Heroic Measures (4 page)

“It’s the cell phone!” Ruth says, foraging through her purse. She presses the ringing instrument to her ear. By her expression—eyes closed, mouth a wide slot of darkness, forehead painfully taut, as if someone is pulling her hair— Alex doesn’t need to ask who it is.

She covers the mouthpiece. “Dorothy can’t feel pain any longer. They don’t think the steroids are going to work. She needs the surgery. They have to perform a test first to see where to operate. The dye can cause seizures. The test could kill her. She’ll have it around seven; if she’s operable she’ll go right to surgery. They need to speak to you. We put it on your credit card.” She hands him the cell phone.

Even under the best of circumstances—the satellite is overhead, the TV is mute—he can barely make out what anyone says to him on the cell phone. A woman’s voice
crackles
three hundred
or
three thousand
, he can’t tell. He turns to Ruth, but she’s risen off the sofa, her back to him. Her glasses remain on the armrest, the lenses catching the kitchen’s fluorescent glow, concentrating it into two tiny suns.

“We’ll authorize the test,” Alex tells the woman, “but please have Dr. Rush call us on our land line with the test results. We want to talk to him
before
the surgery.” He closes the phone, puts it back in her purse.

“He talked about a wheelchair of some sort,” Ruth says. “He said the dogs adjust better than their owners.”

“Did you believe him?”

“No.”

She sits down again, pulls a tissue from her purse, wipes her eyes, and then crushes the sodden wad in her fist, as if she were trying to compress it into a diamond. In a voice as calm as he can manage, he says, “She’s one tough old dame, Ruth. She might surprise us.”

He takes her hand, and they sit side by side in the television’s volatile, liquid light. The newscaster is now interviewing a robotics expert who explains, in a droning monotone, how an aqua-bomb robot can enter a ten-thousand-gallon gasoline tank and maneuver through highly flammable liquid without destabilizing the environment. “She’s called a Robo-eel. She uses the undulating motions of an eel to keep friction to a minimum.”

Ruth is right, there’s nothing new.

Without even knowing that he’s doing it, Alex nods off, catches himself, and sits upright. He doesn’t want to leave Ruth alone right now, but sleep tugs him under again. Only when something loud—a laugh, a gunshot—
shatters the oblivion, and alerts him to the world he’s abandoned, does he resurface and open his eyes. In those brief clicks of consciousness, he sees Ruth—now wearing her glasses, pushing the channel button on the remote control as it were a morphine pump. Sometimes he sees the television screen—dancing M&M’s, the ravaged face of a middle-aged rock star, a bloody dagger, BBQ sauce being painted on ribs, an SUV climbing a staircase, a map of Bonanza burning, a cat dancing the cha-cha, the basset-eyed newscaster, green shapes rolling over a weather map, a comely woman eating worms, their empty co-op lobby, commemorative president portrait plates, a man’s face going through a window, a planet exploding. And sometimes, just as sleep gets hold of him again, just as he sinks back into tranquil nothingness, he sees Dorothy in the examining room, crouched on the linoleum floor, waiting for him to call her.

RUTH PAUSES AT THE NEWS STATION ON HER
third go around. In the time it’s taken Alex to fall asleep, a graphic for tonight’s top story has already been designed— a long shot of the tunnel as seen by the night-vision bomb robot, and a bold red-and-black sans-serif typeface emblazoned diagonally across it,
Danger in the Tunnel
. She switches back to the BBQ sauce being painted on ribs, to the gold-edged dinner plate bearing Ronald Reagan’s face, to their lobby as seen by the security camera near the vestibule door—a skinny boy of twenty, their upstairs neighbor who always forgets to take off his wooden clogs, strides through the lobby on his way out.

When Ruth had cast her vote against the camera, she did it with galling righteousness, warning her neighbors, too young to remember, about giving up their privacy for false security. But once the system was up and running and their lobby played twenty-four hours a day on channel seventy-one, she had found herself tuning in from time to time, absorbed by the activity, oddly soothed by the steady bustle of life entering and exiting their building. When Alex had asked her what could be so engrossing about watching their neighbors come and go, she said, “Remember
Mrs. Birukov sitting on the stoop all day long? We were so sure she was spying on us, that she was the FBI’s informant in the building. Maybe she was just an old woman who found solace in the hubbub.”

