I was in the studio Dad had built for me gathering photos of Orient and of Kyle. I found one when she, Art, and I were secretly smoking cigars outside Donnie Boyle’s. Alchemy was playing wiffle ball in the backyard with a friend when I heard him scream, “Mom!” Hilda was passed out on the back porch. Alchemy ran inside and dialed 911. I wrapped Hilda in my arms. I sensated this was her time to transmigrate to another world. I kissed her forehead, and even though she couldn’t hear me, I said, “I will miss you so damn much.”
The paramedics rushed her to Eastern Long Island Hospital. She’d suffered a mild heart attack. The doctors predicted full recovery but wanted to keep her for observation. I extended our stay by three weeks, for her sake and mine.
The night before her release, she died from “cardiogenic shock.” I had sensated correctly. I felt myself untethering. I called Ruggles and he talked to me for almost two hours. He asked if I wanted to come to Collier Layne. I didn’t. His words seemed wise: “If it was going to happen, and it was, isn’t it better you and Alchemy were there? This way you were able to spend quality time together.”
Nathaniel flew back for the funeral. He protected me from the odors of miniminded pieties whispered by Hilda’s friends while they conveyed their phony condolences. Billy Jr. said he would sell the house and put the money in the trust. We took a few mementos, packed up books, records, photo albums and stored them in a neighbor’s barn. The rest would be donated to charities.
One last time I climbed to the roof. Two great white egrets gracefully patrolled the bay, and I bid a final goodbye to Kyle, Art, Dad, and Hilda.
On the way to JFK, an irrecoverable sorrow gnawing at my insides, I asked the driver to stop at the cemetery. Alchemy jumped out and ran ahead of me and stood in front of Hilda and Dad’s headstones. I wished I could’ve reassured him that although their heaven is a lie, there is DNA travel and Hilda existed somewhere where we could all meet again. Only Hilda and Gus weren’t of our DNA and possessed no psychopomp powers. With his long, loose curls flopping over his reddened eyes, his hand touched the nameless headstone next to Dad’s. “Who’s under there?”
“Your brother,” I said, as even-keeled as possible. “I was very young, only two years older than you are now, when I got pregnant. He died during childbirth. I never named him, but I wanted him to have a proper burial so he would be remembered.”
Alchemy started to quake. So did I. I feared he was experiencing a mystical connection through me with his brother. We held hands and knelt in front of the headstone. He rubbed his eyes and runny nose against his red T-shirt.
“No. I met your father many years later. He lives in England now.”
“I want to see him.”
You could say that my impetuous stop at the cemetery was a coincidence that happened to change the course of our lives. Bullshit. Just as finding Teumer’s photo was no coincidence. Both had to happen. I had to accept Alchemy’s unwavering decisiveness, even as the ferocity of his determination startled me that morning. It always did, no matter how often I witnessed it.
Berlin reeked of death. Over the summer, Z had been diagnosed with AIDS and was interred in Auguste-Viktoria-Krankenhaus. He had barred visitors, preferring to be remembered as the smooth-faced man-boy rather than a leprous escapee from Kalaupapa. People listened to him because paranoia and AIDS were synonymous then; too many cowards thought even being in a room with an HIV-positive person was akin to a death sentence. I visited him almost every day.
I arranged a meeting between Alchemy and Bent. The bastard would see him only in exchange for £1,000. Nathaniel, who was attending a mid-September meeting of No Nukes organizers in London, flew with Alchemy and escorted him to Bent’s Earls Court hovel, which he had actually cleaned up. The three of them ate lunch at a local fish and chips place. Although Nathaniel believed Bent was not high, he returned the next morning to check on Alchemy, just to be safe. No one was home. That evening, he returned to find Bent strung out, mumbling that Alchemy had taken off and not come back. Foolishly, we’d given Bent the money before the visit ended. Nathaniel taxied back to the hotel in a quandary, fighting his anticop instincts. Luckily, he found Alchemy, who’d run away, sitting in the lobby flirting with a desk clerk.
They were evasive when I asked for details. Alchemy simply shrugged. “I didn’t like him. He said mean things about you and told me to ask if you had much fun in any loos lately.” I held him close to me, wishing I could exsanguinate the blood of Bent from him.
