The Metropolis (43 page)

“We can try,” the vet said in an efficient but superficial tone Martin found somewhat more comforting, before he left to complete the paperwork. This gave Martin a few minutes alone with Beatrice, who now cowered under a small sink, which along with the concrete floor
and beige tiles reminded him of the nurse’s room at his old elementary school in Cedar Village, not that such memories—as he bitterly noted—were going to be of any use.

“Little Beatrice, they’re going to fix you up,” he nevertheless promised as he kneeled down beside her; as he spoke, he tentatively reached out his hand but withdrew it when she shrank away.

H
E RETURNED FOR
visiting hours the following day and met with her “team,” all of whom agreed that, while the case was severe, the official stance was one of guarded optimism. The plan was to reverse the lipidosis by tube feeding until her liver kicked in and began to function normally, which the doctors assured him was by no means an unprecedented prognosis, particularly given her age. They had already placed her in intensive care, where he found her in an oxygenated chamber with a feeding tube running through her nose, various IVs attached through each of her hind legs, and her head in one of those plastic cones that looked like an Elizabethan collar. “Beatrice? Are you okay?” he whispered through the cage, and in response, she moaned softly and moved her eyes, which despite her obvious weakness the doctor said was a good sign.

The next morning—Tuesday—Martin received a call from one of the doctors, who told him that, for no reason anybody could figure out, Beatrice’s sodium levels—her “electrolytes,” a word Martin was surprised to learn existed outside television commercials—had dropped overnight to precarious levels. He immediately went in to find her completely unresponsive, even when he called her name. “What happened?” he asked one of the team members.

“Well, she was weaker than we thought,” the doctor explained. “But we had a specialist in this morning, and she made some adjustments. Our most recent readings actually show her electrolytes stabilizing, which is good.”

On Wednesday, Martin brought her a few clippings from his planter troughs. It pained him to think that, except for her time in a Dumpster in Brooklyn, she had never been outside but had often watched him intently through the window as he worked with his plants. He had considered letting both her and Dante onto the deck but was afraid—especially in her case—that he wouldn’t be able to get them back in. He allowed himself to believe that the clippings helped; or at least something was helping, because she seemed a little stronger, and even stood up like a newborn foal when Martin called to her. “Dante can’t wait until you’re home,” he added, fending off any doubt with this show of conviction. “He would have come himself, but you know how carsick he gets.”

On Thursday, another doctor called to give the morning report. “She’s not out of the woods yet,” she said, “but her sodium has stabilized and her most recent blood work looks good, so I think we can remain optimistic.”

Martin went to visit filled with hope: the last four days had been excruciating, particularly as he watched Dante look for Beatrice under the bed, in the pantry, among the orchids, and in her other usual hiding spots; although he tried to reassure himself that for animals fear—much less grief—exists only in the most present and literal situations, he could not shake the idea that Beatrice’s sickness had upset a certain psychological balance in the house, and that Dante was no more immune than he was.

But when Martin arrived at the hospital, Beatrice was completely unresponsive, practically comatose. In a panic, he tried to find someone from her team but could locate only an oncologist unfamiliar with her case.

“Her blood work does look better,” she noted as she examined the charts. “Maybe she’s just tired.”

Martin sat with her until visiting hours ended at nine and then went home. “She was tired,” he numbly repeated to Dante. “It’s just going to take a little longer than we expected.”

I
T WAS NOW
Friday morning; the phone rang and Martin jumped to answer: it was a doctor, who relayed a new theory that some sort of primary condition—cancer perhaps—had brought on the lipidosis, but they could confirm this only with a liver biopsy, a process that in itself greatly lowered the prognosis for recovery. “So what should we do?” Martin asked.

“I think you should come in if you can, and we’ll talk about it.”

Too anxious to drive and wanting to avoid rush-hour traffic, Martin decided to take the subway. As he walked to the station, the sun hovered cruelly overhead: it made him feel not only scrutinized but slightly paranoid, as if he were being punished for crimes he did not commit or, even worse, crimes which he did commit but for which others were now going to pay the price.

