She sat down on the edge of Father’s bed.
“He texted me,” Joshua said. “Imagine that. He learned how to text. Constance would be proud.”
Bernie began to snore, his breathing achingly even and so loud that they couldn’t help but recognize — and confirm it with eye contact — that one day, very soon, Shmuel Levin would end that whole breathing business and withdraw finally from the earthly domain of cruise ships and suffering. Every person is the first person; every death is the first death. Janet’s face was suddenly, soblessly, wet with tears. The TV now showed a trailer for a Batman movie and Noah looked up: a grown man who liked to dress as a bat stood facing a clown in some kind of a showdown. Spandex defeats death: those bastards manage never to grow up, let alone die; ridiculous costumes stave off mortality. Janet put her face in her hands to sweep away the tears.
“You coming over for Seder?” she asked.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll come.”
She grabbed the remote and turned the TV off, then pressed the call button, then did it again, but there was no response.
“Could you do me a favor?” she said. Whenever Janet demanded a favor, Joshua would normally cringe in trepidation, but there was no way he could deny her at a time like this.
“Name it,” Joshua said.
“Doug is coming to pick Noah up. Can you take him down?”
“Take Doug down?” Joshua asked. “Like, off him?”
“Funny,” Janet said, without laughing. “Would you really off him for me? That’s so sweet. The only thing is that, as far as I’m concerned, he’s already dead.”
It must be taking enormous energy to do her Janet-did-it-again shtick every day; no wonder she was so worn out.
“Could you take Noah down, then, so I don’t have to lay eyes on that dick?” Janet sat down next to Bernie’s bed and commenced pressing furiously on the call button. “Please!”
* * *
One day Noah would recall his boyhood in full Technicolor, wherein he would be a thinking, reading, sensitive boy whose parents’ painful rift turned him into a lifelong little patient, for which he’d be entitled to resent them to his grave. It was a safe bet that he wouldn’t be capable of recalling himself as a selfish little scourge who showed no desire to consider others. He would certainly edit out the long ride down in the hospital elevator with his distraught uncle, made all the longer by his pressing twenty-two buttons before said uncle could intervene to stop him.
What was I really like as a kid? Joshua wondered as, floor after floor, the elevator leapt, sped up, stopped. He routinely recalled himself as a pensive boy, who liked to read in quiet corners, who in the movie theater hid under his grandmother’s seat sneaking peeks at Doctor Zhivago. But he was also a lonely boy whose wrath at his warring parents was expressed randomly: hiding Bernie’s wallet behind the wilted ficus; pissing into the paper shredder; dropping Rachel’s car keys into the garbage; reading anything but the Torah at temple; sabotaging Seder by using the Goofy voice when it was his turn to read. It had never occurred to him that he’d done all that simply because he’d always just been himself, a congenital asshole perhaps, that he would’ve done it all even if his parents’ marriage hadn’t imploded so ignominiously. The American story: we reinvent ourselves in order to punish others for what we believe has been done to our previous version. For his part, Joshua was sure that the scourge of Noah had nothing to do with Doug and Janet, yet the boy’s sinister nature would end up buried under the alternating layers of his self-pity and his parents’ guilt. Kimmy would know what to say about all that, as she understood the mysterious ways in which little patients ruthlessly turned into themselves.
“Hey, Noah, let me ask you a question!” Joshua said as they stopped on the twelfth floor. “What are you going to be when you grow up?”
Noah looked at him, not so much surprised by the question as by his uncle asking it at all.
“I don’t know,” Noah said. “What can I be?”
“You could be a firefighter,” Joshua offered.
“Firefighter? Who wants to be a firefighter?”
“Many kids. It’s a very noble profession. They fight fire. They save lives. On nine-eleven, they saved hundreds of people.”
“Why aren’t you a firefighter?”
When Joshua was Noah’s age he wanted to be a speedboat racer, piano tuner, nuclear physicist, monkey wrangler. Never a firefighter. South Side Irish became firefighters. Not North Side Jews.
“When I was your age I wanted to be a firefighter. It was my dream. But then my mom and dad got divorced,” Joshua said.
A flash of pain on Noah’s face caused a surge of shameful pleasure in Joshua’s chest.
“Well,” Noah said on the seventh floor. “I don’t think I want to be a firefighter.”
The boy did indeed have some feelings; he hadn’t turned into a sociopath quite yet. They lurched between floors on their way down amid the whooshing and screeching of the machinery.
On the third floor, Noah said: “I’m going to be a doctor.”
* * *
Doug the former hip-flexing competitive dancer; Doug the manager of some shady money-laundering fund that made him spend months at a time in Dubai; Doug the wiry charmer, the casual prick. Doug the Dougster. What did she ever see in him? What was it she didn’t wish to see now? There had been a time when Doug had offered to his young brother-in-law sagely advice on the various means of getting laid; another when he’d shared a line of Wall Street — quality coke. There had been a time when Doug would wink at Joshua randomly across the family dinner table, as if to confirm the feasibility of some conspiratorial plan. “It will be okay,” Doug’s twitching eyelid would signal. “Don’t you worry about any of it.” But the conspiracy would never pan out, simply because Joshua could never understand what exactly it was supposed to be.
“How’s Bernie?” Doug asked. He wore a snazzy suit, his tie rakishly loose, his sunglasses pushed up above his tanned forehead. It was actually him that Billy/George resembled, Joshua abruptly recognized: he could now see the same subcutaneous wiring, the same energetically deceitful sheen on their respective surfaces. Noah was leaning into Doug’s hip, hugging his thigh, eager to get away from his passive-aggressive uncle. A little convoy of overweight people in scooter chairs progressed glacially across the vast foyer.
“Not that good,” Joshua said, in the vain hope that Doug might feel guilty, which he most obviously didn’t.
“Poor guy,” Doug said.
“Let’s go, Dad,” Noah said.
“I want him to get better soon. I like him,” Doug said.
“Me too,” Joshua said.
“I’m sure the doctors are taking good care of him,” Doug said. “This is a top-shelf hospital.”
“And how are you doing?” Joshua asked. Noah was watching the scooter convoy advance toward the elevators, his back now turned to Joshua, Doug absentmindedly stroking his head.
“I’m good,” Doug said. He was trying to read Joshua, assuming — correctly — that Joshua didn’t really care about his well-being.
“Janet is good too,” Joshua said.
Doug nodded faintly wistfully, as if remembering her name from way back. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad.”
“She’ll destroy you,” Joshua said. “She’ll rip you apart.”
Doug laughed. He laughed like someone who had just been told good news, stroking his son’s blond hair all along.
“I seriously doubt that,” he said. “And it’s not something you yourself should worry about.”
As the scooter convoy reached the elevators, Noah turned to look at Joshua with what could be interpreted only as bitter contempt. How is this nightmare different from any other nightmare?