Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  “Devon Flowers.”

  “Elizabeth Hamersley.”

  “Kanchan Khemhandani.”

  “Cynthia Wolf.”

  “Orlanda Olsen.”

  “Natasha Stowe.”

  “Ashley Brownstein.”

  “Hannah Filkins.”

  “Zachary Jump.”

  Sometimes, a name had to be repeated, and its owner discovered to have been in the men’s room, or stretching his legs in the atrium, or asleep. Only once did someone fail to materialize at all, and the effect on the room was a kind of jarring collective consternation. Who was this AWOL Amar Jamali and what reason could he have for standing up the American judiciary? And yet, Alice envied Amar Jamali a little, desperate as she was to be somewhere else herself. Someone else herself.

  “Emanuel Gat.”

  “Conor Fleming.”

  “Pilar Brown.”

  “Michael Firestone.”

  “Kiril Dobrovolsky.”

  “Abigail Cohen.”

  “Jennifer Vanderhoven.”

  “Lottie Simms.”

  “Samantha Bargeman.”

  Alice looked up. The woman beside her yawned.

  “Samantha Bargeman?”

  A few others lifted their heads and looked around. Alice turned her summons over in her lap and frowned.

  “Samantha Bargeman . . .”

  The man in front of her, recently reappeared, rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand. Willoughby scanned the room witheringly, then shook his head and wrote something down.

  “. . . Purva Singh.”

  “Barry Featherman.”

  “Felicia Porges.”

  “Leonard Yates.”

  “Kendra Fitzpatrick.”

  “Mary-Alice Dodge.”

  Still stunned, Alice stood and followed the others down a windowless corridor into a room where copies of a questionnaire were passed around and filled out in a near silence syncopated by sneaker squeaks, sniffs, throat clearings and coughs. A clerk rubbed his chin as he read over everyone’s answers; then a couple of unsuitables were dismissed and those remaining led into an adjacent room for questioning by an attorney alone.

  “Have you ever been sued?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever sued anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been a victim of a crime?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Malpractice?”

  “No.”

  “Rape?”

  “No.”

  “Theft?”

  “Well, maybe. But nothing important.”

  “It says here you’re an editor.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of an editor?”

  “Fiction mainly. But I’m planning to give my notice next week.”

  The attorney glanced at his watch. “This is a drug case. Do you use drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Does anyone you know use drugs?”

  “No.”

  “No one?”

  Alice shifted in her seat. “My stepfather did cocaine when I was little.”

  The attorney looked up. “He did?”

  Alice nodded.

  “At home?”

  She nodded again.

  “Was he ever violent with you?”

  “Not with me, no.”

  “But with someone else?”

  Alice blinked at the attorney for a moment and then replied, “He’s not a bad person. He’s just had a hard life.”

  “And what about your father?”

  “What about my father?”

  “Did he use drugs?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. We didn’t live with him.” Her voice wavered. “I couldn’t say.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I know. You didn’t. It’s not—It’s not that. I’m just . . . tired. And sort of going through a difficult time.”

  • • •

  “Choo?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was sleeping. Are you all right?”

  “I’m having chest pains.”

  “Oh, no. Did you call Pransky?”

  “He’s in Saint Lucia. His secretary said I should go up to Presbyterian.”

  “She’s right.”

  “Darling, you can’t be serious.”

  “Of course I’m serious!”

  “You want me to go to an emergency room in Washington Heights at eight o’clock on a Saturday night?”

  Through the taxicab’s windows the Upper West Side became Harlem and Harlem a neighborhood whose name she didn’t know, a wide-avenued wasteland of delis and beauty salons, dollar stores and African hair braiding, iglesias and a sky almost Midwestern in its sweeping pastel striations. At 153rd their driver braked suddenly to avoid a plastic bag swirling in the road between Trinity Cemetery and Jenkins Funeral Chapel. When they’d recovered from the jolt, Ezra leaned forward politely while Alice righted his cane. “Excuse me, sir! Would you mind slowing down a little please? I’d like to get to the hospital and then die.”

