He didn’t want to play the kind of games that had transformed people like Rich Panda into spiritless husks. He didn’t want to embark upon a lawsuit to get money. He was a failed composer, a musician with performance anxiety. To take on a giant corporation run by insanely aggressive, acquisitive, semi-human ciphers was hardly promising of success or pleasure. And yet, as bankrupt as it seemed, it was the only thing he could think to do. He wondered if in fact the semi-human ciphers had once been forced, as he was now, to enter upon this game, if they knew or regretted it, and if even at this late stage he would become like them.
Sammi Montmirail had the patience and fortitude to sit at a desk all day and do legal puzzles under high pressure, but when Jules walked into his office he had been thinking about how his children would like the hat he had made for their dog, a timid and self-effacing beagle who was the baby of the family. It was a surprise for them. When the beagle was naughty, which she was on occasion, she would be sent to her bed and made to wear the hat, a baseball cap with holes for her ears and the word Cat embroidered on the front. So much for the United States Code. Nor was Sammi Montmirail the lawyer’s original name. Jules knew this upon seeing his face, a wonderful face to which Jules took instantly. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“The Gironde, fifteen minutes from Bordeaux.”
“And before that?”
Sammi hesitated. Jules had made him, but he hadn’t made Jules. “Israel,” he said.
“And before that?” Jules asked in Hebrew.
Sammi relaxed. “Iran.”
Jules looked past him all the way to the Atlantic, where enormous ships in great number seemed no bigger than bright little seeds. New York was a water city, close to the ocean, hard by bays, riven by inlets, surrounded by rivers. Just as Paris was surrounded by hills and forests to which many Parisians did not give a thought, probably many New Yorkers never realized how, in their city, land and water intermingled like clasped fingers. “So, a Jew, an Iranian, an Israeli, a Frenchman, and an American. Of the five, which is your favorite?”
“I would say husband and father, definitely. And you?”
“The same, although for me that’s largely over.”
“How old are you?” Sammi asked.
“Seventy-four.”
“And where were you during the war?”
“In France.”
“Then we both started rough. How can I help you?” Ready to take careful notes, he picked up a fountain pen and opened a portfolio.
Jules told him the whole story and laid before him copies of the emails promising acceptance. Sammi was slight and dark, his face gentle and sympathetic. He read the documents carefully. When he finished, he thought in silence.
This hesitation impressed Jules, who wanted to trust his thinking, whatever conclusions might issue. But nonetheless, before the lawyer could utter even a word, Jules said, “Apart from whatever the facts or legalities of the case, I have a question.”
“Which is?” The lawyer was expecting a query about cost.
“Does the law,” Jules asked, “have within it, like music, secrets and keys that unlock it?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Things that, though in the open, remain hidden to most, but if discovered clarify and increase the power of effect – patterns, repeated proportions, and rhythms that when taken as a whole and with sufficient detachment melt into a coherence that can’t be properly perceived without them.”
Who was this person? At a thousand dollars an hour, the conversations Sammi had in his office were dense with information rapidly communicated, and never philosophical or discursive. “Can you give me an example?”
“Verdi and waveforms.”
“Okay,” he said, in the way it can be said meaning, Go ahead.
“Almost all of Verdi’s music comports with the timing and amplitude of ocean waves. Or sea waves: after all, he knew the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. Though this is complex and subtle in an analytical frame, it’s easy to perceive in the sound, and if you’ve realized what it is and how he does it you can ride on those waves instead of letting them wash over you.”
“You’re a musicologist?”
“No. They would protest what I’ve just said. I’m a musician. Musicians work in waves. Musicologists work in shards.”
“You realize,” Sammi said, “that these speculations cost a thousand dollars an hour, or – I like to remind my clients – sixteen dollars and sixty-seven cents a minute, or twenty-eight cents a second?”
“What the hell,” Jules said, in for a dime, in for a thousand dollars an hour. “Does the law have waves?”
“Yes, but I don’t think waves are as relevant to the law as they would be to Verdi, especially to contract law, which is all about the definition and legitimacy of specifics – what you would call shards.
“And the shard picture, upon cursory examination, is not encouraging. To be blunt, Acorn has a thousand lawyers floating on a lake of several trillion dollars. In suing Acorn, few individuals could withstand the intense combat that would occur entirely apart from the merits of the case. It would cost you, not including appeals, upwards of a million dollars and at least two years. Bring in French law, and you might not have to double those figures but you’d certainly be in for a lot more than a million, and three or possibly more years.”
“For such a simple thing?”
“For such a simple thing: depositions, motions, discovery, countersuit. And Acorn is not invested in it emotionally. Whereas the Acorn principals will never think of it other than at the end, you will obsess and your dreams will be monopolized. For them, depositions will be fun. They’re sadists when it comes down to it. You’re analytical and perhaps brave. You won’t collapse in deposition, but no matter that you might do well, you’ll still be angry, frustrated, insulted, and your blood pressure will double.”
“But what about the merits of the case?”
“Sixty/forty for you. I would side with you. But it could go either way. It depends upon the judge and, believe me, we have what my associates here call doofusses.”
“So what do you advise overall?”