At the hospital, he found Beatrice crumpled and dirty in the corner of her intensive-care unit. Her rib cage heaved in and out with each breath, and her eyes were cloudy and distant. There was no question about what to do. He instructed the team to stop treatment; there would be no biopsy. He asked them to remove the feeding tube and the collar before they brought her out of intensive care and into an examination room so that he could say good-bye.

When she was delivered to him, she was destroyed, worse than drowned, even worse than the day before; her coat was greasy and covered with flecks of dander, her mouth and eyes were coated by thick gobs of something white and unidentifiable; her nose bled from where they had removed the feeding tube, and her skin hung off her ribs and spine. She still had IVs in each of her hind legs, one
wrapped in blue gauze and one in red. The pads of her feet felt cold, and he wondered why they had wrapped the IVs so tightly. “Beatrice,” he managed between deep breaths. “You’re covered in snow.”

She tried to stand and managed to totter a step or two before she collapsed against the wall. Her eyes remained open but were dull and motionless, even when Martin showed her a golden bauble with several feathers attached to it he had brought to remind her of home. He told her about everything that had happened during the past week; how hot it was outside, how Dante kept looking for her under the bed, and how none of the games they played were as fun without her. He told her that he hadn’t been able to sleep without her saying good night to him. She raised her head a little as Martin placed a finger under her shivering chin. “I know,” he said, trying to sound less dire, “you don’t want to suffer anymore.”

Martin, awash in helplessness, could think of nothing but to restore some semblance of dignity to the most undignified thing in the world, i.e., death in a modern hospital. He took a small cloth he had brought with him and started with her face. As best as he could, he gently wiped away the thick saliva from her cheeks, the blood that trickled out of her nose, and the gunk from around her eyes; from there he moved down to her neck, chafed from the collar, and then to her shoulders and down her side, where each one of her raspy and labored breaths continued to make her stomach rise and fall with a shudder. As he cleaned her polydactyl paws, he remembered how his mother had told him that they were supposed to be good luck, and for a second he hated Jane for it. But this was fleeting, because he knew that Jane had been right about Beatrice, which was why it was so difficult to think of losing her. There was a tap against the window, and Martin nodded before he turned back to her. “Beatrice,” he whispered, “I have to call the doctor in now, okay?”

The vet came in armed with a hypodermic full of barbiturate,
which he inserted into the IV of one her hind legs as Martin kneeled down and placed one of his big hands over her tiny stomach and a finger under her head. “You’re going to sleep now,” he managed as the vet plunged the syringe into the IV and Martin looked into her dark green eyes for the last time and saw a flicker of the aurora borealis, and then nothing at all, and he knew that she was dead. He felt baffled by her lifeless form as he picked her up and held her for the first and last time while great drops splashed out of his eyes against the floor. He considered her mitten-paws, which he caressed between his thumb and index finger, and thought about the cold and arbitrary side of nature, its complete disregard for fairness or worth in the choice of life or death. With this certainty came a rush of hatred for life, if it meant having to die in a clinical hell so far from anything of comfort you had ever known, nor did he hesitate to acknowledge an even deeper hatred for those he felt confident would belittle this display of grief from a very large and once athletic man for a very tiny cat, probably just one of thousands that were dying all over the world at this exact second; he recalled a piece in the
Times
lamenting the money spent on pets with so many disasters in the world, as if one were the cause of the other, and he hated the logical part of himself that agreed with all of them, and the accompanying sense of shame he felt at his incapacity to love anyone more than Beatrice.

