by Alon Preiss
Henry limped back to the office, seemed to have a normal late morning, wandered out to lunch and collapsed in a Beaver Street diner.
Apparently, according to the doctor who pronounced Henry dead, a clot formed in the area of the bruise, got loose in the bloodstream and flowed to his brain, causing a massive stroke. The doctor made two additional comments. First, that Henry was in excellent physical condition at the time of his death. Second, that Henry was actually lucky not to have survived the stroke.
Daniel wondered how a thirty-eight year old man who dies of a stroke after a strange leg press accident can ever be called “lucky.” He later learned, accidentally, that this is a concept known as “conditional probability,” in which one examines mitigating factors before scientifically assessing whether any individual can really be considered “lucky” in any particular situation. Mathematically, Daniel was told, this is represented as “the probability of A, given B.” If one suffers a stroke of a certain magnitude, and evidence shows that more than 50% of all victims of such strokes live on in an irreversible vegetative state, which is actually worse than death, then one can accurately be described as “lucky” if one dies.
Daniel worked through the day as though nothing had happened, then fell into bed in his lonely apartment. He picked up the phone to call Susan at around midnight, but hung up after two rings. Deep down he realized that Susan would know it was he who had phoned and had then hung up after two rings.
Somehow he slept, waking at 3:00 in the morning; death loomed fresh in the room.
The day after Henry’s death, the office seemed self-consciously subdued; a forced mournfulness enveloped everyone, and the door of the newly empty office was shut tightly, perhaps even locked. The other employees tiptoed past Daniel’s office, and if they happened to bump into him at the coffee machine, he nodded solemnly, and they nodded solemnly back. How about that? one fellow remarked. I just saw him yesterday. He was alive and well just yesterday. There was really nothing much to say about Henry, so they talked about the weather, but cheerlessly. Daniel could still discuss the weather as well as the next man. It was a cold day, he would admit sadly. It was awful and cold and he’d forgotten his scarf!
Finally, in the early afternoon, an executive secretary summoned Daniel to the office manager’s room, where Ms. Margaret Spencer, pen in hand and legal pad on desk, asked Daniel, as Henry’s friend, as perhaps his best friend in the office, who he thought should receive flowers.
“No one,” Daniel said. “A girlfriend, maybe? He had no one special, but he was seeing this girl.”
She thought a moment, but she seemed to find this unacceptable.
“Maybe his ex-wife?” she asked. “Sometimes these dead marriages still seem like family.”
“No,” Daniel replied. “No kids, no reason to see each other. A lot of hostility, I think. Maybe hatred.”
He blushed. Real life, here in the office, and so damn much of it.
“Parents?”
“It’s funny,” Daniel said. “One dead, the other vanished.”
“Siblings?”
“One sister,” Daniel said. “Sandra.” He winced a little.
“All right then,” Margaret said. “Mission accomplished.” She smiled at Daniel, then began scribbling out a message of condolence.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Daniel said suddenly. “We didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to him.”
Margaret Spencer looked up from her legal pad, a 50-year-old woman in a well-pressed suit. Her voice was gentle. “We never get a chance to say goodbye, Daniel,” she said. “You know that.”
The next day he called Susan from the office and said he had to see her. She said OK, with a combination of optimism and apprehension that made Daniel feel terribly guilty. Had she heard the news? Apparently not. Had anyone told Rachel? Daniel shied away from these sorts of situations; he wouldn’t be the one to break the news to anyone.
He rushed over to her apartment at ten that evening, determined to reaffirm his love for her and to propose marriage. When he arrived, she was smiling, nervously, in the doorway. It would be a wonderful smile to wake up to every morning for the rest of his life. In her living room, he told her that he loved Natalie, that he and his wife were reuniting, that this time it would last. Susan burst into tears, and he did, too. “I really thought we would get married eventually,” she said. “I thought you would divorce your wife, and we would have a beautiful wedding, and that we would be in love forever. Stupid, right?”
