The Metropolis (36 page)

Guillaume slowly stood and kissed each of his cheeks, and in his eyes Lucien could see his own. “Great truth requires great sacrifice”—he nodded—“and today you’ve proven your capacity for both.”

O
VER THE NEXT
two weeks, Guillaume assembled several new furnaces, which along with test tubes, pans, and bains-marie all had to be tested and calibrated. Lucien was charged with water distillation, a time-consuming procedure in which barrels of water had to be boiled and strained through charcoal and slow-sand filters. He helped organize and measure vials of cinnabar and sulfur, silver and lead, and any number of vegetative extracts, including one from a Mongolian orchid that Guillaume insisted was the most poisonous substance on the earth. Once the procedures began, with a flame burning under every piece of equipment—and a wave of summer heat outside, as though a higher power had placed a magnifying glass over the proceedings—the lab became unbearable; it was a noxious jungle, dank and steaming, and Lucien could not enter without retching. Yet even in this most wretched condition, he was astonished by the speed and agility with which his father—who seemed impervious to the heat and the smell—moved from one task to the next, all the while making precise measurements and notations and recording them in his notebooks. As a spectator, Lucien understood what decades of training had brought to the fore, and while he watched, there were moments when he could not
help but be infected by his father’s optimism. Death seemed far away, as if it would be impossible for such an ordered, efficient rehearsal process to lead to anything but a successful performance. It was easy to imagine countless others around the world—whether scientists or architects or engineers or artists—undertaking the “unperformable,” making people stronger, transforming cities into taller, more formidable places, so that those who had walked the same streets even a generation earlier would not recognize the marvels they now beheld.

O
NE MORNING IN
early September, Guillaume extracted the new vaccine from a congealed mass of what to Lucien looked like a handful of dripping seaweed. He placed the liquid in a small covered flask, where it was scheduled to remain until sunset, which he had determined to be the best time for a living organism to ingest it. While his father spent the rest of the day cleaning and organizing the laboratory, Lucien stayed in the garden, trying to contain a mix of nerves and adrenaline not unlike what he used to feel before performing. What was perhaps most remarkable to him—except for the vaccine itself—was the extent to which his grief had melted away over the past three weeks; as his thoughts turned to Eduard, a part of him still longed to tell him about everything that had happened, but it was with more enthusiasm and appreciation than loss. He felt Eduard beside him, listening, observing—possibly laughing—and several times Lucien found himself caressing nearby rose petals as if they were Eduard’s lips, which made the prospect of his own death more comforting.

As the afternoon began to wane, Guillaume and Lucien went upstairs to the music salon and situated themselves in the slanting rays of amber light.

Guillaume nodded at the piano. “Do you remember the first time you saw it?”

“Yes,” Lucien answered. “I never imagined that anything could be so beautiful.”

“And do you remember what you played?”

“Of course,” said Lucien, trying to sound confident as he thought of the old French song. “I’ll never forget—and I’ll always be grateful.”

They sat across from each other and placed their cups on a low table in front of them. They had agreed that Guillaume would go first, so that Lucien could gauge the reaction and if necessary assist in the event of a problem—for example, Guillaume had discovered that applying gentle pressure on the chest of a mouse could resuscitate it—after which Lucien would take his dose.

“Don’t cry, Lucien,” Guillaume reprimanded Lucien as he took hold of his son’s hand, his expression both triumphant and doleful. “This is good.”

“I can’t help it.” Lucien tried to smile through his tears.

“I know,” Guillaume said and released his hand. As the sun passed through the line of the horizon and heaved a final sigh, emitting a few last rays of light, Guillaume raised the cup to his lips. “To life,” he offered. “To truth.”

“
Deo concedente,
” Lucien managed to whisper back as Guillaume, his eyes shining, eagerly swallowed the murky liquid.

It shocked Lucien how fast it happened, how quickly Guillaume—even before setting down his cup—fell onto the chair and rolled to the floor, where he began to convulse. Without a thought, Lucien held him down and ripped open his shirt to massage his chest as Guillaume continued to thrash for perhaps a minute or more—Lucien could not watch; it was too terrible to see his father’s expression—until the convulsions subsided and there was no more than a periodic twitch. Lucien let go and raised his eyes to his father’s face, hoping for the best but knowing as soon as he saw Guillaume’s
eyes, glassy and hard, staring past him, that something was wrong; he shook his father by the shoulders and placed a finger on his neck—searching for a pulse—and then an ear to his mouth, but felt nothing, no trace of breath. He collapsed onto his father’s chest, tears blurring his vision, listening for some echo of a heartbeat, some sign that his father—who only minutes before had spoken to him, had reassured him that everything was going to be fine—was still alive, but in the stillness of a dark, empty house, he found only more proof that Guillaume was dead.

Lucien looked at Guillaume and saw no trace of torment; his expression resonated with peace and even determination, as if his ideals hovered like angels in the moonlight, guiding him forward. To see his father like this filled Lucien with rapture as he considered the irrefutable end of his own grief. Without another thought, he stood up with his chin raised—as if to sing his final aria—and spun around to face the pale twilight streaming through the windows. He offered a short bow to his imaginary audience, put the cup to his lips, and drank, swallowing many times before it was emptied.

