I wasn’t sure about leaving Daddy like that. As we were going through the door, I pulled Mommy’s hand and said:
‘Mommy. Will Daddy be OK?’
I knew this was kind of a stupid thing to say, because he is dying. But I think she knew what I meant. She bent down to whisper in my ear, but I could see she was still looking at Bill Clinton and the other people who were moving out of the room.
‘Yes, darling. The doctors will come straight back if anything happens.’
‘But he knows, doesn’t he?’
‘What?’ She had started to pull me away. Bill Clinton and his friends and the doctors had gone through the door.
‘Daddy. He knows. He can hear. He knows we’re leaving him on his own.’
‘Darling …’ Even though she was saying darling, her voice had gone harder, like it does when she’s cross, ‘… Daddy – of course, yes, he can hear everything – but remember, Daddy, you know, he’s still a grown-up … he’s been on his own before, many times. And we’re really not going to be very long. So, Colette … could we hurry up, please.’
I let her pull me. As I went through the door I looked back at Daddy. I couldn’t see him too clearly because of all the machines, but I said goodbye to him in my head. I tried not to make it too big a goodbye because I didn’t want it to feel like I was saying goodbye goodbye. I didn’t want him to think that.
* * *
Harvey strides under the glass of the Guggenheim Pavilion, looking out towards Madison Avenue, his eyes already searching for a taxi before he has left the building. He has decided: he will go and pick up his stuff at Eli and Freda’s apartment and then go straight to JFK. He does not know when the next plane to London is – plus, it crosses his mind, doesn’t it cost more to buy a ticket at the airport? – but fuck it, he thinks: I’m gone. I’m outtahere. In his head, he lets himself revel in the diction one last time.
People pass him, ill ones in, healthy ones out. He fishes his iPhone out of his pocket: the battery shows only a small sliver of red. He taps favourites star and calls Stella. It rings twice.
‘Hello?’ The sleep-slurred voice, again.
‘Shit! Darling, sorry. Shit.’
‘Harvey?’
‘Yes, sorry. I forgot about the time difference. Again. Shit. It’s the middle of the night with you …’
‘Is everything all right? Are you OK?’
Before he can answer, he hears a voice in the background say: ‘Dad?’
‘I’m fine.’ says Harvey. ‘Well, I’m not fine. But I’m fine. I’m not ill. I’m coming home. Is Jamie with you?’
‘Yes, he came into our bed. ’Bout two hours ago.’
Harvey’s present energy, an arrow speeding away from the circus surrounding his father, is deflected by this callback to his domestic life, the thing his son does of coming up to sleep with his parents, even though, at nearly ten, he is too old for that. Stella, properly awake now, takes the silence as reproach.
‘He’s disrupted by you being away for so long.’ Disrupt: it is their soft word, their euphemism, for their son’s reaction to breaks in his routine. ‘You’re coming home?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right now?’
‘Yes.’
She is quiet. Harvey knows what is coming.
‘Is he …?’
‘No. The old bastard seems to be hanging on for ever. But I’ve had enough. Look, I’m so sorry to ring you so late – and Jamie’s already woken you up earlier.’
‘Dad?’
Harvey stops. He is at the exit doors. He can see the taxis passing, stop-starting in the traffic – a faltering yellow stream, not unlike, he thinks, the one produced by his own knackered prostate.
‘Jammy?’
Stella puts him on. ‘Hi, Dad.’
‘Hi, Jammy.’ This is what he has called him since he was a baby. An old man in blue pyjamas being wheeled past him looks up sharply as he says it, as if he might be mocking him. It makes Harvey aware of how he should probably stop calling Jamie it, but that would disrupt him. It passes his mind that many parents fear their children growing older, losing their childlikeness. ‘You couldn’t sleep?’
‘No.’
‘I’m coming home soon. Now, in fact.’
‘Is Grandpa dead?’
‘No. No, he’s not.’
‘So why are you coming home?’
