The Empire of the Dead (11 page)

All night, in his New York hospital room, his dreams replayed that absurd and terrifying moment, from a war long forgotten.

The next day, in a large white room vibrating with primal rock music, several young male nurses prepped Bern for an angiogram. He felt a sting in his right leg, near his penis. Immediately, dizziness overcame him. Someone turned his gurney so he could see a television monitor hanging from the ceiling: there, on the screen, the interior of his heart, an intricate, tidy design. The arteries resembled cascading streams—
Fallingwater
, Bern thought.
God bless Frank Lloyd Wright
. “Left main,” someone remarked. “Eighty, eighty-five percent blockage.”

The next thing he recalled was cool liquid, head to toe; a dim blue light, and the hands of beautiful women tending him, shaving his chest and legs. His soul had passed over, beyond the Fixed Stars, into the Empyrean.

He awoke in a lake of pain.
He
was the lake. Plastic tubes stuffed his mouth and throat. “You made it,” someone said. He didn't like the note of surprise in that voice: had there been some doubt about whether or not he would make it?
What have I done to bring this on myself
? Bern thought. “Breathe,” said the voice. “Stay awake, now.” Later, he learned the surgeons had collapsed his lungs during the operation, to get a better angle on his heart, and he wasn't breathing
on his own. Those first few hours after the operation, a machine did the work for him. Once the machine was off, if he drifted toward sleep, his breathing got too shallow, and the nurses shook him awake. For months after leaving the hospital, he dreaded slumber.

In the ICU, he was a Frankenstein's monster of pacer wires, IVs, and yellow tubes draining fluids from his chest into a humming plastic container. A young doctor—my god, were they letting children into med schools these days?—explained to him that he had rerouted Bern's left mammary artery. Then he had “harvested” a saphenous vein from Bern's right leg and sutured it to the aorta, to bypass the blockages.

Now, Motian tapped the crown of his ride cymbal. A crisp ping. A tolling bell.

“So, technically, you were dead, right?” a colleague said to Bern the day he returned to work, his chest still tender and aching. “I hear they pack the heart in ice, then afterward, shock it back into rhythm.” Bern went numb, and spent the rest of the day gazing through his office window at Lower Manhattan, the various construction zones.

The song stopped. Another—“I Have the Room Above Her”—began. Bern had been mistaken.
This
music had nothing to do with the drummer's quick feet. Motian barely touched his bass drum. No timekeeping. Piano phrases wandered around the melodies as though lost on a forest path. The tenor sax keened like a distant bird. Motian's brushes whispered across the snare:
over here; no, over here; let's take a look over there
.

Midway along the journey of our life.

In those rare interludes when a beat held for a bar or two, Bern tapped his foot, a clumsy, mocking echo of the pattern.

If Motian had slowed after
his
surgery, he had whipped himself back into shape. On stage, he was a rapacious storm. Generally, Bern was happy, too, with his adjustments since his illness. At first he'd been afraid to eat (no fried foods, no more eggs, red meat, or cream), fearful of exerting himself, but then he'd found a balance:
careful moderation. As he recovered more strength, he stopped restricting his activities. And he didn't brood on what had happened to him—though whenever he felt his heart rush or experienced the slightest twinge in his arms, chest, or back, naturally he wondered.

On his last day in the hospital, a weary doctor had told him, “Usually, the veins we use in bypass operations, like the one we took from your leg, have a good ten-year track record.”

“Wait a minute. What are you saying?” Bern responded, shooting up in bed. Cool plastic tubes wrapped his body. “Are you saying I'll be back here in ten years?'

“Well,” the doctor said, “you'll let us know, won't you?”

Two of Bern's colleagues who'd fallen ill in the last three years seemed to fare much less well than he did. Chris Henderson, trained at the University of Oregon, a good anodized aluminum man, had beaten leukemia, at least for now; ever since, he'd become tentative, delicate. In the office, he drove everyone crazy. Did I make the coffee in the break room too strong, he'd ask. Was I talking too loudly with my client just now? Bern wanted to tell him, Don't worry about it, Chris. Do whatever the hell you want, just like before.

