Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  No such luck. I stared out at the city, listless. I felt certain I would not make it home. Certain I could not go home to face the life I had created for myself. Nor the life I had literally created, this thing that needed me all the time, every second, always and always. When Nancy Davenport tapped me on the shoulder, she could have been a gorgon for the difference it made. I recall her linking her arm in mine and saying some things just had to be lived, you couldn’t explain them otherwise. I recall the clack of my heels on the bathroom floor and several women bent over the vanity. There were introductions—this is Isifrid—and a flaunting of pertinent information—she runs Syn, yes that Syn—followed by a parting of women at the vanity and Nancy Davenport saying, “Welcome home.” I don’t know how many lines of coke made their way into my body that night, just that whatever I had known of abandon and rapture, whatever I would know in years to come, it would never suffice again.

  From then on, the only fix I got was to my intentions. I knew my goals. And hardly anything suffered as a result. The company ran itself, my marriage ran itself, and motherhood, insofar as I delegated the job, ran itself. With all that free time, I aspired only to procure and use drugs, which required none of the chicanery that often attends abuse. I had money and I had friends, and when I ran out of friends, I bought more. If anyone asked why I was doing this, I’d say because I could think of no other way to live that would work for me. Even as I’d sit in the bathtub, sobbing for the pain of addiction, wanting to stop, praying to stop, I’d light up with the idea that one more pull and I’d be healed.

  I snorted cocaine for ten years. It took that long to get creative. But after that, the learning curve wasn’t so steep. I sniffed coke, ate coke, shot coke. Sniffed, shot, and smoked dope. I put them together and thought I’d done something new. Meantime, AIDS was starting to make news. AIDS was in, needles were out. Needles were out, crack was in. Crack. My friends were aghast. Crack was for junkies and bums and black people. It had no social cachet whatsoever. God knows you couldn’t buy it at the Mud Club or Area. The hedonists would only go so far. You saw footage on the news of crack houses and black people looking like those famine babies Michael Jackson was always talking about. Crack was poison and if you weren’t careful, it could turn you into one of those distendedbelly, doe-eyed Negroes.

  So on the one hand: doe-eyed Negro. But on the other: crack. Most electric sensation ever. A supernova in every cell of every part of your body. Negro, nova. I took my chances and started to make my own. If you could make pasta, you could make crack. They say things acquired with difficulty are sweeter than those acquired with ease, but, as with most truisms, the drug addict need not apply. Further, there is something of the Barbie Baker to it all—blend, heat, strain, dry—that could make you feel like the Queen of England doing cupcakes. Alternately, you could outsource the job to a high-end chef for whom rethink, revise, revamp is second nature. The result? Take Benedictine, twelve-year-old Scotch, Pellegrino, fresh mint, and some extremely expensive uncut cocaine; mix, dry, cut (centrifuge tubes and Bunsen burner are a plus); serve in obsidian stem fashioned by Italian glazier of repute, and enjoy.

  Enjoy for a second. Maybe two. Then despair. Followed by your daily life. What did I care for Michael’s affairs? His illegitimate daughter come to live in our house? My own daughter, retarded in all ways but technical? I was a crackhead! But take away the crack and I was still an addict. And, apparently, a Viking. I guess I’m not surprised. At bottom, both are people who depredate their souls in pursuit of a misery so comprehensive and insane, it satisftes—albeit in the short term—a need whose brutality might kill you otherwise. A need for what? Who can say. Scholars continue to dispute the etymology of the word viking, though the consensus is that Northmen regularly used the phrase i viking to mean trading and plundering across the open sea. A Viking: one who fared by the sea to his adventures of commerce and war. A sensitive, artistic people of whom a great number were possessed of the need to venture out, to maraud, murder, trample, and steal. One tends to forget that because the Vikings were brutal, they were also disposed toward the acquisition of land and power, an enterprise no less sober than, say, Andrew Jackson’s liquidate-the-Native-American initiative. No one knows for certain whether Jackson approved the distribution of smallpoxinfected blankets to Mandan Indians in 1837, or if the pandemic arose by accident; suffice it to say that a highly patriotic American will kill most anyone for love of We the People. Enough with the interweaving? The parallel stories? I’m afraid not. From my vantage, I see there can be no growth without the understanding and application of principles developed over time, because of time, times past, histories made.

