The Sky Below (20 page)

The front door opened. Janos came in. “Gabe,” he said. “What are you doing?”

The hat slipped over my eye. “It's Sarah,” I said. My voice cracked.

“Is she all right?”

“She got married. She's gone.” I stood there awkwardly. “Neither of us got into the show, either.”

Janos gently took the hat off my head. “Ah,” he said. “It will be all right, you know? You will visit. There will be another show. Next time, you will win.”

But I knew that none of that would happen. I just knew. The blue figurine was not a kind spirit, as it turned out, but a vengeful one. A dark knowledge, like an anchor, dropped from my center straight down into the earth. I rested my forehead against Janos's and felt his force, his warmth, the lines in his forehead. I kissed him, both because I wanted to and because I didn't know how to explain that I was panicking. I didn't know how to say
I think I'm losing. I think maybe I've already lost,
so I kissed him again, more forcefully this time, and I tasted the espresso in his mouth and pushed his coat off and unbuttoned his shirt and moved my hand inside it. His chest was warm. He pulled me against him with the lonely, hungry sigh that never seemed to get less lonely or hungry no matter how long we were together, and that always made me think of those rows of Hungarian boys in their beds in that tattered Catholic boarding school, Janos staring, awake in the dark, his thin scabby legs.

We went upstairs and moved together. My belt, his belt, clattering to the floor. The flesh of his belly was undergirded
by muscles that even now seemed strong as drawbridges, thick bands that could move whatever needed to be moved. I tasted the crepey skin of his balls, the smooth hardness of his dick. He lay back on the bed with his hands behind his head and his brow furrowed. I wanted him to stay hard forever, and I also wanted him to come forever, until my jaw ached and the streets turned from glass to rushing water. They almost did. Then I lay in his arms and curled around him, my ear to his heart. It beat, and beat, and beat, quickly, and then more slowly, just like hearts do.

“So are you ready to come home to me, my love?” he said into the dark. I pretended I was already asleep, my knee on his thigh. I didn't answer. In the morning, I thought, I'll ask him again about the bid. I was so close.

 

But in the morning a feather brushed my cheek.

I was drinking the coffee Janos had made me. When he made coffee it always tasted as if it had been made half out of rust—that's the way he liked it, rusty and sweeter than sweet, like the Manhattan Bridge immersed by a tsunami of sugar. He was on the phone: some market was already open, or just closing, somewhere. He was speaking in German, though not necessarily to Germany. I decided to go into the atrium with my coffee and see what the Tweeties were up to. I sat down on the stone bench, sipping the rust and sugar.

The Tweeties were in one of the thin, three-story trees. I could see the delicate upper branches swaying from their tiny weight. I was running over what I knew about the habits of goats for Anna, who was in hiding in a convent, tending the nuns' goats. I really wanted to finish
Stolen at Twilight
and get more money. Maybe Fleur could advance me for
Stolen in Flames.
Outside the glass, Janos paced back and forth in boxer shorts, scratching his ass and pouring himself more coffee. Inside, the sounds were so subtle you wouldn't hear them unless
you were alone and still: a branch shaking as a Tweetie hopped onto it, the almost subliminal whir of the fan that was hidden somewhere. And another sound—I don't know if it was sound, technically—of three stories of air distilled in a lush green column.

You couldn't eat any of these trees, so Caroline wouldn't have liked the atrium; she would have thought it was artificial. That's why she said she left New York, because the city had become too artificial and manicured; it had lost its wild, secluded areas, its productive wreckage. She said Berlin still had great wreckage. Berlin, she said, was New York in the sixties. It had mystery. It was obvious to me that the real reason Berlin was better was that Carsten was there, though Caroline wouldn't admit it. The only thing better than Berlin, she said, was Cracow. Anyway, I was content in the atrium. I could have lived there, almost. Slept there, definitely. I wondered why I never had.

The Tweeties, who tended to travel together, glided down to the birch feeder, careless streaks of yellow chattering away, and at first I was thrilled when the wing of one brushed my face, a feather on my cheekbone. But then a voice that I barely recognized as mine was screaming with pain. It was as if that feather had sliced me open to the bone.

