The Goldfinch, Page 66

  was stamped with a rainbow skull and the word AFTERPARTY. In a moment the desk clerk came back on. “What time will you be needing the suit, sir?”

  “Early.”

  “I’m afraid it’s already gone out. The truck just left. But our dry cleaning is same-day service. You’ll have it this afternoon by five, guaranteed. Will there be anything more, sir?” he asked, in the silence that followed.

  xvi.

  BORIS WAS RIGHT ABOUT his dope, how pure it was—pure white, a normal sized bump knocked me cockeyed, so that for an indeterminate interlude I drifted in and out pleasantly on the verge of death. Cities, centuries. In and out I glided of slow moments, delightful, shades drawn, empty cloud dreams and evolving shadows, a stillness like Jan Weenix’s gorgeous trophy pieces, dead birds with bloodstained feathers hanging from a foot, and in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

  When the doorbell shrilled into my dreams, hours later, it might have been hundreds of years, I didn’t even flinch. Amiably I got up—swaying happily on air, supporting myself on bits of furniture as I walked—and smiled at the girl in the door: blonde, shy-seeming, offering me my clothes wrapped in plastic.

  “Your laundry, Mr. Decker.” As all the Dutch did, or seemed to do, she pronounced my surname “Decca,” as in Decca Mitford, once-upon-a-time acquaintance of Mrs. DeFrees. “Our apologies.”

  “What?”

  “I hope there’s been no inconvenience.” Adorable! Those blue eyes! Her accent was charming.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We promised them to you at five p.m. The desk said not to put it on your bill.”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” I said, wondering if I should tip her, realizing that money, and counting, was much too much to think about, and then—closing the door, dropping the clothes on the foot of the bed and making my unsteady way to the night table—checked Gyuri’s watch: six-twenty, which made me smile. To contemplate the face-clawing worry the dope had saved me—an hour and twenty minutes of anguish! Frantic, phoning the front desk! envisioning cops downstairs! flooded me with Vedic serenity. Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

  Absolutely. Which was why I didn’t fret about the snippy pre-printed note Housekeeping had slid under my door (Dear Guest, we made an attempt to service your room but were unfortunately unable to gain access to…), why I was more than happy to venture into the hall in my bathrobe and waylay the chambermaid with a sinister armload of waterlogged towels—every towel in the room was soaked, I’d rolled my coat in them to help press the water out, pinkish marks on some of them that I hadn’t really noticed before I—fresh towels? Certainly! oh, you forgot your key sir? you’re locked out? Oh, one moment, shall I let you back in? and why, even after that, I didn’t think twice about ordering up from room service, indulgently permitting the bellboy to enter the room and wheel the table right to the foot of the bed (tomato soup, salad, club sandwich, chips, most of which I managed to throw right back up again half an hour later, the pleasantest vomit in the world, so much fun it made me laugh: whoopsy! Best dope ever!) I was sick, I knew it, hours of wet clothes in zero-fahrenheit weather had given me a high fever and chills, and yet I was much too grandly removed from it to care. This was the body: fallible, subject to malady. Illness, pain. Why did people get so worked up about it? I put on every piece of clothing in my suitcase (two shirts, sweater, extra trousers, two pairs of socks) and sat sipping coca-cola from the minibar and—still high and coming down—fell in and out of vivid waking dreams: uncut diamonds, glittering black insects, one particularly vivid dream of Andy, sopping wet, tennis shoes squelching, trailing water into the room behind him something not quite right about him something weird looking little bit off what’s up Theo?

  not much, you?

  not much hey I heard you and Kits were getting married Daddy told me

  cool

  yeah cool, we can’t come though, Daddy’s got an event at the yacht club

  hey that’s too bad

  and then we were going somewhere together Andy and me with heavy suitcases we were going by boat, on the canal, only Andy was like no way am I getting in that boat and I was like sure I understand, so I took apart the sailboat screw by screw, and put the pieces in my suitcase, we were carrying it overland, sails and all, this was the plan, all you had to do was follow the canals and they’d take you right where you wanted to go or maybe just right back where you started but it was a bigger job than I’d thought, disassembling a sailboat, it was different than taking apart a table or chair and the pieces were too big to fit in the luggage and there was a huge propeller I was trying to jam in with my clothes and Andy was bored and off to the side playing chess with someone I didn’t like the looks of and he said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along

  xvii.

