The Metropolis (35 page)

“I wouldn’t care if you did,” Maria said with genuine nonchalance as she got up and went into the bathroom.

After a quick shower, she peered at herself in the mirror and was
surprised—but pleased—by who stared back: not only was she older than Maria had imagined but there was a graceful quality to the way she brushed the hair away from her face and turned the spigot on the sink, a physical maturity she would not have believed possible had she not just seen it herself. If there was something flawed about what she had done—to the extent that it was not very romantic—it struck her as a necessary flaw, rooted in a spirit of pragmatism that she would need to balance the rather many uncompromising facets of her future. She thought of Ronald in the next room, old as he was and at the height of his career, and how she had seduced him, and it made her realize that she was no longer a child, or even a student. She felt confident, as if she had mined an intuition on which she would have to rely to motivate and guide her—particularly after she left Juilliard—to practice, to choose her roles, or to make any number of other important decisions related to her prospective career. That she had discovered this in the course of having sex with Ronald, she knew, was not an accident; she saw her father’s coin, except she was not holding it in her palm thinking about nothing, as she usually did, but it was slowly flipping through the air—as when he had tossed it to her on that last night in Pittsburgh—and she could see her embossed silhouette as much on one side as on the other.

PARIS, 1870. After his arrival at the Gare du Nord, Lucien took a carriage to the Île, where he found his father about to sit down for lunch. As much as Lucien might have wished otherwise,
his gaunt expression could not disguise a continuing struggle with grief, even now, four years after Eduard’s death.

“I wish you could find a way out of this,” Guillaume said as he pulled the cork out of a bottle of red table wine. “I’m sure when you were a teenager you never would have predicted the day I would say this, but you should be singing.”

“I’ve tried,” Lucien replied, “but it’s not there—I still can’t seem to breathe.”

Lucien’s grief had not been constant; in the first days, his friends had to prevent him from jumping out the window like a trapped animal, and then he had been gripped by an irrational belief that Eduard was not actually gone, so that he ran through the apartment opening and shutting doors. During the funeral cortege, which had snaked all the way from the opera house to St. Stephen’s—an honor decreed by the emperor himself—Lucien had bit the insides of his mouth to resist the temptation to wave and laugh at the Viennese who lined the route, absently nodding with their vacant, dull expressions. This initial phase eventually gave way to a more reflective but guilt-driven state, in which he sat for hours, obsessively replaying not just the day in question but their entire past, looking for clues to exactly what had gone wrong—besides the rains and the flood—as if there were still a chance of doing things differently. He could not imagine, for example, why he had not woken up on the morning in question but managed to sleep while Eduard walked out to be shattered by a chance conversation with the emperor; and if their exchange in the flooded opera house had been a final performance, it didn’t prevent him from revisiting his lines over and over, like a mad composer writing for the dead.

Guillaume considered him for a few seconds. “When your mother died,” he said, “it was devastating in ways you now appreciate, but
there’s a limit to how many times a young child can see his father in tears.”

“How did you manage it?”

“Do you think you’re the only actor in the family?” Guillaume gently chided him. “I’m not saying I was very good, but children can be—or at least, you were—a forgiving audience. They’re naturally happy; they cry for a little while and get over it—they become distracted by their curiosity about the world and their place in it. You might even say they’re little scientists.”

Lucien nodded; it made sense, not only in terms of scientific inquiry but also with the kind of larger meaning he had always ascribed to music.

“I’m not saying it’s easy,” Guillaume continued, “or that you should act like a child—or for that matter, have one—but you have to find something. As I’ve said to you before, we only get one chance at life, so there’s a limit to how much we can squander. I’m not saying you have to sing, but if you stop trying to understand—well, then—”

“You’re dead,” Lucien concluded, and he did not protest when his father left him to sit alone in the sunlight.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Lucien had breakfast with Codruta in the main residence of the Georges, where a retinue of servants was busy preparing for her imminent departure to the Loire Valley for the summer.

