23.

Fearful. Chilled. Running from an invisible demon.

But what is the demon? I don’t know, Bob. I can’t confront it, can’t look it in the face.

I’m on the PATH as I type this. Ass vibrating, plastic seat rumbling against my spine. The shuttling sound helps, like a mother rocking her children—in a jerking, lurching cradle. The sickly light makes the other passengers look greenish, cancerous. That’s okay, though. I feel almost at home here.

Outside, the cold has sharp teeth, but in here, it’s warm and smelly. You could blindfold me, fly me around the world, and set me down in these tubes; I’d know this stale, sooty tunnel odor in an instant.

The train speeds up, then relaxes, speeds up, relaxes again. I find this soothing. It reminds me of me: panicking then calming, despairing then accepting.

The Hudson is a heavy blanket, insulating us from the world above. A peculiar refuge, this, but I’m glad to have found a place where I can bear to sit still.

I interviewed Eka on Mrs. N’s couch—first time I’d ever seen the Nieminens’ living room. Kai and Ahvo and their sister, Pilvi, watched us from the wall, tow-headed, chubby-cheeked children growing up American despite their names. A blue glass dove sat plumply on the coffee table. The predominant impression was the smell of their meaty dinners, forty years’ worth, baked into the paint.

Highlights of the interview:

Eka never learned to swim.

She doesn’t remember any more about the river than she already told me. My questions—were there factories on the shore? could you see industrial waste pouring into the water?—brought forth no clear memories.

Thwarted, I moved on to other topics. “Tell me about your parents.”

“Mother, age fifty-eight. Father, died in nineteen nine-six. Very good parents.”

“What is your mother like? Does she work?”

“She was accountant. After independence, the factory is privatized and goes bankrupt. They make over to apartments.”

She talks to her mother three times a week. And she sends money via the Western Union at Kmart. (MoneyGram costs less, but the shop is too far away to walk.)

I asked for childhood memories of her parents. She remembered her mother dripping something called mastica on the floor and polishing it with a cloth. “It smells too much!” Her mother used to clean the windows with vodka and a crumpled sheet of newspaper. “We make our own vodka and wine, is not expensive like here. Windex cost more.”

She frowned. Was she, like me, beginning to fear that this will never add up to a book?

“What are you thinking?”

“I miss mother. It’s hard, to be here.”

I realized something important. She can’t see it herself, she has latched on so tightly to her role as provider, but she needs to go home. No matter how desperate her family’s finances may be, she shouldn’t die here, alone.

I delayed bringing this up, however, until I could find a way that didn’t include the words die alone.

Since she’d mentioned Georgian independence, and since she couldn’t tell me anything about the river, I asked what it was like for her and her family when the Soviet Union disintegrated. It has nothing to do with her poisoning, but I was curious.

“Terrible, terrible time. Civil war, crime in streets, dangerous to go out. My cousins got robbed—coat, wallets. No food in stores. For one loaf of bread, we stand in line one full night. I bring book to read. Sometimes we have no electricity for three days. I make homework next to kerosene lamp. People is burning wood in apartment for heat, cutting trees. We do everything to survive.”

“Go on. Tell me more.”

“We drove to grandparents and loaded car with fruits and vegetables from their farm. Apricot, peach, grape. We pickle tomatoes and peppers, green and red.”

“You’re saying your grandparents in Georgia grew peaches?”

“Yes, is common.”

I didn’t explain why that amused me. “How did your family feel about the end of Soviet rule?”

“We was never Communist. But to me, life is good under Soviet Union. What we need, we have. But we don’t know about everything in the world outside.”

The more she talked, the more I doubted I’d be able to stitch a book together from these random anecdotes. She saw my gloom. “Is no good, what I tell?”

I said I needed more detail—how things looked, smelled, tasted. I asked her to tell me what she misses from home. This had nothing to do with the real problem, but I didn’t want to shoot an arrow through her heart.

She did her best to satisfy me. “In Georgia we have flower like your violet. This flower have best smell, whole valleys have this good smell. I come here and see violets. I pick one, and find out, in America, violet don’t have smell. So beautiful, and no smell! I eat an apple, same thing, no taste. I miss everything what Georgia got, too many delicious foods. Each kind apple got own special smell. And grapes. Everything, even vegetables got own special smell. Our poets say, ‘God gave us best place in the world.’ It’s different here.”

I relished that polite understatement.

She thought of something she couldn’t wait to share with me. Her hands flapped on the couch by her thighs. “You know this Jason and Argonauts? The story tells from Georgia! The Golden Fleece was in Colchis, on Black Sea— part of Georgia! Medea is Georgian too. The first woman who made medicines, from grass and wildflowers. Medicine is from her name, you can read this. But she fell in love with Jason, and love, for a Georgian woman, means too much.”

Unspoken memories carried her off. I let her go and did some musing of my own. She had grown in my estimation. Eka the ox-like home health aide wouldn’t have noticed or remembered the smell of violets and the taste of apples, or taken such pride in Medea, her countrywoman. She has a soul! Which makes her dying much, much worse.

She returned to our task before I did, and misread my sudden sorrow. “You can’t use in book?” she asked.

I had something else on my mind, I told her. Since I couldn’t say what, I went back to the other unspeakable truth. Shouldn’t you go home and be with your family?

Her worried face stopped me. I think she feared I had changed my mind about helping her.

It was good to be able to reassure her. “I’ve been thinking about your situation. Your illness. You’re all alone here— wouldn’t you be better off at home, with your family taking care of you?”

She nodded, frowning. “My son comes soon to America. He will have chance to make life here. I stay for him.”

Wretch though I am, I respected her sacrifice. She’ll never see home or her mother again—all so her son can escape poverty.

While I wondered whether her son’s destiny would justify her lonely death, she took over the role of questioner. “You make promise to me?”

