The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  Should we kiss? Shake hands? What was I supposed to say? “You’re welcome” didn’t seem like it would cut it. In the end, the gap between us was too wide; we didn’t even touch.

  “You, too,” I said.

  She followed Liz from the room. I felt miserable—not only because of my painfully blockaded loins, but also because of Liz’s unmistakable disappointment in me. I had revealed myself to be just like every other guy: a pure opportunist. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully realized how important her opinion of me had become.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked Jonas. The building was remarkably quiet.

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning. Everybody’s gone. Except for Alcott. He’s passed out in the pool room.”

  I looked at my watch. So it was. Whether from the adrenaline or the coke counteracting the booze, my thoughts had cleared. Cringe-inducing snippets of the night came back to me: knocking a drink onto a member’s date, attempting a Cossack dance to the B-52’s “Love Shack,” laughing too loudly at a joke that was actually somebody’s sad story about his disabled brother. What had I been thinking, getting so drunk?

  “Are you okay? You want us to wait?”

  I’d never wanted anything less in my life. I was already calculating which park bench I could sleep on. Did people do that anymore? “You guys go ahead. I’ll be along.”

  “Don’t worry about Liz, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was totally her idea.”

  “It was?”

  Jonas shrugged. “Well, maybe not that you’d actually bone her cousin on the couch. But she wanted you to feel … I don’t know. Included.”

  This made me feel even worse. Stupidly, I had assumed that Liz was doing her cousin a favor, when it was the other way around.

  “Listen, Tim, I’m sorry—”

  “Forget it,” I said, and waved my roommate away. “I’m fine, really. Go home.”

  I waited ten minutes, gathered myself together, and left the building. Jonas hadn’t said where he and Liz were going; back to her place, probably, but I couldn’t chance it. I made my way down to the river and began to walk. I had no destination in mind; I suppose I was performing a kind of penance, though for what, precisely, I could not say. I had, after all, done exactly what was expected of me by the standards of that time and place.

  Gray dawn found me, a pathetic figure in his tuxedo, five miles away on the Longfellow Bridge, overlooking the Charles River Basin. The first rowers were out, carving the waters with their long, elegant oars. It is at such moments that revelations are said to come, but none did. I had wanted too much and embarrassed myself; there wasn’t anything more to say than that. I was badly hungover; blisters had formed on both feet from my too-tight shoes. The thought occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to my father in a very long time, and I was sorry about that, though I knew I would not call him.

  By the time I got back to Winthrop, it was nearly nine o’clock. I keyed the lock and found Jonas freshly shaved and sitting on his bed, shoving his legs into a pair of jeans.

  “Jesus, look at you,” he said. “Did you get mugged or something?”

  “I went for a walk.” Everything about him radiated cheerful urgency. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re leaving, is what’s going on.” He got to his feet, shoving his shirt into the waistband of his jeans. “You better change.”

  “I’m exhausted. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Better rethink that. Alcott just phoned. We’re driving down to Newport.”

  I had no idea what to make of this ridiculous claim. Newport was at least two hours away. All I wanted to do was climb into my bed and sleep. “What are you talking about?”

  Jonas snapped on his watch and stepped to the mirror to brush his hair, still damp from the shower. “The after-party. Just members and punchees this time. The ones who, you know, passed. Which would include you, my friend.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Why would I joke about a thing like that?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because I made a total jackass of myself?”

  He laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You got a little wasted, so what? Everybody really liked you, especially Alcott. Apparently, your escapade in the library made quite an impression.”

  My stomach dropped. “He knows?”

  “Are you serious? Everybody knows. It’s Alcott’s house we’re going to, by the way. You should see this place. It’s like something in a magazine.” He turned from the mirror. “Earth to Fanning. Am I talking to myself here?”

  “Um, I guess not.”

  “Then for fucksake, get dressed.”