He nodded, and her tears stalled.
“So screw you, anyway, Daniel,” she said softly and angrily.
He tried to explain.
This was as difficult for him as it was for her, he insisted.
She sat on the couch with her back to him, staring out the window at the modern, skyscraping apartment building across the street.
“We’ve had some good times,” he said, “and that’s how we should remember this.”
Susan whirled around and, in one motion, let fly a vase filled with flowers, which crashed against the wall inches from Daniel’s head, showering him with luke-warm water and ceramic shards. This was a side of Susan he had never before seen, but her behavior was neither inconsistent nor unjustified. Flustered, he left her crying in her living room.
In the living room, crying, Susan could only think of the way Daniel tied his tie the next morning rather than stuffing it into his pocket or just hanging it around his neck. Susan fell in love with his sad face, with his years of marriage, with his wedding picture, with the tan mark on his ring finger, with his devotion to a beautiful wife, with her devotion to him. Susan could always see his wife’s beauty when she looked into Daniel’s eyes. She fell in love with his tender attempts to compensate for so many mistakes made with another woman. She fell in love with all those faithful nights in the dark, past and present. He was faithful to the end, Susan would say later, but not faithful to me. The spirit went first, then later the flesh.
As he rushed from her apartment, Susan whispered, “Please, just don’t go. Please stay.” But he was already in the hallway, halfway to the elevator. Had he heard her plea, he would not have left; his heart would have melted, he would have gently sat down beside Susan on her couch, and he would have held her and eventually she would have stopped crying; after a moment or two spent comforting her, he would have given up his halfhearted attempt to abandon Susan, and he would have sworn never again to think about such a foolish thing.
But he did not hear her beg him to stay, and so he took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out of the building, and he felt the cold of that terrible night slap him in the face. And when he returned to his own apartment he realized that this was a terrible mistake, that he loved Susan now, that he would always love Susan, and that he would never be able to forget her. Out of habit, he telephoned Henry’s home number and learned to his puzzlement that the line was still active, that Henry’s telephone voice mail still clicked on after four rings. Without thinking, Daniel found himself speaking, leaving Henry a long, heartfelt message, telling him how much he missed him and how badly he needed some pithy advice. Outside Daniel’s window, the world seemed colder and darker.
When he was young, his parents had been killed; the loss had devastated him, and he had cried for weeks; the idea of moving away and living with his relatives had sickened him, and he had cried a little more. His own mortality, however, had kept a safe distance. When he was seven his grandfather had died. His parents sat down to talk with him about death, but there was nothing that he didn’t already know, and nothing that troubled him about the concept. The fragile existence of the elderly had little relevance to a seven-year-old boy, especially one who tripped and fell on hard concrete at least every other day and was seldom the worse for it.
But in the wake of Henry’s collapse, he now felt his strength waning. Life itself seemed unreliable. In a way, Daniel had been redefining Henry’s essence over the past few months; he had ceased to be an i
ndividual in his own right and had become a specter of Daniel’s future. For that reason, or perhaps others not yet considered, Daniel felt an urgent need to avert what he saw as the obvious consequences of his separation. Superstition, perhaps, but before a week had gone by, he appeared at his estranged wife’s studio, flowers in hand.
“Daniel,” Natalie said, surprised. “Flowers.”
“Probably stupid,” Daniel said. “Just turning up like this. You might have had a man here.”
Natalie smiled. “So I would have asked you to come back later.”
He nodded sheepishly.
“That would have been pretty awkward, huh?” she said, teasing him.
“I suppose not,” he said. He still stood in the doorway.
“Come in,” Natalie said. “No men. In my studio anyway. Right now, anyway. I’ve just been sitting here day after day, waiting for you to come back to me.”
He walked into the studio, a room on the top floor of an old building downtown; sun streamed in from a skylight. Pizza and Chinese food boxes were piled up in the kitchen. “I’ve been working pretty actively,” she said.
He was surprised that she wanted to talk about her work. “Inspired lately, are you?”