“Take the blow and get on with your life. You may not thank me if you follow my advice, because you won’t know. But if you go ahead with the suit, I promise, you’ll curse yourself.
“Do you know why I asked your age? Not just from curiosity and to gauge who you are and what you might know, but because I’ve had clients, and not just a few, who spent the last years of their lives drowning in the nonsense and unhappiness of a lawsuit. You might end up like that bunch of Jews in California who because they wanted to open a casino called themselves the Snickers Tribe.”
“Snickers? For the feet?”
“No, Snickers. It’s a candy bar.”
“A bar of candy? Why would they …?”
“It’s hard to explain, but, needless to say, they didn’t get a casino license because they weren’t really an Indian tribe.”
“So why did they say they were?”
“That’s a question I can’t answer. You’d have to ask them. All I can say is that they spent a lot of money on legal fees.”
“I see.”
“Don’t be crestfallen. Among other things, this has been half an hour – five hundred dollars – and I won’t bill it.”
“I insist,” Jules said, looking around at the office. “With this kind of overhead, you must have so much pressure to bill.”
“I do, but I’ve never had a client who at a thousand dollars an hour talked about Verdi and waves in the ocean. Tomorrow I’ll cut half an hour off lunch.”
Lights Corruscating Through the Dusk
ONCE AGAIN, JULES was running in the park. It was sunny, the weather tranquil and bright. Convinced that the only thing left to him was physical strength, he attended to it. The day before, the music faculty had told him by email that his teaching load and his salary, such as they were, would be further reduced. And Cathérine had w
ritten that Luc had a persistent fever, slept most of the day, and cried often, not from pain but for help. Jules was trapped in New York because changing his ticket would cost several thousand Euros more than he had already paid, and as the hotel was irrevocably paid up as well he would stay on until his originally scheduled flight out, economizing by eating at supermarkets and from street vendors. That kind of saving hardly mattered. He’d kept a ledger of his expenses in a little notebook. With the recent change in exchange rates, by the time he walked in the door at home he would have spent nearly €40,000, not a single Euro of which would be reimbursed. Half his savings were gone. In addition to what was left he had some gold coins, Jacqueline’s jewelry, and a tiny Daubigny, which together and with luck might bring €50,000. The piano was worth quite a lot, although he didn’t know how much.
He could live solely on his pension, semi-impoverished like so many others, and give the rest to Cathérine for Luc, but that would be only a fraction of what was needed. He would stay in Saint-Germain-en-Laye even if not in the Shymanski house. Saint-Germain-en-Laye was his home. Jacqueline flowed through it like air, and to leave it would be to break a connection yet unbroken.
When the Shymanski house was sold, Jules would probably end up in a small room above a store, with loud neighbors, traffic sounds, no view, and persistent cooking smells. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Jacqueline had deserved to see her grandchild, and yet she had not. She had deserved to live, and yet she had not. She had deserved to go gently, and yet she had not. Luc deserved to have a childhood and not to suffer and die early. Jules had failed them and could think of nothing except to keep up his health and strength so that if an opportunity arose he might seize it.
But he ran too hard. He wasn’t as fast, and he no longer sailed effortlessly as he had after his prodigious sleep. By the time he reached the northern end of the park, having almost sprinted down the hill, it got easier, so he picked up his pace, all the while trying to think of what might arrest the downward trajectory of his life.
As the road turned south, it climbed what was known, if not to Jules, as Heartbreak Hill. Although he had run it on the first day in New York, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye he was used to level ground or, in the forest, rolling rises. This was different, a steep hill with sharp rock outcroppings. Though everyone tried not to, everyone slowed here. Three quarters of the way up, Jules began to feel lightheaded. It was pleasant, but as it intensified he grew alarmed. If only he could crest the hill, he thought, his lightheadedness might cease. Soon after, it became painful, and the world darkened as if in an eclipse. Apart from the strain of ascending, he felt all right. It wasn’t his heart. He was running automatically, and soon he could no longer hear either his steps or the wind. Then he was flying through total darkness as his feet left the ground and there was no gravity … until he hit the pavement without even extending his arms to break the fall. First his head struck, followed by his chest, as his body slid forward with continuing momentum. His left cheek burned as it scraped the asphalt, and what felt like warm water gushed around his face. This was not unpleasant, and he enjoyed it until he lost consciousness.
Half a dozen runners immediately came to his aid, and a woman called 911 on her pink cell phone. Someone took off a nylon jacket, folded it, and put it under Jules’ head after two other people had rolled him onto his back. “Is he dead?” another person asked, as someone else began to push Jules’ chest with the heels of his hands, singing, as he was taught in his CPR class, the song “Stayin’ Alive,” to time the pushes. The sound of an ambulance could be heard not even half a mile distant, near St. Luke’s. All the while, Jules’ heart was functioning perfectly well even as it was suffering violent and unnecessary ministrations. And all the while he was dreaming, although the dream was so real he would think upon remembering it that it was not a dream but a visit to another world.
