The Novel vs. The State

A phone call from my sister in D.C. wakes me up on Thursday morning. Mom is in Trinidad on business and our fifteen-year-old dog at home in Houston is on her way out. Hurricane Ike is set to nail the city and the vet can’t keep the dog because the whole area is going to lose power. When the power goes, it will be sudden (unlike the dog, whose once full cockles of cocker spaniel heart are going slowly and without reset).

While I am in the shower, mom leaves a voicemail. I suspect she wasn’t going to cry until she called me and I wasn’t going to cry until I heard the voicemail and then I cried that one good annual storm. This was all forecasted.

I am limping on a lame leg through Grand Central Station, I’ve hurt my knee running and now I can’t walk. Things it takes for strangers to be kinder to you: a chip in the veneer.

After school, I will get an MRI. I go all the way to class and it’s been canceled. The entire class for the entire semester is canceled. I call my best friend while I wait for the train back to the city.

“The professor is on medical leave.”
“What was the course about?”
“It was called ‘The Novel vs. The State.’ I guess that battle isn’t happening.”
“Can’t someone else teach?”
“He was the only one qualified.”

My insurance has given me an out-of-date address for my appointment. I am lost on Chambers Street during rush hour on September 11th, searching for an office in Lower Manhattan that no longer exists.

I promise the doctor's office I'd only be twenty minutes late. On a packed express train uptown, a passenger gets sick and they have to hold the subway at the station. I watch two other local trains pass before I press into the third cramped metal conveyance where everyone leans as if limping. I finally feel kicked-in by New York and it’s all for no real thing; the state of one animal, one tendon, one turgid academic venture.

Three agonizing numbers shy of the doctor’s address, I spy a man leaving an apartment building and I recognize him right away, his eyes dark and sunken like punctuation. He turns, aware of my slowing. I've hung more than a dozen of his jackets on my bookshelves and, absent from them now, I am fittingly cold. He looks me in the eye, the mallet hits my temple. I see stars through the beams and cover of the awning overhead.

“Hi.”
“Hi.”

He gets into an idling car and sits. I walk into the doctor’s office.

“Because you were late, two people are ahead of you now. It’s going to be an hour and forty-five minutes.”
“That’s fine. I am going outside to make a call.”

I’d aspired to meet this man since I was young, my teenage heart thick with the feeling of health, the full-noon trill. I wouldn’t have minded standing there all hundred minutes, in dented armor, hoping only that he’d be kind.

After a moment, the man left the car and as he made his way back to the sidewalk, I approached him.

“Mr. Roth,” I began.

I began beyond the tremors of my hands, all the prostrations of my knee. An hour later, the MRI machine wipes clean the memory of the credit cards and subway tickets in my back pocket. All my identification has been demagnetized, my credentials amnesia-struck. I am universally nobody.

“Did you just say hi or did you really meet him?” sister asks.
“Well…both.”

From my window, the state blasts a pillar of memorial light into the firmament. The dog will survive the weekend, news of my knee will arrive in roughly three-to-four business days.

My conversation with Mr. Roth is ending. I’ve introduced myself, I’ve shaken his hand. I’ve thanked him and told him that there was no one else qualified. I mention the strangeness of meeting him only a few months after I’d written him a letter.

"Did you receive a reply?" he asks.
"Not yet."
“Well, this counts as a response,” he says, forcing laughter.

I telegraph back mockingbird laughter and ask him a final question.

“How are you?”

This is a question of paradox. It is the question of both an acolyte and an equalizer, something you'd ask an immortal mortal and his other, something that would be considered odd as part of any other valediction.

“I’m well,” he says. “Thank you. I’m very well.”