The Metropolis Case Read online

  7

  Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To

  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 tall
er 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.”

  He wondered if all adults felt this way and just lied about it, and if the most he could expect from life was a flicker of whatever was supposed to make it worth living. The question made him feel weak and dissatisfied until in the next second he concluded that to experience this type of ambivalence—and more important, to be conscious of it—was, if you could look at it from another angle, sort of a revelation, because at least you could pinpoint a few things that didn’t make you incredibly happy, which in theory should expand the pool of things that might.

  ALMOST THIRTY YEARS later, Martin grew aware of the bleating alarm clock. It was beyond time to get up, and even though the aspirin had effectively transformed his hangover into a distant and not entirely unpleasant thud, he felt troubled by many things: it was 7:45, and he was running late to a job—and a career—that no longer thrilled him; he was now forty-one, which for all intents and purposes made him a senior citizen in gay years, and which—though he had never had any trouble before—made him worry whether or not he would still be able to attract the kind of man, almost always younger and without exception thinner, he tended to prefer. And while he was rarely inclined to regret being single, this, too, was beginning to feel like a liability as he considered the vague outlines of his future. Or if being single wasn’t a liability—because he frankly enjoyed the freedom it offered—the uncertainty he felt, in either case, demonstrated how complicated the variables of time and experience made the calculation of what made life worth living.

  Given all of this, he would not have predicted that he was about to launch himself off the bed to face the day—his birthday—with a smile. Yet to his own surprise, this is what he did. On his feet, he wobbled for a few seconds with a hand on the wall and considered that, if nothing else, at least he could state with greater certainty any number of things that did not make him happy, e.g., sex with men who didn’t kiss, extreme temperature fluctuations, postwar American political hegemony, and the color beige, to name just a few. He pinched the ends of his fingertips and was relieved to feel them; after staggering to the bathroom, he presented himself to the mirror, where he pulled his face back and forth and rubbed his hands over the silver-tipped hair of his buzzed head.

  “I look like shit,” he admitted but detected something in the air—if not redemption, at least curiosity and maybe even some desire—which no doubt explained the mischievous glint in his slate-blue eyes.

  8

  The Diary of One Who Disappeared

  PITTSBURGH, 1965. By the time Maria was five years old, she had developed an amazing ability to sing in Italian and French. “Chants, mon petit oiseau,” said Bea, who reverted more and more to her native French when she spoke to her granddaughter, as though it were the language of children, and Maria would almost always oblige, offering up any number of things she had memorized from the records that were always playing.

  As much as Gina appreciated her daughter’s talent and her mother’s encouragement—which mirrored her own—she was bothered when Bea told Maria that the best singers gave their voices to God. Gina was starting to hate church; nothing Father Gregory said resonated with her, and she could barely listen as he droned on about the evils of communism and the deteriorating moral fabric of a country where so many young people had clearly fallen into league with the devil. I’m one of them, Gina thought as she visualized her own nonprocreative acts in the bedroom. Even the memory of his voice—nasal and all-knowing—made her skin burn, so that she feigned sickness on many Sundays as the rest of the family got ready to go to mass.

  “This is how you thank the good people who brought you this child?” Bérénice whispered to her daughter’s unresponsive back on one such morning.

  “Ma, drop it,” Gina whispered back. “I’ll go next week.”

  Because she didn’t want to influence Maria negatively, however, Gina didn’t stand in the way when Bea brought Maria to church, sometimes three times a week to make up for Gina’s neglect. Nor could Gina deny that Maria seemed to love it; nothing outside of La Bohème made her happier than to sit in a pew transfixed by the agonies of the wasting man nailed to the cross, or to allow her eye to wander between the stained glass and the antiquities that glinted in the filtered sunlight as if placed there by the hand of the Almighty Himself.

  At home Maria spent hours leafing through Bérénice’s saint-and-martyr tomes, dreaming of the day when she, too, might be pierced with iron hooks, mauled to death by beasts, or burned at the stake. Bea taught her prayers in Latin, the holiest language of all, dressed her up as a nun—a venial sin in comparison to the indulgences Bea could expect to receive for indoctrinating her precious
Maria into the faith—and together they would recite the litany: “Mother, hear me, immersed in woes! Ave, Mater dolorosa, martyrumque prima rosa, audi vocem supplicis,” Maria cried, having memorized it.

  “Fac, ut mortis in agone, tua fidens protectione, iusti pacem gaudeam!” Bérénice responded, as her black eyes beamed out of her wrinkled face with the fervor of salvation, though her command of the English was not so strong: “Only a death and agony we peace for our soul!”

  They played this game until they collapsed onto the floor weeping, at which point they would crawl into each other’s arms, overjoyed with the promise of divine redemption. Though the five-year-old Maria did not yet grasp the literal meaning of these incantations, she understood that, by repeating and memorizing whatever Bea placed in front of her, she was acting, which gave her a certain power over her grandmother, who most assuredly was not.

  Gina suspected as much. “Ma, she only likes the costumes,” she protested to Bea. “Why don’t you play house or school with her?”

  “What mother ever complained that her daughter prays too much?” Bérénice replied. “Besides, you think I make her to do this?”

  “No, but she sees you and—”

  “So now we’re ashamed?”