“In the mornings he’d invite me to tag along on his walks around these medieval villages where no one recognized him. I had to stay a step behind him. It was a rule or something. If my mother came along, that didn’t change anything—he still had to be out front.”
“He’ll let you walk next to him now,” Cyril said.
“Oh, I read the papers,” Alistair said. “I know we’re becoming better people all the time.”
Cross’s disembodied voice asked, “You see anything?”
Winchester looked toward Peter, depressed the talk button. “It takes the machine a while to crunch the data.”
In the video feed, Cross sucked on his lips. His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath.
Peter looked over Winchester’s shoulder as the technician highlighted areas for review, added tracking marks, and flipped through scans like a solitaire player who needed, perhaps, a black queen and wouldn’t spare a red queen a second glance.
Though Peter knew—at least in theory—what they were looking for, each machine spoke its own vernacular. He couldn’t translate the changing screens fast enough. As soon as he got oriented, a new image would replace the one he’d been studying—it wasn’t dissimilar from that children’s game where you stared at a pair of drawings to detect where the copy deviated from the original.
And then the exam was over.
Winchester asked Cyril and Alistair to make sure Cross sat up for a few minutes before they let him off the bed.
ONCE THE TWO other men left, Winchester scratched his upper lip before addressing Peter with a careful whisper, “When I first started training on this machine, I found all sorts of treasures lurking inside people, microcysts and tumors, but the more I see . . . the less I see. There’s a problem arises when we try to name everything.”
“What’s that?”
“Responsibility.” Winchester peeked out the window at the men waiting beside the machine. “Let me show you a few things.”
Peter felt a twinge of apprehension—for Cross or for himself?
“First the edema.”
The machine divided Cross’s head into slices, which they riffled through like pages in a book.
“I’m not seeing any fluid,” Peter said.
“No, there’s good attenuation.” Another image popped up. Winchester highlighted a section on the outside of the singer’s skull. “Notice the superficial swelling. Nothing to be alarmed about, it’s just a goose egg. I’m guessing this is from his fall.”
Peter found himself nodding.
The next scan had three small areas fenced off.
“What am I looking at now?”
“They’re minor lesions. Call them rock-and-roll memorabilia. I’ve seen high school kids who looked worse, but, still, you can tell he’s no Mormon.”
“What about TIAs?”
Winchester pushed a button. “Mr. Cross, if you wouldn’t mind waiting there for another minute or two while you get your sea legs, Dr. Silver will be with you momentarily.”
The technician ran his finger against the screen. “Occasionally you land a spot that shouts at you, or maybe there’s something that doesn’t feel right. I’m not seeing that here. I’ll send the scans to your brain guy. Maybe he can ferret out something I missed.”
Peter rubbed his eyes. The hour had gotten late all of a sudden. “So he looks good, for the most part?”
“He looks great.”
A series of images cycled on the monitor.
“What are we looking at right now?”
Winchester switched to another screen. Inside a 3-D rendering of Cross’s skull glowed a latitudinal scan of the singer’s brain.
“Go back a few scans,” Peter said.
The men stared at something resembling a burl on a tree trunk.
“There,” Peter said.
“Shit,” said Winchester.
“That’s the basilar artery, right?”
Winchester hit a few keys and image rotated on the screen. “It’s not obvious.”
“But what does it look like to you?”
“You need to have a vascular surgeon to take a peek, but I think it’s presenting as a saccular aneurysm.”
Peter stared at the frog shape of the basilar artery at the base of Cross’s skull.
“It may have been there for years. Maybe all his life.”
What had Winchester said was the problem with naming everything?
“Typically the only time you find these things is after they burst.”
63
For too long, I’ve limited my passions to the arts and, yes, the intellect. In the process, I sort of cut myself off at the neck. Rosalyn says she took one look at my duster—the way it covers me from my ankles to my chin—and diagnosed the problem.
And, sure, at my age, even in the best of circumstances, these things can be touchy. Sometimes you don’t want to court failure. But if you don’t court failure, can you succeed?
Well, in the Columbus DoubleTree, Rosalyn helped me out of my duster. In the Columbus DoubleTree, she and I went on stage together—I’d forgotten, somehow, that a bed is a stage. She and I played both roles, performer and audience. We sang together. Yes, it was tentative, and we were not always in the same key, but it was full-bodied singing. And I felt—we felt—transported, which is what music promises.
Afterward, we were neither sad nor solemn. I moved to the second bed, because she and I are both creatures of habit—neither of us knew how to get comfortable beside another body.
64
Peter’s left leg had fallen asleep, but rather than wait for it to clear, he stumbled over to the scanner like some tin soldier. Before he could find the words he needed or could arrange them into a sentence, Cross read the look on his face.
“That bad?”
Had he ever been taught how to tell a person there was a bomb in their head? “Were you comfortable?”
Cyril moved close to Cross. “He’s doing all right, aren’t you, boss?”
