as it bleeds slightly into the two folders Polly has brought to dinner, one with preschool applications and the other aimed at helping me set up a 401(k).
“I have a tumor.”
I push my neck forward. I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly.
“You know how I’ve had trouble sleeping, the headaches, that mistake I made in my presentation last week at the investment conference. .”
“That’s just the pregnancy, the hormones.”
“The baby is fine, Nathaniel.”
“Stop it.”
“You’re going to be a father. You’re going to be a great one. You’re going to teach him how to throw and catch and make great but judicious use of adjectives and, you’ve got to promise me, to also add and subtract. He’s going to need some practical teaching along with your romantic leanings.”
“Polly. .”
She looks at me now, square. I know this look, the one she gives investors when she’s reached her bottom line.
“It’s in my brain, and its Stage Three and it’s inoperable, at least until this bundle is born, and they can’t do chemo because it could. .”
Almost as if from a distance, I hear myself say: “We can make another baby, another time. We have a lifetime. When the life of the mother is at stake, the baby takes second position.”
“There’s a chance we’ll both survive, a reasonable chance. We’ll schedule an early C-section so I can get care as soon as possible.”
“How can you be telling me this now!” Less question than accusation.
“It happened so fast. I found out two days ago. I’ve been in disbelief and denial.” She shakes her head, almost bemused. “I wonder if you’re right: maybe all the deal making on my cell phone radiating my brain. Don’t let our baby boy press the device to his head.”
The limping waiter appears with a plate bearing a second fortune cookie. I wave my hand. We need privacy. I hate this man, the bearer of the empty fortune cookie.
He sets down the plate and scurries. Polly reaches for the cookie. She’s got tears rolling down her cheeks. She cracks open the fragile brown pastry.
She holds it in her hands. It’s empty. Just like the first.
“Bad batch.” She smiles a smile I’ve never seen before. It looks 90 percent effervescent but, at the same time, terribly empty, a 100 percent black void.
In the present, I see only intensifying drizzle, the foul San Francisco fog, the shroud of death, weather just like the night that Isaac was born.
I picture the ambulance unloading Polly at the emergency room after she’s passed out in the family room of the loft I later inherited. They rush her to labor and delivery for a C-section a month earlier than planned.
“Isaac,” Polly says as she goes under, then goes terribly pale. She gasps. Beeping, shouts, I’m pushed aside.
I went to medical school. I should be able to do something. I’m not just a writer, not just a romantic, a chaser of conspiracies and weaver of disparate ideas, a synthesizer, blogger, storyteller, seducer of sources and readers. I’m not just a neurotic who can identify medical conditions like some
After that, it’s all a dream. Isaac appears, crinkly and pink, but not pink enough, white, if I’m honest. I touch his pale arm, waiting for the wailing. A nurse gently pushes my arm away while sterilized hands and blazing figures in blue and green scrubs bob and weave and take the fight to the death. In the midst, helpless with my medical degree, a chronicler of life and conspiracy, I pull out my phone. I snap a picture of Isaac’s first and only moments on Earth. That is my helpless act, a memory, I tell myself, to share with Polly when the world rights itself.
There’s a knocking sound.
I spring upright.
The man with the crooked smile stands at the window. He wields a knife he’s been using to tap the glass. In his T-shirt and off-center San Francisco Giants cap, with his crooked smile, he’s the devil-may-care.
Polly is dead. Isaac never had a chance.
What can this man possibly do to me now?
49
I open the door. At his silent urging, I reach into the front seat and snag the Juggler and hand it to him. I stand. I pull the brain images from my back pocket.
“There’s more,” he says.
“Of course. But not here.”
Knifepoint aside, he’s more genial than I remember, stocky, but an ambler, like a guy trundling to get a beer from the fridge.
I walk a step in front of him, hands jammed in pockets, where I feel my keys and the phone they mingle with. Weapons? Hardly.
It’s anger that wonders these things, not hope. The future no longer matters.
I walk up a modest grade, soil and chunky rock beneath my feet, trees becoming denser as we ascend Mount Davidson.
“Where’s Faith?”
“Safe and very comfortable. Comfy.” He’s trying out the vernacular. “She spent the night at the Mandarin. Keep walking.”
The Mandarin. One of San Francisco’s nicest hotels.
I trudge, my feet sinking slightly into the damp soil, winding up the hill into what is becoming a veritable rain forest, surrounded by thickening English and cape ivy and blackberry bushes. It’s the lush green, primitive San Francisco that lies beneath the crisp green money and the organic lettuce. My vision glazes over but in my mind’s eye I can clearly see the whole mystery, not the mystery involving Leviathan, Faith, Alan Parsons, the girl killed by the Volvo, the Juggler-that remains hazy-but my own mystery.
Polly died the night Isaac was born. Isaac died hours later. I plummeted into disbelief and grief. I poured myself into work. I became surrounded by sympathy, even from the cops who once hated my zeal for undoing authority. Every compassionate touch felt like a burn. I can see now the Witch pleading with me to come to terms with my loss, trying everything. That’s why she wanted to share an office with me, so she could monitor me, cajole me, albeit gently and with her witchery. She lit candles, offered temple massages and patiently, without comment, took down the picture of Isaac that I’d emailed myself from my phone and printed out and, inexplicably, tacked to the wall.
Finally, relenting, I agreed to see Wilma, a therapist. Less Witchery, more Freud. I said I was going because I just didn’t feel like myself.
For months, I wouldn’t talk about Polly. Our relationship was so brief that she never really happened, we didn’t happen, Isaac hadn’t really come into this world, just stopped by in transit, so what was the point in talking about it?
But in the last few weeks, right before the subway incident, I started to feel something different. Grief. Raw emotion. I started to see Polly and Isaac not just as another dream deferred but as a connection severed, one I’d spent a lifetime trying to make. I left med school because the practice of medicine was too barren and impersonal. I’d pursued writing, a lifetime of poor-man’s poetry through prose. And I’d found my muses in Polly and Isaac.
Then I got smacked in the head. Concussion. The fresh wounds of realization paved over by blunt-force trauma. My new neurons of grief commingled with nine months of denial, giving rise to a twisted fiction in which I’m separated from Polly, living in her former house, driving her car, but somehow still connected to her and Isaac, whose toy bouncer remains unused on the floor of my living room.
