—
After returning to the designated meeting spot, seeing Angel’s relieved face, riding in silence across the bridge, and changing clothes discreetly in the backseat before getting out at the apartment building that she now called home, Neva was unable for a long time to understand what she was doing. It’s all over now and I’m fine, she kept saying in her head, but she felt more anxious and confused now than she had earlier in the day or even during her expedition. I’m alone. I’m safe. I’m Neva. I have a good job. I take care of children. I’m home. No matter how many times she repeated this mantra in her head she still felt disoriented. It wasn’t until she was sitting with Roman helping him with his gladiator project that she realized why.
She had been hoping before today that she would find nothing at the hotel. No trace of the subjugation and slaughtering of will that she had once endured. Now she realized that her former life had been caged inside of her, the memory of it trapped and caught like a wild animal. But on seeing the hotel, the manager, his dirty office, and the tiny hints of that parallel world, her old memories had begun to press against their cage, beating themselves on the gates of consciousness, and then had burst through the bars, ragged and bloody, dumb things, stumbling, again and again, riding along like dead bodies on horses that keep running, blind yet gaping, unable to stop. Looking out the window of Roman’s room across the rooftops she felt images and feelings circling madly in her head, exhausting, tragic in their unceasing gallop, a barely contained pandemonium.
—
I thought gladiators would be cooler, Roman said.
Well, said Neva, you have to do some research. Have you read the books?
Roman rolled his head back and closed his eyes, as if the word “books” had been conceived to torture him.
I looked at them, he said, with his eyes closed.
—
Out the window, a distant corner of Central Park. A stirring of wind that begins in the clouds. Branches sway. A whole swath of them bends and they brush one another and to Neva it looks like water flowing. Then she remembers: I am a river. And she thinks: I will carry these memories on the current that is my strength. These memories will flow through me like corpses on horses swimming across a river and these horses will drop their burdens, let them fall. These bodies will fall into my waters, float along, and they will sink. These bodies are old memories, gone forever and dead to me now. They cannot hurt me. I will lower them down. I will let them fall to the bottom of the cold and muddy river. They will drift or they will dissolve. These memories will be borne along or they will drown. They will be a part of me but they will not stop me. They will not slow me down. I will carry them, bear them, dissolve them, decompose them, but I will not let them slow me down.
—
What did the books say? Neva asked Roman.
Nothing, said Roman.
Nothing? Not one word about gladiators? asked Neva.
Roman threw a basketball across the room. It bounced off the corner of the ceiling and landed on his bed, steadied for a moment, and rolled off onto the floor, a rogue idea.
I don’t remember, he said.
—
Neva told Steve what she had seen and heard at the hotel and he arranged for some form of authority—she was not sure if it was the police or a private security firm or his own men—to remove the people who were using his property for illegal purposes. The whole thing ended quickly. Nobody knew. It wasn’t in the papers or on the Internet. There were no arrests or sentences. There was no story. The hotels were clean again. The storm held at bay. The darkness, with its roiling current and riderless horses, was gone.
—
It appeared to Neva that Steve had handled the incident with expert firmness and calm, dispatching his people, displacing the intruders, protecting his kingdom, and restoring order. But she noticed in the following days that he seemed older, less agile in his movements and thoughts, as if a rumor of his aging had spread and shadowed him and had now—perception as they say being reality—come true. His thick wavy hair looked slightly less robust, his tailored jacket hung with the tiniest gap around his neck, a new shrugging looseness through his shoulders. His relationship to age had always been perfectly clear: any businessman or gambler knew that the first one to give a number would lose. So Neva understood that Steve would never go first in this negotiation. He would maintain his poker face, assess risk with equanimity, acknowledge his ignorance, tolerate uncertainty, protect against fragility, and prepare for pain. But he could not abide weakness, disease, or dying. They were unacceptable.
—
He awoke in the night coughing and he continued to cough until his lungs felt raw. He sat up in bed and Patrizia sat up with him and then went to get him water. When she returned, the coughing had subsided and he was sitting in a chair with a blanket wrapped around his head and shoulders and he drank the water slowly and set the glass on a side table. He looked absurd but no one would have laughed. Out the window the darkness tilted gently toward morning. The buildings across the park on Central Park West twinkled in the charcoal light, a dashboard lit up from within, a control panel waiting to be instructed and manipulated, as if the city itself were a car or an airplane at the ready, keys in the ignition, wanting, begging to be driven.
Am I getting too old for this town? he asked.
No, of course not, she said. Don’t be ridiculous.
She was wearing one of her silky robes and it fluttered and fanned out around her as she sat on the arm of his chair.
I used to feel like I could ride this place like a cowboy, like an astronaut.
You still can. You still do.
I felt young until about ten minutes ago, he said.
You are not old, she said.
Maybe I’m having a bad dream right now.
He started coughing again and it lasted a long time. Patrizia hovered beside him, holding the water glass. When he had finished she suggested they call the doctor.
I was right, he said. I am having a bad dream. And he stayed in the chair until she had gone back to bed and gone to sleep.
