Jill Ciment

by Heroic Measures (v5)

  When Ruth had cast her vote against the camera, she did it with galling righteousness, warning her neighbors, too young to remember, about giving up their privacy for false security. But once the system was up and running and their lobby played twenty-four hours a day on channel seventy-one, she had found herself tuning in from time to time, absorbed by the activity, oddly soothed by the steady bustle of life entering and exiting their building. When Alex had asked her what could be so engrossing about watching their neighbors come and go, she said, “Remember Mrs. Birukov sitting on the stoop all day long? We were so sure she was spying on us, that she was the FBI’s informant in the building. Maybe she was just an old woman who found solace in the hubbub.”

  When the front door closes behind the skinny boy, the long, narrow black-and-white lobby looks, to Ruth, no more or less foreboding than the long, narrow phosphorous green tunnel playing on all the other channels. Compared to the fate of one little dog, nothing else matters.

  How can he sleep at a time like this?

  How could she not? Fatigue pervades her every cell. The whirligig of imagery exhausts her. Whatever they might face tomorrow, rest will only help. She mutes the sound and goes to the medicine cabinet. All three shelves are overflowing. Alex’s prescriptions dominate the top one, hers the middle, Dorothy’s the bottom. She scours her shelf for her over-the-counter sleeping pills, a foil-backed, plastic sheet of eight perforated squares, each square holding a little blue diamond of sleep in its own air bubble. She finds the sheet, but the diamonds are gone. She must have swallowed the last one yesterday evening. She fingers through the rest of her shelf—expired penicillin, Lipitor, hemorrhoid cream, Advil, Aleve, Excedrin Migraine, an ancient jar of skin lotion, ear plugs—for some alternative (any label that warns of sleepiness). She checks Alex’s shelf—-Gas-X, Zantac, Nexium, Cystex, Sudafed, Proscar, Viagra, Avapro, Toprol, hydrocortisone, and one disintegrating roll of antacid chalk. She even searches Dorothy’s—Zubrin, Soloxine, heartworm pills, Advantage, chicken-flavored toothpaste, Atopica, Clomicalm, and a vial of sedatives for travel.

  She can’t be up all night, not tonight. She’ll descend into a vortex of panic and worries far more disturbing than anything she saw on television. She and Alex have to be up, showered, and dressed before Lily arrives. The young couple she’s bringing over might overlook the five flights of stairs, the water stain on the ceiling, but they’ll certainly take notice of a septuagenarian couple greeting them in their bathrobes.

  She reaches for Dorothy’s vial of travel sedatives and reads the label: one quarter tablet for dogs up to eleven pounds one half hour before traveling, or when needed. She tries to do the arithmetic. How many times does Dorothy’s weight go into hers? Her mind goes blank. She struggles with the childproof cap and pours two pills onto her palm. Placing them on her tongue (they taste like chicken), she turns on the faucet and drinks from the stream, like an animal. She half expects the very act of swallowing them to calm her, but she feels anything but quieted. She returns to the living room, covers Alex with a blanket, and shuts the lights. She mutes, but doesn’t turn off, the television. It will act as a night lamp should he awaken in the dark.

  She goes to their bedroom, changes into her nightgown, sets the alarm for seven, and puts it on her side of the bed. But she’s hardly ready to lie down and close her eyes. The sedative’s label instructed the dog’s owner to allow the pills a full half hour to work. It’s only been ten minutes.

  She wakes up their computer, asleep on a tiny desk next to the bed. She opens the icon for their dial-up server, a connection so slow that it alone sometimes puts her to sleep. When the search engine comes up, she types into its thin window, dog dachshund herniated disc. Six hundred and eight matches appear. She can’t get herself to click on any of them. She stares through the electric blue lines of Web addresses, as if they were the slats of a Venetian blind.

  Finally, she clicks the top link, a dachshund magazine. The cover features three dappled, shorthaired puppies about three months old, sunbathing near a swimming pool. Articles this month include All You Need to Know About Disk Disease and Spring Finds Many Puppies Available. She guides the cursor up to All You Need to Know About Disk Disease, but she can’t yet make herself open that door. Behind that door are nerves and bone and blood. She rolls the cursor down to Spring Finds Many Puppies Available. Behind that door is youth and spring. She forces herself to click on All You Need to Know About Disk Disease.