When the front door closes behind the skinny boy, the long, narrow black-and-white lobby looks, to Ruth, no more or less foreboding than the long, narrow phosphorous green tunnel playing on all the other channels. Compared to the fate of one little dog, nothing else matters.

How can he sleep at a time like this?

How could she not? Fatigue pervades her every cell. The whirligig of imagery exhausts her. Whatever they might face tomorrow, rest will only help. She mutes the sound and goes to the medicine cabinet. All three shelves are overflowing. Alex’s prescriptions dominate the top one, hers the middle, Dorothy’s the bottom. She scours her shelf for her over-the-counter sleeping pills, a foil-backed, plastic sheet of eight perforated squares, each square holding a little blue diamond of sleep in its own air bubble. She finds the sheet, but the diamonds are gone. She must have swallowed the last one yesterday evening. She fingers through the rest of her shelf—expired penicillin, Lipitor, hemorrhoid cream, Advil, Aleve, Excedrin Migraine, an ancient jar of skin lotion, ear plugs—for some alternative (any label that warns of sleepiness). She checks Alex’s shelf—-Gas-X, Zantac, Nexium, Cystex, Sudafed, Proscar, Viagra, Avapro, Toprol, hydrocortisone, and one disintegrating roll of antacid chalk. She even searches Dorothy’s—Zubrin, Soloxine, heartworm pills, Advantage, chicken-flavored toothpaste, Atopica, Clomicalm, and a vial of sedatives for travel.

She can’t be up all night, not tonight. She’ll descend
into a vortex of panic and worries far more disturbing than anything she saw on television. She and Alex have to be up, showered, and dressed before Lily arrives. The young couple she’s bringing over might overlook the five flights of stairs, the water stain on the ceiling, but they’ll certainly take notice of a septuagenarian couple greeting them in their bathrobes.

She reaches for Dorothy’s vial of travel sedatives and reads the label:
one quarter tablet for dogs up to eleven pounds one half hour before traveling, or when needed
. She tries to do the arithmetic. How many times does Dorothy’s weight go into hers? Her mind goes blank. She struggles with the childproof cap and pours two pills onto her palm. Placing them on her tongue (they taste like chicken), she turns on the faucet and drinks from the stream, like an animal. She half expects the very act of swallowing them to calm her, but she feels anything but quieted. She returns to the living room, covers Alex with a blanket, and shuts the lights. She mutes, but doesn’t turn off, the television. It will act as a night lamp should he awaken in the dark.

She goes to their bedroom, changes into her nightgown, sets the alarm for seven, and puts it on her side of the bed. But she’s hardly ready to lie down and close her eyes. The sedative’s label instructed the dog’s owner to allow the pills a full half hour to work. It’s only been ten minutes.

She wakes up their computer, asleep on a tiny desk next to the bed. She opens the icon for their dial-up server, a connection so slow that it alone sometimes puts her to sleep. When the search engine comes up, she types into its thin window,
dog dachshund herniated disc
. Six hundred and eight matches appear. She can’t get herself to click on any
of them. She stares through the electric blue lines of Web addresses, as if they were the slats of a Venetian blind.

Finally, she clicks the top link, a dachshund magazine. The cover features three dappled, shorthaired puppies about three months old, sunbathing near a swimming pool. Articles this month include
All You Need to Know About Disk Disease
and
Spring Finds Many Puppies Available
. She guides the cursor up to
All You Need to Know About Disk Disease
, but she can’t yet make herself open that door. Behind that door are nerves and bone and blood. She rolls the cursor down to
Spring Finds Many Puppies Available
. Behind that door is youth and spring. She forces herself to click on
All You Need to Know About Disk Disease
.