He could hear a familiar catch in his son’s voice, an angry tremor. ‘Because …’
‘You said you had to go because Grandpa was dying. You said you would come back when he was dead.’
‘Yes, I know but …’
‘You’ve been away for fifty-one days. There’s no point in coming back now. That would be a waste of those days.’
‘Jamie. Jammy. Listen …’
‘It would be a waste, Dad. It would be a waste of all the time you weren’t here. You mustn’t start something you don’t finish. It’s a bad investment.’
‘Can you put Mummy back on, please?’
And bang, he does, even though Harvey knows his son is fixed and fervent in his position.
‘Stell …’
‘Harvey, I’m not sure this is a good idea. Whatever’s happened, I don’t want you – I don’t want you regretting coming back too soon.’
Outside, Madison Avenue seems to beckon to him. There was a band called Madison Avenue once, wasn’t there? They sung ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’. Perhaps he should check it out on Spotify. Or they were a girl band, weren’t they? YouTube, then.
‘Regret. That’s OK,’ says Harvey. ‘You know what Eli said once, in one of his last interviews, when they asked him if he had any regrets? “I am besieged by regret, as is any thinking person …”’
‘Yeah. Bollocks to that.’
Immediately, he hears a distant laugh, followed by the words ‘Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks.’
‘Now you’ve set him off.’
‘I know. But honestly, darling, I don’t care if your stupid Great Man dad embraced regret. Which he didn’t anyway. That’s just something he said: I can’t think of anyone who lived his life less held back by the possibility of regret.’
‘Stella …’
‘Bollocks!’
‘But either way, he’s in a coma. If he ever did, he doesn’t have any regrets any more. But you might. You will …’
Harvey takes a deep, self-conscious breath; he feels the air going into and out of his lungs. A family with three children, all apparently packed with health, bursts through the door: the mother shuffles them away from him, making him wonder if he looks mad.
‘I miss you, Stella. I really deeply miss you. And Jamie. It’s not just that I don’t want to stay here. I want to come home.’
‘Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks.’
Even though he knows his son is just echolalaing, he wants to say, No, it’s not. He really wants to be there. He doesn’t want to be in Manhattan any more. He wants to be in Kent, on one of those bright winter’s days when the county’s beauty is at its bleakest; when the air refuses to snow, and frost spreads across its raped-by-motorways countryside.
‘I miss you too, darling. So much.’
‘I should let you sleep. I’ll be back by the morning. Your morning.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Have you at least said goodbye?’
‘To who?’
‘To your dad.’
‘Oh Christ, Stella … not you too.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what Colette’s been trying to get me to do. Freda told her that in some mystical way he can hear everything, if you – I dunno – if you say it with enough love, or something. I’ve tried once or twice but I just feel like a twat.’
‘Well … OK … I just think …’
He never finds out what she thinks, because the phone goes down, the blue earth re-emerging complacently onto the screen. He looks at it. No great thoughts come to him about his tiny place in this vast universe. A man comes through the door and barges into
him. He looks up: it is a doctor, clean-shaven, wall-eyed, who is staring at him in an oddly intense way, as if Harvey should have known not to get in his way. Something about the man’s features touches his memory, but before Harvey’s hyper-recall for faces can kick in, he moves on, without a word. Harvey says ‘sorry’ to his retreating back, even though he is blameless.
The sun comes out. The sky seems to pour through Peggy Guggenheim’s glass. Turned around, facing back towards the hospital, still a little troubled by the sense that he has seen the doctor somewhere before, Harvey Gold thinks: OK. There is someone I need to say goodbye to.
* * *
He walks faster, convinced that the sudden break of sunlight bodes well for his destiny. He looks up and into it. He can look straight at the sun because of his bad eye, if he keeps his other one closed. If he does that, all he sees is light.
He does not know exactly where to go. But he has a plan. He needs a doctor. A small part of his mouth rises into a smirk at the thought, feeling the tiny smarts of the shaved upper lip: he needs a doctor – there will be some who think in a different way. From what Lisa has told him, he knows that he will need to go up, so he waits by the elevators; and here they are, two of them, one black and one white, coming through the doors talking to each other as they walk.