  The spinal cord is protected by membranes called the meninges. The innermost layer, the pia, contains the highly vascular network that delivers nutrients and removes wastes from the nervous system. The meninges are inverted by numerous sensory nerve fibers called meningeal nerves. When a disk herniates into the spinal canal, the meningeal nerves become compressed and inflamed …

  She stops reading: she already knows the article isn’t going to divulge the only answer she needs. Is Dorothy going to be okay? On either side of the text, in the left-and right-hand margins, are advertisements—dachshund calendars, doxie dolls, hot dog bun beds, dachshund jewelry, doxie duds. There is also a dachshund adopt/rescue site and a dachshund memorial garden with a grief-counseling chat room and a link to buy pet sympathy cards.

  Rainbow Bridge Cards

  Design your own card

  and send it to someone on the Net

  who’s lost a pet.

  Below is an example: a white rabbit in a field of grass. The message: My deepest sympathy for the loss of your rabbit. Ruth bursts out laughing, covers her mouth so as not to wake Alex, and then remembers he’s asleep in the living room. She scrolls down to the next example, a hamster in a wicker basket: Losing a precious furchild is so difficult. When she laughs this time, she suspects that the breathy explosions escaping from her throat are more hysteria than hilarity.

  The next service offered by the Rainbow Bridge Company is personalized death notices. In Memoriam the card line is called. The example: a black-and-white studio portrait of an Irish setter with today’s date, January 9, 2004, and an inscription that reads: It is a sad day in our lives. Joey “Oggy” Richards, our best friend, and our son, died of heart failure. Marty and Mary Richards.

  Ruth quits, signs off, clicks on Sleep. If only sleep were that easy. She climbs into bed, but she still isn’t drowsy, despite the sedatives and the fatigue pooled in her limbs. She reaches for the book on her night table, The Portable Chekhov. When she first retired, she read every new novel praised by the Times, a languid pleasure nearly impossible while she was busy teaching, but lately, she’s can only bear the company of long-dead Russians.

  The table of contents includes: At Christmas Time, An Attack of Nerves, Heartache, A Calamity, The Man in a Shell, The Lady With the Pet Dog. She opens to The Lady With the Pet Dog, an old favorite.

  A new person, it was said, had appeared on the esplanade; a lady with a pet dog. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov, who had spent a fortnight at Yalta and had got used to the place, had also begun to take an interest in new arrivals. As he sat in Vernet’s confectionery shop, he saw, walking on the esplanade, a fair-haired young woman of medium height, wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian was trotting behind her.

  And afterwards he met her in the public garden and in the square several times a day. She walked alone, always wearing the same beret and always with the white dog; no one knew who she was and everyone called her simply “the lady with the pet dog.”

  “If she is here alone without her husband or friends,” Gurov reflected, “it wouldn’t be a bad thing to make her acquaintance.”

  The first thing Ruth notices is that the little dog, which she had remembered as vital to the story, isn’t nearly as important as she imagined. The Pomeranian is only a prop—an excuse really—for Chekhov to get the lovers to meet.

  He beckoned invitingly to the Pomeranian, and when the dog approached him, shook his finger at it. The Pomeranian growled: Gurov threatened it again.

  The lady glanced at him and at once dropped her eyes.
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  “He doesn’t bite,” she said and blushed.

  “May I give him a bone?”

  After their first tryst, before either is aware of the profound love awaiting them, “the lady with the pet dog” sits dejected on the hotel bed, weeping with remorse, while Gurov, a little bored and impatient, cuts a slice of watermelon and eats it “without haste,” Ruth’s favorite line in the story. She would try to get her tenth graders, mostly teenagers from the Jacob Riis projects, who had never been in love, though some of the girls were pregnant, and who didn’t know where Russia was, never mind Yalta, to understand the perfection of that detail, the promise of trans formative love implied in the callous act of enjoying a watermelon slice while the woman you’ve just made love with cries. Chekhov doesn’t mention the Pomeranian in this scene, but Ruth knows the little dog must be somewhere in his mistress’s hotel room bearing witness.

