Too amped up now to rethink his process, he tried the next one. It was a bathroom. A couple was in the tub. Another was attempting to destroy the toilet with their ride-’em-cowboy antics. Water everywhere. Yipping. It smelled like sandalwood and patchouli. The next, a bedroom, another group fling, a more Germanic arrangement, two women on the bed, five men around the edges, pants pooled at their ankles, and what appeared to be a game of cribbage under way at the table beneath the window. Albert lingered dreamily at Vik’s side.
Hot damn, Vik thought as he reached for door number four, his fingers trembling with voyeuristic ecstasy. Alas, the room he was about to enter was virtually empty; I was the stain on that virtue, sleeping peacefully on the bed beneath a blanket of cyan TV snow, alone, unperturbed because no matter how perverse the diabolical plans in the drug-soaked brains of the partiers, by some miracle none of them, none of them, included getting it on in front of, with, or around a little girl.
So it was that with a mixture of relief and disappointment Vik parked Albert on a creaky teak chair next to a wooden statue of a Maasai herder, taking care not to wake the kid sacked out atop the coverlet. He had no idea how old I was—a little kid, that was how I registered—and he whispered to Albert that he’d be back soon. What a thoughtful boy. Having secured the addled old man, he closed the door behind him and went to find an adult who might be able to tell him where Albert, who had nothing to say on the matter, lived.
3.
Approximately three hours earlier, Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell, partner emeritus, former head of litigation, Swank, Brady & Plescher, an editor of the Harvard Law Review, class of ’26, father of three, widower, atheist, fiscal conservative, moralist, known to the tailors at Paul Stewart as Cheese on account of his habit of expelling toxic nebulas while being taped for trousers, known to the waiters at the Cosmic on 81st and Broadway as Bark (as in, tight as), on account of his miserly tipping and insistence on instant coffee (kept in a glass jar labeled AHC behind the counter, to be wordlessly delivered with one cup hot water, one spoon), magnet for single-fingered farewells, known to his grandchildren as Grumps, known to longtime residents of the Apelles as Albie, for whom co-op meetings were but a canvas on which he might paint his opinions in re the emancipated woman, the ghetto issue, the Soviet threat, the Israel issue, the New York City Department of Sanitation issue, tree huggers, the A-building lobby rug issue, the Head Peanut Hizzoner Jimmy Carter, the Transit Authority conspiracy—in short, anything that happened to tumble across the cerebral threshold of this man known to haggle over the price of Girl Scout cookies and whose five bathrooms, it was rumored, were furnished exclusively from a stockpile of four-star hotel courtesy soaps—had cried into the mouthpiece of his black Bell telephone, I can’t feel my hands!
Numbness! Tremors! Again, quaveringly: Tremors.
I have a shooting pain in my abdomen!
Tightness—(light gasping)—rib cage.
He was reading from a short monologue he’d composed on the legal pad resting on his rumpled corduroy lap, plotted to convey nothing so specific as heart attack or stroke, but leaving the door open to the possibility of a panoply of life-threatening failures of the body’s major systems. When he hung up, he tore off the topmost sheet, folded it in two, and dropped it into the drawer of the side table. He drummed his fingers on his knees, then endeavored to assume a supine position on the rug, a position he achieved with some difficulty, owing both to his age and his sedentary lifestyle, but also to the hour (it was nearly his bedtime), and, despite a healthy dose of scotch, the stiffness that set like epoxy in his joints late in the day. Some blessed mornings he found his body almost completely devoid of pain, limbs loose, his blood warmed from sleep and rippling through his veins with Balanchine-like effervescence, but now, so late in the day, he was a museum of tortures. He hadn’t been stretched out on the Oriental long when, gazing absently at the trompe l’oeil ceiling (manganese blue sky, cirrus, a few orioles in flight, elm leaves in the corners), he realized he’d neglected to pocket the slip of paper on which he’d written his final destination. And so he reversed the procedure, rolling from back to front, raising his posterior by shuffling forward on his knees, favoring the tender left one, walking his hands back into a cat’s arch, at which point he reached out to the sofa and steadied himself before maneuvering his rear onto the cushions and embarking on phase two: standing. A feat of epic proportions, he thought, that he’d remembered the paper. His memory was a junkyard, heaps of scrap as far as the eye could see.
By the time he was up, he’d forgotten why he was up.
Thus, when the ambulance crew arrived, he was still standing fully erect, still trying to recall what he was looking for, and he greeted the paramedics with a yelp of surprise that they interpreted correctly as surprise, an anomalous reaction from a man who had himself phoned for an ambulance fifteen minutes earlier, therefore diagnostically significant, confusion being a symptom of stroke, and he was quickly apprehended, strapped to an exceedingly uncomfortable stretcher, and wheeled out of his apartment sporting a grimace that the plastic oxygen mask transmuted into a knifeish smile, past the doorman Manny, who’d
