The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [137]
Ms. Maldonado was summoned, and she wisely thought to call Omar, who came up and swept me out the side entrance of our suite, so as not to embarrass anyone or frighten the secretaries. On the ride back to my place I asked Omar if he had ever considered suicide. He said he had after his youngest boy had been shot in the head while throwing rocks at soldiers during the first intifada, he said he wanted to blow up himself and as many of them as possible, and there were people in Fatah encouraging that sort of thing then. But he thought it was a sin, both the suicide and killing ordinary people. Dying after you assassinated someone in power was a different story, but no one had ever given him the opportunity to do that. So he had come to America instead.
That afternoon was when I retrieved this pistol I have here from its lair in the back of my utility closet and for the first time seriously asked Camus’s big question, since, unfortunately, I was already in America. I even stuck the barrel in my mouth just to taste the tang of death, and I did a little active imagining, trying to think of anyone who would be at all inconvenienced by my death right then. Amalie would be relieved and free to marry someone worthier of her. The kids hardly knew I was alive to begin with. Paul would be pissed off but get over it; Miriam would up her medication for a month or so. Ingrid would obtain another lover, indistinguishable from me in any important respect. In my will Omar gets the Lincoln and a nice bequest, so he’d be better off as well.
Obviously, I did not at that time pull the trigger, since I am still here and typing. In fact, I recovered from my hysteria fairly rapidly, one of the advantages of being as shallow as a dish. Nor did I go to bed for a week, forgo eating, stop shaving. No, I thought at the time, the Jake persona would click once more into place and I would continue with what passed for my life, only without the ring tones. In the end I think it was curiosity that kept me alive. I wanted to find out how Bracegirdle’s spying went, and to see if that play still existed, and I wanted to meet Osip Shvanov. Yes, curiosity and a mild desire for revenge. I wanted to find out whose little schemes had fucked up my life, and I wanted to get my hands on the woman who had played Miranda Kellogg and played me for a fool.
My appointment with Shvanov was at ten in SoHo, but I had a previous appointment uptown, for I had promised to take Imogen to her rehearsal at the kids’ school. Mrs. Rylands, the drama teacher at the Copley Academy, does Midsummer Night’s Dream every third year, alternating with R. & J. and The Tempest. Last year, Imo played a spirit in the latter play, but this year she has the part of Titania and is insufferably proud. I did not see her perform that spirit because, as I think I’ve mentioned, I do not go to the theater, and not because I didn’t like what they’re showing nowadays. I literally cannot bear to sit in a darkened auditorium and watch live actors on a stage. My tubes close up three minutes after the curtain rises, I can’t breathe, a painful vise clamps around my head, and my digestive system wants to rid itself of its contents from both ends. My sister is obviously correct when she says I need my head examined, a need I decline, however, to satisfy.
I don’t mind rehearsals, though, with the lights up and people moving around and the director calling out directions and actors missing marks and lines. It’s sort of fun and not at all like being pinned, silenced, in the dark, while living people in ghastly makeup