“We could head to the train station tomorrow. I’d like to get back to New York,” says Xavier. “I have a feeling I missed an important meeting.”
The sun has been down for a few hours. The cold wind coming off the sea has made the temperature drop. The candle flame flickers dangerously. Xavier and Hollywood are shivering in their coats. The waves wash up and die on the beach; otherwise, there isn’t a sound. In the distance, they can barely make out the glow of the lighthouse on Montauk Point.
“I’m going in before I freeze to death,” Xavier says. “I’m sick of winter.”
He gets up. Hollywood follows, picking up their plates.
“I’ll take care of the dishes. Could you make a fire?”
They walk into the house. Hollywood washes their plates while Xavier lights a fire. The room warms instantly.
“Can you play the piano?” he asks Hollywood as he flops onto the sofa.
“No. I’ve tried, but it never works. My hands never seem to be on the same page.”
He sits at the piano and picks out a nursery rhyme, stumbling as he plays.
“See? I’m terrible.”
He lowers the cover over the keyboard and leans on it.
“What about you? Do you know how to play?”
“No,” says Xavier, then adds, “It’s a shame… such a lovely piano, and it’s no good to us.”
“Find any books or CDs?” Hollywood asks.
“There’s a huge bookcase in the den. And the turntable’s in the corner.”
“Excellent! I brought something to read, but apparently my bag doesn’t follow me into my dreams…”
“Do you still think we’re dreaming?”
“I have no idea. What about you?”
“I try not to think about it.”
Hollywood gets up and goes into the next room to peruse the bookshelves.
“Do you like classical music?” he asks Xavier, who hasn’t moved.
“Not really.”
“Then you’ll need to get used to it: that’s all there is.”
“You can put on whatever you want, I don’t mind. I’ll head to bed, if that’s OK. I’m sleepy.”
“That’s weird, though,” Hollywood thinks aloud. “If we were in a dream, we wouldn’t need to sleep…”
“But since I’m tired… maybe we really are here, after all. What I don’t understand is how and why we ended up in Montauk.”
Hollywood puts a recording of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater on the turntable, then comes back into the living room. He lies down on the sofa.
“I’m going to sleep here. I don’t really know the house well enough yet, and the small bedroom gives me the creeps.”
“You can take the big one if you want,” Xavier offers.
“No, that’s OK. You take it. The sofa seems comfortable. I’ll grab a pillow and a blanket later, when I’m ready to go to sleep.”
“OK. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
A cramp rips through his chest. The machine, he thinks. Either it turned on, or it’s acting up. The Stabat Mater is over. The disc is still spinning, but the needle is hanging in the air. Hollywood gets up and shuts off the turntable. He turns out the lights and lies back down on the sofa. The silence weighs on his chest. He breathlessly hums a Leonard Cohen tune, quietly, as if to soothe himself. Then he falls asleep.
When Xavier comes out of his room a few hours later, eyes red from lack of sleep, troubled by insomnia, Hollywood is gone.
Hollywood
“sorry, sweetie: the A/C ain’t been workin’ for months an’ it’s over a hundred degrees outside…”
The nurse brought me a fresh glass of ice water.
“We didn’t think you was ever gonna wake up, honey pie. You been sleepin’ for two weeks, an’ Doctor Williams ain’t got no idea why.”
It was hot, a smothering, humid heat. New Orleans smack in the middle of Chicago. Chokichi was there that morning when I woke up. And he told me everything. I’d been at the University of Illinois Hospital for two weeks already.
Nurse Baumfree asked Chokichi to leave the room so she could ask me some questions. About, no doubt, the “device” implanted in my ribcage—and the heart that was no longer there. I gave her the contact information of the heart surgeon who’d performed the surgery. Then I asked for a glass of water.
She left, promising that she’d be back later for routine tests. They were intrigued by my condition and were attributing my coma, for the time being, to the experimental nature of the surgery. Obviously. I didn’t feel ill at all, though. I was hot, yes, and not exactly in top shape on account of all the tubes they plugged into my veins, torso and temples; all those annoying machines beeping non-stop. But I wasn’t in any pain, and the only thing I truly wanted was to rip out all the tubes, take off the hideous hospital gown, put on some real clothes and get the hell out of there.
“I got this at the youth hostel two days after you were admitted.”
Chokichi handed me an envelope as he came back into the room.
Chokichi
Hostelling International Chicago
24 East Congress Parkway
Chicago, IL 60605
USA
“Who’s it from?”
“See for yourself. It’s about you, anyway.”
I opened the envelope: a tiny white card, barely a few words.
Chokichi. Stay right where you are. I’m coming over. We’ll take care of Hollywood when I get there.
Saké
“You found her?”
“No. Remember how she left without telling a soul where she was going? Did you tell anyone we were in Chicago?”
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
“What about the postmark?” I asked, taking back the envelope.
“Stockholm.”
The envelope had indeed been postmarked by the Swedish postal service.
“I suppose all we can do now is wait for her. I’m hooked up to all kinds of machines anyway. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
Chokichi brought me a sandwich and left. I almost swallowed it whole, then threw up a few minutes later.
