The Republic of Nothing (17 page)

As we walked cautiously through the mobs of crazed New
Yorkers, Ben assured me that all was normal, that I should relax and take in the scenery. We made our way towards the stairway that would lead us up to the street when we came across a crowd of ragamuffin men and women huddled by the doorways, all pushed up together in a corner, as if someone had swept the floor and simply aimed the broom at the farthest, darkest corner. Not one of them was moving.

“Are they all dead?” I asked.

Suddenly Ben stopped walking. “Today, tomorrow or the next day,” he said, his voice grown heavy with the weight of his past. “Right now, they're sleeping. Nowhere to go. Those are my people.”

Things began to fall into place. I was with the old Dr. Ackerman now, the one fired from his job for trying to help the street people. “Why don't they just leave the city? Go live in the woods or find an island?” I asked.

“Maybe they should. But I don't think they can. This is what they know. Sometimes you can't break free of who you are and go off to an island. Besides, there's too many of them. Some of them have only themselves to blame, others just had bad luck.”

“What can we do?” I asked. It was the question that only an outsider would ask. But as they began to stir and waken, I could see that there were so many of them, a small army. And off in a farther corner on the other side of the great railway terminal, I saw another pile of sleepers. A uniformed policeman was going along tapping each gently with a night stick. “You see why I had to leave?”

Maybe I saw and maybe I didn't. “There must be something we can do,” I insisted. If I saw a gull with a broken wing, I'd catch the bird and try to set the wing. If I found a starfish left high and dry at the tide's retreat, I'd bend down, pick it up and put it in a pool that wouldn't dry up, wouldn't I?

Ben reached in my pocket and pulled out the folded money. In Portland we had exchanged Canadian for American. He
peeled off a ten dollar bill and handed it to me, then pointed to an old woman waking up by door. I walked over to her, bent down and put the ten in her hand. Her eyes had a hard time focusing at first. First there was fear. She thought I was going to hurt her. But I pressed the money into her hand and curled her fingers around it. She looked down at the bill in disbelief. She wasn't any older than Mrs. Bernie Todd but she had lived a different life, one of disappointment and defeat. She started to speak but I moved quickly away. Ben led me out the door.

Charity suddenly didn't feel good. It felt like a stab to my heart. A tide of numbness, of hopelessness swept over me as I was led through a noisy, horrible canyon of concrete buildings, glass, cars like wild beasts threatening each other, and wave after wave of humans in a hurry, running, avoiding something, going somewhere. “It's a long way, but I think we should walk,” Ben said. “I want you to see everything. Don't try to understand. Just watch, then take it home with you, live with it but don't let it destroy you.”

War, I kept thinking. This is what a war must be like. After hours of walking we arrived at a place that truly looked like the aftermath of a war. Buildings were gutted. Slogans were painted on the remains of brick walls of buildings half torn down. Abandoned cars, some that had been lit on fire and burned from the inside out, littered the streets. What stores that were open had iron bars in front of the windows. Blacks and Spanish speaking kids approached and asked for a spare quarter, but Ackerman waved them away. In the middle of the wreckage, Ben stopped and pointed to a tall, sombre brick building. “And that's where they go to die. If they're lucky.”

It was his hospital. And the burden began to descend again on this man who was my friend. He slowed his pace and suggested we sit down on a bench and rest before going on.

“No,” I insisted. “I'm not tired. How far is the nursing home?”

“Five, maybe six blocks. Over near the river.”

I had this awful feeling that if I let Ackerman sit down there in the dirty little park with newspapers flying around like demented gulls, maybe he'd never get up. I realized then that this foray into this bizarre entanglement of human crisis was to be a commando operation. Hit and run. I wanted us to be out of there before night.

