by Jack Livings
Surely not. He did it all with an attendant at his side, his body nothing more than a carriage for his brain. The domestic rituals by which we mark the passage of our days became averages for him, a slur arcing across a line clogged with sixteenth notes. If he spent eight hours a night in bed, that added up to a respectable, and noticeable, fifty-six hours a week. But disconnected, each instance of sleep like a blink of the eye, did it all add up to a deep slumber? Or had he, unable to detect his body’s daily motions, separated from the need for sleep entirely? Is it possible that by the end of his first week at Pickering he’d stepped out beyond the end of his own life and was living in a future after he’d died?
He would have spent a hundred hours a week in front of the white wall in his room. He would have seen the wall. He might have registered the sunlight racing across the plaster, the expansion and contraction due to humidity and temperature, the wall pulsing like a vein, the birth and growth of cracks that crept and spread, the subtle shift of color as the paint leached pigment. His body sat there for years, the wall all the while throbbing with life. Where was he?
In that first week, he still would have been evolving, thus capable of recognizing Schiff’s presence, however brief. Lazlo’s question, Are you speaking to me? took the duration of the first tape to complete. Each of the four remaining tapes was an hour and four minutes long, identical to the first. I ran them all through the same process, and did I get secret messages from the beyond? Messages to Turk, to his sons? Confirmation of his scientific breakthrough? Did he quote Goethe, the fly’s thousand dead eyes? Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”?
Blame Schiff for adhering to clinical procedure, leading off with the same question every day: How are you feeling today, Dr. Brunn? One tape a day for five days. Same question, same answer.
I called Dr. Schiff and asked if there were more tapes. I asked him if he had any recollection of the interviews, or any notes.
I could hear him smile and shrug through the phone.
The young Schiff didn’t work weekends, and when he returned to Pickering the Monday following Lazlo’s committal, the patient had gone mute. He never spoke again. I suspect Lazlo had entered a new phase of communication, an adaptation that took advantage of the disparity between his perceptual advance and his physical equipment. His further communications may yet be awaiting discovery, hovering somewhere out there in the future, encoded in the molten core of our planet, awaiting rebirth in a leaf. By that second Monday morning, could he even tell Schiff was there?
Are you speaking to me?
* * *
My beneficent madre-in-waiting, architect of the Gedanken, spending her peaceable retirement in repose, puffing on an assortment of electronic one-hitters and watching the Criterion Collection from bed. If not for the bathrobe, a garnet terry-cloth number that had become her day-lounge uniform, you’d have thought Turk a starlet in nova.
Darling, she said when she opened the door.
Hi, I said. I was aware that I might have looked—what, predisposed? Intent, in any case, a seeker arrived from a great distance, having traveled across the wastes, through wind and weather, beset by bandits, transformed by my journey into the foreigner now beseeching her from the doorstep, and it made me self-conscious, so I affected an attitude of perfect me-ness: casual, blithe, amicable.
Good god, what’s wrong? she said, and pulled me inside. What happened, dear? Is your father all right?
Oh yes, I said. I assume he is.
Something downstairs? she said. Downstairs being her name for the business, because we had to call it, well, something.
No, no, everything’s fine.
Is it?
Turk, I said, when your father was getting on, near the end, did he talk to you about his work?
Oh, here and there.
Anything about the device he was working on?
I see. I’ve been down this road, Turk said. And no, not that I recall. I tried to piece it together, you know, but only after he’d gone up to Pickering, after the tape decks were stolen—that put a real scare into me.
He never said anything to you about what they were supposed to do?
No, Turk said.
I have something for you, I said.
Oh? How exciting, Turk said sotto voce, folding her hands together as if she were a little old lady and not the immortal being that had created my world, as if she didn’t already know exactly what I had for her.
I reached into my bag and handed the slim boxes, white with foxing, to Turk.
These are recordings of your father, I said. From Pickering.
Artifacts from the deep? Turk asked. You went to the institute to get them?
Asher Schiff, I said.
Really? she said. Isn’t that something. How did you track him down?
It wasn’t hard, I said. He used to treat my father.
So he did. I’d forgotten that. He’s in good health, is he?
Seemed so, I said.
He was good with Father, Turk said. He was always helpful when I’d go up to visit. It’s funny—years later I started to see him around, at Zabar’s, out on Broadway. Finally I stopped him one day and reintroduced myself. This was ten years after we’d last spoken, and he remembered my father as if it had only been the day before. Turns out his office was just around the corner. I suspect we had some of the same clients. I saw him out once with his family. You fear for a psychologist’s family a little bit, don’t you?
Mhmm, I said.
You didn’t go to him looking for these? she said, holding up the boxes.
No, I said. Just doing some personal excavation.
Did he tell you where the treasure’s buried?
Not much help there.
Sometimes the wrong answer’s more useful than the right one, Turk says.
Maybe.
So what’s your plan?
What do you mean?
Sweetheart. You’ve been rattling around like a ghost since the funeral, doing god knows what. You’re not sleeping, are you?
