Here comes one now, looking like a young Jawaharlal Nehru. “Let’s take a look,” he says, consulting the chart he carries. “Ah. Cicciaro.” The clipped efficiency with which he pronounces every syllable exposes his warmth as a pretense. Carmine has a vivid fantasy of shoving the paperwork down the man’s throat. Instead, he asks the same question he does every time he meets a new doctor, as if it might change the answer. How long will this last?
The ve-ge-ta-tive state? asks Nehru. There’s an absence of gesture here, of the head-scratching and turning away Carmine’s gotten used to. There are cases, mi-ra-cu-lous cases, where a patient wakes up, but the data are very much against this. And Carmine isn’t a re-li-gi-ous man, is he? No, he hadn’t thought so. She might go on like this for years, in body, but without these machines, she would already be dead. “I am sorry,” the man then says, as if a different and deeply pained person has commandeered his larynx, but when he tries to touch Carmine’s arm, all Carmine can think of is getting him down on the floor among the wheeled bases of the equipment and horse-whipping him with his stethoscope until he needs a machine to help him breathe.
Sammy’s in no pain, of course—of that Nehru is certain. The grimace Carmine sometimes thinks he sees is just a combination of muscular reflex and his mind’s own drive to make meaning. The doctors are constantly reassuring him of this: she is neither warm nor cold, neither angry nor forgiving, and certainly not in pain. And for months now, instead of grieving for the soul, he’s been trying simply to see her as this, a vessel, a shell. The shiny petroleum jelly the nurses apply around the nostrils, the chapstick he puts on the lips, the cracking it can’t quite prevent. Dehydration is a danger. Bedsores a danger. Weight loss: a constant danger. He untucks the sheet at least once per visit to inspect her legs, which is where you’d really expect to see it. Each time he imagines she’ll have held steady thanks to the doctors (who now come to check on her every ten minutes, you could set your watch, because apparently there’s been some trouble earlier with her breathing apparatus). And each time, instead, there’s a little less of her. He looks again. With their down grown back, the legs could be a skinny boy’s. The ankles like pencils. No matter what they say, she’s suffering, and it’s the sins of the father, his sins against the very idea of fatherhood, she is paying for.
All he would have to do would be to ask them to unplug the machines, and no one could blame him; this, he sees at last, is what Nehru was too green not to imply. Is what they’ve been implying one way or another since January. She is never going to recover. But Carmine knows he would blame himself. Would live the rest of his life as if he’d been dipped in polverone and white arsenic and lit on fire, tossing off sparks.
Nehru, returning with a colleague, pretends no longer to see Carmine. The colleague frowns as he examines the connections on the respirator. Nehru makes tiny marks on the chart and says something about how long the machine was off, the potential for further brain damage. Carmine can’t quite make it out, because a chant has arisen outside the window. Three beats: Da da DAH. It’s that protest march he heard about on “Dr.” Zig this morning. It must still be going strong, but when he gets up to look, all is dark out there, save for a blip on an office tower a half-mile away, like an eye that sees him—that sees what’s in his heart. It would see even if everyone else was eager to accept that somehow, in the power failure, the technology keeping her alive had failed too. Mechanical error, one of those things, her time, the Lord’s will, not in pain anymore. For the best. Is he man enough, is the real question. Is he man enough to sit here and watch his own daughter gasp like a fish on a line and not turn back? Because if he does it, he isn’t going to leave the room till it’s over.
Don’t, the crowd outside is shouting, as the doctors retreat again. Don’t do that, or maybe Don’t turn back. He used to think sacrifice meant giving up his own life. Nope. It means giving up hers. And he wants it to hurt more than anything has ever hurt, more than she’s hurt, if she’s hurt, and to annihilate him with hurting. He wants the black powder all over, consuming him from the outside, but never quite finishing off the core, which will stay screaming inside for all eternity. Those other fathers were man enough. Abraham. Jehovah. And now here is Carmine Cicciaro, reaching for the mask.
THE FOUR VISIONS OF CHARLIE WEISBARGER
THE FIRST VISION, PROLOGUE TO THE OTHERS, is of the narrowness of all previous visions—the way they never reached much beyond the limits of Charlie’s skull. Meaning they must not have been visions at all. Or anyway, not like this. For it is the outside world that transforms itself now. What seemed to be a window becoming a door.
