by Jack Livings
Thunk-rumble, the passengers poured into the vestibule outside PH1 and began adding to the graveyard of boots and coats, the precarious teepee of cross-country skis by the door. The coats had formed a mountain slope descending from the ceiling at the right-hand wall, somewhere at its core a wheeled rack on which early arrivals had hung theirs with care, draping scarves just so over lapels, taking pains to insert gloves in pockets, hats folded and tucked securely into a sleeve … there was movement on one side of the wedge, an excavation, a poor bastard who’d left a dime bag in the pocket of his coat. Knee-deep in wet wool, he dug deeper into the flank, the thick aroma rising in stinking waves around him as the new arrivals pitched their coats onto the pile. Though harried, he continued to dig. On the other side, boot arrangement likewise had initially followed some ordered system that had collapsed as footwear piled up like a slag heap, rising, shearing, rising again, shearing, absorbing new artifacts as each fresh batch of travelers arrived: a bag of wine, a plastic toboggan, backpacks filled with snacks and brandy for the voyage across Central Park, pulped copies of the Post that had been stuffed beneath sweaters as extra insulation, things that slipped free from breast pockets while de-booting: bifocals, Watermans, receipts, prayer beads, boxes of Camels, Marlboros, condoms, lighters, pouches, papers, baggies of weed, baggies of reds, blues, greenies, so that the boot pile was densely populated with excavationists—in fact, a sizable contingent of partygoers were tromping around on the site, mashing and squishing everything in their increasingly frantic attempts to recover the buried mind-altering substances, and, unfortunately, contributing to serious stratum disarray so that, had there been at one time a controlled, archaeological approach to recovering lost items, there was no chance now, as the whole pile was a contaminated context, goulash.
No way was Vik taking his hands out of his pockets, not now, and the pair moved hopelessly along with the crowd, squirting through the bottleneck at the doorway, Albert shuffling along like a trained seal.
Inside, the entrance gallery was dim and thick with smoke—not the painterly striations that hang suspended in opium dens like the gossamer robes of angels, but a searing, heavy storm of smoke that had established itself as the essential medium through which all commerce would be conducted. The Joan Mitchell hanging directly across from the door was nothing but a hint of blue through a fogbank. Entire bricks of marijuana had been combusted and were presently lounging around in cottony clouds, mingling with enough R. J. Reynolds’ bright leaf and burley to balance the North Carolina state budget. Here and there, microclimates, the sharp masculinity of Cohibas, Toros, Presidentes, Ascots, Perfectos, Chisels canoodling with feminine curls of Drum, Sir Walter Raleigh, Borkum Riff, Sutliffe Vanilla Custard, Prince Albert. Like a descant, the mysterious perfume of cloves everywhere, nowhere. In darker corners, the harsh burn of bidis.
Enterprising young Tanawat Kongkatitum, known to his friends at Columbia as Hiwatt, after P. Townshend’s customary stack, had set up a pair of multi-hose hookahs in the library and was charging the exorbitant sum of eight dollars U.S. for a bowl of shisha and hash. He was doing a bang-up business but it was getting crowded as the remains of his previous customers were taking up all the floor space. They were great for marketing but— Christ on a bicycle, Hiwatt said to a woman in four-inch spikes who was walking across an unresponsive carpet of bodies. Step right up!
Vik, looking for somewhere to stow Albert while he inquired about where exactly in the building the old man lived, was blown away from the pulsing heart of the party like a sloop caught in a squall, toward the residential wing, by the excruciating volume of the song, Iggy Pop grinding out “Lust for Life,” on about its eighth curtain call. To the east were six bedrooms and three bathrooms that branched off a dark central hall lined with Cubist paintings, couples making out, triangular shadows, more smoke, one of Hiwatt’s customers sleeping Pompei-style atop a Nelson bench, and underfoot a foreboding tangle of clothing.