Uneasily, “Hm?”

“Money from this book, you will give to my son and mother? Some people would keep money, but you I trust. You will give half of money to my family?”

I really hadn’t planned to stay alive that long. Maybe, I thought, I can foist the responsibility off on someone else. Maybe you, Brother Bob.

“I’ll make sure they get it.”

With a probing stare, she assessed my sincerity. What she saw seemed not to satisfy her. “So much I depend on you,” she said.

“I’ll do my best not to disappoint you.”

She has faint pockmarks on her cheeks, little white craters I’d never noticed before. She doesn’t wear makeup. Her face is as plain as a nun’s: pale skin, short dark eyelashes. And her mouth is small, cinched like the opening of a drawstring purse. I’ve never seen it open wide.

I’ll do my best not to disappoint you. That means I’ll have to keep interviewing her until the end, so she can go on believing I’ll turn her stories into a best seller that will support her family for generations to come.

I’m too tired for this, Bob.

I can’t keep my promises. Anyone who deals with me will find out sooner or later that the best bet is to sever ties before I do too much damage.

My intention, as I descended Mrs. N’s back steps, was to drink until Eka and her problems faded to a distant echo. Next door, Don Quinones was moving a carton of caulk cartridges from his car to his truck. The white nozzles pointed up like artillery shells, tightly packed in rows. Don called to me, “Hey, Angus, how’s your landlady doing?”

I could have said Dunno and slipped through my door, but the devil whispered a mischievous idea in my ear.

Don and I conducted some small talk over the hedge. His younger daughter has gone off to Fairleigh Dickinson. What would he like to do, now that he’s relatively free? Hike down into the Grand Canyon, he’s wanted to do that ever since he was a kid—but it won’t happen, because the cartilage in Denise’s knees is shot, and besides, she has no interest.

Viewing him through Cindy’s eyes, I saw a handsome face, in the rough, weary style of older contractors and firemen. That thick brush of vertical hair really does set him apart. Compared to the average blue-collar fellow, he’s sincerely courteous—not to mention soft-spoken, honest, dutiful, patient, kind, and selfless. He’s the Boy Scout ideal, grown up: a good man, in the traditional sense, i.e., my opposite. Works hard for his family, spends his free time doing whatever Denise or the girls want. I doubt there’s anything she ever asked him to do that he hasn’t done, pronto. How many times have I seen him maneuvering a new piece of furniture through their doorway?

You know what I had on my mind. But I didn’t know myself whether I would actually speak—not until the words popped out.

“What do you think of Cindy?”

Like a shyer Gary Cooper, he gave the impression of shambling without moving from the spot. “She’s a wonderful person. Why do you ask?”

We don’t come to such forks in the road often. She had asked me to keep a secret, but I saw no kindness in that. It’s years too late for me to find a happy ending, but they still have a chance.

“She’s in love with you,” I said. The words had a painfully insipid, early Beatles sound, but saying them aloud cleaved time into Before and After, as decisively as the whack of an axe.

You wouldn’t have thought I’d said anything unusual. He’d been leaning one hand on his truck, and he didn’t move it. The last knuckle of the ring finger was bent—broken, it seemed. Eventually, he said, “Gee.” His sober gray eyes searched mine. “Why do you think that?”

“I saw the way she looked at you, and asked some questions. She didn’t want me to say anything, but I thought you should know.”

Unable to refrain, he peeked up at her window. So did I. The changing blue TV light represented the lighter-than-air spirit of our perky neighbor.

“She’s really a special girl,” he said. “She doesn’t have it easy, but I’ve never seen her without a smile. I always admired that about her.” A pause, while he absorbed the news more deeply. “Wow.”

I had the pleasure of imagining them at the altar, all because of me. But he snuffed that candle out.

“I wish you could let her know that I think she’s just . . . the best. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Like a crab in a seagull’s beak, I’d enjoyed the panorama before being dropped on the rocks.

Denise’s head appeared between the drapes in his living room window, searching impatiently. Finding us watching her, she pulled her head back in and straightened the drapes.

“On second thought, you’d better not say anything,” Don said. “I’d hate for her to be embarrassed whenever she saw me.”

I should have understood that a man like Don would cut off his hand before he’d abandon his miserable wife and run off with the girl of everyone’s dreams. The more I think about it, the more my mistake bothers me. I’m losing my acuity. And what else do I have?

Ah, well. Soon I’ll leave all of my failing faculties behind.

Halfway down the stairs, I couldn’t bear to stay inside. My home spat me out like a watermelon pit.

For a while I drove without a destination. I tried taking only right turns, on a whim, but that kept leading me back to the same abandoned factory. Next I got on the highway, hoping to escape my invisible enemy by outrunning it. By the time I could see Manhattan, I’d lost the race. I had to get out of the car, into a public space—so I parked in Hoboken, sat in the rail terminal, and watched people hurry. I had more in common with the vagrants than with the commuters, i.e., lack of any place to go where someone might want to see me.

Hurtling through the Hudson tube offered some relief. I made it to Thirty-Third Street and almost back to the river again before the heavy-breathing demon found me and chased me off the train.

I’ve been sitting in the Ninth Street station for a while now, typing this and waiting to be rousted again by my nameless pursuer. The platform is long and mostly deserted. It’s pleasantly warm, if malodorous, until a train pulls in (like the one arriving now) and pushes a frigid wind through the tube.

They don’t put backs on these benches, so as not to invite bums, but there’s a slumping guy (or possibly gal) in a long beige parka one bench down, face hidden in the hood, nodding off.

After a sigh of release from the brakes, the train pulls out again, dragging the cold wind behind it and leaving us to shiver.

Typing this has helped, Brother Bob. Not that I’ve solved any problems, but at least I managed to sit still.