Want Not (38 page)

The desire gripped him on an almost cellular level—he could feel his leg muscles twitch in preparation for movement, his weight shifting on the chair, his body poised to rise—before the realization swamped him: Alice was dead. Of course. His cells went slack, his bones folding back into the seat. Alice was dead. At least, that’s what everyone told him. He didn’t
remember
Alice dying, not the how of it nor the funeral nor the eulogy he was accused of having delivered, which was suspicious; sometimes he wondered if his children had concocted the story to protect him from some greater sadness, such as Alice having deserted him for some actual Mediterranean lover. Yet that scenario struck him as even more improbable and absurd than him forgetting her death. For one thing, Elwin Jr. was as shoddy a liar as his father, and as for Alice, well—Alice had always been faithful. So had he, though not without struggles he’d prefer to forget. Alice made fidelity look easy, like walking or drinking lemonade or the way your unmonitored heart beats on and on in your youth and middle years: like an instinctual response to love.

Had
made it look easy, that is. It was so hard to keep the tenses right without any evidence.

He drew his gaze back down to page 235 and its prosperity or ruin. The words appeared to need a question mark, so he penciled one. Then he pondered it for a while as though he’d written himself an essay question. He looked up, down, around, surveying the room before deciding in a bout of Spenglerian gloom:
Ruin.
Ruin’s what we get, ruin’s all we get. Prosperity is just a phase, like childhood, and like childhood it lasts longer for some than for others—for people and civilizations, the same. If he’d concluded anything from sixty-some years of reading history, it was the absence of any unifying theory save transience: We come and we go, as we came and went. Greatness, however broadly or narrowly you defined it, was no defense or insulator against ruin; its bones and scraps were indistinguishable from those of mediocrity or worse. He lowered his pencil to transcribe this last thought before half remembering the front end of the quotation back on page 234. Damn it all, he thought. I’m wandering again. He slammed down the pencil just as a faint mewing sounded behind him.

The cat’s name was Jack, or maybe John—possibly Joe. Not that it mattered. He was a small tabby Manx, with a rumpy riser for a tail, whose swirled black-on-gray fur patterns called to mind an oil slick or the sort of unctuous curbside puddles Dr. Cross recalled from his childhood in Brooklyn, gruesome-looking puddles he was never tempted to go splashing in. The cat was sitting in the doorway, studying him in a vaguely predatory manner. “Go away, cat,” Dr. Cross said. The cat glanced around, yawny and unaffected, then returned its stare to Dr. Cross. “Shoo,” he said.

The cat was death. That was the rumor around the Roth Residence, anyway. When the cat chose you, death followed quickly—someone clever had calculated six months, tops. Mrs. Odenkirk down the hall, for instance, had awakened to the sight of the cat lying at the foot of her bed; for three weeks the cat returned nightly, purring by her feet, until Mrs. Odenkirk passed in her sleep and the cat went on its way. After her it chose Fred Something-or-Other on the third floor; same outcome, a stroke felling him five weeks after the cat’s first visit. Once word got around that “pet therapy” was in fact a death warrant, a few of the more despondent patients tried luring the cat into their rooms by leaving smuggled bits of fish from Friday dinner under their beds. Those of an opposite bent barricaded themselves in their rooms at the first sight of the cat roaming their floor. One fellow managed to score a water-pistol from his grandson, taking desperate potshots at the cat whenever it passed his doorway, while a woman three rooms down, halved by a stroke seventeen years before and unable to speak or feed herself, was somehow able to procure catnip from her daughter and went about sprinkling it on her comforter every night. Dr. Cross did not believe in any of this voodoo, of course, but he was nonetheless a cautious sort who’d never been keen to tempt fate, as in his boyhood when he’d avoided those poisonous-looking puddles all the other boys dared one another to leap during the walk to school. “Shoo,” he said again, with a backhanded whisk of his arm. The cat either blinked or winked; Dr. Cross felt certain he’d seen the latter but had doubts cats could wink.

Grunting, he turned in his chair to face the cat, and was staring it down
High Noon
–style when appeared behind it two enormous blue legs. These belonged to Boolah, the nurse, who was carrying a small pink plastic tray and had a thin sheaf of envelopes tucked beneath his armpit. Dr. Cross looked away, embarrassed to have been caught in a staring match with a cat that might or might not have been equipped with the ability to wink and/or incite a tranquil death. With a toneless expression, Boolah glanced down at the cat between his feet, up at Dr. Cross, then down at the cat again. He pursed his lips. Somberly, he said, “Yo. Kitty.”

“Get that cat out of here,” said Dr. Cross.

“You don’t like cats?”

“I don’t like
that
cat.”