The doors were all closed, and Albert stood docile at Vik’s side as he rapped on the first one. Impossible to hear anything over the noise, he cracked and peeked and saw, oh yeah, an orgy, or group action, at least, definitely XXX if not a full-scale Dionysian revel, pumping asses and hairy bellies, the juxtaposition and rejuxtaposition of arms over legs over arms, the dull flash of jewelry glinting in the oily light from the bedside lamp, which had been boudoired with an orange paisley silk. He lingered, but withdrew before the shoe hit the door.
Too amped up now to rethink his process, he tried the next one. It was a bathroom. A couple was in the tub. Another was attempting to destroy the toilet with their ride-’em-cowboy antics. Water everywhere. Yipping. It smelled like sandalwood and patchouli. The next, a bedroom, another group fling, a more Germanic arrangement, two women on the bed, five men around the edges, pants pooled at their ankles, and what appeared to be a game of cribbage under way at the table beneath the window. Albert lingered dreamily at Vik’s side.
Hot damn, Vik thought as he reached for door number four, his fingers trembling with voyeuristic ecstasy. Alas, the room he was about to enter was virtually empty; I was the stain on that virtue, sleeping peacefully on the bed beneath a blanket of cyan TV snow, alone, unperturbed because no matter how perverse the diabolical plans in the drug-soaked brains of the partiers, by some miracle none of them, none of them, included getting it on in front of, with, or around a little girl.
So it was that with a mixture of relief and disappointment Vik parked Albert on a creaky teak chair next to a wooden statue of a Maasai herder, taking care not to wake the kid sacked out atop the coverlet. He had no idea how old I was—a little kid, that was how I registered—and he whispered to Albert that he’d be back soon. What a thoughtful boy. Having secured the addled old man, he closed the door behind him and went to find an adult who might be able to tell him where Albert, who had nothing to say on the matter, lived.
3.
Approximately three hours earlier, Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell, partner emeritus, former head of litigation, Swank, Brady & Plescher, an editor of the Harvard Law Review, class of ’26, father of three, widower, atheist, fiscal conservative, moralist, known to the tailors at Paul Stewart as Cheese on account of his habit of expelling toxic nebulas while being taped for trousers, known to the waiters at the Cosmic on 81st and Broadway as Bark (as in, tight as), on account of his miserly tipping and insistence on instant coffee (kept in a glass jar labeled AHC behind the counter, to be wordlessly delivered with one cup hot water, one spoon), magnet for single-fingered farewells, known to his grandchildren as Grumps, known to longtime residents of the Apelles as Albie, for whom co-op meetings were but a canvas on which he might paint his opinions in re the emancipated woman, the ghetto issue, the Soviet threat, the Israel issue, the New York City Department of Sanitation issue, tree huggers, the A-building lobby rug issue, the Head Peanut Hizzoner Jimmy Carter, the Transit Authority conspiracy—in short, anything that happened to tumble across the cerebral threshold of this man known to haggle over the price of Girl Scout cookies and whose five bathrooms, it was rumored, were furnished exclusively from a stockpile of four-star hotel courtesy soaps—had cried into the mouthpiece of his black Bell telephone, I can’t feel my hands!
Numbness! Tremors! Again, quaveringly: Tremors.
I have a shooting pain in my abdomen!
Tightness—(light gasping)—rib cage.
He was reading from a short monologue he’d composed on the legal pad resting on his rumpled corduroy lap, plotted to convey nothing so specific as heart attack or stroke, but leaving the door open to the possibility of a panoply of life-threatening failures of the body’s major systems. When he hung up, he tore off the topmost sheet, folded it in two, and dropped it into the drawer of the side table. He drummed his fingers on his knees, then endeavored to assume a supine position on the rug, a position he achieved with some difficulty, owing both to his age and his sedentary lifestyle, but also to the hour (it was nearly his bedtime), and, despite a healthy
dose of scotch, the stiffness that set like epoxy in his joints late in the day. Some blessed mornings he found his body almost completely devoid of pain, limbs loose, his blood warmed from sleep and rippling through his veins with Balanchine-like effervescence, but now, so late in the day, he was a museum of tortures. He hadn’t been stretched out on the Oriental long when, gazing absently at the trompe l’oeil ceiling (manganese blue sky, cirrus, a few orioles in flight, elm leaves in the corners), he realized he’d neglected to pocket the slip of paper on which he’d written his final destination. And so he reversed the procedure, rolling from back to front, raising his posterior by shuffling forward on his knees, favoring the tender left one, walking his hands back into a cat’s arch, at which point he reached out to the sofa and steadied himself before maneuvering his rear onto the cushions and embarking on phase two: standing. A feat of epic proportions, he thought, that he’d remembered the paper. His memory was a junkyard, heaps of scrap as far as the eye could see.