  I WOKE WITH A snap of the head, nauseated and itching all over like ants were crawling under my skin. With the drug leaving my system the panic had roared back twice as strong since clearly I was sick, fever and sweats, no denying it any more. After staggering to the bathroom and throwing up again (this, not a fun junkie throw-up, but the usual misery), I came back in my room and contemplated my suit and scarf in plastic at the foot of the bed and thought, with a shiver, how lucky I was. It had all turned out okay (or had it?) but it mightn’t have.

  Awkwardly, I removed suit and scarf from the plastic—the floor underneath me had a drowsy, nautical roll that made me grab for the wall to steady myself—and reached for my glasses and sat on the bed to examine them under the light. The cloth looked worn but otherwise okay. Then again, I couldn’t tell. The cloth was too black. I saw spots, and then I didn’t. My eyes still weren’t working quite right. Maybe it was a trick—maybe if I went down to the lobby I’d find cops waiting for me—but no—beating this thought back—ridiculous. They’d keep the clothes if they’d found anything suspicious on them, wouldn’t they? Certainly they wouldn’t return them pressed and cleaned.

  I was still out of the world halfway: not myself. Somehow my dream of the sailboat had bled through and infected the hotel room, so it was a room but also the cabin of a ship: built-in cupboards (over my bed and under the eaves) neatly fitted with countersunk brass and enamelled to a high nautical gloss. Ship’s carpentry; deck swaying, and lapping outside, the black canal water. Delirium: unmoored and drifting. Outside, the fog was thick, not a breath of wind, streetlights burning through with a diffuse, haggard, ashen stillness, softened and blurred to haze.

  Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more sumptuous the dope, the deeper the anguish—mental and physical—when it wore off. I was back to the chunk spewing out of Martin’s forehead only on a more intimate level, inside it almost, every pulse and spurt, and—even worse, a deeper freezing point entirely—the painting, gone. Bloodstained coat, the feet of the running-away kid. Blackout. Disaster. For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds
stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

  My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.

  Chapter 12.

  The Rendezvous Point

  i.

  THE DAYS LEADING TO Christmas were a blur, since thanks to illness and what amounted to solitary confinement I soon lost track of time. I stayed in the room; the Do Not Disturb sign stayed on the door; and television—instead of providing even a false hum of normalcy—only racketed-up the variform confusion and displacement: no logic, no structure, what was on next, you didn’t know, could be anything, Sesame Street in Dutch, Dutch people talking at a desk, more Dutch people talking at a desk, and though there was Sky News and CNN and BBC none of the local news was in English (nothing that mattered, nothing pertaining to me or the parking garage) though at one point I had a bad start when, flipping through the channels past an old American cop show, I stopped astonished at the sight of my twenty-five-year-old father: one of his many non-speaking roles, a yes-man hovering behind a political candidate at a press conference, nodding at the guy’s campaign promises and for one eerie blink glancing into the camera and straight across the ocean and into the future, at me. The multiple ironies of this were so layered and uncanny that I gaped in horror. Except for his haircut and his heavier build (bulked up from lifting weights: he’d been going to the gym a lot in those days) he might have been my twin. But the biggest shock was how straightforward he looked—my already (circa 1985) criminally dishonest and sliding-into-alcoholism father. None of his character, or his future, was visible in his face. Instead he looked resolute, attentive, a model of certainty and promise.

  After that I switched the television off. Increasingly, my main contact with reality was room service, which I ordered up only in the blackest pre-dawn hours when the delivery boys were slow and sleepy. “No, I’d like Dutch papers, please,” I said (in English) to the Dutch-speaking bellhop who brought up the International Herald Tribune with my Dutch rolls and coffee, my ham and eggs and chef’s assortment of Dutch cheeses. But since he kept turning up with the Tribune anyway, I went down the back stairs before sunrise for the local papers, which were conveniently fanned on a table just off the staircase where I didn’t have to pass the front desk.

