Heroic Measures (10 page)

When he finishes, he flushes the toilet, closes the seat, washes his hands, tucks in his shirt, turns up his hearing aids, and then scours his pockets for matches, but all he finds is the packet of Stim-U-Dents. He leaves the window open, unlocks the door, and squeezes past the knot of
house hunters waiting to see what a million-one bathroom is like.

Ruth ran out of questions for the realtor long ago. She sits on the window seat cushion, her back to the view, waiting for Alex. When he finally shows up, she says, “It’s a sealed auction. Bids are being accepted till noon. The results will be final. We sign a contract. No second chances. No backing out.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t wait,” he says.

“I told you to have an English muffin. Next time will you listen?”

In the elevator, on their way down to the lobby to call Lily in private, Ruth takes his arm with conciliatory tenderness. “Hey, you never know, you might have turned the odds in our favor by overpowering the smell of cinnamon.”

“We can call it the Bran Muffin Principle,” Alex says.

In the lobby, Ruth dials Lily.

“No one is making anymore commitments until Pamir’s caught,” Lily tells her.

Ruth lowers the phone. “Yellow Rubbers’ is our last solid offer, nine even.”

“Ask her advice,” Alex says.

“We found a place, Lily, it’s perfect. We have to put our bid in before noon or we’ll lose it. The sellers are asking a million one, but the realtor says the seller is willing to consider any offer. Any words of wisdom?”

“If the seller is willing to consider
any
offer, it means he’s scared, which might work in your favor. Take advantage,
but don’t bid so low that if you lose it, you kick yourselves for not risking more, and don’t bid so high that if you get it, you have to back out. That could cost you
real
money in legal fees. And make sure everyone signs the bid contract. If Pamir turns out not to be a terrorist, just a nutcase, the seller might use any excuse to wheedle out of the agreement. Lots of buyers include a personal letter with their offer, an appeal to the seller why they should be chosen in the event of a tie. If you write one, don’t be afraid to pull on the heartstrings. We realtors call it a Queen-for-a-Day letter.”

When Ruth first retired, she thought she’d try her hand at writing. Nothing as ambitious as fiction—she hardly believed she’d find an untapped vein of talent—but autobiographical sketches or profiles of people she had known, exercises written just for herself, an experiment to see if her love of reading could translate into something more. To her frustration and then disenchantment, what she understood as a reader—the bracing delight of the unexpected metaphor, the fascination with spying on another’s consciousness—eluded her as soon as she splayed her fingers across the typewriter keys. She typed clichés. She was like the old illiterate peasant woman in Chekhov’s “At Christmas Time,” dictating a letter to her daughter, who she hasn’t heard from in years. She timidly asks the scribe to write down a string of platitudes—“to our only beloved daughter, our love, a low bow and our parental blessing enduring forever and ever. And we also send wishes for a merry Christmas, we are alive and well, and hoping you
are the same, please God, the Heavenly King”—when what the old peasant really means to tell her daughter is that she and Grandpa had to sell the cow and are now starving.

In an odd way, Ruth felt relieved to put away her ambition—a part of her had always worried that teaching had kept her from a greater destiny, and now she knew. She never told Alex about her exercises. That winter, she ran for secretary of the local chapter of Women for Peace and Justice and accepted her lot as a pamphleteer.

But now, sitting on the bench in the lobby, it seems to her she has one last chance to put her story on paper.

She rereads the letter. It’s the truth, but it reads like propaganda.

“How much?” she asks Alex.

“We should make it an even trade. Write down nine hundred thousand,” he says. But as soon as she agrees and plies her pen to the contract, he changes his mind. “Make it nine hundred and ten. We can manage another ten, Ruth. Rudolph said he’s getting traction on my FBI pieces. No, write down nine hundred and twenty thousand; no, nine hundred and thirty …”

Ruth knows that the amounts he’s dictating to her are like the old peasant woman’s prayers, that what he really means to say is:
We’ve put the cow up for sale. Don’t we deserve some peace?

