CHAPTER 17

ROOT BEER

I HAD A REMARKABLE amount of energy. I even felt chipper. I couldn’t recall the last time I felt chipper.

The inevitable walk beckoned.

But Maggie, who wanted the details of my visit to the VU, delayed my departure. I told her the whole story.

“Not a den of evil?” she asked, incredulity in her voice.

“Quite the contrary. It’s a small city coping with poverty and in its way struggling to build a just society. As you might say, for the most part, at least.”

“I’m going to have to look into this. I don’t like being fooled, and I am usually not. But sometimes the layers of fake news fool even me. And there seems to be a boatload of fake news about the VU on social media.”

I assured Maggie that I’d continue to rely on her word for things. I admitted I was chastened by finding a reality so completely different from what I’d expected. We chatted a moment about the society they were constructing; then Maggie shifted the subject.

“Do you have any idea, Nick, what we can deduce about Shelley Tanzer’s behavior?” she asked.

I did. But I wanted Maggie’s take. “Tell me what you think.”

“Why would he do what he did if he had not been in contact with someone who ordered him to do it?” she asked. “Who would order him?”

“Maybe Esther, maybe Shmulie—if he’s alive. By the way, I don’t take this fool’s idea that Shmulie’s dead for anything but a revenge fantasy. Why drug me? I wasn’t a threat to him. I didn’t mean anything to him until I showed up yesterday afternoon.”

“If he heard from Esther, you know what that means?” Maggie asked.

“Of course. That Esther has greater accessibility than she lets on. Maybe she still has a relationship with Shelley.”

“And the key,” Maggie said. “What’s behind the door it unlocks?”

“Too vague. Could the key be why he dosed me? To get rid of me?”

“It’s for the future. But right now, my Nicholas, I know you have a job to do.”

“Yes. I need to pay Lorraine a visit,” I said, recalling a familiar voice I heard in the midst of my Lerbs-induced lunacy.

“Understandable. It has been three months and seventeen days since your last visit. When do you anticipate that you will return home?”

“Not too late. Certainly before dark. I haven’t biked for two days. But why don’t you just stay with me and we can review what you learned in your researches?”

“I am aware, Nick, that it is imperative we have that discussion. I certainly have uncovered a great deal of information that I must pass on to you. Nevertheless, I think it incumbent upon you to see your daughter unaccompanied. We can defer our conversation by a few hours.”

“You’re right, I guess,” I said, though I could have used the company. But there were some things a man had to do alone.

“I know I am right. I am most of the time, almost always. Of course, if you need me for an emergency, I shall be only a call away. I shall never desert you ever again, Nicholas, not ever. Of that truth you can be abundantly certain.”

There was a click and Marlene disappeared.

***

I exited Wally’s Wireless and entered daylight. Bright rays bounced off the sidewalk and hit me in the face like a day at the beach. After blinking some of that light from my eyes, I got my bearings and headed north on Sixth Avenue for about a mile. The air was chilly, but I was so lost in thought I felt nothing.

In the Land of No Mind the One-I’d Man is king, the Rebbe had said. No clue what or who a One-I’d Man could be or what a land of No Mind might amount to. But it must have been important, else why would the Kobliner Rebbe have said it?

As I proceeded north my mood shifted from cheerful to despondent. Lerbs had left countless souls in hospital beds around the world, motionless, save for being shifted from time to time by hospital aides employed to flip them like flapjacks on a griddle. Euphoria morphed into morbidity as I considered how I barely escaped that fate.

My mouth tasted like mothballs, and my stomach grumbled in hunger. I entered a coffee shop, one of only a few remaining in the city. Reasonable prices, bad coffee served in ubiquitous blue paper cups. I sat down on a round backless seat at the Formica counter. A lovely young woman ran a wet cloth over my bit of personal space. She was perhaps in her early twenties with a petite tattoo of a hummingbird above her left shoulder, a long piercing across her forehead, and lime-green lipstick, lately all the rage, that, oddly, looked good on her. She put the rag down.

“What can I get you?” she said. I saw something in her eye I recognized immediately—that same look in Lorraine. Filled with life, the expression bore witness to the power of the moment, a look exclusively the privilege of youth. With Lorraine, that familiar saw that youth was wasted on the young was utterly false.

How did Lorraine spend her youth? She did, and never stopped doing. That was her greatness. She found her way to leadership positions, whether in youth group, high school, or at the university. Everything improved through Lorraine’s touch.

I had a pivotal role in her greatness.

