Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  "It's from the Met Museum. Imagine," I mused.

  "Look how long di Paolo lived. In the fifteenth century, eighty years was at least three lives long," Alistair commented. "What else is in that Jiffy?" He pulled out the yellow foolscap pad Matt had written messages—and that poem—on. Half-hidden inside were sheets of paper folded in three. "Look, Cuz, it's addressed to you!"

  When I cut the tape, it opened to two poems, the one I'd already read, and a second:

  beach, north truro, 1985

  the sun rolls out and covers you,

  arranging the letters of your body into one

  beautiful and dark word.

  the waves repeat it,

  like counting, reassurance in each one

  finding you

  there, among the sweet cousins of the grass.

  "Wonderful," Alistair said.

  "But the year's wrong. It was... what, '75 that we were up at the Cape?" "He wrote it last week," Alistair said. "Between the fevers."

  "But it's all about us. Our first years together. I remember him saying something like this at the time...."

  "I watched him write it," Alistair said. "The night before he got so sick. He wanted to give it to you."

  "I don't understand. How...?"

  "How? Because the time in between vanished, Cuz, when Matt fell in love with you all over again. That's how he could write the poem, even though a decade had passed."

  "But... I fell in love with Matt again too!"

  "Then it's all fixed," Alistair said. "You see, after all, I did manage to fix it. I suspected as much when he showed me those two poems he'd written for you. He told me you'd found the other and wouldn't leave him alone about it."

  "What do you mean? What's fixed?"

  "What I broke," Alistair said. "You and Matt. Truthfully, Cuz, it's the only thing I've ever done I've regretted."

  I could only stare at Alistair.

  "Will you be taking these?" the assistant interrupted.

  "Yes, of course." Alistair quickly gathered everything up, as though pleased to break out of this moment of reconciliation. He placed it all back into the Jiffy bag and asked, "Will that be all?"

  Out on Second Avenue, Alistair hailed a taxi.

  "And now, to get this ghastly taste of hospitals and morgues out of our system, I've arranged lunch at Tavern on the Green. Don't say no. You have no choice. I'm kidnapping you. I've gotten my old table back. The one without intervening terrace. Afterwards we'll go look at this apartment I'm thinking of buying. It's nearby, right off Broadway. An old building, really, and quite spacious, two bedrooms, high ceilings, allegedly cute breakfast nook, otherwise nothing special. It's not the Ansonia or San Remo or anyplace even halfway famous. But an old acquaintance has to sell due to poor speculation and a divorce bankrupting him, and thanks to your play being a hit, I'm suddenly forced to find another way to lose money, so I might as well invest it in an apartment and get credit on my income tax, no? Aren't any of these passing taxis vacant? Where are they all going so full at this hour? By the way,

  Sal Torelli is going to be a tiny bit more of a project than I'd at first thought. Not that he isn't interested. He's intensely interested. It's just that there's a great deal of family and home influence to be gotten past, but if you, Cuz, can so easily make a perfectly straight creature like my cousin by marriage—What was his name? Doriot's cousin? You know, with the thunder thighs and rippling stomach?—then I can certainly convert Mr. Torelli into jelly. There's a cab. Grab it! Don't let that old biddy slip in before us. Those old tarts look so fragile, but they'll break your leg to get a cab. Ah! Air-conditioned too. Driver! Central Park West! Tavern on the Green! Now, where was I? The show! Blaise and I have already discussed moving somewhere larger and off-Broadway. So that we're in competition for Obies, natch. And no, that isn't merely part of my ploy to get Torelli on his belly, though that wouldn't be a bad side benefit. We thought the Lortel, but it's booked for months. Too bad, because that's the perfect venue for this show, right on Christopher Street, only blocks away from... Maybe the Perry Street Theater? Of course we'll advertise weeks in advance. Cynthia thought that billboard in Sheridan Square, you know, over the roof of Village Tobacco. By the way, did I tell you I met this divine man from Montpelier or someplace Way up North in New England and, let me tell you, butcher than Connie Stevens. So even if Mr. Torelli doesn't fall under my spell... Speaking of which, there's this new waiter at Tavern on the Green you've got to lay eyes on. One of those corn-silk blonds with those pale ice-blue eyes you usually only find on Akitas and Norwegian elkhounds that can absolutely hypnotize you. Makes me all but quiver...."

