“He’s going to get away with it,” I said, my voice flat with despondency.
“Why don’t you go clean up and then visit your father in the hospital,” said Slocum.
“It’s past visiting hours.”
“Go on home then, Victor. Get some rest.”
“You aren’t going to do anything. He’s too powerful.”
“Get some rest,” said Slocum.
“You’re terrified of him.”
“By the way,” said Slocum. “You’ll find out tomorrow. The Bar Association has started proceedings against you on the Derek Manley thing. They’re going to try to pull your ticket.”
“It’s him. Don’t you see? Don’t you?”
“Go home and get some rest, Victor. We’ll be in touch. Just go home.”
I went home.
I left Slocum and McDeiss huddled on the sodden, scarred street and went home. My suit stank of smoke and chemicals, was ripped at the knee and the shoulder, a total goner, as were my shirt and socks, all of it smelling as if I had been dancing like a medicine man in the middle of a campfire. Only my tie came through unscathed. But I didn’t undress as soon as I came home, didn’t strip and shower and scrub the stench of the black night off my skin and out of my hair. Instead, I went straight to the photographs pinned to my wall and began, one by one, to rip them down.
They repulsed me, now that I knew how they were taken and whom they were of. One by one I ripped them down and let them drop like dead leaves onto the floor. One by one. But then I stopped.
It was the despair that was driving me, I realized, not the photographs. There was still something clean about them, something of the ideal in them. They had captured not Alura Straczynski, in all her vainglory, but instead the dreams and hopes of Tommy Greeley. I could imagine him, atop his collapsing drug enterprise, the dogged Telushkin sniffing here, sniffing there, getting closer to closing it down and putting him in jail. But there, in that spider’s web of a studio, behind the barrier of a camera, Tommy Greeley maybe thought he spied something true and pure, something that might be able to save his life. And he captured it. Snap snap. And it was still alive, on my wall. And even if it had proved a pathetic illusion, there it was, the thing he prayed would transform his life. On my wall.
My father had felt the same way as Tommy Greeley, I was sure, about the love of his life, his Angel. And though that vision had proven just as illusory, just having it was more than I had ever given him credit for. My father. It was all almost enough to give me some hope.
But only almost. Because I knew the truth of it, the truth behind everything. That our certainties are all false, our dreams are all lies, our loves will always betray us.
The living go on dying, only the dead will rise unchanged.
Maybe he was right, Cooper Prod, meditating on the sins of his past in his prison ashram. Maybe the only hope for life was death.
It was too late to visit, but I called the fourth-floor nurses’ desk anyway, just to find out how he was doing, my father, how he was doing.
Not so well.
Chapter 49
“VICTOR?”
I looked up. Dr. Mayonnaise was in the room. Her head was tilted funny, as if once again, when she looked at me, she was seeing an art work that made no sense. This time a Magritte painting perhaps.
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Is there anything I can get you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“What happened to your forehead?”
“A pigeon I kicked flew up and punched me in the head.”
“While you were playing golf?”
“How did you know?”
“You want me to look at it?”
“No.”
“We’re doing everything we can.”
“I know you are.”
“It’s still too early to tell whether the Primaxin is working. Sometimes the lag between first administering the drug and seeing a definite result can be seventy-two hours.”
“Okay.”
“I know it looks bad, Victor, but in these cases it’s the best thing for him. His heart rate is down, his oxygen level up.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Indicators are promising.”
“I can tell,” I said, as I looked over at my father.
He was out, more unconscious then asleep, which I suppose was a good thing, considering there was a blue tube snaking down his throat. The respirator bellows were drawing and blowing at a steady clip, the heart monitor was letting out a steady bleep. He was being kept alive by a machine while they waited to determine that the latest antibiotic also was having no effect on the disease that plagued him. They were stumped, the doctors, stumped by my father, which put them in the same uncertain place I had stood toward him for the entirety of my life. I wasn’t sure of the reasons for my own bewilderment, Freud would have a better theory for that than I could ever come up with, but I knew why the doctors were confused. They thought they were fighting a mere microbe, but what they were up against was far more virulent. The thing destroying my father piece by piece was his past.
“I’ll inform you if there’s any change,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Let me get you some Kleenex.”
“I’m okay, really,”
“Your tie’s getting wet.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s indestructible.”
“Handy.”
“Can you do one thing for me, Karen?”
“What, Victor?”
“Can you save his life? Please.”
She looked stricken.
“Can you? Please? Save his life?”
“Let me get you the Kleenex,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I felt sorry for her, just then, Dr. Mayonnaise from Ohio. It was going to be a long career, fetching Kleenex and going around saying things like Indicators are promising. I used to be jealous of doctors, the money they made, the status of their little degrees, the way everyone bowed and scraped in their presence and made it a point to use the honorific before their names, as if it were a sign of higher nobility. Excuse me, Lord Wentworth, I’ll have a table for you in a few minutes, but first I have to take care of Dr. Finster. He’s a gastroenterologist, you know. I used to be jealous of doctors, but not anymore. Dr. Mayonnaise was welcome to it, the money included. Before her time was up she’d earn it.
I sat alone in the room with just my father and my hopelessness for a long time. It was surprisingly peaceful there, with the predictable rhythm of the bellows. Resignation is a very peaceful emotion. I was through, I told myself, it was over. Joey Parma had given me a murder and now I was giving it back, along with his own. It was too hard, I didn’t have enough fight in me. The bastard behind everything had the law on his side and he had won. Maybe I’d be able to save my career, maybe my life would return to where it was before McDeiss called me to the crime scene, maybe I’d finally get my cable back. It was funny how comforting maybe had become. And as I made that decision to give up, finally, my body unclenched and I caught myself once and then twice, my chin falling, my eyes drifting shut before they snapped open in panic. And then I didn’t catch myself, I let myself slide into sleep, beside my father, with the soft rhythm of the bellows.
A nurse shook me awake.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I jerked to a stiff position. “I know I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Carl. You’re allowed to sleep. That’s not why I woke you. You have a visitor.”
“I’m not a patient,” I said.
“Not yet,” she said, with a maternal smile. “But none the less, someone is here to see you. But he’s not allowed in the room.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll have to go out to see him.”
“Okay,” I said and I did. And he was waiting for me, leaning at the nurses’ desk, hat in hand, chatting away, making the cute night nurse blush.