With a little thrill of anticipatory fear, Bill glanced at the window. What he saw, haze shot through with streaks of light, could hardly have brought Max Baccarat to this pitch. His face seemed rigid with terror. Then Bill realized that this had nothing to do with terror, and Max had suffered a great, paralyzing stroke. That was the explanation for the pathetic scene before him. He jumped to the side of the bed and pushed the call button for the nurse. When he did not get an immediate response, he pushed it again, twice, and held the button down for several seconds. Still no soft footsteps came from the corridor.
A folded copy of the Times lay on Max’s bed, and with a sharp, almost painful sense of hunger for the million vast and minuscule dramas taking place outside Governor General, he realized that what he had said to Molly was no more than the literal truth: it seemed weeks since he had seen a newspaper. With the justification that Max would have no use for it, Bill snatched up the paper and felt, deep in the core of his being, a real greed for its contents—devouring the columns of print would be akin to gobbling up great bits of the world. He tucked the neat, folded package of the Times under his arm and left the room.
“Nurse,” he called. It came to him that he had never learned the real name of the woman they called Molly Goldberg. “Hello? There’s a man in trouble down here!”
He walked quickly down the hallway in what he perceived as a deep, unsettling silence. “Hello, nurse!” he called, at least in part to hear at least the sound of his own voice.
When Bill reached the deserted nurses’ station, he rejected the impulse to say, “Where is everybody?” The Night Visitor no longer occupied her pair of stools, and the usual chiaroscuro had deepened into a murky darkness. It was as though they had pulled the plugs and stolen away.
“I don’t get this,” Bill said. “Doctors might bail, but nurses don’t.”
He looked up and down the corridor and saw only a gray carpet and a row of half-open doors. Behind one of those doors sat Max Baccarat, who had once been something of a friend. Max was destroyed, Bill thought; damage so severe could not be repaired. Like a film of greasy dust, the sense descended upon him that he was wasting his time. If the doctors and nurses were elsewhere, as seemed the case, nothing could be done for Max until their return. Even after that, in all likelihood very little could be done for poor old Max. His heart failure had been a symptom of a wider systemic problem.
But still. He could not just walk away and ignore Max’s plight. Messinger turned around and paced down the corridor to the door where the nameplate read Anthony Flax. “Tony,” he said. “Are you in there? I think Max had a stroke.”
He rapped on the door and pushed it all the way open. Dreading what he might find, he walked into the room. “Tony?” He already knew the room was empty, and when he was able to see the bed, all was as he had expected: an empty bed, an empty chair, a blank television screen, and blinds pulled down to keep the day from entering.
Bill left Tony’s room, turned left, then took the hallway that led past the Salon. A man in an unclean janitor’s uniform, his back to Bill, was removing the Mapplethorpe photographs from the wall and loading them face-down onto a wheeled cart.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
The man in the janitor uniform looked over his shoulder and said, “I’m doing my job, that’s what I’m doing.” He had greasy hair, a low forehead, and an acne-scarred face with deep furrows in the cheeks.
“But why are you taking down those pictures?”
The man turned around to face him. He was strikingly ugly, and his ugliness seemed part of his intention, as if he had chosen it. “Gee, buddy, why do you suppose I’d do something like that? To upset you? Well, I’m sorry if you’re upset, but you had nothing to do with this. They tell me to do stuff like this, I do it. End of story.” He pushed his face forward, ready for the next step.
“Sorry,” Bill said. “I understand completely. Have you seen a doctor or a nurse up here in the past few minutes? A man on the other side of the floor just had a stroke. He needs medical attention.”
“Too bad, but I don’t have anything to do with doctors. The man I deal with is my supervisor, and supervisors don’t wear white coats, and they don’t carry stethoscopes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”
“But I need a doctor!”
