Vexation Lullaby (28 page)

He walked to the front of the bus and asked the driver to let him off.

The evening had carried a damp earthy smell into the city. Where, he wondered, did the cornstalks start, or the wheat? He'd barely given Ohio a thought since fifth-grade geography.

He came across a two-way pedestrian path. Just beyond the path a big, slow river shone metallic pink. Peter was constantly being overtaken by a parade of joggers, the occasional bicyclist knifing through their ranks. Since when had women's shorts become so, well, short? The jog bra craze had caught him off guard a few years ago, but now he was seeing hamstrings. Those teeny fucking black shorts. He'd just made peace with yoga pants.

Plump songbirds flitted about the underbrush bordering the path. He scanned the bobbing, hypoxic faces in the oncoming lane. A skiff gouged a white line up the river, disappeared beneath an overpass. Wasn't it weird, Peter thought, that the same rivers that once enabled cities now girded them. That sort of penetrating intelligence would have knocked Maya's knickers off. Watching the water corrugate around the cement pilings of a bridge, the doctor took out his phone and paged Martin.

A few seconds later, his phone shook.

“Tell me you've got good news.”

“I'm ninety-nine percent certain nothing's wrong with him.”

The joggers kept brushing past Peter, pushing him aside. There must have been some innovation in Lycra, some breakthrough.

“We're not having a conversation about your instincts. I'm drawing a line in the sand here. Either you get him in the tube tonight, or I tell Peg about his fall and she'll do that thing where her mouth looks like a cat's asshole.”

Who was being bullied now?

“I'll get him to the hospital.”

“Seriously? You'll bring him to Wexner Medical Center?”

“Right after the show.”

“Silver, you and I are a couple of forward-looking motherfuckers. Don't jerk me around.”

“Make sure that tube is empty. He won't hang out in a waiting room.”

On the opposite bank, a huge bird glided along the tree line trailing a gang of crows.

57

While we wait for our food Rosalyn tells me more about her tumor, which is slow-growing and about the size of a cocktail olive. I ask if there's anything doctors can do. She says her oncologist recommends “snipping out all my plumbing.” While she's sleeping on the operating table, the surgeon will evaluate tissue samples and decide if anything else needs to be done.

“But?” I say.

There's a small white vase on our table and Rosalyn reaches out and touches it. “I like my plumbing. If I were younger, they might consider an alternative course of treatment.”

“Are you thinking about the alternative treatment?”

She shakes her head. “Not at all. Bring on mainstream medicine.”

“It's nice that you've got that guest bed,” I say.

Such an odd look flashes across her face. “What do you mean, Arthur?”

“If you're not feeling up to the stairs.”

“People usually feel okay by the time they leave the hospital. That's what they told me.”

“Well, it's got to be better than chemotherapy.”

But it turns out she's going to have chemotherapy, too; it's part of her treatment plan. This news is a flapping malevolence I've released into the room.

The waitress delivers our food. She wears a fabric wrist brace on her left hand, which makes me think that she's been at this a long time. Who does she see when she looks at us: me in my blasted duster and Rosalyn cocooned in cashmere? Could she mistake us for one of those couples who, despite decades of domesticity, still manage to differentiate? Or, as I suspect, are we Lady and the Tramp? I fold the hem of my shirt to conceal a jagged line of ink, like a seismograph's record of a catastrophe.

Neither Rosalyn nor I have much of an appetite. We pick at our food in silence. Though I feel responsible for the quiet, I can't figure out how to change anything.

When the waitress delivers our bill, Rosalyn has her credit card out.

Finally I ask her, “When do you think you'll have the surgery?”

“In ten days. Ten days from today.”

I
NSTEAD OF GOING
to our seats, I pull Rosalyn into the LeVeque Tower lobby. As a rule, I don't like frescoes, but the vaulted ceilings in the LeVeque Tower lobby offer a different sort of fresco. The blue, cloud-dappled heavens and pink gods have been replaced with art deco designs rendered in real American colors—clay browns and yolky yellow.

While I've wandered through the Louvre and stood in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, neither of those places speak to me like Tacoma's waterfront or Chicago's Carbon and Carbide Building.
⁴²
I'm an American. This country is my only home.