She finally writes
$950,000
, an amount she doesn’t believe she’s ever written down before. When would she have had the opportunity?

BARKS, HOWLS, YAPS, AND YELPS RESOUND UP
and down the hospital’s corridors. Inside her cage, Doro thy listens with apathy and distain. She has no interest in adding her voice to the bedlam. She stares through the bars and whimpers, a mournful hum lost in the din. It’s finally sunk in that this is her life now, a cell in a window-less ward, noisy with other dogs’ ranting, where her only treat is a teensy crumble of sausage.

“They’ve been going berserk for the past ten minutes,” says the orderly as he hoses out the empty cage below Dorothy’s; the bulldog finally passed the penny. “They know something’s up. They can smell danger. We should listen to them instead of the newscasters. You didn’t see any pictures of elephants drowned in the tsunami, did you?”

“I heard a parrot just got loose in pre-op and tried to fly through the glass door,” says the medical student as he administers nose spray to the Mexican hairless.

“They have a sixth sense.”

“They’re only smelling your fear,” says the nurse as she opens Dorothy’s cage door. She picks her up. “You’re not a
scaredy-cat, are you?” She gently wipes away the jelled tears caked under Dorothy’s eyes. “Your mommy and daddy are here. You don’t want them to think you were crying. Look at those long beautiful lashes. Who does your makeup?”

Cradling Dorothy in her arms, the nurse carries her through a maze of hallways until they arrive at a big room pungent with outdoor smells—snow, slush, wet leather, damp wool, goose down, fur, feathers, and hair. After the overpowering odors of her ward mates, it’s like a bouquet.

“I’m looking for Dorothy’s owners,” the nurse asks the receptionist.

“The little old couple? They’re in visiting Room two.”

Holding Dorothy in one hand, the nurse opens a door. Ruth and Alex rise from two plastic chairs. They look anything but little and old to Dorothy. To Dorothy, they look like titans. She recognizes Ruth’s glasses first, the enormous omnipotent eyes, and then Alex’s outstretched hands, those quick, strong hands that always sweep her up when bigger dogs approach.

“Ruth, she’s wagging her tail!”

The tiny room becomes heady with the sharp, sweet scent of reunion. Alex carefully takes Dorothy from the nurse and then shares her with Ruth. Dorothy is cushioned between their soft overcoats, in a bough of arms. She inhales the essences of Alex and Ruth. She kisses their coat sleeves, buttons, fingers, wristwatches, and when Ruth leans closer, her nose and glasses.

RUTH HAS TO FORCE HERSELF TO LOOK AT
the shaved clearing in the fur, the silver railroad tracks running along the crest of Dorothy’s spine—a five-inch incision fastened with staples. The staples look painful to Ruth, but Dorothy doesn’t seem to notice them. Settling into Ruth’s arms, she lets loose a sigh of such contentment that Ruth feels it though her sleeves, through her skin.

“She’s so light, Alex. I think she lost weight.”

“We’d like to talk to Dr. Rush,” he tells the nurse as she leaves.

They sit down to wait for the doctor, Dorothy on Ruth’s lap. The whole time in the bus, she and Alex had to stand. At every stop, surges of passengers would push and ebb like tides. The taxis were still under curfew, though Ruth has no idea why. Isn’t Pamir on foot again?

Alex puts one arm around her, the other around Dorothy. Stirring on her lap, Dorothy looks up at her, and then turns her doleful, intelligent eyes on Alex. Though Dorothy can’t give voice to the look, Ruth knows what it means:
Don’t ever leave me again
.

The doctor comes in. “You wanted to see me?”

“Are the staples painful?” Ruth asks.

“Animals feel pain differently than we do.”

“When we get her home, is there anything else we can do besides crate her?” Alex asks.

“I advise five hundred milligrams of glucosamine daily, also chrondroitin. Some owners swear by vitamin C and beta-carotene. There’s also a promising new drug called Adequan.”

