The Metropolis (6 page)

“God is for those who don’t know how to think,” Guillaume said with a nod. “Or are too lazy to figure out how something really works. A hundred years ago, if someone got sick and died, people would say things like ‘It was God’s will.’ Too many people are still like this.”

“Do you think if Maman were alive now and got sick, you would be able to cure her?”

“Not yet,” admitted Guillaume, whose smile seemed to indicate that he was more amused than troubled by his son’s question, “but someday, I’m sure there will be a cure for what killed her—and for every other sickness, too.”

Since his wife’s death, Guillaume had devoted his research to the increasingly validated theory that many diseases could be prevented
if molecular compounds—either derived from or resembling the pathogens in question—were delivered to the body in proper doses, allowing it to build a resistance. At the university, he worked with a team on cholera, rabies, childbed fever, and syphilis; in his new quarters, he planned to devote his spare time to an even more radical concept, albeit one that had tantalized his predecessors for centuries, namely that the most debilitating disease of all—the aging process—could also be greatly inhibited by means of a vaccine, if the proper ingredients could be discovered. As he often discussed with his colleagues, there were pockets of humanity around the world—most notably in the Ural Mountains of Russia, the Gobi desert, and the jungles of the Amazon—said to live more than two hundred years, and he believed that understanding the fauna (primarily) and microorganisms (secondarily) of these regions would eventually provide the key to bringing such longevity to the people of France.

“So does that mean we could live forever?” Lucien asked when his father explained his reasons for cultivating such exotic plants in the greenhouse; some had enormous vein-covered leaves and twisting tendrils that Lucien found monstrous, so that—while he wouldn’t have admitted such a childish fear—he preferred not to be alone with them.

“No, of course not. But much longer than we do now—assuming you weren’t killed by a bullet or run over by a carriage.”

As much as Lucien disliked school, it made him proud to consider his father making such an important discovery. “But how—how will you figure it out?”

Guillaume turned so that the reflection of the sun off his hair—once curly and dark like Lucien’s, it was now short and flecked with gray—caused Lucien to squint as he looked up. “You may have a scientific future in you yet,” he noted as he pulled his stopwatch from his pocket and handed it to Lucien. “You understand how a watch works,
with gears and dials?” Lucien nodded as Guillaume split open the stem of a rose, where he displayed the fibrous system that transported water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves and flowers. “Plants and animals—and humans—are not so different in some ways. We’re all made out of tiny parts into bigger, more complicated bodies. What I do is figure out how foreign substances interact with these parts. Certain things will make them stronger, while others make them more efficient, the way oil will prevent gears from rusting.” He looked down at Lucien and blinked. “My job is to discover what will do both.”

NEW YORK CITY, 2001. After his dinner with Jay at Demoiselles, Martin woke up fascinated by the way his head and stomach undulated, and estimated he would need at least a year to recover. It almost made him resolve never to eat or drink again, but on further reflection he decided that he felt little contrition for having indulged with barely any restraint (e.g., he had not eaten red meat) in the epicurean phantasmagoria of the four-star French restaurant. He supposed he could have limited himself to a few glasses of wine instead of the five bottles he and Jay had shared, but he remained committed to the idea that each course demanded its own selection, nor could he regret ordering the second glass of port, which the acidulous taste of the cow’s-milk fribourgeois had so clearly demanded. Jay could probably be blamed for the cognac that had accompanied the dessert tray—compliments of the establishment—with which they
had ended the meal, but Martin’s protestations had sounded weak and emasculated even at the time.

He turned his head and slowly focused on the clock: it was already after 7:00, and most sad to consider, he had a 9:15 conference call scheduled at his office. He needed to allow at least an hour for the car service downtown—he was in Washington Heights, just north of the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan—which gave him slightly less time than that to get ready. He forced himself to roll over onto one elbow so that he could reach out with his other arm for the six aspirin he had placed on his bedside table the night before, and after swallowing these with the aid of a glass of water placed there for the same purpose, he collapsed back onto the pillow, granting himself a reprieve.

