by Paula Champa
The shift change from Maria-Sylvana to Brian had taken place while I was sleeping. Since Brian was freshly on duty, I couldn’t imagine how Emerson could have vanished before his eyes.
I looked to Brian expectantly.
He crossed his fleshy arms over his chest. “He asked me to wheel him down the hall to his office. Then he sent me out to the deli to get him an egg sandwich.”
“What? He tricked you! Why didn’t you wake me up before you went out?”
I ran for my clothes, with Brian following behind.
“I thought I was doing you a favor, Beth. You were zonked out! He was happy in his desk chair. I was gone for like fifteen minutes.”
Someone had failed to observe a Primary Procedure.
We searched the loft again. There was no sign of him, except for the empty office chair by the front door. I went back to his desk and took a few minutes to read through the legal papers that Bruce Kingston’s office had faxed—a clarification of some clause in Emerson’s will about the meaning of the word bequest. Then, with no option except to pivot from one empty space to another, I started making phone calls with the text of the Standard Policy for archivists running through my head: It is your duty to ensure that each object in your care can be found easily when required.
Dr. Albas (her answering service promised to page her).
Bruce Kingston (in court).
Eric Dart, the conservator: “I haven’t heard from him in months, Beth,” he reported. “Let me know if I can do anything.”
The location scout in Los Angeles, who didn’t remember who I was at first, but said he’d let me know if Emerson tried to reach him.
Dr. Albas called in on the second line. She asked me to keep her posted.
“He might call you,” I suggested.
She sighed with frustration. “I hope he does.”
The specter of Emerson’s father floated through my mind. And right behind it, the image of Miguel in the car outside my hotel, smug in Lynford Webster’s friendship—his mentorship: like a son. Had Emerson sensed someone moving in on him? It seemed unthinkable that he would try to get himself all the way out to Burring Port, but, after he’d been missing for several hours, I phoned Gray Hill. At the sound of Laurel’s clipped greeting, I tried to iron the desperation out of my voice.
“Emerson might be visiting Connecticut today. Has he stopped there by any chance?”
“I don’t know anything about Emerson’s schedule,” Laurel said, sounding distracted. “Mr. Webster is overseas.”
“If Emerson stops by, will you call? It’s urgent.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of him making his way alone through the city. Then I reminded myself that Emerson was an adult and a free human being. Not my ward. On the contrary, I was there to serve his wishes. If he wanted to take a skeletal wander through Manhattan, what business did I have trying to stop him?
It frustrated me that I couldn’t make his final days any better for him. I was stuck in the doorway myself, like Janus, the Roman god whose two faces greeted me every month on the letterhead of the International Council on Archives: one face looking backward, the other looking forward. What should be saved from the past? What will be needed in the future? Alpha and Omega. I didn’t know which direction I was facing myself.
I left Brian to answer the office phones and headed down Bleecker on foot.
An object’s location should be recorded at all times.
At Golden Hands: a brief disruption of business.
Not there.
I kept alert for any limping forms all the way back along Bleecker, then down to the garage on Perry Street.
Emerson’s Quattro was parked there as usual, at the top of one of the ramps. I asked Nate if Emerson had been there looking for the Beacon, but he reminded me that the car was with mechanics, being reunited with the engine. Not that Emerson could drive anyway.
Taxi. I trawled the Village by cab, street by street.
Nowhere.
It is your duty as an archivist to ensure that each object in your care can be found . . .
But the only thing in my care, the only thing that was entrusted to me, could not be found. Like a creature stirring from a long hibernation, I had finally discovered in Emerson’s employ something I could accomplish: to help him die. Now he had turned into someone whose life was in danger.
Back at the loft, I thought Emerson might have wanted to see some of his friends from prep school, or college. Beckett’s brother Tom, for instance, whose thin lips I had eventually kissed to exhaustion when we ended up getting together briefly in college. I had no number for Tom, and it had been awkward when I’d seen him at a party a few years ago. But I could call Beckett. First I had to find my neglected address book, buried in one of my suitcases in Emerson’s guest room.
Once she registered who I was, Beckett launched into the news of her pregnancy, already several months along. She was so excited about it that we were on the line for ten minutes before I felt comfortable changing the subject.
“Have you heard anything about Emerson Tang lately? Or has Tom?”
“Besides the shutdown?”
“The shutdown?”
“Yeah, he’s snubbed everyone out. Tom hasn’t heard from him in more than a year. Anyway, you would know more than me. Aren’t you still working for him?”
I worded my response carefully. “My job has changed, actually. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“Exactly.”
“If you hear anything about him in the next day or so? I’m trying to reach him. It’s important.”
“Sure. What about you, Beth? You still living in the city? What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing much. The usual.” It struck me how often those words had been my magic pass to communicate the truth without prompting any more questions. As I was hanging up, I remembered to ask: “Oh—is it a boy or a girl?”
