The Metropolis Case

by Matthew Gallaway

  45

  There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

  NEW YORK CITY, 2002. Leo Metropolis ushered Martin and Maria into a small cabin on the upper deck and invited them to sit. They began by talking about the weather, about Bayreuth, about Martin’s “retirement” and Maria’s facetious desire for the same. Leo complimented Maria on her tribute to Anna and admitted that the significance—if not the beauty—of the song had been lost on him, and as he listened to Martin and Maria discuss its larger meaning, he almost forgot what he was here to do. He remembered what it was like before he had seen anything painful and destructive, when he was young and in love with music, and learning how works of art can sometimes mutate or evolve into other, equally beautiful pieces.

  With the cabin infused by the bronze light of the setting sun, Leo raised the topic of the manuscript. Martin abashedly confessed—given how little sense it made—his suspicion, or perhaps hope, that Anna had died in a state of bliss, which led Maria to describe how she had heard a second voice at the end of her Liebestod in Bayreuth, and how she had somehow known—even before she got the phone call—that it had been Anna. It pleased Leo to hear this, for it seemed to confirm that in the beckoning aura of the approaching night, there would be a familiar, theatrical sense of possibility, a necessary suspension of belief that would allow his audience to understand his story—just as he had understood theirs—without questioning its plausibility.

  Martin opened his briefcase and handed the document to Leo, who—and this was a conscious decision on his part—flipped through the pages not with the reverence of a scholar or the greedy fingers of a dealer but with the easy assurance of one who had handled it hundreds of times. Although he had not expected to have this document at his side and was prepared to tell his story without it, its appearance struck him as a fortuitous break, and one that the performer in him felt obliged to use to his advantage. As Martin and Maria silently watched, he took a breath and began to speak, looking at them each in turn and explaining that he had wanted to talk to them about something for quite some time but that circumstances—along with a certain cowardice on his part that he hoped they would soon understand and forgive—had prevented him from doing so until now. He asked for their indulgence—which they appeared quite willing to give—and begged them not to jump to conclusions; he assured them that he did not want to convince them of anything but only to offer his service and perhaps—in return—ask for their help.

  This moment—the beginning of his story—was one he had rehearsed many times, at least in his head, and he welcomed a familiar weightlessness that allowed him to craft every phrase, to fill each syllable with as much love and nuance as he could—at least without singing—as if he were taking the stage for the greatest role in his life. He started quietly, with a more distant, objective tone, not unlike the narrative in his mind when he recalled episodes from his past but could not afford to delve into the accompanying emotion. From his pocket he withdrew an envelope, which he set on top of the manuscript and encouraged them to examine. These notes, he explained, which had been in his possession for a very long time, represented a formula for a vaccine against aging, discovered by a French scientist in the nineteenth century, who coincidentally—and here he nodded at the score—was the father of Lucien Marchand, the French heldentenor who had created the role of Tristan. As Leo said this, he glanced at Maria, who just as he had hoped instinctively nodded—she had obviously heard of the man—while Martin watched pensively beside her.

  Leo briefly explained how Lucien had come to possess the score and then offered a few details about his life; he described how Eduard had jumped to his death from the scaffolding of his opera house, and how Lucien had carried his lifeless body through the streets of Vienna to the steps of the palace, as if to indict Franz Joseph, after which he remained in a state of grief-stricken paralysis, unable to sing. He told them what had happened one summer when Lucien returned to Paris, where his father, as per the French emperor’s edict, had taken the vaccine, and how Lucien had also taken it, with the unexpected result that Guillaume had died while Lucien had not.

  Whether Martin and Maria believed him, Leo knew he had at least captured them—he could feel them wanting to know what had happened to Lucien—and he felt sustained by the artistic alchemy that allowed him to distill so much life into the words and images rolling off his tongue. He told them that Lucien eventually came to New York City—carrying little more than a Tristan manuscript and his father’s last words, the formula for the vaccine—where it didn’t take long to realize that what he had taken had worked; while those around him aged, he did not (or if he did, it was imperceptible). He lived a solitary life and refused to consider the prospect of sharing his fate with anyone else until he understood it better himself; he changed his name twice, first to Luke Merchant and then to Lawrence Malcolm; he worked as a furniture maker, a shipbuilder, and—finally—a dealer of antiques. He imposed upon himself a spartan discipline and routine; he read thousands of books and studied inventions; he went to museums and gallery exhibitions, he observed the construction of ever-taller buildings and wider bridges in the city; he reflected on his past with as much objectivity as possible, writing and rewriting episodes in notebooks like the ones his father had once used and, over time, grew confident that he, too, was on the cusp of great discoveries about the nature of life, as if he had melded all of his experience into an eternal, golden ring he could offer to those who continued to suffer.

