Chapter 34

For the staff of the Profile, the word crazy had taken on new meaning this day.  The office was a shamble.  Several had gone with the ambulance, but most stayed behind to keep the wheels turning.  “Keep the wheels turning” Harrison had always said in times of stress.  “Don’t let momentary setbacks or delays slow the momentum.  Hurito could walk out of that elevator any minute and fire us all” he would joke.  Humor delivered with a hot poker, always stirring the staff to laughter and an immediate reminder he was serious.

It had been Martin - the white uniformed caretaker of Harrison’s propensity for green tea every hour – that upon entering his office, had dropped his tray and leaped to the window seat where Harrison lay gasping for air, his hand still clenching the window latch.  His long and flirtatious affair with hereditary heart disease was finally making a visit.

***

Unaware of his impact on Harrison, Ari walked the cobble stone back-streets of Paris in between daily visits to the Louvre.  He hadn’t touched his camera or computer for days since announcing his intention to resign.  The long walks and quiet hours at the museum had rendered him more relaxed than he could ever remember.  He had carried at least one camera over his shoulder for the past ten years and during the recent 5 years, a shoulder bag containing his laptop.  For these days, however, his shoulder relieved of the weight, which perhaps ironically contributed to his sense of freedom, allowed him to experience a fresh kind of relaxation he was unaccustomed to.  So unaccustomed, in fact, he would tell unsuspecting bar patrons after he had consumed a fair amount of French wine, “I don’t care if I ever look through a lens or digitize another impression… ever… it just feels wonderful…”  Most would nod in a patronizing way, some would engage him in deep philosophical examination of his state, especially in those cafes along the Boulevards St. Michel and St. Germain, where the would-be intellectuals were on the hunt for imbibed tourists so they could puff up and fantasize their longing to be part of the hip cache of Quartier Latin, Hemingway, Camus, Sartre, deBeauvoir, and Barthes. 

So it was.  Ari and other vagabonds along the Seine for days and nights toasted the liquid happiness that only they could dream.  But for Ari, the fantasies could not quite remove all the broken prisms of his past where the refracted attempts at completeness continued to bounce from agonizing wall to agonizing wall.  These nights were a cleansing, a purging of pain he couldn’t even define.  He only knew the process was strangely relaxing and doing what he hoped would be completed soon.  He wanted to get it done and get on with a new challenge.  After so many nights, however, he became so relaxed, the Gendarme accommodated his inebriated proclamations of sanity with an overnight rest in the local maison de force.

The following morning, he paid the fine for such behavior and returned to his hotel room.  Under his door was a manila envelope of forwarded mail from his New York apartment.  Among the bills, junk mail and advertisements, he found two envelopes: one from Max and one from Samantha.  In Max’s, an invitation to a screening of his desert saga and a thank you “…for one hell of an awakening fight.”  In Samantha’s, a sticky attached to a snapshot said:  “Wrangled your address out of Max before he went off to a new film.  The snapshot was of her with the orphaned family mugging for the camera.  The back of the photo simply said, “Home.”  Ari sat down and stared out the window at the early sun splitting its light through the Arc de Triomphe.  As the sun rose above the arch, he reached for the phone and dialed the front desk.  “Could you connect me with Air France, please.”

***

The nurse entered his room, opened the curtains, and placed on his bed stand the usual daily flowers from his staff.  Harrison opened his eyes from his midmorning nap and adjusted his body and the several wires and oxygen tubes to his nose. “What’s that… a telegram?” he asked, noticing the familiar Western Union markings on the envelope in her hand.

“Oh, arrived just a few minutes ago.”  She handed it to him and proceeded to exchange the old flowers with the new.  Harrison took the telegram and held it for a long time.  “What day is this?”

“Wednesday, Mr. James.”

“When did I come in here?”

“Last Thursday.”

“I’m doing pretty good then, aren’t I?”

“For a man with high blood pressure, ulcers, and the beginnings of premature arthritis, not to mention that little irritant in your chest we caught in time, yeah, you’re doin’ pretty good.”

“Good enough to open a telegram?”

“Why not?  Must be well wishes from someone.”

“Or my walking papers.”

“Now, why on earth would anyone do that to a man in intensive care?”

“You don’t know Hurito.”

“Who?”

“Oh, just this guy I know,” he muttered as he opened the telegram.   “He’s an SOB, but a stylish SOB.”  Harrison slid his finger into the envelope expecting the worst.  He was just one day from his deadline with the little arrogant man with no conscience and he knew heart attack or no heart attack, Hurito was capable of using the unfulfilled deadline to persuade his board of directors it was time to pull the plug on him.

“You know, Mr. James, you should really give whoever is responsible for these flowers coming every day a bonus. Now, I see a lot of bouquets come in and out of here, but the ones you get daily, I swear, they are the most… exotics like this are rare even if you can afford them.  Course you’re a loved man, Mr. James, so your staff, they’re not sparing any cost to make you feel good and…”

“Miss Bennington? Harrison said as he slowly lowered the envelope to his chest, “You play the stock market?”

