The scanner pulses green under his palm and the front door opens onto a clutter of his brothers’ suitcases, scattered clothes, a sand-encrusted surfboard, but no one seems to be home. In the hall before his mother’s room are architectural drawings of ancient buildings and Piranesi’s studies of nonexistent prisons, and though her door is closed there are faint sounds within that could be voices—she’s probably lying in bed with the blinds drawn, listening to books. “Mom?” he calls, sotto voce, suddenly reluctant to violate the stillness. “It’s me. Can I come in?”
No response. Perhaps she’s asleep. He knocks—still nothing. Maybe he should let her sleep but he knocks again, and then louder, and it occurs to him that he has yet to see the inside of her room—in fact he doesn’t think he’s seen her since his collapse. “Mom?” he says again, trying the doorknob—locked, so she must be within. “I think someone recognized me. I think we’re in trouble.” He smacks the door with the ham of his fist which is rude but still there’s no response so she’s either asleep or deliberately ignoring him. Frustration overcoming manners, he kicks the door, then kicks it harder, then harder still. The hotel’s interior doors are thin, built more for privacy than security, and he’s winding up for the kick that will break it down when the door swings gently open.
He feels profound relief as he steps into the dark room and the words comes pouring out as he says, “Something’s gone wrong. There was a stranger who I think followed me from the clinic and I think she has the implant dementia but she seemed to know who I was and she asked me what I remember but I remember almost nothing, and at the clinic they told me things were going badly, but it felt like a threat. I’m afraid I’m going to die. Mom?” As his eyes adjust he sees that the darkness isn’t absolute, that there’s a little light from a TV, dimmed by a blanket thrown over the screen, that that’s where the voices are coming from, though his mother hates television, won’t watch it even on long flights, and he wonders if she’s herself these days.
He pulls the blanket off of the TV like a magician doing a trick and on the screen there’s a religious show, the sweating preacher apoplectic and pleading as websites and fragments of scripture scroll by. In the full glare of the television’s light he sees that the room has no bed, and no books, just an old couch covered in duvets, and gin bottles, mostly empty, scattered on the floor among half-burned votive candles adorned with beaming Jesuses and serene Virgins, though his mother despises religion, and there’s no good apparent explanation—has she for some reason given the room to a maid? There’s no sense of her presence at all; he knows she’s been drinking since they came to the Protectorates but he can’t believe she’s this far gone.
Back outside the garden looks ancient, and threatening, a residual pocket of the Mesozoic just biding its time; he resists an urge to look behind the cycads. He listens to the wind moving the branches and it occurs to him that it’s late and he could go inside and to bed and assume everything will have resolved itself by morning but he still has the lucidity he’s felt since the clinic, which makes him feel like a kind of ethereal detective, and sleep seems less important than finding his mother, who’s probably in her house in the mountains, because he doesn’t know where else she’d go in Los Angeles.
27
Venice Replicated
Rain sluicing down the windows, reflecting the restaurant’s dim light, distorting the strangers passing on the street. The interior is like a firelit cave, the waiters unobtrusive as attendant ghosts as they light the candles that accentuate the shadows. The acoustics are muffling, enveloping her in a hush of voices, the words blotted up.
Alone at her table, she watches the door. Out on the sidewalk, water beads on the guards’ helmets, pours in rivulets from their blue plastic ponchos; their filtration masks give them the air of anonymous henchmen, though their postures speak only of the boredom of the shift. Is this security necessary, or just a kind of decor, meant to imply a clientele that’s posh enough to rob, and do the guards come to loathe their charges, warm and dry and eating tapas, or are all their thoughts of the monotony of the shift?
Under the regular menu she finds the waiter has left a smaller, handwritten one, listing dishes made with the flesh of slaughtered animals rather than the usual cultured meat; it’s outlandishly expensive, the kind of thing favored only by hard-core gastronomes and rich old Republicans mourning a lost Augustan age. She wonders which he took her for, tries not to hold it against him.
The downpour intensifies, the water switching channels on the glass, roaring and echoing in the narrow street, and suddenly she’s in Manhattan, as though the voice of the water had summoned that city. How Manhattan is like Venice, once a great commercial principality, now flooded, its roads become waterways, beautiful and useless and beloved. Finance is long gone but the arts hold on, tenuously, students and writers squatting in the unheated Park Avenue apartments where once magnates lived, working in the sound of the perpetual storms. The bridges between buildings, late additions, like the arcs of white wings. She once went to a fashion show in the undrowned levels of the public library, saw the lions of the steps, their dignity intact under the swirling tide, and in the cramped dressing rooms that were once archives slim young girls hurried by, their makeup thick and operatic, their shimmering green dresses like the plumage of birds, bejeweled and elusive, court attire of an empire unborn, and always, always the rain.
Manhattan, like Venice before it, will presently be a stub, so many worn stones a few feet under water, a romantic ruin in an ocean replete with them. Her pleasure in the rain fades as she thinks of cities crumbling, the soul of Venice replicated endlessly, falling endlessly beneath the waves. The door opens, then, admitting the smell of rain and of wet concrete; a few patrons turn to look, then look away, except for her, because it’s Philip, come to see her.