“Think that everything's going to be all right, and I mean that,” Kirt said. “Think that the doctors, for all they know, could be wrong too. Think that they'll find that the most important test result that came back was wrong. Or that one of the treatments they give you will work a hundred percent. Or that they will discover a miracle cure for your disease in the next few months and one that will take effect immediately on you. Listen. Even if you told me now that only five percent of those who have your disease survive after a year, think that you'd be one of those five percent. You will live and eventually be healthy, believe me. I know it in my bones and everywhere else inside of me that you're going to pull through, and you have to believe that too.”
Chris was admitted to the hospital a week later. When Kirt saw him there, Chris was suffering terribly. “Nothing they give me stops the pain,” he said. “The experimental painkiller that was giving me some relief apparently has hurt more people than it's helped, so they took me off it for the time being till they test it out some more. I can't sleep, I can't eat. They're putting me on I.V. Please don't tell me I'm going to get better. I've done nothing the past few months but get worse. If I'm going through this much pain without anything much to alleviate it, what should I expect to come next? I'm also as scared as I ever was not only of dying but of being dead. My brother, who to him spent a considerable sum to fly here, couldn't take my complaining and morbid talk anymore and flew back to France. You're in charge of running things for me if you'll do it. These are my instructions: I want to be kept alive no matter what. Life support systems and experimental drugs and treatments, if the more proven stuff doesn't work, all the way. In the end, anything they've never tried before but want to start on someone, give it a shot on me. Only after I'm flat and out dead do I want the systems turned off. I've written all this down and my last wish to you is to carry them out.”
Kirt said “Believe me, it'll never come close to being that bad. I spoke to the doctor in charge on this floor and she's very hopeful the present treatments will work on you and that a complete cure will be found in a year or two. And she swears nobody's said to you that your condition is terminal.”
“They haven't because I told them not to, but I know it is but don't want to know for sure. That'll make it even worse for me in the head. But if they did tell you there was no chance in the world for me, and I'm sure they have, you wouldn't tell me, right? Because you know I don't want to know, and besides that, your philosophy is to keep the patient thinking positively. And how could I think positively if the most positive person I know tells me I'm going to die in a few months? But you will carry out my instructions, won't you?”
“They won't be necessary, but I'll do anything you want.”
In one of Kirt's next visits to the hospital, Chris was lying on his back in bed. Tubes were in him, he could barely speak. He paused after every few words and most of the time Kirt had to strain to hear him. He did manage to say in one spurt “I told you so, didn't I? On a stack of bibles: it's everything I didn't want.” It took him about a half-hour to say “Don't bury me belowground. You mustn't. A steel casket, thoroughly sealed. If steel isn't the most airtight and impenetrable casket going, then get what is. I want nothing coming into my casket ever, or at least while my body's still relatively intact. I want to dry up to almost nothing before anything's able to get inside. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe in two. Tell my brother that when he returns for the funeral. Insist. I've signed and given to my lawyer a power of attorney putting you in total charge of whatever there might be of my estate and all the funeral arrangements and things once I'm gone. But my brother might fight it, and being my only blood relative and a battler when he sees what he thinks is waste, he might win. You've my original instructions?”
Kirt kissed him on the forehead.
“Disease, you'll get my disease.”
“Nonsense,” and he patted Chris's hand.
“I'll get better, yes? Oh yes, I'll get better. I'll be jumping around like a jumping jack in a few days.”
“I wish you would get better. And you can, you know. People have come back healthy and strong from the most extreme states of sickness and lack of strength, not that your condition has gone that far.”
“The doctors don't say that to you about me, do they? No, don't tell me what they say.”
Kirt saw him in the hospital the day before he died. Chris couldn't speak. He wanted to write something to Kirt, but couldn't hold the pen. When Kirt came back from a snack in the hospital cafeteria, Chris was in a coma. He never came out of it. His brother was there. He spoke to Kirt in French, Kirt said he couldn't understand but a few words, his brother cried in his arms. “The poor man,” his brother said in French. “So young. So terrible. So unnecessary.”
