I leaned across the taxi's partition. The driver glanced in his rearview. 'Take me to the New York Public Library,' I said.
Varanasi-amattagobi-halapur-geshura-nanaloo!
Heh-heh.
Two hours later I knew that the air humans breathe at sea level is about twenty-one percent oxygen. In polluted American cities such as New York and Los Angeles and Tokyo, the concentration can fall to eighteen percent. Man breathes in about eighteen cubic feet of air per hour, drawing the stuff deep into the sacs of the lungs, making his red blood cells glow as oxygen hits them, and, like a tree or a dog or a worm, returns carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fully a fifth of the oxygen we breathe is consumed by the brain. Not only do we need the stuff, we're made of it: sixty-two percent, by body weight. The lungs grow steadily in children, then quite rapidly during puberty, but also continue to grow after maximum height has been reached. In males, lung capacity may continue to increase up to the age of twenty-five. The greatest variable in maximum lung capacity is, as would be expected, the size of the person, and Jay's theoretical maximum lung capacity was probably about 680 milliliters. But in healthy people the limits of exertion are dictated by the limits of the circulation system, not by the lungs. This is why shorter people can outrun taller people and why Olympic athletes often train at high altitudes to increase their red blood cell concentrations and return to low altitude just prior to competition. For all people, however, lung capacity begins to fall after age thirty. The ability to absorb oxygen is, in fact, one of the medical definitions of aging. The downward curve in our capacity is slow, however, and, in the absence of disease, is usually gentle enough to carry a human being far into old age.
There was more. FEV, the thing Jay wanted so badly not to be obsessed with, stood for forced expiratory volume and was the ratio of an individual's lung capacity to his or her expected healthy lung capacity, given height, age, and sex. A normal FEV score is 85 or higher. The morbid effects of disease can be seen in a low FEV score. The average decline in FEV of long-term smokers, for example, when plotted against non-smokers, is quite dramatic. A heavy smoker in his fifties has often lost so much lung capacity that he or she has reached an FEV rating of 45 or 50, a score that a healthy nonsmoker would not reach until age one hundred, were he to live that long. But slowly smoking a mountain of beautifully poisonous cigarettes is not the only thing that causes a low FEV. Other causes include organic diseases such as severe asthma, cystic fibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis, and environmental irritants, including air pollution, asbestos, and exposure to toxins. These conditions can cause permanent loss of FEV by damaging the elasticity of the lungs and their ability to receive oxygen. They can also cause a reversible, mechanical loss of FEV by simply irritating the bronchial tubes, which both reduces the air that can get into the lungs and causes intense mucus secretion. Judging from the contents of his refrigerator, Jay was doing everything the books mentioned to marginally increase his breathing ability, dosing himself with steroids, bronchial dilators, and whatever else might increase his uptake and utilization of oxygen. His color, I reflected, was usually pretty good, which suggested his self-medication was successful. The inhalers, I read, reduced the sensitivity of lung tissue, and the prednisone actually shrank the tissue. Did he use these drugs constantly or just for intervention when his FEV was dropping? Put differently, what was his unmedicated capacity? That, I suspected, was pretty low- because of the enormous amount of oxygen Jay was using. An FEV below 60, in itself a very bad sign, requires supplemental inhaled oxygen, at least intermittently, and inhaled oxygen, as Jay no doubt knew, is a deal with the devil.
The more often you use inhaled oxygen, the longer you survive. People with low FEV scores on twenty-four- hour oxygen supplementation live longer than do people with the same FEV using oxygen only fifteen hours, and they in turn live longer than people using it only ten hours. And so on. But the more often one uses supplemental oxygen, the more addicted the body becomes to it, and the more constricted one's life. Clearly Jay was trying to avoid using the stuff, even in moments of high exertion- such as swinging a baseball bat, an activity that no doubt gave him pleasure and release and a sense of his former talents. This explained, perhaps, the shortness of his visits to Allison's apartment. It also begged the question of how he had sex with her. Swinging a baseball bat is a lot less rigorous than sex. Did Jay have on an oxygen mask when he was plugging Allison? That seemed unlikely. Freaky and sick, but unlikely. I kept reading. Jay probably needed a backup source of oxygen, and I wondered if the device in the rear of his truck that he used the night we moved the bulldozer might be what the books called an oxygen concentrator, a relatively inexpensive device that pulls oxygen from the atmosphere and stores it.