He heard glass shatter but he could no longer see; he tried to move and could not. The liquid seemed to turn his stomach to ice, an effect that quickly spread into the rest of his body, so that each thump of his freezing heart sounded like the strike of a kettledrum in a vast hall. He had entered a world unlike anything he had ever imagined, and as a blue tint encroached on the edges of his vision, he feared that he would soon behold Lucifer perched on his throne to dictate punishments for the new arrivals. He remained paralyzed for what seemed like an eternity, or even two, and only after he detected the crash of continents and the resulting eruption of mountains did his heart begin to beat; slowly at first and then faster, until the icy torment he had already endured became a forgotten past and like Pyrrhus and Attila he was delivered into the boiling Phlegethon,
doomed to flail in a river of lava. His bones and arteries disintegrated into a glutinous mass and he begged for relief from whatever caused this agony, until in his futility he was merged with the sun and then cast out like a beam of light into the remote beyond, and only when this crossed his mind—this nothingness,
néant
—did the pain begin to ebb, as if someone had turned off a spigot. He felt snow falling, melting away one flake at a time in his slowly pulsing blood.

NEW YORK CITY, 2002. It was just after five o’clock, and the January sun—shifting north after the winter solstice—was about to set. Martin contemplated the ember tones reflecting off the ice patches on the Hudson and allowed his eye to drift up to the arched towers of the George Washington Bridge, grandly backlit in the manner of a Parisian monument. Now into his fourth month of retirement, he did not cultivate a routine, although he didn’t resist one, either. Besides taking care of the cats, he let himself be occupied by small tasks, e.g., alphabetizing his records, reading his favorite Schopenhauer passages, trolling eBay for missing pieces in his silverware pattern (Gorham Hanover), or perusing alpine plant catalogs. Some days he went for walks in Fort Tryon Park or—if the weather was bad—took naps in the afternoon, a luxury that still seemed pleasantly unimaginable after so many years in an office. He spoke to his sister on the phone and several times met Jay Wellings for lunch or dinner downtown. He almost never thought about his old job, and his chronic health problems had improved if not disappeared entirely.

With a thought to follow through on his exploration of a
longer-term relationship, he had imposed a moratorium on the shorter kind. Having taken no other steps to make a longer relationship happen, he knew something was holding him back, though whether habit or history—or more likely, some combination—he could not yet say. In the first few months after 9/11, it had seemed “too soon” to date, but he was starting to acknowledge that the expiration had passed on that particular excuse.

“You just hate not being good at something,” Suzie said to him when he admitted his failure to answer even a single “LTR” personal ad, as he had resolved to do. “I call it big-brother syndrome.”

“I’m not very good at gardening, either,” Martin replied, “and I don’t have a problem admitting that.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but the difference is that because of other things you’ve done—hockey, law, whatever; things that don’t require so much emotional investment—you can easily see how to get better. You take a class, you practice, you research, you start small and then you improve. It’s more logic than emotion.”

“So what’s different about dating?”

“Actually, nothing!” she insisted before continuing more earnestly. “It’s just that you—like many of our gay brethren—missed out on the usual starting-small phase that others take for granted, the kinds of institutionalized opportunities that allow for
healthier
and more stable romantic relationships.”

“You’re using your Ph.D. voice.”

She ignored him. “The point is, at your advanced age it feels kind of ridiculous—especially for such a ‘man’s man,’ ” she added slyly, “to own up to your lack of skill in what is effectively an art.”

“Okay, that’s enough.” Martin laughed. “I think I’ve been schooled enough for today.”

“Small steps, big brother—small steps.”

…

A
S
M
ARTIN CONSIDERED
his sister’s admittedly sensible advice, he remembered something not entirely dissimilar that Leo Metropolis had said to him years earlier. This was the same afternoon he had bought the house, i.e., the day after seeing
Tristan
for the first time and meeting Leo at Café Joséphine. In Martin’s memory, at least, the practical side of the transaction had taken just a few minutes; Leo had given him a tour, they had agreed on rough financial terms, and then it was more or less done. Of course there had been the usual thousands of documents to be signed and notarized, but the closing had been relatively painless; as Martin knew from his career, some deals seemed to move forward like that, as though they were meant to be. They decided to celebrate with a drink; in fact, they had been sitting on the same Biedermeier sofa on which Martin sat now, where for the first time he had been mesmerized by the western light oscillating through the glass to illuminate the gilt spines of Leo’s book collection. Leo had ultimately left many of these books behind, along with the bookshelves, two deco armchairs, a dining room set, and much of the rest of the furniture that could still be found throughout the house. Martin had kept it all and, despite his initial plans, had even left the wall treatments, including some very ornate damask wallpaper in the back bedrooms, which had initially struck him as dated and “overwrought.” As time passed, he grew to appreciate the opulent textures, which began to strike him as more disciplined and crafted than garish, and—as he did now, considering a similar pattern in the upholstery—regularly felt hypnotized by the gold and silver threading contained within, which like certain species of fish surfaced only at twilight. While there was nothing “clean” about the aesthetic, there was a constant yet subdued movement—a sort of visual white noise—that Martin understood to be musical in reference, not unlike,
say, the Paris
Tannhäuser
where Venus is about to grind her lover into a pile of dust, or even the songs of “shoegazer” bands he had long admired—e.g., My Bloody Valentine, Ride—that juxtaposed slow, turbulent beauty and ethereal dissonance to similar effect.

On the day in question, Martin had given in to a form of buyer’s exuberance that, while not completely unfamiliar to him—given the many deals he had closed in his career—was augmented by an avuncular benevolence he detected in Leo, who as far as Martin could ascertain was close to twenty-five years older than he was. That they were both gay was a dimension here as well and, as Martin knew, hardly unusual given how often gay men left—or were forced to leave—their actual families for those who were more capable or understanding (or in his case, were alive); in this respect he understood that Leo was willing to mentor him in a manner that Martin was happy to accept. “So—you and Arthur,” Martin asked, “are you really—”