Munich Airport (20 page)

He says, Yes, I have to get on that plane.

Can you lock the door behind me, when I go? I ask. I think so, he says. I tell him not to worry, I won't be long, and I leave him. I close the door behind me, and I wait to hear him lock it. Then I wait to hear that he is sitting safely down again. I say, All good? All good, he says. The door of another stall opens—only two doors down—and a man starts to walk out. Then he sees me and pretends to have left something behind, something that makes him swiftly reverse, with embarrassment, and close and lock the door. The bathroom then goes very quiet. I can see that a handful of stalls are occupied—by the color of the locks on the doors—and I realize that everyone in those stalls is waiting for me to leave so they can dash away. They are in those stalls quietly panicking, not knowing what to touch, everything is contaminated, only their embarrassment keeps them from fleeing.

The morgue, in Berlin, was in the basement of a hospital. The hospital was an old building and it seemed like a dangerous place to be, a place that would make you sick if you stuck around. Beside every door there were hand sanitizers. You placed your hand below a sensor and a fine puff of alcohol spray came out, and you rubbed it into your hands. Even though I touched almost nothing, I sanitized my hands at every opportunity. I went alone. Trish had offered to come along, but I said I'd prefer to be by myself. There was a coroner and a witness, a police officer. The coroner was a man in his fifties with little glasses, a weak chin, a bad complexion, a lazy eye, and he was bald on top with closely cropped hair on the sides. I found him hard to look at, but not because of his appearance—it was that the place itself had infected him with dreariness. I was given some papers to fill out. I looked them over and said, I can't understand any of this. They said the paperwork was essential. I'm here to identify my sister, I said, can I call the embassy and get them to help me with the paperwork afterward? The coroner spoke quietly to the officer for a few moments. The coroner was in charge, but I could see that he didn't want to be. He wanted somebody else to take responsibility for altering the procedure. The officer, who was young, tall, blond-haired, muscular, who wore a stiffly starched uniform, and who wore a sidearm—and who was probably quite inexperienced—refused to accept the responsibility. The coroner finally agreed to let me see the body. He said it would be an unofficial identification. I asked him what that meant—would I have to come again? No, he said, it would be sufficient once the paperwork was completed. I was taken into a room that had a glass window. Through the window I could see another room, which was dark. The officer stood just behind me, ready, I guessed, to catch me if I fainted. The light in the other room came on. It was a blue-green light. The tiles on the wall were blue-green—I suspected they were white, and the light gave them color. The coroner, who wore a face mask and protective glasses, wheeled in a gurney with a body under a blanket. Suddenly I thought I was going to lose my nerve, I was going to be sick, I wasn't ready, I'd never done anything like this. The coroner stepped away from the gurney and the body and pressed a button on the wall, and his voice came through. The officer then said to me, in English, Shall we proceed? Yes, I said, please proceed. The officer pressed a button on our side of the glass and told the coroner to proceed. The coroner pulled the blanket down to just below Miriam's neck. He held the blanket and did not step away. I nodded and he immediately pulled the blanket back over her head. I turned around. The officer, who was averting his gaze, said, Okay? Okay, I said. I really needed to be alone, but I had to sit in an office and meet the coroner again, and then I called Trish and she got the paperwork faxed to her for me to complete later. And then I went outside and, for no reason I know, hopped on a bus that looked empty and sat in the back and rubbed my eyes. She had almost no hair. Miriam's head was almost hairless. Her head seemed shrunken, and this made her nose seem gigantic. Her ears, too, looked oversized. The light in the room prevented me from seeing the color of her skin, but the texture was claylike, striated, and stretched. Her cheeks were pulled back in a way that gave her a ghoulish smile. If I had not seen her five years ago, when she was already painfully thin, I would not have recognized her. Actually, I didn't recognize her right away. But I finally recognized something in her closed eyes, an expression quite at odds with the torment that had expressed itself all over her face and head and neck. I think I saw surprise, surprise without fear. Or else I have been gradually altering the memory ever since, possibly to make the image easier to bear, as I carry it forth forever, or possibly to extend to her a reward for her courage, to decorate her troubled memory with a millionth of a millionth of a second of grace.

Outside the bathroom, Trish is waiting with our carry-ons. She is facing away from the entrance, looking toward the windows behind where we were sitting, past the history exhibit—staring at the tarmac, or the brightness, or the city hidden in the distance, or the mountains far beyond the city. I get her attention. I put my sunglasses back on. I grab my carry-on and my father's carry-on and start to walk. She walks beside me. She knows what we need to do—she saw the floor in the bathroom—but we don't need to speak of it. I go a little faster than my normal pace, and she keeps up. I tell her I can't believe how much farther we have to travel today.