Raymond Davis, a lung cancer survivor, had become creepily buoyant, a bon vivant. After work, he'd try to herd everyone to bars for tequila shots. “Live it up, man! What's the matter with you?” he'd admonish anyone who turned him down. Bern liked Chris and Raymond but mostly avoided them now. It seemed to him they had not recovered from their traumas, that their maladies had taken root in their brains and warped them, terribly. They had shrunk; friendly leeches, polite and earnest, feeding on others' concern. They targeted Bern, especially, if he let them: a fellow sufferer. He feared that to spend time with them would be to stay sick.

On the sidewalk outside the club, after the set ended, Bern flipped up his coat collar against the night's chill. Behind him, the New School girls huddled against the wall, sharing a hand-rolled cigarette. Motian appeared in the doorway wearing his shades. He
glanced past the awning at the sky—skeptically, as though the air's calm was deceptive. “Mr. Motian,” said one of the girls, stepping forward, smelling of sweat and sugary alcohol. “Mr. Motian, we think you're brilliant.” Motian appraised her, nodded exhaustedly, said “Okay,” turned, and shuffled down the stairs.

From the shadows, the mummy lurched at the girls—the man to whom, earlier, Bern had given money. The girls fell back against the wall, and the mummy lumbered down the street toward the darkened windows of the Village Cigar Shop.

Bern headed up Seventh. The mannequins of Fantasy World, standing in the window wearing teddies and leather boots, offered him synthetic, come-hither looks. Come-hither-big-boy-and-squeeze-my-plastic-butt.

He wandered past Abingdon Square—the children's swings creaking, empty, on their chains. West of the square, candlelight dithered sweetly behind the lace curtains of a small Italian restaurant. It had a new name these days. What was it? Ah, yes: Valdino West. Bern remembered its old incarnation, Trattoria de Alfredo. When he and Marla first moved to the Village, they spent a couple of romantic evenings munching melons and prosciutto at a window table here. On Bern's starting salary, the place was too expensive, so they didn't come here often. Bern stopped on the sidewalk now and gazed in the window. The décor hadn't changed significantly: large wine bottles on a shelf lining the tastefully painted yellow wooden walls. White tablecloths. Flowers in bottles. Couples holding hands.

On Marla's thirtieth birthday, Bern had brought her here. As a gift he had bought her a gorgeous rare edition of Dante's
Vita Nuova
translated by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, with hand-painted pictures of lovers in gardens, churches, or at feasts (
that
purchase had set him back a month or two!). He had found the volume at the old Gotham Book Mart. “To our new life,” Bern toasted his wife. Inside the flyleaf, echoing Dante's words to Beatrice, he had written, “Happy birthday, to the lady to whom my master has named me.”

Marla would be fifty-one years old now. Bern wondered if she
had ever made it to Tuscany, always a dream of hers. With whom might she have gone? Her new best friends, her lover or lovers (to his knowledge, she had not remarried), were people he had never met.

The night of her birthday here, they had experienced one of their first New York celebrity-sightings, though like most New York celebrity-sightings it was disappointing, a minor event involving a man only a few folks in the crowd knew anything about. At a table next to them, someone pointed out the window at a pale, portly fellow on the sidewalk, and said, “That's Max Frisch! He's a writer!” The man seemed confused, and scurried away from the restaurant when he noticed people staring at him. Since then, Bern had meant to read Max Frisch. He never had.

He strolled up Tenth Avenue, not a route he usually took. The street seemed fresh and alive to him: friendly looking neighborhood bars, where people brought their dogs and appeared to be left alone if they didn't want to engage others. Bern passed a parking garage he knew had been stripped of its Romanesque moldings. A former horse stable, built in the nineteenth century, it had gradually been whittled down into a stucco box. Preservationists had hoped to salvage it—in the 1890s, this avenue, especially north of here, where it became Amsterdam, was known as “Stable Row”; now, most of the old horse-and-carriage barns were gone—but the garage's owner had taken advantage of the city's ponderous bureaucracy. A few months back, as the case for protecting the building worked its way to the top of the public hearings docket, the owner destroyed the last of the structure's historic ornamentation. By the time the Landmarks Preservation Commission considered the case, nothing authentic remained of the former stable. What was the point of saving a bare, empty shell?

