He had been told since childhood to expect such symptoms. They were the first warning signs of a heart condition, indicators of a far more robbing pain that would chew and swallow until the muscle eventually stopped.
After a half hour, Joseph gathered enough strength to climb from the bathroom floor and run cold water in the shower. His stomach had regained its stronghold, but numbness ran through his arms and legs. He filled his mouth with water from the shower nozzle and spit it down between his feet. Was this the sickness that he hoped would never find him, the sickness he tried to ignore but which always seemed right around the corner, just beyond the next day, traveling like a storm front straight from Ohio to New York?
He roped a towel around his waist and staggered into the living room, where his cell phone blinked red. It was from Janice Eccles. Texting was his agent’s preferred method for scheduling auditions that didn’t allow for questions. “1:45, Carlyle hotel. Aleksandra Andrews. Asked for you by name.” He considered calling in sick, but he was sure the vomiting had subsided and he didn’t want to give in to the vacant stalemate of a day lying in bed. He dressed quickly and sipped only enough coffee to allow the caffeine to strengthen his pace.
Joseph caught a cab that sped up Park Avenue, careening on the viaduct around Grand Central Station and through the hollowed-out base of the Helmsley Building until it swept into the clean geometry of uptown, passing Mercedes and BMW dealerships gleaming on the ground floors of corporate skyscrapers. Joseph always imagined driving one of the new cars right through the plate-glass windows and breaking away, gearing it north, waving good-bye to the deodorant stick of the Met Life Building, and breezing over the Queensboro Bridge. But the dealerships must have expected such consumer hallucinations when they parked the latest models there, that impossible pileup where the thing you steal is the very thing that aids your escape. Joseph’s fantasies were consistent on one theme since childhood: they always involved the plotline of getting away.
He paid the cabbie a twenty on the corner of East Seventy-Sixth and was directed by a receptionist toward a bank of black elevator doors. He wiped the sweat from his hairline and shook his wrists to startle the blood that was still running cold through his fingers. Joseph dreamed of getting away or disappearing completely. That had been his motivation for moving to New York in the first place, and it also explained why he worked so diligently in his chosen profession. As an actor, he could stand in front of an audience and disappear right in front of them, transform into any given character and tell stories that weren’t his own.
This morning hadn’t been the first bout of sickness to creep over him and leave him splayed on the bathroom floor, caught in a standoff with his own body to determine whether the sickness would travel deeper or simply fade. Those attacks had struck at least five times in as many months, and he had secretly scheduled appointments with four different doctors, three general practitioners and one heart specialist, for a battery of tests that came back clean. He had purposely not told Del. Even in the middle of the night when he woke up panicking, he muffled his mouth with both hands to prevent from rousing her. If he let that fact into their apartment, he worried it would remain there, moving in like an unwanted relative who would never leave. He had seen how quickly a house became infected with death. How his mother had shut the curtains and locked the doors to keep the paranoia trapped in with them. Joseph felt that if he said it out loud—death, the possibility of it, right ahead of him, one birthday away—it would be like admitting it, agreeing to the pattern, encouraging it along. He inhaled deeply, whipped his fingers through his hair as if to drive away all memories of the morning, and followed the medallion pattern in the carpet to 706. He knocked lightly on the door.
“Come in.”
The room was dark, the sheer curtains that scrolled from the rod over the window diffusing the sunlight. He caught the smell of perfume and coffee, as he nearly tripped over a tray of dirty saucers on the floor. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a woman sitting in a chair in front of a set of French doors. His hand lifted to wave, but he wasn’t sure if she could see him.
“You’re Joseph Guiteau?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, rising from the chair and walking over to the wall with her arm outstretched, her fingers already forming a grip to turn on the light switch.
Joseph had come here for work but, as she turned on the light, he felt as if he had escaped one sickness only to find another. He recognized the woman, the thin silhouette and soft monotone of her voice reminding him exactly where he first saw her. The prisonersofearth meeting.
“What are you doing here?” He took a step back against the door.
“Waiting for you,” she replied, forcing a polite smile. “I’m your appointment.”
“But I know you . . . ” he replied, thinking maybe he shouldn’t mention it, maybe she wouldn’t recall, “from the meeting.”
“Yes.” Her fingers still grasped the switch, as if at any moment she might turn the light off and leave them in the darkness to work out how they had found themselves together again in a very different room. “That’s where I saw you,” she confirmed. “That’s why I’ve asked for you to come. It wasn’t easy. Do you usually give out fake names of other actors in your agency?” It took Joseph a second to remember the misinformation he had passed on to poor, confused Rose Cherami at the conspiracy meeting, identifying himself as William. “I asked your friend, what was her name? Well, I thought you two were friends, because you were talking. I guess you shouldn’t trust anything you see in those kind of places.”
“I thought I was coming here for an audition.”
