Our Country Friends(88)

Once he opened the door to their bungalow, he thought he would fall into the grace of the shadow-laden air-conditioned room. But the air felt warm and sultry in all the wrong ways. His beloved was lying on the couch beneath a blanket, her golden shins and Japanese novelty socks sticking out below, a tiny compress on the left eye reminding him of the gold coins placed upon the eyes of the dead. “Karen!” he shouted. Only it wasn’t a shout. It was a tiny squeal. She stirred miserably. Once again, as it had been for most of his life, they were together while being apart. But at least she was alive, still. He went into his room and fell on their bed. There was something he had to get out of the bottom of his luggage. That small stack of notarized papers along with a larger bundle of articles printed out in his Elmhurst studio during the earliest days of the virus. He needed only to find the will.



* * *



—

    Karen discovered the paperwork three days later. He was lying flat on his stomach in their bedroom. She had her afflicted eye closed and was wearing gloves, a mask, and one of the plastic face shields her assistant had ordered for everyone in the colony on Masha’s instructions. His suitcase was opened and looked ransacked, a torrent of black Jockey underwear and holey white socks, which she had been planning to replace when long-sock weather came around. “Vinod,” she said. There was a murmur. She heard a long wheezing sound, the accordion trapped within. “Vinod!” she shouted, shaking his leg.

“Cover me,” he said. His body shuddered lightly at regular intervals, mostly around his armpits and haunches, as if he were a cowering dog.

“Are you cold?” she said. “I’ll get Masha to come and look at you. What is this?” She picked up the papers lying next to him.

“It’s for you,” he said, each word requiring a brief intermission. He now understood the term “to catch one’s breath.” He couldn’t catch his. It kept running away from him. Now that he was marginally awake, he couldn’t lie still. His muscles were flaring, his new muscles shaped by swim and sport. What a bloody waste, he could hear a Britishly affected uncle saying, despite his best efforts still unable to shake off the years of Gujarati and Bambaiyya Hindi. At the peak of the summer, with her in his arms, with Senderovsky admitting to his lie, he had bought the myth they were all selling him, of a healthy, successful, sexually active Vinod. Ha! All roads led to his shaking haunches, to the liquefied lungs.

She drew a blanket over him and tucked it over his shoulders and toes. At the top of the stack of papers, there was a printed form. VINOD S. MEHTA, she read. And then the jumble of numbers that constituted a low-rent Elmhurst address. And then capital letters: NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. Medical Orders of Life Sustaining Treatment (MOLST).

    “Oh, fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you, you fucking idiot.” Inside the cocoon she had made for him, he kept drawing breath, his mouth opening for what looked like a dramatic inhale, but then coming up shortchanged, the hand of a child beggar in his original hometown pushed away from the windowsill of an ambassador at a stoplight. “I’m getting Masha now,” she said, but he did not hear her.



* * *



—

He was walking up the stairs, grasping the familiar curving teak balustrade. Right away he knew where he was and when he was, the massive rollicking front parlor and chef’s kitchen crammed with hungry revelers below, heavy furniture all around but the immigrant’s absence of national tchotchkes, the long bare walls miracle enough. He could hear Suj and Gender’s liberal arts friends talking about food co-ops and continuous sexual discovery. He could hear his and Senderovsky’s city-college friends, first-year law students at local midtier institutions, the three brothers that formed a Filipino indie band and then all went into advertising, a small herd of aspiring social workers and grade-school teachers, honking away in their outer-borough accents. “Vinod!” one of them said in passing, a blurry face, tendrils of dark hair, a gold chain from the unreconstructed parts of Queens, same intact accent as his own. “Where you going, yaar?”

“Help me,” Vinod said. “The more steps I take up, the more…” The more steps were added in front of him, as if he was trying to climb up a downward-bound escalator.

“Let me get Suj,” Gold Chain said. “Why don’t you take a break in the meanwhile?”

“No!” Vinod said. “I have to keep climbing.”

He kept climbing, the stairs multiplying before him. Others kept coming down the stairs, boisterous, shouting, seemingly happy people, their faces blurred in the hubbub, but he was the only one going up. Why couldn’t he just turn around and go down with them to the raucous party below?

There was a hand on his elbow. It was Suj. She had the same grievous shadows beneath her eyes as he did, the shadows Karen tried to temper with her creams. “Let’s sit down,” she said to Vinod. He had forgotten her cut-glass accent. She had gone to Goldsmiths for a spell.

    “I have to get upstairs,” he said. “Could you do something about the staircase maybe? It’s your house.”

“Why?” she said. “What’s upstairs?” She held his hand. Her fingers were long and thin. Her skin proved burning to the touch, like sandpaper left out on the desert floor, and he withdrew.