“You can’t wolf down your food like that, darlin’. Your stomach ain’t used to it no more,” said Nurse Baumfree, who’d come to clean me up.
Ironically enough, after sleeping for two weeks, I was too exhausted to feel any shame. I let her change the sheets and bring me a clean gown. She unplugged some of the machines so that I could walk a little around the room.
“Be careful not to trip an’ fall. Your legs is probably still asleep.”
I waited until she was gone to sit up on the edge of the tiny bed. The catheter in my arm was starting to hurt. I winced as I ripped it off, then put a towel over the wound to keep it from bleeding out. I waited for a few minutes, stretched my legs a couple of times and finally stood up. I was dizzy. I managed to wobble over to the small armchair by the window and collapsed into it. I turned on the TV and flipped through the channels for a few minutes. Stupid music videos. Talk shows with guests I’d never heard of. Lots of ads for insurance companies. And that documentary on Jupiter that I’d watched recently on the Space Channel. The coincidence unsettled me, but I watched it for a third time all the same. I was too exhausted to want to do anything else. I closed my eyes, hoping to fall asleep.
The documentary was over, and I was still wide awake. An episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had started. I turned off the TV: I’ve always hated Worf and O’Brien.
Nothing to read. No music. No one to talk to. That hospital, that night, made me wish I could just die. I rang. A nurse I hadn’t met before came to see me. She refused to give me anything to help me sleep. “Not in your condition,” she said. My condition… She brought me a copy of the Chicago Tribune so that I could ente
rtain myself doing crossword puzzles. I failed miserably. I kind of suck at crosswords—I can’t name a single river in Nigeria—and realized that my knowledge of English was somewhat limited: my vocabulary doesn’t include any “Manicurist’s tools,” and I’m at a complete loss before “Scoundrels,” “Bull’s League (abbr.)” and “Hullabaloo.” I lay down, got up, went back to bed, and my desire to die only grew stronger. I read the newspaper from cover to cover, including the classifieds and the obituaries. Then I rang again. The same nurse came to see me, a bit less eager this time.
“Honey, you have to stop beeping me if it’s not an emergency. I have other patients to tend to, you know…”
I asked her if any of her patients might be awake and available to have tea or coffee with me. She looked at me like I was a moron and left the room without bothering to answer. She should work on her bedside manner, I yelled after her. She didn’t turn back to comment.
At that moment, the window shattered into pieces and a tiny rock bounced on the floor before me, stopping in front of the bathroom door. I went to pick it up. It was scorching hot. I threw it on the bed. At this rate, I thought, I’ll soon be so used to meteorites that I’ll watch them crash without batting an eye. But this time it felt different. Something else had happened: an explosion had knocked me to the ground. I crawled to the window across the broken glass, scraping my knees and elbows. I pulled myself up onto the ledge to take a look outside. Part of the parking lot had been blasted off on the rooftop opposite our building. A car exploded, and the fire spread quickly. The firemen intervened straight away, as did the stone-faced nurse. She came to help me back to bed, and she disinfected my scratches and wounds. A janitor quickly came to sweep the floor, and I was transferred to another room. No windows this time. Like I was being punished for bringing heaven’s wrath down upon myself or something. It was six in the morning when I was finally left alone in my new room, with my copy of the Chicago Tribune and the pebble I’d managed to pocket without anyone noticing.
Chokichi came by around eight thirty with the latest news and my things from the hostel.
“They say this comet is heading straight into the sun. It’s so close now that the frozen part in the middle is evaporating, exploding all over the place into pieces of rock. The rock just entered the atmosphere, which started a meteor shower. Most of them burn up before they crash, but some fall to Earth, like the one that just hit Chicago.”
“I got a chunk of it last night,” I said, handing him my little piece of comet.
Chokichi examined it for a moment. A small, dented piece of rock.
“It looks just like any other pebble.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“A little, to be honest.”
“Me too. It’s not the end of the world just yet.”
He handed me back the rock, which I hid under my pillow.
“I didn’t sleep at all last night. And not because of the explosion. I was awake when it happened. The night nurse hates me and she won’t do anything for the pain.”
“What do you need?”
“Anything. I just want to sleep.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Chokichi got up and left the room. I used the time alone to take a longer look at my pebble. It had seemed yellow the night before. Now it was no more interesting than a regular piece of cracked black rock, the kind you can find anywhere. I turned on the TV in frustration. A 24-hour news network covered the story three times in the space of ten minutes. No victims had been reported: the meteor that destroyed the cars on the rooftop opposite had only hit the administrative wing of the hospital, which lay empty at night. NASA had provided images of the comet, and a scientist was explaining the phenomenon in layman’s terms to the broadcasters. They looked dumbstruck, verging on distressed. The expert was telling people not to worry: it was highly unlikely that more comet fragments would hit the ground. The one that had totalled the cars was twenty-five centimetres in diameter. I looked at mine: a couple of centimetres at most. The report ended on a message to amateur astronomers: the meteor shower would last a few nights longer, so this was the perfect time to get out their telescopes and bring the kids to the national park to take in the show.