He gazed into the kaleidoscope of his ceiling and assessed the situation: he was hungover to be sure, but he also detected something else lurking in his condition that was decidedly more psychological, although it did entail a faint numbness—a certain syrupy sensation—that seemed to spread throughout his body, not completely unlike what had recently been afflicting his hands, although less painful, and possibly even pleasurable. He remembered a summer day when he was thirteen years old, and how—for the first time in his life—he had woken up possessed by a similar sense of unease; he did not feel sick, exactly, but he did not feel healthy, either, as though he were a piece of leftover food on an unwashed dish.

This particular morning had arrived after seventh grade, a day or so after he had returned home from two weeks at hockey camp. He was on the screened-in porch off the back of the house, where he liked to sleep when it was warm enough, and was stunned by a sudden lack of motivation to do anything, even blink. As he looked through the mesh screen at the backyard, it seemed like every color had been bleached from the world, which itself was about as exciting as a corrugated box.

Around eleven, his mother, Jane, leaned through the pass-through from the kitchen and asked if he wanted breakfast, a question to which he responded with a blank stare. “Earth to Martin,” she said.

“What? No—that’s all right; I’m not hungry.”

“Is something the matter?”

He finally shifted his eyes in her direction. “I guess I’m tired.”

She seemed to consider this for a few seconds as she plucked an errant thread from the front of her bright orange turtleneck top. “I’m sure you are.”

Martin understood this to be a mild rebuke for having spent two weeks of summer playing hockey, so he responded in kind. “Do you think hockey is a cause or an effect of my fatigue?”

Jane responded by rolling her eyes in an exaggerated way, which—as crappy as he felt—made him smile for a second as she continued. “Okay, Mr. Cause and Effect, I’m going out for a few minutes to run errands and drop off some papers to your father. I don’t suppose you’d like to come?” Martin’s father, Hank, was second in command at the same industrial supply house Jane’s father—i.e., Martin’s grandfather—had started almost thirty years earlier.

“No, I’m too tired,” Martin said.

“Well, I suppose this officially marks the start of your adolescence,” Jane declared in an airy tone. “Maybe I’ll check in later, then? Oh, and by the way, don’t forget about those paints I ordered for you.” She smiled at him. “That might cheer you up.”

“Okay, thanks,” Martin said with more enthusiasm, but one that as soon as his mother was gone gave way to a new fog of ambivalence. Most days, he could spend hours painting a goalie mask—he had a collection of almost twenty—pleasantly intoxicated by the epoxies and urethanes, but in his current mood, the thought seemed as enticing as a game of “school” with his little sister, Suzie.

He contemplated the lazy turn of the ceiling fan until the sun
moved over the tree line, invading the porch and driving him upstairs to his room. He pulled down the shades, flicked on the power button to his stereo, and moved the arm of the turntable over to
Houses of the Holy
.

He was listening to it for the second time when his sister poked her head around the door. “Martin,” Suzie yelled, “Mom’s back and said to turn it down.”

“What?” Martin barely raised his head from where it had landed on the edge of the bookshelf after rolling off his pillow. “Get out of here.”

“She said turn it DOWN!”

Martin reached over and turned off the power, so that the whole system ground to a halt with a vicious scratch, right in the middle of Robert Plant’s howl at the end of “D’Yer Mak’er.” He eyed his sister. “Happy? Now could you please disintegrate? I’m serious.”

He went downstairs to the kitchen and ate three bites of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich his mother made for him before he decided that—definitely not up for mask painting today—he needed a change of scene. He grabbed a hockey stick out of the basement and walked over to the tennis courts at his old elementary school, but the turnout was meager, as this was prime vacation time in Cedar Village; in fact, the Vallences were leaving the following weekend for their annual two weeks at the beach in Loveladies.

On his way home he took a shortcut and ran into some freaks behind the school. “Hey, Vallence,” one of them greeted him; it was Dunfree, a tall, skinny kid with white hair.

Martin knew Dunfree from science class, where even though Martin was more of a jock than a freak, they had talked about Led Zeppelin and the Who and speculated about perpetual motion. “What’s going on?”

