The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [73]
He was distracted by the sight of a young suit, maybe in his late twenties, in a double-breasted coat and a candy-striped tie, with shaggy hair and aviator shades; he wasn’t walking with anyone, and his vaguely distracted, antagonistic aura seemed both appropriate and frankly seductive to Martin. But now that he was forty-one and not, say, twenty-nine—when the fate of the universe had so often seemed to hang in the balance of possessing a stranger—Martin easily restrained himself from making any kind of overture. There would be other days, perhaps, but what could he possibly say today—a disaster day—that wouldn’t sound ridiculously trite and mundane, so that he would be left wanting to slit his wrists the second the words left his mouth? He again considered the multitudes around him and realized that each person had a story, yet—at this juncture—he could not bear the thought of hearing a single one.
21
The Past Unfolds in the Wax Museum like Distance in the Domestic Interior
NEW YORK CITY, 1978. In the fleeting image of a dream, Maria could see her parents at home asleep, in their bedroom underneath the attic. On the roof, a little silver light landed like a snowflake and burrowed down to ignite an exposed electrical wire next to a shopping bag full of old Popsicle-stick stage sets. While the first flames seemed innocent enough, small and curious as they explored their new surroundings, licking here and there, in just a few seconds they grew into a crackling fire and then a rabid inferno that ate through the ceiling to ravage John and Gina, whose souls had departed long before their bodies dissolved into the molten memories of their daughter’s childhood. Delivered to her in the hazy fog of awakening, this image was as ephemeral as a black-winged moth in the night, and so it fluttered away before Maria was fully conscious of it, although she knew it was true because Kathy was holding her and they both were weeping inconsolably. Maria already felt the shock and grief and worst of all the guilt, which made her long to follow her parents in death—but not her grandmother Bea, who was safe visiting Maria’s uncle for the weekend—and not painlessly, either, but like Saint Hippolytus to be drawn and quartered by wild horses.
Though she did not die in the hours and days that followed, a period that took her back to Pittsburgh to witness the charred remains of her home before she was shuttled around by an assortment of relatives, Maria felt increasingly numb, so that there were many times when she was sure her heart was beating slower and slower, and she was led to wish that it would stop completely. She was installed in her aunt and uncle’s house, where she shared a bedroom with Bea, and where the two of them were prone to view each other with a mix of shock and a kind of wariness or survivor’s guilt as they were to find themselves clutched in each other’s arms with tears of disbelief running down their cheeks, just as they had done when Maria was a child but now without any acting. When she thought of her old life, the one she had inhabited just a week earlier, Maria saw two versions of herself—a singing one and a nonsinging one—and she could remember thinking that the singing one had taken her to beautiful, peaceful sanctuaries, whereas the nonsinging one existed in the boring and functional world she had otherwise tolerated; but in her new life, both of these seemed to be disappearing islands from which she had been cast adrift.
She managed to sing one last time, at the funeral, and even those most disinclined to the emotional tides of music marveled at the power of Maria’s voice in the coruscating light coming through the stained glass above the altar, a sign that the deceased had not, after all, lived in vain. For a moment Maria forgot where she was, seduced by the familiar scent of flowers and the iridescent pinwheel spinning before her eyes; except as she sang, the smell made her nauseated and the colors made her dizzy, so that she had to put out her