The index of self destru.., p.47
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 47
She would have to start almost entirely over. It would take a long time, maybe years, before anything really worthwhile came of it. Perhaps that day would never come. But she needed to take that risk. She would leap without knowing what lay on the other side. She’d get a job in a bookstore or waiting tables somewhere, and she’d write. Not for her father’s sake, not for Richard’s, but for her own.
She looked up from this reverie to find one of the movers—the largest one, who seemed to be in charge—standing in the hall outside her door, slightly out of breath, waiting for her to take notice of him.
“We’re pretty much done downstairs,” he said. “What would you like us to start on next?”
“You can do that room,” Margo told him, pointing in the direction of her father’s office. “Just give me a second.”
As she walked down the hall to get Frank and take him upstairs, she imagined that she’d have to explain everything over again. She was starting to realize how hard the transition would be. He’d wake up every morning in the new apartment and ask her where they were, when they were going home. Before she opened the door, she heard the TV playing World Series highlights for probably the fourth or fifth time since she’d placed him in front of them, and when she walked in she looked instinctively at the screen, so she didn’t immediately register the condition of the room. Dozens of books had been taken down from the shelves and left on the floor. Some were in neat piles, others just thrown about. He might have been trying to pack his things. She found the idea oddly moving, though on further consideration it seemed more likely that he’d been pulling things down in a kind of tantrum.
She went upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, which was also a mess. Her father’s clothes had been taken out of the closet and tossed onto the bed, along with more books. There was still no sign of him.
On her way downstairs, she ran into the men bringing boxes and packing paper into Frank’s office.
“Have any of you seen my father?” she asked.
“Not since he went out,” one of them said.
“Went out? When was that?”
“I’d say an hour ago. He went out with a bag in his hand.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
This was a stupid question. Frank was a grown man, and Margo hadn’t asked them to look after him. She hadn’t thought to worry that he might run off.
Plenty of times over the past month she’d put him in front of a ball game. He’d happily spent entire evenings that way. But all the packing had obviously upset him. This development annoyed more than worried her. He’d lived here for forty years, and his long-term memory was still intact. He’d find his way back. If anything, she’d have to worry about his finding his way here for months to come. What bothered her was what the mover had said about Frank carrying a bag when he left, as though he meant to run away somewhere.
Before heading out, she gave the movers her number and asked them to call if her father showed up. She turned uptown at Madison, retracing one of the walks they often took. She walked for a few blocks before she admitted that she was wasting her time. He’d already been gone more than an hour, and he could have gone anywhere. She wasn’t going to find him. She considered calling the police, but that seemed a bit dramatic under the circumstances. He didn’t have dementia, exactly. He didn’t have a history of getting lost. He wasn’t a danger to himself or anyone else. He’d just gone out without telling her. Was that something you were supposed to call 911 about?
He’d work his way back to the house before long, having forgotten why he’d ever left, and it would only make things more difficult if she wasn’t there when he arrived. All she was doing was wasting time that she needed to spend packing.
She returned to the house, where the men were still at their work. She didn’t ask, but she could tell from their chastened expressions that Frank had not returned. She went back to her room. She had plenty more packing to do, but she found herself picking up the notebook she’d left on the bed. She turned to the first empty page, as though she might convert the anxiety she was feeling now into something there. She was so out of practice. She didn’t know how to begin. She was still looking at the blank page when her phone buzzed with a call from Eddie, probably checking in to see how the move had gone. She should have called him herself, but she hadn’t wanted to make too much of the thing. She was relieved to have an excuse to tell him what had happened.
“I’ve got Dad,” he said abruptly before she could start.
Had Frank wandered his way down to the Lower East Side looking for his son? It didn’t seem possible. She didn’t think he had any idea where Eddie lived.
“Where is he?”
“New York General.”
“What happened?”
“He walked in front of a cab. He was fine in the ambulance, but then his oxygen levels started to drop.”
Eddie’s voice trailed off. He sounded like he was crying, something he didn’t do in the way that she and Frank did, so she knew it was serious. Right away she started crying, too. It was her fault. She’d said that she could take care of him. She’d insisted on it. And she’d let him walk into traffic.
“Is he all right?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I don’t think so. You need to get over here.”
She ran straight out the door, this time without telling the movers anything. She didn’t pack a bag; she didn’t even put down the notebook or throw on a coat. She got lucky finding a cab, but the traffic going crosstown was excruciating. Several times she decided to get out and run, but right before she did, it picked up for half a block.
In the hospital lobby Eddie waited in his EMT uniform, which she’d never seen before. She didn’t recognize him right away.
“Where is he?” she asked when he stood to greet her.
