Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

She decides to brave the hallway. Fluorescent air and the feeling that the ceiling is pressing down on her head, that everyone is carrying the ceiling around on their heads. She rushes first to the nurse’s station and finds a woman on the phone, a man filling out forms. No one has time for her. Her voice stretches into sounds but she is not entirely sure of what she is saying.

We need help in Mr. Zane’s room, pointing.

What for?

Something isn’t working.

What?

I’m not sure.

Someone will be there in a minute.

I don’t think we have a minute.

Is he breathing?

Yes.

We have a minute.

So she is looking for the doctor. She notices that he usually arrives from one particular elevator and bizarrely she decides to stand in front of the elevator as if he will magically appear. This is unlike her, this reliance on magic. The doors open and out wheels a woman in a chair and an orderly leading what appears to be a parade of people who are not the people she needs. She returns to the nurse’s station.

Can someone please come to the room?

Someone came to the room. There was no one there but him.

And how was he?

He was fine.

But he’s not fine.

Miss, would you like a pill? Something to calm you down? You’ve been here a long time.

You’re not a doctor.

Yes, I am a doctor.

Really?

Really, says the doctor.

Please come look at him again.

I looked. He’s fine.

Did you check all the machines?

Everything is okay. Go back home. Get some sleep, the doctor says and trots off.

She stands alone in the hallway and the activity disperses around her, things pulled away by a tide. She feels like a castaway. She staggers or feels as though she staggers back to his room. On the way she evokes no recognition in the doctors, nurses, patients, whom she passes. She is apparently invisible.

Back in the room he is talking with his eyes closed; his words drifting from phrase to phrase. She could make out:

Anyone who is really serious about this country would fix this carried interest foolishness…Of course I didn’t vote for a single one of them…Poppy, come home this instant and what is that article of nonclothing you have on…? Yes, it’s true we really do not know much of anything. Can you believe it? Can you face it? The truth of how little we know? Our ignorance is vast like the ocean and what we understand is so tiny, so meager, it is not even a droplet of spit upon the waves…

His hands begin to arc and curve above the sheets, and his voice grows louder.

If I were a…

And the coughing starts again. A wrestling in his throat with mucus and saliva, a deep pulmonary argument raging in his chest. Neva scans all the machinery beside the bed, a flickering dashboard, and sees nothing she understands, nothing changed. A glance up the tube attached to the IV, where the clear liquid bobbles in the air, and she sees that it looks about the same as before, but of course there should be less of it, if it is dripping properly, if it is working, and now he is shaking as he coughs, she has pushed the button for the nurse but there is no way she is going to leave his side, and her arm reaches up, turns the bag of hanging water, untwists it from a position it has shifted into, perhaps earlier when the boys were there, moving around, knocking into things, and she gently tugs at the bag and she sees the liquid slide through the tube and the coughing subsides and she doesn’t know for sure if she has saved him but he is looking up at her and through the heavy lids there is a gratitude that she has never before witnessed.

Jonathan does not come. A nurse arrives and checks things and sees that they are fine and leaves. The time passes and Neva waits in the chair while Steve sleeps and she gets a text from Jonathan saying to stay there, he is running late. Her heart is still pounding. She has not forgotten the terror, it has not left her body. When Steve is deeply asleep, nearly inert, she stands over him and checks that he is breathing. She puts her hand on his chest. She talks to him. In the darkening room she whispers her story to him and he has no choice but to listen. She says she is telling him now because she is afraid she may never have another chance and he is the only person to whom she can tell her story. It does not take long, the truth. When she is finished she says she thinks that he knew most of it already but the full confession had to come from her — not confession, really, because she knows that she hasn’t done anything wrong, but nevertheless it feels like a confession.

—

When Jonathan finally arrives and releases her she is sitting in the chair again, upright, and nobody would know that she has told Steve anything or, in this case, everything. Steve is breathing; the room is dim; Neva is waiting; the liquid is dripping from the bag. But Jonathan has the feeling that his relationship with his father has changed because of this woman. For the first time, he senses her power. Perhaps it is the sight of his weakened father that hits him not unlike the way it hit Felix, only in this case the blow is followed by a reaction more like Roman’s, a reaction based on strategy, shifts of weight, control. Jonathan’s jealousy of Neva is not registered but subsumed, repressed and made utterly logical if entirely irrational. Feeling turns to fantasy in his mind and what was jealousy becomes, for him, a real injustice.

—

I’ll take it from here, Jonathan says, taking out his phone and resting it on top of a piece of medical equipment. You go home. I’ve got this covered.

WITHIN TEN DAYS Steve had returned home, a new man. His jacket hung slightly looser around his shoulders, and his hair had thinned, but otherwise he appeared healthier than before, having paid a visit to Patrizia’s dermatologist and been given a chemical peel in order to look refreshed. He went to the office, gave specific instructions, lectured associates, closed deals, came home, had medically unsanctioned sex with his wife, and late at night spoke to Neva in his amber-colored study. He spoke with a strange urgency about his business, his properties, and his holdings around the world. In hushed tones he opened up to her about his office towers, malls, skyscrapers, housing developments, business contacts, political connections, both domestic and foreign, the ministers he knew in Europe, in Asia, the Near East, and beyond. The more he unburdened himself the more he seemed to trust her. The more he told her the more he revealed, his reflections unfolding like a mansion in a dream with rooms leading off of rooms, hallways ending in stairways that cascaded floor after floor after floor.

This was the House of Steve, a mental construct, a dynasty, a place, as much an idea as an enterprise, a vision that appeared in a darkroom on a negative and then burned the paper through, bleeding colors and light so lustrous, vivid, effulgent that a hologram of a house seemed to develop in reality, a 3-D rendering of an estate, a rambling mansion and outbuildings, a bright green glade, a stand of birches, blue meadows, a world of purple leafless trees in winter, bending boughs in summer, a small cemetery in the woods, a single grave, a soulful breathing in the swaying branches, sighing yellow fields and low hills, and, beyond, a ring of silver mountains reaching up to the sky. Shadows fast-forwarding across the steep cliffs. A gathering of clouds. A tremble at the top of the highest peak. Echoed, distantly, imperceptibly, by a shiver in the walls of the house.

—

I heard everything you said, he told her, leaning close.

What do you mean?

Everything you said to me in the hospital.

She closed her eyes, looked away. I didn’t know if you were even conscious, she said.