The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [160]
Whether Martin and Maria believed him, Leo knew he had at least captured them—he could feel them wanting to know what had happened to Lucien—and he felt sustained by the artistic alchemy that allowed him to distill so much life into the words and images rolling off his tongue. He told them that Lucien eventually came to New York City—carrying little more than a Tristan manuscript and his father’s last words, the formula for the vaccine—where it didn’t take long to realize that what he had taken had worked; while those around him aged, he did not (or if he did, it was imperceptible). He lived a solitary life and refused to consider the prospect of sharing his fate with anyone else until he understood it better himself; he changed his name twice, first to Luke Merchant and then to Lawrence Malcolm; he worked as a furniture maker, a shipbuilder, and—finally—a dealer of antiques. He imposed upon himself a spartan discipline and routine; he read thousands of books and studied inventions; he went to museums and gallery exhibitions, he observed the construction of ever-taller buildings and wider bridges in the city; he reflected on his past with as much objectivity as possible, writing and rewriting episodes in notebooks like the ones his father had once used and, over time, grew confident that he, too, was on the cusp of great discoveries about the nature of life, as if he had melded all of his experience into an eternal, golden ring he could offer to those who continued to suffer.
As close as he came to this revelation, as satisfied as he might be on one day, he inevitably lost it the next; as many times as he started the process anew with a thought to improve, he would end up back at the beginning, doubting and afraid. He grew despondent as he arrived at the seemingly futile conclusion that any truth—or at least any truth worth living (or dying) for—was always fleeting, subject to the vagaries of time, while any that lasted was doomed to a fate of the banal, the assumed, the given, the sort of thing—like a geometry formula—that children could appreciate for a second and then discard. Because this new insight contradicted everything he had ever believed about the nature of true understanding, instilled in him by his father, he felt defeated, and worse, it brought into intense relief the maddening loneliness under which he had already labored for so many decades. As he continued to consider his past, it seemed that everyone he had ever touched was about to die, while he, as if made of rock, was doomed to live.
Desperate to escape this numb despair, he returned to the opera. To this point he had avoided it, fearing that it would instill in him a grief-stricken longing that would test—and likely exceed—any bounds of sanity. But on a snowy evening in 1960—almost one hundred years to the day after he had first heard it—succumbing to his deeper intuition, he went to see Tristan at the Metropolitan Opera. He knew the second he heard the soft, teasing call of the cellos and winds not only that his fears had been unfounded but also that the music had never ceased to course through him, as if it were his blood, his air, and his food. He emerged resurrected, wanting—or no, needing—to sing, knowing that, without his voice, his body might have been alive but his soul was dead. The truth he had been seeking for so long was not something universal or sublime to be discovered but rather mutable; it was his version of the world—and his alone—to create or, more to the point, to sing, using the language of music, in which he had always felt most at home. So for the second time in his long life he became a singer. He dedicated himself to the opera, with the intent—sure that nobody could ever tell a story such as his—to be the greatest singer who ever lived. He chose a new name—one with which Martin and Maria were already familiar—to reflect this aspiration to tie his past to his future, and here he paused, as if to summon enough strength to smash even the possibility of doubt—the name of Leo Metropolis.