The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [147]
AS HE WATCHED a whale launch its massive body above the surface and there seem to float for a second before smashing down with a tremendous splash, he was struck by an eternal quality of the ocean and its denizens, so that even the idea of a two-hundred-year life suddenly seemed brief and inconsequential. The passage of time, he was starting to realize, was filled with arbitrary notions of hours, days, and years, all of which might be as useless to him now as they were to a fish or a bird, and while there were countless institutions and traditions built around the fact that people did not live beyond an age of seventy or eighty or ninety, he had already resolved not to give himself to any of them. As the wind ripped through his shirt to dry the sweat from his chest and arms, it helped him to be reminded that no matter how long he lived, it would still be a mere fragment compared to the life of lakes or conifers or even sea turtles. He thought of cities, which as he could now painfully attest also thrived and suffered in cycles that bore remarkably little relation to the life spans of those who created them. When he had first decided to come to New York, it was little more than an intuition, but he now recognized a more concrete hope to find an entity whose existence might be expected to mirror—and likely outlast—his own. He remembered his vow to his father: to discover some truth about the world and his place in it, to justify his life, and to give it meaning for as long as it lasted. There were moments when he wavered and the prospect frightened him, mostly on account of the loneliness it seemed to promise, but he tried to push these fears aside. He was both sorry and not sorry to be alive, for in the rushing air he could imagine melodies, dulcet and pristine, even as he acknowledged that to sing any of them would for the moment be impossible.
41
Cocksucker Blues
NEW YORK CITY, 2002. August had arrived, and even at the highest point in Manhattan it was feverishly hot. Though Martin’s garden had held up well, as he stood inside the sliding glass door and squinted out at the hostile sun, none of the plants in his troughs—not even the gracefully weeping blue spruce, the adorable hen and chicks, or the delicate bell-shaped campanula blooms, all of which just weeks earlier had filled him with such contemplative satisfaction—aroused in him anything but vague loathing. It made him question whether any of “the progress” he had made over the past year, the sense of reconciliation and forgiveness—in terms of himself and others—was anything but a charade, given the way life always conspired to deliver new and unexpected forms of misery from which there could be no escape. He knew that others might laugh or scoff at the nature of his particular plight, but he didn’t care; the fact remained that Beatrice was extremely sick—she was in the hospital—which made the surrounding life seem garish and futile.
It had started a week earlier, when he noticed that she seemed thinner than usual. “You know, Beatrice, you could stand to eat a bit more,” he had commented after she appeared on the edge of his bed, and he tried to decide if she really had lost weight. It was difficult to assess, given that—despite his almost nightly attempts to coax her in, and her increasing willingness to allow him to rest a single fingertip for one or two seconds on her back—he had never picked her up. On this night, she had looked back at him with a mix of coy intensity and dismissal, as if whatever he was saying, she couldn’t quite imagine the stupidity of it. “Well, you don’t seem sick,” he concluded, but began to monitor her more closely.
For several days she appeared for meals, but she never spent more than a few seconds at the plate before walking away uninterested. While this, too, was hardly unprecedented—she had always been finicky—he became more concerned when she turned up her nose at a fresh cocktail shrimp, which just a month before would have delivered her into something closer to a state of ecstasy.
Martin scheduled an appointment