The nursing home appeared to be much like the hospital with institutional dirty brick walls, barred windows, featureless and forlorn except for the fact that it was skirted on one side by a river, a brown, foul-smelling river like none I had ever seen. The river's only saving grace was the fact that its waters were deep and swift and still driven by a primal planetary need to rush itself back to sea, for I could feel the tug myself. Despite the madness and the jumble oi buildings, I could feel that we were not far off from the ocean, the Atlantic, and this knowledge reassured me that perhaps I was still on this planet. Ben, almost in a daze now, led us to the front steps. “It won't work,” he said. “Look at us. And we aren't even family. They won't let him out.”

I realized that we both smelled rather bad. Our clothes had not been changed and Ackerman had not shaved. “There,” he said, pointing to a run-down hotel across the street.

We checked in. He seemed to be regaining strength now. We showered, Ben shaved and we changed into our only extra set of clothes. “Let me rest for ten minutes,” he said after that, and he lay down on his back on one of the beds and seemed to fall into a deep trance. As I sat in a chair and studied the dingy surroundings, I felt as if I was watching over the corpse of a dead man. What would it be like to be alone in this city without Ben? I half-expected he would not wake up, but he did. Precisely ten minutes had passed. I saw a changed man. “Someday I'll teach you to meditate,” he told me. Then he handed me a tie to wear. I tried but failed to get it right, and he knotted it for me.

Inside the front doors of Broadview Manor, a security guard wearing a gun asked us our business.

“I'm Dr. Ackerman from Nova Scotia,” Ben said, “and we're here to take one of your patients home for a visit to his family.”

The security guard, a short, fuzzy-haired man with oily skin said, “Stay here. What's the name of the patient?”

“Delaney O'Neil,” Ben answered. “I believe he's been here for several years.”

The man walked away, went into an office, then returned. “You can go in to see Mrs. Claymore. She's the director and she'd like to talk to you.” Suspicion was written all over his face as if he'd been born that way.

Mrs. Claymore was a white-haired lady with a haggard face and a wary look. Were all New Yorkers afraid of something? Did they all expect the worst? Could she tell that Ben was not a doctor? There was no greeting, no hello, no questions to be asked. “I'm sorry to inform you, doctor, that Mr. O'Neil died some months ago. He had Alzheimer's, as you probably know. His memory went very quickly and then his health. I think that sometimes with cases like his, there comes a time when they simply can no longer remember to breathe. And that's it. I'm sorry that you have come all this way for nothing.”

“But why had the family not been informed?”

“Well, let me check.” She went to a filing cabinet, pulled out a file, set returned envelopes from three addresses on the desk. “We sent notices. We tried everything. Again, I'm sorry.” But there was no real compassion in her voice. So many had come and died in this unforgiving place, this old age brick prison. It would be impossible to care for every one and worry over every single death without losing your mind. Instead, you simply gave up your soul to keep your job. A cloud settled in my brain, a dark, ominous thing that grew cold and dense. It was all for nought. There would be no reunion.

“There was the matter of the cremation. Someone will have to pay.” Dying was business. It cost money. It was just another cash transaction for services rendered.

“Certainly,” Ben said and pulled out a chequebook from inside his jacket. “But first, could I see the certificate of death?” In a city like New York, I suppose nothing was to be trusted, not even news of death.

Mrs. Claymore produced the document from the file. Ben studied it closely. Handing it back to her, he looked down at his chequebook. “How much?” he inquired.

“Three thousand five hundred.”

“And there was nothing left in his insurance or his property to cover this?”

“Not a penny,” Mrs. Claymore assured us. “He seems to have timed things almost perfectly. All of his savings had gone into his final days of care, but he had not accounted for his disposal.” There was a wry look on her face as if something she had said were witty or intelligent.

Ben wrote out the check and handed it to her. “We'd like his ashes and whatever valuables were left.”

Mrs. Claymore got on the intercom. “Harold, get me Delaney O'NeiPs remains and his particulars.”

Ben handed over the cheque. Mrs. Claymore studied it as if it were a fine and rare work of art. “Chase Manhattan,” she said. “That's our bank too.”

“I used to live in New York,” Ben explained. “I still keep an American account going for, well, exigencies like this.”