“We’ll have to clear off another shelf in the medicine cabinet for her,” Alex says.

“Can she still run around if she’s able?” Ruth asks.

“Just let her be a dog.” He waits for another question, but Ruth and Alex can’t think of one. “The nurse will be coming for Dorothy in a few minutes. I’d let her go home with you now, but after that seizure I’d like to keep her one more night.”

When he closes the door behind him, Ruth says, “I almost forgot about the seizure.”

Alex pats her shoulder, caresses Dorothy’s neck, and then looks at his wristwatch. “The auction’s been over for nearly ten minutes.”

“I turned off the cell phone. We’re not supposed to use it in the hospital.”

“Should I see if there’s a pay phone?”

“We almost lost her, Alex. What difference will knowing five minutes later make? We either got the apartment or we didn’t.” She turns her attention to Dorothy. “We brought you something, sweetie.” She reaches into her purse and takes out the rubber hot dog, but Dorothy ignores it. “Those staples must hurt her. How does the doctor know that her pain feels different than ours?”

Alex continues rubbing Ruth’s shoulder and stroking Dorothy’s neck. Gliding back and forth against the dark fur, his shiny wristwatch hypnotizes Ruth: it’s almost twelve-thirty. “Where’s the nurse already?” she asks.

Barks explode from all the wards along the green corridor as the nurse carries Dorothy, listless and silent, back to her cell. Dorothy’s sixth sense—a tactile alarm, as if danger were a breeze moving through her fur—is as strong as the next dog’s; she’s aware of the mounting agitation in the air, but she’s too forlorn to care; Ruth and Alex just handed her away.

“They’re getting louder by the minute,” the orderly says to the nurse as he changes the yelping, shrieking Mexican hairless’s water bowl. “I’m telling you, they know something.”

The nurse opens Dorothy’s cage and settles her inside, like a loaf of soft dough laid in an oven. Dorothy’s instinct is to stand up and bark, too, to become one with the pack, to howl her head off until every dog in the land is alerted to the danger, but her sadness prevails: she curls into a ball and holds her tongue.

“You and me are the only one keeping our heads, aren’t we, Dorothy?” says the nurse, locking her inside.

In the hospital lobby, beside a wall of donor plaques honoring departed pets—in memory of Stretch, Buttons, Chaos, Irving—Ruth and Alex check their cell phone to see if the realtor has left a message, though if she has, neither
knows how retrieve it. The bright plasma bar reads fifty-eight new messages, one more than this morning. Ruth dials the realtor, while Alex glances out the lobby doors to see if the taxis are back. Flashing red glyphs and whirling blue lances play over the glass. Two helmeted silhouettes flank the entry. The doors spring open and a frantic woman clutching a shoe box rushes in.

“Has something happened?” Alex asks her.

“My ferret just went crazy and jumped out the second story window. I think he’s broken his leg.”

“The FBI’s got Pamir trapped in Bed Bath and Beyond just around the corner,” says the moon-faced young guard manning the metal detector. He steps in front of the woman and holds up his hand like a crossing guard. “You’ll have to open the box,” he says.

“You think I have a bomb in here?”

“Otherwise, the box has to go through X-ray.”

She cracks the lid wide enough for the guard, and Alex, to see tiny white teeth. The guard lets her pass.

“Do they know if he has a bomb?” Alex asks him.

“Nope, but they know he took hostages.”

“How many?”

“As many as he could grab in kitchenware.”

Ruth throws her arms around Alex. “It’s ours! We got the apartment! There was a tie, but our letter made the difference!” She looks out the glass doors, at the fleet of idling squad cars frenetic with red and blue lights. The two helmeted silhouettes have doubled into four. “Has something happened?”

“The FBI has Pamir cornered nearby in a Bed Bath and Beyond,” Alex tells her.

“They have one on the Upper East Side?”

“It’s just around the corner,” the moon-faced guard pipes in.

