The Metropolis (29 page)

“Well—yes—a little.” Lucien laughed. He understood that Guillaume—far from doubting him—was only trying to establish the kind of rapport that they enjoyed in Paris but that seemed more tenuous in an unfamiliar city. “And you?”

“On your behalf? Not at all,” Guillaume replied. “But I’m curious: is the music really as difficult as they say? I’ve been reading these articles in Paris—”

“Yes, it’s difficult,” Lucien admitted, “but far from impossible,
or at least not in the way they make it out to be. We had our final dress rehearsal two days ago. It wasn’t flawless, but we made it through—”

“Well, of course the doubters will come out in flocks until you do something to prove them wrong,” Guillaume said rhetorically before he addressed Lucien. “But you’re pleased with it—you’re happy?”

“Yes—very much—though I’m not sure
happy
is the right word. There are times when it’s difficult to leave the music at the theater, if that makes sense.”

Guillaume nodded. “Your mother used to be like that, too—if she was singing a sad part, she would mope around in a cloud of despair, but if it was comedic, she couldn’t stop telling jokes, and we’d laugh and laugh …” He smiled wistfully as he stood up. “That’s why I always liked it when she played happier roles.”

Lucien tried to remember the last time they had talked about his mother. “But which did she like better?”

“I’m sure she enjoyed both—that’s what she did—but I think she was like you. It’s not that she was melancholy by nature, but her favorite music conveyed what she used to call the sadness of life. In this respect, we were very different—we used to argue about it.”

“Really? In what way?”

“In the way that I don’t think there’s anything inherently sad about life.”

“You think that even now?”

“Yes, even now,” Guillaume said with a shrug. “It’s not that I haven’t cried and grieved, but I don’t see such experience as inevitable. Your mother didn’t have to die when she did—it was mostly bad luck, and had things been just a little different …” He did not finish the sentence as he looked at Lucien. “No matter how hard life gets, we only get one chance, which is why we owe it to ourselves to make the best of it, for as long as we have.”

Lucien nodded, although—as much as he admired his father’s conviction—it occurred to him that a difference between an artist and a scientist was that one worked to transform the pain of life into something beautiful, while the other worked to transform it into something negligible.

T
HEY MADE THEIR
way off the boulevard, turning north at the river and in at the English Garden, where they admired the late-afternoon mist rising off the lawn beyond the outstretched boughs of the black pines. They followed a path through a stand of larch trees, which proved to be an unexpected pleasure for Guillaume; as he caressed the feathery, lime green needles of the deciduous conifer, he explained to Lucien that it was one of the oldest species on earth, and one he was hoping to study in greater detail in the future.

“How is your research going?” Lucien asked as they found a bench on which to sit and rest. “The last time I was Paris, you mentioned problems—”

“Yes, I did,” Guillaume said, “but as it turned out—and this is so often the case—the moment when nothing seemed to be working, when I was on the verge of giving up, is when I had the breakthrough I’ve been wanting.”

“You mean with the longevity vaccine?”

Guillaume nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

Because Lucien had been so young when he first learned about his father’s project, and because so many years had passed with so little progress, he had assumed that the experiments would never really end, or at least not successfully. He didn’t doubt his father’s skill or intelligence, but a palliative for aging seemed much more of a grand ideal than a possibility. As Lucien considered Guillaume’s expression, it seemed to convey more than fantasy, and for the first time he began to envision the vaccine in concrete terms; in a flash of
understanding and foreboding, he saw how valuable it would be, how kings and queens would spend fortunes to acquire it, while criminals could be expected to resort to their own brand of extremes, a thought that made him fear for his father.

“You haven’t taken it, have you?” he asked.

His father shook his head and laughed. “No—no, it’s not anywhere near being fit for humans. At this point it’s only mice.”

Lucien felt relieved by this. “Have you told anyone else?”