Harold arrived with a cheap metal urn, shockingly small. To think that a human's remains could fit into such a small thing. Ben studied it. “This is what it all boils down to,” he said philosophically. “The body is mostly water. Once you take all of that away, all you have is a fairly unpretentious mound of dust.”

I accepted a large manila envelope of valuables. Inside was a watch, three gold tooth fillings, a square Oddfellow's Club
ring and pair of photographs of Delaney O'Neil. One showed him as a young man, holding his baby daughter, Gwen's mother, up to the camera. The second was apparently a birthday party there at the nursing home.

“That was his last birthday, but I'm afraid he didn't appreciate it,” Harold said.

It looked almost nothing like the happy man I had first been introduced to in Gwen's mother's bedroom. Despite a surrounding throng of smiling old people with faces pushed up close to his, Gwen's grandfather had a look on his face that spoke of nothing save sheer horror and pain.

“Is this everything?” I asked.

“We gave his clothes to the needy,” Mrs. Claymore answered. “Now if that's everything, I should be getting back to work.”

“Thank you for your time,” Ben said. We got up to go.

“It was a waste, wasn't it?” I asked Ben, who seemed a bit too much in a hurry as we walked out. “The first really important thing I have to do in life and it's just a big waste.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” I was clutching Mr. O'NeiPs “valuables” while Ben carried the urn. It had turned to a cool, grey blustery day. The water on the river in front of us was choppy and frothy. Ben walked up to the concrete edge and looked out across it towards the dilapidated tenements on the other shore. He rattled loose the lid of the urn.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I was afraid he had lost his mind. The least we could do was return the grandfather's ashes to Gwen's mother. But it was too late. Doctor Bentley Ackerman heaved the contents onto the surface of the river. The ash caught in the wind and dispersed, almost instantly. Some of it took off in the air as other tiny flecks fell on the choppy little waves and were immediately swirled and churned off toward the sea. With a loud cry — I don't know if it was madness, despair or something else — Ackerman heaved the empty urn far out into the river where it sank instantly.

“Why?” I asked. “What do you think you're dong?” Now I was sure he was crazy. My old friend Ben had dipped a paddle into the river of insanity. He was being carried far away into a world where I could not retrieve him, I was sure.

“I'm about to bring Mr. Delaney O'Neil back to life,” he said with a perfect air of confidence. “Could I see all three of those photographs?”

I felt protective of what little was left of Delaney, but I could see no point in confronting Ben with his insanity. All was already lost. I should have never convinced him to come down here. It was all my fault. We sat down on a concrete bench and Ben studied the three photographs. “This is the one that matters,” he said, holding up the one I had been carrying all these miles, the one of the older, bald smiling Delaney O'Neil. He gave me back the one of O'Neil holding his little daughter, but with a deft, precise snapping motion, he tore the final birthday shot up into fragments and gave them a toss in the wind saying, “This one doesn't look like him at all. It is of no importance whatsoever.”

We began the search that afternoon and it lasted four days. At first the task seemed impossible and the whole scheme foolish. There were so many candidates to choose from. It was not just a matter of appearances. Gwen's mother, after all, had not seen her father for nearly ten years. Certainly she would not have recognized the man at the birthday party. All we needed was a man of the right age, right build, right facial structure and someone who had gone around the bend far enough that he could be convinced that he was, in fact, Delaney O'Neil. It was a bold proposition, the reinvention of Granddad O'Neil, but we had a problem that called for bold measures.

On the fourth day we were back in Grand Central Station. It was that time of day when the homeless would be shovelled out onto the streets for cold, lonely hours, to wait without a
roof over their heads until the early morning commuter trains would begin again, the doors would open and they would be permitted to find a corner to curl up in.

He was wearing an old aviator's cap, a frayed rain coat, blue tennis sneakers and a smile that wrapped across his face like he had just won the lottery. Ben studied the photo and then studied the man. Close enough.

“Buy you a meal, my friend?” he asked the grandfather-to-be.

“I'm a vegetarian now,” the guy said. “Once you're off meat, you never want to go back.”