Because oxygen uptake tends to decrease at night, especially during REM sleep, he was probably using the oxygen tanks mostly then. The hyperbolic chamber, I learned, is used to saturate the tissues of the body with as much oxygen as possible. Its effectiveness occurs in the outer margins of measurable oxygen uptake but it does help prevent certain kinds of infection and stiffening of tissues. Jay was doing everything he could. But no matter what, the books said, FEV keeps dropping, and once it falls below a score of 11, then death is imminent. No wonder Jay was trying not to be obsessed with it.
Walking out of the library, I remembered the mail I'd shoved in my pocket and had a look at it. Marceno had discovered what was now my former address, perhaps through the New York Bar Association, and sent me a request for interrogatories, which is basically a questionnaire used to prepare for a deposition. I threw it in the trash and flipped through the rest of the mail. There was nothing coming to me that I might look forward to, so I didn't expect to see a postcard from Casole d'Elsa, a Tuscan hill town with lovely stone towers hundreds of years old. It was from my son, in his sloppy script:
Dear Dad, Mom doesn't love Robert anymore. She says we might fly to New York City. I know the difference between gelato and ice cream.
Love, Timothy
P.S. Italian kids don't like baseball.
Never have I scrutinized a document like this one. Not when I was studying for the New York State bar, not when I was checking the final contracts for the sale of a $562 million office building in midtown. The fact that Judith had taken my address with her was at least somewhat interesting. What did Judith and Timothy say to each other about me? Did they talk about me, did she ask him if he missed me, did he ask her what I was doing? And how did he know she didn't love Robert anymore? Is this why he wrote the card? Timothy had addressed the card himself, which meant one of two things; that he'd discovered my address among Judith's things, her address book most likely, or whatever trendy little electronic gizmo she used, because he suspected or knew that his communication was forbidden, which meant that he had secreted a stamp and mailed the postcard on the sly, a complicated undertaking for a boy his age. The other possibility was that Judith had simply provided the address to him, which meant that she knew the card was being sent and may well have known its message. Which meant that she sanctioned its existence, which then was a message directly to the husband she'd dumped not so long ago: Our son wants to communicate with you, and this is okay with me. Who knew?
I had an idea. I hurried down to the great sporting goods store a few blocks away, near Grand Central Station, where fathers buy their children birthday presents before taking the train home from work. The store was open until eight. I bought a fielder's glove and a new Yankees cap and packed them, with the ball signed by the great Derek Jeter, five-time All-Star, owner of four World Series championship rings, in a box marked TIMOTHY WYETH, c/o JUDITH WYETH, AMERICAN TOURISTAS EN IL VILLAGGIO D'CASOLE D'ELSA, TUSCANA, ITALIA [POSTINO: PER FAVORE PORTARE. GRAZIE]. Close enough, and not bad for a guy who hadn't been to Italy since the Clinton administration. For a return address I taped one of my new business cards to the box. Judith would scrutinize the card, see if the address was a good one, inspect the quality of the paper. If the box arrived, that is. But I liked my chances. I've been to these little Tuscan hill towns. There's generally one post office, a public servant dutifully selling stamps, weighing packages. Nobody is in a hurry but everything gets done. The winter season is the slow time in Tuscany, very few foreign tourists. An American woman like Judith would stand out.
I took the box to an international overnight shipper.
'American tourists in a small Italian town?' said the clerk.
'Yes, the husband is an executive of an American company.'
'He might be getting business mail from the States on a regular basis then?'
'Quite possibly, yes.'
'Our guy over there might know who it is.' He shrugged. 'You never know.'
Good enough. You have to shoot to score, you have to hunt to kill.
There's a nice hotel around the corner from the Public Library, the Bryant Park, and they had a room, the desk