“No—of course not—you’re the only one.” Guillaume shook his head and spoke in a low tone. “I likewise trust you to keep it quiet—not even Herr van der Null should know, and above all not Codruta. I’m sure you can imagine what could happen if—if word got out.”

“I’m not sure I could,” Lucien admitted. Though he had mentioned this element of his father’s work to Eduard, it had always been with the same mix of astonishment and incredulity with which he viewed it himself, and not as something in any way imminent; furthermore, he had never seen Guillaume discuss the longevity vaccine with anyone else except in the most theoretical terms, as he had done at lunch with Eduard. It occurred to Lucien that the vaccine was like
Tristan;
because most people couldn’t begin to conceive of such a thing, there was little reason for debate until proof was in hand, after which all the old assumptions would be buried under an avalanche of newfound certainty.

“The last thing I need,” Guillaume continued, “is for some idiot to think he could just swallow some concoction and live for two hundred years.”

“But isn’t that the idea?”

“Eventually,” Guillaume admitted. “But for now, it’s still much too dangerous—only about five percent of the mice survive more than a few seconds.”

“And those that survive …?”

“Well, that’s another question.” Guillaume smiled. “But if my suspicion is correct, there will be some very old mice running around the Île St.-Louis for the next few decades.”

A
S
L
UCIEN PONDERED
his father’s news, he alternated between states of awe at the implications of such a vaccine for society at large and something closer to anxious hilarity as he imagined how much more intense Tristan’s longing for death might be if he were 150 or 200 years old. He understood this latter reaction to be mostly a function of his nerves, but rather than fixate on it—to the detriment of his performance—he reminded himself that the most likely outcome of his father’s work would be the indefinite continuation of the experiments; as Guillaume had said, mice and people were far from the same, and what worked on one could rarely be trusted for the other.

The day of the premiere, Lucien slept late and ate lunch with Guillaume and Eduard. He went to the theater and by five o’clock was in costume. Thirty minutes later the houselights were dimmed; Bülow entered the pit and after a polite round of applause signaled the orchestra, which began the prelude. Lucien moved into position to wait for his cue, and as he listened to the first breath of the cellos, he could almost hear his father and dead mother talking, while in the cascade of strings that followed, he felt his heart beating in time with that of Eduard and imagined them still together in the night.

By almost any measure, it was a good and possibly a great performance, which was not to say there were no mishaps. Several times Lucien or Pelagie came in early, which resulted in cross looks from Bülow as he tried to adjust the tempo of the orchestra; then the ropes on the curtain snagged at the beginning of the second act, which led the third-chair violinist to drop his bow and cause a rather loud
screech; and finally, during Brangäne’s warning, a lock of hair fell out of Pelagie’s wig into Lucien’s mouth and made him cough. When he could, he watched the audience from the wings and observed a few people inserting fingers into their ears, though very discreetly, as the rapture of their king was apparent to all. For some, it was destined to be a long night indeed, and Lucien pitied those he saw checking their watches just fifteen minutes into the piece, with more than four hours to go. There were many others for whom the music seemed to take hold: their twitches and squirms abated, replaced by a more transfixed state of contemplation, as if to be exposed to such dissonance and volume left no choice but to place a magnifying glass on their heavy souls. For those being exposed to this process for the first time, it was a trial by fire, while for those like Eduard who were better versed in the art of introspection, the piece was less disturbing than evocative of the inherent ambiguity of life.

When it finally finished, the crowd remained silent until one of the king’s men had the foresight to clear his throat, at which point the audience erupted in a display of fervor as unprecedented as the more introverted states from which they had just returned. As Lucien took his bows, he felt like his dreams and memories and aspirations—along with all the petty obligations and responsibilities, all the hopes—had been decimated; the notes he had sung just a few minutes earlier were beyond his grasp, and there would be no way—even under duress—to summon them again until some point in the future he could not begin to think about. As the applause continued, he was reminded of certain mornings in Vienna—especially after he’d just arrived—when he would wake up next to Eduard and for a little while feel sated and content, and for the first time he understood the consummating power of performance and how—as with romantic love—he had grasped this only after years of searching, of craving something he could not have described until after it was found.