“You look okay to me,” the man said, turning away. He took the last photograph from the wall and pushed his cart through the metal doors that marked the boundary of the realm ruled by Tess Corrigan, Molly Goldberg, and their colleagues. Bill followed him through, and instantly found himself in a functional, green-painted corridor lit by fluorescent lighting and lined with locked doors. The janitor pushed his trolley around a corner and disappeared.
“Is anybody here?” Bill’s voice carried through the empty hallways. “A man here needs a doctor!”
The corridor he was in led to another, which led to another, which went past a small, deserted nurses’ station and ended at a huge, flat door with a sign that said MEDICAL PERSONNEL ONLY. Bill pushed at the door, but it was locked. He had the feeling that he could wander through these corridors for hours and find nothing but blank walls and locked doors. When he returned to the metal doors and pushed through to the private wing, relief flooded through him, making him feel light-headed.
The Salon invited him in—he wanted to sit down, he wanted to catch his breath and see if any of the little cakes had been set out yet. He had forgotten to order breakfast, and hunger was making him weak. Bill put his hand on one of the pebble-glass doors and saw an indistinct figure seated near the table. For a moment, his heart felt cold, and he hesitated before he opened the door.
Tony Flax was bent over in his chair, and what Bill Messinger noticed first was that the critic was wearing one of the thin hospital gowns that tied at the neck and the back. His trench coat lay puddled on the floor. Then he saw that Flax appeared to be weeping. His hands were clasped to his face, and his back rose and fell with jerky, uncontrolled movements.
“Tony?” he said. “What happened to you?”
Flax continued to weep silently, with the concentration and selfishness of a small child.
“Can I help you, Tony?” Bill asked.
When Flax did not respond, Bill looked around the room for the source of his distress. Half-filled coffee cups stood on the little tables, and petits fours lay jumbled and scattered over the plates and the white table. As he watched, a cockroach nearly two inches long burrowed out of a little square of white chocolate and disappeared around the back of a Battenburg cake. The cockroach looked as shiny and polished as a new pair of black shoes.
Something was moving on the other side of the window, but Bill Messinger wanted nothing to do with it. “Tony,” he said, “I’ll be in my room.”
Down the corridor he went, the tails of his suit jacket flapping behind him. A heavy, liquid pressure built up in his chest, and the lights seemed to darken, then grow brighter again. He remembered Max, his mind gone, staring open-mouthed at his window: what had he seen?
Bill thought of Chippie Traynor, one of his mole-like eyes bloodied behind the shattered lens of his glasses.
At the entrance to his room, he hesitated once again as he had outside the Salon, fearing that if he went in, he might not be alone. But of course he would be alone, for apart from the janitor no one else on Floor 21 was capable of movement. Slowly, making as little noise as possible, he slipped around his door and entered his room. It looked exactly as it had when he had awakened that morning. The younger author’s book lay discarded on his bed, the monitors awaited an emergency, the blinds covered the long window. Bill thought the wildly alternating pattern of light and dark that moved across the blinds proved nothing. Freaky New York weather, you never knew what it was going to do. He did not hear odd noises, like half-remembered voices, calling to him from the other side of the glass.
As he moved nearer to the foot of the bed, he saw on the floor the bright jacket of the book he had d
ecided not to read, and knew that in the night it had fallen from his moveable tray. The book on his bed had no jacket, and at first he had no idea where it came from. When he remembered the circumstances under which he had seen this book—or one a great deal like it—he felt revulsion, as though it were a great slug.
Bill turned his back on the bed, swung his chair around, and plucked the newspaper from under his arm. After he had scanned the headlines without making much effort to take them in, habit led him to the obituaries on the last two pages of the financial section. As soon as he had folded the pages back, a photograph of a sly, mild face with a recessed chin and tiny spectacles lurking above an overgrown nose levitated up from the columns of newsprint. The header announced CHARLES CHIPP TRAYNOR, POPULAR WAR HISTORIAN TARRED BY SCANDAL.