THE SECOND IS A NOISE. A voice. You have to decide whether to step through, it says. To awake. But there’s a problem: the birds are blocking the doorway, so he can’t see what’s beyond with any clarity. The others distracted by the presence of Sewer Girl (as he too might have been, under different conditions), he closes his eyes and pulls himself up onto the window ledge. The strap of the camera forces breath from his lungs. An iron fist squeezes his heart. He doesn’t have to look to know how far it is down to the street, and these birds seem pissed. They thrum just beyond the window like a vengeance machine, the tight wind they churn up blowing his hair all around. But he cannot bring himself to open his eyes. Or maybe he doesn’t need to. Maybe it would just detract from the next vision, the one now unfurling inside.
THIS ONE INVOLVES A FUTURE, OR FUTURES. He is floating above Midtown, the office tower below him an ancient ruin, along with everything in a several-block radius. Farther off, beyond the intact wall of the Financial District, is the harbor. The waters are placid at first, glinting, but then they stir under the pressure of something coming from the north and west. What Charlie witnesses when he turns, from the top of what was once the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, is incredibly fast and bright, even twenty miles off, a pair of little suns, gold flaws in the blue. They leave too little time for anything to be done to stop them—just enough for him to understand that July 14 was only the leading edge, that the KGB or the PLO or some other letters will be blamed, and struck, and strike back, and be struck back, until ultimately everything he’s ever known is consumed. What does the end of time look like? His mom, in her kitchen window, watching the sky go white like a flashbulb. His brothers, sleeping, turned to ash or air. Everything he has not loved as he should, everything he has forgotten to be choosing at every second, because this is evidently the only life one gets: the skyline and the bridges and the grasses of Long Island, and the granite slab that was to bear his dad’s name into the future, all dead. In this future, Sam is dead, too. And these last seconds he spends utterly alone with what he knows. And in the other one—the one he chooses if he goes through?
THE LAST OF THE FOUR VISIONS OF CHARLIE WEISBARGER is just a glimmer of where his error was. He’s been looking for a way to change what is, but it is never going to arrive from outside. This was in the Gramsci Nicky gave him, and the Marx, and even in his Bible somewhere. “No man hath seen God at any time.” The only available change has been inside him all along, where the lines between indication and invocation get hopelessly unclean. He’s been waiting for a finger to point, but God is more like the meaning of the pointing—a thing whose existence depends on the observer. Act like there’s nothing larger than yourself, no justice or mercy or community or whatever, and there won’t be. Or you can try somehow to call it into being. There are Paradoxes here you could disappear right up the butt of, and he does for a second, but then he’s feeling again the flashlight making that pink cave on the backs of his eyelids, and he can hear the rubber tip of the inspector’s crutch striking the floor, once, twice, coming to rescue him, and when he opens his eyes he can just make out beyond the light’s white spot the fat attendant and Sewer Girl. Don’t do that! Now’s not the time! But time is just the language of God. Or so he’d tell them, only he doesn’t want his last words to be bullshit, and there’s no time to decide if this is. There is no time, even, really, to be a
fraid anymore, as Charlie turns to face the outer world and the feathers caress his face and he gathers his last breath and hurls himself into them, the wings, the arms that are also the void.
MIDTOWN—2:20 A.M.
FOR A WHILE, Keith keeps slowing to talk to passersby just loud enough for Regan to hear that he’s still behind her, that she hasn’t succeeded in making him give up. Eventually, though, he stops bothering. He’s known all along that no one will have noticed two little kids in this outer dark. It is probably no less effective, all things considered, to go back to what he was doing forever ago, before the lights went out: cupping hands to mouth and shouting their names. “Will! Cate!” A half-block ahead, near a cataract of brakelight, Regan stiffens. He is drawing attention. But that’s exactly the point, and soon she’s doing it, too. “Will! Cate!”