“Does he have a bomb?” Ruth asks.

“He has hostages,” Alex says.

“I don’t want to leave Dorothy here with a bomb nearby. Is the hospital in any danger?” she asks the guard.

“Nobody’s told me anything,” the guard says.

“Pamir might not even have a bomb, Ruth. If the hospital was in any danger, the police would have evacuated it by now.”

“They might evacuate the people, but will they take the animals?”

She strides past Alex and the guard, opens the door, and approaches one of the helmeted silhouettes, faceless behind a dark visor, clad in black armor, holding an assault rifle. She barely comes up to his bulletproof vest. Alex, who follows her outside, barely comes up to his chinstrap. “We’re supposed to bring our little dog home tomorrow,” Ruth tells the policeman, “but we can go back for her right now if you think she’s in any danger. Is the hospital safe?”

“The hospital is in the green zone, ma’am.”

“What’s a green zone?” Ruth asks.

Alex doesn’t know anymore than Ruth does, but he figures a green zone must be safer than a red zone. “She’s better off in the hospital than out here,” he tells Ruth as panicked pedestrians push by. “How would we get her home? There still aren’t any taxis.”

“Please, folks, we need to keep the walkway clear,” says the faceless helmet.

To their west, beyond the fleet of squad cars, a convoy
of armored trucks, FBI vans, fire engines, a Caterpillar bulldozer with its plow raised, and ambulances block First Avenue, ready to descend on Bed Bath & Beyond. To their east, circling above the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, helicopters drone. Civilian traffic, both heeled and wheeled, is being diverted onto York Avenue. Alex and Ruth join the downtown foot traffic being channeled between police sawhorses erected along the sidewalks. The crowd is too unwieldy to move with any flow through such a tight space. Overcoats press against them, pushing to get as far away as fast as possible. Whenever a siren goes off or horns honk the panic intensifies and Alex can feel himself and Ruth momentarily lifted off their feet and borne along by the pressure. He struggles to free his arm and wraps it protectively around her. She holds on to his waist, gripping his overcoat.

“You were so right, Alex. Thank God we left Dorothy at the hospital.”

In the shadow of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, the police barricades abruptly end and the pressure is released. What had been a chute of crazed cattle now becomes an orderly herd. A man stops to straighten out his crushed dry cleaning. A woman answers her cell phone. Alex and Ruth, still holding on to each other, duck into a doorway to get their bearings and catch their breath. South of the bridge, the city looks relatively normal—stores are open, traffic is moving, albeit slowly. Overhead, the cable car from Roosevelt Island is still running, albeit with no one inside. Locking hands, they make their way south. Near the bridge, at the stone feet of its massive pillars, news vans are parked every which way, cables erupting from their
interiors, antenna poles telescoping out of their roofs. Atop each pole, a satellite dish tilts heavenward. Cameramen and heavily powdered reporters surround a middle-aged woman in a torn pink parka clutching a Bed Bath & Beyond bag as if whatever it contained was priceless.

“I was at the checkout when everyone started screaming and running,” she shouts into a thicket of microphones. Her voice is so shrill even Alex can hear her. “I got pushed on the floor and lost my glasses. Someone stepped on my coat and tore it. I forgot to get my card back and now I can’t find …”

Before she can finish her story of loss, the cameramen pan away and focus on the bridge’s exit ramp. Alex follows their aim. The lower lanes are solid yellow. Against the bridge’s black shadows and the gray afternoon sky, the taxis look dazzling.

“Breaking news,” announces one reporter after another, repositioning themselves before the cameras so that the bridge, with its golden vein, is now their backdrop. “The mayor has ordered all cabbies back to work. He urges New Yorkers to go about their business as usual, just avoid the Upper East Side.”

“Just what we need, more traffic,” grumbles someone in the crowd.

“Who would come into the city?” asks another.

“Maybe it’s over,” ventures a third.

The crowd suddenly fractures and people start running to catch the taxis as they pour off the bridge near Second Avenue.