  Also, I can ponder matters of universal import, or I can mingle with my kind, among them that man doing unspeakable things to himself with a cow prod and a midget weeping for her solitude, here, there, everywhere.

  Forty-three

  We were terrified. The first case of superplague to hit New York, you’d think it had never struck anywhere else. That no one had heard of the thing—What is this? And, Oh my God, this is the end.

  The victim worked in Coney Island—a shill for one of those bust-a-balloon, win-a-fish derbies. He died within hours of presenting a first symptom. For the next couple weeks, his girlfriend, family, and immediate colleagues were quarantined with little hope of return. I cried for them. They’d had no time to say goodbye, some even had small kids. Usually, when death comes emergent, the tragedy of not being able to prepare gets mitigated by the benefit of not having to see it coming. But these people sitting in quarantine, they saw it coming every second of every day. I could not imagine anything worse.

  I had a certified check for six million dollars in my wallet. Hardly made a dent in what Mother left me. I planned to give most of it to charity, assuming such things still existed postplague. Probably all the good Samaritans would die from helping the sick, and all the poor people for whom charity is intended would die for lack of six million dollars to buy a converted missile base on eBay, which is what I did. It was a race against time. The owner had his own base, so he was fine, but the check had to clear and we needed to find a pilot willing to fly us out, and all this assumed we could escape before lockdown.

  The city didn’t have space for emergency hospice, so it did the crazy thing of sprucing up North Brother Island, home to Riverside Hospital, once a TB sanitarium, then a rehab that hadn’t been operational since the sixties. No one really knew it existed except maybe the guys on Rikers, for whom the shores of Brother meant, possibly, escape. The island was overgrown with weeds and wildlife, which had colonized the ruins and lighthouse. No way could the buildings be made functional, so in came the Quonset huts. Helicopter cams broadcast pictures of chicken-coop-type structures arriving by barge, and the National Guard deboarding cots and IV bags. The whole thing was repulsive, and from the scale of the operation you got the impression the city was bracing for a lot of inmates, beginning with the Coney Island Twelve. Thing is, none of them got sick, and eventually they had to be released. NBC filmed the reunions. The reporters asked questions like: How emotional has this been for you, having your life all but ended, only to be given this second chance?

  No program got higher ratings that month. And while this happy turn of events relieved some of the grief suffered by people elsewhere in the country, it drove the rest of us in the city that much closer to madness. If it was exhausting always to be asking who’s next, at least you should be able to rely on the promise that once your mom got superplague and you were living under the same roof, you’d get it, too. Only it wasn’t happening that way. The bacillus would not conform to a pattern, which meant no scientist or doctor had been able to model a likely scenario of transmission. Despite the thing’s virulence, only 3,067 people had died nationwide; by all accounts, the toll should have numbered well into the hundreds of thousands, if not more. At any moment, the plague could fell a locker room or act as if dropping an atomic bomb whose casualties are one. Autopsies, biopsi
es, cultures, there was no explaining whence or how immunity conferred itself on the fortunate. Clearly those susceptible to plague released by our highly patriotic, highly elusive American were in the minority, but you had no way of knowing your karma in advance.