‘Hi,’ he says, standing in their way. They look at him, blank. ‘Do either of you know Dr Ghundkhali?’
‘Ghundkhali? He’s head of Geriatrics, isn’t he?’ says the black one.
‘Yes,’ says the white one. ‘He’s the one who’s been on TV lately. He’s got that writer guy in his care.’
‘Oh, right,’ he says. ‘Because I need to speak to him about some test results.’ He has thought about this sentence for some time. Because I need to see him sounded not enough: they might ask why. So this is what he has chosen. I need to see him about some test results. Saying it now, though, it feels hokey, like something from a daytime soap opera. They will see through him. His heart beats hard, sounding in his head like it did through the stethoscope.
But they do not. Jesus and Joseph Smith are surely on his side. ‘Uh, well, you wanna go to Geriatrics,’ says the black one. ‘Fourteenth floor. Although I don’t know if he’ll be there right now …’
A drop of fear forms in his stomach: have they moved him? ‘Why?’
‘’Cos of Clinton,’ says the white one.
‘Clinton?’
‘You don’t know? Where have you been, man?’
‘I …’
‘Hey, Matt,’ says the black one. ‘Don’t give him a hard time. He’s just trying to do his job.’ He smiles and does a head-throw towards his friend, indicating apology for him. ‘Bill Clinton’s in today. Visiting the writer guy …’
‘Oh,’ he says. He feels his heart fall. ‘Does that mean … does it mean there’ll be a big crowd of people up there? Maybe I should come back another time.’
‘Uh … well, Clinton and his people came in like over an hour ago, so they’re probably on the way out by now. They may not even be up there any more, probably. There’s not much talking to the patient that can be done, from what I understand …’
‘I think there’s some kind of reception for Bill in the Annenberg Building. That’s where they’ll be now.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t want to go over there. If I were you, I’d just go up to Geriatrics and wait. Shouldn’t be too long.’
‘OK.’
‘Just look for a huge black man.’
‘Much more huge and black than me.’
‘Yeah. He stands outside the writer guy’s room, day and night. What is his name? Not the black guy, the writer guy?’ The black one shrugs. ‘Do you remember?’ The white one says to him. He shakes his head. ‘It was the one whose wife died in a suicide pact.’
‘And he didn’t, of course.’
‘Yeah. Complicated.’
‘Clever, some would say.’
He cannot bear this. But perhaps he needs to hear it; it will impel him on. The elevator tings. In a second, the doors will open. He moves off without a word. Behind him, he hears:
‘Hey? You OK?’
He has no need to speak to them any more, but he does. He turns back, to the white man and the black man.
‘Why is he here?’
‘Who?’
‘Bill Clinton. Why is someone so important visiting a man who did that? That … suicide pact. Wasn’t it a scandal? Don’t ex-presidents normally avoid people involved in stuff like that?’
They glance at each other. He needs to move, really: this outburst may already have made them suspicious. But he stays to hear the answers.
‘Well, I dunno,’ says the white man. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Yeah, and he was never charged with anything, I don’t think.’
‘And hey, it’s not like Bill was scandal-free, in his time.’
‘Yeah. Although he never quite got around to killing Hillary.’
The black one laughs. He hears the elevator doors open behind him. People flood past his sides. The two doctors shuffle, wanting to move back to their jobs, their lives.
‘And also,’ says the black one, looking back, ‘he’s famous. And dying.’
‘Yeah,’ says the white one. ‘That’ll do it.’
He turns round and walks into the elevator. He watches them walk away amongst the crowd of people. On the panel of circles, he presses 14: its white circumference, encasing gold, turns red.
* * *
He had run as fast as he could – even thinking, at one stage, of getting out his iPhone and putting on the running playlist – but when Harvey arrived back outside the door to Eli’s room, Colette had not been there; neither were Freda, or Bill Clinton, or even any of the doctors. Having ascertained from John that everyone had left on Clinton’s coat-tails, Harvey had stood there for a while, bereft of purpose.
