Burning Down the House (16 page)

A
S DIFFICULT AS
it had been for Neva to carry out Steve's request, as much as she had dreaded it, then prepared for it, and finally accomplished it, she had never expected that seeing traces of a situation similar to the one in which she had been held captive years ago would have so terrible an effect on her. She had not anticipated that finding evidence of the horrible inhuman business that she had escaped would make her feel so removed from herself, so thrown. It should not have been surprising, but so many things in her life should not have been. This was yet another unsurprising surprise.

At the hotel she had asked for the woman whom she was supposed to meet and had been required to sit on a stained microsuede club chair facing an undercleaned wall-length fish tank. She had waited dutifully for a long time until a “manager” had come out to meet her. The manager was a man with a beard. He had taken her to a small office and asked her many questions, about her background, her experiences, her interests, her address, her phone number, her friends' names. She had prepared for these kinds of questions, but still as the interview went on she could tell that her responses were unsatisfactory. She was a good actress, but not a great one. She could not conceal the traces of sophistication that had marked her in the last few years. Nor could she successfully convey the desperation necessary for someone to believe that she would be seeking out this kind of nightmare. The manager was not naïve. He was not convinced. Neva was persuasive enough not to arouse his suspicions too strongly—she did a compelling drug addict and a passable criminal—but it was clear that he would not take her on, would not even attempt to lure her into his fold. She was not vulnerable enough. Her nervous glances around the room had been too curious, her posture too dignified, her shoes too clean.

After returning to the designated meeting spot, seeing Angel's relieved face, riding in silence across the bridge, and changing clothes discreetly in the backseat before getting out at the apartment building that she now called home, Neva was unable for a long time to understand what she was doing. It's all over now and I'm fine, she kept saying in her head, but she felt more anxious and confused now than she had earlier in the day or even during her expedition. I'm alone. I'm safe. I'm Neva. I have a good job. I take care of children. I'm home. No matter how many times she repeated this mantra in her head she still felt disoriented. It wasn't until she was sitting with Roman helping him with his gladiator project that she realized why.

She had been hoping before today that she would find nothing at the hotel. No trace of the subjugation and slaughtering of will that she had once endured. Now she realized that her former life had been caged inside of her, the memory of it trapped and caught like a wild animal. But on seeing the hotel, the manager, his dirty office, and the tiny hints of that parallel world, her old memories had begun to press against their cage, beating themselves on the gates of consciousness, and then had burst through the bars, ragged and bloody, dumb things, stumbling, again and again, riding along like dead bodies on horses that keep running, blind yet gaping, unable to stop. Looking out the window of Roman's room across the rooftops she felt images and feelings circling madly in her head, exhausting, tragic in their unceasing gallop, a barely contained pandemonium.

I thought gladiators would be cooler, Roman said.

Well, said Neva, you have to do some research. Have you read the books?

Roman rolled his head back and closed his eyes, as if the word “books” had been conceived to torture him.

I looked at them, he said, with his eyes closed.

Out the window, a distant corner of Central Park. A stirring of wind that begins in the clouds. Branches sway. A whole swath of them bends and they brush one another and to Neva it looks like water flowing. Then she remembers: I am a river. And she thinks: I will carry these memories on the current that is my strength. These memories will flow through me like corpses on horses swimming across a river and these horses will drop their burdens, let them fall. These bodies will fall into my waters, float along, and they will sink. These bodies are old memories, gone forever and dead to me now. They cannot hurt me. I will lower them down. I will let them fall to the bottom of the cold and muddy river. They will drift or they will dissolve. These memories will be borne along or they will drown. They will be a part of me but they will not stop me. They will not slow me down. I will carry them, bear them, dissolve them, decompose them, but I will not let them slow me down.

What did the books say? Neva asked Roman.

Nothing, said Roman.

Nothing? Not one word about gladiators? asked Neva.

Roman threw a basketball across the room. It bounced off the corner of the ceiling and landed on his bed, steadied for a moment, and rolled off onto the floor, a rogue idea.