  She can hear sirens on First Avenue; a helicopter passes overhead. She looks down again, but she can no longer focus. Who can concentrate on a slice of watermelon with everything that’s going on?

  ALEX SURFACES. THE LIVING ROOM’S ONLY light source is the muted television. Ruth has covered him with a blanket. He rises from the sofa to look for her. It’s not until he locates Ruth—wherever he wakes up, whatever the hour—that he feels oriented.

  She’s asleep in their bed, supine, breathing evenly, her face empty of worry. The reading lamp is shining. Her glasses rest askew on her nose. Her Portable Chekhov lies tented on her chest. He has loved her for so long that he can no longer distinguish between passion and familiarity. He slips off her glasses, puts away her book, douses the light, and returns to the living room. The windows face north, in the direction of the tunnel. If ten thousand gallons of gasoline had exploded, surely he’d see a red glow. The night sky is as monochromatic as always.

  He goes to his studio, the back bedroom facing the air-shaft, and switches on the lamp over his worktable. He never approaches his unfinished tome, especially in the middle of the night, without wonder and fear. Wonder that it’s still alive; fear that, with the next mark, he will kill it.

  Sending away for their FBI files had been Ruth’s idea. When the Freedom of Information Act declassified the cold war documents in the late nineties, all their old lefty friends, even those who had traded in their manifestos for the Torah, had sent away for theirs. You couldn’t dine at someone’s house without the files coming out, if they weren’t already on display, next to the photo album. The length of the dossier was a point of pride, the bigger the better, a vita of activism, proof that the wizened hostess, who had to use a magnifying glass to read about her glory days, had once been a tigress. “Nine hundred and six pages,” she would tell her guests. “What a waste of taxpayers’ money. A school could have been built for what it cost to spy on me. Who knew I was so important?”

  When his and Ruth’s files finally arrived, three years after they sent for them, he could see that Ruth was a little disappointed by the page count. “How could Bernice”— the wizened hostess—“merit over nine hundred pages when all she did was sign a few petitions?” Ruth had said, and he understood. Didn’t he feel the same way when a less deserving artist rated a bigger review?

  At first, he and Ruth read the files as if they were entries in a journal they’d forgotten they’d kept: Cohen, Alex (b. 1928), New York City. Honorable Discharge from the army, 1946. Cohen née Kushner, Ruth (b. 1930). Graduated City College, 1952. Subjects married on April 22, 1953. Arrested November 15, 1954, disobeying court order: marching without a permit: Citizens Against the H-Bomb. November 26, 1955, at 1:55p.m., informant observed subject, Ruth Cohen, entering a teacher’s union meeting. On May 6, 1956, confidential informant of known reliability, turned over to the NYC Office, The Nation, with information that the subject, Alex Cohen, was illustrating for the Communist organ. Informant told NYC Office, that subject, Ruth Cohen, assigned Anton Chekhov, a known Russian writer, to high school students.

  When they finished the book on them, they reread it, this time trying to ferret out from the scant clues, who, exactly had betrayed them. “October 12, 1967, neighbor was interviewed telephonically She was most cooperative and expressed great admiration for the FBI. She told agent that subjects’ trash pail contained remnants of a banner for The Lower East Side Women Against the Vietnam War” Which neighbor? Mrs. Birukov, the old Ukrainian who practically lived on the stoop?

  Ruth eventually tired of the intrigue and went back to reading fiction, but not Alex. The beauty of the pages had captivated him. The sheets came blackened out, or partially obscured, the names of informants shrouded. What remained was sheer abstraction, the very shapes of subterfuge, the silhouettes of duplicity. The idea of illustrating the actual files came to him months later in a used-book shop. He saw a copy of the Book of Hours and knew instantly how he’d utilize those pages. In place of crosses and saints, martyrs, and angels, he’d paint A-bombs, Mouseketeers, two-tone refrigerators, Khrushchev, and portraits of him and Ruth. Instead of ornate, delicate gold-leaf borders, he’d stencil on the perforated patterns of vintage nineteen-fifties paper doilies. Instead of the Bible’s Psalms, he’d copy the FBI’s accusations.

