The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [146]
While a part of him wanted nothing more than to please her, to sing for her and all of her important friends and relaunch his career in Paris, and most of all to give voice to the mutating and oddly distorted strains of sound that had been festering in his mind, he knew it could not happen. Though he no longer attributed his inability to sing to a particular grief for Eduard, he was beginning to detect the contours of a much larger and more complex grief—for his youth, for the city, for his parents—that left him too bereft to consider singing, at least for the foreseeable future. Whether he could sing or not, he knew he had to leave Paris; he could not bear to see Codruta die but wanted to remember her, like the city in which they had lived, as alive and glimmering.
He managed to smile graciously, just as she had taught him. “Soon—very soon,” he promised with serene confidence, despite knowing that by the next day, he would be gone.
HE WENT TO Vienna, where he wrapped up his affairs before heading south to Rome and then to Civitavecchia, where he boarded the first of two ships en route to New York. He brought with him only a few tangible remnants of his past: letters from Eduard, the Tristan manuscript—into which he had placed his father’s formula, as if one were the antidote to the other—and a few rings Codruta had given to him over the years. On most nights—weather permitting, and sometimes when it didn’t, because the rain and fog offered a different allure—he left his cabin and went above to contemplate the expanse of the passing water from the deck. The ocean, it seemed, was the opposite of a city, and if it lacked in art and genius, its mutating waters invited reflection. He liked to imagine the horizon passing through him in a thin, straight line, as if connecting the future to his past, notwithstanding the certainty, as he would have been the first to admit, that this was really only a hope—or perhaps a distraction—from his true past, which could never have been described as anything but jagged and erratic.
It was strange to remember—as he sometimes did—that he had been a famous singer, and he could even smile as he remembered the joy of offering his voice to the public and how appreciative they had been in return. Yet as he reflected on more distant episodes of his life, he was troubled by the way new details never ceased to surface, always raising doubts and questions; it made him nervous about moving to a new city—which he had chosen with the hope to be as unencumbered by the past as possible—and only the flat, silver plane of the ocean made it possible to believe that anything he had ever done or felt, no matter how brutal or exhilarating, was as distant as the land he had not seen for weeks.
Although just slightly more than a year had passed since he had taken the vaccine, he was now more inclined to think that it had worked. He seemed to shave less and sometimes at night woke up with his pulse almost gone, like he had slipped into a coma. His needs and desires, at least for now, remained admittedly blunted and primitive: when he was tired, he slept; when he was hungry, he ate, although never robustly. Any sensual longing—even the basest forms—had been relegated to the same empty room as his voice. There were men on the ship he knew he might have found attractive, but he could only watch them from behind the glass walls of an aquarium in which there was space for one. At times he fantasized about offering the vaccine to someone else—someone he loved—but there was still too much uncertainty, not to mention the conundrum of risking the life of anyone who might want to take it. After what had happened to his father, he could not imagine offering the formula to another scientist or university or government; he was afraid of not only what they might do with the vaccine but also what they might do to him, knowing that he had taken it and