She let go of the switch and walked over to him. The shoulders of her thin, black sweater carried a few blond strands, and her loose white pants clung with static down her legs. She wasn’t wearing makeup. He could see the crosshatch of wrinkles around her mouth and eyes and the gray hairs weaving into the blonde at the roots of her scalp. The red birthmark was no longer hidden by a collar and had the intense line of a slash down her neck. She did not look as calm and collected as she had in that basement meeting more than a week ago, but she seemed comfortable in this hotel room, as if she had made it her home for some time. Something about this woman frightened him, how quickly she was moving toward him or the way her eyes were scrutinizing the details of his face. People are supposed to stay where you have left them last, they aren’t supposed to crop up unannounced in other unrelated situations. At the meeting, he had wanted to follow her, but now that she was standing in front of him, Joseph’s first reaction was to run.
“Yes, it is you,” she said, stopping a foot away, still staring up at his face. “I knew as soon as I saw you that you were right.”
“I might be awful,” he replied meekly, realizing that he was still shoving his back against the hotel-room door. “I don’t really believe all those things at prisonersofearth. It’s more curiosity, killing free time. I don’t know why I find it calming. But I remember you. I remember wondering how a woman like you ended up there.”
“Maybe we end up finding what we need there. You look exactly like him.”
“Like who?”
“My husband,” she said with a slow exhale. “Not when he died. But when we were young.” She shook her head and pressed her fingers against her eyelids as if she had been in the dark for so long that the light bothered her. “That must sound crazy. I’m not crazy. It’s just that, without even realizing it, I’ve been waiting for you.” She noticed his tense posture with his fingers frozen on the doorknob and again tried to smile.
Joseph wondered what it was about him that was like her dead husband. For she had reminded him of his mother, so many years lost now back in Ohio, and the resurrection of that memory arrived like any homecoming: filled with strange warmth and the fear of returning to old ground.
CHAPTER TEN
EVERY MORNING DEL woke precisely at seven. She did not choose rock music or the tremolo of St. Patrick’s bells or even,
as one AM station offered, the deep-ocean blowhole orchestra of bottlenose dolphins; no, Del elected for the honking Long Island accents of 1010WINS announcers to drag her back to consciousness. It seemed as if the last New Yorkers who still possessed that cartoonishly vowelskidding speech were the ones delivering the city’s news and weather. Del had tuned her alarm clock to that station ever since 9/11 as a preventative measure for hearing the terrible fate that might await each day: “The terrorists have poisoned the water supply, don’t take a shower.” “Try to avoid midtown. The streets are coated in anthrax.” Or worse, “All of Manhattan’s radioactive. Life as we know it is over.” She no longer worried about such probable atrocities, but the dial remained fixed to the station.
On the subway, she watched the morning workforce reading newspapers or staring with zombie eyes at the strip of plastic-surgery advertisements. She wondered what beds these commuters had just left, what crazy sex acts they had just extricated themselves from, what bitter sleeping partners kept their eyes shut until these early risers dressed to catch this exact uptown train. In the subway, it was impossible to tell who was happy and who was miserable. Everyone looked slightly constipated, as if the entire car had ordered from the same Chinese restaurant the night before. It was inhuman to be so human this early, she thought as the doors split open for her stop in the Bronx.
Del climbed the staircase to the sidewalk and performed her junkie move of leaning against the stone wall while she rolled a cigarette, dug for a lighter, and pulled smoke into her tired lungs. At least today she would call the immigration lawyer. Then she remembered the children. Oh, god, the children. Her immediate future was overrun with them.
Two hours later Del stood before an electronic map of the world, speckled in outdated blinking lights to indicate thriving reptilian populations. Collected around her were twenty sixth-graders on a summer class trip, smacking gum, drinking red slush out of plastic elephant heads, and trying to push the weaker members of the group toward the darkened cobra display.
“Welcome to the reptile department,” she said in a flat monotone. The teacher with candied metallic hair and gallon-sized breasts frowned at her. This teacher had probably taught for so many years that, in every human interaction, she treated adults like misbehaving twelve-year-olds constantly out to disappoint her. “Today I’m going to talk to you about snakes.” The children’s eyes widened. Slushystained lips grimaced. Two girls turned their backs to her with hands over their mouths as if to vomit. “I am one of the zoologists specializing in snakes here at the zoo, and I hope by the end of this discussion some of you will have changed your minds on how you consider these animals.”
“Snakes are disgusting,” screamed one of the girls who still couldn’t bear the courtesy of turning around to face her. “My brother ate one.”
“But what you may not know is that the rattlesnake was originally chosen to be the animal to represent your country.” Del caught herself. She still said your.
“That’s a lie,” a boy with spiked blond hair yelled. “It’s an eagle.”
She stared down at him hard as if to indicate that, in a less democratic country, his impertinence might render him prime beef for the alligator pit. “It is an eagle. But it wasn’t always. To continue, the rattlesnake is in a group of venomous pit vipers found only in the New World. Benjamin Franklin picked the rattler for a number of anatomical reasons. As the rattlesnake has no eyelids, Franklin prized it as a symbol of vigilance. Consider the utility of the rattle itself. The fair warning of danger the snake offers its enemies before it strikes. In 1754, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Franklin drew a political cartoon of the rattlesnake cut into eight parts. He wrote, ‘Join or Die’ under it. There was a superstition in those days that a snake cut into pieces could come back to life before sunset. He was encouraging the eight colonies—”
“There were thirteen colonies,” the teacher corrected.