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. When Martin woke up on the Wednesday after the attacks, he turned on the radio news and confirmed that the previous day had not, after all, been a nightmare. He called his office switchboard and learned that the building was closed, and after hanging up was startled by a cat walking across his bed, yet another detail in a surreal stream that now returned to him. But if Martin was at all inclined to regret his decision to take in the cat, he found himself entranced by the way Dante—he now recalled his name—methodically cleaned his paws, slowly and deliberately, without apparent concern that Martin might disown him at any moment.

They went to the kitchen, where Martin boiled water for his morning tea and gave Dante breakfast. Eating, Martin noted, was one of the few activities in which the cat appeared most like an animal—really, almost rodentlike—his head bent down to the plate, gulping up and chomping the pieces of turkey breast Martin set out for him. “Don’t worry—there’s plenty of food,” Martin said, and felt pleased when a few seconds later Dante stepped back from the plate—which was not empty—and stretched before sauntering out of the kitchen.

His tea ready, Martin carried it into his study on a tray along with half of a Zabar’s cheesecake. He turned on the computer and once again considered quitting his job—or “retiring,” as Jay had put it—which had felt so imperative the day before, when he was leaving his office. He pulled up his finances, and it did not take him long to conclude that, while not exactly a moot point, the concern was not particularly vexing. Hardly a year had passed at his firm when
he did not receive a hefty bonus, which in turn had allowed him to make a second killing in the stock market after he invested in all sorts of Internet highfliers on their way up and—in a show of pessimistic bravado for his colleagues at the firm—shorted a good portion of them on the way down. All of these gains were now converted into a well-balanced selection of munis and slow-growth funds effectively impervious—to the degree possible—to market fluctuation. He concluded that barring some catastrophe—e.g., the one that had happened the day before—his portfolio could be expected to provide a reasonable per annum in the six-figure range.

He wondered if he could really be happy leading the life of a dilettante and recalled something his father had said to him after eighth grade in the context of giving him his first job. “I think last summer may have been a little too unstructured,” Hank had explained. “It’s not good for someone your age to sit around too much.”

Martin, who at that age had shared Jane’s views about the potentially stultifying aspects of the bourgeois workplace, responded with a prepared statement: “Do you think it would be better next year, when I’m a year older?”

Hank laughed but was unmoved. “Sorry, Marty; everybody has to work. It makes you a man. The job is three hours a day. You can work out in the morning, come into the warehouse after lunch, and spend the rest of the night doing whatever you want.”

Though Martin was annoyed—if not quite angry—at his father for framing the issue in such logical but repugnant terms, the job—as he now admitted—was actually one of the better ones he had ever held. Although the assembly-line work (screwing a seemingly infinite number of eyeglass temples to frames with an electric screwdriver) introduced him to an almost visceral and at times exhilarating form of tedium he would later understand to be a foundation of modern life, it was genuinely fascinating to watch the
piles of tiny screws gradually disappear from the tray in which they awaited their fate like cattle at an abattoir. Sometimes they would briefly fall into perfect formation, twenty-five lined up in each of the ten slits designed to hold them, while at other times, such as when Martin poured in a fresh batch, they would be panicked and chaotic, rolling all over—as if succumbing to entropy—and would have to be corralled by an angry god before they were removed one by one to fulfill a destiny with the nonprescription safety eyeglasses of the world.

This was also when Martin first learned to appreciate the aural tedium of album-oriented rock radio, which at this point in his life was his primary source of music (not counting the classical works Jane periodically introduced him to). To hear the same five or six bands—the Who, the Stones, Sabbath, Zep, Deep Purple, Hendrix; i.e., all the music he would disavow in prep school—over and over was the aesthetic corollary to the assembly line; had he not experienced this firsthand, he never would have understood the appeal of such an extreme, much less the desire to destroy it.