The singer took a deep breath, scooted forward, and set his feet on the floor.
“We free to vamoose?” Alistair asked.
“Your father and I should probably have a discussion.” Peter’s voice sounded as dull and empty as his sleeping leg.
“I’m tapped out of words,” Cross said, waving a hand in front of his face. “Try me tomorrow.”
“It’s getting late,” said Cyril. “We need to get everybody on that plane.”
“Mr. Cross can’t fly.”
“You bullshitting me?” Cyril asked.
Cross nodded his head slowly, as though it were made of meringue. “He called me Mr. Cross.”
Winchester came out of the control room and stood beside Peter.
Alistair said, “You’re not suggesting we stay in Columbus?”
All along, Peter had assumed that if he could get Cross into a hospital, then order would assert itself.
Peter said, “You and I ought to discuss this in private.”
“This is as private as it gets.”
Chaos had proven itself more resilient than order. The tour had conquered the hospital.
“I can’t have you in a pressurized cabin,” Peter said.
Alistair put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “What’s this about?”
“Have I had a stroke?”
Winchester said, “Dr. Silver found a suspicious bulge in your basilar artery; it appears to be a saccular aneurysm.”
“Wait, he had an aneurysm?” Alistar asked.
“Not had, has.” Peter addressed Cross, “I don’t want you in a pressurized cabin until an expert looks at it.”
“Mud walls?” asked Cross.
“There could be unfavorable outcomes.”
“What if they didn’t pressurize the cabin?” Cyril asked. “Could he fly then?”
WHILE CYRIL CONSULTED with Bluto, Peter called the switchboard in Rochester and had them patch
him through to Ann Chen, the hospital’s senior vascularist. She picked up on the third ring. Peter handed her off to Winchester, who fed her measurements. The two of them talked for ten minutes before Winchester returned Peter his phone.
“What do you think?”
“The files are too big for me to review them at home. From what I’m being told, there’s not a lot of redundancy in the vasculature, which is unfortunate. The biggest issue is we don’t have any growth trends.”
“He wants to get on an airplane. Do you think that’s risky?”
“It’s certainly riskier than not getting on a plane.”
Peter looked at Cross: the singer was sitting on a chair and nodding while Alistair toyed with a balance scale. “But if we stayed below five thousand feet and didn’t pressurize the cabin?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. Not if he was my patient.”
Peter said he understood.
“Then again,” Ann said, “he’s not my patient.”
If Peter had learned anything it was this: the point of a tour is to keep moving.
NO ONE SAID a word at takeoff. The plane climbed and climbed. Peter had put his career on the line, and he wasn’t sure why. It had to be the most rock-and-roll thing he’d ever done.
The mood lightened some once the pilots announced that they’d reached their cruising height.
“Here’s the takeaway,” Cyril said, “the man would rather die on a plane than live in Ohio.”
“You ever have any close calls?” Wayne asked.
“Nobody’s reminiscing,” said Cyril.
Peter could feel Alistair’s eyes boring into him; slumped in his club chair, Cross’s son looked like a stoned toad.
“What if I have to sneeze?” Cross asked.
“Don’t fight it,” Peter said.
Tomorrow morning, Martin would commandeer one of the hospital’s conference rooms, draw the shades, turn off the lights, and, with the aid of a ten-thousand-dollar HD projector, throw Cross’s scans on the wall. Then he and George Milakis, the hospital’s chief of surgery, would lean back in their chairs and wiggle their laser pointers at a six-foot slice of the singer’s brain. They might make small talk about the relative merits of the Siemens scanners, about resolution and detail and crispness as pertaining to, say, the singer’s nasal cavitation, the resonant cathedral that gave Cross’s voice its inimitable character. And after a few minutes, because they were professionals, they would get down to the business at hand. Ogata would probably teleconference in.
TILTING HIS HEAD back to bounce his voice off the ceiling of the cabin, Alistair said, “Can we have some fun in Lexington?”
“Anything you want,” his father said.
“We need an animal sacrifice to please the gods.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“And bourbon.”
“Rum is the new bourbon,” offered Wayne.
Cross chuckled.
“I’m not joking,” said Wayne.
Cyril said, “That’s why he’s laughing.”
“I don’t get it.”
Cross said, “Cyril, what was the name of that guy?”
“Malcolm Littlefield.”
“I can’t remember what he said.”
“He said, ‘Cats are more empathic than dogs.’”
Alistair started laughing, too.
Cross said, “I fired him on the spot.”
“You’d been wanting to let him go for a while,” Cyril added.
Cross flashed all his teeth in a vicious smile. “But he didn’t know that. To this day he believes he got fired for sticking up for felines.”
Wayne said, “Forget what I said about rum.”
They all laughed, even Peter. For a minute or more, it seemed like the funniest thing anyone had ever said.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “That, folks, was the gentlest landing in the history of aeronautics.”