  They sat for over an hour in the lobby watching two girls color butterflies on the floor while a third slumped motionless against a heavily pregnant woman’s arm. Then a young Korean woman in green clogs and burgundy scrubs summoned Ezra for an EKG and afterward stationed him to wait in a long room with too few partitions for the dozens of men and women lying on gurneys or sitting in wheelchairs, most of them old and black or old and Hispanic and still dressed in their pajamas or robes and slippers from home. Some were asleep, and in this position looked as though they were trying to decide whether death might be preferable to another hour in this fluorescent beeping limbo. Others watched the young orderlies to-ing and fro-ing with a dazed, even wondrous expression that suggested it was not the worst Saturday night they’d ever had. A few feet away from where Ezra had been moored to an IV dripping liquid sugar into his arm an odorous man with soiled trousers and bloodshot eyes wandered sociably up and down the aisle. “Sit down Clarence,” a nurse said to him as she passed.

  “I knew this would happen,” said Ezra.

  A little after ten, their nurse returned to say that she’d spoken with Pransky’s office and his EKG had indicated nothing out of the ordinary but they wanted to keep him overnight anyway just to be sure. Previously perfunctory, her manner had become girlish, flirty even; clutching her clipboard to her chest she fluttered her eyelashes and said, “By the way, my mother is a huge fan. She’d kill me if I didn’t tell you The Running Gag is her favorite book.”

  “Good.”

  “How are you feeling now? Any pain?”

  “Yep.”

  “The same? Worse?”

  “Same.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  Ezra levitated a hand.

  “It’s radiating?” said Alice.

  “That’s right. Radiating. Into my neck.”

  The nurse frowned. “Okay. Let me see if I can get you something for that. Anything else?”

  “Can I have my own room?”

  “You’d have to pay.”

  “That’s fine.”

  In the cubicle across from theirs a woman produced a rosary from her purse and began working her fingers along it while the man lying beside her squirmed and moaned. Another couple, in matching Mets sweatshirts, prayed in tandem, their hands clasped to their foreheads with such assiduous concentration that even Clarence stumbling to within an inch of their toes failed to break the spell. “Jesus!” said the man, laying his hands on his partner’s abdomen. “Let this pain cease and desist!” Ezra watched spellbound, eyes bright and jaw slack; he could never get enough of humanity, so long as
it slept in another room.

  “Your mouth is open,” said Alice.

  He shut it, shaking his head. “I hate that. My brother started doing it about a year before he died. It looks terrible. Whenever you catch me doing it, darling, tell me to stop.”

  “No!”

  “You don’t have to make a big deal of it. Just say ‘Mouth.’ ”

  Alice got up and went to the parting in the curtain. Ezra checked his watch.

  “Did I tell you the apartment next to mine is for sale?” he asked.

  “How much?”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know. Four hundred thousand?”

  Ezra shook his head. “A million.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “For a studio?”

  “It’s a small two-bedroom. But still.”

  Alice nodded and turned back to the curtain. She looked both ways.

  “I’ve never seen you wear jeans before.”

  “Oh? What do you think?”

  “Walk a little.”

  Alice slid the curtain to one side and went as far as a cart of bedpans before turning around. Clarence appeared outside his own cubicle and clapped. “Doesn’t she look great?” Ezra called. When Alice had got back, he said, reaching for her arm, “So what should I do?”

  “About what?”

  “The apartment.”

  “What about the apartment?”

  “Should I buy it?”

  “Why?”

  “So someone with a baby doesn’t move in. And so I could knock down that middle wall and turn it into one big room, and then we’d have so much more space here, darling. We need more space in the city, we really do.”

  The man in the Mets sweatshirt pointed at something in the Post. The woman beside him laughed. “Don’t,” she said, holding her stomach. “It hurts.”

  “Mouth,” said Alice.

  Ezra snapped it shut, like a ventriloquist’s doll, and a moment later squeezed Alice’s hand. “Sweetheart, I hate asking you this, but I’ve just remembered something. I’m going to need my pills.”