“We’re going to be surprised!”
“Congratulations, Beckett.”
I tried to imagine what it was like to be on her end of the life cycle, instead of the end Emerson and I were on. Dr. Albas had warned me that it was natural for someone at his stage to detach, to withdraw from all but the most necessary human connections, in order to grieve his own death. I knew Emerson had already detached from his old professional associations. He had even deaccessioned his friends. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected him to do it to me.
Brian combed the streets around the building on foot until his shift ended, leaving phone numbers with the shopkeepers and asking them to call us if they saw anyone of Emerson’s description. Periodically, Brian came upstairs and offered to bring me something to eat. I was so angry, I couldn’t look at him.
In spite of my doubts, I wondered if Hélène might have phoned Emerson again or had something to do with his disappearance. The last place I’d seen her was Monterey. Was she back in New York? I phoned Arthur Quint’s gallery and got an answering machine. I dialed the Royalton Hotel. My heart stopped when the operator offered to put me through to her room—she was back, after all—but there was no answer. Had she kept the room while she was traveling? I tried phoning a few more times, until I reluctantly left a message asking her to call.
The only sensible course of action was to do more research into Emerson’s possible whereabouts. But this would require me to violate his privacy—something he knew I would be loath to do. The sources of information I considered to be fair game were any papers visible on his desk and the contents of his office files, which we’d always shared, and I already knew those to be bone dry, unless he was visiting every museum and gallery in the Greater New York metro area.
The surface of his desk was an equally barren land for clues. It was partially tiled with CD jewel cases and otherwise littered with old receipts, legal documents and business correspondence that I had continued to place there for him as a courtesy in the previous months. At some point he had stopped reviewing them. Now it all needed to be filed.
I busied myself sorting halfheartedly through the stacks of paper, and with each page I filed, I fought the urge to pull open the drawers of his desk. I rid myself of the temptation by turning instead to the college notebook that Maria-Sylvana had dug up. Emerson had been so amused by its reappearance that he’d moved it to his night table. Several times he had asked me to recite some of the contents to him—in effect, he had already invited me to look at it. Nevertheless, I paged through it uncomfortably, not quite reading it, only scanning the lines for anything that might be relevant to his current whereabouts.
The early pages seemed to be filled mostly with quotations and arguments with himself—the explorations of a cocky college student. One lengthy section was devoted to what appeared to be research notes for a written assignment, as if he had interviewed someone for a business course. He must have produced a report or case study on the company being discussed, though I never found the typed paper. The businessman who was being interviewed (some pages had been removed, and the subject was referred to only as “he”) sounded more confident than the one taking notes. Was it his father? Five or six ruled pages were filled with quotations from the interview, carefully transcribed in Emerson’s spidery hand:
– “It’s a leader’s job to keep things on track.”
– His fear—that he’ll fail; credibility; reaching the next rung
– learned to “deal with reality” (not avoid)
– sense that the world was already doomed, and his generation would finish it off . . .
– “if people believe that what I want to do can be profitable—in more than one way—they’ll support it.”
X – (obstacles:)
I flipped through the pages, thinner with notes as they went on. But what was this? Near the back of the notebook—
About me.
There was no question. My name was right there.
Amid Emerson’s sporadic jottings in recent years were his impressions of a conversation I vaguely remembered, around the time I’d begun working for him. He’d been in the process of replacing the cassette tapes in his music collection with new CDs. We’d talked about the pros and cons of converting his archival records to electronic data storage, versus continuing with my traditional paper system.
BETH’s big argument: “We already know paper can last for at least 2,000 years, but CD data is expected to degrade within 400!” (she is so CONSERVATIVE! But she is a saver, of course. A conserver . . .)
And cloistered. She’s a professional cloisterer! Does she ever go out?
Does she ever look ahead and think, something NEW could be BETTER??? And that some things are not worth saving?
It depends on the factors in each case—but why argue about changing something we already KNOW can be improved?
When there are options to be explored. Failure to make something new—this is even worse than—
Insulted by his spidery hand, I stared at the rest of the pages uncomprehending, unable to focus. I threw the notebook down.
How dare he insult me.
Amateur philosopher.
Since when was he such a creative visionary? He was the one who was obsessed with the past—with old houses, no less. Old photos of old houses. And an old car. All he did was collect old things. Rich of him to call me a saver.
Let the police save him.
When Tisa arrived for her night shift I called 911 and reported him missing. I was still furious. In contrast to my irritation, which sounded merely like panic, the dispatcher’s voice was warm and friendly. I believed her when she said she was sorry to hear how upset I was.
“I’m telling you,” she said, “most of the time it turns out that someone just went to do an errand and their family didn’t know about it.”
At this, my anger toward Emerson collided with impatience: “He doesn’t do errands. His guts are turning to liquid.”
An electronic beep reminded me that my call was being recorded.