I shrugged.
All this detective work, Turk said. What exactly are you looking for? Something that can’t be explained. What did you go up there to see Schiff for? Something about your father?
No, I said.
What, then?
Something about my past. The usual.
And you wound up with my past instead. What a shame.
Past, present, and future, I thought. I could have told her what I’d found on the tapes, but I didn’t. I didn’t trust her. Good Turk, who’d been like a mother to me. I could have asked her the central question that had been eating away at me like an acid since I’d found her father’s question on the tapes, but she was right: I was trying to prove an unprovable. All the research, digging through my past, my father’s past, Albert’s past, all of it was a search for clues that might tell me what Turk, if I could trust her, could have told me in a single word, yes or no. The question: Wasn’t everything that had happened to me since that night in 1978 a complication?
I knew, though, that if the answer was yes, Turk wouldn’t tell me. If she’d created the complication and had adhered to its rules for this long, surely she wouldn’t break them simply because I asked. Equally possible: She’d been part of it for so long that she would no longer recognize that she was part of it. This had been her life, too, this elaborate fabrication.
Does it sound far-fetched? Is it really any more absurd than what my father did, creating an analogue version of Hazel Saltwater, one that turned me into the unrecognizable, the impostor, the photocopy?
You need a little R and R, Turk said. Why don’t we watch a movie?
I’m okay, I said. I’m going up to see Dad.
Thank god, Turk said.
Mm? I said.
That’s the right thing to do. All this business—you’ve been barking up the wrong tree, dear. Go see your father if you want to know about the past.
27.
In Cornwall there is snow on the ground
. My father’s house, perched on a hill overlooking the Hudson, battered by the weather, appears to have recoiled slightly from the water, turned its face away from the source of all its trouble. Built as a small hotel during the spa boom in the late nineteenth century, it is solid, and it stays warm inside. From my father’s discursions on timber joists and horsehair plaster, I gather that the ancient asbestos insulation is holding up fine. He moved into the old ruin when Vik and I got married, having sold us the apartment at the Apelles for a dollar.
Why did I expect to find the house empty? He is home, alive and well, for once not reading a book but watching, of all things, ski jumping.
He turns slowly to look at me, as though I’ve caught him in a state of meditation. His eyes long ago faded to a milky blue, the green and brown radials of his irises submerged in Caribbean waters. Struggle though it is through those presbyopic lenses, he still consumes books at a frightening pace. He doesn’t write anymore, and in most respects he has mellowed, but when he is reading, he budges for neither love nor money. Won’t answer the phone or the door, and on those occasions when I haven’t been able to reach him for days on end, I’ve raced up the Palisades Parkway fearing the worst, let myself in expecting to find him facedown on the hall rug, only to find him absorbed in, say, some nine-hundred-page treatise on the formation of the Teutonic character, looking at me, as he is now, as if I’d roused him from an epic sleepwalk. Hello, dear heart, he’ll say to the crazed woman standing in his living room. I understand how recollection is a riptide that can carry you far from shore, yet it does nothing to console me when he, accompanied by only his faulty cardiovascular system, decides to take a temporal vacation, close as he is to crossing that final threshold.
He holds out his hand to me.
He offers me some tea in the spare mug he has at hand not because he’s prescient but because he always has a spare mug, just in case. I settle into the sofa, which is generously piled with quilts, as naps are an essential part of his day. He rocks gently in his leather armchair. With the mug of tea warming my hands, mint steaming up, sock feet tucked in lumps beneath my thighs, I feel as though I’ve been packed in cotton batting, and it’s harder to feel as though I’m a fading image, someone about to crop myself out of the photograph.
If this visit is part of the complication, if it is a detail courtesy of Turk’s grand plan for me, it is a generous gift.
My father points at the TV and says, I’ve never paid much attention to this sport. What an oversight! Once, not long after I moved up here, Charles Quail was going to take me to see some jumping up around Amenia, but when we got there, the ramp had turned to slush. I remember the structure had a certain utilitarian elegance—you can imagine, like the underside of a long pier—but nothing to recommend that it was capable of facilitating anything so sublime as this, he said, waving at the TV. Charles would go on endlessly about the sport, you know, with great passion, but to be confronted by that brown, dripping, wooden thing about as elegant as a shipwreck … We ate at a Wendy’s and drove home. If only I could have seen them flying, I would have been a lifelong fan. How right he was. If anything, he undersold the whole enterprise. Imagine! All these years I could have been an enthusiast, if not for one too-warm day in February.
It suits you, I say.
Yes, speaks to my boundless appetite for danger, doesn’t it?
Through the window I see a raven land in the field to the side of the house, stately, its feathers iridescent across the shoulders. In better weather they were always battling with the gulls, executing twisting dives to escape the larger birds. If a single raven was under pursuit, others would show up to harry the gulls. They’re smart, ravens, but something about their intelligence, devoid of compassion, makes me dislike them. They are neither brave nor curious, merely efficient hunters equipped with bodies large enough to allow them to fend for themselves. The gulls attacked only because the ravens raided their nests. William Push had been a fan, and had lobbied to have the building named not the Apelles but the Raven.