“That’s all b.s., you know.” Boolah sighed. “Miss Snyder been sleeping with that cat for three years now. Ain’t nothing wrong with her and Lord help me ain’t nothing
going
wrong with her.”

Dr. Cross said, “I just don’t like him.”

Boolah returned his gaze to the cat, which was more than small enough for him to step over or around or even, for that matter, on. Instead, though, he spoke to it: “Go on now. You heard the man. Pussy,
move.
”

The cat gave no indication it had even noticed Boolah behind it, an impossibility given Boolah’s seismic presence. With his crepe-soled shoe Boolah gave it a gentle giddy-up, kitty-up nudge, eventually—gingerly—lifting its rear end with his toe and rotating it on the glossy tiled floor so that the cat was facing the hallway. The cat stood up, twitched its little bump of a tail, and plopped itself down in the doorway so that Dr. Cross was once again in its whiskered crosshairs. “Uh-oh,” Boolah said.

“Cut that out.”

Cringing, Boolah stepped over the cat and set his tray on a bedside cart along with the envelopes. “Truth is,” he said, counting pills into his hand, “I don’t like that kitty much either.”

“I don’t know why they allow it here. It’s a health hazard. Cats are dirty.”

“He ain’t dirty.”

“He’s for rats, isn’t he? I’ll bet he’s for rats.”

“Naw, supposed to make it feel like home here.”

“Well,” said Dr. Cross, and guffawed. “It doesn’t.” The word
home
went ricocheting through him.
Home:
of course. That was it, the answer to a question he hadn’t quite formulated. He needed to go home. Yet another question, this one fully formed, came thumping along behind: Where
was
home? Was it Brooklyn? He saw the puddles: yes, Brooklyn, the pavement glistening in the aftermath of a springtime rain, the sight of his two-tone school shoes navigating the sidewalk cracks, the storefront windows filled with faded Ex-Lax placards, Fatima signs, rubber baby-pants, antique displays of antipasto and halvah and chocolates, down Carroll Street the steam gusts of a tailor shop exhaled onto the sidewalk like the breath of some great polar beast. But then, wait—

“I’m just reading from the script, my man,” said Boolah. “You understand?”

Foggily, Dr. Cross said, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m going home tomorrow.”

Boolah ignored this. “I got your ’roids here, and grabbed your mail for you, too, ’cause I’m so nice.”

“My what?”

“Your steroids. Your vitamins.”

“My vitamins?”

“Your
pills,
man. I got all your pills.”

Dr. Cross grunted. “I don’t need those pills.”

Boolah ignored this too, standing beside Dr. Cross’s shoulder with a multicolored assortment of medicines on his wide expanse of palm, a glass of water in his other hand. He said, “Shoot ’em down for me.”

“Blech,” said Dr. Cross afterwards. “That big orange one—it’s like swallowing a golfball.”

“That one make you
strong,
man.” Boolah curled his fist and leaned forward, flexing his bicep. “Put that ol’ tiger in your tank.”

“Huh. I don’t need any tiger.”

“Everybody need some tiger.”

The sight of the cat sprawled in the doorway distracted Dr. Cross. Was this the tiger Boolah was talking about? “I don’t like that tiger,” he whispered.

“Say again?”

“That—tiger,” said Dr. Cross, pointing to the cat.

“That ain’t no tiger.”

“But it . . .”

“What?”

“You said . . .”

“You want your mail?”

“Oh yes,” said Dr. Cross, with a sudden swerve of brightness.

Boolah laid the envelopes on the desk. “All yours, tiger,” he said, and gathering up the tray headed toward the door. He paused at the cat, and offered it a respectful nod before stepping over it with calculated stealth.

“And could you make that cat go away?” Dr. Cross shouted after him.

From down the hallway he heard Boolah shout back, “Pussy do what pussy want,” which brought forth a yawp of old-lady objection from a neighboring room.

After turning his chair, with an exaggerated harrumph, so that his back was to the cat, Dr. Cross went sifting through the envelopes in his standard way, as always looking first for a personal letter—anything hand-addressed. There was, of course, nothing of the kind, and excepting the annual trickle of Christmas cards there hadn’t been for years. This was partly due to email—Dr. Cross had once tried to use the computer in the common area, at Elwin’s urging, but found the machine entirely unlikable—but more to do with all the crossed-out entries in his address book. Put plainly, almost everyone was dead. They’d all gone extinct. The only friend who still wrote him was Ted Blundell, but Ted wasn’t really a friend—rather an ex-friend whose letters were all depressingly apologetic, a paragraph of wan news floating atop a ten-ton anchor of regrets. Back in the ’80s, when Ted had been a rising star in the Montclair State history department, he’d borrowed $15,000 from Dr. Cross for a down payment on a Brookdale Park Tudor. Six months later, however, he’d ditched his wife, three-year-old twins, tenure track, and the handshaken loan agreement with his department chair to go gallumphing after the bass player in an all-female Hoboken New Wave band. (Until he resurfaced eighteen years later, the last Ted sighting, reported by a grad student, had been of him working the door at a Newark lesbian bar, collecting the $2 cover charge in an upturned Montclair State baseball cap with an expression of squirmy indigestion, as though this fat slice of life he’d bitten off had yielded him a case of existential dysentery.) Bathetic letters of remorse had started flowing from Ted in the late ’90s—one of them ran to eleven damp pages—but for all their pleas for forgiveness they were notably devoid of checks. Still, Dr. Cross wouldn’t have minded seeing one of those letters now—anything from a familiar voice, even a piteous one.

