The Metropolis Case

by Matthew Gallaway

  She entered the last bars of her aria, and as her heart slowed—the ultimate control of an involuntary muscle—to a final beat, she closed her eyes and savored for the last time the awed silence hovering over the theater. She heard someone else singing, and—like two shafts of light refracted into a single beam—this other voice joined hers in a perfect unison that gradually softened into an exquisite pianissimo. She assumed it was death, because nothing, not even Leo, had ever sounded so sweet and strong, but it was a female voice, and like a maternal hand, it reached into the deep water and clasped Maria’s fading consciousness to pull her gently to the surface.

  THE CURTAIN CAME down, and Maria lifted her head from where it had fallen on Leo’s chest. She stood up and shivered as she tried to find her balance. She watched Leo follow her to his feet; just as unsteady, he seemed exceedingly frail, nothing but costume and makeup as he collapsed against a boulder, breathing hard. Maria tried to catch his attention, but he was inaccessible, his eyes rheumy in the light. Neither moved until a group of stagehands appeared from the wings to help them down to the front of the stage, where they split the curtain and gingerly took their bows. Maria had never seen an audience in such a frenzy, rioting and screaming as they begged not to be dragged back to the dungeon of existence from which they had been so briefly rescued. They buried the stage in red roses for love and black delphiniums for death, and still they called for more. It was easy for her to imagine that soon they would go home to change careers and conceive children, to call long-lost relatives, to divulge their darkest secrets, and to forgive unforgivable sins. It was, she realized, just as Anna had predicted so many years earlier, when she had first spoken to her about their gift, and the potential it held for those who did not share it. Maria had no doubt that those who had seen this performance would never forget how the opera can make and alter history, and how, on this night, history had been made and altered.

  40

  Fashion Is a Canon for This Dialectic Also

  PARIS, 1871. The commune was over. Bodies were retrieved from the rubble, buildings—charred from fire—torn down, and empty lots cleared of debris. The nobility returned from their summer estates, while the architects and bankers surveyed and measured as they began to raise capital to rebuild what had been destroyed. As much as Lucien understood that all of this represented a resurrection of sorts, to witness it repulsed him, as if he and his fellow citizens were maggots eating away at the dead parts of the city to make way for the new, while the constant hammering and scraping together of bricks and stones created a cacophony that invaded his dreams.

  As soon as Codruta arrived at the Georges, he went to see her.

  “So you’re back,” she said, as if he had not spent much of the previous year on the sinking ship of the Île while she had weathered the storm in the Loire Valley.

  He shook his head as if to say no, he was not back at all, except for the fact that he was sitting here in this room, where despite everything he was soothed by the familiar clink of her spoon against the teacup. It almost made him angry at her, until she offered her condolences about his father and her hope that he would remain in the apartment, at which point he saw her as if he were a child and felt vaguely—nostalgically—enthralled by the gilt trim of the windows and mirrors, which still gleamed in the bronze sun.

  “Yes, I’m back,” he said, but then reconsidered. “But I’m leaving Paris,” he added, and the second the words left his mouth he knew it was true.

  She smiled gingerly. “Nonsense.”

  He continued more gently: “I wanted to say good-bye.”

  Her hands trembled as she raised the cup to her lips, and it occurred to Lucien that she, too, was afraid, not only for herself, because she was getting rather old, but of everything that had happened to the city that she loved and that to some extent she no longer recognized. He also knew she understood his intent and was only acting now, because she had always refused to argue about anything, and at this moment—most certainly their last together—she wanted to pretend. “You still haven’t told me,” she said in a low voice that seemed to skip off the surface of her tea, “when I can expect to hear you at the Paris Opéra.”

  While a part of him wanted nothing more than to please her, to sing for her and all of her important friends and relaunch his career in Paris, and most of all to give voice to the mutating and oddly distorted strains of sound that had been festering in his mind, he knew it could not happen. Though he no longer attributed his inability to sing to a particular grief for Eduard, he was beginning to detect the contours of a much larger and more complex grief—for his youth, for the city, for his parents—that left him too bereft to consider singing, at least for the foreseeable future. Whether he could sing or not, he knew he had to leave Paris; he could not bear to see Codruta die but wanted to remember her, like the city in which they had lived, as alive and glimmering.

  He managed to smile graciously, just as she had taught him. “Soon—very soon,” he promised with serene confidence, despite knowing that by the next day, he would be gone.

  HE WENT TO Vienna, where he wrapped up his affairs before heading south to Rome and then to Civitavecchia, where he boarded the first of two ships en route to New York. He brought with him only a few tangible remnants of his past: letters from Eduard, the Tristan manuscript—into which he had placed his father’s formula, as if one were the antidote to the other—and a few rings Codruta had given to him over the years. On most nights—weather permitting, and sometimes when it didn’t, because the rain and fog offered a different allure—he left his cabin and went above to contemplate the expanse of the passing water from the deck. The ocean, it seemed, was the opposite of a city, and if it lacked in art and genius, its mutating waters invited reflection. He liked to imagine the horizon passing through him in a thin, straight line, as if connecting the future to his past, notwithstanding the certainty, as he would have been the first to admit, that this was really only a hope—or perhaps a distraction—from his true past, which could never have been described as anything but jagged and erratic.

