Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  “Sure.” I smiled at him, trying to read his expression. Both sincere and opaque.

  “I don’t think there’s any trouble here,” he clarified. “I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. This is protocol.”

  “Well, sure.” Now I stood. “I completely understand.”

  A nurse in pastel pink came to the door with a tray of apple juice and soda crackers and peered at Meadow. “Anybody awake yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Is that normal?”

  We traded places at the bedside.

  “She’s gonna be fine,” said the nurse. She flipped through the clipboard at the foot of the bed. “She’ll rouse soon. It’s just time to check her vitals.”

  I left the room with a foreboding that surprised me.

  The cop and I stepped into the hall. I explained it to him like this: My daughter and I had taken the bus down from Conway the previous morning, just a father-and-daughter Saturday trip into Boston for the sights (swan boats, roasted cashews, the chandelier at the Copley, etc., etc.), and had lost her inhaler in the lagoon, and maybe it was petting the horses that kicked up her asthma. But I noticed that after several minutes of him writing up his report with an awkward leftie scrawl, he had stopped writing and was listening to me with a kind of strained interest. He asked where was the girl’s mother and I said she was back in Conway with our other little one, waiting for the two of us to be discharged. We were both shaken up over what happened, I told him, but we knew that Mass General was one of the best hospitals in the world and besides we were never going to go anywhere without her inhaler again. And then he finally asked for my name and I put out my hand and said, “John Torraine.” We shook hands. “And your daughter is?” “Jessie. Jessie. Short for Jessica. But she hates being called Jessica,” I added. Then the cop told me he was all set but that I was eventually going to have to fill out some paperwork for the hospital. I didn’t have insurance, I said, but you could bet I was good for it. He said I could work that end out with the hospital.

  Finally, he let me go.

  I walked back into the room shaken. Then I stopped short. Meadow was awake. The nurse in pink was leaning over her, having just placed her glasses back on her nose. Meadow, now tilted upright on the mechanical bed, beamed with restored sight.

  “Daddy!” she whispered.

  I went over to the bed and clasped her skinny arm, which looked brown against the white linen. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry for years.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s good to see you,” I said.

  “Good to see you too, Daddy.”

  I fluffed the pillow below her head, uselessly. I brought my forehead to hers.

  “OK,” I said. “It’s OK.”

  “OK,” she said, hoarsely.

  “OK.” Finally, I laughed. “This is wonderful.”

  The nurse laughed too. “It is wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.” She gathered her instruments. “Meadow was just asking me where her daddy was.”

  I drew back, looking now at the nurse, my smile still arrayed.

  “Well, here I am,” I said, after a long moment.

  “Just like I said,” said the nurse.

  “Just like you said,” murmured Meadow, nuzzling the pillows with both cheeks.

  Then I said, half-choked, “I’d never leave you.”

  “I know that,” Meadow said. She lifted her arm. “Look, I got a bracelet.”

  As the nurse was passing me I reached out and grasped her shoulder more firmly than I’d meant to. She raised her eyes with a glimmer of alarm.

  “Sorry,” I said, pulling back. “God, sorry to, like, grab you.” I brushed my damp forehead with my wrist. “I was just wondering if we might be able to go now.”

  The woman smiled. “You want to leave right now?”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Let me get someone. OK?”

  “OK, sure. Who?”

  “Well, I’ve got to talk to the doc. Let’s see if the doc can come take a peek at her. OK?”

  “OK, great. Great. You’re going to go ask the doctor now?”

  The woman looked over her shoulder, striding out. “Absolutely.”

