Open City (23 page)

Professor Saito was like this, especially after his retirement: a curious combination of reticence and frankness. I wish I had asked what his late partner’s name was. He would have told me. Perhaps some of the artifacts on display in the apartment—the Meissen porcelain in the curio cabinet, the Javanese puppets, the row of books on modern poetry—were the legacy of this other man, with whom Professor Saito had spent so much of his life. Or perhaps there had been a series of partners, each important in his own way. But in spite of myself, unable to be fully present to our conversation, I could not lead it in this new direction. I simply nodded, smiled, and spoke about other things. He noticed, perhaps, that my attention was flagging, and he said, as if he were waking someone who had fallen asleep, You’re still young, Julius. You must be careful about closing too many doors. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I simply nodded when he said this, and watched his spidery hands slowly dancing around each other in that gloomy room.

The bedbugs were on my mind. New Yorkers had begun to speak more often about these tiny creatures in the past two years. The conversations,
as befitted a troublesome occurrence in the private arena, had remained private, and the bedbugs were having an unlikely success. They were the unseen enemy that carried on their work, even as false alarms were raised about the West Nile virus, avian flu, and SARS. In the age of the dramatic epidemic, it was the old-fashioned bedbug, a minuscule red-coated soldier, that was least deterred. Of course, other illnesses were much more serious, and more of a drain on public resources. AIDS remained a devastating problem, especially for the poor, and for people who lived in the poorer countries. Cancer, heart disease, and emphysema were not pandemic, but were nevertheless of great importance among the causes of mortality. Even as the terms of transnational conflicts had changed, a similar shift was happening in public health, where, too, the enemies were now vague, and the threat they posed constantly shifting.

But bedbugs were not fatal, and were happy to stay out of the headlines. They were hard to fumigate into oblivion, and their eggs were almost impossible to kill. They did not discriminate on the basis of social class and, for that reason, were embarrassing. An infection in a wealthy home was just as likely, and just as difficult to get rid of, as one among the poor. Hotels at all levels of luxury suffered. If you had them, you had them, and ridding yourself of them permanently was difficult. And in that moment, as I contemplated these ideas, I suddenly felt sorrowful for Professor Saito. His recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. The feeling was subconscious, contemptible. Had it been put to me so baldly at the time, I would have denied it. But it was there, an example of how an inconvenience can, because of one’s proximity to it, take on a grotesque aspect.

These tiny, flat creatures, which had sought out human blood since before Pliny’s time, were involved in a kind of low-grade warfare, a conflict at the margins of modern life, visible only in speech.
At the end of the afternoon, when I left Professor Saito’s apartment, I decided to walk north through Central Park. The snow from three days previously had not melted. In the frigid air, it had hardened to create smooth, low hills across the fields. I kept to a snow-covered road that ran along a sturdy old wall. Footprints were visible, but there was no one else in sight. The light was so diffuse that almost no shadows were cast on the snow, and this gave one the feeling of levitation: white light above and white below. A flock of tiny birds—they might have been starlings—swirled around a tree in the distance. I had the distinct impression that the tangled branches, and the birds that wove expertly in and out of them, were made of the same dun brown substance, the latter different only because they were in an active state. At any moment, I thought, the jagged little branches would unfold their hidden wings and the entire crown of the tree would become a living cloud. The surrounding trees, too, would lose their heads, leaving sentrylike stumps behind, and in the sky above the park there would be a massive canopy of starlings. I walked along this soothing white road for a long time, until the cold cut through my gloves and scarf and compelled me to leave the park and take the subway the rest of the way home.

Later that night, looking through my medical textbooks for more on the bedbugs, I found only dry descriptions of etiologies, life cycles, and therapies. Steam laundering and cyanogas fumigation were discussed at length, but none of this got at what disconcerted me about these creatures. But by a remarkable chance, I found among my books a volume of field reports on epidemiology from the early twentieth century, one in a stack of outdated books that had been discarded by Dr. Martindale at his lab. I had idly picked up a few of those books without really looking at them, but now I found the report written by Charles A. R. Campbell in 1903, and in his writing I got a sense of the disgust and awe in which
Cimex lectularius
was then held.