Still holding hands, Ruth and Alex hurry to catch one, too.

•    •    •

“Where to?” asks the thick-necked Ukrainian cabbie glancing in his rearview mirror at Alex and Ruth. Alex takes off his baseball cap; his white hair sticks up in disarray, like an albino tornado. Ruth yanks loose her wool scarf as if it’s strangling her.

“Second Avenue and Third Street, please,” she tells the driver, then turns to Alex. “I told the realtor we were coming right over with our deposit.”

“We shouldn’t give her any money until Pamir’s either caught or dead, until it’s over,” Alex says. “I’m not writing a check while the city’s under siege.” He leans forward. “St. Mark’s and Avenue A,” he tells the cabbie.

“We could lose the apartment,” Ruth says. “You didn’t talk to the realtor, I did.” She leans forward, too. “Second and Third.”

The cabbie turns around. His neck is so stiff and solid, it looks, to Ruth, as if only his head swivels, like a cap on a bottle.

“Just drive downtown,” Alex tells him. “We’ll give you the address when we get closer.”

“Look at this traffic,” the cabbie mutters, banging on the steering wheel. He guns the engine and lurches an inch closer to the stalled bumper in front of him. “How can the mayor order me back to work? Does he think he’s my commandant? Who gave him such power?”

“Do you know what’s happening with Pamir?” Alex asks. “Can you turn on the radio?”

“It’s broken. Last I heard he was in that Beyond place with hostages. Look at this gridlock. That TV professor of
traffic was right. He warned the mayor there’d be tidal waves and floods if he ordered the cabs back.”

“We should at least call the realtor, Alex, and tell her we’re still coming over with our deposit, we’ll just be a little late,” Ruth says.

“What is she going to do if you don’t call her?”

“Phone our competition and ask if they want to make a counteroffer.”

“If the tie had come out differently, and our letter lost, would you make a counteroffer right now?”

“What is it with this bus?” the cabbie mutters, gunning his engine and honking to no avail. The broad side of a double-decker Grey Line Tour bus now takes up the cab’s entire windshield. Ruth can count only two sightseers inside, a man and a woman. The woman is squinting uptown toward Bed Bath & Beyond, her faced pressed to the glass, her hands cupping her eyes as if she were holding binoculars. The man is asleep beside her, head back, jaw slack.

Forty-five minutes later, despite the Ukrainian crazily changing lanes, revving in place, kissing bumpers, and relentlessly honking, the cab is only at Fourteenth Street, stuck in another swamped intersection.

“It will be faster to walk home from here,” Alex says, paying the driver. “Can I get a receipt?”

On the corner, in the first lit storefront they pass, a laundromat, six souls are gathered around a small television playing on the fluff ‘n’ fold counter. A massive black garment fills the screen.

Alex opens the door. “Is that his mother?” he asks anyone who will answer.

“Yes, she’s standing outside BB and B, talking on the phone with her son,” someone says.

Ruth steps closer to the tiny screen to see with her bad eyes. The black garment is shaking and blurry. The angle must be from one of the news helicopters circling over the Upper East Side, shot with a telephoto lens: the fuzzy black shape keeps changing form.

“How long has she been talking to her son?” Ruth asks.

“They’ve shown the same clip for the last half hour. We don’t even know if Pamir’s on the line. They can’t broadcast the call because it might taint a jury later on,” says a girl with a tongue stud folding her laundry while she watches.

The garment fades and the basset-eyed newscaster takes over the screen. “Only fifty-two percent of our viewers say they’d come out if their mother called. What do the experts think?”

He’s turns to the double-chinned forensic psychologist from this morning. Six hours under the hot lights and her lipstick looks as if it’s melting. “The suicide bomber believes he’s doing this
for
his mother,” she says.

They step outside again, keep walking south. At the corner of St. Mark’s, they dart into the magazine shop to see if the stout old counterman, who always sports a bow tie, has his radio on.