  17

  The fall was a marathon of parties, each more extravagant than the last. Nights at restaurants I could never afford, strip clubs, a harbor cruise on a sixty-foot boat owned by an alumnus who never came out of his cabin. Bit by bit, the candidates dropped away, until only a dozen remained. Just after the Thanksgiving holiday, an envelope appeared under my door. I was to report to the club at midnight. Alcott met me in the entryway, instructed me not to speak, and handed me a pewter cup of powerful rum, which he told me to down. The building seemed empty; all the lights were out. He led me to the library, blindfolded me, and told me to wait. Some minutes passed. I was feeling quite drunk and having trouble maintaining my balance.

  Then I heard, from behind me, an alarming sound—a low, animal growling, like a dog about to attack. I spun, stumbling, and whipped off the blindfold as the bear reared up before me. It seized me bodily, hurled me to the ground, and pounced on top of me, pushing the wind from my chest. In the dark room all I could make out was its great black bulk and gleaming teeth, poised above my neck. I screamed, utterly convinced that I was about to die—a prank, intended to be harmless, had obviously gone terribly wrong—until I realized that the bear, rather than tearing my throat open, had begun to hump me.

  The lights came on. It was Alcott, wearing a bear suit. All the members were there, including Jonas. An explosion of general hilarity, and then the champagne came out. I had been accepted.

  The dues were a hundred and ten dollars a month—more than I had to spare, less than I could do without. I signed on for extra hours at the library and found I could make up the difference easily enough. I had spent Thanksgiving at Jonas’s house in Beverly, but Christmas was a problem. I had told him nothing about my situation, and did not want to be the object of his pity. A semester of nonstop parties had also put me badly behind in my studies. I was at a loss as to what to do until I hit upon the idea of calling Mrs. Chodorow, the woman whose house I had lived in for the summer. She agreed to let me stay, even offered to let me have my room for free—it would be nice, she said, to have a young person around for the holidays. On Christmas Eve, she invited me downstairs, and the two of us passed the afternoon together, baking cookies for her church and watching the Yule log on TV. She’d even bought me a present, a pair of leather gloves. I had thought I was immune to holiday sentiment, but I was so touched that my eyes actually welled with tears.

  It wasn’t until February that I decided to call Stephanie. I felt bad about what had happened and had meant to apologize sooner, but the longer I’d waited, the more difficult this had become. I assumed that she’d just hang up on me, but she didn’t. She seemed genuinely happy to hear from me. I asked her if she wanted to meet for coffee, and the two of us discovered that, even sober, we liked each other. We kissed under an awning in the falling snow—a much different kind of kiss, shy, almost courtly—and then I put her in a cab to Back Bay, and when I returned to my room, the phone was already ringing.

  Thus were the terms established for the next two years of my life. Somehow, the universe had forgiven me my trespasses, my vain ambitions, my casual, self-interested cruelties. I should have been happy and for the most part was. The four of us—Liz and Jonas, Stephanie and I—became a quartet: parties, movies, weekend ski trips to Vermont, and lusty, drunken outings to Cape Cod, where Liz’s
family had a house left conveniently unoccupied during the off-season. I did not see Stephanie during the week, nor did Jonas see much of Liz, whose life did not seem otherwise to intersect with his own, and the rhythms appeared to work. From Monday to Friday, I worked my tail off; come Friday night, the fun began.

  My grades were excellent, and my professors took notice. I was encouraged to begin thinking about where I would pursue my doctoral work. Harvard was at the top of my list, but there were other considerations. My adviser was lobbying for Columbia, the chairman of the department for Rice, where he had taken his PhD and still had close professional connections. I felt like a racehorse up for auction but hardly minded. I was in the gate; soon the bell would ring, and I would commence my mad dash down the track.

  Then Lucessi killed himself.

