What in Satan’s fiery red hell was she doing? He heard the soft rustle of polyester, an inhalation strumming the harps of her nasal cavity. Slowly he lifted his eyelids, just enough to peer through his eyelashes’ dewy prisms at the penumbra of her shoulders as she stood at the window, her back to him, arms crossed as if to warm herself, her fingers clasping the backs of her arms. Christ’s sake, she was watching the snow fall? He waited until she dropped her hands and smoothed her uniform. By the time she’d turned toward him, his eyes were closed and he was a vision of peace.
The nurse squeak-rustled nearer, past him, out the door. Hermetic swoosh, latch snapping into strike plate. He waited thirty ticks of the clock before attempting to lever himself out of the bed. Once he’d gotten his feet on the floor, he made his way across the linoleum to peek through the crosshatched glass. The angle was bad for a full sweep of the hall, and he cracked the door for a better look. They never left you alone for long. He’d have to be quick about it. To the right, the hall was clear to the elevator bank. To the left was the nurses’ station, and though he could hear their voices, they came from somewhere else, down the corridor, around the corner. Satisfied with his chances, he removed the gown, located his pants, shirt, and shoes, dressed, and crept out. He did not bother with the buttons on his sleeves.
All his life, he’d relied on logic to survive. On the playground, scrawny Alfie had been able to demoralize bigger kids with his argumentative powers. That hadn’t stopped the beatings, and often enough invited them, but he secured his intellectual superiority early, and it became his source of power. In court he was an assassin, logic his dagger. He argued with an otherworldly calm that unhinged opposing counsel—the more devastating the argument, the more beatific his countenance. It wasn’t a strategy, one of those synthetic plays lawyers trot out to woo jurors. It was genuine. The more decisive the blow he’d dealt, the dreamier the look in his eyes. And he’d won, and won, and won, piling up a record of dominance that made him not only rich but deeply feared. Nothing in his life suffused him with the warmth he felt constructing a perfect stone wall of argument. In those days, his mind had been so supple he could recall every legal argument he’d ever made, each one a dark line traversing the Irish countryside, the full effect like a Mondrian scored into the rolling green, the interplay of precedent and analysis, policy and proof, arguments intersecting and reinforcing one another. A grand construction, a life’s work, from his first, in Constitutional Law with Professor Haggerty, 1923, to the last, New York State Supreme Court, 1971. Logic had been a reliable companion, a guide with whom he had been unafraid to wander the darkness. It had been his only comfort. And what more did he need? The capacity for reason was the only measure of a man.
Now his reason was failing him, or, more precisely, he was failing it, failing to abide by its tenets. He was on iffy terms with cause and effect. To wit, his failure to consider the weather’s ability to foul up his suicide plan. The plan itself—that Goldbergian construction of fake emergency call, ambulance as escape vehicle, his decision to invite himself into yet another prison from which he’d have to engineer a break—was testament to the cracked, weedy ruin of his logic.
However, at the moment, his adrenal glands were streaming heavy doses of spirit-elevating hormones, and he felt sharp again, electrified. As I sift through the history of his mind, his brief visit to Roosevelt is a bright atomic spike on the dull flatline of his last year, a landmark I can use to orient myself. As familiar as I am with his inner workings, even I sometimes get lost in the wasteland.
He felt it powerfully, the resurgence of his logic, a crackling essence that he’d thought was gone forever, evaporated like the angel’s share. It marshaled his intelligence into a clear, cold liquid that coursed through him, an unstoppable natural force. He felt like he’d pinned a witness on cross. It has been so long. Oh god, the clarity, just this side of madness.
Down the hall he found a janitor’s closet, and inside, a heavy canvas coat hanging on a peg, a knitted cap sticking out of the grease-blacked mouth of one pocket. He pulled on the coat, flipped up the collar, tugged the hat low over his brow, and practically floated to the elevator.
At that late hour, the old man in the enormous coat found decent cover among the other passengers—orderlies, insomniac patients in paper shoes, interns, blurry-faced attendings who’d been pulled from their warm beds. No one gave him a second look.
The doors opened and Albert got off. On the other side of the lobby, an eager young fact-checker from WPIX named Bobby, elevated to on-air correspondent for the night, armed with a mic and a winning attitude, was conducting man-on-the-street interviews, playing goalie at the revolving doors: And what’s your name, ma’am? And are you a patient? Have you thought about how you’ll get home? Have you ever seeeeen weather like this in New York?
At first Albert felt a flash of recognition, a remnant from days when news crews parried their silver microphones at him as he loomed over the city from atop the steps at 60 Centre. They’re here for me? he thought. Damnit, why? Remember, damnit. The confusion that followed (so much for all that adrenalized logic) had a familiar shape, as though he’d awoken in a dim hotel room, unable to recall in the dark where he was—he thinks first of home, no, he’s somewhere else, turns on the lights, a hotel room, there’s my suit on the door, it’s freezing in here, it’s Chicago. Albert stood now at the edge of the light, casting about the lobby for the clue that would retract the tumblers locking tight his mind just enough to crack the door, let in a breath of air. But no.
Like bald tires spinning on ice. Unable to catch his breath. The obvious one: thrusting, thrusting away like a damn piston, but no release.
No, honestly, it wasn’t like any of those things. This defeat, this inability to catch the tail of whatever thought was eluding him, was excruciatingly nothing except itself. The loneliness of being adrift in his own mind, urging his brain to catch, like an engine on a cold morning. No, not that, either. An empty white room? How else am I to explain his predicament, where one moment there is sanity and understanding and in the next it’s been vaporized? Funerals are for the living; these metaphors are for my own comfort.
He took stock. Evidence on and around his person suggested that he intended to exit the building. A sequence of events initiated by a former he, the one who got on the elevator, a lost self. He stepped forward, falling in closely behind an orderly pushing an empty wheelchair, borrowing the man’s momentum, matching the pace of his footfall on the marble floor, shrugging off ambitious young Bobby as he reached for his arm, the wailing siren, Sir, sir, sir. The orderly swung to the side and parked the wheelchair, and Albert, caught in the no-man’s-land between exit and eager young reporter, Sir! lunged at the crossbar on the revolving door, which, frozen in place, wasn’t budging until, Sir! on the other side of the door came two men whose added effort, Sir! cracked loose the icy seal and with all of them leaning against the grindstone at once, there was the sweet luffing pop of the weather strips as they brushed the glass cylinder, Sir! Sir! hissing advancement, the wind battering him as he emerged on the snow-washed brick. Bobby pounced on the new arrivals, a pair like a circus bear and his handler, No, no interviews, the older, smaller one said, but Bobby persisted until the bigger of the two, holding a towel to his forehead, screamed, Getthafuckouttamyway loud enough to rouse even the deepest sleepers draped over the lobby chairs, and he and his handler were allowed to proceed to the desk while Bobby was left spinning his microphone by its cord and eyeballing the lobby for the old and weak.