Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

“But?” I say.

There’s a small white vase on our table and Rosalyn reaches out and touches it. “I like my plumbing. If I were younger, they might consider an alternative course of treatment.”

“Are you thinking about the alternative treatment?”

She shakes her head. “Not at all. Bring on mainstream medicine.”

“It’s nice that you’ve got that guest bed,” I say.

Such an odd look flashes across her face. “What do you mean, Arthur?”

“If you’re not feeling up to the stairs.”

“People usually feel okay by the time they leave the hospital. That’s what they told me.”

“Well, it’s got to be better than chemotherapy.”

But it turns out she’s going to have chemotherapy, too; it’s part of her treatment plan. This news is a flapping malevolence I’ve released into the room.

The waitress delivers our food. She wears a fabric wrist brace on her left hand, which makes me think that she’s been at this a long time. Who does she see when she looks at us: me in my blasted duster and Rosalyn cocooned in cashmere? Could she mistake us for one of those couples who, despite decades of domesticity, still manage to differentiate? Or, as I suspect, are we Lady and the Tramp? I fold the hem of my shirt to conceal a jagged line of ink, like a seismograph’s record of a catastrophe.

Neither Rosalyn nor I have much of an appetite. We pick at our food in silence. Though I feel responsible for the quiet, I can’t figure out how to change anything.

When the waitress delivers our bill, Rosalyn has her credit card out.

Finally I ask her, “When do you think you’ll have the surgery?”

“In ten days. Ten days from today.”

INSTEAD OF GOING to our seats, I pull Rosalyn into the LeVeque Tower lobby. As a rule, I don’t like frescoes, but the vaulted ceilings in the LeVeque Tower lobby offer a different sort of fresco. The blue, cloud-dappled heavens and pink gods have been replaced with art deco designs rendered in real American colors — clay browns and yolky yellow.

While I’ve wandered through the Louvre and stood in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, neither of those places speak to me like Tacoma’s waterfront or Chicago’s Carbon and Carbide Building. 42I’m an American. This country is my only home.

ROSALYN STOPS WALKING, which, because we’re holding hands, stops me.

“Was I going too fast?” I ask her.

She bites her lips, shaking her head.

I kiss her. I kiss her on the edge of this vaulted space. Then this unexpected woman stares up at the ceiling with me, Arthur Pennyman.

I want to be alone with her and so I tow her toward a bank of elevators — the elevator’s doors are another miracle, a tangle of astrological symbols and industrial motifs, everything rendered in filigreed brass. The doors are counterpoints and peers to the frescoes. Each one must weigh a thousand pounds. And there, above the door, I spot a single word brazed upon the lintel, a single, extraordinary word. I lift our clasped hands so that we point at it together.

Here’s one more indisputable fact: that word is Health.

We step into the elevator. I press the button for the top floor, but the doors don’t close. My galloping heart knows this is a very bad sign. It’s as if the elevator has judged us to be missing something essential.

A black man with a thin (there’s no other way to say this) Jimmy-esque mustache, wearing a blue-gray security uniform, stops in front of the elevator. “Folks, you need a key to go up.”

“Busted,” Rosalyn says.

I say, “It’s her birthday.”

“Is it your birthday, ma’am?”

Rosalyn scrunches up her face.

He leans into the elevator, smiles at Rosalyn. “Promise you’ll come back down in ten minutes?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

The guard slots a key in the elevator’s override and presses the top floor. “Don’t do anything up there unless you want to be on the ten o’clock news. They got cameras everywhere.”

The doors pinch shut. In the next moment we feel ourselves being hoisted up.

“Let me guess,” I say. “There’s an elevator scene in The Holy Screw .”

Rosalyn presses her shoulder against mine, squeezes my hand.

After the surgeons do their job, what would become of the new space inside her? What happens when they take something like that out? Should a person be heartened to learn she can survive without all her original parts, or will it remind her that everything we love is on loan?

Our windowless box creeps higher, chiming each time it brushes past a hidden floor.

“I have a favor to ask,” I say.

“A favor?”

“The day after tomorrow, I’m meeting Gabby’s friend.”

Rosalyn takes a step back, shaking her head, as though I’m some misguided pet bringing her a dead mouse.

Her reaction triggers sparks of panic inside me.

The elevator halts. Like china in a cupboard, we shake a little, settle. The doors open and we step onto the forty-seventh floor. The bare concrete floor is laced with dried adhesive. To our left, sheets of plywood make a crude wall. On our right, behind glass doors, a bright reception area with austere, blocky furniture and matching filing cabinets; everything is taupe, except for a potted orchid.

Why had I whisked Rosalyn away from the lobby to show her this?

Rosalyn pushes against a section of plywood. It scrapes across the floor. She looks over her shoulder at me and winks.

The space is cavernous, empty but for a few stark columns. Coils of telephone wire dangle between panels of the drop ceiling.

Standing by the windows, we look out over Columbus, over the constellation of streetlights and house lights, headlights and stoplights extending out of the city. At the horizon the sky smolders, a thin ribbon of electric blue. I can imagine we are seeing the curvature of the Earth. It feels as though we’ve left Earth, like we’re aboard some spaceship.

I kiss Rosalyn, again. I kiss her soft cheek. I kiss the corner of her mouth. I kiss her parting lips. I kiss her teeth.

“God, Arthur. You’re making me light-headed.”

I kiss her twisted neck.

“Okay. Okay.” She doesn’t kiss me back, but she says, “I’ll go with you to see your daughter.”

Peter walked around the downtown for more than an hour. The sidewalks were crowded with people enjoying the day. He didn’t come across Maya or Alistair. The faces he saw didn’t recognize his face.

He ate a grilled chicken sandwich and a side salad in a restaurant attached to a middle-tier hotel. To keep busy, he pulled up the Ohio Theater’s website on his phone. Apparently the space had been designed in the Spanish Baroque style; Peter wondered if Cross had chosen the venue for how it would complement his black bullfighter getup. He paid his bill and took a cab to the theater.

When he knocked on the stage door, Lumpy let him in without comment. The backstage was indistinguishable from Buffalo or Pittsburgh: standpipes and electrical panels, circular staircases and catwalks, everything painted matte black. Endomorphs in boxy T-shirts emblazoned “Security” checked his credentials again and again, reinforcing his suspicion that he was forgettable.

He found a quiet spot near the curtain that permitted him to look into the hall. Every surface was either red or gold. Depending on a person’s self-regard, one would feel like either a head of state or else a peasant, drunk on stolen wine, lost in a castle.

The opening act, a couple guys with banjos and a woman with a quivering voice, did their thing as the crowd filed in.

The Blister walked past, saluted Peter with two fingers splinted together with duct tape. Peter wanted to ask what had happened, but the roadie vanished somewhere.