R
OSALYN STOPS WALKING
, which, because we're holding hands, stops me.

“Was I going too fast?” I ask her.

She bites her lips, shaking her head.

I kiss her. I kiss her on the edge of this vaulted space. Then this unexpected woman stares up at the ceiling with me, Arthur Pennyman.

I want to be alone with her and so I tow her toward a bank of elevators—the elevator's doors are another miracle, a tangle of astrological symbols and industrial motifs, everything rendered in filigreed brass. The doors are counterpoints and peers to the frescoes. Each one must weigh a thousand pounds. And there, above the door, I spot a single word brazed upon the lintel, a single, extraordinary word. I lift our clasped hands so that we point at it together.

Here's one more indisputable fact: that word is Health.

We step into the elevator. I press the button for the top floor, but the doors don't close. My galloping heart knows this is a very bad sign. It's as if the elevator has judged us to be missing something essential.

A black man with a thin (there's no other way to say this) Jimmy-esque mustache, wearing a blue-gray security uniform, stops in front of the elevator. “Folks, you need a key to go up.”

“Busted,” Rosalyn says.

I say, “It's her birthday.”

“Is it your birthday, ma'am?”

Rosalyn scrunches up her face.

He leans into the elevator, smiles at Rosalyn. “Promise you'll come back down in ten minutes?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

The guard slots a key in the elevator's override and presses the top floor. “Don't do anything up there unless you want to be on the ten o'clock news. They got cameras everywhere.”

The doors pinch shut. In the next moment we feel ourselves being hoisted up.

“Let me guess,” I say. “There's an elevator scene in
The Holy Screw
.”

Rosalyn presses her shoulder against mine, squeezes my hand.

After the surgeons do their job, what would become of the new space inside her? What happens when they take something like that out? Should a person be heartened to learn she can survive without all her original parts, or will it remind her that everything we love is on loan?

Our windowless box creeps higher, chiming each time it
brushes past a hidden floor.

“I have a favor to ask,” I say.

“A favor?”

“The day after tomorrow, I'm meeting Gabby's friend.”

Rosalyn takes a step back, shaking her head, as though I'm some misguided pet bringing her a dead mouse.

Her reaction triggers sparks of panic inside me.

The elevator halts. Like china in a cupboard, we shake a little, settle. The doors open and we step onto the forty-seventh floor. The bare concrete floor is laced with dried adhesive. To our left, sheets of plywood make a crude wall. On our right, behind glass doors, a bright reception area with austere, blocky furniture and matching filing cabinets; everything is taupe, except for a potted orchid.

Why had I whisked Rosalyn away from the lobby to show her this?

Rosalyn pushes against a section of plywood. It scrapes across the floor. She looks over her shoulder at me and winks.

The space is cavernous, empty but for a few stark columns. Coils of telephone wire dangle between panels of the drop ceiling.

Standing by the windows, we look out over Columbus, over the constellation of streetlights and house lights, headlights and stoplights extending out of the city. At the horizon the sky smolders, a thin ribbon of electric blue. I can imagine we are seeing the curvature of the Earth. It feels as though we've left Earth, like we're aboard some spaceship.

I kiss Rosalyn, again. I kiss her soft cheek. I kiss the corner of her mouth. I kiss her parting lips. I kiss her teeth.

“God, Arthur. You're making me light-headed.”

I kiss her twisted neck.

“Okay. Okay.” She doesn't kiss me back, but she says, “I'll go with you to see your daughter.”

58

Peter walked around the downtown for more than an hour. The sidewalks were crowded with people enjoying the day. He didn't come across Maya or Alistair. The faces he saw didn't recognize his face.

He ate a grilled chicken sandwich and a side salad in a restaurant attached to a middle-tier hotel. To keep busy, he pulled up the Ohio Theater's website on his phone. Apparently the space had been designed in the Spanish Baroque style; Peter wondered if Cross had chosen the venue for how it would complement his black bullfighter getup. He paid his bill and took a cab to the theater.