***

One day when Lorraine was maybe ten, we went on an outing to Manhattan to see a Disney film. Afterward, we made our way to a coffee shop much like the one I found myself in now. We ordered lunch. As part of my meal I ordered a glass of root beer. When it arrived, Lorraine groaned with colossal disgust. I had no idea where such disdain originated, but it sat there on her face plain as the straw in my glass. I thought, What kid on planet Earth doesn’t love root beer? To expand her stock of life experiences, I slid the glass her way.

“No thank you!” Her reply was so full of loathing you’d think I’d asked her to eat compost. I persuaded her to sample some.

“I just took you to the movies, didn’t I?” I asked, implying, if not actually stating, the terms of a quid pro quo.

“Yes, thank you, Dad,” she said. “But because you took me to the movies, I don’t owe you anything back.”

She was right, of course. So, I attempted another tack. Bribery.

“How about five dollars for a sip?” I asked, knowing full well I was heading into hazardous parenting waters.

“You’re not going to get me that cheap,” she said, wise beyond her years. But she’d opened a door through which I thought I might be allowed to pass.

“How about seven fifty and subway fare home?” I suggested, my tone indicating this to be my final offer.

To my surprise, she put the straw in her mouth and took in enough to have a justifiable claim to the promised reward.

I expected nausea and gagging, if not worse. Instead, there was a glint, a surge of energy lighting up first her eyes and then the room. “I like it,” she said with surprise in her voice. “It’s good.”

Hell yes, I thought. What kid doesn’t like root beer?

Every time thereafter, when Lorraine would express some irrational reluctance to engage in an activity, in my best sardonic tone I would bring up the root beer incident. She once confided in me that root beer became her own private meme for overcoming reluctance and easing anxiety.

Best seven dollars and fifty cents I ever spent. The subway fare, of course, was always a given.

“What can I get for you?” my waitress repeated.

I looked up at her. “Sorry,” I said. “I’d like three egg whites poached, a slice of whole wheat toast, dry, and some jasmine tea, please. Sliced tomatoes instead of home fries.”

“Coming right up,” she responded and walked toward the counterman to place the order.

“Miss!” I called out. She turned around. “Make that a root beer.”

***

After breakfast I continued north. At Fifty-Fifth Street I turned east. I came to a small hospital. I entered, nodded to the guard, who returned the gesture. I took the elevator to the second floor, exited, turned left, and walked to room 237. Without feeling much save some mild dread, I took a breath and entered.

Nothing new. Lorraine lay in bed attached as usual to the feeding and hydration tubes, as well as to a monitor tracking her bodily systems. She lay there on her back, as always, eyes closed, no glint, no energy, no discernible intelligence.

When she first landed in this place, I came weekly. I used to kiss her, speak with her about the weather, the news, a book I was reading, a movie. I’d pretend all of this was temporary, that she could hear me, that my voice aided her imminent recovery. Over time I realized my chatter was ludicrous. I continued to visit, but instead of speaking aloud, I’d sit wretchedly and review the plans and hopes we’d had for a young woman who nearly made it through her second year of Columbia Law. That practice lasted about a year. Then the monotony of the visits became too depressing, my hopes absurd.

Now I came to make certain all was well as could be with my daughter, who recently celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday in this comatose state. She rested here courtesy of the City of New York, along with 170 other victims of the marketing genius of Esther Lacey and the pharmaceutical brilliance of my old high school buddy, the missing Shmulie Shimmer. I no longer wept, hadn’t for some time. I looked and sighed. I wished from time to time that she’d open her eyes and say, “Dad, that’s your thousandth groan. Stop it and get on with your life.” And then she’d close them.

“Hello, Nick,” an unmistakable voice said from behind.

“Hi, Linda. How are you?” I said without turning around.

“New day, same shit, right?” she said. “How are you?”

“Same old, same old,” I responded with equal flair. I turned to face her.

She looked haggard, as always, eyes tired, her wrinkles exacerbated by her mental state. She looked at me with undisguised fury and uttered a variation on a theme.

“You might think your old high school playmate did this to her, but this is all your fault. I know it and you know it,” she said. If one were to follow the chain of causality that flowed back to my high school years, she held the correct assessment. She didn’t know that part. Her poisonous words reflected the way our marriage concluded.

“I know. I know,” I whispered. What else to say? I left the room, lightly touching Linda on the shoulder. She recoiled.

The connection of the task at hand to the daughter whose eyes would never see anything again struck me like a hammer. I needed to go home. Now.