The Metropolis (17 page)

They were back on the highway, and as usual—because Hank had a heavy foot—Martin was following. He saw the blur of the first heavy, thick drops of rain hitting the windshield and could feel Suzie beside him as she watched the side of a truck roar past about six inches from her window. “Check it out, big brother,” she said, putting her palm against the glass. “The water’s coming right through—it’s a miracle.”

“It’s called condensation, Sherlock,” Martin corrected her, “but I’m glad it makes you happy.”

Martin whispered the word
happy
at the same moment he heard it now. In his memory it was like a gunshot instantly followed by his sister’s scream, which reverberated across these many years, joined not only by the vulture screech of the brakes but by Martin’s own involuntary cry, as if he were reacting for the first time. It happened fast—two seconds at most, maybe three—and he pounded the arms of his chair, an involuntary echo of his chest slamming against the steering wheel, constrained only by the seat belt as he skidded to a stop and—hands shaking—threw open the door.

Numb with panic, he stumbled forward a few steps but then caught his balance and sprinted toward a blurry heap, which as he approached became increasingly focused but also mangled and—with a truck behind it, on its side like a fallen horse—incongruous; somehow the car had been flipped, but there was also something—a piece of steel, an I beam—sticking through it, so that it lay on its back at a strange angle, like a spinning top that was no longer spinning.

Frantically Martin ran around it; one side of the car was crushed,
while the other—the passenger side—was slightly more elevated, and here he dropped to his knees; through the cracked window, he could see his mother—she was still in her seat but upside down—and his father beyond her, but it was raining so hard that he could not tell if they were hurt or could speak or even move. The smell of gasoline was thick, and he knew he would have to get them out before anything caught fire. He had already checked the doors, and none would open, but he noticed that a back window was cracked a few inches, and after brushing the water away from his face, he crawled over and called in to his mother and father, to let them know that he was there and that they shouldn’t worry because they were going to be fine and help was already here—and as he said this, he could hear the wail of sirens and see the flashing lights reflecting off the wet pavement, so he knew it was true—and he twisted his ear down to the gap and tried to listen, and he seemed to detect a low moan, which gave him hope. He sat up and put his hands on the window and pulled, so that the whole thing just fell out and crumbled like a sheet of ice.

All of this took only a few seconds, and Martin heard a familiar voice in his head—his goalie voice—telling him to be calm, be calm, be calm. His hands and knees were cut—badly—but now he was able to crawl at least partway in through the window to the back. Inside, he still couldn’t see much of Hank, who was on the other side of the beam, but Jane was pinned to her seat—somehow he knew that she was broken; there was nothing in here that wasn’t—but still alive; she seemed to be breathing, and he ignored the blood running down her twisted arm. He asked if she could hear him, and there was a response—low and garbled, but it was there—which drew him farther in, so that by turning over he could see the side of her face. And even though one of her cheeks had a gash across it and her forehead was already swollen and misshapen, at least her eyes were open and he knew she recognized him because her lips were moving and her
eyes were searching and her fingers reached for him. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that all of this mangled steel and broken glass and blood was just a bad dream, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that it was going to be all right as soon as he got them out, but when he tried to speak, he realized that he was already talking, that he hadn’t stopped—“Mom, it’s going to be all right,” he kept saying over and over—and he believed it, and for a second he even paused to think about what he should do next, because he knew he had to get out but he couldn’t leave, either.

He felt something pulling at his legs, and it was hard and rough so that he grabbed at the edge of the seat to hang on but his hands were filled with shards of glass so he couldn’t really hold on to anything, and just a blink later he was back out in the rain being pulled across the pavement and he screamed at the men holding him that she was alive, that his mother was alive, and he strained against them to get back, he clawed at the asphalt looking for something to hang on to so that he could shake them off, and even after the blast, they had to sit on him as he pounded the unforgiving ground with his blood-soaked hands and feet.

I
T WAS NOT
something he ever wanted to remember—or so he had told himself for years—although that had never stopped him from getting to this point, where as he did now he braced himself for the inevitable, breathtaking pain of knowing, and the desire to detach himself, to skirt away and imagine his parents already flying. Except this time, as much he wanted to, he did not—could not—wander off but rather felt his mind slow to survey the scene, not all at once but in bits and pieces, interrupted by short gaps of breathless, almost instinctual determination. Soon he was awash in forgotten details: the oddly muted sound of the explosion—really more of a pop than a
bang—that ignited a small inferno; the heat of the asphalt under his palms, the evil hiss of a burning wreck in the downpour, his sister’s wet shirt and the convulsing sobs that shook her as she sat beside him hugging her knees while the EMTs and bystanders raced around yelling and screaming, the bloodred tint of his vision; and most horrible of all, the motionless silhouettes in the burning wreckage in front of him.

Yet even as all of this seemed to compound the shock and grief, his mind kept turning over the image of the rain, the way all the drops seemed to bounce off the pavement in an infinite number of perfect little explosions. It tugged at him, so that he could feel the drawers of his mind slamming open and shut as he desperately looked through them for an explanation; then, miraculously, he found what he was looking for: again he was at the beach with his family, this time literally in the ocean, in a churning surf that crashed over him with furious insistence as the rain smacked down hard around him, each drop bouncing off the roiling sheen of the salt water, almost as reflective as an asphalt highway. In this memory, Martin was not sobbing but yelling with a hoarse, adolescent glee; it was a hurricane day at the beach—not to the point of evacuation but one of those days when you weren’t supposed to go in the water—but he and Hank didn’t care; they went in anyway, and Martin loved every second because, even if it was macho and stupid, it was wild and uninhibited and violent, and he knew how to handle the rough surf.