By the time he was up, he’d forgotten why he was up.
Thus, when the ambulance crew arrived, he was still standing fully erect, still trying to recall what he was looking for, and he greeted the paramedics with a yelp of surprise that they interpreted correctly as surprise, an anomalous reaction from a man who had himself phoned for an ambulance fifteen minutes earlier, therefore diagnostically significant, confusion being a symptom of stroke, and he was quickly apprehended, strapped to an exceedingly uncomfortable stretcher, and wheeled out of his apartment sporting a grimace that the plastic oxygen mask transmuted into a knifeish smile, past the doorman Manny, who’d escorted the crew to 12C, and to whom it appeared that Mr. Caldwell had winked, onto the elevator, down, out, and through the lobby, not yet stuffed to the gills with party people, and across the wet cobblestones, where he was shunted into the back of the rig like a slice of pizza into an oven. The snow swirled in, the doors slammed shut. In the sudden stillness of the medical bay, the snowflakes sashayed down and melted into the fat wales of Albert’s pants. Strapped tight, he nonetheless bounced on the stretcher as the snow chains scrabbled against cobblestones, found purchase, and the ambulance scooted through the archway and onto Broadway for its skidding voyage to Roosevelt, where doctors administered a bevy of tests, a second wave of which presumed to measure Albert’s mental acuity (D-minus, dunce cap), and where, owing to his advanced age, inebriation, what appeared to be memory impairment, his inability to provide the phone numbers of any relatives, no answer at his home address, and the deteriorating weather conditions, the chief resident declared he should be held overnight for observation.
When the physician had asked if there was anyone they could contact, Albert had patted helplessly at his trouser pockets until a nurse inserted her fingers and plucked out a storm of paper—slips of memory, most numerical: account numbers, dates, times, ages of his grandchildren (without corresponding names), phone numbers (also without corresponding names), all scrupulously inscribed before being pitched into the abyss. Had he remembered to pick up the scrap of paper bearing the name of his final destination, it’s unlikely Albert would have been able to make heads or tails of it. He had no memory of copying it onto the paper. At the moment he had no memory of why he’d done anything. His plan was nothing more than a little turbulence on the surface of rough seas.
He had only a feeling that, like a migrating goose, he was to travel south. An image of water.
Is there a number here we can call? A relative? the doctor said, probing the pile, which had been deposited on an instrument tray, with the tip of a pen.
Albert opened his mouth. He closed his mouth.
What was he trying to remember, again? He’d given the doorman the slip, but then what? Perhaps that alone had been the goal. He stared up at the big lights. His shirt was splayed open, the skin of his torso so loose that it appeared to be draining over his sides like melted icing. Oh, the hands that palpated that papery skin and his narrow bones, his stringy muscles, so many hands. His flickering nerves, relit and glowing brightly, bright as a twenty-year-old’s, buried within this worn-out machinery. Birds alighting on a lake at dawn.
No immediate relations, Mister Caldwell? No one to call?
He moaned when they touched him, not with pain or sexual delight, but as only a lonesome being can moan, with sorrow and joy at once, in communion with his fellow man, in thanks for their affection. The body is made to be handled. It aches to be embraced. Oh, the hands.
Immediate relations?
Albert shook his head at the doctor. No relations.
Then allow me to invite you to join us here at Camelot, said the chief resident. Albert stared back at him. None of the nurses laughed. The chief resident’s hapless witticisms were an endless source of embarrassment for him, yet he couldn’t stop himself, and he thought of the ways he’d injure himself later, when he was home alone with his alligator clips and lighter. Admit ’im, he said, before thudding off to another failed interaction with the rest of the species.