—
The next day he stood in the foyer, about to leave the apartment, when a light-headedness overtook him and his back seized up in pain. Neva was in the next room and heard a quick sound and she rushed to him. As he fell he reached and took hold of her head in his hands and began to explore her face. His eyes moved under heavy lids, darting, as he pulled her downward with him. He had her whole head in his grip as if she were some orb that he was clutching and examining for prophetic purposes.
When his curved back and then his head reached the floor his arms seemed to fall with a heavy weight and he had no choice but to let her go. That’s when she loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, saw his gray chest hairs rising and falling as if some wild creature were running over his body, making him shudder up and down, and called out to the housekeeper to phone an ambulance and kept talking to him, saying that everything would be all right.
It seemed inappropriate for her to get into the ambulance with him. She took a taxi and followed. The short trip to the hospital took only a few minutes. By the time they arrived Patrizia had been alerted and a little while later she was there, managing the doctors and speaking calmly into her phone, informing Alix and Jonathan and a few key people in Steve’s office. Everyone agreed that Poppy and the twins should not be disturbed while in school. And the whole world didn’t need to know. This was private. Neva would pick up the boys as usual and tell them then. In the midst of all the activity, confusion, and emotion, no one thought about who would tell Poppy.
As it turned out, the task fell to Neva. Poppy looked ashen, stricken for a few minutes, and then visibly set the pain aside, relegating it, Neva thought, to that place where images of Diana must live in Poppy’s mind. Poppy said she had a ton of homework and was going to a friend’s house to study.
—
Steve stayed in the hospital for several days undergoing numerous test
s. After a while the boys expressed a desire to see him and Neva brought them to the hospital after school. Walking down the brightly lit halls Felix thought about whether his father would live or die, what the nurses felt toward various patients, how the doctors never seemed to get tired, whether it made sense for all sick people to be housed together or if it would be more sensible to keep them at home, away from other infectious beings, even if that meant less access to the newest medical equipment. All these questions swirled in his head and made his brain tingle as if each atom had its own thoughts and feelings, and he felt himself glide down the halls as if he were a cloud of spinning electrons, a force of energy moving through space, not one person with a coherent set of beliefs but many thousands of thinking beings magnetically connected, orbiting, intersecting, bouncing off one another and held together with love, fear, some kind of cosmic, invisible glue. Roman appeared to have an entirely different relationship to the present events, as if questioning the circumstances of Steve’s hospitalization or the nature of life in the hospital or life itself, for that matter, were not an option or, worse, a waste of time. Felix could tell that Roman viewed any situation as a playing field of power and movement, a landscape in which to make progress but not to dwell. Felix accepted their opposing points of reference and yet he could not help feeling that Roman’s way of looking at things was not only more useful but more in keeping with Steve’s perspective and therefore made Roman more like Steve and, as a result, closer to Steve. Although Felix recognized that Roman did not actually feel very close to anyone, Felix could not help the stirrings of jealousy and loneliness brought about by the sensation that his outlook on the world made him essentially another kind of person from Roman and from Steve.
Felix knew that his father appreciated his sensitivity, even, at times, valued it as a type of intelligence that elevated Felix and made him special, but he knew that Steve believed in a world dominated by people who thought the way Roman thought, who looked on life as a game, a battle, a theater of war. Felix admired his father, wondered in awe at his power, sensed in his bones and blood that Steve was the personification of power, neither good nor bad just pure power, a thundering wordless force. This left Felix unsure of how to view himself. What he knew was that his way in the world was all words and sensations and thoughts and feelings. He was not power, but at least he knew that about himself.
So it came as a shock and a nauseating, sickening blow to see Steve in bed, in a hospital gown, hooked up with tubes to machinery and what appeared to be a dangling water balloon, his face drained of color, his hair matted in parts, tufted in others, his big hands immobile on the sheet, his lidded eyes like drawn shades in an empty room. Felix felt the giant weight of his father reduced to a fatty, bony, wispy body, a ragged vehicle for breath. Felix stopped far from the bed, took everything in, and only then slowly approached Steve. Roman ran into the room and went straight for the window, drank in the view of the coursing river, and then picked at a fruit basket on a table, taking a handful of grapes whose purple skins fading to the palest green near the stems were bursting with juice and flesh and a muscular pull when he plucked them from their branch. Dad, can I turn on the TV? were Roman’s first words to his father that day and, as far as Felix could remember later, his last.
When Patrizia appeared shortly thereafter she spoke quietly to Steve for a few minutes, conferred with the nurses and a doctor, and took the boys home. Felix placed his hand on Steve’s wrist as he said goodbye. Roman grabbed a banana. Neva was asked to stay until Jonathan showed up, which was expected to be sometime in the next hour. Steve was improving, according to all accounts, and Patrizia seemed relieved and ready for life to return to normal. As she left with the boys she pulled on her coat and swung her bag with a quotidian efficiency that conveyed an impression of moving on with things whether or not Steve improved, as if this were the appropriate way to behave. Neva could not tell if this was a false front covering anxiety, a complete denial of how frail Steve seemed, or if Patrizia were simply thinking of other things, if for her, as for Roman, life moved on, today was a game, and sentiment was for lesser creatures. It was impossible for Neva to know. All she could be sure of was that her own feelings were stormy, rough, and just below her own surface calm coursed a charging current of fear flowing into determination. The room was now empty except for Neva and Steve. She sat in the chair by his side. He was breathing, resting, not sleeping, rising, falling, not dead, alive.
