Paris Twilight (6 page)

As Maasterlich launched into “the world,” his flights of significance and ramification grew even loopier—how we should relish our essential incompatibility, how that was the mark of any golden age worth crowing about, for “only a house divided against itself is strong enough to stand,” take Spain, for example, in those halcyon centuries before the Catholics chased away the Moors, or Germany before it incinerated its Jews. What had befallen these societies when they'd achieved the purity they'd so desperately sought by driving out the best they had?

The snickers had begun, along with a quiet groan or two. “Things to do,” Willem explained, slipping past my knees with his books under his arm just as Maasterlich got to “the Soviet before the purges,” but I hardly noticed his departure, was riveted by the scene before me, which remains bolted into memory intact, the folding wooden seats in their descending rows, the lecturer's rostrum as heavy as a catafalque, the blackboards on which figures and terms had been dispelled by erasure and overwriting and erasure again into swirling calcite cumuli, a billowing fog of chalk, as the hulking madman in the fog-smeared suit stalked the pit, raving at whoever was left.

“You surgeons, your belief is in improvability, perhaps ultimately in human perfectibility. Your journey is linear; its compass always points toward progress. Good! It must! How else are you to take knife and bone saw and commit the irrevocable? You don't turn away. You are epic. You step through. Your violence has the name of optimism; it is the violence to push the moment to its crisis.”

And then he addressed the opposing side, or rather, as I heard it, me, for in the next few minutes, the rest of my life was determined, its banes and blessings defined and named. “You anesthesiologists, your journeys are lyric and, if they are to be successful, circular,” Maasterlich said. “While the surgeon's every sun ascends to noon, to the zenith, you, by contrast—you will traffic in twilight.” In those hours when the surgeon opened to the examining lamp recesses that were never meant to see the sun or feel the air, in those same bright hours I would lead the conscious mind into proscribed darknesses. But with caution: I would never push the moment, would shy from the brink. That would be my talent, in a nutshell, knowing where the brink was and when to shy, when to release my patient to retrace his path back upward toward the light, to surface in the very ripple where his dive had commenced, with no more than a dime of a bruise or a Band-Aid over a needle prick to remind him of his hour in oblivion.

Except for those—and this was something Maasterlich failed to mention, a phenomenon not easily discussed that some of us would notice over the years and learn to be on the lookout for—except for those patients who remembered, not the surgery, but the oblivion. It didn't occur with every operation—heart procedures seemed to be the worst—or in every patient. Only in a very, very few patients, actually, and maybe only those very few who were fated to such perceptions anyway, who already knew how death inhabits life. We could spot the signs when the patients came around—a hollowness in the eye, a metallic blankness haunting the gaze in the aftermath of surgery—and then, usually a couple days later, the delirium set in. For these few, the awareness lingered of how, in the course of outrunning pain, they'd traveled to the border of mortality.

Rarely did the sensation become permanent, though there were those occasional witnesses for whom the stupor and the haunted eye never fully lifted, and we had a name for those people, gleaned from a paper in a German academic journal that was the only piece I ever read that addressed the syndrome, likening it to the mindset of survivors of historic trauma and referring to its exemplars as
die Wiedergänger
: the revenants, returners from places that could not be described. Generally, though, the condition persisted some several hours, a day or two at most, and finally was gone, and the hollowness and the blankness abated into ordinary cheer.

Then, for some reason, as I was sitting on the bench, looking out at the templed island and the Suicide Bridge and the promenade along the lakeshore, and thinking about all these things and Maasterlich, a horrible realization sprang into my mind, as motivating as a bee sting, that I'd left the window open.

I
DON'T REALLY KNOW
where my frenzy came from—was I alarmed that too much light might leak in and stain the gloom of that dank box?—but I got myself to Sèvres-Babylone as quickly as I could. I was irritated, predictably. As I drew nearer I became aware of another and insurgent emotion. My irritation felt like a cover for something more perverse, less admissible, and as I walked down the impasse, pushed through the entry into the
cour
, climbed the precipitous stairs, and turned the key in the lock, I put a name to it: anticipation. My destination had been transfigured by its status in my mind: what had been, on my first visit, an enigma, something unknown that the world had withheld from me, had become my secret knowledge, something private I was withholding from the world. Could anything be more precious?