When he knocked on the stage door, Lumpy let him in without comment. The backstage was indistinguishable from Buffalo or Pittsburgh: standpipes and electrical panels, circular staircases and catwalks, everything painted matte black. Endomorphs in boxy T-shirts emblazoned “Security” checked his credentials again and again, reinforcing his suspicion that he was forgettable.

He found a quiet spot near the curtain that permitted him to look into the hall. Every surface was either red or gold. Depending on a person's self-regard, one would feel like either a head of state or else a peasant, drunk on stolen wine, lost in a castle.

The opening act, a couple guys with banjos and a woman with a quivering voice, did their thing as the crowd filed in.

The Blister walked past, saluted Peter with two fingers splinted together with duct tape. Peter wanted to ask what had happened, but the roadie vanished somewhere.

While the opening act were taking their bows, Sutliff sidled up beside Peter. “Alistair didn't push him down the stairs.”

“Did someone say he did?”

“He was trying to catch his old man.” Though they were talking, Sutliff didn't look at Peter. The whole time he kept playing his unplugged guitar.

“You're saying Cross stumbled first.”

Sutliff pointed a finger at the ceiling.

High above, the lights dropped away until just a few cans glowed like cats' eyes. In the artificial twilight, a stream of stagehands bumped past, as though Peter were an uncharted island.

When the lights blazed on, Cross and the band had already taken their places. A roar from the crowd rushed the stage, but the guys mounted a quick counterattack, releasing a squall that overwhelmed the audience, setting them on their heels. And then the noise became music.

Some of the songs were so familiar it seemed easier to attribute them to a civilization than to a single human mind. It hardly mattered that Cross didn't have the greatest singing voice; someone else could make the songs pretty.

A hand clamped on the doctor's elbow, pulling him backward. Had he been on the stage? As he backpedaled, it seemed that a few faces in the audience turned to watch him withdraw.

Cyril said, “I need you.”

Peter chased after Cyril to avoid being dragged. Unlike the irresistible forces he'd encountered in physics textbooks, Cyril wasn't hypothetical.

The music filtered through the building—the walls buzzed as they charged into the basement.

Cyril unlocked the door to an empty dressing room and pushed Peter inside. “He's in the bathroom.”

“He” was Alistair.

Despite a whirring ceiling fan, the room smelled of puke and cigarette smoke. Cross's son sat, naked, in a pool of urine; his sodden clothes scattered across the floor. His elbow rested on the rim of the toilet. He was smoking.

Peter noticed little shards of glass shining in the piss. No, they weren't glass.

“You throw ice water on him?”

Cyril nodded.

The doctor crouched down, watched the naked man smoke, watched the slow way he blinked, how he couldn't seem to keep his head up.

“You feeling okay?”

Alistair twisted the cigarette between his fingers, stubbed it out on the tiled wall. “My clothes are wet.”

“Did you throw up?”

Alistair licked his lips.

“He passed out on the throne,” Cyril said. “I couldn't wake him.”

No wonder Maya hadn't heard from him.

Alistair managed to climb halfway to vertical before one of his feet slipped. He went straight down, his head glancing off the toilet, his body slapping on the floor. He started snoring; he'd knocked himself out cold.

“Shit,” said Cyril. “That ain't going to help.”

With his phone's stopwatch, Peter checked Alistair's pulse and respiration. “Do you know what he took?”

Cyril stood outside the bathroom door, so only his tilted forehead peeked in. “Wayne saw Allie getting up in Fletch's grill earlier, but I don't want to speculate.”

“So how long's he been like this?”

“You believe me if I said his whole life?”

Peter turned, one shoe squeaking on the floor. “I mean today.”

“Maybe an hour or two.” Cyril stepped into the bathroom, opened the faucet and washed his hands. “You think he'll be okay?”

When he rotated through the ER, Peter had dealt with every species of overdose: drug abusers, accidentals, suicides, and parasuicides. Before falling, Allie had seemed coherent enough. Puking was good. The ice water was good. He'd rather Cross's son hadn't hit his head, but with his vitals stable it wasn't a huge concern. He'd probably have some bruising on his face, a headache, sure as hell.