  Bloedend. Moord. The sun didn’t seem to rise until about nine in the morning and even then it was hazed and gloomy, casting a low, weak, purgatorial light like a stage effect in some German opera. Apparently the toothpaste I’d used on the lapel of my coat had contained peroxide or some other bleaching agent since the scrubbed spot had faded to a white halo the size of my hand, chalky at the outer edges, ringing the just-visible ghost of Frits’s cranial plasma. At about three thirty in the afternoon the light began to go; by five p.m. it was black out. Then, if there weren’t too many people on the street, I turned up the lapels of my coat and tied my scarf tight at the neck and—taking care to keep my head down—ducked out in the dark to a tiny, Asian-run market a few hundred yards from the hotel where with my remaining euros I bought pre-wrapped sandwiches, apples, a new toothbrush, cough drops and aspirin and beer. Is alles? said the old lady in broken-sounding Dutch. Counting my coins with infuriating slowness. Click, click, click. Though I had credit cards I was determined not to use them—another arbitrary rule in the game I’d devised for myself, a completely irrational precaution because who was I kidding? what did it matter, a couple of sandwiches at a convenience shop, when they already had my card at the hotel?

  It was partly fear and partly illness that clouded my judgment, since whatever cold or chill I’d caught wasn’t going away. With every hour, it seemed, my cough got deeper and my lungs hurt more. It was true about the Dutch and cleanliness, Dutch cleaning products: the market had a bewildering selection of never-before-seen items and I returned to the room with a bottle featuring a snow white swan against a snow-topped mountain and a skull-and-crossbones label on the back. But though it was strong enough to leach the stripes out of my shirt it wasn’t strong enough to lift the stains at the collar, which had faded from liver-dark blobs to sinister, overlapping outlines like bracket fungi. For the fourth or fifth time I rinsed it, eyes streaming, then wrapped it and tied it in plastic bags and pushed it to the back of a high cupboard. Without something to weigh it down, I knew it would float if I dropped it in the canal and I was afraid to take it to the street and shove it in a rubbish bin—someone would see me, I’d be caught, this was how it would happen, I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.

  A little while. What was a little while? Three days tops, Boris had said at Anne de Larmessin’s. But then he hadn’t factored in Frits and Martin.

  Bells and garlands, Advent stars in the shop windows, ribbons and gilded walnuts. At night I slept with socks, stained overcoat, polo-neck sweater in addition to coverlet since the counterclockwise turn of radiator knob as advertised in the leather-bound hotel booklet didn’t warm the room enough to help my fever aches and chills. White goosedown, white swans. The room reeked of bleach like a cheap Jacuzzi. Could the chambermaids smell it in the hall? They wouldn’t give you more than ten years for art theft but with Martin I’d crossed the border into a different country—one way, no return.

  Yet somehow I’d developed a workable way of thinking about Martin’s death, or thinking around it, rather. The act—the eternity of it—had thrown me into such a different world that to all practical purposes I was already dead. There was a sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from an ice floe drifted out to sea. What was done could never be undone. I was gone.

  And that was fine. I didn’t matter much in the scheme of things and Martin didn’t either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come—for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water—the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

  An act of God: that was what the insurance companies called it, catastrophe so random or arcane that there was otherwise no taking the measure of it. Probability was one thing, but some events fell so far outside the actuarial tables that even insurance underwriters were compelled to haul in the supernatural in order to explain them—rotten luck, as my father had said mournfully one night out by the pool, dusk falling hard, smoking Viceroy after Viceroy to keep the mosquitoes away, one of the few times he’d tried to talk to me about my mother’s death, why do bad things happen, why me, why her, wrong place wrong time, just a fluke kid, one in a million, not an evasion or cop-out in any way but—I recognized, coming from him—a profession of faith and the best answer he had to give me, on a par with Allah Has Written It or It’s the Lord’s Will, a sincere bowing of the head to Fortune, the greatest god he knew.

  If he were in my shoes. It almost made me laugh. I could imagine him holed up and pacing all too clearly, trapped and prowling, relishing the drama of the predicament, a framed cop in a jail cell as portrayed by Farley Granger. But I could imagine just as well his second-hand fascination at my plight, its turns and reversals as random as any turn of the cards, could imagine only too well his woeful shake of the head. Bad planets. There’s a shape to t
his thing, a larger pattern. If we’re just talking story, kid, you got it. He’d be doing his numerology or whatever, looking at his Scorpio book, flipping coins, consulting the stars. Whatever you said about my dad, you couldn’t say he didn’t have a cohesive world view.