I don't remember, he said.

Neva told Steve what she had seen and heard at the hotel and he arranged for some form of authority—she was not sure if it was the police or a private security firm or his own men—to remove the people who were using his property for illegal purposes. The whole thing ended quickly. Nobody knew. It wasn't in the papers or on the Internet. There were no arrests or sentences. There was no story. The hotels were clean again. The storm held at bay. The darkness, with its roiling current and riderless horses, was gone.

It appeared to Neva that Steve had handled the incident with expert firmness and calm, dispatching his people, displacing the intruders, protecting his kingdom, and restoring order. But she noticed in the following days that he seemed older, less agile in his movements and thoughts, as if a rumor of his aging had spread and shadowed him and had now—perception as they say being reality—come true. His thick wavy hair looked slightly less robust, his tailored jacket hung with the tiniest gap around his neck, a new shrugging looseness through his shoulders. His relationship to age had always been perfectly clear: any businessman or gambler knew that the first one to give a number would lose. So Neva understood that Steve would never go first in this negotiation. He would maintain his poker face, assess risk with equanimity, acknowledge his ignorance, tolerate uncertainty, protect against fragility, and prepare for pain. But he could not abide weakness, disease, or dying. They were unacceptable.

He awoke in the night coughing and he continued to cough until his lungs felt raw. He sat up in bed and Patrizia sat up with him and then went to get him water. When she returned, the coughing had subsided and he was sitting in a chair with a blanket wrapped around his head and shoulders and he drank the water slowly and set the glass on a side table. He looked absurd but no one would have laughed. Out the window the darkness tilted gently toward morning. The buildings across the park on Central Park West twinkled in the charcoal light, a dashboard lit up from within, a control panel waiting to be instructed and manipulated, as if the city itself were a car or an airplane at the ready, keys in the ignition, wanting, begging to be driven.

Am I getting too old for this town? he asked.

No, of course not, she said. Don't be ridiculous.

She was wearing one of her silky robes and it fluttered and fanned out around her as she sat on the arm of his chair.

I used to feel like I could ride this place like a cowboy, like an astronaut.

You still can. You still do.

I felt young until about ten minutes ago, he said.

You are not old, she said.

Maybe I'm having a bad dream right now.

He started coughing again and it lasted a long time. Patrizia hovered beside him, holding the water glass. When he had finished she suggested they call the doctor.

I was right, he said. I am having a bad dream. And he stayed in the chair until she had gone back to bed and gone to sleep.

The next day he stood in the foyer, about to leave the apartment, when a light-headedness overtook him and his back seized up in pain. Neva was in the next room and heard a quick sound and she rushed to him. As he fell he reached and took hold of her head in his hands and began to explore her face. His eyes moved under heavy lids, darting, as he pulled her downward with him. He had her whole head in his grip as if she were some orb that he was clutching and examining for prophetic purposes.

When his curved back and then his head reached the floor his arms seemed to fall with a heavy weight and he had no choice but to let her go. That's when she loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, saw his gray chest hairs rising and falling as if some wild creature were running over his body, making him shudder up and down, and called out to the housekeeper to phone an ambulance and kept talking to him, saying that everything would be all right.

It seemed inappropriate for her to get into the ambulance with him. She took a taxi and followed. The short trip to the hospital took only a few minutes. By the time they arrived Patrizia had been alerted and a little while later she was there, managing the doctors and speaking calmly into her phone, informing Alix and Jonathan and a few key people in Steve's office. Everyone agreed that Poppy and the twins should not be disturbed while in school. And the whole world didn't need to know. This was private. Neva would pick up the boys as usual and tell them then. In the midst of all the activity, confusion, and emotion, no one thought about who would tell Poppy.

As it turned out, the task fell to Neva. Poppy looked ashen, stricken for a few minutes, and then visibly set the pain aside, relegating it, Neva thought, to that place where images of Diana must live in Poppy's mind. Poppy said she had a ton of homework and was going to a friend's house to study.

