How did it all start? Me, six years old, at a party, asleep on the Vornados’ guest bed, the coverlet imprinting my cheek and arm with arpeggios of pointillist nonsense, the TV accompanying my heavy, magnetic sleep, my brain dreamlessly emitting spindle waves, delta waves, my consciousness a receptive void. Vik deposited the old lawyer Albert Caldwell into that same room. After Vik left, Albert lay down next to me. He took my hand and he bestowed on me the archive of his life. I had within me a new landscape, both unusual and instantly familiar, as though I’d been on a dark trail all along, following his bootheels. I had become a file cabinet for Albert’s history.
So it would seem that Albert carved himself a snug little slot in my head. I have his memories, but the fog blurring his final year obscures his intentions. I can only speculate. Maybe he meant only to hold my hand, to establish a human connection as his final act on earth. Albert was a difficult man, short-tempered, intolerant, made wicked by the erosion of his reason. Yet it’s possible he meant me no harm. Albert, being Albert, would point out that intentionality is the only means of judging his actions.
For as long as I can remember, Albert has been with me. I know things about his family that even his children do not know. His life with Sydney. His life before Sydney. The smell of Langdell Hall, the sound of law students’ fingers on the pages of those old books. The terrible power his father held over him. The pervasive calm of standing among horses on the farm where he grew up. The infant faces of his children. I have questioned his surviving children, and I have known the answers before they’ve spoken.
We absorb our parents’ grief whether that grief is spoken or not.
The workmen across the street have finished their breakfasts and gone inside the building. They begin work at 8:00 a.m. Soon they will be on the roof, where they’ve been banging on the HVAC units all week. They will have the best view in the city, but there will be no gifs of the incident passed around social. No conspiracy theories will coalesce around mismatched metadata from one of their phones, somehow calibrated incorrectly, out of sync with central internet time, an outlier, a time traveler, a visitor from another dimension. They will deliver no eyewitness accounts to brisk reporters with sharply parted hair. No helicopters will arrive to provide the bird’s-eye view. No wailing fire engines at the curb. No one will claim to have seen black-suited men fleeing the building. But there will be reverberations. One of the workmen might inexplicably return to the religion of his childhood. One might begin a study of geology. Another might quit the trades and move to Jamaica. They will not know it, but they will bear witness to my act of genesis.
2.
Poor, sweet Vikram Patel. A boy of thirteen, all wrists and ears, a good son, studious, generous with friends, helpful around his father’s office, solicitous of strangers in need, respectful of his elders, just the wrong package entirely. A calamity, when you come right down to it. It was on Vik’s arm that Albert Caldwell entered the stately lobby of the Apelles, whereupon the two found themselves on the rump of a mob, a steaming mass of humanity, everyone dripping with melting snow, their cross-country skis, poles, snowshoes, toboggans, sleds clattering and barking against the marble floor with each forward surge.
Everyone but Vik and Albert had assembled for a party. Everyone but Vik and Albert was wearing party-conducive vestment, genre choices informed by a murky matrix of personal politics, pharmaceutical proclivity, alma mater, what was on the closet floor from the not-so-distant New Year’s: gorilla suits, tuxedos, deerskins, accessories, and headgear straining the walls of plastic Fairway bags and waxed canvas backpacks—Viking horns, Coneheads, habits, the inevitable Afros, stovepipe hats, Iron Eyes Cody headdresses. Many had traversed great distances, their sufferings a sign of their devotion. Those from the east had braved the tundra of Central Park, those from the south, deep drifts, a persistent headwind. And those hearty souls who had descended from points north had embarked on a passage that would have ensured their murders on any other night of the year. They had come on foot across the frozen wastes of the city, and every last one of them was now jockeying for position at the elevator doors, each car of which could accommodate, in a configuration that would have pleased an orgy efficiency officer, twenty adults, give or take.
Albert was shivering with such violence that he appeared to be vibrating. Vik had only just met the old man. Had the two been better acquainted, he would have been suspicious of Albert’s acquiescent behavior. Oh, waters, said Albert. Oh, stars! These were the last words he ever spoke aloud. He had gone down through a trapdoor, vacated the premises, mentally speaking, while Vik pogoed in hopes of putting eyeballs on a doorman or porter, someone who could help. No surprise to him, a watchful kid, that the inside of so grand an apartment building was a complete nuthouse, but didn’t he expect a zookeeper or two, a uniform who might acknowledge him, even if only to ask what the hell he thought he was doing there? There had to be someone in charge.
A howl of snow poured through the lobby door behind them, more bodies squeezing Vik and Albert against the wall of people in front of them, the sudden weather on the assembled mass inciting screams, hoots, cheers. And, Ding! the elevator thunk-rumbled open, inhaled a nostril full of partygoers. Whining expletives, more hoots, dramatic screams of Rape! and soprano trills as fingers goosed and rumble-thunk Get those fucking skis in! as the doors did their rattling chomping thing and heavenward groaned another muzzleful to the Vornados’ penthouse.
Vik, who’d sacrificed