Helplessly, Bill read the first paragraph of Chippie’s obituary. Four days past, this once-renowned historian whose career had been destroyed by charges of plagiarism and fraud had committed suicide by leaping from the window of his fifteenth-story apartment on the Upper West Side.
Four days ago? Bill thought. It seemed to him that was when Chippie Traynor had first appeared in the Salon. He dropped the paper, with the effect that Traynor’s fleshy nose and mild eyes peered up at him from the floor. The terrible little man seemed to be everywhere, despite having gone. He could sense Chippie Traynor floating outside his window like a small, inoffensive balloon from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Children would say, “Who’s that?” and their parents would look up, shield their eyes, shrug, and say, “I don’t know, hon. Wasn’t he in a Disney cartoon?” Only he was not in a Disney cartoon, and the children and their parents could not see him, and he wasn’t at all cute. One of his eyes had been injured. This Chippie Traynor, not the one that had given them a view of his backside in the Salon, hovered outside Bill Messinger’s window, whispering the wretched and insinuating secrets of the despised, the contemptible, the rejected and fallen from grace.
Bill turned from the window and took a single step into the nowhere that awaited him. He had nowhere to go, he knew, so nowhere had to be where he was going. It was probably going to be a lot like this place, only less comfortable. Much, much less comfortable. With nowhere to go, he reached out his hand and picked up the dull brown book lying at the foot of his bed. Bringing it toward his body felt like reeling in some monstrous fish that struggled against the line. There were faint watermarks on the front cover, and it bore a faint, familiar smell. When he had it within reading distance, Bill turned the spine up and read the title and author’s name: In the Middle of the Trenches by Charles Chipp Traynor. It was the book he had blurbed. Max Baccarat had published it, and Tony Flax had rhapsodized over it in the Sunday Times book review section. About a hundred pages from the end, a bookmark in the shape of a thin silver cord with a hook at one end protruded from the top of the book.
Bill opened the book at the place indicated, and the slender bookmark slithered downwards like a living thing. Then the hook caught the top of the pages, and its length hung shining and swaying over the bottom edge. No longer able to resist, Bill read some random sentences, then two long paragraphs. This section undoubtedly had been lifted from the oral histories, and it recounted an odd event in the life of a young man who, years before his induction into the Armed Forces, had come upon a strange house deep in the piney woods of East Texas and been so unsettled by what he had seen through its windows that he brought a rifle with him on his next visit. Bill realized that he had never read this part of the book. In fact, he had written his blurb after merely skimming through the first two chapters. He thought Max had read even less of the book than he had. In a hurry to meet his deadline, Tony Flax had probably read the first half.
At the end of his account, the former soldier said, “In the many times over the years when I thought about this incident, it always seemed to me that the man I shot was myself. It seemed my own eye I had destroyed, my own socket that bled.”
She’d lived a long time and never seen anything to make her believe that any part of us could survive after death . . .
The Score
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Don’t matter what we sing
Every window we open, they jam another door
They gladhand, pander, lie for the king
It’s our song, but their score
—Jake Pray, “What We Sing”
(First documented performance:
February 15, 2003 at the pre-invasion anti-Iraq War marches in New York City)
•
Gmail—Inbox—[email protected]—chat
me: violet, i’m so sorry. if you need someone to come over . . .
Sent at 3:16 PM on Sunday
Violet: he never liked you, you know
Sent at 4:43 PM on Sunday
Violet’s new status message:
Two bleeding hearts drank ginger beer / and mocked and stung their gingered fears / to know the future, and still die here. Rahimahullah, Jake.
•
NEW YORK CITY MEDICAL EXAMINER
NAME: Jacob Nasser
AUTOPSY-NO. 43-6679
SEX: Male
DATE OF AUTOPSY: 3/21/2007
RACE: White (Arab)
TIME OF AUTOPSY: 3:36 p.m.