In his dream, fur-clad, pre-medieval warriors met on a frozen strait, far from land. The battlefield was perfectly white and flat, with no horizon but only three hundred and sixty degrees of mist. And there they fought to the death. Hours passed, combinations formed and dissolved, but the battle continued to the last man on both sides, and the two who remained killed one another. Scattered over the reddened ice and its snow were whitened bodies. The corpses, and weapons of bone, wood, and iron were laid out as if by a receding flood, stacked and crosswise, hunched over, the men’s faces a gallery of frightened and agonized expressions. Nothing moved or changed. Neither crows nor jackals interrupted the quiet. Silence reigned until spring, when the ice melted and gave way, and in half an hour every evidence of life and struggle disappeared as if it had never existed, all the vanquished sinking into oblivion, their weapons, plans, hopes, and passions easily subsumed in the smooth, unconscious sea.
WHEN JULES AWOKE he had an extraordinarily strong, almost sensual feeling of delicacy and impermanence. Aware that he might die at any moment, he was like a traveler who, before taking a single step, has in spirit left his home, his city, and his country. He was reconciled and unafraid, sorrowful only because important matters remained unaddressed. Little things ballooned in his perception as if he were once again an infant. The painfully white, waffled, cotton blanket that covered him up to his chest, the almost smooth, slightly threadbare sheets, the top of a copper-clad steeple he saw through the window, murmurs from the hospital corridor, and the cooing of pigeons nearby and out of sight were as comforting as if he were embraced, held, and loved.
He had no pain, and breathed easily. Something had happened, he didn’t know what, but evidently he was not yet over the edge. A nurse came in and saw that the patient was conscious, his eyes open. She had strawberry-blonde hair, a big face, and prominent upper front teeth.
“I enjoy this hospital room,” Jules declared. It stopped her cold.
“I’ve never heard that before,” she said, “ever.”
“Oh yes I do,” Jules said.
“Sit tight,” she told him, an idiom with which he was not familiar. “I’ll get the attending.” She went out.
It took fifteen minutes for the attending to arrive, and when he did he announced himself as Doctor Beckerman. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“You were running. You experienced what appears to have been a transient neurological event, and you fell. Before anyone could stop it, you were given unnecessary CPR, which, surprisingly, didn’t break your sternum. It easily could have. You went down on Heartbreak Hill. An ambulance was near and got to you very fast. You were brought here in four minutes, which must be some sort of record. You’re not in acute danger.”
“What kind of danger am I in?”
The doctor was consummately professional but warm by nature. He could have been a rabbi or a priest. Some people are simply born that way. “You know what an aneurysm is?”
“Yes.”
“You have a basilar aneurysm. The basilar artery is located near the brainstem, and your aneurysm is unusually large. They tend to burst before they enlarge to the extent that yours has. Did you ever have a serious head injury? That’s a medical question, not a taunt.”
“Yes, I did.”
“When?”
“When I was four.”
“Did you suffer the impact in the back of your head?”
“Yes.”
“And did you lose consciousness?”
“I believe so.”
“I realize that it was a long time ago, but can you recollect what happened? How old are you?”
“Seventy-four. I was told it was a rifle butt.”
For a moment the doctor was shocked into silence, but then he calculated. “In nineteen forty-four,” he said, as if vaulted back to the war that was over before he himself was born. “Was whoever did this punished?”
“His nation was punished.”
“I think I understand. We don’t have the best news for you. We did an MRI ….”
“An NMRI?” Jules asked. “I kno
w there’s no radiation in it.”
“That’s correct. Most people don’t know that, and there’s no point in scaring them. Unfortunately, the aneurysm has formed and expanded in such a way that it’s partially wrapped around the brainstem. Blood pressure to the brain is consistent and well-regulated, but, still, with the exertion of running up the hill, at your age, perhaps a change in position, the pressure of the aneurysm itself – without leakage, as far as we can tell – mimicked the effects of a hemorrhage.
“It would be very dangerous were you to strain. The aneurysm may not be operable, being so unusually large and because of the way it embraces the brainstem. We’re affiliated with Columbia P and S, and later this afternoon our team will consult. The surgeons can do extraordinary things. Meanwhile, you should know that your blood values are truly amazing, unheard of in someone your age. I’ve never seen every single measure of blood chemistry right where it should be. Do you know that you may have Gilbert’s disease? Actually, it’s a syndrome.”
“I do have it,” Jules told him. “Whenever my blood is taken, they tell me that.”
“So the bilirubin ….”
“Is always elevated. But in my case never to the extent of a negative effect.”
“That’s it,” the doctor said. “There’s a strong correlation between Gilbert’s syndrome and living past a hundred.”
“Does it cover aneurysms?” Jules asked.
“Not to my knowledge.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll come back early in the evening after studying your imagery. We’ll know more then. All you need do is rest and be calm.”
“In regard to a possible operation,” Jules asked, “could there be side effects?”
“Of course.”
“Grave side effects?”
“Yes.”
“Such as?”
“Death.”
“And with no operation?”
“You could die tomorrow or you could live to a hundred. We can’t even guess about the probabilities until we have observations over time, to see if there’s degeneration and/or expansion. That is, the thinning of the artery wall, and/or the expansion of the aneurysm. Unfortunately, they usually go together. It’s a difficult decision. You don’t have to make it now.”