“It’s for you,” he said, each word requiring a brief intermission. He now understood the term “to catch one’s breath.” He couldn’t catch his. It kept running away from him. Now that he was marginally awake, he couldn’t lie still. His muscles were flaring, his new muscles shaped by swim and sport. What a bloody waste, he could hear a Britishly affected uncle saying, despite his best efforts still unable to shake off the years of Gujarati and Bambaiyya Hindi. At the peak of the summer, with her in his arms, with Senderovsky admitting to his lie, he had bought the myth they were all selling him, of a healthy, successful, sexually active Vinod. Ha! All roads led to his shaking haunches, to the liquefied lungs.
She drew a blanket over him and tucked it over his shoulders and toes. At the top of the stack of papers, there was a printed form. VINOD S. MEHTA, she read. And then the jumble of numbers that constituted a low-rent Elmhurst address. And then capital letters: NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. Medical Orders of Life Sustaining Treatment （MOLST）。
“Oh, fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you, you fucking idiot.” Inside the cocoon she had made for him, he kept drawing breath, his mouth opening for what looked like a dramatic inhale, but then coming up shortchanged, the hand of a child beggar in his original hometown pushed away from the windowsill of an ambassador at a stoplight. “I’m getting Masha now,” she said, but he did not hear her.
* * *
—
He was walking up the stairs, grasping the familiar curving teak balustrade. Right away he knew where he was and when he was, the massive rollicking front parlor and chef’s kitchen crammed with hungry revelers below, heavy furniture all around but the immigrant’s absence of national tchotchkes, the long bare walls miracle enough. He could hear Suj and Gender’s liberal arts friends talking about food co-ops and continuous sexual discovery. He could hear his and Senderovsky’s city-college friends, first-year law students at local midtier institutions, the three brothers that formed a Filipino indie band and then all went into advertising, a small herd of aspiring social workers and grade-school teachers, honking away in their outer-borough accents. “Vinod!” one of them said in passing, a blurry face, tendrils of dark hair, a gold chain from the unreconstructed parts of Queens, same intact accent as his own. “Where you going, yaar?”
“Help me,” Vinod said. “The more steps I take up, the more…” The more steps were added in front of him, as if he was trying to climb up a downward-bound escalator.
“Let me get Suj,” Gold Chain said. “Why don’t you take a break in the meanwhile?”
“No!” Vinod said. “I have to keep climbing.”
He kept climbing, the stairs multiplying before him. Others kept coming down the stairs, boisterous, shouting, seemingly happy people, their faces blurred in the hubbub, but he was the only one going up. Why couldn’t he just turn around and go down with them to the raucous party below?
There was a hand on his elbow. It was Suj. She had the same grievous shadows beneath her eyes as he did, the shadows Karen tried to temper with her creams. “Let’s sit down,” she said to Vinod. He had forgotten her cut-glass accent. She had gone to Goldsmiths for a spell.
“I have to get upstairs,” he said. “Could you do something about the staircase maybe? It’s your house.”
“Why?” she said. “What’s upstairs?” She held his hand. Her fingers were long and thin. Her skin proved burning to the touch, like sandpaper left out on the desert floor, and he withdrew.
“Water,” he said, weakly.
“What’s upstairs, Vinod?” she repeated.
“Let’s go up together and find out,” he said. “We can form a team.”
“Like an investigative team?” she said. “You’re such a silly Billy.” Her fine pink lips were cracked around the edges. “A silly billy goat. Don’t look up.” He did anyway. The ceiling was gone. Fast-moving city clouds passed without disturbance headed inland, hoping to make rain. He started shaking and she pressed him into her embrace. She smelled of alcohol and hummus. “Vinod,” she said. “You should have gone to a better college. Why didn’t you leave them behind?”
“Because I knew I’d catch up eventually,” he said.
She was whispering into his ear now, warm alcoholic breath, soothing but strong. “You’ll never catch up to those people,” she said, the accent thicker now, motherly. “Not ever ever ever.”