Chapter Twenty-Nine: Litigation

Felix stood outside of Max Mbeke’s office with a pit in his stomach. All the way there his fantasies of vengeance had intensified. He would have his day in court, with a jury and a judge and lawyers. The executives and doctors would be made to confess what they had done. He would prepare for trial with his lawyer, Mbeke. The money was nothing. He wanted to see someone beg for his life. He wanted to see it drain out of them with the same horror he had felt watching Veronica shrivel up into nothing from the vibrant, bursting fruit of youth. If his life was going to be cut off in mid stride so was the life of whoever was responsible. Mbeke would gather all the evidence. The investigation would involve him so totally he would forget everything else. The job, the apartment, the dreams, the future. All would be paid for. And then, when justice was done, he would move on to Alaska. He would buy a headstone and mark a grave for Veronica. Then the ashes could go free. Then she and he would be at rest.

“Mr. Clay. Sit down,” said Mr. Mbeke. He was seated behind his desk and didn’t rise to shake Felix’s hand. He was relaxed, his blue pinstripe jacket open and red tie loosely knotted. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I can have eNeNe bring one in if you like.”

“No thank you, sir.” Felix felt suddenly like he was back in school.

“Now, let’s see.” Mbeke examined a sheet of gold electraweave. “I’m sorry Mr. Clay, but I’m going to have to disappoint you. There is nothing actionable here.”

Mr. Mbeke no longer seemed so relaxed. But Felix couldn’t really read him. “How can that be?” he asked.

“Well, the coroner reports natural causes as the cause of death, for one.”

“B-but she was forty years old! And healthy.”

“Healthy Mr. Clay? It says here that for the last 3 years or so Mrs. Clay suffered from a variety of severe mental illnesses. As recently as six months ago she was on, how shall I put it? A veritable drugstore of medications. Proving it was Paregane is impossible.”

“But the doctor said–”

“Doctors,” Mbeke gave a little burp or hiccup and his face briefly knotted before going on as before, “don’t like to admit they’re wrong Mr. Clay. Who does? And Dr. Tarlton said he could not testify to the side effects of Paregane.”

Felix started to hyperventilate. “But someone has to pay for this. She didn’t die, she was killed.”

“Do you not have money from her insurance policy?”

“That’s not what I mean!”

Mbeke swelled slightly. “What do you mean?

“Money isn’t what I want. Christ. Someone is responsible. The drug should be illegal if it kills. There should be warnings. Something.”

“If it kills. Word on the street is that Paregane is perfectly safe. And the street, you should understand, doesn’t lie. By definition.”

“But what about all these reports from China? And the medic who came in the ambulance said–”

“That’s China. They do things differently there than here.” He made a sipping noise and wooshed a little. “I did a lot of digging Mr. Clay. Paregane is not a candidate for a wrongful death lawsuit. Nor was it misprescribed. What I suggest for you is a long rest and a change of scenery. You can afford it I’m sure. Take a little vacation time. Go to the Andes for a ski trip, or Alaska. Kill a walrus. Join a club. Screw a waitress. In a year you’ll be in fine fettle. You’re young Mr. Clay and you’ve suffered a terrible injustice. But I’m afraid it’s a cosmic injustice. I can’t take God to court, after all.” He chuckled and his eyes widened and narrowed. Felix’s face burned with a rage that lacked direction, like a fire that has consumed everything and goes in search of combustible material. The last tree standing was Mbeke. Mbeke tightened and grew an inch in his chair. “Now Mr. Clay, get control of yourself. This is a dangerous game you’re playing and your hand isn’t good enough. The opposition in such a case has weapons we just can’t possibly hope to equal.” He shrugged sympathetically. “I know you’re disappointed, but this wasn’t my idea. And I’ve already taken quite a few risks on your behalf for no remuneration at all. Try to understand what I’m saying. Read between the lines, ey? Be an adult. You know how things work.”

Felix made two fists and rose in his chair. “She’s dead and someone has to pay!” he yelled.

Mbeke forced a smile and swallowed hard. “I think that’s about all then.”

The emptiness of the room whirled around Felix. The windows were streaked with rain and the sky was a sack of cinders. Mbeke pulsed in his chair. “You were my last hope,” he said. “Please.” Mbeke didn’t budge or even speak. Felix then felt himself launched into the air as if by the hand of another. Mbeke screamed hoarsely, “Mr. Clay!” Felix dove across the desk and crashed into Mbeke’s chair. He wanted to crush his windpipe in his hands but he could not get a grip on any part of him. He thrashed about, fighting with the air, pounding the soft leather upholstery. “Mbeke!” he shouted. “You come back here!” But there was no Mbeke. The alias had zipped out. He turned around and in the doorway stood eNeNe looking very scared.

