Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CAMERON DEWAR, AS soon as he was unexpectedly and miraculously released from the conference room on the thirtieth floor of the new federal office building that overlooked the cluster of new and nineteenth-century courthouses on Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, walked the eight miles to the apartment on 82^nd Street. He knew that after this one last time he would never return to it even though it had been his beloved home for years, because when the two unknown agents had suddenly told him he was free to leave, they had already turned on a vivid, wall-mounted video screen that displayed, as it was happening, the burning of his lover and best friend in a cage on the windswept Hudson River. Cam threw up in a wastebasket. The anonymous agents in suits didn’t flinch. One of them casually said, “That’s the door. Get out. We don’t need your sorry, worn-out ass anymore.”

And the other agent said, “And thanks for letting us know about the soup kitchen. It made it easy to find the Angel of Life.”

When he opened the oak door to the gorgeous old-world apartment, Cam was overwhelmed by the silence, the stillness, darkness. The wounded Oliver was in the hospital. Gabriel was dead. They had made this home vivid and vital. It was now only a collection of objects which he had selected and for which Gabriel had paid: the Chesterfield sofa, the vases, the wall sconces that suffused all their space with seductive light.

Literally uncertain how he would go about closing down this phase of his life, Cam stood in the kitchen and cried. This was grief, and he knew it. The sense of total loss and destruction. When he was a boy in the Deep South, his father, a Baptist minister who never forgave the fact that Cam was gay, often read that passage in the Gospels in which Peter, expressing his undying love for Jesus and that he would lay down his life for him, was told by Jesus that he would three times deny ever knowing him. And Peter did make that denial three times on the night Jesus was arrested. And Peter, too, had cried.

Cam saw on the rattan coffee table the pile of printed sheets with the e-mails Gabriel Hauser had exchanged with his Afghan lover. Cam saw from the way the papers were organized that Gabriel had taken time to read them all, one of the last acts of his life. As a doctor, Gabriel was a methodical man. He had separated the pages with meaningless e-mail chatter from those pages that suggested Gabriel’s love and determination to bring Mohammad to the United States.

In one much smaller stack of papers, as Cam saw, Gabriel had assembled those e-mails that in any way referred to Mohammad’s “cousin,” Silas Nasar, and his family. Some of those e-mails had grainy, black-and-white images of Silas, images in which the evidently handsome, bearded cousin had traces of a seahorse-shaped birthmark on the left side of his face.

Cam went to the kitchen and took out one of the big, black opaque garbage bags he used for trash. He stuffed the hundreds of pages containing all the e-mails into them and neatly tied the twisted neck of the bag when it was filled. Then, because he and Gabriel were frequent travelers, particularly to Paris, Cam went to the large closet where they stored their suitcases. He opened them on the bed with the elaborate quilt on which they had so frequently made passionate or tender love, depending on their moods or needs.

Cam carefully laid in the suitcases his own newly laundered shirts and pants, socks, and underwear. Although he still suffered through gusts of grief and fear, he made certain he took nothing that belonged to Gabriel.

Once the suitcases were packed, he carried them one flight down the bannistered wooden stairwell to the apartment where Gloria and Everett Jordan lived. They were married and in their mid-thirties. Neither of them worked and they made no secret of the fact that they were both trust fund babies who spent eight months of each year at apartments they owned in London and Rome. They were friendly, open and engaging. They liked Cam and Gabriel, and left the key and the codes to their security system with Cam so that he could water their plants, replace those that had died, and just generally watch over their small, beautifully decorated New York home.

At that moment Cam had only two specific plans in mind. One was to leave his luggage in their bedroom, and the other was to return for one last time to the apartment in which he and Oliver and Gabriel had so happily lived until less than a week ago and take the doctor’s prescription pad that Gabriel kept for emergencies in a drawer in the kitchen. Cam precisely and carefully tore six prescription slips from the pad.

He left the apartment with the heavy plastic bag into which he had placed all the printed pages with the e-mails Gabriel and Mohammad and Silas Nasar had written. Even on elegant East 82^nd Street there were mountains of identical black plastic bags. He dropped his anonymous bag into the center of the mountain range of bags. Since most of the other bags contained a pervasive odor of the rotting of household stuff-food, diapers, all the other detritus of daily living that except for the lockdown would have been picked up virtually every day by the big white city garbage trucks-he was certain no one would ever go near the bag filled only with pages of paper.

He knew that in the city’s attempt to return even to the rudiments of normalcy that the century-old, quaint pharmacy at the corner of 90^th Street and Madison Avenue was open. After years of living with Gabriel he had developed, for no particular reason, a passable facsimile of his lover’s handwriting, a kind of skill at draftsmanship that, when he was a little isolated boy living in the Deep South, gave him the dream of becoming an architect who would design antebellum mansions. Besides, imitating a doctor’s script was not an art.

Cam prescribed thirty Vicodin. He dated the slip a week earlier. The pharmacist knew Gabriel and knew Cam, and Cam was concerned that the man might have seen or heard that Dr. Hauser had been put to death in a cage in a fire on the Hudson River just an hour earlier. The pharmacist, bald and bland and friendly, simply glanced at the script and said, “This’ll take about ten minutes. You can come back or wait.”