“That came later. He encouraged the colonies to be united as one body or die alone in the desert of war. Think what a different country you would be living in if the rattlesnake graced the coins in your pockets and was stamped across the president’s podium during press briefings. Think of the Middle East waving snakes angrily into news cameras to protest the war your president started.”
This speech was not her invention. Okay, “desert of war” onward had been ad-libbed to provide a little menace to her lines. But Abrams had penned this pat introduction to herpetology twenty years ago as a method of drawing the listener in on historical hooks, endearing the reptiles sleeping behind the dense plexiglass to the visitors shielding their eyes as if navigating a house of horrors. Snakes wrapped around proud founding fathers instead of suffocating necks, snakes biting warship enemies in national defense rather than ankles in the garden. Abrams forced every staff member to memorize it and often listened by the door to ensure it was being delivered with the proper inflections. Del did not use the inflections. She waved the school group to follow her to the window of a bull snake coiled under a piece of driftwood. She explained the patterns on its skin as an imitation of the rattlesnake, a visual trick in the wild, a Darwinistic tactic to keep the animal alive by mimicking a far more venomous cousin, like an unloaded gun fending off a police force (she wasn’t allowed to use that comparison).
These public tours were her least favorite duty, right above gassing the baby mice with carbon dioxide on feeding day. Her years in the department gave her seniority never to speak to a children’s group, but Kip had begged a switch when a Catholic high-school sisterhood had crowded the entrance in skimpy plaid skirts and crisscrossing A-cup trainers a week ago. She forced herself to continue. “Many snakes are strategic actors in making us believe they are dangerous, when really they are anything but.”
Del wasn’t thinking about the bull snake or the argyle diamonds webbing down its epidermis. She wasn’t looking for signs of Abrams listening by the door. She was thinking of the phone call she would make to Frank Warren, Esq. as soon as this tour concluded. Madi said that Warren was the best for climbing the prickly branches of immigration law all the way to a green card. Del imagined green cards blooming on maples, dropping like open leaves, drying into curls in the baked dirt.
“Ma’am, have you ever been bitten by a snake?”
A hush fell over the school group, as if something extraordinary were about to be revealed.
“Dry bites,” Del clarified, instinctively rubbing her wrists. “Once or twice. No poison. I’ve never been struck by any of the venomous here. We are extremely careful. We have procedures that make those possibilities impossible.” The image of Francine dropping the diamondback on the floor came into her head, but she did not feel the need to relay this mishap to an audience only now growing accustomed to the display cases. “Snakes don’t always inject poison. Sometimes they strike as a warning. It stings, maybe ten minutes.”
“Would it kill you if they did?”
Del smiled and the teacher frowned at the fat black girl in skinny black glasses conducting the Q&A.
“Depends on the variety of snake. But we keep antivenom on hand in the lab to be on the safe side. If antivenom is administered into a strike victim in time, say two or three hours, death is usually preventable.”
“Which snake is the deadliest?” the girl persisted. Del felt an immediate liking to her, and, of course, it helped that she was the only non-white member of her class and, because of this, must have learned courage faster than the rest. It always amazed her how quickly the subject of death entered these tours—lions, tiger sharks, and honeybees all killed far more efficiently with bigger yearly death tolls, but her specialty was construed as the armless grim reapers, the creeping killers under the porch stairs.
“Diamondbacks, cobras, inland taipans, these are the vipers with the potent juice. This bull snake wouldn’t hurt you more than a pinch, although I’m sure he wishes he could.”
Bites were the mandatory occupational duty that Del was good at.
The roaring Whirlpool refrigerator in the lab held twenty-nine antivenoms for the entire New York county, icy packets ready to be grabbed and thrown in the Honda Civic parked out back with the keys in the ignition for a race to the emergency room. She had taken this course of action only five times in her career. The general polyvalent was marked green on the top shelf for unidentifiable bites. The monovalents, marked in red and labeled by species, were used for those rare victims who knew what variety attacked them—knowledge usually acquired because they owned them illegally as pets. Del stocked the antivenoms. She knew the exact location of each packet in the refrigerator. She knew the different symptoms for each bite. The rattlesnake, for example: swelling, bleeding, nausea, chills, salivation, spasms, tingling of the tongue, fluctuations in blood pressure; this venom was a hemotoxin: a rapid rise in the heart rate, paralysis of the circulatory muscles. She knew the exact serum to neutralize these effects. Twenty minutes ETA from hospital call to emergency desk. She had obsessively run through the symptoms on those five drives out to the hospital and often repeated them to herself on the subway to work: bleeding, nausea, extreme fluctuations in the blood, heart attack, swelling, dilated pupils, cramping, vomiting . . .
She did not recite these symptoms to the class. Instead she told them how farmers released snakes into cornfields to kill the vermin that infested the crop. She told them how rattlesnakes burrow together in winter in complex societies, sleeping intertwined through the cold just above the frost line; how recent studies indicated that the rattlesnake was losing its rattle in certain newly developed urban areas in the Southwest where their warning could not be heard over the highway traffic.
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