Will your dad be okay? Can he make the trip?

He'll make it. I'm not sure if he'll survive the flight, but he's getting on that plane.

We are moving fast and I tell Trish I need to slow down. I feel sick, my head is spinning. Trish asks me if I'm going to be okay. I ask her if I look green again and she says no, I look translucent. I am sweating but I am ice-cold. I think my glands are swelling up. I have a headache in my teeth and jaw. I feel fine, I say, I feel like a million dollars. We stop at a departures board and check for Atlanta. Our flight is scheduled, at last. There it is—Go to Gate. Trish checks the time on her phone. I check the time as well. Considering all that lies ahead of us, we do not have a lot of time.

Though I cannot speak for my father, it was easy for me, in the beginning, not to eat. For the first forty-eight hours after our return from Aachen, I simply had no appetite. We went out drinking that first night, and I felt nauseous until I had quite a few drinks, and on the way home I thought about getting a kebab or a pizza slice, but I didn't, because I knew I wouldn't keep it down. That was when we met the man sitting on the curb and sang him Happy Birthday. He was English. I've lost me mates, he said. He didn't know what hotel he was staying in. He didn't know where he was. But he wasn't too worried. And after we sang to him, he cheered up and decided to go find a bar he could drink in all night. I think we hugged him. I can't remember how old he was. He was probably twenty-one. I think he tried to convince us to come along with him, but we were absolutely finished. I hadn't been drunk on consecutive nights for many years, and suddenly I found myself hanging on to life at the end of a nine-day binge. When I woke the next day, I felt truly terrible. I felt as though my insides had liquefied. I couldn't get back to sleep. I was wide awake but unbearably tired. I got up, showered, and went to sit on the couch. My father was up, too. Neither of us was in the mood for breakfast, or even coffee, and we didn't have the energy to speak. It was too cold to sit outside on the terrace. It was obvious that a period of pure waiting had begun—and apart from one last trip to Miriam's apartment, and a night out with Otis and Miriam's friends, that was what I did. I waited. I walked around and listened to music. I cycled. I stood outside cafés. I sat on benches. And as my appetite slowly returned, I staved off hunger pangs. Perhaps, if I had been in London, I'd have started eating sandwiches. In London, I might not have made it through that second day, and there never would have been a question of deciding not to eat. But in Berlin, they have no sandwiches. They have these things that are like sandwiches, but they are not sandwiches—the bread is wrong. And the only thing I could have eaten at that point were sandwiches—bland, familiar, prepared sandwiches from supermarkets or sandwich shops. I sat on the couch, checked the time, then stared out the window at the sleet, or just the gray, and thought of how far away London seemed to be, how unreachable, as though I would have to travel back in time to get there. Everything in my life would instantly dematerialize if I were dead. All my possessions would vanish. All my notes would be erased. All my debts would drift away. My remains would become nothing more than impediments to others—banks, bosses, an incoming tenant. But I did not have to die. I could just go live at home. I could work with my hands, I thought, renovate houses, lay roof, learn to drive a backhoe, find work shoveling on a horse ranch, buy a tiny fishing boat, meet a woman twice divorced.

