There were no last words from Ben, no moments of redemption and grace; he simply disappeared into a soft fit of coughing, his chest rising and falling against the liquid filling his lungs—it was Ben’s last race, Charlie had always thought, and it could not be won. He stood next to the hospital bed until the very end, until the nurse took her hand away from Ben’s wrist and looked up at Charlie, until they straightened Ben’s body while they could, pulled his legs from his chest, pushing down the knobby knees, and set his arms at his sides into the coffin position—society’s last formality. As the hospital gown fell back, Charlie had glimpsed Ben’s penis, gray and loose in the nest of pubic hair, the catheter tube shoved deep into the pisshole—yet another violation of Ben’s youth, as if sucking the life out of him from there, too. Ben’s chin was still lifted upward, his eyelids not quite closed, and for a moment his expression appeared brazen, even hostile, daring all comers, which would have been like him. The attendants unfolded the long gray plastic bag and lifted Ben into it with practiced ease, and Charlie stopped them then and asked if they would leave the room for a moment, and that was when he leaned close to Ben, shrouded by the bag, and pressed his own warm forehead against Ben’s cool one and said, Goodbye, son, I will love you forever.
HE LOOKED AT THE NEWS FOR A WHILE, then checked his corporate E-mail while Ellie drifted around the apartment in her nightgown. Her feet looked bumpy. She set a book down by her bed table. She was going to sleep earlier and earlier, it seemed. A sign of depression? He remembered the cloisonné bowl in the front closet and wondered if he could cheer her up.
He retrieved the bowl and set it on the bed.
“Hey, wifey-girl,” he called.
“What is—Oh, that is lovely, Charlie.” She picked up the bowl, traced her finger around a dragon’s nostrils. “This is quite nice.”
“I think it’s old enough to count.”
“I do, too. Where did you get it?”
“There’s an antiques place in Shanghai, in the old city. I had them send it.”
She ran her fingers along the dragon’s wings. “You know, I haven’t heard from Miriam upstairs for almost two weeks. She had something terrible happen. Her son killed himself playing racquetball.”
“What?”
“Yes. He ran into the wall, head first.”
“Broke his neck?”
“He died right there on the court, Miriam said. He and his wife had three children. The wife is just devastated. Now Miriam has to help out. He didn’t leave enough life insurance, I guess.” She pushed her fingers along the dragon’s scaled tail. “Anyway, the problem is, Miriam doesn’t like the daughter-in-law. They never really—Where did you get it, anyway?”
“An antiques market in the old city.” He smiled at her. That didn’t mean anything, not necessarily. “I just told you.”
“You did? Of course. It’s very nice. Thank you, sweetie. I was just trying to—” Ellie stood there. “Charlie, I’m—I’m having some problems.”
He nodded silently.
“I’m not remembering things. Little things, mostly. I was trying to remember my mother’s birthday today and I couldn’t. Then I thought I could look it up in the phone book. I actually put my hand on the phone book before I remembered that made no sense. It’s things like that.”
“We’re all doing things like that.”
“No, no, Charlie, don’t pretend.” Her eyes begged him. “I need you to see this now.”
“Come here.” He held her. “What else?”
“Oh, I feel like putting notes on everything, just to remember. Call Julia. Get the cleaning. Yesterday I drove the car with the emergency brake on for half an hour.”
“That’s not good.”
He massaged her neck. She sighed, and with the exhalation, the tension seemed to pass out of her. She looked at him expectantly, eyes bright. Smiled, even. My Lord, Charlie thought, she’s forgotten what she was anxious about.
“I like this a lot.” She picked up the bowl and immediately touched her finger to the dragon’s nostril. “Where did you get it?”
“Oh, don’t, please.”
“What?”
“You’re joking.”
She looked at him. “About what?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s the joke?”
“There’s no joke.”
She smiled hopefully. “You’re teasing me about something?”
“No, no, Ellie, I’m not. I thought you were asking about the bowl.”
“I was asking about the bowl.”
He stared.
“You’re making me feel self-conscious. You seem to be suggesting I asked about the bowl before just right now.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t, though.”
“I thought you had, sweetie.”
She wanted to be reasonable about the disagreement, he could see. “No, no, I know I didn’t, Charlie.”
He nodded. “You’re right, Ellie. Not to worry.”
He helped her to bed, where she took three of her favorite little sleeping pills—the flesh-colored ones, which seemed ominous somehow. “Everything is going to be okay, isn’t it?” she asked.
He looked at her, thinking about the question.
“Just humor me, Charlie, just tell me it’s all okay.”
“Yes.”
She searched his face to see if he meant it. “Just tell me one more time?”
“Everything is going to be fine.”
“You believe that or you’re just saying it to me to make me feel better?”
“I believe it.” He nodded. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
Ellie frowned at her book for a few minutes, then put her glasses on the table. He watched her settle against the pillow, wondering why she was so anxious, so fixated on disaster. Maybe she sensed he was up to something. Or perhaps it was Julia. He rubbed her brow, which made her sigh agreeably. Strange things pass through her head, he remembered, music and faces and sounds, she forgets herself, she remembers everything, she sees death and babies and her father; she smells a forest or an ocean. Did he know his wife, really? Even now? Her skin remained soft around her eyes and cheeks. A few women’s whiskers poked from her chin—he’d never mention them. She sighed again, curled into her pillow, the pills clicking her asleep, and finally he eased up from the bed.