* * *
Push was the guiding spirit behind the Apelles, and the reason I have come to visit my father. When the Apelles opened in 1915, Push intended it to be the most technologically advanced building in the city. He was an automat mogul, an engineer of renown, and his considerable wealth bought him a position as consultant to Black and Simms, the architects of record, who assigned him the responsibility of designing the pneumatic tube, waste disposal, ventilation, heating, and dumbwaiter systems, all of which, as he would eventually prove, enabled a resident to close the door of his apartment behind him and abandon the world to its self-destructive urges. Push died in 1938, having spent the last nine years of his life sequestered in his apartment. Why he did so can be chalked up to that distinctly human tendency to define oneself by the depth and breadth of one’s discontent.
He considered the human organism to be inefficient and alarmingly fragile. According to his personal taxonomy of the world’s beings, wild animals were far more advanced than Homo sapiens. Take, for example, the lion, which operated at maximum efficiency, lying at rest unless seized by a biological imperative. A lion, Push argued, had no desire to be anything other than what it was. If an un-lionlike thought ever put into the harbor of a lion’s brain, it would be raided, burned, and sunk on the spot. If, by a perversion of nature, there should ever be a lion given to lolling about in the dirt thinking up poems, it would be quickly set upon by marauding elephants, tusked and trampled and left to dissolve into the savanna floor. Lions never looked at birds and wished for wings. They couldn’t have spent years musing on the beauty of a tree if they wanted to. They were pure, the elegant result of evolution’s dispassionate murder of any trait that didn’t increase the lion’s ability to hunt and reproduce. Likewise the raven, whose very image spoke to Push of ecological efficiency.
The note card my father had written on that night in 1978 when Turk’s Christmas tree had blocked his way had itself been designed by Push. His pneumatic tube system once carried hundreds of them an hour all over the Apelles, and the job of sorting the cylinders fell to young women who worked twelve-hour shifts in a basement room. The job was notorious for inducing nervous diseases, in no small part because of the elevated swivel chairs designed by Push according to his interpretation of ergonomics, which dictated that the female’s delicate anatomy required a wicker seat and a low wooden backrest that, in practice, crushed the kidneys and liver, threw the sacrum into disorder, and bit into the lower spine. No matter how the workers complained, he insisted they use the chairs, even though no sorter lasted more than a month, most leaving the building’s employ for less physically debilitating occupations in sweatshops. As a consequence, few of the girls became competent in the job, and with forty containers a minute sluicing through the tubes at times of peak activity, messages rarely reached their intended recipients on the first try. For Push, these setbacks only confirmed his assessment of Homo sapiens as infuriating creatures whose utility had been weakened by centuries of miscegenation, inbreeding, and the insistence on caring for and even cultivating the weak and sick.
Over the decades, use of the pneumatic tubes dwindled, and by the time I was a girl, the system had been shut down. Hence the cards in the elevator lobbies.
Is it any surprise that Push’s design included a set of tubes that allowed him to divert any branch of the system to a delivery bay in his apartment? When I was a girl I could tell something was weird about the empty room in our apartment, something beyond its antiseptic air of disuse. My parents could feel it, our housekeeper could feel it. They knew well enough to leave it alone. My father parked a few boxes of books in there, but otherwise it remained unused for decades. When Vik and I moved in, we avoided it.
As it turns out, it was waiting patiently for me, the one room in the apartment with no ghosts from my childhood, and no memory of Vik. A few months ago, when I decided to abandon the bedroom and move the bed to the empty room, the electrician, punching neat little
squares on either side of the headboard for wall lamps, found Push’s matrix of secret tubes. He said there was no way to run wire without ripping out the entire wall first. In every direction, his test taps struck metal. I told him I’d go with floor lamps, and I had a drywaller tear out the plaster, all of it. There, packed as tightly as cigarettes from one side of the room to the other, were vacuum tubes, and affixed to each were gauges, inlets and outlets, a series of interconnected flat handles that, like organ stops, opened and closed the valves that made possible Push’s voyeurism.
In the Apelles, there are many ways to listen. The heating vents, the doormen who are only too happy for you to stop by for some gossip, old-fashioned hallway loitering, the pneumatic tubes. By manipulating the handles, I can pick up transmissions from all over the building. Most of the inlet slots in the apartments have been covered over, but even through plaster and paint they provide a little sonic connection. At night I open all the valves and let the building sing me to sleep.
What do people talk about? The contours of their day, how much they hate people who they wish liked them more. Money, their bowels. Eavesdropping is spiritual pornography, a novelty that ceased to interest me much after I realized that the source of my excitement was not the content of the conversations I overheard, but the power to overhear them. I prefer the insect hum of all the voices at once, the droning proof of life. A building full of people, a living entity.