Dr. Campbell’s report superficially conformed to the period style for a medical bulletin, but it drew its real power from a gradual accumulation of assertions, which created an intense and oppressive image of the creature under study. One of the characteristics of the bedbug, Campbell wrote, is its cannibalistic nature. He presented evidence that engorged bugs were sometimes slit open and consumed by their young. He also described a half dozen experiments he had carried out, ostensibly in the interest of scientific research but which gave the impression of an obstacle course designed to prove the bedbug’s hardiness and intelligence. Campbell would have been disappointed, I felt sure, had the bedbug failed to pass any of the trials he put it through.

In the experiments, bedbugs survived four months of isolation on a table in a sea of kerosene without food, they came through a deep freeze lasting 244 hours without being harmed, and were able to remain alive underwater for an indefinite period of time. The cunning of these insects, an awed Campbell wrote, is remarkable, and it appears that they have, to a certain extent, the power of reasoning. He described an experiment by Mr. N. P. Wright of San Antonio—“a very reliable citizen and close observer”—in which, as Wright moved his bed farther and farther from the sides of the room, the bedbugs climbed up the wall to the precise height from which they could jump and land on him. When he moved his bed closer, the bugs climbed only as high as was necessary. Campbell’s report included a number of stories of this kind, in which bedbugs demonstrated a certain ingenuity in reaching a bed to which their access had been blocked.

I thought of the bugs in their countless millions in all the five boroughs of the city, of their invisible eggs, of their appetite, which was greatest at the hour before dawn. The problem began to seem less and less a scientific one, and I came to share Campbell’s unease. The concerns were primeval: the magical power of blood, the hours
given over to dreams, the sanctity of the home, cannibalism, the fear of being attacked by the unseen. My rational self was dismayed at these glib analogies, at this unexpected surrender to the kind of insecurity I mocked in others. Nevertheless, when I was done reading, I unmade my bed, switched off the lights, and, kneeling down, carefully examined the seams of the mattress with a flashlight. I found nothing, but of course this did not in itself guarantee a restful night.

T
here had been a bombing at the biggest pet market in Basra, and the scene was filled with the feathers of parakeets, the cries of dying animals, blood-streaked debris, a mangled engine, a destroyed chair, and cages twisted as though they were made of twine. On the radio, the secretary of state began to discuss an upcoming offensive in the Shiite-controlled area of Baghdad. I went to the pet market and saw the carcasses of dogs lying next to human corpses. Women in black gowns cried and beat their breasts. There was one father who, dead, continued to clutch the vial of insulin he had been trying to take home to his daughter. I became very tired;
tired unto death
was the phrase that scrolled across my mind. I was in my white coat, and my tie was loosened at the neck. My mother was in the pet market. She wore a burka, and Nadège was there with her, wearing the same. My mother asked, What is worse than the bombs? Nadège said, Bedbugs! The two spoke to each other in Yoruba. My mother said, Listen to your sister, Julius. I was about to correct her.

It was one in the morning, and I had fallen asleep in my clothes. I undid my tie and changed, and drank water from the glass on the side table. Before I fell asleep, I had been reading the prologue of
Piers Plowman
. Of its long, alliterative descriptions, all I now retained was the image of William Langland wandering around the world, seeing the various work and struggle of humanity, then settling on one of the Malvern Hills and looking at a brook. He became drowsy, “slumbered into sleep,” and in his dreams a magical vision of reality appeared to him, and it was just as I began to read that section that I had fallen asleep.

The light of a streetlamp trembled from behind the curtains. I was hungry but had no appetite. There was a pork chop in the fridge and, as I ate it, standing with the fridge door open, the siren of an ambulance went by in the night. I opened the window, and the air entered in a single gust, as though it had been waiting for admission. The pulsing in my mind matched the flickering pattern of the streetlamp against the curtain. Below, the world was bare, and showed little sign of Langland’s “fair field full of folk.” I took two acetaminophen and went back to sleep. The following day was the Saturday of a call-free weekend, and I could sleep in, untroubled by dreams. When I awoke, I decided I would run errands and, if the day was right for it, visit the old professor later in the afternoon.