The apartment itself was exactly as small and shabby as before. It was brighter, at least, and the odor had fled through the neglected window—had the poison cloud done a pirouette around the yard, I wondered, before winging off over the city? I found a sponge and mopped up the puddle of rainwater under the sill, and then I retrieved ammonia and a bucket from beneath the bathroom sink and a broom from behind the bathroom door and kept on going. The cleaning ritual mollified me, dispersed the remnants of my disturbing brunch. But if it was Willem I fled, I was drawn by something—by someone—else, and as I knelt on his floor and encountered his world inch by inch, I felt I was getting my first vague glimpse of the face of Byron Saxe.

The thing I saw there initially was desperation, a derangement that culminated in the grim silhouette, that ghastly snow angel carved in the floor wax by the excoriating kerosene. Its implication was confirmed to me some days later by the excoriating housekeeper, Céleste, who described with undisguised delectation how Saxe had passed out in the fumes from the overturned stove and then spent two days unconscious (due to either a concussion from his fall or
sa
marinage
in gas fumes before he was found). His brain never really recovered.

Smaller signs gave me greater pause. Maybe the weather stripping that sealed the door tight against the hallway light could, along with the blackout curtains over the window, be explained by the bottles of film-developing chemicals stashed near the sink beside a Japanese camera—had this chamber also served Saxe as a darkroom? But how was one to explain the peephole hidden by a sliding cover positioned a meter off the floor in the corner of the room, which would afford anyone cringing there an excellent surveillance of the stairs? How, except with a diagnosis of extreme paranoia? And I began to suspect that the weather stripping was engineered not to keep the hall light out of the apartment, but to keep the apartment's light and all signs of internal life invisible from the hall. What on earth had the poor man been afraid of?

Along with all this, though, I encountered a paupered dignity, a grace in the proportions of the room as he'd laid it out, in the bolster propped against the wall to make the divan comfortable, in the careful conceits of his day—that so spare an individual would bother to wax his floors at all. Can you read a man by Braille? My sweeping palm tried. The distressed floor wax smoothed away easily; the phantom all but vanished. In this way, even as I encountered Saxe, I erased him. I tossed out his toothbrush and his shaving kit, mapped with a moist sponge my own private kingdom cleansed of the dust of his life, directly in the center of his world, a beachhead of safety whose borders I dared extend only so far.

What on earth was I afraid of? The closet, for one thing—I couldn't imagine invading so personal a precinct. It felt as though his shirts and shoes might rise up to defend their owner's privacy. Even less could I bring myself to open the drawers of his dresser. So I mopped out my little ammonial empire, which enlarged satisfyingly with every pass of my arm and every backward shuffle down the floor, until I bumped into something and felt behind my denimed fanny the leg of the writing table.

Of the two varieties of fate—the one that seeks and the one that lurks—I've always feared the latter most, and the table leg gave me a start. Of course it had been there all along, and of course I had known where it was—how often in life are we surprised by the inevitable, the crease beside the eye, the spot on the skin, the lump in the breast that wasn't there yesterday but must have been? So here's where my search for safety had brought me: directly to the thing I feared. For the table was the prelude to the dresser that was prelude to the closet—atop the table was his mail.

The evening was waning by now, and it was getting too dark to read, but the gloaming also emboldened me, afforded me some cover, cast a welcome shadow over my surreptitious mission. The first envelope I opened was a bill from a neighborhood tailor, the second was another bill, and the third, forwarded from some establishment named Café Portbou, was an itemization, apparently, of toll calls racked up on its phone. The fourth was a statement of account from a hospital, which I scrupulously avoided inspecting, alarmed at what I might see, and the last two were utility bills I greeted with the same reflexive outrage that I lavish on all bills as a matter of policy before even reading the damage. The damage in this case was spelled out in print so faint that I had to carry the invoices over to the divan, in order to determine in the light through the window if the totals sounded reasonable. Two hundred and thirty francs, one said. Was that a lot?