It was the biggest meteor shower in living memory.
Chokichi came back a half-hour or so later with a bottle of pills.
“Only one before bed. Two if you want to sleep through the night and the next day.”
I asked him how he’d managed to get them.
“Like a true Japanese, I summoned my inner ninja.”
He put on a dramatic face and tried to pull some ninja moves. I laughed.
“Actually, it was a breeze: I walked the halls until I came across a nurse doing her round, pushing a cart. I waited for her to go into a patient’s room and looked through what she was toting around. And I got myself a little bonus…”
Out of his pocket, he produced another bottle containing fifty or so tiny pink tablets.
“Morphine,” he said. “To help with our cashflow.”
I thanked him, and he smiled.
“Don’t mention it. You’d do the same for me.”
He leaned over the bed and gave me a long kiss. Then he got up and left the room.
“I’ll be back late this afternoon,” he said without turning back.
I popped a sleeping pill, lay down and pulled the covers up, waiting for the sandman to come.
Hollywood
Underground poem #19
writing from nowhere
from the dark recesses of my shadow
that I keep pacing to find
bliss of the never-ending kind
Montauk
Hollywood isn’t in the living room, the kitchen or the den. The small bedroom is empty. Xavier slips on his shoes, goes back into the main bedroom to grab a wool blanket and walks out onto the porch. Shooting stars tear across the black sky, their flashes periodically lighting up the night. He sits down on the chipped wood of the old porch and bundles himself in the blanket. He watches the sky and listens to the sea.
As the night fades, his surroundings quickly take shape. First, Xavier can make out the dunes just in front of the house. Then, the tall grass swaying gently in the early morning breeze. Not a cloud in sight. And Xavier still can’t sleep. He gets up and walks under a blue sky to the sea. He takes off his shoes and socks and rolls his pants up to the knees. Although the water is freezing, he moves forward through the ripples until his pants are wet. The ocean spray bathes his face. He keeps going. Before long the water reaches his neck and the salt stings his eyes. He has trouble keeping his balance; his clothes, heavy with water, pull him down. He lets himself fall onto his back. He is chilled to the bone. The surf quickly sweeps him back onto the beach. There’s no point in suffering like this, but he doesn’t move, aware of how stupid he’s being. The cold empties his mind and puts his thoughts at rest. Then the pain becomes unbearable. He flips over and crawls a little, trying to stand up. Once he gets his legs under him, he heads back to the house as fast as he can. He strips off his clothes on the porch before he even makes it through the door. He goes straight into the living room, naked, freezing, dripping, covered in sand. He makes a fire and wraps himself up in the rug.
That is how Hollywood finds him, in the middle of the afternoon, when he wakes up on the living room sofa.
“You seem rested,” Xavier says, coughing.
“I’ve stopped trying to understand,” Hollywood replies.
Xavier stands without thinking of concealing his nakedness.
“I’m going to take a shower and get dressed. I’ll be back.”
Hollywood watches him leave the room. He, too, gets up. He sits down at the piano, hits a few notes, then snaps the cover closed: he can’t get a single tune out of it. He shouts over to Xavier, who’s just gotten out of the shower.
Xavier walks into the living room wearing a polo shirt, golf slacks and white loafers with a tiny green crocodile on the outer edge. His hair is still wet, but he looks better than when Hollywood first found him in the living room.
“At least these guys know how to dress!”
“Yeah, if you like the rich douchey look…”
They both laugh.
“OK. Yeah, I’m hungry. Just let me grab a jacket from the front hall closet and a couple hundreds from our stash, and I’m ready.”
Hollywood ties his shoes and slips on a jacket as well. They head out, locking the door behind them. It’s more a reflex than a precaution. They haven’t seen a living soul since they arrived.
The streets are empty. So are the houses. Nobody’s in the restaurants. Or the stores. They’re walking through a ghost town. The only thing they hear is the sound of their own footsteps. It’s warm: about ten degrees. The sun is beating down. The grocery store isn’t locked: they walk in and go through the aisles, haphazardly throwing items into the big cart that they’ll bring back to the beach house. They slip a few bills into the open cash drawer. Hollywood leaves a note for whoever finds it first. Then they set off with their shopping cart. Since no cars have driven through for some time, a dusting of snow still covers the ground. The cart’s wheels get caught in the snow now and then, but they keep moving at a good pace. Xavier stops in front of the pharmacy.
“I need something to help me sleep. I won’t be able to otherwise.”
They run up against a locked door. Hollywood knocks three times: nothing happens. He sits down on the low concrete wall to the right of the entrance.
“What do we do now?”
Xavier doesn’t answer. He walks through the deserted parking lot, wandering around for a few minutes. Then he takes a step back, gathering momentum, and starts to run. He charges straight into the glass door, making contact with a thud but not breaking it. Xavier crumples to the ground, his face twisted by the pain ripping through his shoulder. Hollywood gets up.
Listening for Jupiter Page 8
