* * *
It’s weeks later, and I find her on her knees, rag in hand, scrubbing the kitchen floor.
“Mother, you don’t have to do that. Let me do it.”
“It’s not going away,” she says, standing up. She lifts her arms. “It’s coming out of my skin.”
“What is?”
“That rotting smell. That old-people smell. That stench of formaldehyde that makes them smell as though they’re dying from within.”
I take her hand and raise it close to my nose.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I don’t smell anything, Mother. Just soap. I always liked the smell of your soap.”
Late that night I find her still awake in bed. All the lights are on. She has the radio humming softly, an old Frank Sinatra favorite.
“You’ll be all right?”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“Don’t force yourself. Read, do something. Let your body tell you when it’s ready to sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Because if I do, I’ll never wake again. And you know what that means?”
I pull a chair over and sit next to her bed.
“It means I never survived the bomb. It means, at last, that I’m dead.”
“Oh, Mother. Please don’t say that. Please.”
“Am I dead?”
“No. Not at all. Don’t let them do this to you.”
“I can’t feel anything.”
I poke her arm lightly with my finger. She twitches, pulls away. “You’re okay,” I tell her.
“I didn’t feel a thing.”
* * *
Days later the caravans come. They must be people from the next county, driving by several times a day and shouting, BABY KILLERS GO TO HELL! When it becomes obvious that, under my supervision, it’s going to be business as usual at the clinic, they use more covert, and more annoying, tactics. I find our door locks stuck with glue, the car tires punctured, the phone wires cut. Fake clients keep calling to set appointments and book us for weeks, and we have to turn away patients who really need our services. Someone spray paints, MOMMY DON’T KILL ME, on our front door.
Right before Thanksgiving, Mother’s name appears on the Life Crusaders’ online hit list, just below Frank’s; the list is alphabetical.
I decide to move Mother out of the place. It isn’t a hard decision to make. Her delusions soon overwhelm all sense of reality. In time I have to admit that she is never going to work again.
I pack our things in a U-Haul. As I heave the last of our stuff in the back of the truck, the neighbors stare at us, peering from behind curtains or through slightly open doors.
Just before we move, the Life Crusaders have one last thing to say. They send Mother a letter with a line from the Book of Hebrews. This is what it says:
For our God is a consuming fire.
* * *
We move down to the city, where I can have her close to specialists who can keep her under observation. She is diagnosed with a rare disorder called Cotard’s syndrome. In Cotard’s syndrome, all senses become disconnected from emotions. Everything in the world ceases to have any emotional significance. The only way a patient explains this is that she’s dead. Anything that contradicts that conviction is distorted to fit the delusion.
I have never heard of anything like it before. Despite the specialists’ careful though arcane explanation, it sounds too weird, too sci-fi, and I argue that all Mother needs is a little rest and a little time. I find a two-bedroom apartment on West --, five flights in a walk-up above a truck garage. Every night when the trucks come in, the building shudders like an island sitting on a tectonic plate. We hardly see anyone else, except for a young Korean couple on the first floor who walk a yapping terrier late at night and don’t like to chat much.
In the apartment below, someone plays a cello every morning. For several weeks after we move in, the same Brahms andante floats up to our apartment as I make coffee. I am desperate for signs that I have done the right thing. This seems as good as any. It gives me, at least, some reassurance that Mother and I can now safely disappear.
The apartment has enough room for some of the stuff I saved from the bombing, useless junk that she and Frank once shared, some CDs and books. Not one photograph of our life in Dobbs Ferry has survived the fire.
“Who are you?”
The first time she asks that question, I realize no proof of our existence remains. I don’t know how to respond.
* * *
There is no better place to move her to than New York City. It is the only place where we can avoid caravans of indignant Christians and be safe from their threats and pranks. It isn’t going to get her name off their hit list, but at least no one is going to lob another pipe bomb at us around here.
In my need for providential signs, our move seems significant at that time. The city is the opposite of what she is. It is her image in reverse, magnified and multiplied. She is alive and believes she is dead. The city is by all appearances alive, and only when you look closely, not up at the lights and towering high-rises but down in the gutters and tunnels, do you realize it’s in an advanced state of decomposition. It’s propped up by a life-support system of billboards, shops, train tracks, tourists, money, noise, and seemingly purposeful mayhem. But it’s a lost cause. It’s rotting in its bones, its innards infested with cockroaches, mosquitoes, and rats, its services inept, its dissonant ghettoes teeming with the refuse of the human race, the homeless, the crazy, and the poor. It’s a city sewn together from many cities, people from all over the world bring their shit here and call it a life: a Frankenstein’s monster of a city, born without a soul and doomed to die, if not already dead. No wonder Lorca’s impression of it was morbid:
Por los barrios hay gentes que vacilan insomnes
como recién salidas de un naufragio de sangre.
In the neighborhoods sleepless people stagger
like survivors of a shipwreck of blood.
I am happy to stay home with her all day. The city discombobulates me. Its farrago of everything causes my head to spin. Just the idea of having to go out already makes me feel nauseous. The shortest trip to a Rite Aid three blocks away, where I have to get her medication, feels like I’m walking through a gauntlet, past the rebellious gun-toting teenagers streaming out of Martin Luther King High School, the hawkers of fake Gucci bags, the Chinese takeout cyclists who will run you down for no reason.