  As close as he came to this revelation, as satisfied as he might be on one day, he inevitably lost it the next; as many times as he started the process anew with a thought to improve, he would end up back at the beginning, doubting and afraid. He grew despondent as he arrived at the seemingly futile conclusion that any truth—or at least any truth worth living (or dying) for—was always fleeting, subject to the vagaries of time, while any that lasted was doomed to a fate of the banal, the assumed, the given, the sort of thing—like a geometry formula—that children could appreciate for a second and then discard. Because this new insight contradicted everything he had ever believed about the nature of true understanding, instilled in him by his father, he felt defeated, and worse, it brought into intense relief the maddening loneliness under which he had already labored for so many decades. As he continued to consider his past, it seemed that everyone he had ever touched was about to die, while he, as if made of rock, was doomed to live.

  Desperate to escape this numb despair, he returned to the opera. To this point he had avoided it, fearing that it would instill in him a grief-stricken longing that would test—and likely exceed—any bounds of sanity. But on a snowy evening in 1960—almost one hundred years to the day after he had first heard it—succumbing to his deeper intuition, he went to see Tristan at the Metropolitan Opera. He knew the second he heard the soft, teasing call of the cellos and winds not only that his fears had been unfounded but also that the music had never ceased to course through him, as if it were his blood, his air, and his food. He emerged resurrected, wanting—or no, needing—to sing, knowing that, without his voice, his body might have been alive but his soul was dead. The truth he had been seeking for so long was not something universal or sublime to be discovered but rather mutable; it was his version of the world—and his alone—to create or, more to the point, to sing, using the language of music, in which he had always felt most at home. So for the second time in his long life he became a singer. He dedicated himself to the opera, with the intent—sure that nobody could ever tell a story such as his—to be the greatest singer who ever lived. He chose a new name—one with which Martin and Maria were already familiar—to reflect this aspiration to tie his past to his future, and here he paused, as if to summon enough strength to smash even the possibility of doubt—the name of Leo Metropolis.

  MARIA SEEMED TO brace herself—but with a graceful strength and heightened sense of control that did not fail to remind him of her performance in Bayreuth, which had matched and possibly exceeded
his own—while Martin aggressively leaned forward, as if to assault him with questions, a response that also did not lack a certain aesthetic appeal and intellectual rigor. Leo could see both of them working to reconcile their doubts with a desire to believe him, not only because of who he was but also because of everything that such belief implied about the potential of life to deliver the unexpected. And so, as soon as he caught his breath, he asked them to judge him in such terms: he begged them to look at the city in front of them, to consider the skyline, to imagine the streets and the subways, the hypnotic ebb and flow of the people moving in and out of the buildings and elevators, or even the availability—in a certain restaurant on Fifth Avenue—of a pâté de canard that brought him back to a Romanian princess he had known in Paris. His life, he maintained, was no less and no more than an attempt to create something transcendent and lasting out of the haphazard and random events that defined so much of it—to order and possess his past, as if he had willed it and not the other way around—just as the city did for the millions who lived there. Or—he added more softly—they might consider Maria’s earlier song and Martin’s appreciation of the same, or the impossible but undeniable odds that both of their parents had tragically died at such a young age, or even the circumstances that had brought them together on this day. That they had already discussed this idea was apparent to Leo in the way they glanced at each other with expressions that seemed to convey more understanding and determination than shock, although it lasted only a second before they turned back to him with renewed expectation, which he knew stemmed from his failure to explain exactly why he was telling them this story.

  On the verge of unveiling this last great secret, he felt exhausted, so that he could barely manage to part his lips to breathe, let alone summon the energy to speak. He grimaced and managed to steady himself; this weariness, he knew, was also an aspect of his performance, a symptom of the self-destructive but sacrificial need to go on at any cost—even the ultimate one—as if the lives of those who listened, those he loved, depended on it. He took their hands and in a hoarse but urgent whisper told them how he had met Anna after her performance—one, he noted, that was almost as miraculous as Maria’s in Bayreuth, and perhaps even more unexpected—and inspired by the idea that her voice might help him to regain his own, had invited her to his store. To his pleasant surprise, she had come the following day, and he had impulsively shown her the manuscript and played from it, with a thought to re-create a moment of his youth, to both honor and be absolved from it, and to his astonishment and gratification, she had joined him, singing Isolde to his Tristan.

  Maria through her tears quietly confirmed that this was true, and that Anna had never told anyone but her. What she had not told Maria, Leo continued, was that, in the course of singing, they had been gripped in a way that he felt sure they all could understand; and that while he had been physically attracted to women only a handful of times in his very long life, for these minutes, his desire had mirrored her own, and several months later he had received a letter from Anna explaining that she had given birth to twins, one boy and one girl, but that she had given them up for adoption to two families who lived near the city of Pittsburgh, where she was certain they would be given the love and attention she—as an opera singer traveling the world—had not felt capable of delivering. Over their gasps of belief and disbelief, he found the will to tell them that this had occurred almost exactly forty-two years ago, and he hoped they would forgive him for not coming forward until now, because it was only after he realized that he was going to die that he could once again afford to love.

