me the usual bullshit about writing and living in Manhattan, and I’d give you the usual bullshit about how honoured I feel to be here, and we’d never see each other again.”
He grabbed my shirt and lifted me off the bar stool and slammed me against the bar—it felt as if my spine had snapped—then hauled me out of the room so fast my feet couldn’t keep up, and dumped me on the sidewalk out front. Then he went back inside.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, blind with humiliation. The feeling was so intense it somehow rebounded on itself and made me shameless, sitting on the pavement not caring who saw me, my clothes soaking up the slush, indifferent to Görbe’s voice back in the bar telling everyone how lucky I was. I got home and Marcy asked why I was wet, and I couldn’t look at her, and I couldn’t look in on Henry and Benjamin asleep in their beds. I was so consumed by what Görbe had done I couldn’t focus on anything.
The next morning Görbe left his apartment at ten, hopping the subway into Manhattan and then the M35 bus to Ward’s Island. He was dressed as always—black suit, black tie, the overcoat, the cigar. He wasn’t reading anything, wasn’t looking around, wasn’t muttering more than a quick hello to the bus driver. He took a seat and stared straight ahead, and once in a while he’d open a big sketchbook on his lap and make a note or doodle a picture for the next installment of the Atlas.
The morning started with snow, by noon it was rain, and I got off a block after he did to avoid suspicion and got soaked running back to catch Görbe checking in with the receptionist and moving down one of the corridors of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. After he was gone, I went up to the receptionist and said I was there to visit Zella Görbe. She looked at me a bit, wanting to say something, but in the end kept it to herself. “Her husband just checked in, too,” she muttered.
I crept down the corridor after him, hoping not to be seen, and when I came to Zella’s room I skirted it and then snuck back and peeked in the window.
He was sitting in what seemed an absurdly small chair, all that weight on those spindly chrome legs, his coat hitting the floor in folds around his ankles.
The woman in the bed looked as if she’d been there all her life. But for some reason—maybe because she’d been there so long, removed from the stresses of lived life, taxes and sick kids and getting to work on time—Zella looked radiant, her face smooth of wrinkles, her skin white, her hair carefully arranged, to the point where I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that someone came around every morning to clean her up. As I peeked in further I saw the woman from the photographs, the one always in the background, aged so much I wouldn’t have recognized her except I knew she’d be there—the private nurse Görbe had been paying for who knows how long to look after Zella. For a second it seemed to me that the nurse, with her thinning hair and withered face and bent back, was somehow paying the price, physically, for Zella’s radiance. Closing my eyes I leaned against the wall and listened to her and Görbe. They were speaking Hungarian. It was the first time I’d heard Görbe use the language. The nurse’s name was Zsuzsa, and what they spoke of was Zella’s condition, how often the orderlies shifted her body to prevent bedsores, whether there was anything Görbe needed (“No” was his reply, though he thanked Zsuzsa for her concern), how his next book was coming along (“On time as always,” was his tired reply), and whether Zsuzsa needed anything (“You’ve looked after me just fine,” said the old woman). Then, after a short pause in which both of them seemed to be avoiding the next topic, Zsuzsa asked Görbe if he’d reconsidered “the treatment” proposed by “Dr. Norris.” He replied so loudly I heard every word: “I’ve told you, I’m not ever going to agree to that. It’s too risky.” Zsuzsa’s silence made it plain just how much she disagreed, or how little she believed that the “risk” was for him the only, or even the main, consideration.
“Can I help you, sir?” I was startled out of my eavesdropping by a nurse. I opened my eyes to find her standing in front of me, her hand on my shoulder as if she was worried I’d fall down. “Are you okay?”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m just tired. A bit dizzy.”
“Come over here.” She did as I’d hoped and led me away from Zella’s room to another waiting area, returning a second later with a glass of water.
“I was on my way to see Dr. Norris,” I said.
“Oh, he’s not in today,” said the nurse. “Did you have an appointment?”
“Well, no . . . I’m a writer. A journalist. I heard he’s been experimenting with some new treatment and I was thinking maybe there was a story in it.”
She looked at me strangely. “Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She got up and smoothed the fabric of her uniform on either hip, and said, “I hope you’re feeling better.” I told her I was, and the minute she was gone I rose to leave as well.
It didn’t take me long to look up Dr. Norris and discover he was a research physician at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center working on an experimental procedure for patients with “severe catatonia resulting from schizophrenia.” I didn’t have a lot of use for the article—it was filled with technical jargon I didn’t understand—except it gave me the window onto Görbe I’d been looking for. Zella was schizophrenic, the disease had worsened over time, and the reason Görbe lived in such poverty was because he spent all of his money on her care, and it didn’t matter to him, because without Zella there was no life for him worth spending money on. I sat in the Bobst Library with the research in front of me and wondered what I was doing, how I’d come to this, obsessing over the troubles of a man who’d gone through more suffering than I could conceive, and beside which my own failures in New York amounted to nothing. I wondered, too, why Görbe had not taken up Dr. Norris’s offer, for it seemed to me that neither he nor Zella had anything to lose. I’d seen her on the bed, so vegetative that whatever position they moved her body into it stayed there, like a mannequin. Even death seemed better than that. So why didn’t he agree to it? And I think it was this, the hopelessness of Görbe’s situation, his inability to do what he knew he had to do, that made me get up and call him.
We met in a Cuban diner, Margon, on Forty-sixth Street near Times Square. It was the dirtiest place I’d ever gone to in New York, but the food was the best, and Görbe was already into his third plate by the time I arrived. He watched suspiciously as I made my way along the narrow space between the tables and the people lined up by the counter. I’d told him over the phone I really wanted to “clear the air” over what happened at Lotus, my voice edging into an apology when he just coughed nervously into the phone and said, “Forget it, it’s nothing, come have lunch at Margon.”
“How’s your back?” he asked, and it took me a second to realize he was referring to slamming me against the bar. I shrugged, dropped my coat, got my food, and came back just as the waitress, who knew Görbe personally, was bringing him his fourth plate.
I waited until we finished eating, talking in the meantime about nothing—the business of writing, the stories we were working on—before asking, “How’s Zella?”
Görbe looked like he wanted to jump the table and grab my throat. But he was too fat, and was hemmed in by the people behind and beside him. In fact, the only way he could stand up was to upend the table, along with the food of everyone sitting there.
“I know about Dr. Norris,” I said, “and the terrible decision you have to make . . .”
But it was coming out all wrong, even to my ears. It occurred to me then, staring into Görbe’s enraged face, that I had no idea why I’d come here. I had thought, sitting in the library and the subway on the way up, that knowing what I knew would show Görbe