He walked directly into the dining room, carrying the bowl. He hated the fucking thing. Millions from a dead man’s mouth—what did it get you? A wife who was losing her mind. He slipped out the front door to the garbage chute in the foyer. The elevator came clanking up then, its circular window rising so slowly that one of Lionel’s eyeballs followed Charlie downward. Fuck you, Lionel, he thought, and your silent judgment of me. He yanked the chute door open and shoved in the bowl without hesitation and listened to it thump and slide down the long dark passage, landing with a quiet pop at the bottom, soon to be buried and ground up with the rest of the building’s junk mail and toothpaste tubes and wet chicken bones. We throw away everything, Charlie thought bitterly, especially our hopes.
THE NEXT MORNING Teknetrix’s share price was up almost two points in the first fifteen minutes of trading—as the financial soothsayers shook their magic rattles and decided that tech stocks were hot—and this was good news, good enough to ward off the spirits of evil Chinese bankers for a day or two, good enough to carry him to the Park Avenue fertility clinic whose services Martha had engaged. He slipped a hand into his pants pocket and jiggled himself a bit, as if to weigh what kind of effort he might be able to make.
In the waiting room, its walls covered with photos of children, half a dozen anxious-looking women flipped through magazines without talking to one another. So young, Charlie thought, just like Julia. Two or three glanced up at him with smiles of benign curiosity, as if he were one of their fathers, which in one sense he was and another he was not.
The nurse summoned him into the doctor’s office, where he stood reading the framed pr
ofessional certifications for subspecialties he didn’t know existed. The doctor, a curly haired man not even forty, came in, shook hands, waved at the chair.
“You understand this arrangement?” Charlie asked.
“Martha explained it pretty well.” The doctor shrugged, merely a humble technologist, a gentle farmer of embryos, so proficient he could probably get women pregnant with his thumb. “Seems straightforward,” he added.
This kid has probably created as many lives as I’ve destroyed, Charlie thought, and yet here we are. “You don’t have any problem with it—I mean, it’s a bit unusual.”
The doctor shrugged again. “We get all kinds of situations. Lesbian couples, widows, you name it.”
“Sort of nontraditional,” said Charlie. “Inappropriate, even.”
“I help people have babies,” the doctor replied, not interested in judging his patients. “I like babies. I believe in babies.”
“You’re busy?”
“Booked for the next three years.”
“How did my lawyer get us in, then?”
“Martha is my older sister.”
Old Martha, working every angle. “I guess that’s why I’m here,” Charlie said.
“No.”
“No?”
“Martha doesn’t give anyone any slack, not even her little brother.” He shook his head. “The reason is that we have the highest success rate of any fertility practice in the city. Granted, it’s only by nine one-hundredths of a percent, but it is the highest. You’d be amazed at how important this is. First thing a lot of prospective patients want to know.”
“My daughter tried with a practice on Lexington and Sixty-first”
“Oh, they’re very good,” he noted. “Excellent reputation.”
“She went through the whole thing nine times.”
The doctor shook his head. “After nine times, it’s not going to work.”
“I guess not.”
“We’ll try only six times. After that, we tell patients no go.” The doctor pulled a stoppered, wide-mouth test tube from a drawer. “Now, there’s only one question I need to ask you.”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember how to masturbate?”
HE STOOD IN A DARK, SAFE ROOM, not a bedroom, but a velvety dark lounge in a very good hotel, perhaps the Conrad in Hong Kong, or the Huntington in San Francisco. Maybe the Pierre. No one else was close by. The smell of cigarettes. Music. Saxophone. A woman sat on a sofa holding a silky, nearly translucent veil, bluish in the light. She pinched a corner of the veil with each hand, and it lay over her nose and fell straight down from there, not draped against her body but swelling slightly where her breasts pushed against it. He wore his best suit and approached with a fluid ease impossible in real life; he moved like a thirty-year-old. He and the woman had never seen each other before, and yet they were well known to each other. Her eyes were warm, her mouth coyly affectionate behind the veil. As he neared, he could smell her perfume, which was heavy, as he liked it. She lowered the veil a little, so that its edge dropped below the tip of her nose, and she let it fall farther, looking from the veil to his eyes and back to the veil. And now she let the veil drape against her for a moment, he could see that she was voluptuous. The saxophone held a high note, smoke spiraled. She looked into his eyes and tilted her head forward, her eyes still holding his. He nodded, as if asked a question, and she moved closer to him, nearly touching him. Now she lowered the veil to her breasts and then against her belly. Her shoulders and arms were fleshy, her breasts heavy with their size, nipples large and eyed outward, and he ran his palms lightly up over them, which made her breathe in. He had to have her, he had to—
—be sure he aimed into the test tube. Which he did, opening his eyes as his semen spat into the receptacle, a white shot that slid down the glass wall, and he squeezed out a last bead, even as his erection was falling away, shrinking back to a state of plausible deniability. He pulled the stopper of the tube out of his breast pocket, inspected its underside for any foreign element, then pressed it into the glass mouth.
