Act of God (11 page)

“So how best seller doing? You still need Russian translator?” Ashley asked.

“When can you start?”

“I check schedule. How life at Metropolitan Hotel?”

“It’s a long story. Are you still house-sitting for the actor?”

“Lousy view. I move up to penthouse. Plenty of electricity. Much juice as phone can drink.”

“Does the penthouse also have a bath? Oh, Ashley, I would do anything to take a long hot soak and get out of these filthy clothes.”

“Electricity costs.”

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“I can find my own plug, thank you.”

“Price include hot bath and clean bed.”

Kat gave her four ones and a fistful of coins.

“Here are rules. We tell doorman you American grandmother come for visit.”

“No one will believe I’m a grandmother. Let’s tell him I’m your aunt.”

“I move to penthouse week ago,” she told Kat as she retrieved the key from the door ledge. She didn’t immediately turn on the lights as they stepped inside. She wanted Kat to see the unimpeded bejeweled skyline.

“Two-million-dollar view,” she quoted one of the real estate brokers she’d overheard while hiding in the closet.

Kat smiled, her enormous false teeth as bright as a miner’s lamp. “You’ve done very well for yourself, Ashley.”

“This model apartment. I house-sit for her. She think maybe I be model, too.”

“Oh, Ashley, you don’t have to pretend with me. I know you’re squatting. Point me toward the tub. You don’t happen to have any bubble bath, do you?”

While Kat soaked, Ashley plucked her dirty, rank pantsuit off the bathroom tiles, as if it were an infected hankie, and carried it to the trash chute. She didn’t want those rags on her clean floor. Just as she tossed it into the blackness, she saw, or thought she saw, a tiny comet of luminous spores. It twinkled only for a split second.

After washing her hands twice in the kitchen sink, she sat by the wall of glass to wait for Kat to finish. Until tonight, she hadn’t talked to another soul in close to a week. She watched the river far below, a black crevasse between two incandescent glass cliffs. The view had only saddened her until now. She wished she had a picture of herself in front of the skyline to send back to Omsk. What good was beauty with no one to share it? Alone, beauty was almost cruel.

A blackout slammed over the steamy city, like a lid on a boiling pot.

The audience let loose a collective gasp as they waited for the lights to come back on.

The wind machine’s blades made one last rotation. Becalmed on the black stage, the two old pros, Lear and Gloucester, finished their scene with such vociferous authority that the audience saw Gloucester’s blindness.

Acts four and five continued by torch and candlelight, as a castle in pre-Roman Britain should be lit.

Afterward, in the dark dressing rooms, a communal bunker under the bleachers, the blind cast bantered and laughed, the infectious headiness of having surpassed the previous performances. Vida momentarily forgot that her home and everything she owned had been reduced to ash that morning. Unbuttoning her high-necked gown, she felt glorious. Beams from smartphones began to light up here and there. By touch alone, she changed into her street clothes.

“Are those sequined pants?” asked Regan.

She glanced down at the flecks of luminosity playing over her legs. Had she put on someone else’s khakis? She reached into her pocket and fingered the familiar shape of her nail clipper, her talisman: she always trimmed her nails before
a performance. The khakis were her favorite old pair, the only article from her contaminated wardrobe that she hadn’t thrown away—she’d washed the pants twice with bleach. The longer she stared at the sequins, the more plentiful the spangles became, as if breeding before her eyes. The sequins were alive! She half screamed, half retched, then practically tore off her pants and T-shirt. One of the knights shined his smartphone on the commotion. The beam caught something alive and glowing in the back of Vida’s dressing room.

The knight screamed.

Lear ordered all the knights to shine their smartphones on the glow, then knelt to take a closer look. “I believe Vida’s growing mushrooms in her dressing room.”

“How could mushrooms
not
be growing in this damp, hot dungeon?” asked Regan.

“Call the fire department,” Vida told the stage manager.

“For a mushroom?”

“Ask for the HAZMAT squad.”

While the stage manager dialed 911, Vida explained to the cast about the new supermold, and how she had lost her home.

“I believe I’ll wait for the HAZMAT squad outside,” said Lear, backing away from the toxic glow.

Rank was suddenly forgotten; queen and scullery maid, duke and pawn stampeded as a single blind herd into the night. The city was gone, the power outage vast. The normally starless New York sky now looked like a gala show at a planetarium.

