Things You Should Know (19 page)

“The rest of your life, or my life, however long or short, should not be miserable. It can't go on this way.”

“We could both kill ourselves,” she says.

“How about we separate?”

I am being more grown-up than I am capable of being. I am terrified of being without her, but either way, it's death.

The ride lurches forward.

I came to Paris wanting to pull things together and suddenly I am desperate to be away from her. If this doesn't stop now, it will never stop, it will go on forever. She will be dying of her cancer and we will still be fighting. I begin to panic, to feel I can't breathe. I am suffocating; I have to get away.

“Where does it end?”

“How about we say good-bye?”

“And then what? We have opera tickets.”

I cannot tell her I am going. I have to sneak away, to tiptoe out backwards. I have to make my own arrangements.

We stop talking. We're hanging in mid-air, suspended. We have run out of things to say. When the ride circles down, the silence becomes more definitive.

I begin to make my plan. In truth, I have no idea what I am doing. All afternoon, everywhere we go, I cash traveler's checks, I get cash advances, I have about five thousand dollars' worth of francs stuffed in my pocket. I want to be able to leave without a trace, I want to be able to buy myself out of whatever trouble I get into. I am hysterical and giddy all at once.

We are having an early dinner on our way to the opera.

I time my break for just after the coffee comes. “Oops,” I say, feeling my pockets. “I forgot my opera glasses.”

“Really?” she says. “I thought you had them when we went out.”

“They must be at the hotel. You go on ahead, I'll run back. You know I hate not being able to see.”

She takes her ticket. “Hurry,” she says. “I hate it when you're late.”

This is the bravest thing I have ever done. I go back to the hotel and pack my bag. I am going to get out. I am going to
fly away. I may never come back. I will begin again, as someone else—unrecognizable.

I move to lift the bag off the bed, I pull it up and my knee goes out. I start to fall but catch myself. I pull at the bag and take a step—too heavy. I will have to go without it. I will have to leave everything behind. I drop the bag, but still I am falling, folding, collapsing. There is pain, searing, spreading, pouring, hot and cold, like water down my back, down my legs.

I am lying on the floor, thinking that if I stay calm, if I can just find my breath, and follow my breath, it will pass. I lie there waiting for the paralysis to recede.

I am afraid of it being over and yet she has given me no choice, she has systematically withdrawn life support: sex and conversation. The problem is that, despite this, she is the one I want.

There is a knock at the door. I know it is not her, it is too soon for it to be her.

“Entrez,”
I call out.

The maid opens the door, she holds the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign in her hand. “Oooff,” she says, seeing me on the floor. “Do you need the doctor?”

I am not sure if she means my wife or a doctor other than my wife.

“No.”

She takes a towel from her cart and props it under my head. She takes a spare blanket from the closet and covers me with it. She opens the Champagne and pours me a glass, tilting my head up so I can sip. She goes to her cart and gets a stack of night chocolates and sits beside me, feeding me Champagne and chocolate, stroking my forehead.

The phone in the room rings, we ignore it. She refills my glass. She takes my socks off and rubs my feet. She unbuttons my shirt and rubs my chest. I am getting a little drunk. I am just beginning to relax and then there is another knock, a knock my body recognizes before I am fully awake. Every
thing tightens. My back pulls tighter still, any sensation below my knees drops off.

“I thought something horrible happened to you, I've been calling and calling the room, why haven't you answered? I thought you'd killed yourself.”

The maid excuses herself. She goes into the bathroom and gets me a cool washcloth.

“What are you doing?” my wife asks.

There is nothing I can say.

“Knock off the mummy routine. What exactly are you doing? Were you trying to run away and then you chickened out? Say something.”

To talk would be to continue; for the moment I am silenced. I am a potted plant, and still that is not good enough for her.

“He is paralyzed,” the maid says.

“He is not paralyzed. I am his wife, I am a doctor. I would know if there was something really wrong.”

In the morning there are marks where the pillow touched his face, where his T-shirt wrinkled against his back, from the waistband of his underwear, elastic indentations, ghostly traces. He peels off the socks he wore to sleep, the pattern is like a picket fence. With her fingernail she writes on his chest, Milk, Butter, Eggs, Sugar. The invisible ink of her finger rises up like a welt. In the shower it becomes perfectly clear—dermatographism. For the moment he is a walking grocery list—it will fade within the hour.

 

“I dreamed I was in the eighteenth century, having tea in a very elaborate cup.” He is a clockmaker lost in time, keeping track of the seconds, fascinated by the beats, hours passing, future becoming past. “And you? How did you sleep?”

“I dreamed the building was sealed, there were no doors, no windows, no way in or out, nothing to knock, nothing to ring, nothing to bang against,” she says. “The house of glass was suddenly all solid walls.”

“You are what you dream,” he says.

“It's true.” She puts on her shoes, slipping a small piece of lead into both left and right, to keep her mind from wandering, to keep herself steady. “I'm late,” she says.

“You have a feather,” he reaches out to pluck something poking out of her skin. She sometimes gets feathers; they erupt as pimples and then a hard quill like a splinter presses
through the same way a feather sticks through the ticking of a pillow or the seat of a sofa.

