Ark (17 page)

“I couldn’t sleep,” Henry said. “At about three in the morning, the routine noises of the hospital faded away, as if someone had turned down the volume all the way. I thought maybe I was dying. Then I began to see things. Very clearly defined, three-dimensional images in living color, as if the things I was seeing were in the room with me.”

“People?”

“I saw a person asleep. It was an early human, a caveman— naked, stocky, hairy. For a while, he continued in a deep sleep. Then, as if he felt my eyes on him, he woke up. He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. It was obvious that he saw me as clearly as I saw him. He
recognized
me. He understood that I was a man like himself. I could see it in his eyes. I understood what he was thinking. He wasn’t sure that I was real.”

“And then?”

“And then he faded out,” Henry replied. “Other images appeared—crowds of people, patiently waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“There were no explanations, just images,” Henry said. “All sorts of people, all races, both sexes, clothing from many eras. Soldiers in ranks, wearing the uniforms of different wars—armor, shakos, steel helmets, World War I khaki. They stood absolutely still, absolutely silent, absolutely patient.”

“Wounds?”

“None visible.”

“Did they see you, like the caveman did?”

“I don’t think so,” Henry said. “They weren’t looking at anything.”

“These were long shots or close-ups?”

“Both. I didn’t see all of it. It went on forever. I had a sense that there were an infinite number of these silent, motionless people, and I was just being given a glimpse of the multitude.”

“What did you think you were looking at?” I asked.

“While it was happening, I didn’t think.”

“And later?”

“Limbo? The dead waiting for judgment or reincarnation? I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure.”

Limbo? Judgment day? Christian soldiers? I couldn’t believe my ears.

I said, “Did the hallucinations, or whatever they were, ever repeat themselves?”

“Not the same ones,” Henry said.

“How long did they last?”

“All night. I got out of the hospital the next morning and went back to the frat house. The doctors told me to spend the day in bed. Ng Fred was my roommate.”

“He knew about the hallucinations?”

“No. Until now I’ve never told anyone,” Henry said. “That evening, I heard music, coming from outside the building.”

“What kind of music?”

“A choir—male voices singing, as if a choir were standing under my window. It was completely different from any music I knew— scales and tones I had never heard.”

“Did anyone else hear it?”

“No. I said, ‘Fred, listen to that.’” He said, ‘Listen to what?’ A couple of guys came into the room to see how I was. I asked them the same question. They didn’t hear the music, either. They thought I was kidding around. The music went on and on, and it was almost too beautiful to listen to. We watched TV for a while and turned out the lights. Fred sleeps like a stone. He dropped off immediately.”

I started to ask a question.

Henry held up a hand and said, “Wait. I was lying in the dark, trying to go to sleep. All of a sudden, I heard church bells—just a few at first, then more, then hundreds, then many more than that, all sorts, every tone. They were near and distant. It sounded like every bell in every church for miles around was ringing. I knew Fred wouldn’t hear them if I woke him up and asked him to listen. I thought,
If this is dying, how kind the Great Genetic Engineer has been to arrange things as he has.
I thought I should call my parents and tell them that I loved them. I had to urinate—all part of the process, a last reminder of my physical self, I supposed. I got up and went down the hall to the toilet. All the while, I kept on hearing the church bells. They drowned out the music. On my way back to the room, I thought,
If I see myself in bed, I’ll know for sure.
But as you can see, that didn’t happen. Here I am.”

So he was. I knew I should say something, but what? I didn’t doubt for a moment that what Henry had told me was the literal truth. He really had seen the caveman and the silent armies waiting for the last trump. He had actually heard the ethereal music and the church bells.

I said, “So what do you make of the experience? Was it the drugs, or was the Almighty revealing himself to you?”

Henry said, “Who knows?”

“You don’t reject either possibility?”

“No. Which would you choose?”

“The drugs.”

“You may be right. But three weeks after that, I saw the solution to the superconductor problem.”

“Saw
it? Like you saw the caveman?”

“The two experiences were quite similar. I was riding my bike, coasting down a long hill, and it came to me in pictures, not as real as the caveman and the soldiers, but pictures nevertheless.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“The solution. Equations. Apparatus. The entire instructions manual.”

“Has the same thing happened with all your other discoveries?”

“Yes.”

“Including the Event?”

He nodded.

“This stuff just comes to you?”

“Exactly.”

“Did you tell your parents or your teachers about this gift of yours?”

“You call it a gift?” Henry said.