“More than ninety-five percent of missing people show up within twenty-four hours,” counseled the dispatcher. “More than ninety-five percent. Odds are, your guy will too.”
She instructed me to fax a clear, recent photograph of Emerson to the number she gave me. The problem was, I had no recent photographs of him, no photograph at all. After scanning the drawers and shelves in his bedroom, to no avail, the only place I could think to look was in his desk. The one place I had sworn to myself I would not look.
There was nothing interesting in it anyway, I discovered as I rummaged around the drawers now. Not even an address book. He had obviously scrubbed the place clean of his own memorabilia, probably a long time ago. The few photographs I found of him (including the one I faxed to the police) looked like college snapshots, featuring a lot of people I didn’t recognize. The only item of interest I ran across was an undocumented artwork—an unframed watercolor on stiff paper that he had never given me to catalogue—isolated in the middle drawer of his desk. Protected there from the interference of stray pens and other paraphernalia was what looked like a child’s painting. It wasn’t unattractive—that was the best I could say for it. It was a vague depiction of an Asian face. The reverse side was marked with black ink, a design like a little crow with three legs. There was no paperwork with it, but the Standard Policy was clear enough regarding items of unknown provenance: Poor documentation is not, in itself, a reason for disposal.
I stared hopelessly at the little painting as the evening wore on, functioning in a kind of dead alertness, like my teenage years replayed. I hesitated to leave the loft in case Emerson appeared, but I thought a walk might help clear my head. It was becoming unbearable to sit hour after hour, alternating between anger and frustration. Sometime after 1 A.M., I left Tisa in the empty loft with instructions.
I crossed Bleecker and walked toward the river, wondering if I could sense him. I believed he was alive somewhere, but that didn’t make me worry any less. He had no medications or painkillers except the morphine pump attached to him, and I could not remember how full the cartridge was. He had no idea how to check it—he didn’t understand the intricacies of keeping his cocktail of meds monitored and refilled. Mainly, I prayed his morphine would hold out. Because if the cartridge ran dry, he would be rocketed into a hideous stratosphere of pain so instantaneous and debilitating that Dr. Albas said the most merciful thing that could happen would be for his heart to stop from the pure shock of it.
Though of course that might not happen. He could just be left, wherever he was, calling out in pain. The DNR certificate was taped to the wall in his bedroom. Without that document, it was possible he would be found and resuscitated into a vegetative state.
I ran back to the loft and put Tisa on one of the office phone lines. Together, we spent the rest of the night calling hospitals and police stations, using different names, hounding the admissions clerks of the emergency rooms for anyone of his description. But as I should have known, there was no one.
19
WHEN I STEPPED off the small elevator at the Royalton the next morning, the first person I ran into was a policeman. Farther down the hallway, the door to Penthouse B was already open. I walked in to the sound of someone retching.
On the landing I found a second police officer, with his hat off and a walkie-talkie in his hand. He looked at me with a distinct expression of embarrassment as another bout of heaving issued from the bathroom.
Behind him, two men were lifting something long and flat. My mind registered it as a stretcher. But it wasn’t the stretcher I focused on. It was the black body bag on top.
“I offered them a bedsheet,” said Hélène, appearing at the bathroom door. She crossed the room and touched my arm tentatively, her face colorless behind her colored glasses. “The linens are fine cotton. But these men have their own protocol, and they insisted.”
The black bag was made of plastic, stamped with a white figure eight, turned sideways.
Infinity.
From the drape of the b
ag, I made out the rough shape of two arms, a chest, the sunken cavity between the hipbones . . .
I heard Hélène’s accented voice again. Soft. Businesslike. “The police have been calling his office, trying to find you.”
“I just got the message. I went back to the nail salon as soon as it opened.”
“What?”
“I was looking for him.”
“He was here.”
I nodded.
“It was a shock to see him,” Hélène said. “He was sweating when I opened the door.”
“When?”
“This morning! Beth?”
I became conscious that my jaw was shaking. Somehow the mechanical system of eardrums, nerves and brain continued to register her words.
She looked different. Messy. She was wearing a man’s crumpled shirt over capri pants, a shirt covered in paint, cracked blobs of red, hardened drips. Her easel was set up on the balcony, under the cloister.
“I thought you were on the West Coast.”
“I returned from Monterey more than a week ago,” she said.
“How did he know you were here?”
“I have no idea. He might have guessed.”
“Did you know he was coming to see you?”
“No.”
“He didn’t call yesterday, or this morning, before he came?”
“No. The only message I had yesterday was from you. I was out.”
“What about this morning?”
“No. He arrived, I offered him the chaise longue,” she went on. “I helped him down. I went to the bathroom to get him some water.”
“He was hyperventilating,” said a voice behind me. “He shut down.”
“He was having trouble breathing,” Hélène explained. She spoke like someone who’d had to report terrible events many times, but dreamily, as if she didn’t quite believe they had happened.