  The hotel was filling up for the holidays. Couples. American servicemen talking in the halls with a military flatness, rank and authority audible in their voices. In bed, in my opiated fevers, I dreamed of snowy mountains, pure and terrifying, alpine vistas from newsreel films of Berchtesgaden, great winds that crossfaded and blew with the windwhipped seas in the oil painting above my desk: tiny tossed sailboat, alone in dark waters.

  My father: Put down that remote control when I’m talking to you.

  My father: Well, I won’t say disaster, but failure.

  My father: Does he have to eat with us, Audrey? Does he have to sit at the table with us every fucking night? Can’t you make Alameda feed him before I get home?

  Uno, Battleship, Etch-A-Sketch, Connect Four. Some green army figures and creepy-crawly rubber insects I’d got in my Christmas stocking.

  Mr. Barbour: Two flag signal. Victor: Require Assistance. Echo: I am altering my course to starboard.

  The apartment on Seventh Avenue. Rainy-day gray. Many hours spent blowing in and out monotonously on a toy harmonica, in and out, in and out.

  On Monday, or maybe it was Tuesday, when I finally worked up the nerve to pull up the blackout shade, so late in the afternoon that the light was going, there was a television crew on the street outside my hotel waylaying Christmas tourists. English voices, American voices. Christmas concerts at Sint Nicolaaskerk and seasonal stalls selling oliebollen. “Almost got hit by a bicycle but apart from that it’s been a fun time.” My chest hurt. I drew the blackouts again and stood in a hot shower with the water beating down until my skin was sore. The whole neighborhood sparkled with fairy-lit restaurants, beautiful shops displaying cashmere topcoats and heavy, hand-knit sweaters and all the warm clothes I’d neglected to pack. But I didn’t even dare phone down for a pot of coffee thanks to the Dutch-language newspapers I’d been thrashing through since well before sunrise that morning, one featuring a front page photo of the parking garage with police tape across the exit.

  The papers were spread on the floor on the far side of my bed, like a map to some horrible place I didn’t want to go. Repeatedly, unable to help myself, in between drowsing off and falling into feverish conversations I wasn’t having, with people I wasn’t having them with, I went back and scoured them over and over for Dutch-English cognates which were few and far between. Amerikaan dood aangetroffen. Heroïne, cocaïne. Moord: mortality, mordant, morbid, murder. Drugsgerelateerde criminaliteit: Frits Aaltink afkomstig uit Amsterdam en Mackay Fiedler Martin uit Los Angeles. Bloedig: bloody. Schotenwisseling: who could say, although, schoten: could that mean shots? Deze moorden kwamen als en schok voor—what?

  Boris. I walked to the window and stood, and then walked back again. Even in the confusion on the bridge I remembered him instructing me not to call, he’d been very firm on the point though we’d parted in such haste I wasn’t sure he’d explained why I was supposed to wait for him to contact me, and in any case I wasn’t sure it mattered any more. He’d also been very firm on the point that he wasn’t hurt, or so I kept reminding myself, though in the swamp of unwanted memories that bombarded me from that evening I kept seeing the burnt hole in the arm of his coat, sticky black wool in the roll of the sodium lamps. For all I knew, the traffic police had caught him on the bridge and hauled him in for driving without a license: an admittedly shitty break, if indeed the case, but a lot better than some of the other possibilities I could think of.

  Twee doden bij bloedige… It didn’t stop. There was more. The next day, and the next, along with my Traditional Dutch Breakfast, there was more about the killings on the Overtoom: smaller column inches but denser information. Twee dodelijke slachtoffers. Nog een of meer betrokkenen. Wapengeweld in Nederland. Frits’s photograph, along with the photos of some other guys with Dutch names and a longish article I had no hope of reading. Dodelijke schietpartij nog onopgehelderd… It worried me that they’d stopped talking about drugs—Boris’s red herring—and had moved on to other angles. I’d set this thing loose, it was out in the world, people were reading about it all over the city, talking about it in a language that wasn’t mine.