He knew why this memory had come back to him, and why it allowed him to confront the scenes of the accident as never before; it was as if, he realized, rather than escape—detach himself—he had dived under the turbulence, where for a few seconds he could surrender to the larger currents—i.e., of life and death—before resurfacing to confront the aftermath; and though he was flailing as he was
pulled and thrown by forces so much larger and more powerful than himself, to swim through like this, however feebly, gave him a flicker of hope and strength, so that when he looked down at his fingers, he was almost surprised to find they had not been stained with the color of these new tears.

H
E REACHED AROUND
to turn up the volume on his stereo, where Donovan sang as seductively as he had on the radio more than twenty years earlier; the song was the last thing Martin heard before leaving the car, moments after Suzie had found it on the radio and declared it worth listening to. He knew that, just as it had done outside, a tower had given way in his soul; it had been there for him to behold but then shuddered and collapsed and now was gone, leaving an empty space marked by an intense but purposeful sorrow and a vague longing for something that he still couldn’t quite see but that nevertheless resonated with a beauty he could only describe as defiant. Far from disturbing him, the diagnosis of this condition—this gap, this void, this chasm, this HIV of the psyche that without exception afflicted everyone—made him strangely optimistic. He felt a rush of understanding as he stared simultaneously at his reflection and at the dusty cloud in the distance beyond it.

“Wear your love like heaven,” he whispered to the unfamiliar man in front of him, who stared back with silent but knowing eyes.

PITTSBURGH, 1977. From the backseat of her airport taxi, Anna admired the pale green fringe of the ancient hills of Western Pennsylvania, which rippled past her in the April sun. She was here to serve as a judge for a state high school singing competition and, despite some minor qualms about the hotel she had booked, was looking forward to it. Having retired from professional singing four years earlier, she now taught at Juilliard, which, as she liked to tell her friends, offered a “balance” that had been lacking in her career, allowing her to remain immersed in the opera but without the associated indignities. By this she did not mean the actual singing, which she would always miss. Even after she had appeared in most if not all of the major houses in the world (and often repeatedly), there was something astonishing to her not only about stepping out to perform in front of thousands but also the entire process leading up to these incredible nights, the theatrical alchemy by which it all came together—though inevitably at the last minute, and just when she would find herself on the verge of despair about some facet of a production—the backstage crew, who created the lighting and costumes and sets; the stage managers and directors, who dictated everything from the position of her hands to erupting walls of fire with the precision of army generals; the conductors and musicians—many of them musical prodigies in their own right—who immersed themselves in the scores of the (mostly) dead
composers whose spirits seemed to hover in the theaters in which their works were performed.

It was rather other facets of the life, even beyond the expected pangs of loneliness—which had not failed to materialize but for which she learned to brace herself—that had increasingly tried her patience; the way management—and always after opening night, when she was most exhausted—required her to share a ten-course meal with the biggest patrons, who invariably liked to interrogate her about the most intimate details of her life; or how she couldn’t go outside—particularly in Europe—without sunglasses and a scarf over her head, unless she wanted to be accosted by an autograph hound or relentlessly subjected to the details of one of her past performances, as though she had not been there herself. These were not things that had bothered her in the beginning—to the contrary, she had been charmed the first hundred or so times she had been approached by a stranger—and she understood that such nuisances were inseparable from the kind of career she had always sought. Over time she began to understand why so many famous singers were notoriously “crazy,” and rather than succumb to the same impulse—and with her voice by this point showing some wear, as more than a few critics were eager to point out—she decided to walk away completely, knowing that, after more than a decade in the spotlight, she no longer had the same drive as she had ten or twenty or thirty years earlier. She was proud of her career; she still received her share of notes and letters, along with the occasional entreaty from an autograph seeker, but all in moderation, allowing her to respond with the patience and grace she felt the great majority of her fans deserved. Her students also inspired her; she worked hard to prepare them, both vocally and emotionally, for the future they so desperately wanted, even if they could barely explain why, which of course was just the way she had been at their age.

She was dropped downtown at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial—a monolithic Beaux Arts auditorium designed to recall the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus—where inside she was introduced to her fellow judges. As she took her seat, she contemplated the dusty, unused quality of the theater—as if it had spent the past seventy years in someone’s attic—and wished there could be a middle ground between the stifling and history-laden intransigence of Europe and the reactionary disregard for the same that seemed to be the rule in her adopted country. But one of life’s pleasures at fifty-seven was to have relinquished such epic battles: helping one of her students master a difficult passage, taking a twilight walk along Central Park, or (because she now collected them) finding a rare manuscript or painting—these were the smaller, more obtainable victories that satisfied her most.

T
HE COMPETITION BEGAN
, with each singer taking a moment to shine—though some more brilliantly than others—before giving way to the next. Perhaps an hour had passed when they reached the final entrant in the soprano division, a striking but ungainly creature named Maria Sheehan, who—poor thing—tripped while making her entrance and had to windmill her arms a few times to catch her balance. It would have shattered anyone’s nerves but in Maria’s case created a perverse magnetism, so that, for the first time in the day, Anna detected a palpable suspense. She could hear paper rustling and the crossing and uncrossing of arms and legs; a few rows behind her, someone coughed, and she resisted the urge to send a nasty glance.