—
She sits upright, watches the day fade, a March light being absorbed into the room, the medical equipment, the paint on the walls, the sheets. It is as if the room is thirsty for light. Steve lies still, breathing loudly. On the other side of the barely open door feet hustle, doors open, conveyances are wheeled, voices lift and lower and laugh, occasionally. Once she turns around in her chair and glances out the window where birds are dipping and gliding over the molten river, a barge slides along, cars race along the veins of highway that line the water, helicopters—she has flown in them—lift off on this gray day. When she turns back around something about Steve seems changed: he is breathing slightly more heavily. He says: There is no mystery. Or: This is history. Or something that sounds like that. His fingers pat the bed. She stands up and touches his head, which feels the same. She looks over the various pulsing and beeping machines and they make no sense to her but nevertheless she feels that something is amiss. She pushes a button for a nurse. Should she leave the room and go searching? Then if someone comes there will be nobody to explain. Should she wait patiently for a nurse or doctor? Then what if they come too late?
She decides to brave the hallway. Fluorescent air and the feeling that the ceiling is pressing down on her head, that everyone is carrying the ceiling around on their heads. She rushes first to the nurse’s station and finds a woman on the phone, a man filling out forms. No one has time for her. Her voice stretches into sounds but she is not entirely sure of what she is saying.
We need help in Mr. Zane’s room, pointing.
What for?
Something isn’t working.
What?
I’m not sure.
Someone will be there in a minute.
I don’t think we have a minute.
Is he breathing?
Yes.
We have a minute.
So she is looking for the doctor. She notices that he usually arrives from one particular elevator and bizarrely she decides to stand in front of the elevator as if he will magically appear. This is unlike her, this reliance on magic. The doors open and out wheels a woman in a chair and an orderly leading what appears to be a parade of people who are not the people she needs. She returns to the nurse’s station.
Can someone please come to the room?
Someone came to the room. There was no one there but him.
And how was he?
He was fine.
But he’s not fine.
Miss, would you like a pill? Something to calm you down? You’ve been here a long time.
You’re not a doctor.
Yes, I am a doctor.
Really?
Really, says the doctor.
Please come look at him again.
I looked. He’s fine.
Did you check all the machines?
Everything is okay. Go back home. Get some sleep, the doctor says and trots off.
She stands alone in the hallway and the activity disperses around her, things pulled away by a tide. She feels like a castaway. She staggers or feels as though she staggers back to his room. On the way she evokes no recognition in the doctors, nurses, patients, whom she passes. She is apparently invisible.
Back in the room he is talking with his eyes closed; his words drifting from phrase to phrase. She could make out:
Anyone who is really serious about this country would fix this carried interest foolishness…Of course I didn’t vote for a single one of them…Poppy, come home this instant and what is that article of nonclothing you have on…? Y
es, it’s true we really do not know much of anything. Can you believe it? Can you face it? The truth of how little we know? Our ignorance is vast like the ocean and what we understand is so tiny, so meager, it is not even a droplet of spit upon the waves…
His hands begin to arc and curve above the sheets, and his voice grows louder.
If I were a…
And the coughing starts again. A wrestling in his throat with mucus and saliva, a deep pulmonary argument raging in his chest. Neva scans all the machinery beside the bed, a flickering dashboard, and sees nothing she understands, nothing changed. A glance up the tube attached to the IV, where the clear liquid bobbles in the air, and she sees that it looks about the same as before, but of course there should be less of it, if it is dripping properly, if it is working, and now he is shaking as he coughs, she has pushed the button for the nurse but there is no way she is going to leave his side, and her arm reaches up, turns the bag of hanging water, untwists it from a position it has shifted into, perhaps earlier when the boys were there, moving around, knocking into things, and she gently tugs at the bag and she sees the liquid slide through the tube and the coughing subsides and she doesn’t know for sure if she has saved him but he is looking up at her and through the heavy lids there is a gratitude that she has never before witnessed.
Jonathan does not come. A nurse arrives and checks things and sees that they are fine and leaves. The time passes and Neva waits in the chair while Steve sleeps and she gets a text from Jonathan saying to stay there, he is running late. Her heart is still pounding. She has not forgotten the terror, it has not left her body. When Steve is deeply asleep, nearly inert, she stands over him and checks that he is breathing. She puts her hand on his chest. She talks to him. In the darkening room she whispers her story to him and he has no choice but to listen. She says she is telling him now because she is afraid she may never have another chance and he is the only person to whom she can tell her story. It does not take long, the truth. When she is finished she says she thinks that he knew most of it already but the full confession had to come from her—not confession, really, because she knows that she hasn’t done anything wrong, but nevertheless it feels like a confession.
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