Janos hurled open the glass door, his phone clattering to the floor. When he reached me, I was doubled over, the birds peering down at me from high in their Three-Story Tree, cheeping inquisitively. He couldn't know that I was on fire, that a feather had incinerated me. I felt his hand on my chin. He peered into my eyes.

“I—” I said. I was in so much fucking pain. I was in so much fucking pain.

“Lean on me,” he said. “Come out of here.” Janos was not a large man, but he felt vastly sturdy to me at that moment. My knees were exploding. My skin was salted with lye. My hands
were cinders. Yellow birds were trapped in my lungs, piercing them with the scrabble of their sharp, dry feet.

“Ah,” I said.

“Shhh,” said Janos, grabbing up the phone. “I'm calling an ambulance.”

But already, before the ambulance came, a flower of blood was blooming under the skin on my right forearm. I have to say, it was beautiful. It was purplish blue. I thought about how much Sarah would have liked it, how she might have painted it, just before they covered the flower with gauze. We jolted through the city to the hospital, Janos holding my incinerated hand gingerly between his two cool, strong hands and looking questioningly into my eyes. Another flower bloomed on my left arm, near my wrist. One on each side of the gate.
Old friend.
My head ached dully, then ferociously, then dully again.

They admitted me for observation and began testing me for everything. I knew it couldn't be HIV—I'd recently had that test—but it felt bad, and large, and dark, as if a ship had sailed in between my ribs. Janos wangled me a private room. They gave me a pill for the pain, and a dinner that had grainy mashed potatoes with it. A nurse tried to turn on the television set for me, but Janos stopped her, and he was right. The pill had lulled my skin and bones to placid quiescence, but not my ears—they got confused if there was too much noise, like wild animals in traffic. Janos made low-voiced phone calls to other doctors, better doctors, who said they'd be there the next day. In the quiet hospital room, I felt sweetly sad and oddly composed, like a clean, folded white shirt. Outside the windows, the city was dark.

“Janos,” I said, “will you read to me?”

He frantically patted his pants pockets, as if a book might be concealed inside, then sprinted down to the gift shop. Laughing, he came back with Fleur's first book,
Stolen.
The four girls on the cover, like whorish paper dolls. Eighties hair. “It was
this crap, the Bible, or the
Enquirer,
” he said, waving it, with its garish cover, in the air. “I'm not sure there's a difference.” He shook his head.

“It's okay. That one's my favorite.” I felt nauseated; my bones felt fragile, as if they ached down to the marrow.

He turned off the glaring overhead fluorescent light, turned on the bedside lamp, and sat down in the orange naugahyde visitors' chair. Putting on his glasses, he opened the cheap paperback and pressed the thin pages down. “We were all stolen,” he began in his smoky mongrel accent, “stolen right out of our shoes.” I closed my eyes and turned on my side to listen, though I already knew it by heart.

When the other, better doctors arrived the next day, they crowded into the room and went over every inch of me with various instruments. They sent x-rays of me overseas by computer and then huddled around the computer, pointing. They agreed. They disagreed. It took all day.

“Well,” they said as evening fell. “Well.”

“Am I?” I said.

The oldest better doctor, who was technically retired but had flown in from Seattle, stood at the end of my bed with his liver-spotted hands spread on the metal footboard. “Gabriel,” he said, sounding like Walter Cronkite, “we believe that you may have what we call a lazy cancer.” He gestured shyly in the air. “It's—”

“Take it out,” I said.

The other better doctors looked at me sympathetically. The one who wore stylish glasses bit her lip. “We can't,” said the oldest better doctor. “It's in your blood.”

“My blood has cancer?”

The oldest doctor shook his head. “No. It's actually somewhere between leukemia and a cancer. It's very difficult to diagnose—there is a margin of error here. We do feel reasonably confident that we've gotten it right. But, Gabriel, the
good news is that while it's not quite curable, it's only fatal now and then.”

The doctor with the stylish glasses gazed at the floor, folded her arms. Janos looked relieved. “So, the treatment,” Janos began, but I interrupted him.