“Still in the emergency room.” He sounded much calmer than he had on the phone. “He has a pulmonary embolism. His hip and his leg are both shattered, and something got into his bloodstream and his lungs. They’re intubating now. Once they’re done they’ll bring him up to the ICU.”
He led Margo into a staff elevator, up to intensive care, where the receptionist looked through a file and told them it would be at least an hour before they could see the patient. They sat together in the reception area for about ten minutes, neither saying anything. Margo was still in shock, and Eddie looked completely exhausted.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Margo said. “I imagine you’ve got a nook somewhere in this place? This will probably be a long process, and we’ll need to take turns.”
Eddie hesitated before nodding and standing up.
“Call me if there’s any news,” he said.
Alone, Margo wished that she’d thought to bring a book—a real book, not her high school poetry. She’d have a lot of hours to get through here. She began reciting to herself. I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading - treading - till it seemed / That Sense was breaking through. This—not those books that the men had packed up today—was her father’s legacy to her. She wanted to think that he was reciting something, too, whatever he was going through right now.
She’d been waiting for about an hour when she checked back at reception, where they told her that it would still be a while.
“If you want to go out for some air,” the nurse said, “you’ve certainly got time for that.”
Margo decided to get a cup of coffee—a real cup, not the sludge at reception. Maybe also something to eat. While she was at it, she would call the movers and tell them to go ahead without her.
At the shop in the hospital’s lobby, she ordered a large coffee and picked out a muffin. She was nearing the front of the line for the register when Sam Waxworth walked through the hospital doors with a bouquet of bodega flowers in his hand. He seemed to have wandered in from an entirely different story.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He was startled into silence before saying, “Lucy was just admitted.”
“What happened?”
“She’s got Lyme disease,” Sam said. “They’re going to give her an antibiotic drip, and the doctors think she’ll be all right.”
“That’s good to hear,” Margo said.
“She hasn’t been feeling well for a long time,” Sam said, looking curiously pleased. “The truth is that she hasn’t been herself for months.”
He said it almost as though Margo had pulled some kind of trick, taken advantage of him by making him compare her to Lucy when she wasn’t at her best. Margo could see the narrative he was already putting together, in which his wife’s illness had made her throw him out, and he had sought solace in the arms of another woman, before rushing back to her side. If this was the story that he and Lucy needed to tell about these months in New York, that was just fine with her.
“Well, I’m glad she’s on the mend.”
“We’re going back to Madison,” Sam added, as though the news might be painful for Margo to hear. “I’m going to write a book.” He seemed almost ready to walk away when something occurred to him. “What brings you here?”
Margo felt very strongly that she didn’t want to stand in the hospital lobby talking with Sam Waxworth about her father. She wanted to bring her coffee and her muffin back upstairs and wait.
“I’m visiting Eddie,” she said. “He works here now, as an EMT.”
They stood in silence, both aware that they had nothing left to say to each other.
“Tell Frank I said hello,” Sam told her before they parted ways.
Back in the ICU, the nurse at reception said that her father had a room and she could see him now. She felt a surge of relief, followed by guilt. She should have stayed. She didn’t want to think that he’d been alone even for a moment when she could have been with him. She followed a nurse around the corner and down a long hallway.
“It might be a little jarring to see his condition,” the nurse said before opening the door to his room. “The important thing to know is that he’s not in any pain.”
Inside Margo saw only a curtain that was pulled around the bed, but she could hear all the noises—the beep of some machine measuring something, a pumping sound that she imagined was the oxygen being sent into his lungs. Rather than pulling the curtain back, the nurse walked Margo around it, so that they were all wrapped inside.
“Mr. Doyle,” the nurse said, “your daughter Margo is here to visit you.”
She said it loudly, but in a friendly conversational tone, as though he were sitting up, awake and responsive, but a bit hard of hearing. Perhaps it was just what nurses were trained to do when they came into a room, because he was clearly unconscious, and he made no movement in response to her words. He was laid out with his eyes closed, the tube that ran down his throat keeping his mouth open in a surprised O. Tape around his cheeks and chin held the tube in place. The light marks on his neck seemed to be something internal, perhaps caused by the tube going down, but there were more serious bruises on his face. The lower half of his body, which was where Margo had been made to understand the real damage had been done, was covered in blankets, and the mound underneath them did not look like a human form. It snaked around in stomach-churning ways. At least the feet sticking up at the bottom of the bed in their hospital-issue socks with the traction on the bottom—as though he were going to be walking anywhere in them—looked like human appendages. His arms rested lightly beside him and his chest, visible beneath the half-open hospital gown, moved up and down in rhythm with the oxygen machine. He looked so thin. Her father had always been a thick man, almost Falstaffian. It was the only appropriate shape for someone of his voraciousness. She didn’t know when he’d gotten so small.