“I’ll wait,” Cam said. There was an old leather chair, its surface all cracked from years of use but still intact, near the front of the store. He sat in it, tremendously comforted by its all-encompassing softness and the view, through the window, of the beautiful intersection of Madison Avenue and 90^th Street. He had often walked Oliver here. And he knew he would never see it again.

And there was something else that he loved during the quiet ten minutes he waited. Old pharmacies, like old hardware stores, all somehow retained the unique comforting odors they must have had a hundred years ago.

Finally, he heard George say, “It’s ready, Mr. Dewar.”

“Do me a favor, George, I’ll pay for this in cash.”

George knew Cam had insurance. “It’s one hundred and twenty dollars that way. Ten dollars only with your insurance co-pay.”

“It’s fine, George.”

He took the bottle and placed it deep in the right pocket of his pants.

Ten minutes later and fifteen blocks further downtown, he walked into one of those awful, fluorescent Duane Reade stores. He always avoided them. They had become, in his eyes, the scourge of the city, the steady conversion of Manhattan to a suburban mall. He walked past rows of paper towels, headache and sinus medicines, and beauty and makeup products to the pharmacy area. He handed a script for thirty Xanax to a beautiful Punjabi woman who was the pharmacist on duty. She asked whether the Duane Reade stores had his insurance information. He said no. He wanted to pay in cash. He had always expressed a hostility to the computerized world in which, he believed, every movement and transaction and event of his life could be instantaneously tracked. Cash was not only the coin of the realm. For him it was the coin of anonymity.

Cam handed her the one hundred and forty dollars for the Xanax bottle. He stuffed the brown circular bottle deep into his left pocket. He felt fortified now: that he had the ability to choose between life and death. When he was a boy his father, the Baptist pastor, had a large plaque in the kitchen. It contained the words from Deuteronomy in which God says each morning, “I put before thee life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.”

Cam took an hour to walk to the homeless shelter near Tompkins Square Park which he quickly disclosed, when asked, as a place where Gabriel might be. It was one of the very few places in Manhattan where Gabriel Hauser regularly went-the hospital, the Boat House in Central Park, the Angelika Theater and the Film Forum, both on West Houston Street, the Three Lives Book Store at the quiet intersection where, oddly enough, Waverly Place intersected with Waverly Place. But, Cam had told the agents, given the state of the city, the homeless shelter and the chaos and pain, the shelter was the most likely place where Gabriel would be.

The big basement room in the old church wasn’t crowded. It was getting dark. Some of the ceiling lights were already on. As Cam knew from his sometime visits with Gabriel, the huge basement room was usually dark even on the brightest days.

The only sounds were the sounds children made-cries, laughter, chatter. He’d never had much tolerance for children. He’d never regretted for a minute that he had never and would never have kids-his father had once thundered that it was God’s will that men have and raise and nurture the young.

The adults in the room for the most part were quiet and seated on the cots. Only half the cots were occupied. Everyone was alone, except for the mothers of the noisy kids.

Something else Cam had never imagined was that he’d lie down in one of the cots. Gabriel had told him the cots-the steel frames, the mattresses and the sheets, blankets and pillows were clean, although sometimes torn. Cam knew that Gabriel often used his own money to replace the torn bedding.

In the kitchen, as big and clean and orderly as it always was between mealtimes, Cam found on the scrubbed steel counter one of those tall amber-colored plastic glasses that New York City diners used. He filled it with water. He carried it to what appeared to be the darkest area of the big basement. No one spoke to him. He carried nothing but the brimming glass of water. He realized that to anyone who saw him he must have had the look of one of those stranded suburbanites who had literally been locked in the island of Manhattan for more than three days and had finally decided to use one of the long-established homeless shelters rather than the makeshift encampments in the city parks. Those were now out of control with garbage, overloaded mobile latrines, every imaginable type of debris.

Cam found the cot, its blanket, pillow, and sheets clean-one of the cots that Gabriel, just hours earlier, had cleaned.

The corner of the church’s vast basement was cool and comfortable even on a hot evening. There was no one in the nearby cots. As he lay quietly on his back, with his wrists and hands under his head, he recalled for the first time in many years words his stentorian father had frequently quoted from John’s Gospel in which Jesus said, I have the power to keep my life and to lay down my life.

So do we all, Cam thought, nothing unique about Jesus in that or anyone else. We all have that power.

Somewhat furtively, Cam sat up on his cot although he knew no one in this place could care what he did or didn’t do. He shook from the brown prescription bottle fifteen of the Vicodin tablets into his right palm and from the other bottle fifteen of the pills. Then he took up from the floor next to his cot the big glass of water and in twenty seconds swallowed all thirty pills.

Nothing in his life had ever granted him such bliss for the few minutes he stretched out on his cot. I chose death, he said in a whisper, not life. The right choice, my choice, unlike Gabriel, who was not blessed with the choice.

Cam had the sense that he was afloat on his back in a warm, only slightly undulating ocean. And finally, still on his back in that ocean, he drifted below the surface of the benign and all-enveloping water.