  • • •

  At 125th, a pair of black men with saxophones boarded the car and faced off in the aisle. Their duet began slowly, with the men tiptoeing toward and away from each other like a lone man in a mirror; then it accelerated, becoming louder and more chaotic, and the other people in the car began to nod and clap, whoop and whistle; a man with a bleeding-rose tattoo on his bicep sprung to his feet and started to dance. There are some men who buy diverting talk to lead astray from the word of God, cautioned a pamphlet by Alice’s foot. On the other hand: Who takes the greatest pleasure in leading the other one astray? In his bathtub the night before a clot of her own blood had escaped and unfurled like watercolor. Ezra had put a Bach partita on—its case still lay open on the ottoman—and brought her a glass of Knob Creek. Applying a new fentanyl patch to the skin just above his defibrillator he’d left his hand in place long enough to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Alice watched him shave. His ophthalmologist had prescribed some drops to regulate the pressure in his eyes but he’d developed an allergy to them and the skin around his lashes had turned papery and chapped. In bed, they’d read, Ezra Keats and Alice an article about the previous week’s Tube bombings in the Times; by 11:10 the light was off, the elevator still, the glittering skyline dimmed by a scrim he’d had installed to temper the morning sun. To mitigate his back pain, he slept with a foam pillow under his knees. To dull cramps that by four in the morning had become severe to the point of nauseating her, Alice got up and went into the bathroom to take one of his pills. ONE TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY 4–6 HOURS OR AS NEEDED FOR PAIN read the cylinder in her palm. WATSON 387 a machine had imprinted on the smooth oval tablet swallowed a moment before. If there were a pill that would make her a writer living in Europe and another that would keep him alive and in love with her until the day she died, which would she choose? She had once counted twenty-seven different pill dispensers in that bathroom, vials with science-fiction names from Atropine to Zantac and a barrage of exclamatory imperatives: TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY OR EVERY SIX TO EIGHT HOURS AS NEEDED. TAKE 1 TABLET BY MOUTH AT BEDTIME FOR ONE MONTH THEN INCREASE BY 1 TABLET EACH MONTH UNTIL TAKING 4 TABLETS. TAKE 2 CA P S ULES NOW THEN 1 CAPSULE EVERY 8 HOURS TILL GONE. ONE TABLET WITH A GLASS OF WATER ONCE A DAY. TAKE WITH FOOD. AVOID EATING GRAPEFRUIT OR DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE WITH THIS MEDICINE. DO NOT TAKE ASPIRIN OR PRODUCTS CONTAINING ASPIRIN WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONSENT OF YOUR PHYSICIAN. KEEP IN THE REFRIGERATOR AND SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING. USE CAUTION WHEN OPERATING A CAR. AVOID THE USE OF A SUNLAMP. DO NOT FREEZE. PROTECT FROM LIGHT. PROTECT FROM LIGHT AND MOISTURE. DISPENSE IN A TIGHT, LIGHT-RESISTANT CONTAINER. DRINK PLENTY OF WATER. SWALLOW WHOLE. DO NOT SHARE WITH ANYONE FOR WHOM THIS MEDICINE IS NOT PRESCRIBED. DO NOT CHEW OR CRUSH . . . and so on, ad nauseam, especially if you contemplated the mounting sum of so many laboratory-spun chemicals commingling in your gut—words reducing a not insignificant portion of life’s remainder to standing in pharmacy lines and looking at your watch and pouring glasses of water and waiting and counting and eating pills.

  An old woman lay where she’d left him, muttering Spanglish. A receptionist directed Alice up to the inpatient unit, where she found Ezra reclining in a softly lit room with a twinkling river view, his clothes folded into a pile on the radiator and the strings of a crisp baby-blue hospital gown tied in a bow behind his neck. His hands were clasped on the turned-down edge of the bedsheet and his eyebrows were raised delightedly at a woman with a white lab coat and a platinum ponytail running down the length of her back. His chest pain, she was reassuring him, was probably just a bit of gas. But his blood pressure was up and she was glad he was staying the night anyway, so that they could keep an eye on him. Ezra beamed.