There was a light knock on the door, and a woman not much older than Margo walked in, pulling the curtain from around the bed.
“I’m Dr. Drezler,” she said.
“Nice to meet you,” Margo answered. “I’m Frank’s daughter.”
The doctor repeated much of what Eddie had told her about the broken bones and the embolism.
“We’ve got this tube in to help with his breathing, and we’re dripping a lot of morphine now, which should keep him knocked out. He won’t be in any pain. Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do beyond that, besides wait to see if he can clear this thing out. That could be tough at his age, in his condition.”
“And what if he can’t clear it out?” Margo asked.
“It’s hard to say how long he can go on like this. Maybe days, maybe weeks.”
She didn’t say months, Margo noted. It certainly seemed unlikely that he would make it until her mother got home. Kit would probably get some kind of compassion leave, but that would take a day or two, and it didn’t seem certain that Frank would last even that long.
The doctor pulled a chart from the foot of the bed and made a few notes in it.
“Keep talking to him,” she told Margo before leaving the room. “It makes a difference.”
When she was gone, Margo sat in the chair beside the bed and took her father’s hand. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t know what to say. Mostly she wanted him to know that she didn’t want him to die. She’d spoken with Eddie about taking shifts, but she was not going anywhere. The moment she got up, even for the bathroom, he would go—she was sure of it. For now she would stay right where she was. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, she would begin her new life, the life in which she became whatever she was supposed to be without him, but for now she needed him to know that he wasn’t alone.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here.”
After another half hour, she opened the book and started to write. She knew what she was putting on the page wasn’t any good, but that didn’t matter. There was a brief stirring beside her, and she thought she saw Frank’s head turn slightly toward her. His eyes fluttered as though he was coming awake, though she knew this wasn’t likely.
“I’m here,” she said again. “I’m here.”
She sat still with the pen in her hand, poised over the page. There was so much she wanted to say, but it would all have to wait. It could get written down someday, if she had the strength for it. For the time being she could only bring out the same two words.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here. I’m here.”
6.
The week after Waxworth submitted his proposal, he got a text from Matthew Penty, the Reverberator’s reporter, who had a few last questions for his piece. Waxworth was happy to get the thing moving. Craig didn’t want to send the proposal to publishers until after the profile landed, and Waxworth wanted his book sold as soon as possible.
He went out for a walk while they spoke. Leaving the apartment, he felt almost wistful about the smell. He couldn’t say he was going to miss it, but he imagined he’d think of it often in the years to come. As he escaped his block, he felt himself slowly unwinding. He remembered getting lost in these streets in his first days in New York, before he’d met the Doyles, before he’d taken his life off track. It felt like a very long time ago. He’d been filled with all of the possibility that comes from being in a new place, with a new job. He felt this again now, but in reverse—he was on the verge of going back home, having somehow achieved his goals after all.
“Thanks for taking the time to talk with me this morning,” Penty said when Waxworth called. “This should only take a couple of minutes. I was finishing up my draft when I got an email from a reader who raised some issues. I was hoping you might be able to respond.”
Waxworth laughed.
“Some of my readers are pretty tough. But I’m happy to give it a try.”
“To begin with, he’s identified about two dozen instances of self-plagiarism on Quantified World.”
Waxworth stopped in the middle of the block.
“What does that mean?”
“Quoting previously published work without proper attribution.”
He made it sound like a grave offense.
“It’s possible that I’ve repeated myself a few times,” Waxworth allowed. “How many truly original thoughts do any of us have?”
“These accusations go a little ways beyond that. My source claims that you habitually present items from your personal blog as new work.”
Waxworth knew he had to tread carefully.
“That seems like an exaggeration.”
“So you admit that you did some repurposing?”
“No, I don’t admit anything. I’m just saying that—Can we go off the record for a moment?”
“If you think that’s necessary.”
“I wasn’t really prepared for an interrogation this morning. I didn’t want to get into it, but I’ve got a family emergency going on.”
“I’m sorry the timing is bad for you, but I’m working against a tight deadline here. If you’ve got anything to say, I’d like to hear it now. Otherwise I’m going to have to run with what I’ve got.”
Waxworth couldn’t decide how much trouble he was actually in. Penty’s source noted two dozen instances, which seemed about right. He’d written around a hundred posts for the Interviewer, which made this an error rate of almost one in four. Put that way, it sounded pretty bad. It would be embarrassing to have this included in the profile, but he didn’t think it would be fatal. He hadn’t known the rules. No one had told him he couldn’t borrow from himself. They’d add proper attribution to the posts, or else just take them down. His best bet was to go at things head-on, acknowledge some mistakes, and try to get the conversation back to the rest of his work.
“I can talk a little bit.”