DOB: 2/1/81
DATE OF REPORT: 4/1/2007
DATE OF DEATH: 3/17/07–3/18/07
•
FINAL PATHOLOGICAL DIAGNOSES:
I. 25 MICRON TEAR IN CORONARY ARTERY, POSSIBLE
INDICATION OF SPONTANEOUS CORONARY ARTERY
DISSECTION
II. MINIMAL DRUG INTOXICATION
A. Probable non-contributory drugs present:
1. Acetaminophen (2 mg/L)
2. Cannabis (30.0 ng/mL)
OPINION:
Jacob Nasser was a 26-year-old male of Arab descent who died of undetermined causes. The presence of a 25 micron tear in his coronary artery might indicate SCAD (Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection), however it was deemed too small to lead to a definitive finding. The presence of cannabis was small and non-contributing.
The manner of death is determined to be: COULD NOT BE DETERMINED.
M. Andy Pilitokis
M.D., LL.B, M.Sc.
Chief Medical Examiner
Andrea Varens, MD
Associate Medical Examiner
•
Jake Pray (Jacob Nasser) prelim autopsy notes [Recovered]
Last saved with AutoRecover
4:33 AM Thursday, March 22, 2007
Andrea Varens
3/21/07
The subject was first discovered dead in his holding cell the morning of March 18 in the “Tombs” Manhattan Detention Center. The subject was discovered with a rope in his hand, and so police at first surmised it had contributed in some manner to his death, but there are no consistent contusions on the neck or, indeed, anywhere else on the body.
A preliminary physical examination reveals what looks to be a normal, healthy twenty-six year old man with no signs of ill-health or infirmity (beyond the obvious).
Drug interactions? Probably SCAD, poor fucker.
I saw him. I went to the hallway to get a coke from the machine and I saw him. Leaning against the wall looking out the window. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I’ve been staring at his sorry face for the last two days, I oughta know. Maybe he has a long lost twin brother?
Mom was right, I should have gone into
•
The New York Post
ANTI-WAR SONGSTER “SCORED” DOPE, AUTOPSY SAYS
April 2, 2007
Bad news for the anti-Bush peaceniks who’ve turned Jake Pray into a martyr: turns out he was stoned on dope (the equivalent of “one joint of strong chronic,” according to a well-placed source) when police took him into custody. And he died of a “spontaneous” heart attack. Not police abuse.
Of course, you didn’t hear any of that damning data at the packed memorial service in the ultra-liberal Riverside Church this Sunday. In fa
ct, Pray’s memorial service sounded more like an anti-war rally.
Violet Omura, a Columbia grad student who spoke at the memorial, had nothing but contempt for the city’s Medical Examiner. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s like if you shot me in the head and the autopsy said I had died due to ‘spontaneous brain leakage.’ ”
Pray’s fellow protesters were convinced police abuse was responsible. “[The police] really picked on him at the rally,” said Billy Davis, a close friend who had been present at the protest. “Guess they saw his skin and hair, you know, and drew their conclusions,” Davis said, referring to Pray’s Palestinian heritage. “They called him a terrorist. Said ragheads like him were responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers.” Davis also accused the officers of using tasers on the unruly protestors. Conspiracy theories abounded at the memorial of how the non-lethal crowd-control devices could have contributed to his death.
In a statement issued today, the Police Commissioner denied all accusations of wrongdoing by the officers on the scene, and restated the findings of yesterday’s autopsy report. “Should any new evidence surface regarding this case, rest assured that we will pursue it with all due diligence.”
•
Rock & Rap Confidential
“What We Still Sing”
Issue 4, Volume 78; May, 2007
Jake Pray may never have had a hit song, but to the latest crop of anti-war protestors, “What We Sing” has the same iconic resonance that “Bring the Boys Home” or “Masters of War” had for their parents. And over three hundred youngbloods turned out for the memorial of this iconoclastic musician, held this past March in Riverside Church.
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 53
