“So you’re saying that my childish insistence is making him suffer?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But I’d say that when the fate of a loved one is at stake, we need to take ourselves out of the equation. Bessie, this delay is fundamentally unnecessary.”
“Alright already. Enough. You’re stuffing me to the gills with guilt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, we’re talking about the biggest disaster of my life, all pleasantries are off the table. I’m losing my mind. He survived the Germans but he can’t survive this damned stroke?”
“It’s not a storm you can weather. You either snap out of it or not.”
“Don’t you understand that I know all this baloney? I don’t want to hear what I already know. I just don’t want to kill him and then discover that there was a chance he would’ve woken up, even a whole year later. Ann, I’ve got all the patience in the world, but then you come along and tell me he’s suffering, in the throes of death, stuck in limbo, and that’s not helping me at all. Not in the slightest.”
“I’m being of service when I tell you that the chance you’re talking about doesn’t exist. And that all the patience in the world won’t bring Rafael back. Bessie, Rafael’s dead. You need to face that fact. And another thing, Bessie. No one’s killing anybody.”
“Euthanasia?”
“What about it?”
“It’s not sanctioned by the law. I’m just asking because I want to make sure we’re not, God forbid…”
“Bessie, the only crime we’re committing is that we’re allowing him to suffer. Let’s send him on his way.”
“On his way?”
“Yes, Bessie. I’m sure he lived a full and honorable life. Let’s make sure he’ll stay true to that in death, too.”
“And what about doubt?”
“I think you’ve enjoyed its benefits long enough, no?”
Bessie accepted the insult. The fact that she had to balance her hostility toward the frigid nurse with the undeniable chinks in her own arguments infuriated her. Ann mumbled something about being on call in a certain room and, as she turned back toward the gloomy building, asked her to consider what they had discussed. Bessie watched her retreat. “Who do you think you are?” she hissed under her wisp of a mustache. “Rafael doesn’t even know you. You’re going to kill my Kolanski? A small, superfluous woman like you?”
* * *
When she came back from lunch, a piece of yolk stuck between her front teeth, the small, superfluous woman handed Bessie a medical form in quadruplicate. Bessie asked what the papers were for. Ann fished through her pockets, pulled out a pen, and extended it to her. Bessie’s eyes wandered between the lines, ever downward, to the bottom of the page, where they stopped at the thick black line. With practiced tactfulness, Ann slipped out of the room, leaving the sorrowful old woman to deal with the sickening formality of death. Bessie wondered if the nurse’s muted action was yet another stage, bolder than its predecessors, in the nurse’s systematic campaign. She held the pen with the tips of her fingers, as though it were a bloodied blade, finding it hard to believe that such an innocent object could stir up such real and immediate danger. This pen was to seal the fate of a man who had always been repulsed by signatures, a man who claimed that anyone who saw his paintings should recognize that he had created them. Even when presented with bank forms and the like, he would make an offended face and scribble Fuck You in the looping shape of an impressive signature. Bessie was the only one who knew that he never signed his name. When one day she remarked that a time would come when someone noticed his little stunt, he narrowed his eyes and said, “This from the mouth of a woman who used to fill entire notebooks with her ridiculously expressionistic signature attempts? A woman who hoped that she and her girlfriends would find the perfect shape for their names and that their personalities would follow suit?”
Weighing the irony of the moment, Bessie grimaced—her clean, pedantic signature, which was always a target for her husband’s loving arrows, might now prove to be lethal. She read the form until she knew it by heart, as though dressing and undressing each word gave her control over it, enabling her to water down its malice.