“Is that the only one?” she asks.

He searches her arms and legs and pulls out a couple more.

“All plucked and ready to go,” he says.

“Thanks,” she says. “Don't forget the groceries.”

He nods. “Yesterday there was a fox in the woods; for a minute I thought it was you. I went to say hello and it gave me an angry eye—you're not angry with me, are you?”

“It wasn't me. I was at the office all day.”

On her way out the door she puts a clump of dirt in her mouth, presses a pumpkin seed in, and swallows for good luck.

“Drive carefully,” he says. He sprinkles fish food into the pond of koi, flips a penny in, and waves good-bye.

 

Outside, the lawns are being watered, the garden men are going around with their weed whackers, trimming, pruning. Everything is shape and order. There is the
tsk, tsk, tsk
hissing sound as the sprinklers spit water over the grass.

The landscape winding down the hill reminds her of Japan, of Scotland, of another country in another time. There are big rocks, boulders, and sand; a desert, dense vegetation clinging to the sides of craggy hills. There are palm trees, and date trees, and orange and lemon groves.

There is fog in the canyons, a hint of blue sky at the top of the hill. The weather changes from block to block—it is impossible to know what kind of day it will be.

She sits at her desk, pouring over drawings, reading between the lines. Her workspace is industrial, minimal: a skylight, an exposed wooden ceiling, furniture from an old factory.

 

Four pens on her desk, ten paper clips, a plastic spoon. Twenty steps from her desk to the door. She is always counting. There is something reassuring about numbers, she does
math in her head, math to keep herself entertained, to keep everything in order.

Magnetized, she attracts things—right now she has a paper clip on the tip of every finger, like press-on nails. When she's bored, she decorates herself in loose change, quarters all up and down her arms. Her watch clings to her wrist, synched with her heartbeat. Her pulse an even sixty beats per minute. When she exercises, she takes the watch off, afraid of breaking time.

“You are a magnetic, highly influential person,” a psychic once told her. “People and things are drawn to you.”

Making herself a cup of tea, she puts in a pinch of catnip—it makes her pleasant and playful. When she smiles, a thin line of soil at her gumline is easily mistaken for a tobacco stain.

Architectural forensics is her field—why buildings do what they do. Often called upon as an expert witness, she is known as “X-ray specs” for her ability to read the inanimate, to intuit what transformed it, to find the otherwise invisible marks of what happened and why. She is the one you want to call when there is a problem to solve—cracking, sinking, the seemingly inexplicable.

Her first appointment is a disaster. From the moment she's out of the car, she's uncomfortable. She has flashes of things she doesn't want to know—other people's memories. The owner meets her in the parking lot. “It's an insurance question. It's a liability question. It's a question of who's going to pay,” he tells her, as he sweeps a single long lock of hair across his bald head and sweat pastes it down.

“There's something wrong with your facade,” she tells him.

“A partial collapse,” the owner says, pointing at the damage.

She circles the building. If the man weren't watching, she would make herself into a squirrel or a bee and get inside it. She would get between the walls, between what was original and what was applied later. Instead, she simply uses an extension rod and pokes at things.

The owner moves to let her into the building.

“Old keys have more power than new,” she says as the man fumbles.

“Could I have seen it coming? Could I have known? There was no warning.”

“Or was there? Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there—there is something called willful blindness.”

“Is that a legal term?” he asks nervously.

“No,” she says, getting back into her car.

“Don't you need to get inside?” he asks.

“I've seen enough,” she says.

“A woman died,” the man confesses.

She already knows.

A click of the shutter. Her day is spent looking, taking notes with her camera, making permanent what she sees in her mind's eye. She is a special kind of anthropologist, studying what can't be touched or seen. She drives, moving through air, counting the molecules.

She is thinking of shapes—volumes, groined vaults of gothic cathedrals, cable roofs, tents. She is thinking of different kinds of ceilings. She is noticing there is a lot of smog, a suffocating layer.

 

As a child she fell down a well, like something out of a nursery rhyme. “That explains it,” her teachers used to say, but it didn't. One thing had nothing to do with the next, except that she was curious, always curious, but there was more to it than that.

She walks with a slight limp, an unnecessary reminder. She remembers the well, she remembers thinking that she saw something there—she was eight, almost nine—leaning over, catching a glimpse of something in the corner of her eye.

She remembers screaming as she fell, the echo of her voice swelling the well. Wedged, her leg oddly bent. She remembers silence.

And she remembers her mother shouting down to her,
“Imagine you are a bird, a winged thing, and push yourself up. Imagine you are a flower, growing. Imagine you are something that can scale a stony wall.” Her mother shouting; many, many hours of firemen and ropes. She remembers thinking she would fall to the center of the earth, she remembers the blackness. And her picture in all the papers.

After that, while she was resting in bed, her broken leg healing, her mother would hold her hand and stroke it. “What does it feel like to be a kitten? What does a little kitten hear or see?” And slowly her features would change and she would be a little kitten-headed girl. “And what does a kitten do with her paws?” her mother would ask, stroking her hand, and little furry mitts would appear.