“I apologize for the lack of tranquillity,” she noted with a wave of her hand at the hallway behind them, “but I appreciate you arranging your schedule so that I could indulge my continuing interest in your affairs.”

“It was far from an imposition,” Lucien offered truthfully, since he always made a point to visit Guillaume for a few weeks at the beginning of each summer. “My father was also anxious for me to see you.”

She nodded. “I won’t pretend he didn’t ask me to talk to you,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat his advice.”

“No, I don’t think so, either,” Lucien glumly agreed.

“Not that I’m questioning his motives,” she added pensively. “He’s worried about you.”

“I know—I understand.” Lucien nodded. “And I wish I could be more like him—I wish I could work through my grief in a more productive manner—”

“That can be admirable,” she offered, “but I don’t think that kind of sublimation—while suitable for a scientist—necessarily conforms to an artistic temperament, do you?”

Lucien considered this. “No, or at least not for me,” he admitted. “I want to sing—I’ve tried—but I can’t. I think back to Munich, and how at the time it felt like something crystallized in me—as a singer and a person—and though I thought it made me stronger, since Eduard, I feel like it turned me into someone I don’t want to be.”

She waited several seconds before responding. “It was a beautiful performance,” she acknowledged, “and I think it would be naïve to suppose that there would be no costs.”

“But death?”

“If you mean Eduard—absolutely not,” she emphasized. “As we’ve discussed before, you can’t hold yourself responsible for that tragedy, although I understand the impulse.” She slowly arched one of her painted eyebrows. “But I don’t think death is necessarily the wrong word to apply here, if we might remove ourselves from its more literal meaning.”

Lucien saw himself as an adolescent, nervously sipping his tea and hanging on her every word, and as he watched this vision dissipate, any sadness he felt at what had been lost was—perhaps for the first time—tempered by a relief that he was no longer
filled with such improbable hopes and ideals. “My youth?” he suggested.

She tilted her head in a way that seemed to acknowledge his response along with her intention not to reply in a direct manner, which—in keeping with his revelation—he understood was not her place. “As much as we like to think we grieve for others,” she said, “it bears keeping in mind that we are also grieving for ourselves and, above all, what has inevitably passed us by.”

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
, Guillaume—who had spent the day at the university—returned and joined Lucien in the garden. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, “about the vaccine.”

They had not discussed Guillaume’s work in great detail for some time, and Lucien was operating under the assumption that his father had done little more over the past several years than test the formula on mice, most of which still died. “What’s wrong?” he asked and then corrected himself. “Or is it good news?”

“That depends,” his father offered cryptically before explaining how a month or so earlier—desperate to get some insight—he had made the mistake of confiding in a colleague at the university about the exact nature of the experiments; had even gone so far as to show him the surviving mice. While the professor in question had been suitably impressed, he had betrayed Guillaume’s confidence, and word had since leaked out to the faculty and beyond.

“How far beyond?” Lucien asked.

“As far beyond as you can go,” Guillaume sighed. “All the way up to the emperor.”

“To the emperor?” Lucien repeated. “Are you sure?”

“Yes—I was summoned to see him.”

“You were? When?”

“This morning.”

As Lucien digested this news, the surrounding leaves seemed to turn to glass ornaments, clinking against one another in the breeze. “What—what did he want?”

“Well, it wasn’t to present me with another award,” Guillaume said quietly. “He wanted to confirm rumors about the vaccine, and whether it will work on a human being.”

“And you told him …”

Guillaume’s expression darkened. “I told him the truth, which is that I have made progress with mice—some of which seem quite happy and virile—but as for humans, there remain many questions.”

“And what did he say?”

“He wants answers—and sooner rather than later.”