“I’m calling security,” she said.

Felix panted. The blood throbbed behind his eyes and in his temples. “That won’t be necessary,” he said, and ran by her to the elevator, tears starting to squirt out of his eyes.

He stormed out of the lobby like a man in flames. People stared at him. He wanted to run somewhere and hide but there was nowhere to go. He looked around at all the fake little stores with their cheery composite signs and neon fixtures flashing in the windows and wondered how he had ever come to live in such a place. He searched his memory for a time when he belonged here and couldn’t find it. The only time he felt at home was when he was with Veronica. All that time his happiness or contentment or complacency even was because she was the world he lived in. Without her it was all a sham, hostile, put up, a trap. Intellatrawl! He became indignant. Ten years wasted sitting in that stupid BioWatch WorkStation listening to the insipid insights of its Chairman. And the home he was so loath to leave, what was it? Sales. Who gave a damn about who bought what? Who gave a damn about administration, how things get done? New Jersey had been lovely. They were happy there. Or so he thought. Would he have been happy there alone? Like a diseased organ he cut it out of himself.

On the amphibatrain he cast a destructive eye out the window. It was like a scalpel now and the steel flashed as it cut away at portions of his life. In Manhattan he changed for the Ninth Avenue line. He thought about that apartment in Yonkers and how strange it was living with one parent at a time. He rarely thought of those times, the perfect suits of clothes, marching off to school with the other kids. It appeared to be as absurd as the little shops selling cheese and stationary. Why hadn’t they just taken him to the territories with them? His father was a silent unhappy man. Always in the shadows, while Felix sat at the square, antique dining room table with the pad and tablecloth doing his assignments. He was tall, stooped beneath the low ceiling, as if the apartment were a suit of tight clothes, in the kitchen scrambling the eggs into fried peppers and onions. It was all he ever made, and they ate it five nights a week. On the other two they went out to Chinese or had pizza in. The silence of men…he took it for granted. Darkness and silence and scrambled eggs. Outside his father was a big, expansive man, with the same smouldering complexion of brick Felix had. He was martial, square shouldered, powerful but graceful too. Always in uniform and yet informal when moving about in the park, say. Sundays were good then. They played ball. They fished. On the water his father grew bigger, his face opened up. But why would they imagine they could buy his comfort and happiness with their misery? Because he understood now that they must have missed each other terribly.

His parents were gone. You know how things work, Mbeke had said. Parents die. How childish to want them now. As if they had ever done anything for him, besides feed and house him and dress him in the proper clothes. And fuck Veronica! She should have died in the bathtub that night, when it was meant to be.

He was too agitated to go back to the apartment. It was always full of people. They never stopped. Never stopped visiting, talking, smoking and drinking. He was grateful to Peter but he was used to quiet and solitude. He was too old for them, he felt his age constantly. They could drink all night and get up and go to work while he was like a pile of debris, dispirited and aching from head to foot. The chatter of young voices, the ceaseless gossip, the concerns he knew nothing about. Alone at least he could be with Veronica. Alone he could seek out the only thing he desired, devastation. He read devastating literature, The Book of Job, King Lear, Jude the Obscure, Anna Karenina.

Some essential part of reality had been cut away, whatever it was that made the world vital, that part that commits one to life despite the terms. Daily crying jags drove him into private places, the bathroom if necessary, or out of the apartment and onto an isolated stoop between Eighth and Ninth. The emptiness would build and build and then the tears drained it away like poison. The very physicality of the process was a relief from malevolent despair.

He and Veronica argued about Alaska. Their future was at stake. They discussed what to eat for dinner. Fish or bologna. “Why did you say such a stupid thing to Promethea,” Veronica asked. “Do you want to sleep with her?” He didn’t want to sleep with Promethea. “You find her attractive.” No, she was fat and pale with tiny little toes. He got off the amphibatrain and started to walk. He walked like her. He imagined he was Veronica walking among the people through the glass shelters. He was Veronica, her hair was on his shoulder, he shook it the way she did, smiled at the sensation. His fingers and lips smelled like her. He dipped his finger between his legs and felt the warm pool beneath her swelling clitoris.

Home would mean sleep and there is no sleep. The goal was to drink so much there would be no dreams of any kind. Alcohol didn’t kill any pain and finally it exhausted him, as if he and the alcohol were running a race each night and he finally gave out.