By early evening she was forced to admit that the words had gotten the better of her. Her head spinning, she got up and left the hospital, passing by Ann’s smiling face and trudging to the nearest bus stop. The ride lasted an eternity. All she wanted to do was sleep. Her eyelids toyed with her sadistically, rising and falling, enabling her to see her fellow passengers as blurry dots of liveliness and then giving in to the comforting darkness of improvised night for a brief instant. But how could she sleep without Rafael’s soundtrack? For some reason she was sure that the solution to her problem could be found in the archives of her shared life with the artist, whose cavernous nostrils, filled with stalagmites and stalactites that hindered the flow of air, made him snore. Somewhere, in one of those drawers, she was sure she would find a way to sleep again. Still caught up in the thought of Kolanski’s old lullabies, her gaze settled on the young man sitting opposite her. The pleather and chrome he was wearing emitted a slight whiff of Gestapo, but his expression softened the effect and she stifled a smile at the sight of him. There was pleasure scrawled across his face as his head bobbed. That’s when she saw the tiny headphones buried amidst a row of a dozen identical earrings. His head gyrations came to a stop, his fingers stomped on the appropriate buttons, and he pulled out the disc and inserted a new one. Bessie’s gaze followed the disc and just like that she wanted to press her gratitude on the young man with a kiss.
Half awake, she got off the bus and hustled home, Rafael’s fifty-year-old voice careening down the halls of her memory, defending himself. “You’re talking nonsense. I snore?”
She ran to the kitchen, snapped open cupboards and drawers, seeking hungrily, smiling at the sound of her own answer. “One day I’ll record you and then you’ll believe me when I say you sound like an asthmatic dragon.”
She ran to the workroom, flipped through the overflowing drawers of paint, laughing at the mental picture of the artist’s face, when the screeching sound of his trunk came over the tape. She smiled triumphantly as her fingers grabbed hold of the dusty cassette in the bottom drawer. She wiped it clean, brought the equally dusty tape recorder from the studio, laid it on Rafael’s side of the bed, put the tape in, turned off the light, and pressed PLAY. Forty-five joyous minutes of sharp snoring filled the room with miraculous life and Bessie fell asleep, her face lit with tears.
But, in sleep, Bessie went to the familiar site. Rafael was marching erect as a battle horse, the hunchbacked, downcast executioner behind him, the guillotine waiting ravenously. The bucket at its feet craved his splendid head. Bessie was buried in her robe, cloaked in shame, yearning for the end of the despicable ceremony. Rafael was already standing on the platform, his head ready for decapitation. But when the guillotinesse hesitated, he whistled to her just as he did the first time he laid eyes on her virginal beauty, on the secluded beach in Brighton, a rosy-cheeked girl who had unknowingly infiltrated his landscape portrait. Excited, she advanced toward him, a straight line spanning the space between four loving eyes, and now Rafael was the one smiling victoriously. The lady executioner wasn’t sure of his intention, and he nodded in the cramped quarters afforded his head, as though he were urging her to lower the blade. She asked, “Are you sure?”
His smile widened. The guillotine fell.
Six hours later, at noon of the following day, Ann walked out of a room at the end of the hall just as Bessie stepped into the hall’s opposite end. Their eyes met and they approached each other in measured paces, nodded, and carried on.
When the nurse turned and called out to her opponent, the latter looked straight at her. “Yes?” she asked.
Ann scratched her forehead in false embarrassment and coughed up a weak giggle. “Did I, by any chance, leave my pen with you?”
Bessie giggled back. “I
think you did.” After a minute of simulated searching in her bag, she pulled out the pen and gave it to her.
“Well,” the nurse ventured, “did you use it?”
Bessie nodded.
10
The Mad Hop
Ben found his apartment with ease. City of June 2001, Circle 21, Building M, Floor 24, Apartment 7, BM. Pressing his thumb to the hole in the door, he tried to shake the image of himself as a burglar. The door popped open and he walked in, closing it quickly behind him. Groping through the darkness, he found the light switch, flipped it on, and leaped back in surprise, throwing a consoling hand to the back of his head where he had smacked into the door.
Marian stood in the center of the apartment, beautiful and radiant as ever. “Hi, sweetheart,” she said.
Ben stared at her in disbelief.
“So,” she said, striking a come-hither pose, “did you come all this way just to get clocked on the back of the head?”