  It was strange to remember—as he sometimes did—that he had been a famous singer, and he could even smile as he remembered the joy of offering his voice to the public and how appreciative they had been in return. Yet as he reflected on more distant episodes of his life, he was troubled by the way new details never ceased to surface, always raising doubts and questions; it made him nervous about moving to a new city—which he had chosen with the hope to be as unencumbered by the past as possible—and only the flat, silver plane of the ocean made it possible to believe that anything he had ever done or felt, no matter how brutal or exhilarating, was as distant as the land he had not seen for weeks.

  Although just slightly more than a year had passed since he had taken the vaccine, he was now more inclined to think that it had worked. He seemed to shave less and sometimes at night woke up with his pulse almost gone, like he had slipped into a coma. His needs and desires, at least for now, remained admittedly blunted and primitive: when he was tired, he slept; when he was hungry, he ate, although never robustly. Any sensual longing—even the basest forms—had been relegated to the same empty room as his voice. There were men on the ship he knew he might have found attractive, but he could only watch them from behind the glass walls of an aquarium in which there was space for one. At times he fantasized about offering the vaccine to someone else—someone he loved—but there was still too much uncertainty, not to mention the conundrum of risking the life of anyone who might want to take it. After what had happened to his father, he could not imagine offering the formula to another scientist or university or government; he was afraid of not only what they might do with the vaccine but also what they might do to him, knowing that he had taken it and survived.

  AS HE WATCHED a whale launch its massive body above the surface and there seem to float for a second before smashing down with a tremendous splash, he was struck by an eternal quality of the ocean and its denizens
, so that even the idea of a two-hundred-year life suddenly seemed brief and inconsequential. The passage of time, he was starting to realize, was filled with arbitrary notions of hours, days, and years, all of which might be as useless to him now as they were to a fish or a bird, and while there were countless institutions and traditions built around the fact that people did not live beyond an age of seventy or eighty or ninety, he had already resolved not to give himself to any of them. As the wind ripped through his shirt to dry the sweat from his chest and arms, it helped him to be reminded that no matter how long he lived, it would still be a mere fragment compared to the life of lakes or conifers or even sea turtles. He thought of cities, which as he could now painfully attest also thrived and suffered in cycles that bore remarkably little relation to the life spans of those who created them. When he had first decided to come to New York, it was little more than an intuition, but he now recognized a more concrete hope to find an entity whose existence might be expected to mirror—and likely outlast—his own. He remembered his vow to his father: to discover some truth about the world and his place in it, to justify his life, and to give it meaning for as long as it lasted. There were moments when he wavered and the prospect frightened him, mostly on account of the loneliness it seemed to promise, but he tried to push these fears aside. He was both sorry and not sorry to be alive, for in the rushing air he could imagine melodies, dulcet and pristine, even as he acknowledged that to sing any of them would for the moment be impossible.

  41

  Cocksucker Blues

  NEW YORK CITY, 2002. August had arrived, and even at the highest point in Manhattan it was feverishly hot. Though Martin’s garden had held up well, as he stood inside the sliding glass door and squinted out at the hostile sun, none of the plants in his troughs—not even the gracefully weeping blue spruce, the adorable hen and chicks, or the delicate bell-shaped campanula blooms, all of which just weeks earlier had filled him with such contemplative satisfaction—aroused in him anything but vague loathing. It made him question whether any of “the progress” he had made over the past year, the sense of reconciliation and forgiveness—in terms of himself and others—was anything but a charade, given the way life always conspired to deliver new and unexpected forms of misery from which there could be no escape. He knew that others might laugh or scoff at the nature of his particular plight, but he didn’t care; the fact remained that Beatrice was extremely sick—she was in the hospital—which made the surrounding life seem garish and futile.

  It had started a week earlier, when he noticed that she seemed thinner than usual. “You know, Beatrice, you could stand to eat a bit more,” he had commented after she appeared on the edge of his bed, and he tried to decide if she really had lost weight. It was difficult to assess, given that—despite his almost nightly attempts to coax her in, and her increasing willingness to allow him to rest a single fingertip for one or two seconds on her back—he had never picked her up. On this night, she had looked back at him with a mix of coy intensity and dismissal, as if whatever he was saying, she couldn’t quite imagine the stupidity of it. “Well, you don’t seem sick,” he concluded, but began to monitor her more closely.

  For several days she appeared for meals, but she never spent more than a few seconds at the plate before walking away uninterested. While this, too, was hardly unprecedented—she had always been finicky—he became more concerned when she turned up her nose at a fresh cocktail shrimp, which just a month before would have delivered her into something closer to a state of ecstasy.

  Martin scheduled an appointment with the vet for the next afternoon, but when Beatrice spent the rest of the day and that night under the bed, Martin—after conferring with the vet over the phone—decided to take her to the emergency room. He went into the bedroom to break the news. “Beatrice,” he began softly after kneeling down, “I’m sorry, but we need to go to the hospital.” She did not respond, leaving him at a loss as to what to do. He spent a few minutes trying to reason with her as she peered back, her eyes dull and metallic like the heads of nails. Food was obviously not going to entice her at this point, and he did not like the idea of chasing her out, in the event it might exacerbate whatever was wrong. “Beatrice—please—you’re sick,” Martin begged. “Will you come out for me?”