  I turned back to my daughter, who was walking her fingers through the air, her cheeks in high color, like a girl in a fairy tale. I went to the door and looked both ways down the hall. No rushing, no alarms, only an intake nurse sitting nearby in a cone of light, shuffling papers. Dawn was breaking in the eastern windows. A discreet light. Go in there and pick her up, I thought, and run. Or run yourself. Now. There are the stairs. There is the elevator. She said her name. Meadow had. She said her real name. I stepped back into the room. Meadow was sucking apple juice through a curly straw, tethered by the wrist to an IV. Dear God, I thought. OK, ten minutes. Ten more minutes, then we’re gone. I found her clothes in a white plastic bag hanging inside a child-sized wardrobe. “Scootch down,” I said, and yanked up the sheets from the foot of the bed. She was incurious as I slid her purple sweatpants up underneath her floral johnny. And then I stopped. The vents by the window came on, blowing gusts of dry, hot air into the room. I did not pick her up and I did not run. I did not run away alone, one selfish survivor, one perfected criminal. Instead, I sat. My aging knees creaked. The boy on the other side of the curtain sighed in his sleep.

  “Meadow,” I said. “Give me your hand.”

  She did. It was small and dark and coldish.

  I pressed it against my cheek. She fell in and out of sleep.

  I don’t recall how much time passed. Fifteen minutes. Fifteen years.

  Someone cleared his throat in the doorway. Without turning around, I knew exactly who it was. The guy just couldn’t stay away. I tried to clear my expression of open dislike, and looked over my shoulder.

  “I was hoping you were the doctor,” I said.

  The cop returned my expression with nothing, absolutely zero.

  He stood awkwardly for a moment in the doorway, and then told me that there was some hospital paperwork to complete and he was just there to show me where it was. Couldn’t I fill out the paperwork here in the pediatric ward? I asked. My daughter was wakeful now and I didn’t want to leave her alone.

  He said, “It’ll only take a minute.” He said, “Come this way.”

  I stood and leaned down close to Meadow.

  “Sweetheart,” I whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered open.

  “I’ve got to go somewhere for one minute. OK?”

  She nodded. “OK.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “You’ll be right back?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She covered my hand with her own. “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  That’s what I said.

  The intake nurse looked up at me when I emerged from the room and then hastily looked away. There was no other soul in sight.

  The hallway was endless. As we walked, the subtext between us seemed to deepen prismatically. My escort walked very close to me but with a casual roll. I felt his canvas jacket brush my bare arm and heard the jangle of all of his violent instruments. We turned a corner. Another hall. The tension made my bowels cramp. I almost stopped. I almost stopped and grabbed his arm and cried, What the hell do you want from me? But suddenly, he halted. He pointed me toward a set of swinging doors at the end of the hallway. He told me to walk right through and I’d see the registration desk. I tried to hide my surprise. He was letting me go? Had I passed a test by walking down that gauntlet? I nodded to him. I walked the twenty or so paces without glancing back. As I pushed through the doors and stepped into the glass-ceilinged solarium, I was thinking, maybe sometimes you just have to believe everything is going to be OK.

  I guess I startled the officers that were waiting for me. They didn’t seem quite prepared as I strode into the solarium. There were two of them, a large black man and a broad-backed white woman, talking quietly in relaxed poses, and they had to leap over the chairs when I
saw them and turned and ran. Then all was clear. The animosity was clear, the struggle. I was already back through the swinging doors and running toward the pediatric unit with a good lead when they pursued with their whole lot of noise. People stared and froze. They neither moved to stop me nor got out of my way. A doctor leaning over a gurney in the hallway held a bladder of fluid over his head to avoid dropping it. Onlookers seemed paralyzed, not knowing which of us was the aggressor. Look. Look at me. Imagine me. A man of forty, in beach-crusted khakis and a checkered shirt. I skidded into Meadow’s hallway, and there, in a brilliant end around, my familiar opponent approached me with both hands out.

  “Let me talk to my daughter,” I said.

  “Back it up,” he shouted, one hand open. “Back it way up. How the hell did you get back here?”

  The other two officers arrived and yanked my shoulders backwards. At their touch, I felt my gut soften and the hope run out of me. My knees relaxed, forcing the officers to bear me up, holding me around the waist. At last, observed my inner tormenter, the embrace that ends every love story.