In front of the garage now, a drunk, middle-aged woman wearing a very short skirt yelled at a pair of boys—late teens, early twenties, perhaps. Bern didn't catch her words, nor could he decipher the boys' attitudes toward her: threatening, playful? Anger flared
in him … disgust at the situation's irrationality. A tense encounter—whatever its core dynamic—that could have been avoided if the woman had acted her age, had known her proper place on the streets of New York. She was as foolish as the New School girls, Bern thought, but she was seasoned enough to know how to behave.

Well. He was being unfair. He could be such a scold in his head! Really, he surprised himself sometimes. Why
shouldn't
this lady wear a mini and have a snort if she wanted? The boys laughed at her and walked away. She vanished inside the garage.

Why was Bern so furious? So quick to denigrate the woman and the girls in the club? He turned and saw his thin frame reflected in the window of an Irish pub. Inside, a woman in a parka served the remains of a pint of beer to a white bulldog. Marla. Or him. Surely, that was the source of his anger. This wasn't about the woman in the garage. He was feeling lonely, regretful, and—let's face it—gloomy about aging. Sorry for himself. The cliché of a midlife crisis. Talk about
old enough to know
… ! In the bar, the bulldog, hammy, stiff, wove among the legs of happy drinkers.

New lives, Bern thought. Then newer lives, still.

That night at the trattoria, Marla's thirtieth birthday … she informed him that her sister-in-law, Becky, a woman he barely knew, had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. In the coming months, Marla said, she would want to spend more time with the woman in Houston. But, Bern countered, reaching for her hand, he had just started work here, it would be hard for him to get away, lonely for him without Marla in the apartment. Of course he understood, of course, terrible, terrible, poor Becky, but …

And so, after several days, he'd talked Marla out of making regular trips back to Texas, just as he'd later talk her out of having a baby. Meanwhile, Becky's range of motion diminished, stopped, until she was a husk in a wheelchair breathing with the aid of machines. One day, she breathed no more.

Marla had
allowed
herself to be dissuaded from helping her sister-in-law
in the last weeks of her life; to
that
degree, Marla shared culpability. But Bern's selfishness then …

And why? He gazed again at his reflection in the window. He knew damn well why.

Yes. Okay. He could admit it now. After all, what choice but to live with the past?

The spring before Marla and Bern's summer trip to Europe, before their move to New York in the fall, Bern had worked part-time for an architectural firm in Houston noted for its projects with nonprofit organizations, its designs for public schools and social service offices. He was a junior member of the team, but that spring, the firm's principals entrusted him with what was, for them, a minor project south of the city: an elementary school in Brazoria County on the edge of a large rice paddy, crowded beyond its capacity with the kids of low-wage workers. The school district had engaged the firm to design a few new classrooms, a more usable space. The budget was twenty thousand dollars. Bern cut corners wherever he could, doubling the functional role of almost every structural element. The light diffusers also diffused the heat. He designed the corridors to a larger-than-usual scale, to form play areas. He clad the exterior in a glass and marble curtain wall. Inside the building, he showcased the ventilation ducts, placing them out in the open, in the ceiling, rather than hiding them inside the walls. This had the effect of breaking up broad surfaces inside the rooms, reducing the sense of mass. Cheap. Efficient. Just what he'd been hired to provide. And he'd come in on time.

Later, he would wonder about sabotage. He knew he had pissed off the contractors—they weren't used to seeing the architect on site. Young, just getting his toes wet, professionally, Bern wanted the experience. And too, maybe he was arrogant (enjoying the firm's faith in his abilities, seeing his sketches
actualized
for the first time!). Nervous. Micromanaging. He showed up each day and insisted the builders test each weld. “We can't risk being sloppy,” he'd tell them.
If a fellow failed to meet Bern's window specifications, he made the guy rip out all the frames. To Bern, this was only reasonable, good and careful work, but word got around the site. Demanding. Obsessive. Bern remembered inspecting the school's roof with the head contractor, a willowy man named Al. They checked the air-conditioning units, tightened bolts. “I gotta tell you,” Al said to Bern. “Me, I sort of admire a Suit like you taking time to look over the dirty work. Most architects won't do that. Living-in-their-heads types of guys.” With an oily wrench, he scratched the back of his neck. “But the thing is, with you peering over their shoulders all the time, the men here … it bugs them, do you know what I'm saying? Like you don't trust them to do their jobs. My advice to you, young man? In the future, back off.”