Ben walked straight toward her, holding her gaze, eager to verify with his hands what his eyes had registered. Only when he caught the raspberry scent off her skin did he know for sure that she was there, in the flesh, a step away. For the better part of an hour, the two of them hugged and giggled, like kids who had pulled off the ultimate practical joke. Marian bit his ear lightly. “Mmm, how I missed this little lobe…”
Ben arched his neck in the direction of her mouth, offering more skin, and then, as though unsatisfied with the intensity of her emotion, he asked dryly, “How did you know I was here?”
Her lips sought his, and between long pulls she whispered, “The Announcer.”
Ben smiled knowingly. “You heard the announcement?”
Marian didn’t answer. Busy reacquainting herself to his new and improved form, kissing every old nook rendered fascinating by time, she accompanied each kiss with a metallic intoning: “John Dart, Mahmud Davul, Svetlana Devchokshenski, Francoise Deveroux…”
“Just a second,” Ben said, pushing her away. “Marian, what’s going on? Why are you saying all of these names?”
She smiled angelically, continuing, “Deidre Didskin, Bernie Dole, Manny Dole, Sam Dole.”
“Marian, stop, please,” he said before being hit with another wave of names.
“Marian, I’m begging you, please stop. Stop right now or I’m leaving.”
His threats making no impression on her, he walked to the door, stunned by the sheer number of Doles in this world and by the amount of them that had left the world together. He swung it open, went outside, heard seven more names, and slammed it behind him.
The noise shook him and he opened his eyes. In the background he heard the lifeless voice of the Announcer reading the list of names in a monotone and he knew that there was no way Marian had heard his name, even if she had been listening for it. Ten names and the brain sealed itself off. Ben got off the floor, exhaled as he stretched, wandered around his empty apartment, and considered his next move. The Announcer’s voice, which was still ringing in his ears, and his vivid memory of the dream, brought a resolution to mind: from now on he’d hit 3 once on the godget each time he wanted to sleep. He’d also get a radio to drown out the jarring intonations and the inevitable headaches that accompanied them. For now, though, a shower would suffice.
A hot shower always had a soothing effect on him. Under the warm stream of water he thought of the moment he pulled the trigger and retraced his steps to see if he had missed anything. As he finished his mental checklist, he turned off the faucet, remembered he had no towel, and rushed out of his apartment, pushing 2 on the godget ten times as he stepped into the elevator. For twenty-three floors he was subjected to the fat sax player’s wanderings up and down the musical scales. Ben preferred the piano player at Marian’s building; when the doors opened, at long last, he charged out of the elevator and boarded the nearest multi-wheel heading in the direction of the central bus station. Ten minutes later, he thanked the driver as he got off, and, in his haste, while crossing the avenue, got run over twice, recovered both times, sprinted through a gaggle of kids, and pulled to a stop at the edge of the crisply manicured lawn leading to the doors of the white room.
Thousands of moonstruck dead, fresh out of the white room, stumbled to the multi-wheels waiting behind Ben. They cast quizzical looks in his direction, trying to figure out why a dead man was walking against the flow. Had Ben been in a more playful mood, he would have told them he was tired of being dead but, in need of the love-struck Belgian, he pocketed the idea. Four hundred and seven plane crash victims later a smile came to his lips. He threw a hand in the air and hollered, “Robert!”
The Belgian, surveying the crowd with weighty eyes, swiveled his wheelchair and smiled back.
Ben walked up to him and clasped his hand. “How you doing?”
“Not bad, mon ami, not bad,” Robert said, “how ’bout you?”
“Could be a lot better.”
“Hmm…,” Robert said, sucking his cigar and pursing his lips knowingly. “I see you haven’t found her yet.”
“No.” Ben winced. “I need a favor.”
Robert extended his hand. “Help me up? His card’s in the cigar box.”
“You have no idea how grateful I am,” Ben said, smiling, as Robert produced the card. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Robert grinned. “Find her and bring her by for a visit. I could use a shot in the arm.”
