I could hear the terror-making echo of your boots inside the biology lab, feel the agony of the short wait as you turned on the electron microscope and found the glass slide, extracted the Eucharist from your mouth, sick to your stomach now with the finality of your actions, placed the Host onto the slide and secured the slide under the clamps of the scope. I could feel the dry blink of your eyeball as it began making its way toward the enlarging lens. Could hear the sound of the door opening behind you, hear the voice of the security guard, “the toy cop” as you uncharitably called her, demanding to know what you were doing.
Had you ignored her even for an instant you might have gotten a look. Proved to yourself once and for all the fact or the absence of fact regarding molecular conversion and the ways of mystical transformations. But you stood up, as if you’d been questioned by the voice of God itself rather than a minimum-wage security guard. You stood up and she approached the table and immediately caught on to what was happening here. I have to wonder on occasion, when she took the job, could your toy cop ever have known that one night her routine of drunk and disorderlies and parking violators would be disrupted by, of all things, a heretical truth seeker?
As your father was neither alumnus nor contributor to the cause, they managed to kick your doubting ass out the gates and off the Hill inside a week.
And now, I would imagine, you realize the point of this entire diatribe.
There was an awkward pause when you’d finished the story. Less than ten seconds, I would guess. We were parked behind the closed diner at the bottom of the hill and you were looking up at the crosses that capped the turrets of the tallest buildings. I remember your face side-lit by the green neon that rimmed the diner’s marquee. And that is when I laughed.
I laughed at the story of the Transubstantiation Scandal.
And I have always hated myself slightly but consistently for that burst of laughter. That it ended immediately made it somehow worse.
I have always wondered why, in the wake of my laugh, in the face of my fierce insensitivity and disrespect in the moment after you had just confessed to me the event that clearly altered your life in a profound way, you ever wanted to see me again. And how you ever could have married me. And now, tonight, sitting here in the bedroom of the perfect bungalow, the answer comes to me in an instant, in the way that conversion came to Saul on the road to Damascus.
As I watch you shift in the bed now, naked and rolled toward me, as I watch your mouth fall open, making your face appear so much younger, appear close to childlike, I understand everything: You wanted me even more after I laughed at your story. Because you wanted to know how someone lives completely devoid of any kind of faith. Without that relentless burden that had chewed at you for so long. Gnawed away, day and night, at your liver and your soul.
That might not have been much to go on, but it made you need me in a persistent way. And at the risk of sounding like a romance novel, a love grew out of it. We do not choose our motivations. They choose us.
Except for the occasional sound of a page being turned or the body shifting slightly, Lacazze could easily forget that Gilrein is in the backseat.
How did Langer do it? How did the old man focus on his narrative and drive at the same time? How was he able to maneuver the taxi through its routes while his brain was fully immersed in another world?
The Inspector knows that the cab must come to a stop in order for him to finally tell his own story. The distractions of the passing city are just too great. He can’t inhabit the past and the present at the same time. The strain would be unbearable. Perhaps this is another symptom of the Grippe, an effect no one talks about because there are so many others that are more dramatic.
There is simply so much to see on the street tonight. And all of it appears so vibrant. Almost hyperreal. Even the scrap yards up on Cornell Hill. Even the deserted section of the Vacuum. Everything has a vibration tonight. Everything seems to be calling out for attention, sending a warning that means I am significant, I am an integral part of the picture.
But it isn’t until he finds himself steering the hack past the Yusupov Garden Room, then cross-cutting alleys until he’s passing the Hotel Adrianople, that Lacazze understands there has been an underlying plan to his journey, a system born of his subconscious or the strictures of karma. Either way, he’s been taking himself and his passenger on a haphazard, sometimes backward tour, a memorial parade that retraces a historic procession, a trip that once led, in the end, to the Rome Avenue Raid.
And now I think, my love, that you were instinctively correct. My laugh was born not out of insensitivity to another’s tradition (though, of course, there was that). Not out of a moment of social stupidity (though there was certainly a degree of that). My laugh came for the exact reason you sensed at the beginning: because I could not understand the meaning of your need. I could not understand how a seemingly intelligent young man could have so much vested in such an illogical and obviously symbolic ritual. I could not understand that it went beyond ritual, that it was attached to the center of how we view and then live our lives, of how we view the reason for our existence. And ultimately and simply, of how we define and deal with the agents of good. And maybe more important, of evil.
I was laughing at a young man who had wanted, more desperately than I could imagine or understand, to believe that there was purpose and order and meaning beyond himself, beyond his own making.
Please try to understand this, Gilrein: I was laughing because, whether I knew it or not, I was terrified.
It has taken me the span of our marriage to realize this. The truth is unalterable. I laughed out of fear. Tonight’s epiphany says that my intellect could be boundless and it still would not be enough. I can reject Mystery, but that will never negate Mystery. You have converted me with your presence, Gilrein. I am still an atheist as I know you to understand that term. But I am less and less an egotist. By the time you wake up, I’ll be humbled to my core.
Now I find that as a philosopher, I am a coward. As a linguist, I am made blind and deaf by my own ego and pride. And as a cop, I am sinfully envious of the criminal.
I loved you because in the end, you could not be a monster even when you thought you needed to be a monster. I have loved you because you have given me, without a price, the perfect life in the bungalow, where Mystery came to live, where improbable and fragile hope could be born to the sad accompaniment of a perfect-voiced torch diva.
My mentor believes that language creates reality.
My mentor now calls his Methodology “The Final Criticism.”
My mentor could not be a bigger asshole if he practiced on Saturdays.
I have so much to tell you, Gilrein. There is so much I don’t know. But so much that I suspect. I am tempted to wake you right now. But I’m already late to meet the Inspector. Yet another hot tip regarding the Tung. So I’m off to Hotel Adrianople. You sleep now and we will talk forever when I return. As Imogene would say,
We will talk until
Every story has been told.
27
The cab bumps up and over the curb and jerks to a stop. The engine dies by way of a stall. Gilrein looks up to find himself in front of the Dunot Precinct House. In the quiet, the shallow and labored breathing from the front seat is more pronounced, the soundtrack to a movie about disease.
“You don’t like the noise,” Lacazze says.
“Does anyone?”
“Mr. Gilrein, there is a whole breed of people in love with death. This city is lousy with death lovers.”