His mother used to come to him in dreams after she died. She didn’t know she was dead. She floated around in the air above the Gulf of Mexico and said she could fly now, she didn’t need a hovercraft. She had an idiotic, childish grin. His serious, military mother. After a few weeks she stopped coming. So much was going on with Veronica he could barely pay attention to what had happened to them. His father’s coma wasn’t real. He had no time to grieve. If he cried at work it would screw up the equipment. They would take him from his set up and put him away. Take a few days off Mr. Clay. Bereavement leave. For mother and father, yes. Veronica was going in for tests. They took spinal fluid and blood. Then the wave interference pattern analysis. Toxicity screen. Her urine was clean. Her menses were normal.

There was something terribly unfulfilled in his parents’ generation. They hadn’t found a way to live so they ran off to Louisiana in old age. They had been people of the land, pilers up of dirt but they ended their days in the bayous among alligators and predatory fish. All the needs were out of whack, society, childhood, maturity. Duty without heroism, how empty that was. Duty became a habit, like sacrifice. They wanted a better world for him but a better world for him would have been more of them and then, Veronica might have lived. There would have been a way to the future.

Veronica came to him in dreams. He watched her swimming in the garden but she couldn’t see or hear him. She reclined in the hairy mouth of a cave, on some high-forested hill, or in the doorway of a barn. Come with me, she said. Once she brought him a red rose and he wrote a poem.

In my dream she comes each day to bring a rose.

I cannot see her face, she’s tall and gay.

She puts the rose into a glass and says she loves me.

She has brought the rose because she knows what I have been through.

I cannot say her name.

The rose is mercy.

The rose is a gift.

But the rose is red and still I cannot say her name.

If she wanted him at peace he couldn’t understand why she continued to call him. It was wrong for her to leave him and then call out all the time. She had chosen to stay, of that he was sure. Which was strange. The choice had killed her. It was a stupid, selfish, infantile thing to do. He wouldn’t have abandoned her. He didn’t abandon her when many would have. What husband in his right mind would have stayed through all that abuse? She broke the contract and he had stuck it out, renegotiated, refused to let go.

Perhaps he had driven her to it. That was what went wrong. If he had been stronger and walked away she would have pursued him. Or maybe in his weakness he didn’t understand her sufficiently. Didn’t understand what she was saying, resisted change, was overly interested in a way of life that on reflection was ridiculous. He was no different than his parents. He had forgotten the primary things, love, affection, friendship. Where were the friends? The family? What had they made together? A pile of cash and some embryos? Moises and Promethea and Peter and Edsel had infinitely more in their little world of lofts and garrets, performances, porn stars and potluck dinners. There was love there, commitment to an ideal.

Then there were all the treatment options. Wasn’t he the one driving them forward, going to the doctor, trying different therapies and drugs? He was the one pushing her to get ‘better’, whatever that meant. He had insisted that she take Paregane. Had he not done that she could very well be alive right now and he wouldn’t be wandering around in the rain without an umbrella. At twenty he had sworn to live without regret. That was the great revolt from the stultifying suburban childhood he wordlessly endured for his own good. It seemed now he never spoke up and only saw the other children in their absurd circles while he sat apart. It was his destiny then. Childhood and adolescence were periods of waiting outside before being admitted to the assembled present. And once admitted he made his declaration. No regrets. Diving into books his brain, his thoughts became like fire, fed by the imaginative flames of Shelley, Spenser and Blake, of Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Lawrence. That was his mood when he met Veronica. He had known her in her youth! There will always be tall, silent girls in black coats with red scarves and penetrating eyes. He saw her in doorways and alone drinking coffee at the luncheonette. Wherever he went there she was till he noticed once that she was looking at him, as if she were trying to figure him out. What could possibly have puzzled this beautiful, achingly beautiful sylph who always stood apart? He had no idea it was his own aloofness, the fact that he too drifted through classes and crowds apart. It never occurred to him that she was in love with him, that he could be the sustaining mystery to another, that he too was a tantalizing, beautiful cipher.

Regrets. It was all regrettable. Sure he wanted her, loved her, but he had given himself over to the world’s oldest heresy, human worship, and that led to human sacrifice. They let each other stand-in for divine things, lost things, divinities long fled for lack of worship.

They were mad hermits shouting in their cells now, sometimes in unison. He began to see the function of ancient burial rites. To appease the dead. He did not believe in god, no, but he did believe in ghosts and he was being haunted. The dead had conquered the living. The dead would not let go. And even if he could let go of her, she would not release him. He could feel her hand even now, walking, gripping his ankle. It gripped him in his sleep, in all his waking moments. He looked out through her seductive eyes and her warm breath filled his lungs.

Perhaps, he thought, it is time to dispose of the ashes. He had been carrying them around with him in his bag. At night he slept with his arm draped painfully over the box. It was time to let them go. He tried to think of what she would want. That night he went to sleep asking for her guidance but he received none. He would have to decide for himself.