  There came a week of inactivity followed by a recrudescence that killed a family of four in their townhouse on the Upper West Side. The kids—Benis and Geoff Spence—had been schooled privately; the parents—a psychiatrist and an impresario of world renown—were trustees of the public library. In short, no advantage had been denied them except impunity, which meant nearly everything was denied them in death. Next of kin were refused access to the bodies. Local police and hospital staff refused to collect the bodies. Neighbors began to protest. Mercenaries offered themselves by the dozen. Because of the Coney Island Twelve, quarantine—never appealing to begin with—had lost credibility. What good had it done? After all, one of the twelve was Geoff’s Spanish tutor, conduit of terminal infection, a Typhoid Mary among us. And no doubt there were more. Having experienced quarantine, there was no going back; soon as the tutor was named culprit, she vanished. As did the Spence family’s friends and associates. Because if it wasn’t enough to isolate for a couple weeks, if you could be a carrier whose ability to transmit was impossible to gauge, you might as well be jailed at Guantánamo. Forget habeas corpus, you were there to stay.

  The situation was escalating out of control.

  For weeks I’d been making arrangements to get out with Stanley, but without the gusto an exodus of this nature required. There were people to bribe, a silo to renovate, and amenities to be bought. Think there was soap in that place? It was worse than an abandoned coal mine. At least underground. Above ground was a two-thousand-square-foot house—a log cabin really—with basement access to the launch control center and the silo, which was about 185 feet deep and 50 feet wide, whose roof doors at 230,000 pounds had to be opened hydraulically.

  The Atlas-F was one in a twelve-missile squadron decommissioned in 1965. It could travel six thousand miles and carried a nuclear load of about four tons of dynamite. It was also the booster that put John Glenn into orbit. Coulda been the missile that sparked holocaust in ’62. No clue what happened to the actual warhead; all that remained at my base was a bunch of computer equipment, enough asbestos to kill off Kansas, and an underground facility that almost nothing could destroy. I’d read a pamphlet saying if you had seasonal affective disorder, maybe underground housing was not for you, but otherwise, it was today’s mansion for tomorrow’s truth.

  I made the calls and signed some papers, but was still having trouble acquiring the deed. Something to do with contracts as yet unfulfilled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, something something remediation of contaminants in the ground water as per legislation dictating how to deal with formerly used defense sites, affectionately termed FUDS. Some days I’d send out e-mails that used phrases like colossally inconvenient; other days I’d be so depressed by how bureaucracy kept to the script no matter THE SUPERPLAGUE, I couldn’t even get out of bed. Plus there was little excitement in self-preservation now that people I actually knew were dying.

  My favorite doorman, the one who taught me how to tie my shoes, he died. Our board refused to disclose cause of death but come on, we all saw him coughing up gore into the lapels of his blazer monogrammed with the building’s insignia. I had long suspected the new porters were subject to investitures, because how else to account for the pride they took in house livery? Frederick was dying, but he was still pained by sputum on his jacket. Maybe he was pained because he was dying, knowledge of which made him reorder priorities like a crazy man.

  All the other residents in the building had fled. Likewise the building staff. Frederick was, perhaps, the last straw. And so, after thirty years, I finally got what I wanted, which was to open the front door for myself. To walk in unacknowledged. Less appealing was having to take the back stairs, but better them than stalling in the elevator with no one to call for help.

  Day by day the city appeared to exfoliate, as if the affluent who escaped revealed in their stead the marrow that gives this town life. In other words, whole sections of Manhattan began to empty of white people.

  By August, you could still get in and out of the city, though you had to prove residence in either direction after seven p.m. New restrictions were enacted daily, though they rarely made sense. Ships were permitted to dock and unload, but a guy wanting to see his grandparents in Long Island? Forget it.

  I’d heard from Hannah once. Or from Connie on Hannah’s behalf. They were ensconced somewhere in Oswego, way the hell upstate. When this thing was over, Hannah wanted skiing lessons. Would I pay? Of course. I’d pay for anything she asked. Could she have my room if she came home? A thousand times over. Yes, yes, and yes.

  The city forbade public gatherings for fear of providing a target or exacerbating conditions in which plague thrived. I don’t know how people continued to hold religious services, but I bet they did. Of course they did. Duress unites a congregation better than anything.

