Okay, Bo said. We’ll take him downstairs together. But first I want to know is, is that a gun sticking out of your pocket?
Oh no! Vik said, shocked at the suggestion.
Later, when a guest drifted into the kitchen and casually mentioned to Bo that people were tossing his patio furniture onto West End, Bo indicated only that they were to stay the hell away from his Finnish smoker.
He and Vik were busy scooping snow off the windowsill and ferrying it to the refrigerator, which they’d disemboweled, racks and all, in the name of science, and where Vik had arranged the Tami and the black velvet on the vegetable crisper. And that’s where they were, peering at snowflakes, when Albert went over the railing.
34.
One last stroll through the apartment, the sharp cedar/pine of floor polish, the aura of wool in the living room, of heating oil by the vents, mildew on the kitchen sponge, the curry and cumin in the cabinet, the vegetal aroma beneath the sink, ozone and tea in my father’s old office, the rank humanity of the laundry bag, the scent of impending snow in the bedroom I shared with Vik.
A place you spend your whole life becomes a memory vault, its walls hung with images encased in ice. At the front door I loop a finger around a coat hook and give it a tug. It’s seated as firmly as ever, as indestructible as the Apelles itself, for it is the Apelles itself, just as the faucets and floorboards are, each fixture as eternal as stone, each one laden with the past, and I feel as though I’m pulling them all along behind me, every last scrap of wallpaper, every sink and window. I wonder, as I have so many times, if Lazlo Brunn, time traveler in the great beyond, has ever spent one of his thousand-year seconds here, brushing his fingers over the coat hooks, passing through the door of his old apartment to sit with Turk, however briefly, a life being such a brief thing, quicker than a thought to the old doctor. Or would he have been wiser than that, too aware of the dangers of a place so freighted with the past, the near impossibility of escape?
The familiar heft of the front door, the solid whoosh-click of oak and steel, the sonic death of the carpeted hall to the elevator, the cool, almost imperceptible resistance of the call button. The elevator arrives empty and I press 
, and for old times’ sake I release a bloody scream into my balled-up cardigan from around 12 to 2. In the lobby I nod to Peter and divert past the brassy grid of the mailboxes to the service elevator, press, board, and down I go. Past the storage cages, into the boiler room, unlock steel door, close and lock steel door, down the stairs, ever downward, more steel opening, slamming shut behind me. No one waxes poetic about a basement. Beyond the cellar door lies the realm of rot and fear. If you’re lucky, the domicile of your enemies. A pit, home to mold and decay, host to sewer, worm, and root.
Another short flight of stairs, another steel door, the handle cold, two locks and a keypad. It opens directly into my office. No diploma on the wall, but two of my mother’s canvases keep watch over each other from opposite sides of the room. There’s nothing here you wouldn’t expect to find on the C-suite wing at any moderately sized producer of exportable plastic componentry. No windows, of course, but tuned lighting does a passable imitation of Central Park on a clear fall day.
The Nutcracker soldier I lifted from the Vornados’ house all those years ago occupies a position of honor on my desk, a four-drawer fiddleback number that belonged to Turk. Beneath the paintings, which are unobtrusive color studies, interesting but not distracting, there are marble-top work surfaces. A pair of sofas face each other in the middle of the room, White House style, for client meetings. When I bought out Turk and became the sole proprietor, I only made one upgrade: the floor. I had the oak planks ripped up and the concrete jackhammered, which dropped the surface six inches. One industrial iron step, diamond plate, brings you down from the main office.
In 2001, there were two earthquakes in Manhattan, one in January, one in October, and though initially I assigned them no meaning, over the years I began to think of them as bookends to that day in September, a pair of memorial shrugs of the mantel, neither of which moved the needles at the Columbia Earth Institute more than the towers’ collapse, as though out of respect, and I confess that by the time I took over from Turk I felt a strange affection for the bedrock beneath our streets, and wanted to be as close to the schist as possible.
Thus my office floor is the roof of the Hartland Formation, its gray burr ground smooth and buffed to a dull sheen. Most people wouldn’t notice a floor, and if they do I assume they see concrete. I’ve been generous with the rugs, low-pile, natural hues, and you would really have to be on your geologic game to recognize that you’re standing on Cambrian schist, an ancient layer in the St. Nicholas thrust zone, just west of Cameron’s Line. When you stand in my office, you stand on the earth’s crust. It’s a beautiful volcanic rock studded with garnet and flecks of quartz that wink in the light. Copious deposits of magnetite.
Tanawat’s office is on the other side of the lobby, the decor decidedly unchanged since Turk brought him on as chief of operations back in the ’90s, Tanawat being an archconservative when it comes to the preservation of his own personal history. He maintains, for instance, a full arsenal of functioning bongs dating back to his years at Columbia. He also has a shelf heaving with family photo albums. It is because of him that I have no concern about the company’s ability to provide our clients the same level of service as ever, whether I’m here or not. By all rights, the company should be his, anyway. He’s the one who manages relationships with the vendors, keeps abreast of the latest trends in tech and fantasy, and ensures that the clients get exactly what they need, even if that’s not what they want. He tends to spend as much of the winter as possible on the West Coast, so I haven’t seen much of him lately, but he’ll know what to do.
I feel as if a hundred pilgrims who had set off decades ago, each from a different corner of the globe, are approaching their final destination. There is a cohesive presence, a warmth in the air. Surely I was part of the blueprint from the start, a structural element drawn in by William Push, a truss at the apex of a larger idea. My preparation long predates my knowledge of it, that’s for sure. What more could I have asked for: A father who taught me to mistrust probabilities in favor of coincidences. A mother skilled in the interpretation of signs and symbols. From Vik I learned the secrets of dispersion. From Turk, an understanding of the methods of complication. From Lazlo I received the mechanism for transformation.
And from Albert, who rather than surrender his guilt transformed me into his surrogate, Albert, who devised a mysticism all his own, who, like Lazlo, managed to outsmart mortality itself, the master complication, who escaped by engineering his own expulsion, shedding his own skin and putting on mine, I received the final dose of knowledge. Sometimes a suicide is not meant to be an end to suffering but its extension. And while I do not intend to suffer any longer, I do intend to extend myself infinitely.
I had lost myself in my father’s and Albert’s and Vik’s murky recollections, but now I am found. And though I understand that my life has already been written, all of it preordained, I confess to some trepidation about what lies ahead. It has become difficult to keep myself separate from the world. I’ve got real issues with the observable universe right now due to this marriage of the minds, and I suspect this would be only the beginning, like the striated mixing of paint, eddies of Albert swirling into eddies of my father, Vik bleeding into Hazel, blending at the edges, distinction vanishing. Maybe my father was protecting me from this very thing with his fictional version of Hazel. Maybe I’ve done this to myself. It doesn’t matter now. I know what’s coming if I stick around. I know it like I know foot is foot and hand is hand. Soon enough, foot will be paper clip and hand will be soup and I’ll be lost to myself. Before that happens, I must evacuate this body. This is ancient business, it’s witches and cauldrons on the heath. I finally have my chance to invite the seraphim of amnesia to settle on the crown of my skull, to chant, Forget, Forget, Forget, do its egg scramble number down in the brainpan, the old Moniz mash, the leucotome twist, one-two, look, I’m a roux.