~ * ~

4

BACK IN THE CITY, MELISSA
dropped by with some papers to sign. Henry was transferring ownership of the apartment, contents included, to me. Just sign here and here and here and initial in these five places, in blue ink, here’s a pen.

I was annoyed. What right did Henry have to inflict such largesse on me?

I said, “Keep the pen, Melissa.”

She sighed deeply and said, “What’s the problem this time?”

“Same old problem. I can’t possibly accept this.”

“Of course you can accept it. You’ve already accepted it. This is a formality. In Henry’s mind, it’s part of your compensation package. It’s his way of telling you he values your services. It’s not as though he can’t afford it.”

“What Henry can afford isn’t the point.”

“You’re right. Take the pen.”

“Why?” I said. “Tomorrow we die.”

Melissa recoiled. She said, “How can even you joke about that?”

Tears spurted from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, two thick trickles of mascara. I was astonished: This was Melissa. I sat down on the arm of her chair and put my arm around her. I kissed her cheek, tasted powder and paint, and said, “What is it, dear?”

She waved me off. She covered her face with her hands, as if I might kiss her again. Quite soon, she got hold of herself.

“My kids,” she said. “They go to school and every morning after they get in the car and drive off, I know,
know,
that I’ll never see them again, that the earth is going to open its mouth and swallow them before the sun goes down. I hate Henry for telling me.”

“So do I,” I said. “But he may be wrong.”

“Like hell he is.”

Melissa grabbed her purse and left the room. While she was absent I signed the papers. She returned with her face repainted and immediately spotted the signed documents. She did an about-face, went into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of wine in her hand.

“A 2000 Pauillac,” she said. “It must have come with the place.”

We drank the entire bottle in half an hour. Then she gathered up her papers and left.

The wine put me to sleep. I woke up a couple hours later with a cottony mouth and a bad headache. I had nothing in the house that might dull the misery. I stuck my finger down my throat, but it was too late.

I tried to remember where I had hidden my Chef Boyardee cans so that no one would catch me with them. Finally I found them inside an empty canister. After eating a bowl of microwaved spaghetti and meatballs—a sovereign cure for hangover—I felt well enough to go out.

In the cool of the evening I went to the Reservoir for a run. Now that I had been assured that the suspicious characters who haunted me were protectors, I didn’t bother to take evasive action. After a week on a tropical island, it seemed strange to be loping along in the midst of dozens of strangers, listening to the clatter of the city. They all looked terribly serious, as people of my age group tend to do, weighed down as they are by the fate of endangered species, the many carcinogens in the air they breathe, the maddening triumphs of politicians and colleagues they loathe, the disillusionments of career and marriage, the guttering candle of the sex drive.

That evening I called Melissa to see if she was all right. She was. I told her about the Chef Boyardee. She actually giggled. In college, we had often pigged out together on the stuff—Melissa preferred ravioli—when we drank too much, etc., on weekends.

The next call was to Adam. I used a special throwaway phone I had bought to call him. I got his voice mail. I left no message.

After a while Adam called back. We went to a violin recital at Carnegie Hall. The artist was a boy virtuoso who played Bruch’s ravishing second violin concerto. After the recital we went across the street for coffee. Adam lifted a strand of hair and tucked it behind my ear and touched my cheek with his thumb.

He said, “Shall we?”

I said, “After listening to that music? Are you kidding?”

Adam said, “Your place?”

“No. It’s too messy.”

“Mine, too,” Adam said. “The maid quit.”

I said, “I don’t like hotels.”

He tucked a strand of hair behind my other ear.

“Really?” he said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

He made calls to three hotels on his cell phone, using speed dial. Apparently he had a list of them programmed in case of need. The third hotel, the same one we had used last time, had a room. It was quite nearby, a godsend after the Bruch. Adam paid in advance with hundred-dollar bills. He had a stack of them—thousands of dollars—in an envelope in an inside pocket of his grungy old suede blazer. That seemed like a lot of cash for a struggling young lawyer to be carrying around, but this was not the moment for suspicions.

We went upstairs. We had the same room as before. What were the odds on that? Adam asked. He was a little too amazed. Was he in fact some sort of undercover operative who had been trained in the art of driving foolish women out of their minds, maybe by Markus Wolf himself? The more I thought of this dispiriting possibility— thank, you Clementine—the more plausible it seemed.

Adam slept, snoring gently, until I woke him up at first light.

He looked at the clock and said, “It’s 6 a.m., for Pete’s sake.”

“Wouldn’t want you to be late for court on a Sunday,” I said, studying his sleepy face for clues that he remembered his gaffe. None showed.

We ordered a room-service breakfast. Adam paid the bill in cash.