  And now Alistair was gone too.

  I'd unplugged the machine, silenced the terrible breathing apparatus. All had grown silent inside the EMS van.

  I held his hand till the fluttering pulse died to nothing. I touched his carotid artery till I was sure blood had stopped flowing through it. Alistair's face seemed to relax suddenly, as though freed from the astonishing effort of having to respire, and I thought for a second I saw his lips ever so slightly curl into a smile, or a word, or...

  When I was certain all possibility of breathing had ended, I counted slowly to one hundred and twenty and then turned on the oxygen again. It hissed against his unmoving, now blue lips—unable any longer to alter anything. And listening to that inutile hissing, I found myself unexpectedly recalling a moment several years ago I'd completely forgotten.

  It had been winter, mid-February, deeply packed in months of ice. I was driving home to Manhattan after visiting friends in Connecticut and was so stymied by the rush-hour traffic I'd gotten off the highway I usually took somewhere in the Bronx and began to drive along side streets, headed I hoped south. I was sure that as a long-time New Yorker, I'd somehow intuit the location of some avenue familiar to me by name or reputation that would be direct and empty and that would speed me into Manhattan. Instead, endless streets of empty tenements surrounded me. Then I spotted what I took to be the pillars of a road I knew, Bruckner Boulevard or the Cross-Bronx Expressway, I wasn't certain which, but it would be a way out, I knew, if I could only find my way onto it.

  The street that seemed to lead to the main road was even worse than what I'd been driving through. It went through a wasteland of abandoned buildings, row upon row of them, looking in the infrequent, hard, unflattering yellow streetlamp illumination like Hiroshima after the Bomb, and interspersed with them were lots of razed and semi-razed buildings, some cut off at odd angles, like cakes cut into wrong, filled with the remnants of domiciles—plumbing lines snaking out into nowhere, toilets facing emptiness, a built-in cabinet that now opened onto an abyss.

  After driving another ten minutes through this devastation, I saw that the street did indeed finally swerve ahead up to a ramp that led to the raised highway. I had found my way and would be safe. At that very moment, I felt a total, intense need to pass water. It would be half an hour at the earliest before I'd make it home, even with this shortcut, so I stopped the car, left the motor running, and stepped out. I walked into the devastated lots, to a heap of rubble in what had once been the first-floor shop of some old delicatessen—metal stamped signs advertising Nehi and Yoo-hoo Soda—and I began to urinate.

  Complete and utter relief! At the same time, I thought I heard a noise, the clanking of pipes and a sudden ssssss. I spun around, spraying piss all over the rubble at my feet, knowing myself alone and surrounded by what must have been three-quarters-of-a-mile square of nothing but devastated tenements as I searched for the source of the sound.

  There, not two yards away, placed against what had once been a piece of patterned pressed-tin wall, stood an old steam radiator. Nothing special, an object common to buildings in New York City for decades, its paint mostly peeled off, but I could tell it had last been cream-colored. It was still attached at one end to a pipe that dove into the floorboards, down into rubble. A pipe that somehow, unaccountably, remained attached to a boiler somewhere below
, which itself somehow, unaccountably, remained connected to a gas line, which somehow, unaccountably, remained still turned on,

  I stood in the freezing darkness and desolation, and that radiator chugged and rattled and spouted, and its whistle hissed out steam so noisily and with such intensity of purpose that I slowly—amazing myself—became certain it really did have a purpose: to carry on as long as it had the power to do so, and while it remained active, to do what it did best—even if that meant attempting to warm up the entire immense, vitrescent, frigid, indifferent night.