“You're very special,” her mother would say. “When you fell down the well, you didn't know that.”

She nods, still not sure what her mother is getting at—aren't all little girls special?

“Some children are born with a fine coating of hair, but when you were born you had feathers—that's how I knew. When you were living inside me you were a duck, splashing. You know what a good swimmer you are—you had a lot of practice.”

 

Looking out over the city, she receives a thousand messages at once, a life of information.

The next stop is more promising—a developer wants her opinion about where to build his building.

“You come highly recommended,” the man says, unrolling his plans across the hood of her car.

She reads them. Her eyes are like sea water, Mediterranean blue. When you look at her you have the distinct sense that she's right.

“If I were you,” she says, “I'd build in reverse, I'd build into the hill, and then on the hill install a big mirror and situate it so that it gives you a view on both sides. Put the parking lot above rather than below. You'll get a double view, an
interesting courtyard effect, and more protection from the wind.”

“The wind?”

She opens her trunk, takes out a white flag and holds it up. The flag is instantly billowing. “It's windier than you think, and when you add a new building you could end up creating a wind tunnel: the Venturi Effect—in certain configurations, the wind speed increases.”

“I never heard of that.”

She puts the flag back in her trunk.

“What else you got in there?” he says, peering in.

Shovel, gallon of water, long green garden hose, ladder, rope, rubber gloves, knee pads. She is always climbing, swinging, getting on top, going under.

She bends to sift through the soil. “This looks sandy. Sandy soil has a liquefaction factor,” she says. “In an earthquake it's not the ‘this' that gets you,” she says, moving her arm from side to side. “It's the ‘this.'” She pumps her hand up and down. “A lot of it has to do with what kind of soil is down below.”

The man scoops up some dirt. “Is that a good thing?”

“It's a good thing you know about it and can plan accordingly. It's all about what rock you're on.”

“I appreciate your insight.” He shakes her hand. His handshake is firm. “Thank you.”

 

All day the building collapse haunts her, she keeps seeing the sticky guy sweeping sweaty strands of hair across his scalp, patting them down. He is slimy, slithering, slipping in and out of lies. She has the sensation of great weight, of something falling on her, crushing her. She feels out of breath but she keeps moving to keep herself from feeling trapped.

She stops for lunch at the health food store. The boy behind the counter sings a song he's just written. “I'm here now,” he says. “But it's just temporary.” Everyone is something else, everyone wants something more.

She is back at the office. People bring her samples of materials, combinations of things. They want to know what goes with what. What brings success, power? What juxtapositions spell trouble? What do you think of titanium? Curved surfaces? How much does a building really need to breathe? They want to know how she knows what she knows. “Did you study Feng Shui?”

The temperature creeps up—the air is still, like the steady baking heat of an oven, unrelenting, broken only by the shadow of a cloud passing over.

 

In the afternoon, she visits her mother. The doors of the nursing home open automatically; a cool disinfectant smell pours out. Vacuum sealed, frozen in time. There is an easel by the main desk:
GOOD AFTERNOON. THE YEAR IS 2002. TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, MAY 16TH. THE WEATHER OUTSIDE IS SUNNY AND BRIGHT
. Her mother's unit is behind a locked door. There is a sign on the wall: “Look as you are leaving, make sure no one follows you.”

Her mother doesn't know her anymore. It happened over the course of a year. The first time she pretended it was a mistake—of course you know me, she said. And her mother seemed to catch herself, but then it happened again, it happened more, and then sometimes she knew her, sometimes she didn't—and then she didn't.

Every day, she visits. She brings her camera, she takes a picture. It is her way of dealing with the devastation, the rug pulled out from under.

“Hello,” she says, walking into the room.

“Hello,” her mother repeats, a parrot, echoing.

“How are you today?”

“How are you today?”

“I'm good,” she sits at the edge of her mother's bed, unfastening her mother's long braids, brushing her hair.

“Remind me,” her mother says. “Who are you?”

“I'm your daughter.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I remember you,” she says.

“From before?” her mother asks.

She nods.

“My sock is itching,” her mother says, rubbing the tag around her ankle. All the residents are tagged—an alarm goes off if they wander out—the tag leg is alternated, but it remains an irritant.

“What can we do?” the nurse says. “We don't want to lose anyone, do we?”

She rubs lotion on her mother's leg. She puts a chestnut in her mother's pocket just as she once saw her mother do to her grandmother—to ward off backaches. She puts an orange she picked this morning on the nightstand, resting on a bed of clover. Protection, luck, vision.

She takes her mother for a walk in the wandering garden, an inconspicuous circle, you always end where you begin—it guarantees no one gets lost.

“Let me take your picture,” she says, posing her mother by some flowering vines. “You look very pretty.”

“You look very pretty,” her mother says.

Holding hands, they walk around and around.

“I hope you remember the way home,” her mother says.

“Remember when I fell in the well? Remember when you told me how strong I was and that I had to put my mind to it?”

Her mother nods. “I used to know something,” her mother says. “Have you always had a limp?”

 

She visits her mother and then visits the other women up and down the hall. “Imagine us,” they say, “sitting here, like lame ducks. We see it all. There but for the grace, go I.”