The next day the brother had someone call Kirt to tell him in English that Chris had died. There wasn't any problem with the brother over money or the instructions or anything like that, and Chris was buried inside a steel vault aboveground.
Kirt went to the aboveground burial site a year later. Rented a car and went alone. He'd been thinking a lot about Chris the last week, hadn't been to the site since the burial, and wanted to pay his respects and see if the vault was being looked after. He stood in the corridor in front of Chris's vault. It was one of about three hundred vaults in this wall of the building, and he had passed several similar corridors to get to it. No plaque was on Chris's vault. The only way to identify it was the vault's number. Chris hadn't left instructions for a plaque or memorial of any kind. Kirt wrote the brother about it a week after the funeral, the brother wrote back that he'd get one installed with Chris's name, birthplace and dates, but that seemed to be the end of it. Chris had no relatives in this country. Kirt had been his one friend for years. His former wife and stepchildren wouldn't see him in the hospital, when Kirt called them to say how sick Chris was, or come to the funeral. The only other attender at the funeral besides the brother and Kirt was Chris's business partner, someone Chris distrusted and who he said distrusted him. The woman friend he had for two years, but split up with a month before he got sick, said she'd like to visit Chris in the hospital, and when Kirt called her again, would like to come to the funeral, but she was working on a project for her firm that was tying her down day and night. Chris's lawyer was out of town the day of the funeral. His personal physician said he never went to the funeral of one of his patients unless the patient happened to be a relative or close friend. Several people Chris had done business with said they were too busy or unwell to come. Chris's landlady said he was a good tenant, always paid his rent on time, never caused a fuss, but she hardly knew him. Kirt had called her to say Chris had died and if she'd like to attend his funeral. He had wanted more people to be there other than Chris's partner and brother and he. Only Kirt and the brother were at the burial, other than for the minister and the workers who put the casket into the vault. Half of Chris's estate, minus the funeral and burial expenses and whatever bills and debts Chris had, went to his brother and the other half was split between his university and the foundation doing research on his disease. All of this was stipulated in his will.
Kirt wrote a poem the night before and read it standing very close to the vault. “âKirt I miss you, Kirt I.â¦' Oh my God,” he said, “I put in my own name.” He crossed out his name, wrote in Chris's, and read from the poem again. “âChris I miss you, Chris I kiss you. I'm sorry, sorry, a dozen poems, a hundred plaintive groans, can never say how much. You were a relatively successful but very lonely man. I wouldn't want your success if such loneliness depended on it, and I doubt you wanted it that way too. I wish we had leveled with one another more. The aftermath is always filled with regrets, but what are we going to do? Patterns, grooves, et cetera. I was proud to be your friend. Obviously, I can't write poetry for the life of me, but right now I feel I can only say what I have to this way. Life has been a dark place for me too without you. I didn't know how good a friend I had till you were gone. I think I've contradicted myself somewhere there, but so what? I wish more people had come to your funeral. It might have meant there was a little more happiness in your life than I'm convinced there was. What else can I say? Tomorrow I will sit on a bench there, if there's one, and be silent for a minute after I read you this poem, and then go. I'll be back. There is a lack in my life as there was in yours.'”
He tore up the poem, stuck the pieces into his jacket pocket. There were two benches nearby but he didn't sit. He put his hands in front of his face, closed his eyes, leaned his head against Chris's vault, cried, remained still like that for several minutes after he cried, left.
As he was walking to the parking lot, a man he had never seen before came alongside him and said “I was standing several graves, or whatever you want to call those things, over from you when you were inside before. I don't mean to intervene, but we seem to be walking in the same direction to lot B. That must have been one hell of a person you visited just now. One really wonderful person. My condolences, no matter how long a time that person's death might have been. Though because this cemetery, or whatever it is, is so new, it couldn't have been more than seven years ago.”
“It was only last yearâthis week's his anniversary. And he was all right as a person, not greatâI don't want to lie to you. But thanks.” He patted the man's back and got into his car. He backed up, pulled away and saw in the rearview mirror the man waving at him.