My brain was still calculating when it struck me—
quelle idiote!
—exactly what I was doing: straining to read a utility bill in the dark. Hadn't I just completed a microscopic survey of the premises? I had found, excluding the one radiator and the water out of the tap, not the least indication of any public infrastructure whatsoever. Could the gas charge be an assessment for a percentage of the heat, a hot-water tithe? Implausible, even in implausible France, and anyway, what of the electric? There was in the entire benighted joint no wall switch, no outlet, no place to plug in a TV or hair dryer or toaster oven or table lamp, no ceiling light or wall sconce, nothing in the category of artificial illumination beyond two old glass-flued hurricane lamps parked on a shelf, which is precisely why I was sitting by the window holding out a page to catch the last drops of daylight like a child catching snowflakes on her tongue. Considering that the apartment boasted the amenities of a cave dwelling, the bill, which was clearly someone's error, seemed to have been mailed mistakenly not just to the wrong address, but to the wrong century.

I leaned back into the bolster as I mulled over this mystery, my eye idly straying from the paper in my hand to take in the evening sky, the stalagmite landscape of chimney pipes and rooftops. The evening was of the sort in which night doesn't fall so much as day ascends, lifting from the ground mist-like through a palette of finely hued heavens, from frost to orange to indigo, and above it all a single bright planet chased a newish moon across a china-bright dome that had become, when I awoke from sleep sometime later, richly black and densely peppered with stars.

It had gotten quite cold in the room. I stood up to close the window sashes before I'd really surfaced into consciousness, before I realized that I didn't know where I was. Haven't you done this, woken up in a strange room in a foreign locale and felt yourself adrift without handholds in the silence of the place that is not the silence of any place you know? At the window, in the darkness, sight mingled with slumber, and it was as though I were floating above a city, moored by the least substantial coordinates, sounds, glimpses, impressions as precise as the individual stars: a lit window across the
cour
, a puddle of lamplight on cobblestones, someone talking in a room somewhere, and from somewhere else, the thump and clink of a table being set, and each of these things spilling into the air out of different lives (the lives being lived in this building) reached my perception from far and farther places, from different times in my own life, so that the scene below me became this intricate collage, a heritage quilt of misplaced moments. I surveyed the yard with great satisfaction. Could it be? Could they really all be here, all these prodigal memories finally summoned home again, as though my past had gathered to greet me beneath my tower, under the glistening sky?

These benign bewilderings collided with wakefulness as I pulled the sashes to before at last collapsing into ordinary addlement. Then something happened that riveted my attention and drew all my reminiscences into one. Somewhere, in some unseen room, someone began playing a piano. I didn't recognize the piece right away. The player stopped and started, practicing a passage over and over. What struck me first was the persistence of the music: alone among the night sounds, it didn't dim when I closed the sashes and latched them. It still magically saturated the room and the darkness as though broadcast out of my own spinning mind. I think, in fact, that I located the melody in memory before I identified it musically, pinpointed it on a particular night before a particular doorway in Lower Manhattan where you and I stood listening on another cold hour full of comfort and wonder. Do you remember? Would you? Though the piece we overheard through the window that night was the whole thing, the full adagio, two pianos, four hands, an overwhelming culmination of sound and thought, and the playing infusing the darkness of Saxe's apartment was only one side of the duet. Hearing it was like straining to recognize in profile someone I'd met only face to face, and it took me a while to comprehend the thing I was confronting, that this was our Brahms, or half of it anyway.

You would remember, don't you? Daniel, who could have thought we would make of that sidewalk, that marble stoop so sweetly hummocked with snow, our embarkation point? We were trussed up like Eskimo and alone in that bubble of brittle stillness that cold and snow imposes. We'd only just paused to say goodbye when someone pulled the drapes aside to crack open a window of the recital salon—that they inside could be enjoying such heat that they had to let some of it go!—and a keystone of light spilled toward us. A slab of amber dropped across the blue-white snow.