“What does that mean, ‘now and then'?” A ferocious itch, like a little flame, broke out at the base of my spine.

The oldest better doctor looked me in the eye in a practiced, gentle way. “There can be opportunistic infections. Heart problems. Liver failure. Things can develop, but usually they develop quite slowly, which is why we call it lazy, or indolent.” He nodded confidently in Janos's direction, including him in the medical team. “We'll have to keep a close eye on you, and you may find that your pace of life slows down somewhat. You're going to have to rest, and there may be flare-ups, as with rheumatoid arthritis, that are restricting and even painful. You may have an odd growth or two, perhaps a lipoma. We'll have to watch that those aren't too close to a lymph node. Usually this strikes people much later in life—you must be an old soul, Gabriel.”

“I'm barely thirty-eight,” I said. The flame burned higher, angrily. “Look, am I living or am I dying? You know, I work right near the World Trade Center, maybe that bad dust—” That fucking blue devil, I didn't say. I should have known when she cut me the first time. And what about my bid?

The oldest better doctor didn't flinch. “I can't say about the dust. Today you're living. But I won't lie to you, Gabriel. Cancer, even the laziest cancer, is like a lion. Lions spend enormous amounts of time sleeping, did you know that? If you go on safari, all the lions are usually asleep in the shade. But then sometimes they wake up. That's what we'll be watching you for. To see if the lion has woken up.”

All the other better doctors smiled, as if this was a brilliant metaphor, except for the one with the stylish glasses, who
turned her head to look out the window at the night. I wondered what the river was doing, if it was gold or already black. In the glare of the overhead fluorescent light, the room was stark and dull. The windowsill was piled with papers and laptop computers. Oh, I thought. So this is what it's like. This is how it starts. “So it's neither, then,” I said. “I'm not living or dying.” Maybe I was blooming. I wanted to peek under the gauze and see if the blue flowers were still there.

“Don't be silly,” said Janos. “We're all dying, everyone in this room is dying, we begin to die the minute we're born—we're like butterflies.”

“No,” said the oldest better doctor. “You're being metaphorical.” Clearly, he would be the chief maker of metaphors in this room, and it would be lions, not butterflies or flowers. “Gabriel has a real medical issue.”

“Sort of real,” I said.

“Not ‘sort of.'” The oldest better doctor frowned, beginning to grow visibly impatient. “It's very real, I assure you.” He patted my blanketed foot in a kind way that made my heart sink. “They'll do a bone marrow test to confirm in the morning, but I don't plan on being surprised.”

My visitors began gathering their things, sliding their laptops into their clever cases, zipping the cases shut. Janos kissed me on the forehead, which was cool now. Nothing hurt anywhere on me. All the better doctors in their white coats fluttered out behind him to be put in taxis. I was alone in the room with my lion inside me, which might or might not wake up at any minute and eat me. I tried to believe what the oldest better doctor had said about my lion being sleepy, but I kept seeing the downcast eyes and the carefully folded arms of the doctor with the stylish glasses. Staring at the light green floor as if it were her job to keep an eye on it.

Late that night, lying awake in my hospital bed, I saw things. The fever must have come back. I saw colors, as when
you press your fingers over your closed eyelids: red, blue, lines of super-bright white. My mother dancing in a circle, her long, wavy red hair sticking straight out behind her, as if pulled by a fierce wind. That swamp tree flying up toward the sky. The crested head of Tereus, looking spiky and electrified. I got tangled, snared in the sheets. Sarah used to shout in her sleep now and then, and I heard her cursing out ghosts, the way she used to. I saw her sleeping on her back in the summer, her belly large. I saw a ruined house somewhere, maybe on an island. The ruined house was made of stone; huge windows cut from the stone, now glassless uneven rectangles, looked out onto an emerald-green sea. Fleur stood in one of the windows, smiling, young. My mother stood in another, Caroline in another, Sarah in another. They looked like four face cards, four serious queens hanging in the air, bordered by stone. There was another window on the side. A sad bear appeared in that window and then loped away. Goats ran over what was left of the stone walls and windows and dug around in graves behind the house. They stood on top of the tombs. They were kind of joyous.