Man's waiting in the service elevator right next to the passenger elevator. Someone comesâa woman, hopes it's a young one, through the front door or from one of the apartments upstairs or on this floorâhe'll step out behind her with the knife, threaten her with it, take her in the automatic elevator rather than this hand-operated one to the top floor, walk her up to the roof, knife always on her throat, he always behind her and threatening softly but with a real scary tone in his voice “One scream and I'll use it; make even a move from this knife or to see me and I'll kill you,” take her to a good dark out-of-the-way spot on the roofâall depending what lights from the other buildings' windows are on itâand rape her. She'll never see his face and his voice won't be his own. She doesn't put up a fuss, he'll leave her there gagged and tied up. He's scouted out the building. Not many tenants come in or leave their apartments this late, but it's worth the wait. Someone will come. Lots of single women in this neighborhood, so has to be a few in this building too. But on Saturday night, most, he bets, will be with men friends. One won't though and that's who.
Tenant on the eighth floor. Can't sleep. Something's up. Hasn't always been right when she thought something bad was going to happen, but enough times she has. It's not from any crazy imagination she's thinking this. The winos were really loud tonight. Few more bottles and things smashed on the street or whatever they're smashed against than usual too. And a couple more souped-up cars and motorcycles than she's used to racing past her building too. Why don't the police do something? If it's because they don't know of these things going on or they're too lazy to patrol or can't because of cutbacks, then why don't people call them more? This city. She turns the TV off. Get some sleep.
Young woman's mother in Connecticut. Thinking about her daughter. She went to New York to do graduate work in painting. Took an apartment with another young woman, a friend from college. But the building's bad. Filthy, poorly maintained, bell system that doesn't work; a firetrap, she's sure. Even if some of the neighborhood's okay, and some of the river buildings even elegant, and as co-ops or rented apartments, quite expensive, much of it's very bad. Welfare hotels. Cheap rooming houses. Awful-looking men and women on the street day and night. Little park nearby where men drink and some dope and urinate in the open and make vulgar remarks to passing women and all sorts of other things. Beggars. In the
Times
she's read of break-ins and muggings and seen a city crime statistic chart that put her neighborhood near the top. Worried.
Man in a cab going acrosstown. Should have got out of the cab and escorted her upstairs. Didn't like the looks of her building and block. But then he hardly knows her. She might have thought he was being funny in a wayâforward, not funny. And he had this cab, was in it, did only promise to take her to the street door, or rather: just see, while he sat in the cab, she got inside that door, and then he might not have got another cab after he left her building or not so fast. Could have asked the cab to wait while he saw her to her apartment door. Now he thinks of it. But she said she'd be all right. He did ask. And he's sure that no matter how hard he insisted on taking her to her apartment door, she would have said no.
Still
.
Woman's in the lobby, presses the elevator button. Light above the elevator door says the car's on the top floor, the eighth. Slow elevator, takes days to get down. She doesn't like waiting in this creepy lobby. Anyway, her friend Phoebe will be upstairs and they can talk about tonight. The man she met. He was nice. Took her home in a cab, wouldn't let her share the fare with him. She wishes she had accepted his suggestion and let him walk her to her door. But then she would have had to invite him in. And offer him a coffee or a beer, when really all she wants to do, if Phoebe's upâshe'll be upâis talk a little with her and go to sleep. Elevator's about here. It's here.
Man thinks now's the time. She's a good-looking one. Long legs, big ass. She'll screw well. He'll screw her well. He'll screw her till she cries for more, more. He steps out. She turns around. Knife's out. Damn, she saw him. “Don't say a word or I'll kill you right here.” He gets behind her and puts the knife to her neck. Opens the elevator door, knife always against her neck. “We're going to the roof. I know this building. Don't say a word, make a peepânothingâdon't even sneak a look at me again or you're dead. I know how to get out of this building easily so I'll be out of here before you hit the ground. Now get in.”