‘You OK?’ John had said.
‘Er … yeah. Fine.’ And, finding that he had no one else to tell this information to, he told John. ‘I was about to go, actually. Once I’d spoken to Colette.’
‘Go? Back to the apartment?’
‘No. Home. England.’
‘Oh.’ John blinked very slowly, an action that reminded Harvey of Eli. ‘I thought you were gonna wait until …’
‘He died.’
‘I guess.’
‘Yes, well I was, but …’ He trailed off. John nodded.
‘He’s taking his time about it, that’s for sure.’
‘Yes,’ said Harvey.
‘He lived a long life. And from what I hear, quite a life. I reckon he’s still not that keen to exit it.’
‘Yeah. Well, anyway …’
‘You not going in to say goodbye?’
Freda, Colette, Stella, now him: Harvey yields at last to overwhelming pressure. So he finds himself sat by his father’s deathbed, at last alone, at last, surely, ready to speak to him.
But still the words don’t come. He sits on the chair next to the bed, and feels only that he should not be there. He watches Eli’s chest go up and then down again, blown by some electronic bellows he does not understand. He begins, once or twice, stumbling again on the first word: ‘Dad … dy,’ he says. ‘Eli’, he tries. ‘Father’, even, which he tries twice, but it sounds more ridiculous than all of them, the first time an Edwardian schoolboy writing home, the second seeming to require, afterwards, forgive them for they know not what they do. All he can think of is the idiocy, the pointlessness of words. It comes to him in an obvious wave: the irony – the stupid fucking useless irony – of this God of words, this High Priest of Language, being rendered dumb, and the stupid fucking useless pretence of all those around him that the coma which is causing such dumbness does not also render him deaf. He looks at his father’s eyes, which seem even more shut than usual, screwed shut behind their matrix of unfine lines. Around the two of them Eli’s electronic armour, the circle of machines preserving his priceless life, bleep and tick and whine.
&n
bsp; Harvey wishes that a doctor – having to minister to one of the machines, one of the hanging bags, one of the charts and graphs – would come and save him from this. Then he remembers: he doesn’t have to do this. He didn’t even come here to say goodbye to the old man. He turns away from his father, and then, yes, a doctor is there. He has not heard him come in. Harvey looks up at him and smiles, although is careful to adjust the smile so that there is some sorrow in it, not just relief. Oh, he thinks, it’s the one who I got in the way of earlier, at the exit door to the hospital. I hope he’s not pissed about it.
Before Harvey even has a chance to reprimand himself for this latest piece of linguistic Americana, the doctor looks at him blankly, and draws a gun.
– Step away from the patient, he says.
Chapter 16
He knows straight away that saying this is a mistake. He has been lucky so far: or, rather, he corrects himself, God has been on the side of his destiny. Bill Clinton drawing people away, the two doctors saying what he needed to know, the big black security man just nodding at him to let him into the room – it’s like it’s been laid out for him. It’s like he planned it with God. But now he realizes this was too much: it has made him expect it to be too easy. He was expecting no one to be in the room apart from his target. And when he came in and this fat, balding guy was here – damn. He flipped.
Because he could have just carried on playing the doctor. Instead of drawing the gun and saying step away from the patient, he could have just said, Sorry, I need to examine the patient. Then the guy would have said Yes, of course, and moved away, and he could have got close to The Great Satan and put a fucking bullet in his skull.
A doubt crosses his mind. He had felt, coming into the room, exactly as he thought he was going to feel: nervous, excited, ready, elated. But he realizes now that he had felt something else, something he had not bargained for: a second elation, above and beyond that of being at last in the moment of his destiny, something that had only come about because of the unexpected chance that the room was not full of doctors and other people who he would have to shout down using his gun. He had felt that perhaps he was going to get away with it. And then he saw the guy sitting there.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 42