Steve stayed in the hospital for several days undergoing numerous tests. After a while the boys expressed a desire to see him and Neva brought them to the hospital after school. Walking down the brightly lit halls Felix thought about whether his father would live or die, what the nurses felt toward various patients, how the doctors never seemed to get tired, whether it made sense for all sick people to be housed together or if it would be more sensible to keep them at home, away from other infectious beings, even if that meant less access to the newest medical equipment. All these questions swirled in his head and made his brain tingle as if each atom had its own thoughts and feelings, and he felt himself glide down the halls as if he were a cloud of spinning electrons, a force of energy moving through space, not one person with a coherent set of beliefs but many thousands of thinking beings magnetically connected, orbiting, intersecting, bouncing off one another and held together with love, fear, some kind of cosmic, invisible glue. Roman appeared to have an entirely different relationship to the present events, as if questioning the circumstances of Steve's hospitalization or the nature of life in the hospital or life itself, for that matter, were not an option or, worse, a waste of time. Felix could tell that Roman viewed any situation as a playing field of power and movement, a landscape in which to make progress but not to dwell. Felix accepted their opposing points of reference and yet he could not help feeling that Roman's way of looking at things was not only more useful but more in keeping with Steve's perspective and therefore made Roman more like Steve and, as a result, closer to Steve. Although Felix recognized that Roman did not actually feel very close to anyone, Felix could not help the stirrings of jealousy and loneliness brought about by the sensation that his outlook on the world made him essentially another kind of person from Roman and from Steve.

Felix knew that his father appreciated his sensitivity, even, at times, valued it as a type of intelligence that elevated Felix and made him special, but he knew that Steve believed in a world dominated by people who thought the way Roman thought, who looked on life as a game, a battle, a theater of war. Felix admired his father, wondered in awe at his power, sensed in his bones and blood that Steve was the personification of power, neither good nor bad just pure power, a thundering wordless force. This left Felix unsure of how to view himself. What he knew was that his way in the world was all words and sensations and thoughts and feelings. He was not power, but at least he knew that about himself.

So it came as a shock and a nauseating, sickening blow to see Steve in bed, in a hospital gown, hooked up with tubes to machinery and what appeared to be a dangling water balloon, his face drained of color, his hair matted in parts, tufted in others, his big hands immobile on the sheet, his lidded eyes like drawn shades in an empty room. Felix felt the giant weight of his father reduced to a fatty, bony, wispy body, a ragged vehicle for breath. Felix stopped far from the bed, took everything in, and only then slowly approached Steve. Roman ran into the room and went straight for the window, drank in the view of the coursing river, and then picked at a fruit basket on a table, taking a handful of grapes whose purple skins fading to the palest green near the stems were bursting with juice and flesh and a muscular pull when he plucked them from their branch. Dad, can I turn on the TV? were Roman's first words to his father that day and, as far as Felix could remember later, his last.

When Patrizia appeared shortly thereafter she spoke quietly to Steve for a few minutes, conferred with the nurses and a doctor, and took the boys home. Felix placed his hand on Steve's wrist as he said goodbye. Roman grabbed a banana. Neva was asked to stay until Jonathan showed up, which was expected to be sometime in the next hour. Steve was improving, according to all accounts, and Patrizia seemed relieved and ready for life to return to normal. As she left with the boys she pulled on her coat and swung her bag with a quotidian efficiency that conveyed an impression of moving on with things whether or not Steve improved, as if this were the appropriate way to behave. Neva could not tell if this was a false front covering anxiety, a complete denial of how frail Steve seemed, or if Patrizia were simply thinking of other things, if for her, as for Roman, life moved on, today was a game, and sentiment was for lesser creatures. It was impossible for Neva to know. All she could be sure of was that her own feelings were stormy, rough, and just below her own surface calm coursed a charging current of fear flowing into determination. The room was now empty except for Neva and Steve. She sat in the chair by his side. He was breathing, resting, not sleeping, rising, falling, not dead, alive.