“She’ll come,” Ben said, placing an assuring hand on the Belgian’s shoulder, “I’m sure of it.”
Robert shut his eyes. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”
Just before they parted, Ben suggested they exchange thumbprints on the telefinger. Robert shook his head. “You won’t be coming to see me again.”
* * *
At seven of noon, Ben reached his destination and knocked on door number 45 three times. The door opened to reveal a short, moonfaced pudgy man with quick blue eyes behind thick glass lenses, puffy, protruding lips, and a squeaky clean, hairless scalp. The man looked forward and twisted his lip, his chin quivering in disgust. His head was level with Ben’s belly button. Ben took a step back and cleared his throat.
“I’m looking for the Mad Hop.”
The small man looked up, suspicion draped all over his face. “What do you want with him?”
“I’m told he can track down missing people, and I can’t find my wife.”
“You should have kept a better eye on her,” he spat.
Ben, chastised, kept his mouth shut, appraising the sixty-year-old man in silence. After a moment of mutual inspection, Ben smiled. “You’re English, right?”
“And you’re Israeli,” he said flatly. “Even Babel can’t kill that accent.”
Ben, miffed that the strange man had not yet invited him in, took a step forward, amused by the midget’s quick retreat. “I thought…”
“Who gave you this address?” the man cut him short.
“Robert,” Ben responded, his brow wrinkling at the man’s condescending chuckle.
“Oh … Le Malade Imaginaire.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” Ben said. “That was The Miser.”
“Forget it,” he said, chuckling again as he put a hand on his invisible neck. “Small man, big mouth.”
“Robert?”
“No, me” the pugnacious host said, shaking Ben’s hand with paternal might. “Samuel Sutton, and I’d appreciate it if you refrained from making jokes about the initials.”
“Ben Mendelssohn, nice to meet you.”
“Before you ask any questions,” Samuel said, raising his index finger, “I’m the Mad Hop to clients and Samuel to everyone else. Now, let’s go inside before I strain my neck.”
Ben followed him into the apartment, which had been converted into an expansive office, furnished with three oak desks, each with a computer, four bookshelves lined with files, two faxes, a Xerox machine, and several towering stacks of paper. Sitting down, Ben’s feet encountered some more packages of p
aper under the Mad Hop’s desk, filling out the kingdom of office equipment he had established.
“I got to tell you, this place reminds me of the previous world more than any place I’ve seen,” Ben remarked.
The Mad Hop smiled. “I hope that’s a compliment.” Without further ado, he pulled a brown pad out of a drawer and cleared his throat.
“How old are you, Mr. Mendelssohn?”
“Forty, and call me Ben.”
“Where do you live?”
“June 2001. Circle twenty-one. M building, twenty-fourth floor, apartment seven.”
“You don’t waste time.”
“True. My wife and I are in love and I need to find her.”
“When did your wife arrive?”
“March seventeenth, 2000.”
“How did you come to this world?”
“Shot myself.”
“Hmm … courageous lad. Why’d you do it?”
“I wanted to join Marian.”
“Marian? Your wife. Marian Mendelssohn. Maiden name?”
“Marian Corbin.”
“And I thought the days when love could kill were long gone.”
“You were wrong.”
“Why did you wait so long?”
“At first I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do. Slowly, a decision took shape. Six months after her death, I had already decided what to do.”
“And still you waited another year…”
“Marian always wanted me to work out. She claimed my body had great potential but I was lazy. I didn’t have the patience to go to the gym. The whole thing seemed ridiculous. A few months after she died, I remembered that on our last night together, we were in bed, and as she ran her hand over my chest, she asked, “Will you think less of me if I call you Van Damme in bed?” I worked out for a year. On her last birthday I committed suicide as a present to her. I’m sure she’ll be shocked when she sees me.”
“Just a second. I want to understand this. All of the beefing up was for her? For the suicide?”
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