  This was in the summer. I’d remained in Cambridge, staying at Mrs. Chodorow’s, and had resumed working at the lab. I hadn’t spoken to Lucessi since the last day of our freshman year—indeed, had barely thought of him beyond a mild curiosity, never acted on, as to his fate. It was his sister, Arianna, who telephoned me. How she’d tracked me down, I didn’t think to ask. She was clearly in shock; her voice was flat and emotionless, laying out the facts. Lucessi had been working in a video store. He appeared, at first, to have taken his expulsion more or less in stride. The experience had chastened but not broken him. There were vague plans about his attending the local community college, perhaps reapplying to Harvard in a year or two. But across the winter and spring, his tics had gotten worse. He became sullen and uncommunicative, refusing to talk to anyone for days. The low-grade muttering became more or less continual, as if he were engaged in conversation with imaginary persons. A number of disturbing obsessions took hold. He would spend hours reading the daily newspaper, underlining random sentences in wholly unrelated articles, and claimed that the CIA was watching him.

  Gradually it became apparent that he was in the throes of a psychotic episode, perhaps even full-blown schizophrenia. His parents made arrangements to have him admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but the night before he was to leave, he disappeared. Apparently he had taken the train to Manhattan. With him, in a canvas bag, was a length of sturdy rope. In Central Park, he had selected a tree with a large rock beneath its boughs, flung the rope over one of the branches, put the noose in place, and stepped off. The distance was not enough to break his neck; he could have regained a foothold on the boulder at any time. But such was his determination that he hadn’t done this, and death had been caused by slow strangulation—a horrendous detail I wished Arianna had not shared with me. In his pocket was a note: Call Fanning.

  The funeral was scheduled for the following Saturday. Under the circumstances, the family wanted to proceed quietly, with a brief service confined to close family and friends. That I was to be among them was ordained by his note, although I told Arianna that I didn’t know what to make of it, which was true. We’d been friends, but not great friends. Our bond had hardly gone deep enough to earn my inclusion in his final thoughts. I wondered if he intended this note as a punishment of some kind, though I could not think what sin I had committed to warrant it. The other possibility was that he was sending me a message of an altogether different nature—that his death was, in a way only he could understand, a demonstration for my benefit. But what it could mean, I hadn’t the foggiest.

  Jonas was spending the summer on an archaeological dig in Tanzania; Stephanie had won a coveted internship in Washington, working on Capitol Hill, but at the time of Lucessi’s death was traveling with her parents in France and could not be reached. I did not think that Lucessi’s death had shaken me all that badly, but of course it had—my emotions, like Arianna’s, were blunted by shock—yet I showed the good sense to call the one person I trusted whom I could actually get on the phone. Liz’s family was on the Cape, but she was working at a bookshop in Connecticut. I’m sorry about your friend, she said. You shouldn’t be alone. Meet me at Grand Central at the main kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock.

  My train got into Penn Station early Friday morning. I took the 1 train uptown to Forty-second Street, changed to the 7, and arrived at Grand Central at the height of the rush. Except to change buses at Port Authority in the middle of the night, I had never been to New York City, and as I ascended the ramp into the terminal’s main concourse, I was, like many a traveler through the ages, bowled over by the majesty of its dimensions. I felt as though I’d entered the grandest of cathedrals, not some mere way station but a destination in its own right, worthy of pilgrimage. Even the tiniest sound seemed magnified by the sheer size of the place. The smoke-stained ceiling, with its images of constellated stars, soared so majestically overhead it seemed to rewrite the dimensions of the world. Liz was waiting for me at the kiosk, wearing a light summer dress and carrying an overnight bag. She hugged me far longer and more tightly than I was prepared for, and it was in the shelter of her embrace that I suddenly felt the weight of Lucessi’s death, like a cold stone at the center of my chest.