Yet there was nothing of the kind. He tore open the topmost envelope—something from the Veterans Administration. For sixty years he’d used an ivory-handled letter opener but letter openers weren’t allowed in the Roth Residence and his had been confiscated by who-knows-who to who-knows-where for who-knows-what-reason. Perhaps to prevent him from eviscerating that cat whose sniper eyes he could presently feel between his shoulderblades. In those same sixty years he’d grown more than accustomed to VA mailings and the like, yet even now the familiar micro-shiver ran through him, a quick shudder of unsolicited memory: Here was his war, come back to him in a four-by-nine-inch plastic-windowed envelope. True, he’d made a life’s work out of studying war, but for whatever obscure psychological reason these tangible reminders of his own relationship with it tended to unsteady him, as if they exposed the blood ties between the observer and the observed, between the historian and history, or revealed the first-person subjectivity hiding beneath the cool third-person veneer, casting doubt on the affirmed—or were they over-affirmed?—facts. But then, no, that wasn’t quite it—or even it at all. That was just the story he told himself. The truth was that a gulf of difference lay between war and
his
war. One he understood, or had tried to understand; the other was incomprehensible, as even his quaking limbs knew.

This present shiver, however—he paused, gauging it—this shiver was different, this wasn’t the standard-issue shiver he’d learned to extinguish with a fast wag of the head. This one ran deep and then deeper, the memory swooping with a violence he hadn’t felt from it in years, screeching like an incoming hawk or artillery shell. He froze, his throat clogged with trapped air. The next of his old remedies—closing his eyes—also failed him. In fact this only intensified the memory by removing the counterbalance provided by the sight of his desk and room, training his mind’s eye upon the memory the way the dimming of theatre lights trains your eyes upon the stage. Then he heard himself gasping the same gasp he’d sucked into his lungs in May of 1945, and though he tried to lift his eyelids, he couldn’t; they shuddered but remain locked.

The memory comprised two separate scenes. They weren’t quite segregated in his mind’s eye, like a split screen, but neither were they superimposed upon each other; it was more like the way comic books were sometimes misprinted in the old days, with the colors bleeding outside the black lines meant to contain them.

The first scene was of the road to Gunskirchen Lager, the Austrian concentration camp that Pfc. Elwin Cross, as an eighteen-year-old “Doughboy” of the U.S. Army’s 71st Infantry Division—a replacement just sixteen days into his overseas service—had helped liberate just before V-E Day. Alerted to the Allied advance, the SS had abandoned the camp days earlier, and hundreds of the camp’s inmates—Hungarian Jews, for the most part: sickly, starving, skeletal—had swarmed through the open gates to the road where they greeted the approach of Pfc. Cross’s unit with moany cheers and cracked-lip pleas for water and food. One man stormed the slow-moving Jeep in which Pfc. Cross was riding, gripping the top of the door and trying to run alongside it, but without the strength to lift his feet he was half the time dragged. “Cigarettes,” he begged. Pfc. Cross handed him a half pack of Lucky Strikes and the man let go of the Jeep. When Pfc. Cross looked behind he saw the man stuffing the cigarettes into his mouth, chewing wildly. Nearer the gates lay a string of corpses on both sides: inmates who’d perished just yards into their freedom, as though felled by the shock of it, their rabid thirst sated by drowning. Then Pfc. Cross gasped: the same precise gasp he was gasping sixty-plus years later. There by the gates was a boy—twelve or thirteen years old, he reckoned, though starvation skewed any guesses—with his head in the split guts of a shellfired horse that’d been dead two days at least. The boy—or was it a girl?—glanced up as the Jeep passed, his or her face smeared purple and the eyes blank and dismal, and then without expression he or she turned back to the horse’s belly and resumed gnawing. “Jesus,” someone said, and the Jeep crunched to a stop. Skeletons surrounded the Jeep, pressing in and blocking Pfc. Cross’s view of the child and horse.
“Víz,”
they pleaded,
“Wasser,”
and Pfc. Cross watched his canteen disappear into a desperate vortex of blue-nailed fingers.