“Yeah,” she replied, laughing. “Ideas keep coming, and I’ve been dying to know what you think.” Then, more quietly, “I've thought of calling you. You know, just to have you come over here and tell me what you think of my paintings. But I didn’t think it was fair, after I told you to get the hell out of my life.” She looked up at him. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.”
She began turning canvasses around. All the paintings were large and mid-size works depicting whole cities destroyed by fire and disease, dramatic and shocking tableaux with brush strokes so violent that they almost seemed to move. The feeling of lives destroyed on such a vast scale filled him with sadness, although the people in the paintings were undetailed, very small, dehumanized – the cities were dying, and the people themselves, the urban residents, seemed little more than an afterthought.
It was a limited subject, to be sure, but it seemed to suit Natalie’s needs for the moment. He could think of only one possible subtext, which he kept to himself for now.
He complimented her on her exploding cities; she remarked on his new haircut.
“I know about this guy,” he said. “I saw him on the street with you. Really handsome.”
“Alec,” she said, sitting down on the couch. “Coming to an end anyway, I think. He had a lot of connections in the art world, so I guess I’ll always be grateful to him. For helping me professionally.” She looked away from Daniel. “And for the company, in a difficult time ...”
“Yeah.” Daniel sat down next to her on the couch. “Well, I hope you like the flowers.”
“You know,” Natalie said. “Alec is younger than me. The age was, for a while, just perfect. But it was doomed from the start.”
Daniel shook his head.
“Anyone who doesn’t grab hold of you forever is an idiot, a criminal.”
Natalie laughed. Daniel told her no other woman was like her, and she agreed, and he said that he could hardly bear to think about the pain he had caused her, that the memory of the sadness he had seen in her beautiful eyes still made him cry in the night, and she lowered her gaze. They had a drink together and reminisced about their early life; maybe they had just taken a wrong turn at a badly labeled fork in the road, Natalie suggested, and Daniel said he thought that was a very, very good metaphor. Natalie smiled. Her smile made him nervous; this was a new smile, a phony smile intended to cause no trouble, to calm troubled waters. This smile was lying to him. But Daniel was lying to Natalie with every word. For some reason, none of this made any difference to either of them.
Several weeks later, on the phone from his office, he asked Natalie whether the paintings were really about the marriage. His wife insisted that they were really about a bunch of screwed-up cities, and that was really all. There was no subtext to her work, and, come to think of it, there had been nothing really wrong with their marriage, so far as she could tell, at least nothing analogous to genocide on a massive scale. Daniel said he agreed, and they both came to the conclusion that why they’d nearly divorced in the first place was one for the historians to debate.
While Daniel sought to protect himself by painstakingly reconstructing every element of his old life, Irina chose instead to leave her previous identity behind, to pretend it had never existed, as though she had been born the instant she pulled the trigger for the first time. After the blood-soaked night in Moscow, Irina did not return to Yaroslavl, and she did not make contact with her bosses at the factory where she had once hoped to work for the rest of her life, nor with the boy in her hometown whose marriage proposal was still open and unanswered. She didn’t tell Tatiana what had happened to her that night, nor did she explain why Viktor’s car had been driven away by strangers. She could not even admit to herself what had happened that night, and so she erased it from her mind. Now, against her will, she had been separated from the humble destiny that she had accepted as her own, and she wanted to test Tatiana’s ideas, her thesis that the mafia could be used as some sort of genie in a magic bottle, that if the appropriate spell were uttered, she might have instant glory and fame, just like that. “I was thinking,” she said, sitting on the floor in Tatiana’s dark Moscow apartment, leaning against the wall. “How could our parents tell us great magical stories when we are little, and then expect us to work in a factory?” She had imagined other things for herself, but she had never been sure what. Ivory mansions, endless green lawns, horses thundering across wild plains, sunshine in the summer, fields of purple flowers in the spring, snowcapped mountain peaks in the winter.