When the hunger pangs started, and the sweats and nausea were strong, and I couldn't stop the trembling, I found that exercise could take my mind off it. I did push-ups and sit-ups, or laps around the huge rooftop terrace in the freezing wind and rain. I hopped on my bike and rode up and down hills, crossed intersections, raced cars, hurried everywhere. And when I stopped, it felt, sometimes, as though I had eaten. I also thought of food, I placed before my mind's eye huge platters of food, delicious food, expensive food, and I let myself dream of eating it, digging flesh out of lobster claws, eating two-inch-thick rare steaks, sucking the last bits of meat and skin off a whole hen. This was effective but it felt dishonest. It made me feel I was discrediting the whole experience, and Miriam's experience along with it. So I started to refuse to let myself think of food. If I found myself thinking of food, I immediately forced myself to think of Miriam's body, lying in the morgue. After that, I found that brushing my teeth averted hunger. I went and bought some German toothpaste that tasted a little like bleach, and for a while I was brushing my teeth every thirty minutes. When I began to realize that I was swallowing and eating the toothpaste, I quit that, too. And all there was left was to see it through, to face the desire to eat and refuse, to reject the body's need for sustenance. I'd go to my en suite and lie on the floor and convulse and pull my ears out and pull my hair and scratch my face and throw myself over the toilet when I couldn't vomit anything up, and during these convulsions I could see clearly and objectively that to save myself from this pain was hedonism, that everything above this pain was extravagance. And the greatest thing about this pain was that while it was happening you could feel yourself disappearing, cell by cell, breaking down and getting thinner. Then the convulsions would end and I would lie there and think of Miriam and how much she must have hated us, or the pity we wanted so badly to proffer her, in order to go through this. Our faith that she would one day need us again, just as we needed her, no doubt belonged to the hedonism and extravagance and stupidity of life above the pain of starving. I started to eat little bits of bread because the convulsions and attacks were getting more severe. Every time I had a piece of bread, even a bite, I would go and look in the mirror, and I saw I had fattened dramatically, that I was carrying so much useless and unclean weight. And until I was hungry again—until I knew I was suppressing my body's distress—I saw and felt myself fattening. Whenever I thought of returning to London, I felt myself fattening—expanding with habits, ideas, opinions, things—and it seemed to me that my work was not just keeping me in circumstances that allowed for and required this expansion but it was a plague, an incurable and inescapable plague of superabundance and anxiety. I was so preoccupied with my own struggle that it took a couple of days to realize that my father hadn't been eating, either. He looked tired, emotionless. He said he couldn't get warm, even though we had the heat up as high as it would go in our apartment. He would suddenly sit down and complain about blindness, numbness in his hands and feet, and now and then, if the seat were comfortable enough, he'd fall asleep for thirty seconds. I thought our trip had exhausted him, and the reality that Miriam would be released soon, and that our time here, and his time with Trish, would be over, was sinking in. Then he started vomiting, or at least heaving, in the bathroom of our apartment.

Trish and I stop first at a men's casual clothing store. I need socks, I say. I lift up my trouser legs to show her my bare ankles, and I say, Don't ask. What does your dad need? she asks. Everything, I say. She says, You get the pants and whatever else, I'll get a shirt. I say, I've got a better idea, you run across to the shoe store and grab him some shoes. Perfect, she says, and she walks out of the clothing store. I watch her. She gets about twenty feet away, stops, turns around and jogs back. What size would you say? she asks. I say, No idea, I'm a twelve, that's probably a safe size to get. Okay, she says, and she walks out again. Sizing his clothes is much easier. We're the same height, and though he is thinner around the neck and waist, along the arms and legs—he has the frame of a slim, elderly man—we have similar proportions. I get him a white T-shirt with an ocean scene with a surfer and some writing on it. I get him a soft, blue, thick button-down long-sleeve shirt to wear over the T-shirt, and I get him a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt. It has a design on the back, some writing and a cityscape, but it's for warmth and comfort on the flight. I also get him a pair of jeans, thirty-two waist, thirty-four inseam, some boxer shorts, and a pair of socks—I get a pair of socks for myself, too. At the counter, as the woman is ringing everything up, I look down at what I'm wearing—the ragged suit jacket with sweaty armpits, the shirt that is soaked through with sweat almost everywhere, and which stinks of boozy, nicotine-y perspiration. I go back and get myself a gray hooded sweatshirt with a black scorpion on it for the flight as well. The cost of it all is just under five hundred euro. I don't even try to pretend to not be shocked. I tell the woman behind the counter, That is ridiculous, it's mercenary. She doesn't know how to respond. Do I refuse to pay? she wonders. She cannot see my eyes behind the sunglasses, but I am trying to express my sense of futility through them. What can be done about airport prices? I want to ask. I pull my wallet out. How much is the sweatshirt? I ask. She shows me the price tag. It's eighty-nine euro. Then I see that the jeans are a hundred and fifty. I feel outraged, but I shouldn't be. London is more expensive, and it's actually my job to help make affordable things expensive, mostly by redefining, or reverse-defining, unaffordable. I give her my business credit card. I have a twenty-thousand-pound limit on that card, but every month the bank direct-debits the full amount I owe. When I got the card, I said, Not much of a credit card, is it? He said something about responsible business habits—this was a time when people took advice from bankers—and I said it didn't matter anyway, my business didn't require a lot of credit. I never had to go back and ask for an upgrade. I pay myself a decent salary. I try to expense everything I can—even a portion of my rent, and some of my utilities, and any travel. I pay myself a bonus at the end of each year with whatever I have left—in order to avoid corporate tax. I pay my accountant. And I start over. Every couple of years I take any savings I've accumulated and put them into stocks and mutual funds in the US.