  “We’re staying at my parents’ apartment in Chelsea,” she said. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

  We took a cab downtown, through streets clogged with traffic and great walls of pedestrians that surged forward at every intersection. This was early 1990s New York, a time when the city seemed on the verge of unmanageable chaos, and although I was, later in life, to live in a very different Manhattan—safe, tidy, and affluent—my first impression of the city was so indelible, so charged with heat and light, that it remains my truest vision of the place. The apartment was on the second floor of a brownstone just off Eighth Avenue—two small rooms, compactly furnished, with a view across Twenty-eighth Street of a small theater known for incomprehensible avant-garde productions and a men’s haberdashery called World of Shirts and Socks. Liz had explained that her parents only used the place when they came into the city to shop or take in a show. Probably nobody had been there in months.

  The funeral was at ten the next morning. I called Arianna to tell her where I was staying, and she said that she’d arrange for a car to meet us in the morning and drive us to Riverdale. There was no food in the apartment, so Liz and I went up the street to a small café with tables on the sidewalk. She told me what she knew of Jonas, which wasn’t very much. She’d received only three letters, none very long. I’d never quite understood what he was doing there—he was a biologist, or wanted to be, not an archaeologist—though I knew it had to do with extracting fossilized pathogens from the bones of early hominids.

  “Basically,” she said, “he’s squatting in the dirt all day long, dusting rocks with a paintbrush.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Oh, to him it is.”

  I knew this to be so. Sharing a room with the man had taught me that, despite his fun-loving exterior, Jonas was deeply serious about his studies, sometimes verging toward obsession. The core of his passion lay in the idea that the human animal was a truly unique organism, evolutionarily distinct. Our powers of reason, of language, of abstract thought—none of these was matched anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Yet despite these gifts, we remained chained to the same physical limitations as every other creature on the earth. We were born, we aged, we died, all of it in a relatively short span of time. From an evolutionary point of view, he said, this simply made no sense. Nature craved balance, yet our brains were completely out of sync with the short shelf life of the bodies that housed them.

  Think about it, he said: What would the world be like if human beings could live two hundred years? Five hundred? How about a thousand? What leaps of genius would a man be capable of, with a millennium of accumulated wisdom on which to draw? The great mistake of modern biological science, he believed, was to assume that death was natural, when it was anything but, and to view it in terms of isolated failures of the body. Cancer. Heart disease. Alzheimer’s. Diabetes. Trying to cure them one by one, he said, was as pointless as swatting at a swarm of bees. You might get a coup
le, but the swarm would kill you in the end. The key, he said, lay in confronting the whole question of death, to turn it on its head. Why should we have to die at all? Could it be that somewhere within the deep molecular coding of our species lay the road map to a next evolutionary step—one in which our physical attributes would be brought into equilibrium with our powers of thought? And wouldn’t it make sense that nature, in its genius, intended for us to discover this for ourselves, employing the unique endowments it had afforded us?

  He was, in short, making a case for immortality as the apotheosis of the human state. This sounded like mad science to me. The only things missing from his argument were a slab of reassembled body parts and a lightning rod, and I’d told him as much. For me, science wasn’t about the big picture but the small one—the same modestly ambitious, hunt-and-peck investigations that Jonas decried as a waste of time. And yet his passion was attractive—even, in its own crackpot way, inspiring. Who wouldn’t want to live forever?

  “The thing I don’t get is why he thinks the way he does,” I said. “He seems so sensible otherwise.”

  My tone was light, but I could tell I’d hit on something. Liz called the waiter over and asked for another glass of wine.

  “Well, there’s an answer for that,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “About me.”

  This was how I came to learn the story. When Liz was eleven, she had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. The cancer had originated in the lymph nodes surrounding her trachea. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy—she’d had it all. Twice she’d gone into remission, only to have the disease return. Her current remission had lasted four years.

  “Maybe I’m cured, or so they tell me. I guess you never know.”

  I had no idea how to respond. The news was deeply distressing, but anything I might have offered would have been an empty platitude. Yet in a way I could not put my finger on, the information did not seem entirely new to me. I had felt it from the day we’d met: there was a shadow over her life.