“Science experiment,” Dunfree answered as he blew some smoke into the face of a little sixth-grade freak as he tapped at his pocket. “Want one?”

Martin was hardly the rebellious type; he was on the advanced science and math “tracks” at school, where he always received high grades—which pleased Jane—and was considered one of the better hockey goalies for his age group in Pittsburgh, which made his father happy. He had no trouble believing that smoking was a pretty good way to get cancer and suspected his parents would kill him if they found out, yet none of this seemed persuasive when he considered the possibility of a cigarette breaking up what so far had been the most boring day of his life. So he accepted and was not disappointed by the nauseating rush that ensued a few minutes later as he picked up the basics of inhalation.

He had just finished when a second group of freaks—all girls—showed up. Among them was Monica “Kittens” Gittens, who Martin was pretty sure had “liked” him the year before, in seventh grade. After a brief debate, they decided to go en masse to check out the woods up behind the golf course, where Dunfree claimed once to have found fifty dollars in the mud.

“This is so lame,” Monica declared to Martin not long after they arrived. “Want to go for a walk?”

Martin thought about how she used to look at him in math class whenever Mr. Pethil did something stupid—he was always transcribing the equations incorrectly from the book—because she and Martin were inevitably the first to notice. Martin had “gone out” with a few girls in seventh grade, but never for more than a week, and had been a little afraid of Monica because she was friends with some of the eighth-grade freaks. But he was taller now and almost an eighth grader himself, which made him more confident. “Okay,” he said. “Where?”

“Follow me,” she said, but not more than twenty yards into the brush, she pulled him aside, away from the others. “Want to see something?”

“Is it a perpetual motion machine?”

“Don’t be a dork.” She pulled him up to her and put her face close to his, so he could stare into her irreverent eyes. “You like me, right?”

“Yeah—I mean—do you like me?”

She ignored the question. “How come you never talk to me then?”

“Because I haven’t seen you all summer.”

This seemed to please her, and when she smiled he did, too.

She brushed her lips against his. “Do you know how to French?”

“Yeah.” Martin adjusted the boner in his pants so it wouldn’t be so obvious and then kissed her for a while, far longer, in fact, than he had any other girl. Eventually she allowed him to put his hand under her shirt—he knew that guys were supposed to go for this, but no other girl had ever let him before—and rub it against her bra.

“Should I take it off?” she asked. Martin nodded, and she told him to take his shirt off, too, which he did, after which they kissed some more. “Now take off your pants.”

“Really?”

“Come on,” she said and slid her hand down and unhooked the top button of his jeans. “Unless you don’t want to.”

“No, I want to.” He raised himself to a kneeling position so that he could pull down his pants and underwear. He watched as she positioned herself in front of him and delicately wrapped her fingers around his cock. It took only a few tugs to jerk him off, but as amazed as he was to see it happen, he looked down at the ground and gulped when he realized that he no longer wanted to be anywhere near Monica Gittens.

“That was cool,” he managed while he struggled to pull up his pants.

“Was that your first hand job?” asked Monica rather clinically as she wiped her palm on the back of her jeans, down by the ankle.

Martin shrugged, not wanting to admit or deny this. “Are we going out?”

“Yeah, but I have to break up with Todd Mealy first.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Whatever you want,” said Monica, annoyed for reasons that eluded Martin, who couldn’t understand why she would ever be more interested in him than he was in her.

In his room that night, he couldn’t decide what to think. One second he would tell himself that it had actually been pretty awesome to get a hand job from Kittens, but in the next he would admit that he felt a bit disappointed, since sex in any form was supposed to be “a” if not “the” highlight of life. If the thought of a blow job or going all the way—which he bet she would do if he could get a rubber—didn’t exactly thrill him, he knew that his ambivalence was another symptom of the ennui that had been infecting him since that morning, which now seemed a hundred years away. It occurred to him that he could no longer envision doing anything—whether playing hockey, painting masks, smoking, or now fooling around with girls—that would give him any great pleasure. Not that he would necessarily object to any of the above, but if he were asked whether he was happy, or nervous, or excited in the middle of doing said activity, the answer, even in the best-case scenario, would be something along the lines of “possibly.”