Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

But no.

Manuel was not yet getting up to begin the long drive north through the city’s broken-down districts. He was not on his way to lower the straps of Jane’s backless dress from her shoulders.

He was sitting in the bright orange booth by the partly curtained window at the Pancake House & Bar. The window beside the booth looked out on the hospital roof. Maria was speaking to Manuel, and he was nodding his head in accompaniment to her whispering. The hospital’s roof was immense, a lit-up temple that dominated everything in the night. I stared through the restaurant window, through the damp glass and the thickening fog, out at the illuminated pyramid; and it appeared, this structure, as I watched it hovering above our city lost in mist — it appeared to grow a tiny bit in size. What kind of hallucination was this? The roof looked, more accurately, as if it might be coming closer, a detached structure slowly approaching from the direction of the river district. Was it, in fact, a spaceship? Other city buildings had disappeared inside clouds that seemed to come down to ground level. Even the Kernberg College music building, the former academy for orphans that adorns the top of the hill, this fine old nineteenth-century building with its turrets and domes and stained-glass windows, the L-shaped wings leading to other wings beneath copper roofs stained green over the years — even the red-brick orphanage was invisible in the fog. Or was it? Was that it, off in the far distance? It was impossible to say. Shapes and lights appeared, then went away, then manifested again. The entire downtown was effectively gone, a ghost town. Here came the golden pyramid. How impressive this was. Could it have been — was it at all possible? — that the hospital roof’s approach was an illusion caused by atmospheric moisture and reflected light? Did anyone else, happening to put down a fork or knife or cup and gaze momentarily out a northern window, notice that the top of the new municipal health-care tower — the intensive care unit, the maternity ward, and the private suites, to be exact — was sneaking up on us?

Richard’s breath blew against my neck. From the other side of my face came Rebecca’s. There was no air for me to breathe except exhalations from these two people. The moles covering Jane’s back will never, I thought while hanging aloft in Bernhardt’s grasp, seem to Escobar like a Winslow Homer or a Bierstadt painting of the grandiose, thrilling American West. Granted, this estimation of Manuel’s imaginative limits is verifiable only as strong conjecture. It is in the nature of reality to be subject to our fantasies about other people’s conceptions of the world. My thoughts about Manuel and Jane might usefully be understood as nothing more than an alternate version of Manuel’s thoughts about Jane and about Maria — Maria in relation to Bernhardt, though not exclusively in relation to Bernhardt. Rebecca had come swiftly and gracefully into the picture; and what you realized, listening to her talk or watching her throw up, was that, despite her youth, Rebecca was undeniably more grown-up than Leslie Constant. One glance at the Englishwoman in relation to Sherwin Lang made this clear. Leslie gazed across their table at Sherwin; she stared and stared. I think I can in fairness say that this was the finest and most alarming demonstration I’ve ever seen of the infant gaze in a non — mother/child setting. Who could blame the man for wanting to end it? He uncrossed his arms and placed his bottle beside all the others on the table. He slid back his chair, wiggling the chair’s wooden legs across the floor, scuffing and scraping away from the trainee. Suddenly he leaned his body forward; and it looked as if he might speak to Leslie, perhaps whisper something sweet to placate her and make her smile. Instead he turned away. The man knew how to crush another person. Touching the tabletop with one hand, clutching his chair with the other, Lang worked himself to his feet. Each unsteady action was a considered, deliberate movement. What power this man had, drunk. He walked with care between tables, though he performed a kind of swaggering show to the contrary. Everyone in the room waited for Sherwin to tumble hilariously across someone’s lap. But drunks have a knack for finding their way. And sure enough, here he came, weaving across the floor. I could see his enormous head, lit up and red in the bright kitchen light.

He seemed to be doing exactly what I had earlier warned Rebecca about — namely, spying up her dress.

Sherwin glared woozily up at us. He did not look well. He raved at the waitress, “Kernberg? Don’t go to Kernberg ! Kernberg is haunted ! Everyone knows that. The place is crawling with ghosts of children who were forced to become musicians!”