  When she would not, Martin retrieved the carrier from the closet and brought it back to the bedroom, the door of which he shut to keep out Dante, whose pacing and moaning seemed to convey an understanding that something perilous was afoot. Martin pulled down the cover from the bed and sat on top of the mattress, as if he were about to go to sleep. “Beatrice,” he called and tapped on the bed three times, their usual signal. He held his breath for a few seconds and repeated the taps; finally, somewhat clumsily, she staggered out, jumped up on top of the bed, and took a few tentative steps toward him in her growth-stunted waddle. Martin suppressed his dismay at seeing how much smaller she had become in just two days. Worse, she trembled slightly, just like the first time he had seen her, trapped in the corner of that miserable cage at the vet’s office.

  Still, out in the light, her eyes seemed brighter, and Martin tried to reassure her. “Beatrice, I know this is going to feel like a betrayal, but you need to see a doctor. I’m sure it’s nothing—maybe you have a summer cold.” As he finished saying this, he lunged for her with his left hand—still quick from his hockey days—and managed to scoop her up against his body as he placed his other hand on the scruff of her neck to hold her steady. Weak as she was, she could not escape, although she fought and cried as he managed to stand slowly and place her, one leg at a time, into the crate. Martin was relieved to note that she had the strength to scratch, so that a rivulet of blood ran down the inside of his left arm.

  After setting her down by the front door, he ran around the corner to the garage to pick up his car. When he returned a few minutes later, Dante was sitting in front of her carrier, licking her paws, and Martin was relieved that Beatrice was no longer crying. “Say good-bye now,” he instructed them, “just for a little while.”

  He drove down Fort Washington to Broadway and crossed east on 155th, past the public-housing towers at the old Polo Grounds. “We don’t like Robert Moses, do we?” he asked in an attempt to distract her, but she remained quiet as he entered the Harlem River Drive and started south. “You picked a good time to get sick,” he pointed out. “Not only is it August but it’s Sunday, so there’s no traffic.” In less than ten minutes, they arrived at the Animal Medical Center, which—he could not fail to note with a mix of trepidation and hope—was not far from Sloan-Kettering. “You’re going to get the best doctors in the world,” he declared, an assessment that seemed to be confirmed by the high-tech swoosh of the automatic doors and the army of staff inside.

  It was harder to remain optimistic as he stepped into the inalterably dreary scene of a Sunday afternoon at the emergency room, where he passed through a waiting area filled with sad-looking families and their even sadder-looking pets, along with an assortment of chairs, pay phones, and vending machines. After he explained the situation to a receptionist, he was given the intake forms, which he filled out among the ranks of the downtrodden as he now and again placed one of his fingers through the metal grate of her carrier, where Beatrice sat quietly petrified. From behind the reception counter, Martin could hear people sobbing as vets delivered bad news or worse. Someone walked by on a cell phone, weeping. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to Beatrice. “You’re going to be fine.”

  After fifteen minutes or so, Martin was led to an examination room for a preliminary consultation with a doctor, who shook Beatrice out of the cage and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck. “She’s very yellow,” he said as he folded back the inside of her ear. “When’s the last time she ate?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Martin admitted. “A few days ago?”

  “It looks like hepatic lipidosis,” the vet explained. “If cats stop eating for any reason, the fatty cells of their tissues can basically ove
rrun the liver and shut it down.”

  Martin dug his fingernails into his palms. “Why would she stop eating?”

  “It could be anything—a cold, a change in food, depression.”

  “A cold? Depression?” Martin took a second to digest this, restraining the urge to reason away such a ridiculous premise. “Can you help her?”

  “We can try,” the vet said in an efficient but superficial tone Martin found somewhat more comforting, before he left to complete the paperwork. This gave Martin a few minutes alone with Beatrice, who now cowered under a small sink, which along with the concrete floor and beige tiles reminded him of the nurse’s room at his old elementary school in Cedar Village, not that such memories—as he bitterly noted—were going to be of any use.

  “Little Beatrice, they’re going to fix you up,” he nevertheless promised as he kneeled down beside her; as he spoke, he tentatively reached out his hand but withdrew it when she shrank away.

  HE RETURNED FOR visiting hours the following day and met with her “team,” all of whom agreed that, while the case was severe, the official stance was one of guarded optimism. The plan was to reverse the lipidosis by tube feeding until her liver kicked in and began to function normally, which the doctors assured him was by no means an unprecedented prognosis, particularly given her age. They had already placed her in intensive care, where he found her in an oxygenated chamber with a feeding tube running through her nose, various IVs attached through each of her hind legs, and her head in one of those plastic cones that looked like an Elizabethan collar. “Beatrice? Are you okay?” he whispered through the cage, and in response, she moaned softly and moved her eyes, which despite her obvious weakness the doctor said was a good sign.