Stripped to her bra and underwear, Vida sat away from the others, shivering on the bleachers, though the temperature hovered near ninety. She’d been wearing those contaminated pants all day, next to her skin. She’d put her hands in those infested pockets and then rubbed her eyes.

Headlights swept through the blackness, vectoring on the open-air theater. Trucks rumbled up to the gates, next to the ticket windows. Strobes suddenly blinded the players and crew. A dozen or so men, all hooded and hermetically sealed, began ducking under the bleachers, entering the dressing rooms.

The stage manager approached the hood giving orders, and then pointed at Vida. The hood turned to look. Vida recognized the HAZMAT chief’s face in the clear plastic window. There was no sign of the
grin.

“We’re going to need you to step into the fumigation tent,” said one of his suited squad, a woman.

Outside the theater, between the four-thousand-watt searchlights and the cordoned-off curious crowd, Vida felt as if she were at a premiere, in her bra and panties. Some of the onlookers recognized her, and not as Queen Goneril. People began aiming their smartphones at her, taking pictures and shooting videos.

The fumigation tent, lined with showerheads, resembled a car wash.

Without removing her hood, the woman asked Vida to undress, then sealed Vida’s bra and panties in a biohazard bag. Vida then stepped into the shower area; ten jets sprayed her from all directions. The woman asked her to hold up her arms and then scrubbed Vida raw with what felt like an industrial-sized push broom. Before Vida was allowed to towel off, the woman coated Vida with chemical-smelling talc from what looked like a fire extinguisher. Still naked, Vida was led to a water fountain that squirted her in the eye. Afterward, the woman had Vida look up and administered drops.

“You’re fumigating my eyes?”

“It’s perfectly safe.”

Vida’s fingernails and toenails, underneath and around the cuticles, were swabbed with a Q-tip that smelled of bleach.

“Should I see my doctor?” Vida asked, as the woman used another Q-tip to disinfect the whorls of Vida’s ears.

“Do you have symptoms?”

“What should I be looking for?”

“Headaches, nosebleeds, fatigue, trouble breathing, coughing up blood, hair loss, rashes, swollen glands, memory loss, vomiting.”

Vida involuntarily touched her neck glands. Were they swollen? She couldn’t remember what size her neck glands normally were. Her arms smoldered and itched, but she saw no rash. Nausea fisted in her stomach. Was she about to vomit? If she didn’t have a headache before, she had one now.

The woman issued Vida an orange jumpsuit, the kind worn by prisoners, and a pair of plastic clogs. When she emerged from the tent, all the other cast and crew sported orange jumpsuits too.

“The theater’s being closed,” announced the stage manager.

“How are we supposed to get home?” asked Regan. “All our money and credit cards are sealed in biohazard bags.”

“Everyone will be issued Red Cross debit cards,” explained the stage manager.

“What about our house keys?”

“Can’t the doorman let you in?”

“I don’t have a doorman,” said Gloucester.

“You can’t call a neighbor?”

“All our neighbors’ numbers are in our confiscated phones.”

“You’ll have to call a locksmith,” answered the exasperated manager.

“With what?”

Outside the park, traffic moved a block an hour. No cabs were available in any case. The subways were paralyzed. At the station entrances, bodies poured out of the stifling black underworld. Vida joined a sweaty herd pressing downtown. Here and there, a cold fluorescent street lamp blinked eerily above. Someone lit a cigarette.

“Put that out!” a flurry of voices shouted.

“You going to arrest me?” the smoker taunted. “It’s a blackout. I’m going to smoke a goddamn cigarette in my own city if I damn well please. Fuck the mayor!”

Match flares, distant campfires in the dark night, sparked up here and there as smokers lit up.

By the time Vida reached Brooklyn, her new plastic clogs had given her what felt like trench foot. Was that one of the symptoms?

A red dot, the glass tower’s emergency light, guided her toward the entrance. She blindly climbed the stairwell to the second floor, found the right door by counting knobs. Despite fatigue, she didn’t go straight to bed. By touch, she opened every closet in Sam’s apartment, anyplace she might have kept those infested pants, hunting for the phosphorescent spores. The unbroken blackness became the most beautiful color she could imagine.