  “Hold on,” said the cop in charge. “Hold on. Not here, guys. Settle down.”

  “Please,” I begged him. “Give me one minute to say good-bye.”

  “Not on your life. You get back. Back up. We’re not going to do this here, guys.”

  Now I pressed forward against the commanding officer, in some sort of abject supplication, my chin on his shoulder. Leaning against him intimately like that, I could see past him down the hallway. In the distance, a security guard stood outside Meadow’s room, watching me. The doctor in the white coat closed Meadow’s door and slipped away. A nurse came out of the nearest room with a tray of Dixie cups. Seeing me, she hurried back into the room, shutting the door behind her. Doors shut all along the corridor.

  “She’ll think I’ve left her,” I wept into my captor’s ear. “She’ll think I abandoned her. I told her I’d be right back! I promised!”

  “You are in big fucking trouble, buddy. You’ve got other things to worry about.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t care about other things. There are no other things.”

  “Calm down. If you stay calm, we can walk out of here. We removed you from the room to avoid upsetting the little girl.”

  “But she’ll be upset when she finds out her father is gone!”

  “You are not calling the shots.”

  “Please.”

  “Pipe down.”

  “Then call her mother,” I say.

  “She’s on her way. She’s been located. She’s been waiting by the phone for a week.”

  “Let me stay until she gets here. I want to explain this all myself.”

  “Are you kidding me? Don’t you know you’re all over the news?”

  “Call my father. He lives here, in Boston. He’s family.”

  “Not on your life.”

  I nodded, staring at the hands that covered me.

  Then I screamed, “MEADOW KENNEDY! I’M RIGHT HERE! YOUR FATHER IS RIGHT HERE!”

  Immediately I was thrown against the wall.

  I was pinned. I was crying. I found myself trying to reason with the police officers, but nothing came out except whispers. Amazing how they moved me, dragging me like a child by the underarms. My feet slipped on the linoleum. I tried to keep up, but my emotions—sudden, explosive—scrambled physical sensation. The officers opened the swinging doors with my head, and we were back in the bright solarium, and it was daybreak.

  “OK, OK,” I said. “Look. I’m calm now. I’m very calm. Let me walk.”

  They paused to look at me, adjusting their grips. We were standing together in front of a semicircle of chairs, a dozen innocent bystanders reading their morning papers, looking on, dumbfounded.

  “I’m very calm,” I said. “And I see the police car waiting for me. I will calmly walk right out of here if you could just tell my daughter something for me. I would appreciate it if you would at least give her a message. All right?”

  The policeman shrugged.

  “Do any of you speak German?”

  A look of antipathy from all three of them.

  “Good. Then tell her this, please: Ich liebe Dich und werde Dich immer lieben. And tell her, also: Danke. Danke. Es war meine schönste Zeit.16 OK? Please. Please tell her that.”

  Again, I’m crying.

  “What the fuck.”

  “You are a nutcase, buddy. You are in for a world of shit.”

  “Tell her. It’s for her.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Let me write it down,” I cried. “You can give it to her. She’ll understand.”

  “Hey,” one of the younger cops said, pushing me through the revolving doors and into the cold air. “How about you do yourself a favor and shut the hell up?”

  REASONS TO BE SILENT

  Unfortunately, there comes a point in every research project where one’s own personal interests are a liability. One loses the scent of the original project, sometimes never to return. For a year or so, I thought I might expand my “Experimental Encyclopedia” to include not just famous silent moments but also famous silent persons or groups of silent persons.17 But I got hung up on one thing or another, for example some fascinating and finally fruitless investigations about Abbas Diadochus, fifth-century bishop of Photiki. As I had throughout my project, I found myself less interested in the breadth or completeness of my research and more interested in the curlicues of interesting shit I learned paging through moldering books and obsolete science.