  Alex sits down at his worktable, a door on two saw-horses. All he needs to complete page fifty-one is a Prussian blue line around the edge, and a final pattern of cardinal red stenciled over the chrome green borders. He searches his worktable for just the right doily to use as the pattern, one with a little geometry, but all he finds are flower designs. Daisies aren’t what this composition needs. He’ll have to cut a stencil himself. He reaches for his X-Acto knife and a thin piece of cardboard. Holding the knife like a pen, he carves a perfect triangle, about the size of a sequin, in the board. He then stabs the freed shape with the knife’s point, and gently excises it. He repeats this cut thirty more times and thirty more specks are excised. His vision begins blurring, but he won’t allow himself to look away. If he looks away, he’ll break the laser point of concentration drilling out each design, and his attention will scatter.

  Everywhere.

  It will include not only the knifepoint, but also his old fingers gripping the knife’s silver waist. It will take in not only the manuscript page he is finishing, but all six hundred and ninety-nine pages still waiting to be illuminated, and his studio filled with a lifetime of work in the terrified city on the panicked island by the nervous continent.

  In such a wide worldview, Alex fears his ebbing hope that art might make a difference and Ruth’s crumbling belief that a difference can still be made, will surely get lost, and then what will they be left with?

  A sick little dog.

  ALARMS BLARE. HUMANS RUN PAST EVERY which way. The nearest one, a male nurse, springs open the cage next to Dorothy’s and reaches inside. Still wrapped in a yellow towel, eyes milky, tongue lolling, the Chihuahua is carried past Dorothy’s cell and laid on a steel table. The nurse begins banging the creature’s lifeless ribs with his fist. “Get Doctor Griffon, fast,” he shouts to another nurse, a female, who is trying to calm the other restless dogs stacked in cages.

  Despite the liquid tranquility dripping into Dorothy’s neck from the plastic cloud overhead, she is nervous, too. She knows the male nurse isn’t going to rouse the Chihuahua, no matter how hard he beats it, and that the female nurse isn’t going to convince the other caged animals that Death isn’t in the room.

  Dorothy is not staying here. She looks for a way out. If she can just get her front claws under a wire or two, she might be able to loosen them and squeeze through. But her claws never catch a wire. Her nails barely scratch the surface. She is so weakened by pain and paralysis that all she manages is to feebly swat at the bars, like an old cat.

  “Where do you think you’re going, little mama?”

  Dorothy freezes. She doesn’t whimper. She doesn’t raise her eyes to see who or what is speaking. She keeps her head down, her posture small and submissive. If she doesn’t look up, maybe Death will forget about her
and choose another?

  Death unlatches her cage and reaches for her this time. Dorothy bares her little yellow teeth at Death. When he doesn’t take her seriously, she snaps at him.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Death says. His mustachioed face fills her open cage door as he reads the plastic hospital tag around her neck. “I bet they call you Dottie, don’t they mama?”

  Death knows her name.

  She snarls again and Death quickly steps back this time. Dorothy doesn’t let down her guard though. She’s seen birds fly into windows, a rat die of poison, the remains of a deer on the parkway. Dorothy suspects she isn’t going to stave off Death with a mere show of teeth.

  Death returns with a muzzle. He will win any contest of strength. She changes her strategy. When he tries to muzzle her, she licks his fingers.

  “Okay, mama, you don’t have to wear it.”

  He slips a surprisingly warm hand under her and carries her and the liquid cloud out of the cage. He holds her tight and high against his chest, like she is his own baby. From that angle, Dorothy sees the Chihuahua still being pummeled by a fist. Death ferries Dorothy down a long, brightly lit corridor into a small, dark room with a huge machine. Death’s assistant, a female nurse, is waiting for them.

  “How’s the Chihuahua doing?” she asks.

  “Don’t ask,” Death says. He strokes Dorothy’s head; she’s trembling. “You want me to shave her?”