Then he said, with the practiced alcoholic’s sluggish though impeccable diction: “Don’t listen to me. I am a stupid man. Sometimes I say harmless things. Give me your hand. Tom will not mind. I am sure of it. And Richard is strong. They are good men. They will understand. I cannot bear falling in love with a new woman.”

He was so very, very drunk. There was no stopping him. He reached his hand up to Rebecca and, in a voice that was heartbreaking to hear, asked her, “Will you hold me?”

What was Rebecca to do? She looked at me, but I could not tell if it was guidance she wanted.

“Trust your instincts,” I told her, and immediately felt like a manipulator and a fraud; for Rebecca must have known it was not likely that I would appreciate competition for her attention, especially from a charming drunk like Sherwin, who, regardless of his stated inclination to dodge the pains and sorrows of love, would waste no time getting his hands all over her tits. I couldn’t alert Rebecca to this without coming off as a pig. I surely would’ve maneuvered to feel her breasts myself, if I could have gotten free from Bernhardt’s grip. One day I will draft a paper on “Piety as an Expression of the Grotesque.” I should say on this subject that my impression of myself as a fraud had certain cheery implications. The world’s most accomplished charlatans — through no fault of their own — tend to be ordinary adolescents, who dedicate, on average, three to six years of their lives to creating, working through, and eventually discarding possible though often improbable personalities. We’ve all watched this process with the utmost horror. Did my own, calculated fraudulence indicate a highly compressed stage of psychological growth analogous to “normal” teen development? Was I, through these tender negotiations with Rebecca, leaving the state of infancy imposed by Bernhardt?

Oh, happiness! How glorious to become, over the course of a lifetime or a pancake dinner, a fabricator of deceits, a strategist in sex, the vanquisher of rivals — a true man, or at least a man who knows what it takes to look handsome, desirable, generous of spirit! Let Sherwin ascend into the air. Let him come up and take his place beside me and Rebecca. What did I have to fear from this unfortunate old friend, with his bloodshot eyes and comical, pseudo-Victorian costume?

Lang could only make me look good. I gave Rebecca the nod. To make sure she understood, I said, “Haul him up.”

What was interesting to me was the sudden discovery that, having said this, I truly wanted it. I felt, as I frequently have in the past, a great, brokenhearted fondness for the man. It is not unusual to voice, as a prerequisite to articulating in consciousness, one’s incipient and often strong desires, fears, hopes, misgivings, and so on. Rebecca was at that moment the person closest to me. I could feel heat from her body. I could smell her vomit. I felt her palm’s moistness against mine. Was I in love with her? Was my attraction in some way paternalistic? She, too, apparently wanted Sherwin to float around the restaurant with us. Did the girl have a soft spot for drunks? If so, what might this suggest about her home life? And how did Bernhardt feel about the prospect of Sherwin leaning in and breathing beery breath everywhere? No one bothered to ask. Rebecca took the initiative and stuck out her free hand — it was her left — for Sherwin to grab. At the same time, with her lovely, damp right hand she gave my hand a light squeeze. She was letting me know that she was with me, and that this new connection with Sherwin was a connection she and I could build together. Bernhardt as well sensed that Sherwin’s ascension was a meaningful testament to the bond between me and Rebecca, between himself and the two of us anchored in his embrace. The inclusion of Sherwin was a sign of our basic trust in one another’s judgment relating to social life and the kind of company we valued and enjoyed. Sherwin was our kind of guy. Richard gave my ribs one of those tight, awful squeezes he liked to give whenever he wanted to communicate. I felt as if I were being squeezed all over. Bernhardt was squeezing, Rebecca was squeezing; everyone hugged and snuggled and perspired. I noticed, with pleasure and satisfaction, the pain in my chest, the sheer inability to breathe deeply. I gazed with pity at the world below. The analysts and the trainees around their messy tables seemed puny and mean, shabby, cut off from the love filling the top of the room above their heads.