The words sounded naive and silly as they escaped from her lips. She fell silent. Well anyway, she explained, looking down at the floor, she was not the smartest girl in Yaroslavl, but she had been one of the prettier factory workers, for whatever that was worth.
Tatiana nodded, and she suddenly thought of a story. “My father said, when he was a young man, teenage girls would hang around seaports and sleep with foreign sailors in exchange for blue jeans.” She smiled. “For blue jeans! Now I’ve hear that in America people walk around wearing Soviet army uniforms that people sell for hundreds of dollars. We got out of Afghanistan, we had too many army uniforms, and someone’s sold them in America and made his fortune.”
“I wish,” Irina said, “that the government still advertised for people to go East and build the country. You know, that propaganda about the pioneer spirit, patriotism, nationalism, and then and other. I wouldn’t even care if they really sent me to live in a swamp for the rest of my life. I’d get a little money from the government. I’d marry a man who drank too much vodka, and I’d know I could rely on him because by the time he’d turned thirty he would have lost all his teeth, and his breath would stink, and he’d have drunk until his brain was gone, and so no other woman would want him, not even the local toureks. And we’d go to town once a month and watch happy films from the Stalinist era at the local cinema.” She smiled. “It sounds better, you know, than some futures I could imagine. At least I’d be safe.”
Just a few years earlier, when Tatiana and Irina were fifteen, they took a bus to Moscow for the weekend, carrying a little money they put together to sleep on the floor of a Moscow apartment for two nights. They sneaked into Domtorista, a discotheque on Vernadsky Avenue set up to entertain foreigners. Tatiana left on the arm of a young man from – where was it? Neither of them remembered. Irina insisted that her friend left with a black man from Mozambique, or maybe even a North Korean! or a Vietnamese! but Tatiana said that it had been a regular white boy from East Germany or Hungary ... who knew? In the end, she had broken free and run off. The young man spoke no Russian, and something in his eyes frightened her. She found Irina outside the disco, and the two of them walked back to the Metro together. On the way, they passed a foreign students dormito
ry. A teenage Russian girl was climbing the wall, trembling and stumbling, her grip tenuous, as a young man beckoned to her from a window on the eleventh floor.
Irina didn’t want to endanger Tatiana, so she left that day. She stayed for a while in a squat in a decrepit building in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Moscow. The neighborhood was filled with limitchiks: uneducated workers from the poorer republics – Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan – who had been brought to Moscow to paint walls and do menial labor. These days, with the empire in decline and the wall-painting business somewhat diminished, the forgotten limitchiks had formed gangs and frequently wandered into the center of Moscow – even the comparatively lush surroundings of Gorky Street – just to knock Muscovites around, curse at them, and snatch the occasional purse. Irina enjoyed the company of the other squatters, poets, musicians, and other anti-capitalists who amounted to modern-day refuseniks, but she didn’t like to walk through the streets, and looked forward to leaving this neighborhood, when she would no longer be afraid. And so one day she took the train into the center of Moscow, borrowed a black dress from Tatiana and stood by the bar in the crowd at the Myetelitza Restaurant, surrounded by women in sparkling, almost electric dresses, big hair and Yugoslavian shoes. As she’d expected, she met a young man who would promise to protect her.
Like Viktor, he was a young man of little charm, but he bought her dinner, and also helped her with money so that she could move out of the squat. And so for the moment Irina felt safe and protected, and she believed that she had won some hope for the future, even if, as she realized was probably the case, it would all prove to be illusory and fleeting.
That summer, the young man took Irina back to Sochi. She watched the men and women, dressed as well as they could, wandering up and down the broadways, showing off; they danced in a rundown hall, listening to a dated, sad dance band. The old women were still in the train stations, but now they were more aggressive; cheap bastard, one shouted at Irina’s lover when he ignored her offers of lodging. They stayed at a five-story hotel on the beach where, so long ago, the Communist officials would have slept, back when her family had beamed with pleasure at their one room cabin.