  At the same time, the researcher is a searcher. He never quite knows what he’s looking for, or why. After I accepted the essential dilettantism of my project, I still mulled over its subject with genuine wonder. In the beginning, I thought silence was generic. But soon I saw the inverse. Sound was generic. Sound was obvious. But silence. There were so many forms of it. Principled silence. Practical silence. Necessary silence. Ritual silence. Religious silence. The silence of incalculable grief.

  Let me expand:

  PRINCIPLED SILENCE

  Pythagoras himself was not a silent man, but back in ancient Greece, he taught legions of young men about the rigors of silence. He called his students “listeners.” For five years at a time, Pythagoras’s students observed complete silence. Their teachers would ask them questions they were prohibited from answering, and these questions banged around in their heads for five years, so that by the time their silence was over, you can bet they had some hefty answers. Of course, once the students graduated, they found themselves at a stark conversational loss with everyone they had known before. People wanted the listeners to explain what they’d learned by being silent for five years. But you just really couldn’t explain pure silence. It was like trying to send a parcel of light through the mail. And anyway, why should there be a shortcut? If you want to understand, why don’t you stop talking for half a decade? It was soon decreed among Pythagoreans that it was not lawful to extend to the casual person things which were obtained with such great labors and such diligent assiduity.

  Tell me about it.

  THE SILENCE OF FEAR

  In the Gulag, a brilliant middle-aged woman who had once been a music teacher in a noted Baltic conservatory was serving a decade of hard labor for some transgression against the Communist Party for which she was never formally charged but was sure she was guilty of anyway. Some sort of thought crime, some manifestation of her rage. After long days of crushing big rocks into smaller rocks with a medium-sized rock, the woman would spend her free time in the barracks working on her pet project—a silent piano. She made the body of the piano out of a previous prisoner’s wooden crate. The keys she labored on for months apiece, filing down thin planks and tongue depressors. The box was solid, as were the keys—white and black—as responsive as real piano keys. It’s just that the instrument didn’t produce sound. Well, at first it didn’t. And then one day she was able to play the entirety of the Handel Variations. S
he realized that she had developed an ability to create silent music. And thereafter, long after she returned to her life of privation, she always referred to herself, much to the surprise of others, as “lucky.”

  THE SILENCE OF SOLITUDE

  Hermits and recluses fall into this category, though you could also call their silence principled, practical, or ritual. On a personal note, years ago, after a long depression, my friend—the buddy from Loudonville, whose Mini Cooper I stole—decided to go live in the desert for a while, to see if it would help him. He’d recently lost his parents, his girlfriend had left him, and it was just a bad time. That, plus he was born sad. So he went to the desert. He brought a tent, many books, sufficient water and food. During the day, he sat and listened to the silence. Now, he had expected it to be silent in the desert. But he was surprised at how quickly the silence began to gnaw at him. He felt that he was being confronted by the essential indifference of the cosmos. And so, to his chagrin, he started making up little songs, things like “You Don’t Love My Big Toe” or “Someone’s Abusing My Appliances.” These songs embarrassed him not because they were polluting the silence he had come to study, but because they were so childish. After a while, my friend packed up his things and headed home. He had learned something. He didn’t know what he had learned, but he felt better.

  I think what he learned was that he would always be sad.

  A man steps into the room in which I’m sitting and says, “Your father is dead.”

  “The hell he is,” I say.

  “He died three years ago. Here is the death certificate. Otto Schroder. Isn’t that your father?”

  The room I’m sitting in is dim, with no natural light. I bend toward the paper he slides toward me without touching it, despite the fact that my handcuffs were removed hours ago.

  “No,” I say.

  “No? That’s not your father?”

  I stare at the paper.

  “No,” I say again.

  The man sits across from me. “Do you know there’s a warrant for your arrest in three states? New York. Vermont. New Hampshire. Depending on the statutes, you could get charged with kidnapping in the second degree. The maximum for that is twenty-five years.”