  LEO HEARD VOICES and knew it was his Liebestod, his song of love and death that had accompanied him through so much of his life, marking the end of one phase and the beginning of the next. Except while the singing had always been literal and the death metaphorical, this time his death would be most literal, just as the music—he could almost hear low, tremulant cellos—was dreamlike and distant. He listened to the words—“How mild and soft is his smile; how gently he opens his eyes! Do you see him? Shining ever brighter … how he ascends, bathed in starlight!”—and he could detect Maria, Anna, and even his own mother, returning to say good-bye. The words echoed and were accompanied not only by the surging arpeggios of harps but also by the rustling of the flags and the soft, overlapping wake of the boat as it headed toward shore. “Behold how his heart swells with pride,” the voices went on, “how it beats, brave and full, in his breast! And how from his lips … gently issues his sweet breath. Look, friends … do you not feel it and see it?”

  He watched with expectant eyes as Martin and Maria briefly conferred and appeared to come to a consensus with regard to his final request, made only seconds earlier, although the details were already blurring as images from the past began to cascade over his mind. He sighed heavily but contentedly, knowing that his will was about to be done; they were not going to doubt or question but simply lift the burden under which he had labored for so long. Martin ignited a corner of the brittle paper—the formula—and passed it to Maria as the sheets caught fire in a whisper and then expanded into a tiny, flickering flame. Leo felt no regret as he watched the formula disintegrate; this had been his father’s understanding of the world, and only now—through this transformation—was Leo making it his own. He felt tears of gratitude and forgiveness running down his cheeks as the voices continued: “Do I alone hear this music so wonderfully sweet … this blissful lament from his lips saying all, forgiving all? How it grows within me, soars on high, and echoes throughout the heavens!”

  He tried to raise his arms—he wanted to embrace his children—but his blood grew thick and slowed, and he could not. Though it seemed impossible after so many years of longing that he could be possessed by a most irrational instinct to live—an impulse to fight what he craved most of all—he was afraid and for a moment wanted to live a little longer, to know what would happen to Martin and Maria, and he hated the idea of leaving. But he knew that his part in their story was about to end, and in the next second he was consoled by the strong hands he felt on his shoulders, propping him up—this, he knew, would be Martin—and by the graceful manner in which Maria kneeled in front of him, keeping one hand in his while the other held the burning sheets of paper.

  Maria sloughed from her fingers the final remnants of the formula, which drifted back and forth toward the floor. Yet still he lived, and to live, it seemed, was to question: would he rise like an angel or be sent to walk the coals of hell? Or—as he had always believed—would he be given to an endless moment of comfort and delivery, as if the gap between the last note of music and the start of the applause, a moment of complete darkness and silence bathed in accomplishment and regret, were extended forever? Trembling with fear and desire, he called out to his children and felt them close by as his eyes turned away from a diffuse light and the voices grew louder.

  “Growing louder, weaving all about me …

  … are they gentle breezes,

  or sweet-smelling clouds?

  As they swell and whisper, dare I breathe?

  Dare I listen?

  Shall I drink them in,

  or be engulfed by their fragrance?

  In the billowing sea,

  their echoing sound …

  … in the surging night

  of the world’s life and breath …

  … to drown, to be lost …

  … unknowing, in highest bliss!”

  The endless night had arrived; the performance of a lifetime was over. A final shard of scorched paper landed, its flame extinguished, as Leo Metropolis, his children by his side, at last surrendered to the music of the universe.

  Acknowledgments

  Readers: Meg Muirhead, my brother Michael, Bill Clegg, Matt Hudson, Suzanne O’Neill, and Susan Barnett. Blogosphere: Bennett Madison, Choire Sicha, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Jeff Weinstein, Jennie Portnof, M.Snowe, Megen Gumus, Seth Colter Walls, and Brian Ulicky. CLOTU: Dante, Beatrice, Zephyr, Elektra, Syd, Elly,
Lucian, and Anjellicle Cats Rescue. Friends: Jennifer Baron, Mike Donofrio, Jim Harwood, Brigit Dermott, Matt Kadane, Danielle Nguyen, John Pisani, Thoma Marshall, and Judy Zecher. Aspen: Frank Quinn, Susan Gruesser, and Annie Cavlov. Retreats: Jonathan Cobb and Kurt Reitz, Phebe and Paul Tanners. Family: Ma, Dad, Shawn, Greg, Jan, and Zeppo. Love, Patience, Inspiration: Stephen Pickover.

  Thanks to my many friends and colleagues at Oxford University Press.

  Thanks to Crown and the many great people there who have given every facet of the book so much care and attention.

  For more notes, music, photographs, digressions, and links, please visit www.TheMetropolisCase.com.

  About the Author

  MATTHEW GALLAWAY got his B.A. from Cornell University, where he majored in government, and after working for several environmental groups in Washington, D.C., he attended law school at New York University. (He is fairly certain that he is the only graduate of NYU Law to work as a record-store clerk.) After passing the bar, he played in a rock band (Saturnine) for several years before turning his attention to The Metropolis Case. He currently lives in Washington Heights with his partner and three cats.