She stops reading: she already knows the article isn’t going to divulge the only answer she needs. Is
Dorothy
going to be okay? On either side of the text, in the left-and right-hand margins, are advertisements—dachshund calendars, doxie dolls, hot dog bun beds, dachshund jewelry, doxie duds. There is also a dachshund adopt/rescue site and a dachshund memorial garden with a grief-counseling
chat room and a link to buy pet sympathy cards.

Below is an example: a white rabbit in a field of grass. The message:
My deepest sympathy for the loss of your rabbit
. Ruth bursts out laughing, covers her mouth so as not to wake Alex, and then remembers he’s asleep in the living room. She scrolls down to the next example, a hamster in a wicker basket:
Losing a precious furchild is so difficult
. When she laughs this time, she suspects that the breathy explosions escaping from her throat are more hysteria than hilarity.

The next service offered by the Rainbow Bridge Company is personalized death notices.
In Memoriam
the card line is called. The example: a black-and-white studio portrait of an Irish setter with today’s date, January
9
,
2004
, and an inscription that reads:
It is a sad day in our lives. Joey “Oggy” Richards, our best friend, and our son, died of heart failure. Marty and Mary Richards
.

Ruth quits, signs off, clicks on Sleep. If only sleep were that easy. She climbs into bed, but she still isn’t drowsy, despite the sedatives and the fatigue pooled in her limbs. She reaches for the book on her night table,
The Portable Chekhov
. When she first retired, she read every new novel praised by the
Times
, a languid pleasure nearly impossible while she was busy teaching, but lately, she’s can only bear the company of long-dead Russians.

The table of contents includes:
At Christmas Time, An Attack of Nerves, Heartache, A Calamity, The Man in a Shell, The Lady With the Pet Dog
. She opens to
The Lady With the Pet Dog
, an old favorite.

The first thing Ruth notices is that the little dog, which she had remembered as vital to the story, isn’t nearly as important as she imagined. The Pomeranian is only a prop—an excuse really—for Chekhov to get the lovers to meet.

After their first tryst, before either is aware of the profound love awaiting them, “the lady with the pet dog” sits dejected on the hotel bed, weeping with remorse, while Gurov, a little bored and impatient, cuts a slice of watermelon and eats it “without haste,” Ruth’s favorite line in the story. She would try to get her tenth graders, mostly teenagers from the Jacob Riis projects, who had never been in love, though some of the girls were pregnant, and who didn’t know where Russia was, never mind Yalta, to understand the perfection of that detail, the promise of trans formative love implied in the callous act of enjoying a watermelon slice while the woman you’ve just made love with cries. Chekhov doesn’t mention the Pomeranian in this scene, but Ruth knows the little dog must be somewhere in his mistress’s hotel room bearing witness.

She can hear sirens on First Avenue; a helicopter passes overhead. She looks down again, but she can no longer focus. Who can concentrate on a slice of watermelon with everything that’s going on?

ALEX SURFACES. THE LIVING ROOM’S ONLY
light source is the muted television. Ruth has covered him with a blanket. He rises from the sofa to look for her. It’s not until he locates Ruth—wherever he wakes up, whatever the hour—that he feels oriented.

She’s asleep in their bed, supine, breathing evenly, her face empty of worry. The reading lamp is shining. Her glasses rest askew on her nose. Her
Portable Chekhov
lies tented on her chest. He has loved her for so long that he can no longer distinguish between passion and familiarity. He slips off her glasses, puts away her book, douses the light, and returns to the living room. The windows face north, in the direction of the tunnel. If ten thousand gallons of gasoline had exploded, surely he’d see a red glow. The night sky is as monochromatic as always.

He goes to his studio, the back bedroom facing the air-shaft, and switches on the lamp over his worktable. He never approaches his unfinished tome, especially in the middle of the night, without wonder and fear. Wonder that it’s still alive; fear that, with the next mark, he will kill it.