But as this crippled truth washed over him, it felt as pure as anything he had ever known, and he swore that as long as Beatrice was dead—and her tiny, limp body, fifty times smaller than his own, proved that she was—he would not forget her, which was the only faith he would ever believe in. He tenderly placed her back onto the stainless-steel table and covered her with a hospital blue plastic padded blanket, so that only her head poked out from underneath. He thought of the many nights when she, in effect, had done the same for him, watching over him as he had drifted off to sleep. She had been so small,
so fragile, and so ephemeral, really a most insignificant piece of the universe, and in this regard—he realized as he considered the futility he had experienced trying to save her—no different from him. Yet she had been aware and unstinting in her awareness, for was it not true, he next realized, that, as much as he had provided for her—in the most obvious and practical of ways—she had also cared for him?

He touched her one last time and tried to close her eyelids, which did not work. He felt her paw and then opened the door. “
Requiescat in pace
, Beatrice,” he whispered through the glass pane and, looking back, feared he would never leave the room behind.

O
UTSIDE, HE SLOWLY
walked west under an alabaster sky marked by the blue perimeter of an infected blister; it more than festered, it felt permanent, and he tried and failed to imagine a time when it had not been one hundred degrees, when he could take more than two steps without feeling the sting of sweat in his eyes, or the spongy wet elastic of his boxer shorts as they expanded and contracted around his waist. He looked at his arms, where the scratches were starting to heal, and he regretted that, soon enough, every sign of Beatrice would be forever relegated to his dreams and memories. In a daze, he stumbled across Central Park. He considered taking a cab, but the thought of stopping and starting made him nauseated; he again opted for the subway but decided to get something to drink when he realized his throat was dry and raw.

He was about halfway down the block on Seventy-fourth Street when he edged between the bumpers of two parked cars on the south side of the street with the intention to jaywalk to the north side on the hypotenuse to avoid the extra distance to the corner—was there anyone, he wondered, who didn’t count every step in this heat?—and looked in the wrong direction as he stepped into the street. As soon as he realized what he had done—i.e., walked in front of a
roaring taxicab only nanoseconds away from occupying the same space as his body—the mistake surprised him: he had lived in New York City for “only” twenty years. In his defense, he reconsidered, as he coldly observed the white glare of the approaching windshield, a tendency toward the delusional was understandable in his state. Mitigating or not, this excuse, along with the fact that he had been partially correct—to the extent that it was a one-way street—and that nine times out of ten it would have been of no consequence, did not alter the apparent verdict, which despite his lack of bad intention, or any intention at all, was imminent death. He listened to the distorted roar of the car’s transmission and knew it was too late—and way too hot—to escape. He braced himself and sighed; his life seemed so far away before this moment, yet he no longer feared death. As with everyone, he supposed, life had lasted for a little while and now it would end; uncountable others were being born at this very second, and in not very long they, too, would be gone, participants in the same tedious soap opera that Martin would not be sorry to miss.

Then the thought of leaving Dante pained him, despite the fact that Martin had provided for him in his will. He was filled with longing; to go to Sydney, to fall in love, to do something noble for the thousands of underprivileged groups in society—the elderly, the sick, the poor, the transgendered teens, the stray dogs and cats—to go back uptown and mourn with Dante, to watch
L’Atalante
, listen to music, read books, and chatter at the birds, just as they had done until Beatrice had gotten sick. He did not, he decided after all, want to abandon his garden, which would take at least three years to acquire the lush quality he liked to envision when choosing his plants. He did not want to miss a second date he had scheduled with his plant-loving friend, because they were planning to visit the beech trees at Wave Hill in the Bronx, said to be some of the most magnificent in the city. He wanted to confess to someone the extent of his grief for
Beatrice—not on a second date, perhaps, but possibly on a third—and be that much more understood and absolved, which now struck him as an eminently reasonable goal in life. To die, he realized, could mean so many things, and the literal reality of it had not eliminated his desire for something new, a metaphorical death of the present. But with no choice, he regretfully closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable. Yet for all of his preparation, it was not going to happen; instead—and he could barely believe it—the car went right past him, missing by inches, leaving him as unscathed as a hologram. He looked up, more stunned than thankful; he had evidently willed it. For now, death was a great shark in the open sea, and more forgiving prey was apparently at hand.