  Huge Tiffany ad in the Herald Tribune. Timeless Beauty and Craftsmanship. Happy Holidays from Tiffany & Co.

  Chance plays tricks, my dad had liked to say. Systems, spread breakdowns.

  Where was Boris? In my fever haze I tried, unsuccessfully, to amuse or at least divert myself with thoughts of how very likely he was to show up at just the moment you didn’t expect him. Cracking his knuckles, making the girls jump. Turning up half an hour after our state issued Proficiency Exam had begun, widespread classroom laughter at his puzzled face through the wire reinforced glass of the locked door: hah, our bright future, he’d said scornfully when on the way home I’d tried to explain to him about standardized tests.

  In my dreams I couldn’t get to where I needed to be. There was always something keeping me from where I needed to go.

  He had texted me his number before we left the States, and though I was afraid to text him back (not knowing his circumstances, or if the text could be traced to me somehow), I reminded myself continually that I could reach him, if I had to. He knew where I was. Yet, hours into the night, I lay awake arguing with myself: relentless tedium, back and forth, what if, what if, what harm could it do? At last, at some disoriented point—night light burning, half-dreaming, out of it—I broke down and reached for the phone on the nightstand and texted him anyway before I had the chance to think better of it: Where are you?

  Over the next two or three hours I lay awake in a state of barely controlled anxiety, lying with my forearm over my face to keep the light out even though there wasn’t any light. Unfortunately, when I woke from my sweat-soaked sleep, somewhere around dawn, the phone was stone dead because I’d forgotten to switch it off, and—reluctant to negotiate the front desk, to ask if they had chargers for loan—I hesitated for hours until finally, mid-afternoon, I broke down.

  “Certainly, sir,” said the desk clerk, hardly looking at me. “United States?”

  Thank God, I thought, trying not to hurry too much as I walked upstairs. The phone was old, and slow, and after I plugged it in and stood for a while, I got tired of waiting for the Apple logo to come up and went to the minibar and got myself a drink and came back and stared at it a bit more until at last the lock screen came up, old school photo I’d scanned in as a joke, never had I been so glad to see a picture, ten year old Kitsey flying midair at the penalty kick. But just as I was about to type in the pass code, the home screen popped off, then fizzed for about ten seconds, bands of black and gray that shifted and broke into particles before the sad face came on and clicked with a queasy down-whir to black.

  Four-fifteen p.m. The sky was turning ultramarine over the bell gables across the canal. I was sitting on the carpet with my back against the bed and the charger cord in my hand, having methodically, twice, tried all the sockets in the room—I’d switched the phone on and off a hundred times, held it to the lamp to see if maybe it was on and the display had just gone dark, tried to re-set it, but the phone was fried: nothing happening, cold black screen, dead as a doornail. Clearly I’d short-circuited it; the night of the garage it had gotten wet—drops of water on the screen when I took it from my pocket—but though I’d had a bad minute or two waiting for it to come on, it had seemed to be working just fine, right up until the moment I tried to put a charge in it. Everything was backed up on my laptop at home, apart from the only thing I needed: Boris’s number, which he’d texted me in the car on the way to the airport.

  Water reflections wavering on the ceiling. Outside, somewhere, tinny Christmas carillon music and off-key carolers singing. O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter.
>
  I didn’t have a return ticket. But I had a credit card. I could take a cab to the airport. You can take a cab to the airport, I told myself. Schiphol. First plane out. Kennedy, Newark. I had money. I was talking to myself like a child. Who knew where Kitsey was—out in the Hamptons, for all I knew—but Mrs. Barbour’s assistant, Janet (who still had her old job despite the fact that Mrs. Barbour had nothing much she needed assisting with, any more), was the kind of person who could get you on a plane out of anywhere with a few hours’ notice, even on Christmas Eve.

  Janet. The thought of Janet was absurdly reassuring. Janet who was an efficient mood system all her own, Janet fat and rosy in her pink shetlands and madras plaids like a Boucher nymph as dressed by J. Crew, Janet who said excellent! in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said Janet.