Sending away for their FBI files had been Ruth’s idea. When the Freedom of Information Act declassified the cold war documents in the late nineties, all their old lefty friends, even those who had traded in their manifestos for the Torah, had sent away for theirs. You couldn’t dine at someone’s house without the files coming out, if they weren’t already on display, next to the photo album. The length of the dossier was a point of pride, the bigger the better, a vita of activism, proof that the wizened hostess, who had to use a magnifying glass to read about her glory days, had once been a tigress. “Nine hundred and six pages,” she would tell her guests. “What a waste of taxpayers’ money. A school could have been built for what it cost to spy on me. Who knew I was so important?”

When his and Ruth’s files finally arrived, three years after they sent for them, he could see that Ruth was a little disappointed by the page count. “How could Bernice”— the wizened hostess—“merit over nine hundred pages when all she did was sign a few petitions?” Ruth had said, and he understood. Didn’t he feel the same way when a less deserving artist rated a bigger review?

At first, he and Ruth read the files as if they were entries in a journal they’d forgotten they’d kept:
Cohen, Alex (b. 1928), New York City. Honorable Discharge from the army, 1946. Cohen née Kushner, Ruth (b. 1930). Graduated City College, 1952. Subjects married on April 22, 1953. Arrested November 15, 1954, disobeying court order: marching without a permit: Citizens Against the H-Bomb. November 26, 1955, at 1:55p.m., informant observed subject, Ruth Cohen, entering a teacher’s union meeting. On May 6, 1956, confidential informant of known reliability, turned over to the NYC
Office, The Nation, with information that the subject, Alex Cohen, was illustrating for the Communist organ. Informant told NYC Office, that subject, Ruth Cohen, assigned Anton Chekhov, a known Russian writer, to high school students
.

When they finished the book on them, they reread it, this time trying to ferret out from the scant clues, who, exactly had betrayed them. “October
12
,
1967
, neighbor was interviewed telephonically She was most cooperative and expressed great admiration for the FBI. She told agent that subjects’ trash pail contained remnants of a banner for
The Lower East Side Women Against the Vietnam War”
Which neighbor? Mrs. Birukov, the old Ukrainian who practically lived on the stoop?

Ruth eventually tired of the intrigue and went back to reading fiction, but not Alex. The beauty of the pages had captivated him. The sheets came blackened out, or partially obscured, the names of informants shrouded. What remained was sheer abstraction, the very shapes of subterfuge, the silhouettes of duplicity. The idea of illustrating the actual files came to him months later in a used-book shop. He saw a copy of the
Book of Hours
and knew instantly how he’d utilize those pages. In place of crosses and saints, martyrs, and angels, he’d paint A-bombs, Mouseketeers, two-tone refrigerators, Khrushchev, and portraits of him and Ruth. Instead of ornate, delicate gold-leaf borders, he’d stencil on the perforated patterns of vintage nineteen-fifties paper doilies. Instead of the Bible’s Psalms, he’d copy the FBI’s accusations.

Alex sits down at his worktable, a door on two saw-horses. All he needs to complete page fifty-one is a Prussian blue line around the edge, and a final pattern of
cardinal red stenciled over the chrome green borders. He searches his worktable for just the right doily to use as the pattern, one with a little geometry, but all he finds are flower designs. Daisies aren’t what this composition needs. He’ll have to cut a stencil himself. He reaches for his X-Acto knife and a thin piece of cardboard. Holding the knife like a pen, he carves a perfect triangle, about the size of a sequin, in the board. He then stabs the freed shape with the knife’s point, and gently excises it. He repeats this cut thirty more times and thirty more specks are excised. His vision begins blurring, but he won’t allow himself to look away. If he looks away, he’ll break the laser point of concentration drilling out each design, and his attention will scatter.

Everywhere.

It will include not only the knifepoint, but also his old fingers gripping the knife’s silver waist. It will take in not only the manuscript page he is finishing, but all six hundred and ninety-nine pages still waiting to be illuminated, and his studio filled with a lifetime of work in the terrified city on the panicked island by the nervous continent.

In such a wide worldview, Alex fears his ebbing hope that art might make a difference and Ruth’s crumbling belief that a difference can still be made, will surely get lost, and then what will they be left with?

A sick little dog.