A moment later, outside the bathroom, Charlie found the nurse, a happily fat woman with hair the improbable color of tiger lilies.
“All set?” she said brightly, as if to a young child.
“Yes.”
“I’ll take it.” She looked into the tube, swirled it around. She was not impressed.
“Gave it my best shot,” Charlie apologized. There was no dignity in this, of course. So what if I run a half-billion-dollar company, he thought, all they care about is how much jism I have. “Anything else I need to do here?”
“Nope,” the nurse answered. She stuck a coded label on the specimen. “Your part’s done.”
STATEN ISLAND FERRY, NEW YORK HARBOR
SEPTEMBER 14, 1999
CIVILIZATION, LIKE A FISHING BOAT, needed maintenance. You had to keep protecting against the natural advance of decay, and he had decided to maintain himself, too, returning to the truck now with the tools and signifiers of civilization—clean laundry, a desk calendar, the Daily News, a new toothbrush, and a two-pound powder mix of creatine monohydrate, glutamine peptides, and whey protein isolate that he sprinkled on his food. He was going to get beefed and buffed, he was going to get a routine together, not just take showers at the gym with the homos staring at him, not just eat in cheap restaurants, including the Jim-Jack three times already looking for Christina—with no luck yet. Yes, he was going to open a bank account, he was going to set himself up right, maybe find a decent place to sleep. Church, Rick said to himself as he returned to the parking garage, at this rate I might even go to church.
He stepped out of the midday sun into the cool incline of the garage’s shadow and noticed that breathless Horace was not in his booth and that the big elevator was in use, which meant Horace was parking a vehicle in the basement, where the truck sat. Rick now always used the fire stairs, because the rumbling elevator, which ran on hydraulics, not counterweights, took too long. He headed toward the stairs with his packages, pulling out his keys, but he noticed that Horace had left a car, a white Crown Victoria, parked in no-man’s-land just around the corner from the booth. Horace, though a wheezing deadbeat, was dependably obsessive about where his cars rested at all times, and a Crown Victoria sitting there askew not only violated Horace’s system but meant that Horace was not parking a car in the garage, and yes, Ricky-with-the-dickey, a white Crown Victoria was, often as not, an unmarked police car.
He wanted to know what they were doing down there. Maybe fucking with the truck. Could he beat the elevator to the basement? He skipped down the stairs, peeked around the corner, and saw the floor of the elevator sinking past the ceiling, three pairs of legs appearing, and he huffed stiffly along the basement’s dark back wall, sliding to a stop beneath a new Lexus twenty cars away from the truck. Unless they searched the entire garage, they wouldn’t find him.
Now the open elevator stopped, and the men stepped out. With his ear pressed to the oily cement floor, he could just see their feet.
“I’m looking, just let me remember,” came Horace’s ruined voice. They walked toward the truck. Six shoes. A pair of ratty basketball shoes, followed by two pairs of men’s brogans.
“That’s it, my man. That truck.”
“Give me the key. You stand over there and wait for us.”
The four leather shoes continued toward the truck. Police? Somebody who worked for Tony Verducci?
“He’s out eating lunch or something.”
One of the truck doors opened. Then the next. “Look at this.”
“Living like an animal.”
“Definitely sleeping in there.”
“Got a baseball bat.”
“Not against the law.”
“No. Horace?”
“Yes, my brother?” came the reply.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday.”
“The night guy?”
“He don’t
remember.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure.”
“You weren’t watching the ball game and didn’t see him?”
“Maybe. I ain’t making any promises about where he be.”
“The night guy sleep at night?”
“That’s what I do, I sleep at night.”
In a quieter voice: “So our guy is generally in and out.” Louder: “Give us a couple of minutes here, Horace.”
“Right.”
“I mean walk away, Horace. Just get your ass fifty steps back.”
“Right on that.”
The basketball shoes walked away.
“Fucking jig.”
“Looks like he has AIDS. Half the fucking spooks got AIDS, you know.”
The money, Rick thought, don’t let them find the money.
“Thing I don’t understand is why white guys aren’t getting it.”
“You mean straight white guys?”
“Right.”
That voice, thought Rick, I might know that voice. Hard to tell lying on the cement floor. Detective Peck. If he doesn’t look at the engine, he won’t find the money.
“I heard you can’t really get it from fucking a woman. Guys just aren’t getting it from having sex with women?”
“Whores or regular women?”
“I mean your totally regular girl—she has a regular job, apartment, and so on. Doesn’t shoot drugs. Look at the numbers and you see that the guys she’s sleeping with are not getting it.”
Rick heard the sound of the hood opening. The money was hidden in a large plastic Baggie that he’d twisted a wire around and slipped through the wide mouth of the antifreeze reservoir. To get at it you had to put your fingers into the bluish antifreeze and find the wire. “The doctors don’t want anyone to know.”
Afterburn: A Novel Page 24