They’re a peculiar team, her ahead, him behind, separated by the street between them. They could be strangers, were it not for the way their voices cross and part in the garbage-smelling heat. (Will, Cate. Willcate. Late. Kill. Wait!) Cars crawl by but do not honk, and sometimes offer a little bit of visibility. He can see, for example, that they’re now less than a block from the Lickety Splitz Gentleman’s Club at Fifty-Third and Third. If she turns left, she’ll lead them past the very spot where he stood in the snow on New Year’s Eve and decided not to go meet his mistress downtown. Time was he would have wanted to pause here, to genuflect, but when Regan heads straight he merely sends the names of his children clattering back among the fire escapes and trashcans.
For an hour, they zag north and south, east and west, past increasingly unlikely places. Past the Plaza’s eponymous plaza, the entryways of S.R.O.s, the whited sepulchers of the U.N. He’s never thought of these as having any commerce with each other, but in the dark it’s all surprisingly close together. Maybe the vastness of Manhattan is just a kind of accounting fiction you use to justify your own insignificance, your own helplessness, the fact that when you call, no one answers. A sense of constraint is already creeping in when Regan plunges into the cavern of Grand Central, darker even than the night outside. “Will! Cate!” He’s never heard a silence like the one that comes back. The ceiling is gone, but starlight dimming through the vaulted windows at either end of the concourse reveals shapes like vultures huddled under the departure boards. Or possibly these are highwaymen, alert to their presence. They rustle, ready to bar the exits, but he takes it up, “Will! Cate!” He is finding there is no hell into which he would not follow her—
And they are out again into the warm open air. They pass a slab of shadow he recognizes as the library, and the park behind it, where scholars score heroin. There’s a car crash on Sixth Ave.; someone has rammed into a storefront. Cops scuttle through the disco whirl of red and blue, but they seem preoccupied with the car hanging half-out of the smashed glass, and Regan ignores them. The next block, if memory serves, should be a gauntlet of electric come-ons, peepshows and X-rated theaters, but the blackout has obliterated it, and without the promise of live flesh, foot traffic is thin. Farther on, though, it thickens. He is able to make out faces. And then suddenly, between the black shoals of office buildings: the light.
There is always light in Times Square, true, but it should be an incandescent custard coming from the marquees above. Instead, this light is white and mineral in its intensity, and as Forty-Second debouches into Broadway he can see it’s streaming from two king-sized discs that hang from cranes several stories above the ground. Below mill certifiable masses of people, tens of thousands, filling the streets where cars normally go. Traffic islands puncture the crowds at intervals, and on each is a raised platform, draped in red, with an old-fashioned circus cage on top. One houses a lit-up panther. Another, a bald eagle on a branch. Nearest him and Regan, a few dozen yards away, is a ruffed black bear who must be ten feet tall, even slumped on his little stool. In his years in the city, Keith has stumbled upon enough movie shoots to know this must be one, but the scale here is like Cecil B. DeMille, or that Soviet version of War and Peace. Plus where are the cameras? And are the people around him people, or actors hired to play people? Have any of them seen his son?
He’s about to ask when a long chord sounds from atop the army recruiting center. He hasn’t noticed, but there’s a whole choir up there, ranked in gray robes he can just see the shoulders of. A tuxed conductor gesticulates with his back turned. As if at his command, the rest of the square goes silent and still, all except a shopping bag aflap on an updraft. Keith could yell out, and probably the whole square would hear, but he feels under some tremendous pressure to stay silent. Regan must, too, for even she has stopped shouting.
The song that now begins is slow and mournful and in a language not their own. Russian, he’d guess, from the deep double basses. The buildings loft the sound toward the sky and smear it, blurring the edges. Keith wonders if somewhere back in the Lamplighter family tree are some Slavs, because it calls to him, this elegy, if that’s what it is. Requiem. He wants, suddenly, to be standing on some great precipice, overlooking something huge—the way he used to put on his Best of Scottish Pipes and Drums LP to buy a few minutes to think at the end of the day, to send the kids running for the far corners of the apartment with hands over ears while he stood by the window, the light in his heart the color of the light through the Scotch in the glass. Below, on the street, rush-hour people hurried home. His own individual life had felt like a shirt shrunk in the wash … but now he would welcome such straitening. Why must he always be running from some place he never was to some place he’ll never be? What would it take for him to just be where he is? He wants, almost, to be his own ghost, casting his shadow on the little world these other people move in. And he wants Regan beside him—where she is, only a few feet away. She makes no attempt to hide the tears rolling down her spotlit face. She is frozen there, in a note that places them outside of time. And the honey so long withheld from him is given: Keith can hear, he thinks, what’s inside her. Honey, she’s thinking. I’m afraid.