A relentless bell woke her the next morning. The intercom was trilling. All the clocks in Sam’s apartment blinked noon. The electricity was back on. Naked and half asleep, she answered the intercom.

“This is Jerzy from the front desk. Management is asking everyone to evacuate. The fire department is on its way.”

Where’s the fire?
she was about to ask when the truth slapped her.

“Some kind of toxic mold has been found in the trash bins,” said the doorman.

She put on last night’s orange jumpsuit and plastic clogs, proof she’d already been decontaminated, hoping against hope she’d be spared the showers. Anything but. She was scrubbed, fumigated, and issued a new orange jumpsuit and another hundred-dollar Red Cross debit card. After she dressed, she was led into a second tent for a chest X-ray and then asked to wait on a folding chair.

A HAZMAT official dressed in a soupy shirt and loose tie opened a city map and had Vida show him the exact route she had taken on the previous night.

“Did you stop anywhere along the way? You came straight here?”

“Yes.”

Holding his phone so that she could see the screen, he showed her a picture of a gray bundle (by color or dirt, she couldn’t tell) and asked if the pantsuit was hers.

“No.”

“This pantsuit has never been to the Delacorte Theater?”

“Not on me. Maybe it belonged to someone in the audience.”

“You own 66 Berry Street in Brooklyn? Your tenants are Edith and Katherine Glasser?”

“One of the sisters is dead.”

“Do you have a current address for Katherine Glasser?”

He hadn’t bothered to ask her which sister had died: he already knew.

“Did you move your belongings directly from 66 Berry Street here? Where are those belongings now?”

“Upstairs.”

“Nowhere else?”

“There’s nothing left.”

Finally released, Vida walked past police sawhorses, corralling scared, angry neighbors whose houses stood in the infested tower’s shadow.

“What are you doing to protect our homes?” a man’s baritone boomed over the grumbling.

“I warned you people last year about the infested Chinese drywall,” someone else shouted.

“It’s because of the old oil spill,” a third joined in. “The mutant seeds grew in the petroleum.”

“Yeah,” the baritone boomed again. “The flooding from Sandy just brought them to life.”

With her newly issued Red Cross card, Vida went to buy a prepaid cell phone with a thousand minutes. At the electronics store, she borrowed scissors from the cashier to cut the phone free from its packaging, but when she turned it on, nothing happened.

“You need to go home and charge the battery,” explained the saleswoman.

The last time Vida had seen her home the tent was still up. Nothing bandaged it today. Her beautiful turn-of-the-century row house was now ash black and glassless, a coal miner’s face without eyes. In the empty sockets, sunlight crisscrossed the interior, soot swirling skyward, like cigarette smoke in a nightclub’s spotlight. She walked up the stoop, her plastic clogs leaving footprints in the ash. All
that remained of the hundred-year-old front door with its original glass oval was a charred doorknob at her feet. She couldn’t step inside. The foyer floor was gone. She looked up to where her roof once was. All that was left were joists, the ceiling bars of a cage.

Yet she felt oddly free, as if she’d escaped. Had the house been that much of a responsibility? Why didn’t she feel worse? She took her emotional temperature. It was a little above normal, but that was always true the morning after a great performance, and last night’s was definitely one of her best. The intensity of losing her home had heightened her creativity. Up until the moment the electricity went out, she had only been pretending to be a queen who had lost everything. But in that first panic after the darkness, she understood. Loss was far more complicated than the embittered defeat her performance was exhibiting. For the remainder of the play, her ruthless queen also had the insight of compassion.

The stage manager had promised to try to get the production moved to Prospect Park. If she still had her work, if she still had the possibility of matching—maybe even surpassing—last night’s performance, she could get through anything, even this.

In a nearby coffee shop, she plugged in and dialed Virginia to see if the stage manager had called.

“I guess you already know,” Virginia said when she heard Vida’s voice.

“Know what?”

“You haven’t seen it? The YouTube starring you? Some iPhone auteur filmed you in your bra and underwear being led into a decontamination tent by a guy dressed as if he’s
about to clean up Fukushima’s Reactor 3. That’s only the half of it. The footage is intercut with clips from your commercial. I got a call from Ziberax’s attorney this morning. Pfizer is considering pulling the ad if the video goes viral. I’m sorry, Vida, I’ll do what I can.”