Hot damn, Vik thought as he reached for door number four, his fingers trembling with voyeuristic ecstasy. Alas, the room he was about to enter was virtually empty; I was the stain on that virtue, sleeping peacefully on the bed beneath a blanket of cyan TV snow, alone, unperturbed because no matter how perverse the diabolical plans in the drug-soaked brains of the partiers, by some miracle none of them, none of them, included getting it on in front of, with, or around a little girl.
So it was that with a mixture of relief and disappointment Vik parked Albert on a creaky teak chair next to a wooden statue of a Maasai herder, taking care not to wake the kid sacked out atop the coverlet. He had no idea how old I was—a little kid, that was how I registered—and he whispered to Albert that he’d be back soon. What a thoughtful boy. Having secured the addled old man, he closed the door behind him and went to find an adult who might be able to tell him where Albert, who had nothing to say on the matter, lived.
3.
Approximately three hours earlier, Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell, partner emeritus, former head of litigation, Swank, Brady & Plescher, an editor of the Harvard Law Review, class of ’26, father of three, widower, atheist, fiscal conservative, moralist, known to the tailors at Paul Stewart as Cheese on account of his habit of expelling toxic nebulas while being taped for trousers, known to the waiters at the Cosmic on 81st and Broadway as Bark (as in, tight as), on account of his miserly tipping and insistence on instant coffee (kept in a glass jar labeled AHC behind the counter, to be wordlessly delivered with one cup hot water, one spoon), magnet for single-fingered farewells, known to his grandchildren as Grumps, known to longtime residents of the Apelles as Albie, for whom co-op meetings were but a canvas on which he might paint his opinions in re the emancipated woman, the ghetto issue, the Soviet threat, the Israel issue, the New York City Department of Sanitation issue, tree huggers, the A-building lobby rug issue, the Head Peanut Hizzoner Jimmy Carter, the Transit Authority conspiracy—in short, anything that happened to tumble across the cerebral threshold of this man known to haggle over the price of Girl Scout cookies and whose five bathrooms, it was rumored, were furnished exclusively from a stockpile of four-star hotel courtesy soaps—had cried into the mouthpiece of his black Bell telephone, I can’t feel my hands!
Numbness! Tremors! Again, quaveringly: Tremors.
I have a shooting pain in my abdomen!
Tightness—(light gasping)—rib cage.
He was reading from a short monologue he’d composed on the legal pad resting on his rumpled corduroy lap, plotted to convey nothing so specific as heart attack or stroke, but leaving the door open to the possibility of a panoply of life-threatening failures of the body’s major systems. When he hung up, he tore off the topmost sheet, folded it in two, and dropped it into the drawer of the side table. He drummed his fingers on his knees, then endeavored to assume a supine position on the rug, a position he achieved with some difficulty, owing both to his age and his sedentary lifestyle, but also to the hour (it was nearly his bedtime), and, despite a healthy dose of scotch, the stiffness that set like epoxy in his joints late in the day. Some blessed mornings he found his body almost completely devoid of pain, limbs loose, his blood warmed from sleep and rippling through his veins with Balanchine-like effervescence, but now, so late in the day, he was a museum of tortures. He hadn’t been stretched out on the Oriental long when, gazing absently at the trompe l’oeil ceiling (manganese blue sky, cirrus, a few orioles in flight, elm leaves in the corners), he realized he’d neglected to pocket the slip of paper on which he’d written his final destination. And so he reversed the procedure, rolling from back to front, raising his posterior by shuffling forward on his knees, favoring the tender left one, walking his hands back into a cat’s arch, at which point he reached out to the sofa and steadied himself before maneuvering his rear onto the cushions and embarking on phase two: standing. A feat of epic proportions, he thought, that he’d remembered the paper. His memory was a junkyard, heaps of scrap as far as the eye could see.
By the time he was up, he’d forgotten why he was up.
Thus, when the ambulance crew arrived, he was still standing fully erect, still trying to recall what he was looking for, and he greeted the paramedics with a yelp of surprise that they interpreted correctly as surprise, an anomalous reaction from a man who had himself phoned for an ambulance fifteen minutes earlier, therefore diagnostically significant, confusion being a symptom of stroke, and he was quickly apprehended, strapped to an exceedingly uncomfortable stretcher, and wheeled out of his apartment sporting a grimace that the plastic oxygen mask transmuted into a knifeish smile, past the doorman Manny, who’d escorted the crew to 12C, and to whom it appeared that Mr. Caldwell had winked, onto the elevator, down, out, and through the lobby, not yet stuffed to the gills with party people, and across the wet cobblestones, where he was shunted into the back of the rig like a slice of pizza into an oven. The snow swirled in, the doors slammed shut. In the sudden stillness of the medical bay, the snowflakes sashayed down and melted into the fat wales of Albert’s pants. Strapped tight, he nonetheless bounced on the stretcher as the snow chains scrabbled against cobblestones, found purchase, and the ambulance scooted through the archway and onto Broadway for its skidding voyage to Roosevelt, where doctors administered a bevy of tests, a second wave of which presumed to measure Albert’s mental acuity (D-minus, dunce cap), and where, owing to his advanced age, inebriation, what appeared to be memory impairment, his inability to provide the phone numbers of any relatives, no answer at his home address, and the deteriorating weather conditions, the chief resident declared he should be held overnight for observation.
When the physician had asked if there was anyone they could contact, Albert had patted helplessly at his trouser pockets until a nurse inserted her fingers and plucked out a storm of paper—slips of memory, most numericaclass="underline" account numbers, dates, times, ages of his grandchildren (without corresponding names), phone numbers (also without corresponding names), all scrupulously inscribed before being pitched into the abyss. Had he remembered to pick up the scrap of paper bearing the name of his final destination, it’s unlikely Albert would have been able to make heads or tails of it. He had no memory of copying it onto the paper. At the moment he had no memory of why he’d done anything. His plan was nothing more than a little turbulence on the surface of rough seas.
He had only a feeling that, like a migrating goose, he was to travel south. An image of water.
Is there a number here we can call? A relative? the doctor said, probing the pile, which had been deposited on an instrument tray, with the tip of a pen.
Albert opened his mouth. He closed his mouth.
What was he trying to remember, again? He’d given the doorman the slip, but then what? Perhaps that alone had been the goal. He stared up at the big lights. His shirt was splayed open, the skin of his torso so loose that it appeared to be draining over his sides like melted icing. Oh, the hands that palpated that papery skin and his narrow bones, his stringy muscles, so many hands. His flickering nerves, relit and glowing brightly, bright as a twenty-year-old’s, buried within this worn-out machinery. Birds alighting on a lake at dawn.
No immediate relations, Mister Caldwell? No one to call?
He moaned when they touched him, not with pain or sexual delight, but as only a lonesome being can moan, with sorrow and joy at once, in communion with his fellow man, in thanks for their affection. The body is made to be handled. It aches to be embraced. Oh, the hands.