He wants to tell her not to be, but it’s only fair that he not be able to hide from her his own fear.
Where can they have gone? What’s going to happen here?
I don’t know, he thinks. Who knows? But I have to believe, Regan, they’ll be okay. We’re going to find them.
I wish I was strong enough to believe, she thinks.
It is baffling, and he can’t quite say why, until he can. But you are, he thinks. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. You’re the only one who could have been strong enough to bring me through.
To bring you through to what?
It forces him to think harder. She needs him to think harder. And if he can think this hard without her hearing, can he reach her at all? To this, Regan. To a life without protection.
Then, abruptly, the held note ends, and someone yells “Cut!” The song is over, the planetary discs of light clicking off overhead and shadows moving over their faces. The bear growls once, dejectedly, in the gathering dark, as if to say, I knew it all along. And then Times Square, that insane monument, has vanished around them, which really is almost enough to break Keith’s heart. He can’t find her hand. “I’m sorry,” is what he’s left with. “I am so, so sorry.”
“No, I’m the one who dragged you into this,” Regan says, somewhere.
“I mean for all of this. Always.” But out loud, it sounds like more self-regard.
Then her hands are clamping around his. “We can talk about that later, Keith, but it’s not going to help us find the kids.” It is the old Regan and the new one together, honest, responsible, long-suffering—the real self she’ll only let you see under the direst of circumstances. Which may be true of everyone. He really wishes he could see her face. “The best we can do now is go back to Daddy’s and stay there. Give them a stationary target. Get a couple hours of rest, clear our heads, and if they still haven’t turned up by dawn, we start working the phones again. But no more magical thinking, okay?” She squeez
es his hand once, with what proportions of the maternal and the connubial it’s hard to tell. And she begins to pull him through the extras, who are stirring now, as from a dream. The whole city seems to stretch, to sigh. He hears for a moment the beat of wings, a flock of birds passing overhead like incompetent demiurges, no longer able to stitch this world together. It’s as if the pagan order is crumbling, making way for whatever’s next. But probably this is what she means by magical thinking.
GREENWICH VILLAGE—3:22 A.M.
ONCE UPON A TIME, MERCER GOODMAN HAD A VISION OF HIS OWN. This was back in those early months after moving in with William, when the sex so intoxicated him that he couldn’t get to sleep for hours after. He’d lie awake thinking about a city where people might actually be able to communicate their longings and disappointments and dreams, and so move beyond the illusion of being unknown and unknowable, as in the lights of passing buses, the half-finished self-portrait flared up and died. But later, Mercer had begun to wonder if the sense of illusion was itself an illusion. Because there were so many things he’d never understand about William. And there was his own work, the manuscript he never talked about. One of the reasons he started avoiding it in the first place was the swelling contradiction between the world and the novel as he imagined it. In his head, the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it. But how was it possible for a book to be as big as life? Such a book would have to allocate 30-odd pages for each hour spent living (because this was how much Mercer could read in an hour, before the marijuana)—which was like 800 pages a day. Times 365 equaled roughly 280,000 pages each year: call it 3 million per decade, or 24 million in an average human lifespan. A 24-million-page book, when it had taken Mercer four months to draft his 40 pages—wildly imperfect ones! At this rate, it would take him 2.4 million months to finish. 2,500 lifetimes, all consumed by writing. Or the lifetimes of 2,500 writers. That was probably—2,500—as many good writers as had ever existed, from Homer on. And clearly, he was no Homer. Was not even an Erica Jong. He had been writing for all the wrong reasons, for the future, for The Paris Review, for the cover of Time (the peak of cultural attainment, so far as the other Goodmans were concerned)—for anything but the freedom he’d once discovered in ink and paper.
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