Once the hands went away, Albert tried to bring his thoughts into focus. If his brain was a collection of millions of tiny light bulbs, and if certain bulbs lit up in sequence to indicate certain actions that were to take place, the series of bulbs in his brain assigned to light up when it was time to enact his plan were, at best, faulty. All his bulbs were faulty. Their sockets were rusty, their filaments carbonized. They lit erratically, if at all. By the time his comedic failure of a doctor admitted him, half of his bulbs were burned out. The other half could barely get it together long enough to form an unbroken beam pointing to the Hudson River, his final destination.
The problem with so many bulbs having burned out was that the bulbs that did work had to pull double-time, which meant that when he tried to remember his plan, bulbs that had nothing to do with the plan lit up, just trying to help out. Lying there on the examination table, he wondered: What happens next? And, seeing that the plan bulbs were as dark and unexcited as jars of molasses, the bulbs in charge of remembering a case he tried in Germany in the 1940s, just pitching in, just trying to be good neighbors, would light up, and he’d be back in Nuremberg, time-warped, which was not where he wanted to be at all.
Constant use had preserved a few of the most important bulb sequences, but he was down to only a handful of those, which meant that the same old memories kept coming back to him no matter what he was trying to think of. The most common was the memory of his grandson, and when that sequence lit up, it pointed at the first step of the plan. That first step never failed to light bright and true. It was a bulb that said it was time for Albert to die.
From there he could piece the plan together, but it was a laborious process, and because of his rusted-out jalopy of a brain, he’d have to re-create the plan from scratch every single time the memory of his grandson relit, which was about fifty times a day. Thus, for the last week he’d spent entire days conceiving and reconceiving the plan. Sometimes he’d think to write the plan down, but even an hour later, the sequence of events would make no sense to him. Oddly enough, from one reconception to the next, the plans were strikingly similar.
The plan was this: Escape the Apelles, where the doormen were paid extra to hold him captive, by introducing an irresistible force in the form of a medical emergency. He would then escape the hospital. Finally, he’d make his way to the Hudson, where he would drown himself.
Albert had several bathtubs in his apartment. With minimal effort he could have drowned himself in any one of them. He also had at his disposal an assortment of curtain rods, doorframes, and an exposed hot water pipe that ran parallel to the ceiling in the kitchen from which he could have successfully hanged himself. He had drawers full of knives. Merely by asserting that he was having trouble sleeping, he could have accumulated enough sleeping pills to finish himself off. And while the doormen would not allow him to take the elevator down and exit through the lobby of his building without a minder, no one would stop him from taking the elevator up, accessing the roof thro
ugh one of several fire doors, and effecting his best swan dive onto West End Avenue. But no. He intended for his death, an escape from the comfort of forgetfulness, to meet certain requirements, topmost of which was that he die as his grandson had died.
Besides, remember that his plan, so heavy on escape and deception, was formulated in a brain with half its bulbs burned out.
Operationally speaking, so far, so good. He was wheeled out of the ER, down a bright hall, and onto an elevator. His shirt hung open still, and as the car shuddered up the shaft, he endeavored to close it, blindly feeling his way up and down the placket and inserting buttons into whatever hole he happened across, in the process creating an innovatively disordered pattern in the fabric, something out of a differential geometry textbook or a dressing guide for drunks. To Albert’s right was a nurse, to his left an orderly, a skinny white man with a lump of quartz for an Adam’s apple. The nurse looked down at Albert briefly, looked at the orderly, and moved her mouth at the corner to register amusement. The veins in the orderly’s ropy forearms bulged against his muscles and ligaments, vulgar, penile. Albert turned his face away. Obviously the man was an addict. The elevator hitched at the seventh floor and the doors rattled open. The orderly rolled the gurney out, and here Albert took care to mark the location of the elevator, the nurses’ station. One wheel was doing that damn spinning thing, floating millimeters from the linoleum, catching, pirouetting, catching, pirouetting. Concentrate, Albert thought. They entered Room 733 and the orderly docked the gurney alongside the bed. Albert pushed away the man’s awful veined hands when he tried to facilitate the transfer to the bed.
