up when it was apparent I knew less than she did. So I played it cool.

  “What’s he paying you?” I retaliated.

  “He’s paying for my college education; that’s what he’s paying,” said the kid. “He’s my uncle.”

  “What do you study?” I asked.

  “Genetics and plant biology,” said the kid.

  “So Rowan’s got a smart kid like you delivering sandwiches,” I laughed.

  The kid gave me a funny look, as if he wasn’t sure if I was making a joke. He squinted his eyes up real tight, scrutinizing me. I could tell he was trying to make up his mind about something.

  Then he said real carefully, “Yeah, he’s got me delivering sandwiches.”

  He threw his bag over his shoulder and picked up the cooler. Then he said, pointing to the envelope of cash, “You want to make some real money, businessman? Invest some of that in InfraGen Tech.”

  I went online as soon as I got home and looked up InfraGen Tech. There was an InfraGen Technology, Inc. based out of Livermore, California. It was a tiny little start-up with hardly more than a home page and a stock ticker that resembled a dying man’s EKG.

  The home page read:

  InfraGen Technology, Inc. is an American-based research company that specializes in developing new technology for preserving the viability of seeds and spores for agrarian use. Founder Dr. Rowan Krasimir is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and a recipient of the Green Nation Award for his doctoral thesis, “The Extinction of Endemic Plant Species in Mesoamerica.”

  And that was it. No links. No contacts. Nothing more to the website than a banner and a short bio. It looked as if a third grader had designed it.

  Their stock was valued at sixty-two cents a share, and had a year-to-date high of two dollars eighty-three cents and a low of thirteen cents a share. And if I could say the stock was trending in any direction in recent years, I would say t
he direction was down.

  I already owned stocks in Apple and Amazon and Chipotle and Monster Energy Drinks, and they were doing me proud.

  What the hell, I thought, weighing the envelope of cash in my hands. What’s ten thousand dollars?

  And I bought sixteen thousand shares of InfraGen Tech.

  Magnum Opus.

  I turned twenty-eight that month. I had always had the feeling twenty-eight would mean something great, like I would finally be all grown up and life wouldn’t deal me any more surprises. I didn’t know then that life never stops dealing you surprises and that the biggest surprises always happen when it looks like everything is finally settling down.

  It looked like everything was finally settling down. I hadn’t heard from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. in about two weeks, which was fine by me. I wasn’t anywhere near short on cash, and I’d just as soon take a little vacation from jet-setting around with phony passports.

  My sister had opened a free clinic in Haiti, run by priests and nuns and staffed by young doctors just out of med school looking to volunteer for a good cause. The clinic was funded by donations pouring in from around the world, or so the press said. But I knew where the real bulk of the money was coming from.

  Marilee had sold her entire collection: the American Girl dollhouse, the lawn jockeys, the giant porcelain cow she had done over with images of all the animals in the rain forests that were now endangered because their habitats were being cleared away to make room for cattle grazing, the office cubicle that was decoupaged to look like a summer day in the park.

  All of it was going to a buyer from Argentina named Emilio Duarte, who planned to open a private museum in New York called the Museum of Contemporary Idiots, which was dedicated to art, like Marilee’s, that drew attention to controversial global topics, like oil drilling and poaching and religious persecution.

  Novocain for fools, my father would have said.

  Marilee sold the collection for $1,270,000. I had to meet with the attorneys and agents at the Transamerica building to oversee the transaction, since Marilee could not be persuaded to leave her work in Haiti, even for a day.

  Every cent from the sale of that collection went into the formation of a private endowment, now called the Saint Marilee Lorenzo Fund, which financed Marilee’s clinic in Haiti, christened the Holy Rosary Free Clinic. The fund continues to subsidize hundreds of other clinics just like it today.

  Rasima Rasima was installed as director of outpatient care at the Holy Rosary Free Clinic, a fancy title that bore no real weight, since Rasima Rasima didn’t have any real medical training.

  Rasima Rasima tended to the patients at Holy Rosary after the doctors administered their preliminary care, or while the patients were waiting on tests, or while they convalesced. It was her job to see to their everyday needs while they stayed in the hospital, be it for an hour, a day, or longer. She brought snacks and water, helped the patients to the restroom, gave them something to read, calmed them when they were frightened, showed them how to work the remote control, prayed with them if they happened to pray, and when finally it was time for them to check out, Rasima Rasima set to work changing the bedsheets and restocking the cabinets to make the room ready to receive the next invalid.

  Although she was not authorized to directly treat patients, Rasima Rasima was well versed in homeopathic treatments, which some patients preferred, and which she administered here or there upon request. Although she had joined the convent and had renounced many of the practices and teachings of the East Indies, she still retained a vast knowledge of herbal remedies and natural therapies, which sometimes did the trick when Western medicine proved insufficient.

  The Holy Rosary Free Clinic had once been a boarding school for girls. The walls of six adjoining classrooms were knocked down to clear space for the primary care center, which housed examination rooms, operating tables, and labs. Another two classrooms were transformed into administrative offices. The girls’ dormitory became a ward for convalescent and hospice care. The doctors, who were mostly young medical students from the United States, stayed in makeshift barracks north of the school yard. They had access to the old gym, which had been converted into a mess hall and recreation center. The friars and nuns were housed in what used to be the faculty quarters. This included a dozen small private apartments, a kitchen, and a modest living space. The library remained a library, and the chapel stayed a chapel.