“He can’t expect—”

“He’s the emperor, so he can,” Guillaume interrupted. “He was surprisingly frank with me. He didn’t pretend that things have been going perfectly from where he sits—between the food riots and the Prussians, he’s obviously preoccupied—and even offered that under different circumstances he would be happy to give me more time. But—you know how it is—given the political ramifications of such a discovery, he wants to know if a vaccine is viable.” Guillaume shook his head. “In a way I felt bad for him. He seemed very distraught—I could understand his position.”

“Meaning what?” Lucien quietly ventured, trying not to jump to conclusions.

“He wants me to test it on someone.”

“Couldn’t that be murder? Did you tell him it kills more than half the mice you give it to?”

“He wasn’t interested in statistics.”

“Then why don’t you test it on him?”

Guillaume frowned. “That occurred to me, but I thought better than to mention it.”

“Then who?”

Guillaume took a deep breath. “Me. I’m going to take it, Lucien. I know you already understand this—I could never force it on anyone.”

“He can’t do this to you!” Lucien cried.

“No? What would you suggest?”

Lucien’s mind raced as he searched his father’s face for some kind of clue. “You could drink some harmless concoction—or we could escape; we could leave this afternoon for Vienna—”

“I don’t want to leave,” Guillaume responded, in a steely voice that conveyed to Lucien he had already dismissed such options. “My guess is that the emperor would have been more than willing to let me administer the vaccine to someone else—after all, he doesn’t want me to die, since I know more about it than anyone—but I didn’t even explore the option, and had he suggested it, I would have insisted on my own plan.” He put his hand on Lucien’s knee before he continued. “I’m going to take it first, before anyone else. I had to sooner or later, and it’s time—before I’m old and frail. Look at me—I have no intention of dying—I’m much stronger than your average mouse.” His smile broadened as he gripped his bicep. “And think of what happens if it works—the possibilities! It would change everything.”

“What if it doesn’t—what if …” Lucien could not complete the sentence.

“What if I die?” Guillaume responded tersely. “Nothing meaningful is ever unveiled without great risk—isn’t that what you learned singing your opera?”

Lucien stared at his father and for a second despised him for making the comparison; he wanted to ask his father if he thought killing himself would bring his mother back to life. Then he remembered his
earlier conversation with Codruta and knew that he was no longer capable—or even desirous—of following through on such an angry impulse. He was struck by the idea that while his father’s research may have been rooted in science and logic, his obsession was a means of coping with the pain of losing his wife, his greatest loss. Like a page being lifted from the score of his own life, the insight gave Lucien new empathy, and he knew his father was right, at least to a degree; there was always an irrational, emotional component to the opera, or at least any worth hearing or performing, and one of the reasons Lucien couldn’t—or wouldn’t—sing was his continuing fear since Eduard’s death of being overcome by the dissonant chaos he had once sought to embrace. For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt more experienced—albeit more destroyed—than his father and knew that his own reservations would mean nothing to Guillaume and—given that he had no power over him—that it would only be hurtful to argue.

“So when?” he quietly asked.

Guillaume exhaled. “I want to remake the vaccine with several alterations,” he said more calmly, “to make it more palatable to the human body. Three weeks should be enough.”

“Three weeks,” Lucien repeated as he began to consider his own options. He could take the train back to Vienna, but such a choice would damn him even more than Eduard’s death to a penance of guilt. He could remain as a bystander, offering his help, but this option felt equally weak and reprehensible, particularly as he thought of his earlier conversation with his father, and what his father had done for him when he was a child. He next considered taking the vaccine and knew that doing so was the only honorable choice; the thought of his own death barely made him pause, and the even smaller likelihood that the vaccine might work—if he survived—felt too remote to be a serious consideration. He would lend his hand to his flailing
father, even at the risk of being pulled into the churning waters in which he struggled to stay afloat.

The air felt cool on his face—wet from tears—and he could detect a distant, echoing crescendo, a mounting tension that for the first time in years almost made him want to sing. “I’m here, Papa,” he whispered and then turned and kneeled, gripping his father’s shoulders as if to prop them both up. “I will take the vaccine with you.”