Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

“I wouldn’t call her my fraudulent bimbo. But, yes it is.”

He ran a hand through his implants. “I don’t understand. How could you have been so stupid? Wait, don’t answer that! You were shtupping this honey, right?”

“Do you want to hear the whole story, Ed?”

“I do indeed. But let’s go to my office.”

Or something tothat effect, with rather more obscene locutions. Ed is the sort of lawyer who equates toughness with the liberal use of foul language. On the short walk over, collecting a number of pitying looks from the staff, I briefly considered whether I could withhold any significant facts from one of the best cross-examiners in the New York Bar. No, the painful truth would have to emerge, but not the speculation, and not my plans. When we were ensconced in our assigned places I gave him the basic facts, and after he had drained me to his satisfaction he said that we were going to have to get the police involved and that we had to contact the genuine legatee, Oliver March, and let him know what had happened. I was not to be the one to do these tasks, however. In fact, now that we were on the subject, he had noted a significant slippage in my focus of late and I had to agree that this was the case. We discussed my sorry performance at this morning’s meeting and he pointed out that the proposed merger involved the interests of some important clients and that it was unlikely that I was going to do them much good in my present state. He suggested I think about taking a leave for a while, and then he got avuncular, which he hardly ever does with me, a little like King Kong doing social work instead of wrecking Manhattan, and after a while he got to how sorry he had been when Amalie and I broke up and how he thought that I really hadn’t been the same man since. As soon as he said that, as soon as those words drifted into the air, I felt a sort of balloon pop inside my head and…it’s hard to describe, not really a woo-woo type of out-of-body experience, more of a profound detachment, as if Ed were gabbing away at someone who wasn’t really me.

It was quite interesting, really, in a hideous way, and I thought unaccountably of my mother in her last days and wondered whether this was how she felt: alone in that crummy apartment, kids gone (yes, there was me, but didn’t I make it obvious that it was grim duty alone that brought me to her), a stupid job-why keep going, what was the point? Ed was now talking about turning my work over to various associates-just until you can get back on your feet-and part of that work was, of course, the cell phone ring tones. And this phrase now completely occupied my brain ( cell phone ring tones! CELLPHONE RINGTONES!!! ), and the force of the absurdity struck me like a pie in the face: here we were, grown men, actual human beings, the crown of creation, concerned with making sure that money would be paid out in the proper way whenever some idiot’s cell phone went bee-dee-boop-a-doop-doop instead of ding-ding-a-ling and this connected in a strange way with the detached feeling and thinking about my mother and I started to laugh and cry at the same time and could not stop for an excruciatingly long time.

Ms. Maldonado was summoned, and she wisely thought to call Omar, who came up and swept me out the side entrance of our suite, so as not to embarrass anyone or frighten the secretaries. On the ride back to my place I asked Omar if he had ever considered suicide. He said he had after his youngest boy had been shot in the head while throwing rocks at soldiers during the first intifada, he said he wanted to blow up himself and as many of them as possible, and there were people in Fatah encouraging that sort of thing then. But he thought it was a sin, both the suicide and killing ordinary people. Dying after you assassinated someone in power was a different story, but no one had ever given him the opportunity to do that. So he had come to America instead.

That afternoon was when I retrieved this pistol I have here from its lair in the back of my utility closet and for the first time seriously asked Camus’s big question, since, unfortunately, I was already in America. I even stuck the barrel in my mouth just to taste the tang of death, and I did a little active imagining, trying to think of anyone who would be at all inconvenienced by my death right then. Amalie would be relieved and free to marry someone worthier of her. The kids hardly knew I was alive to begin with. Paul would be pissed off but get over it; Miriam would up her medication for a month or so. Ingrid would obtain another lover, indistinguishable from me in any important respect. In my will Omar gets the Lincoln and a nice bequest, so he’d be better off as well.

Obviously, I did not at that time pull the trigger, since I am still here and typing. In fact, I recovered from my hysteria fairly rapidly, one of the advantages of being as shallow as a dish. Nor did I go to bed for a week, forgo eating, stop shaving. No, I thought at the time, the Jake persona would click once more into place and I would continue with what passed for my life, only without the ring tones. In the end I think it was curiosity that kept me alive. I wanted to find out how Bracegirdle’s spying went, and to see if that play still existed, and I wanted to meet Osip Shvanov. Yes, curiosity and a mild desire for revenge. I wanted to find out whose little schemes had fucked up my life, and I wanted to get my hands on the woman who had played Miranda Kellogg and played me for a fool.

My appointment withShvanov was at ten in SoHo, but I had a previous appointment uptown, for I had promised to take Imogen to her rehearsal at the kids’ school. Mrs. Rylands, the drama teacher at the Copley Academy, does Midsummer Night’s Dream every third year, alternating with R. & J. and The Tempest . Last year, Imo played a spirit in the latter play, but this year she has the part of Titania and is insufferably proud. I did not see her perform that spirit because, as I think I’ve mentioned, I do not go to the theater, and not because I didn’t like what they’re showing nowadays. I literally cannot bear to sit in a darkened auditorium and watch live actors on a stage. My tubes close up three minutes after the curtain rises, I can’t breathe, a painful vise clamps around my head, and my digestive system wants to rid itself of its contents from both ends. My sister is obviously correct when she says I need my head examined, a need I decline, however, to satisfy.

I don’t mind rehearsals, though, with the lights up and people moving around and the director calling out directions and actors missing marks and lines. It’s sort of fun and not at all like being pinned, silenced, in the dark, while living people in ghastly makeup pretend they are not who they are; just as I do.

When I arrived at my wife’s house my daughter was waiting on the front steps of the brownstone, chatting with a couple of young men. These had obviously arrived in the white Explorer with gold-plated fittings that stood double-parked on the street with its rear hatch open, the better to share with the neighborhood the thump of its dull chanting music, which was at a volume calculated to shiver stone. She seemed to be having a good time and I was reluctant to break up the party. The young men greeted me politely, for they were from Paul and were keeping an eye on my house, as he had promised. Imogen seemed a little annoyed when I told her this, after we were seated in the back of the Lincoln, since she had thought she was doing something transgressive, entertaining a couple of obvious gangbangers. After this had been straightened out, we rode to the school in silence, at least on my part; Imogen was immediately on her cell phone, speaking to girls with whom she had just spent the entire day and whom she would be seeing in a few minutes. Anything better than a nice chat with Dad.