A Book of American Martyrs(149)

“I missed you—in the ER. When they brought me in. They thought that I was dying, they said I was dehydrated, anemic . . . Why didn’t you come to see me there . . .”

Crying so hard, she could no longer speak.

Jenna begged her to stop crying—“You will make yourself sick, Naomi.”

But Naomi couldn’t stop crying. She could not understand why she was crying when she was not unhappy; when in fact, she was very happy.

The happiest she’d been in years.

Still, she was crying. Hoarse wracking sobs. And Jenna was saying she would have to hang up, if Naomi didn’t stop.

“Then hang up! Hang up the fucking phone! You know that’s what you want to do anyway! Hang up!”—Naomi screamed.

Slammed the receiver down, hard enough so that it clattered onto the floor where she gave it a little kick.





HATEFUGE


Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate until it is burnt away, until it has lost its meaning, until you are transformed, until you are not even you but another





“EMPTINESS”:


JANUARY 2007


There is an emptiness you can’t see—where the twin towers were. Unfortunately, I can see it.”


WHAT A VIEW! Naomi had not ever before stared from a window at such a height in a private residence, a floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window, looking miles into the distance, to the very end of the island.

Clouds in the sky horizontal, shredded and thinning. A crescent sun like a bloodied egg poised to sink into the horizon.

Standing so close to the window she felt a wave of vertigo. She could feel cold emanate from the glass. She was on the thirty-first floor of her grandmother’s apartment in the West Village, New York City. Her gaze swung downward to the street below—(what was its name? West Houston?)—then up again swiftly to flat rectangular rooftops seen from above, water towers, church spires, high-rise buildings columnar and dazzling in the late afternoon sun that stretched for miles, to lower Manhattan and beyond.

She was nineteen years old. That was an accomplishment—just still being.

It was a hiatus in her life. Still in the aftershock of her father’s murderer’s death. Still stunned by her fury that had the power of black bile to boil up into her mouth, leak out of the corners of the mask-mouth at unpredictable times.

And then, mid-winter of what would have been her third year at the university she’d been invited to stay with her grandmother Madelena Kein whom she scarcely knew, for a week or more, in Madelena’s apartment in the West Village, New York City.

Out of nowhere, the mysterious and elusive Madelena had contacted her—If you would like to speak of your father, dear Naomi. If you are still interested.

Of course Naomi was interested! She was consumed with curiosity but also with dread of what her father’s mother might tell her.

Within the Voorhees family Madelena Kein was a remote and glamorously forbidding figure. She had left her husband Clement when their only child was young and had lived for decades in New York City. She’d been a graduate student in philosophy, and then a professor of philosophy and linguistics; she had written many essays, reviews, and books, esoteric and demanding and difficult of access for a general reader. She had not remarried but was known to have had a succession of lovers. She was known to be sharp-tongued, sardonic. She did not soften her words. Her wit could be slashing. It was rare for her to return to the Midwest to visit, and rarer still for her to invite anyone among the relatives to visit her.

But Madelena Kein was capable of sudden—unexpected—acts of generosity. Over the years, somewhat randomly, she’d sent gifts to her grandchildren for Christmas, birthdays. She’d endowed a residency at the University of Michigan Medical School, named for Augustus Voorhees. In recent years she’d become more attentive to Naomi in particular as if, nearing the end of her own life, she’d taken a renewed interest in the lives of others.

Or it may have been, the loss of her only son had profoundly shaken her.

There were no photographs of Gus in the apartment, that Naomi had noticed. Of course, she had seen only a few rooms so far; she had not seen Madelena’s bedroom.

The room in which Naomi was to stay, one of several bedrooms in the apartment, was not a large room but appeared large and airy, with three white walls and one wall that was a plate-glass window looking out, it seemed at first glance, into blank bright air.

The view outside the window—stretching to the horizon, lifting to the sky, plunging below into the street—was mesmerizing to Naomi. She could stare, and stare. She could lose herself in staring. Her brain that often felt wounded, as if with tiny bits of glass, felt peaceful here, after only a few minutes of such solitude.

A consoling thought came to her—I am closer to him here. My father.

Something about the height. The sudden distance her vision was thrown, that was so usually blocked within a few yards. In most urban settings you can see only a short distance and soon you come to forget that your vision is unnaturally foreshortened.

But at this height there was nothing to impede vision. The sensation was, you could see past all earthly things.

That was foolish of course. That was “primitive thinking.” She’d been trained not to think in such a way. Her mother would be shocked. Her father would have laughed.