Gibbon called from New York. He was coming to Cologne, and the skinflint even offered to pay for me to meet him there. A collector had offered $60,000 for a commission with the caveat that we meet first. I wanted Nathaniel to come with me, but he had classes and an appointment in the East. Reluctantly, I went alone. I checked into the hotel decorated in a fin de siècle gaudy opulence straight out of one of Greta’s movies. I almost expected Wallace Beery to lumber across the lobby. Dressed in a white bodice tied in the back, a copperish chenille scarf, and a black leather miniskirt, I wandered downstairs to the dining room to meet Gibbon and his buyer.
“Salome, I’d like you to meet Mr. Malcolm Teumer, who has collected your work since your Do Not Disturb exhibition.”
“Fucking holy fucking shit!”
Everyone in the dining room gaped at us. I collected myself. “Gibbon, please go. Leave Teumer and me alone. Wait in the lobby. This won’t take long.”
“What?” Gibbon jumped up and down in place. “No, I won’t.”
“Murray, I said go! Ask no goddamned questions.” Teumer waved him away.
Once we were alone, I sat down and ordered a tea and cognac. “I guess Lively talked to you.”
“Yes. This seemed convenient, as I have other business here.”
“Attending an SS reunion?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not fifteen anymore. Don’t give me some Joseph Beuys I-was-a-susceptible-youngster bullshit. You’re both impostors in my book.”
“I do not regret my service. And I see you have not lost an ounce of your fiery energy.”
“You haven’t lost an ounce of the superciliousness I once mistook for debonair manliness.” Still ruggedly handsome, he was dressed meticulously in a dark blue suit. “Malcolm, no woman could ever be more relieved than I was that a baby of hers died.”
“Salome, Salome, poor girl.” He shook his head, leaned forward, and reached for my hand. I snatched it away. “He didn’t die. That was a ruse we all agreed upon. Your parents, Bickley, and I. Our son was alive then, and he lives today.”
I placed my hand on my belly and tried to feel the babydeath, or babylife. I started to panic, as if I were going to come apart and disperse into the dark matter. “No. No!” I threw the cognac in his eyes. I stood up and spilled the tea on his lap. He let out a room-piercing “Acchh!” I knelt beside him and pretended to dab his eyes with my scarf. “That is only a fraction of the pain I can cause you. Please, please call the police. I’d love to discuss your past with them.”
The maître d’ scampered to our table. In between his yelps, Teumer shook his head. “It … is … nothing. An accident.”
I stood up and saluted, “Heil Hitler.” I clicked my heels and marched into the lobby, where I told Gibbon that Teumer was a perverted stalker who I’d foolishly fucked. I ordered him to buy back all work of mine in his possession, even if I had to indenture myself to Gibbon for years.
Upstairs, in my hotel room, I vomited. I took some tranquilizers and called Nathaniel to confess the entire sordid mess. He heard distress in my voice and did his best to give me strength. “You and I together will face him. I won’t let him hurt you again.”
When I got back to Berlin (in another noncoincidence), Nathaniel told me he found Alchemy—almost the same age as me when I was with Teumer—having sex with two of Heinricha’s friends. I envied Alchemy’s freedom, the adventures ahead. I talked to him. “Sex is not good, it’s great. Never let anyone make you feel guilty or dirty. Or shameful. Be kind. Don’t lie. Treat women with respect. Treat them as your betters. Use birth control.”
I stopped going out. There’d been two deaths, and I feared another. My spirit, which once was enthused by Berlin, now became moribund. Nathaniel came to me one afternoon with a letter from Magnolia College, an all-women’s school in Virginia. He’d made the final list for a professor’s position and they had requested he come for an interview. He’d neglected to tell me he’d even applied.
“Do you still want us to go with you?”
“Of course. If this job really happens, I will be able to provide some security for us, and for Alchemy.”
“I still won’t marry you.”
“I never expect that you will.”
While we waited for Magnolia’s answer, I spent hours in my studio exhaling little drawings, reading, or just perched on my balcony dreaming into the Berlin sky. One evening I spied a woman, who must have been squatting, in a vacant building across the divide on the east side of the Wall. I tried to get her attention by turning on a spotlight above my head on the balcony, to psychically warn her that the East German police were coming to make one of their sweeps, looking for wall jumpers. She disappeared. I wondered if I’d reached her or if they’d caught her.
The next evening, I spotted a body zigging and zagging across the death strip. It was the woman I had seen the night before. The tower lights flashed. Orders echoed. I screamed, leaning far over the iron balcony. A barrage of gunfire. Howls of pain. She fell. Beside her—a baby. Its cries echoed across the Wall. I had to rescue them.