  “Mary-Alice! Genevieve here is going to order me some chicken. Would you like something to eat?”

  When Genevieve had gone, Alice put his pill bag on the bed and sat in a chair by the window while he inventoried its contents. The light of a plane entered the lower left-hand corner of the window’s frame and climbed its flight path slowly, steadily, like a rollercoaster ascending. Alice watched until it had exited the top-right corner of the window; as soon as it did another winking beacon appeared bottom left and began its identical climb along the same invisible track.

  Ezra swallowed a pill. “Go, little Uroxatral, far and near, to all my friends I hold so dear . . .”

  When a third plane appeared, Alice turned away from the window. “Your eye is bleeding.”

  “That’s okay. The ophthalmologist said this would happen. Don’t worry darling. It’s getting better, not worse.”

  A small Chinese woman entered holding a clipboard. “I have some questions for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When did you last urinate?”

  “About half an hour ago.”

  “Last bowel movement?”

  Ezra nodded. “This morning.”

  “Defibrillator?”

  “Medtronic.”

  “Allergies?”

  “Yes.”

  “To what?”

  “Morphine.”

  “What happens?”

  “I have paranoid hallucinations.”

  “Diseases?”

  “Heart disease. Degenerative joint disease of the spine. Glaucoma. Osteoporosis.”

  “Is that it?”

  Ezra smiled. “For now.”

  “Your eye is bleeding.”

  “I know; don’t worry about that.”

  “Emergency contact?”

  “Dick Hillier.”

  “Health-care proxy?”

  “Also Dick Hillier.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Mary-Alice. My goddaughter.”

  “Will she be staying with you tonight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Religion?”

  “None.”

  The nurse looked up. “Religion?
” she repeated.

  “No religion,” said Ezra. “Atheist.”

  The nurse studied him for a moment before turning to Alice. “Is he serious?”

  Alice nodded. “I think so.”

  Turning back to Ezra: “Are you sure?”

  Ezra flexed his toes under the covers. “Yep.”

  “Okaaaaay,” said the nurse, cocking her head and writing it down, this terrible mistake. When she’d left, Alice asked, “Why do they ask that?”

  “Well, if you say you’re Catholic and it looks like you’re getting close to the end, they send a priest around. If you’re Jewish, they send a rabbi around.”

  “And if you’re atheist?”

  “They send Christopher Hitchens around.”

  Alice covered her face with her hands.

  “Easiest white girl—”

  “Ezra!”

  “What!”

  “I can’t . . .”

  “You can’t what?”

  She took her hands away. “This!”

  “I don’t follow you, darling.”

  “It’s just . . . so . . . hard.”

  “And you’re telling me this now?”

  “No! I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t leave you here. I love you.” That much was true. “You’ve taught me so much, and you’re the best friend I have. I just can’t . . . It’s so not . . . normal.”

  “Who wants to be normal? Not you.”

  “No, I don’t mean normal. I mean . . . good for me. Right now.” She took a deep breath. “If I’m with you . . .”

  Ezra shook his head neatly, as if she’d been misinformed about who he was. “Sweetheart, you’re tired.”

  Alice nodded. “I know.”

  “And shaken up I think. But we’re going to be fine.”

  Sniffling, Alice nodded again and said, “I know. I know.”

  He watched her thoughtfully for a moment, the spot of blood under his eye like a stopped tear. Then he grimaced good-naturedly and leaned forward a little to adjust his pillows. Wiping her cheeks, Alice hurried to help, and in the process extracted a handset from where it had slipped down behind his shoulder. “Oh!” Ezra said brightly, taking the control. “There’s a television.” Turning the handset around, he aimed it at the screen, switched the power on, and surfed until he came to highlights of the game. New York was up by three in the bottom of the ninth.