It was true—the plane was already on the ground.
65
Rosalyn purrs in her bed.
I won’t let myself watch her sleep. For one thing, I wouldn’t want anyone to watch me sleep. The other reason is, I’m afraid that if I watch her some petty part of me might start to pick her apart.
I walk to the window.
Her room overlooks the Supreme Court of Ohio; a giant steel gavel rests in a rectangular reflecting pool by the south entrance to the building. The scale of the hammer—I can see it from the window of Rosalyn’s room—suggests that it belongs to God, since only a hand descending from a cloud might wield it.
On CrossTalk, I can assume, people are floating theories to explain why Cross chose tonight to play “A.D.C.” But that’s not what I’m caught up on. One can’t know another person’s intentions unless he’s willing to share (and even if he’s willing to share them, it’s still not that simple.) I’m not thinking about intentions. The question that keeps me up is this: why did the song sound different the second time he played it.
I have been called a hopeless romantic and a hopeless loser, but neither of these charges is true. I am always full of hope.
I close my eyes and listen to Rosalyn sleeping.
66
Peter dreamed of horses: horses that looked as wise as judges; horses with faces like graven ancestors; horses in white lab coats, their lacquered hooves clacking on hospital corridor floors.
When he woke, it seemed he was already sitting up in the middle of a bed. The sun streamed in—Martin’s tinny voice said, “. . . you know what you’ve done, don’t you? You saved his fucking life.” He sounded giddy.
“You saw the scans? It’s not even remotely what we were looking for.”
“That’s the beauty of it. Preventative medicine, Peter. Repeat after me: pre-ven-ta-tive medicine. Ogata claims he cut Cross into a million slices this spring and there was no indication of anything. Trust me, we hit the lottery with this. We’re just spitballing here, but what do you think about a Tony Ogata Center for Preventative Medicine at Rochester Memorial.”
Peter could tell Martin had him on speaker.
“Is someone else in the room with you?”
“We’re all very proud of you,” Peg said. “Grand slam.”
Martin said, “You think Cross would give us a testimonial? Marketing is going to eat this up.”
“This is going to be very big for you,” Peg said. “For all of us.”
Martin said, “I wanted to send a bottle of champagne to your room, but we didn’t want to send the wrong message.”
“I vetoed that idea,” said Peg.
It seemed to Peter that they were waiting for him to say some code phrase, or for an apology. “Thanks for this opportunity.”
“You’re our man in Saipan,” Martin said.
“What should I do now?”
“Do?” Martin repeated.
“There’s really not much more you can do,” Peg said
Martin said, “I guess if he wants you to stick around the hospital for a day or two . . .”
“Sure,” said Peg. “Obviously, he trusts you.”
“Nobody’s at the hospital.”
Martin said, “I bet Alistair will stop by.”
Peter swung his feet off the bed and stood up. “That’s not what I meant. I mean Cross isn’t in the hospital.” He looked over a wooded park the approximate size and shape of a baseball diamond. “We’re not even in Columbus.”
Martin said, “Don’t tell me you’re in Lexington.”
“Why would he be in Lexington?” Peg asked.
“He’s got a show here tonight.”
“Motherfucker,” Martin said, “I really want to be at that show.”
PETER PUSHED A button and waited for the phone to ring.
Judith answered. “Hello?” She and Rolf used an old RadioShack portable phone—they greeted everyone the same since it didn’t have caller ID.
“What happened to the Sci
entist?”
“Well, good morning.”
“I’m sorry. I had a late night.”
“He would have been a useless father. You have to trust me.”
“Did he just leave one day? ”
“You’re asking me to remember something that happened more than thirty years ago.”
Instead of quibbling, Peter said, “Thank you.”
“I’d been sleeping on a cot in a tent. Cross offered me a spare guest room with a queen-sized bed and matching sheets. I told the Scientist we were through.”
“You didn’t call him the Scientist.”
“I called him Lawrence.”
“You asked him to leave and he left?”
“He hung around for a week or two. I’m not sure if he was hoping I’d change my mind, or what. Then one morning his truck was gone.”
“Was I really born in Virginia?”
“Of course.”
“But after I was born, you went back to the farm.”
“You know your grandparents. If we stayed with them, neither of us would have had any freedom.”
“Why didn’t you get a job?”
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew he’d gone too far. He thought he could hear her heading outside. Was she leaving the house? Her studio? A thought crossed his mind: she was on her way to him.
“Can you understand that before you were born, I didn’t think about you? When I say that, I mean I didn’t think about you at all.”
What he understood was that Judith was always Judith.
67
Rosalyn and I forgo the hotel’s complimentary breakfast in favor of a French place a few blocks away that serves granola and fruit atop yogurt in cut-glass bowls—they squeeze their orange juice right before your eyes, in a device that might be the twin to a machine Patricia and I used at the print shop to punch three-inch-round campaign pins.
Vexation Lullaby Page 24