  We had a routine: Stanley would get up, eat, watch cartoons, movies, eat, nap, lay out furniture for the launch control center—picture a giant underground spool with cement spindle—go to bed and start anew the next day. I would wait for Eric to call, but pretend it was the last thing on my mind.

  Mother had not asked to be cremated; in fact, she’d left no instructions at all, just that I tell Dag of her death. Until now, I had not mustered the stamina to hound the story between them. What could I learn that I wanted to hear? If the loss of Dag could explain Mother, that’d be one thing. But it didn’t. It was just a love affair like any other. Even so, the day I called I was nervous and extremely disappointed to find his number disconnected. I guess I’d wanted something from him after all. Maybe just to hear him talk about her the way I hoped to remember her, but wouldn’t.

  One morning the phone rang. The phone never rang, which made me think Hannah, which made me answer. It was Fran. She heard my voice and said, “Oh, honey, I found you! We’ve been so worried. How is it you’ve never given anyone your number except Ben?”

  “Do you even have to ask?”

  “No, honey pie, I don’t. Are you okay? We miss you.”

  I recapped the last few weeks.

  She said, “That’s a whole lot of shit to deal with.”

  “You been to any meetings?” I asked. “Are they even possible these days?”

  “Sort of. It’s been hard because of space and the police. Still, the people who haven’t pussied out and left seem to get off on the hardship. So we’ve been managing here and there. Recovery stops for no one!”

  “You know, my mother used to fit two hundred lunatics in this apartment and pray to Thor. At least once a month. I’d say, Isn’t this a bit much? And she’d go: Thor stops for no one!”

  “Good grief. We should just have the meetings at your place.”

  “We could have a convention, now that I think about it.”

  “I like it! A meeting in the famous pink room. I’ll wear chain mail.”

  I laughed. “It’s really good to talk to you.”

  “You, too. So I’ll tell everyone seven tonight. That okay? Or is six better?”

  “Tonight?” I’d thought we were kidding.

  “Of course. Everyone will be psyched.”

  “Tonight? In the pink room?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. What’s the address again?”

  I told her, then went tearing through the house, yelling for Stanley. “Stanley! I just did a bad thing!”

  He showed up with a two-liter bottle of orange soda. “What? What’s even left to do that’s bad?”

  I paused because I understood the subtext here. We’d stopped having sex ages ago, so whatever wrong he’d advanced by sleeping with a girl out of wedlock was gone. He had not smoked pot in almost a year. And it’d been a good three months since alcohol. There really were no vices left to us except those of a spiritual n
ature, but you couldn’t call them vices because vice implies deviance, which is okay for stuff like drinking—you may be drunk now, but you were born sober—but less okay for spiritual poverty since I maintain people like me and Stanley were born poor and just stayed that way.

  “I sort of agreed to host a meeting tonight. In the pink room. We don’t even have any food. We need food! Maybe we can use those restaurant coffeemakers in the pantry. Should we make dinner, too? Like pasta salad? Pasta salad for twenty could be gross. But maybe I could make a lot of small things.”

  Stanley put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Slow down there. Have you considered the dangers at all? Or that you might have wanted to ask me, since I live here, too?”

  “I should have told Fran about the stairs. No way Derek gets up here. Or Neil. Jesus, half these guys are hobbled. This place isn’t wheelchair accessible! Okay, think. What would Izzy do? Get the elevator fixed. Is it even broken? Probably not worth it to find out.”

  I told Stanley to stop laughing. What did I know about hosting? I could make fun of people, sure, but to take responsibility for the quality of time they spent in my home?

  “It’s not a gala, Lucy. It’s a meeting. And just bringing people into your house these days, you’re doing something good. In fact, I can’t believe they’re all sticking together. What if one of them is sick? Or gets sick?”

  “Are you worried?”

  He shook his head.

  “Exactly. I knew you wouldn’t be. Which is why maybe this is our moment. Maybe this is the moment when we find out why we were put on this earth as addicts.”