The Cloisters(58)

Begrudgingly I picked up the slice of cake with my hands and took a bite. But it didn’t matter that I ate. It didn’t matter that I drank. Because the drugs only became more powerful, as if they were only just amassing their forces in my blood, gathering strength for a full, final run. And as Leo led me back through the halls of The Cloisters, this time the light closed itself off to me, and I saw only darkness. It was coming from within me as well, a darkness I saw echoed in the saints’ fingerbones and ankle fragments, the wilderness of the unicorn tapestries and the open mouths of the gargoyles that sat along the edges of the cloisters. The whole museum, I realized—although perhaps I had always known it, always wanted to believe it—was struggling to come alive.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


I’ll never forget the way that morning appeared, the way Leo’s apartment was dark because of the cloud cover, the way I kept hoping for a clap of thunder, the release of rain. Instead, the bruised sky darkened everything below. Leo was already gone when I woke, but he had left a note—I’ll see you there—so I saw myself to the subway, where the ride was hot and my coffee bitter. Still, I was early, the drugs in my system having left my sleep fitful and restless, and I caught the first shuttle up to The Cloisters, reshouldering the weight of my backpack as I reached for the door of the staff entrance. Inside, the hallways were empty of people, but full of half-remembered events from the night before, shadows of memories I couldn’t trust. The drugs, it seemed, had caused an erasure of fact, of real events, and replaced them only with sensations, fragments of memories I had no confidence in.

I made my way to the library. Gone were the candelabras, the telltale pools of wax, the cards. Instead, Rachel’s bag sat on the table, its contents strewn at odd angles, as if hastily dropped. The door to Patrick’s office was ajar, and through the crack, I could see a foot, and only a foot, shaking rhythmically, like it was experiencing a slow tremor. Breaking the silence were racking breaths and a repeated sound, like the beat of a hollow drum.

Why I didn’t call out Rachel’s name, why I didn’t run immediately for security, I don’t know. Maybe I couldn’t see the clues for what they were—the foot, the bag, the shaking—adding up to a grotesque accident. Maybe, in that moment, I couldn’t have been sure of what was real in the wake of that night, if the drugs truly were out of my system. Instead, I was pulled to the door of Patrick’s office, where everything was as it should be but for a coffee mug that had been knocked to the floor, where it had bled an inky puddle into the carpet.

Nearby lay Patrick’s body, still dressed in the suit he was wearing the night before, now lifeless.

And there was Rachel, performing chest compressions, breathing air into his lungs, although they neither rose nor fell with the effort—his skin shiny.

In that moment, everything left me—my sense of time and action, my ability to understand the scene in front of me. All I could do was stand in the doorway, watching Rachel, her face emotionless and hard, her compressions mechanical and labored, like a pump jack. Her focus so intense, she hadn’t even noticed me arrive.

When she finally looked up at me, both hands on Patrick’s chest, all she said was, “I haven’t had time to call an ambulance. Can you call an ambulance? I’m afraid if I stop, he—”

She trailed off, her face damp with sweat, drained of color despite the effort, and looked down at the body.

“Rachel,” I said. “He’s dead.”

You could smell it in the room, the stale sweetness of death—like overripe Concord grapes. I managed to walk toward the body and touch my fingers to his neck. He was cold. No blood pumped through his skin, nor had it for hours.

“I’ve heard that as long as you keep the blood and air moving, there’s a chance,” she said, almost to herself, not meeting my gaze.

I knelt across from her and wrapped my hands around her forearms.

“Rachel. It’s over.”

Finally, she met my eyes. There was a milky quality to them, almost unseeing. As if the entire event might be an apparition, a spell from which she simply needed to be awoken. I wondered if we both looked that way, our pupils still enlarged from the belladonna.

“No,” she said, breaking away and holding back a sob. “Call an ambulance.”

I pulled my phone out of my backpack and dialed 911, reporting the scene to a dispatcher who asked me several times if I was sure Patrick was deceased. I answered yes every time. Rachel, listening to the conversation, had finally stopped pushing against Patrick’s chest; she sat on the floor next to his body, her face wet, her knees tucked under her chin, shaking, as if from the cold. Where normally Rachel’s arms seemed lithe and strong, now they seemed weak and wan, and I wondered where she had found the reserve of energy to keep performing compressions.

The questions I might have asked in that moment—how long she had been here like this, pushing over and over into a dead body, what had happened, how she had found him—seemed impossible to articulate. All I could do was join her on the floor, where we held each other, our knees pushed together, hoping that no one would come in and find us for a very long time, until we had at least been able to adjust to a world that didn’t have Patrick in it.

We didn’t know how long it would take for the police to arrive or even the other staff, but we sat together on the floor for what felt like hours, though it could only have been minutes, watching Patrick’s unmoving body, until finally, Rachel pushed herself to her feet and walked around to the front of Patrick’s desk. I watched her as she began to pull open the drawers and lift papers and notepads.