  I have visited the Holy Rosary Free Clinic only once in my life, three years ago. I was invited by the newest director of the clinic, an exuberant twentysomething, who, upon learning that the brother of Our Lady Saint Marilee Lorenzo of San Francisco was still alive and had never seen the clinic, insisted that I be flown out for a tour and to attend a special mass in honor of my late, great sister.

  I accepted. I had never been to Haiti.

  It is not uncommon for those who hold my sister in high regard to expect the same sort of holiness of me, her flesh and blood, as they got from Marilee when she was alive. When I am introduced to people who once knew Marilee, or who have spent their lives studying her good works, I get the impression that they are expecting a sort of Mahatma Gandhi incarnate. What they get instead is a tired, old atheist.

  Nevertheless, I have always been treated with the greatest respect by those who loved my sister. When the workers at Holy Rosary saw that I did not take Communion with them at the mass, they only seemed to redouble their efforts to make me feel at home, and were kind enough to excuse me from blessing the food and leading the evening prayer, honors usually reserved for their hallowed guests.

  My father was an atheist, too. He lied when he met my mother in Milan and pretended to be a Protestant, which he assumed was pretty much the same thing as a Catholic.

  My mother was young, and wholly devout, and God knows a Protestant and a Catholic could never work out, she thought. But she prayed on it, and she believed, in her prayers, that God was telling her to marry this Protestant man—that a man of God is a man of God, whether he worships kneeling or standing.

  What God didn’t tell her was that my father was a phony.

  My father kept up the charade for a while, nodding his head in prayer when my mother would say grace, or going with my mother to church on the holiest of holy days. But by and by, it became apparent to my mother that my father had never communed with God a day in his life, and that everything he owned in this world, he had come by through lying and cheating.

  Even the acquisition of the antique shop in Malibu had been dubious. The property, which was ideally situated along the Pacific Coast Highway between Malibu and Pacific Palisades, and which was subject to a heavy flow of celebrities and wealthy tourists, had once been a run-down fishing and tackle store.

  My father first saw the property on a trip up the coast with my mother and an old friend with known connections to the Mafia. My father had a lot of friends like that from his days in used cars and car parts. My mother claimed to have heard my father say, “It’s a shame a nice property like that is going to waste selling worms.” Shortly thereafter, the bank foreclosed on the property, and my father bought it for a song.

  He had not yet expressed his desire to open an antique shop catering to the rich and famous, at least not to my mother.

  I hesitate to add that much of what I know about my father in those early days comes from the stories my mother told me after my father had died and she had been “liberated from that ramshackle marriage.” Her words, not mine.

  One day my father drove out to Ontario, California, with my mother, claiming he had a surprise for her. This was about four months into the marriage, and my mother was starting to doubt my father would ever go back to work, and she was worried they were going to end up penniless and poor if he kept on gambling his money away at the racetracks.

  My father walked my mother into a mom-and-pop antique shop called Rosanne’s Goodies and said, “Look around and tell me if there is anything you like.”

 
My mother looked around. She said the place was a treasure trove of relics dating back to the nineteenth century. She asked the owner of the store where he had managed to find such fine furniture. The owner said he’d been in the business forty years, and whenever somebody in the neighborhood passed away, they sold their furniture to Rosanne’s Goodies. Fine as the furniture was, the owner said, there wasn’t much of a market for it in Ontario.

  My mother settled on a hand-carved vanity from the 1920s, which the owner claimed once belonged to a silent film actress who retired to Ontario at the advent of talking pictures.

  The story goes, and it is a famous story in our family, that my father walked up to the owner with his checkbook in hand and said, “I’ll take it.”

  “The vanity?” the owner asked.

  “Everything,” said my father.

  “What do you mean?” the shop owner asked.

  “I’d like to buy everything in the store,” my father said.

  “Everything?” the shop owner gasped.

  “Everything?” my mother gasped.

  “Everything,” my father said.

  So they settled on a price—my mother never quite knew how much—and my father hired a moving company to ship all the furniture from Rosanne’s Goodies out to the foreclosed fishing and tackle store in Malibu. He called the new store Pacific Antiques, a classy name that would attract a Beverly Hills clientele, and he came up with elaborate stories about all the furniture, much like the one my mother had been told about the silent film star. Then he marked everything up 30, 40, 50 percent and raked in a handsome profit.

  I used to spend summers working in the antique shop. I don’t remember exactly what age I was when I started, but I wasn’t yet thirteen. My first job was dusting and polishing the furniture. And in junior high, I was promoted to cashier, and then in high school, I became a floor manager, and it was my job to convince potential buyers they were getting a real deal.

  My sisters were never allowed to work in the shop because, my dad said, they didn’t have any business sense. When it was just him and me in the store, he’d say to me, “Your sisters are as empty-headed as jellyfish. They don’t know anything about the great big world out there.”