Miss Bennington laughed, “You haven’t lost your sense of humor, Mr. James.  I got six kids and no husband and a sitter makes more than me on most weeks and…”

“Well, Miss Bennington,” said Harrison, his face solemn, yet curiously coming alive with a smile as he waved the telegram.  “I’m giving you an informed opinion… borrow some money from your sitter and buy Sonico Electronics stock.  It’s got nowhere to go but up.”

***

The taxi came to a jerky halt.  “Damn, carburetor choking again.  Sorry about that,” said the cabby.  “Been waitin’ three weeks for that part to come in to Stanley’s.  That’ll be $23.40 mister.  Been this way in Utica since I was a kid and it’ll probably be this way forever.  About as much urgency in this town as a turtle crossin’ a highway.”

Ari kept his gaze at the hilltop of trees hiding whatever remained of a dilapidated house behind the cover.  He handed the driver two twenty-dollar bills.  “Keep the change.  Say hi to Stanley for me.  My dad used to go through the same thing.” Ari stepped out of the cab, careful not to slip on the ice packed road.

“You know the old goat, too?” laughed the cabby.  “What’s your name.”

“Aristotle.  He’ll remember.”

“Bet he will.  Thanks for the tip.  Watch your step on that ice.  Don’t salt these old back roads at all anymore.”  The cabby took another look up the hill at the trees hiding the house.  “You sure this is where you want to be dropped off?”  Ari waved him on, his eyes still fixed on the hilltop.

The taxi pulled away.  Ari stood in the 22º temperature and adjusted the shoulder strap of his laptop/camera bag and picking up his small canvas over-nighter, started up the hill.  The snow was only six or seven inches deep, but underneath, the ice made it difficult to keep his footing.  By the time he’d made it up the quarter mile to the top, he felt like he had experienced a taste of Tenzing Norgay.  He turned, and catching his breath, looked out over the back woods where he had stood as a young boy and dreamed of going beyond the trees, past Albany, over the Adirondacks and on to his city of dreams, Manhattan.  Now he was looking again with the naked eyes he had used then, the eyes that had not seen what later understood as life’s shell game. 

He reached the top and gazed at the heavily fire-damaged house and muttered, “now you see it, now you don’t.”  He thought back to that morning after he had returned from an out-of-town football game he’d agreed to photograph for the school paper.   With the help of Father Farnsworth and the neighbor ladies down the road, he’d stood at the base of the hill gazing through tearful eyes at the smoke and remains, his first, but not last, experience with the frailty and tenuousness of life.   His family had all perished in the fire.  It was the week before Christmas.  A faulty set of lights on the tree, they said.  He’d never been back after that, choosing to live with his aunt for the remainder of his last year of high school. 

He stepped through the trees and stopped.  What little still stood of his inherited property of burned-out remains brought back his teen sadness of losing his family.  He took from his pocket the picture of Samantha and the Mexican children, reminding himself that he had experienced a relatively happy childhood; that Samantha had shared with him the unhappy childhood she had always felt with her family.  The photo suggested that she may have discovered the unrealized value of family at a time when she needed it most. 

As the icy wind picked up, he trudged around the house for one last look.  Suddenly he stopped.  Fresh footprints coming up to the cellar door appeared to have returned to the woods some fifty yards away.  He wasn’t alone.  His first instinct was to turn around and leave, quickly.  He had, after all, only come the long distance to address feelings from his younger days that he hadn’t visited for many years.  They were awkward feelings.  They were feelings of adolescence.  And they were painful feelings.  But mostly, they were private.  Footprints that went into his house felt intrusive.  It didn’t matter that the structure was barely four charred walls with burned out beams pointing to the sky.  This was where the attic that housed boyhood memories of hidden corners; where with stooped shoulders he had played hide and seek with his sisters; where outside the window on the roof, experiments in flying off the shingled covering had given him his first experience in broken bones. 

He suddenly felt violated.  It didn’t even matter that this house was the only house he had ever called his own.  His work place, the apartments and the lofts, the hotel rooms… these had become his surrogate homes.  The thought that someone, someone he didn’t even know, might be inside this all too important memory, disturbing the ashes, the burnt-out walls, the remains of his childhood…. 

His instinct was to run, but something held him still.  He didn’t know what or why.  He just stood in a silent rage until the silence was broken by a diseased cough from beneath the rotting cellar door.  His mind suddenly snapped, and he blurted out, “Whoever you are, you have no fucking right to be in my house, God Damn It!”  He ripped open the cellar door and burst down the rickety stairs, breaking through the last two steps and falling on the icy, dirt and ash encrusted floor.  He shouted into the darkness, “Get out of my house!”