T
HE DOORMAN IN HIS BUILDING USHERED ME IN
. T
HE ELEVATOR
was humid and smelled of sweat. Mary, heavily pregnant, let me into the apartment. Everything was dark and gray inside. He’s very sick, she said. He’s in the bedroom, come this way, he’ll be happy to see you. But when we got there, I saw a man darken the door and go inside ahead of me. He was the doctor. Mary signaled me to wait. I went into the living room and sat down, under Dr. Saito’s ring of Polynesian masks. I could hear voices from the bedroom. When the doctor came out, he had a genial expression. His face creased in
smiles as he nodded at me and left. I went inside to see Professor Saito, who lay huddled on the bed, tiny and white and weaker than I had ever seen him. His eyes, though they were rheumy and almost closed, were the only part of him that seemed fully there. His voice seemed to be coming not from his mouth, which in any case moved little, but from somewhere else in the room. The timbre was pinched, and he took many breaths. Nevertheless, he spoke lucidly.

Ah, yet another doctor is here, he said. I feel popular. But, Julius, I don’t know what you do in Africa, but I must say, I’m ready to go into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I’ve done enough, I think, I’ve had a good life, and I’m in such terrible pain just now. Who might say ninety years is not enough? It is time. I sat down next to him and held his small, cold hand in mine. He was tired, and I left him, so that he could rest. I told him I would return soon.

Later that day, not wishing to be alone with the image of Death hovering in the room with its cheap suit and bad manners, I called my friend, and went over to his place. His daughter, a bright nine-year-old named Clara, who otherwise lived with her mother, was visiting. But she’s out wandering, he said. His living room had two windows, one west, facing onto Amsterdam Avenue, the other south into a small courtyard, boxed in on all four sides by brick, concrete, and by the small windows of his neighbors’ apartments. Those windows lit up one after the other with warm evening lights. There was a tall tree in the middle of the otherwise empty courtyard, bare and with a dense network of branches. I doubted that it got much sunshine, but it looked healthy enough.

That’s a tree of heaven, my friend said. I know because I, too, got curious about it, and looked it up. Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren’t we all? Once, down in the courtyard, I got a smell quite similar to coffee from one of the broken-off branches. The species was first brought over from China a long time ago, in the 1700s, I think, and apparently it liked American soil so much that it grew
freely and wildly in almost every state, often displacing native species.

He went into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of Heineken for me. It’s the shade, you see, he said. It casts shade over other plants, cutting off their sunlight. A tree of heaven will grow anywhere, practically: abandoned lots, back gardens, sidewalks, streets, beaches, unused fields, even right inside boarded-up buildings, even in a sunless courtyard choked with academics. Well, what’s so bad about that? I said. A tree’s a tree, isn’t it? Can’t have too many trees in the city. It’s not so simple, he said. The tree of heaven reduces local biodiversity. It’s thought of as a pest, no good for timber or wildlife, and not even all that great for firewood.

While he spoke, I stood by the facing wall, which had a massive bookcase, and I looked at the endless rows of volumes, including a rich section on African and African-American literature. There was an overflow of books on the floor, and on the coffee table, I noticed a copy of Simone Weil’s essays. I picked it up. My friend turned from the window. She’s wonderful on the
Iliad
, he said. I think she really gets what force is about, how it motivates action and loses control of what it has motivated. You really should take a look at it sometime.

I had hoped for grace, I said, not for immortality. I had hoped for a graceful, strong exit for this professor of mine. I so badly wanted the old man to give me words of wisdom, I said, not this nonsense about lions. Maybe it’s still possible. Maybe the next time I see him, he’ll recite something from
Gawain
, or from some Middle English lyric. But maybe I’m being foolish. Instead of being thankful for the relationship, I’m attempting to design it to my own specifications. But, you know, I had hoped that, even as his body broke down, that intricate mind of his, one of the best I’ve ever known, would soldier on.