The Immortalists

“I am.” The humiliation of it—his career so long established, now precarious—is exacerbated by Raj’s mansion, his cashmere, his juicer. It takes monumental effort for Daniel to remember Ruby’s question. “I work for a military entrance processing station. I make sure that soldiers are healthy enough to go to war.”

  Raj laughs. “Well, if that ain’t an oxymoron. How do you like it?”

  “Very much,” says Daniel. “I’ve been with the military for over fifteen years.”

  He still feels proud to say it. Coffee drips thinly into the pot.

  “Okay,” says Raj, as if agreeing to a stalemate.

  “And you?” asks Mira. “How are you two enjoying work?”

  Raj smiles. “We love it.”

  Mira leans forward with her elbows on the counter. “It’s so exciting—such a different world from ours. We’d love the opportunity to see you perform. You’re welcome anytime at the Ulster Performing Arts Center, though I’m afraid it might not be up to your standards.”

  “And you’re welcome to come to Vegas,” says Raj. “We’re on every week, Thursday through Sunday.”

  “Four nights in a row,” says Mira. “It must be exhausting.”

  “I don’t think so.” Raj’s voice is mild, but his smile is pasted on. “Rubina, on the other hand—”

  “Dad,” says Ruby. “Don’t call me that.”

  “But it’s your name.”

  “Yeah, it’s like”—Ruby scrunches her nose—“my God-given name, but it’s not my name.”

  “Oops,” says Daniel, smiling. “I called you Rubina yesterday.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” says Ruby. “I mean, you’re a stranger.”

  The word hangs in the room for seconds before her face drops.

  “Oh, gosh,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—you’re not a stranger.”

  She looks pleadingly at Raj. Daniel is touched by the gesture: the teenager running back to a parent’s legs to cling, to hide.

  “That’s okay, sweetheart.” Raj ruffles her hair. “Everyone understands.”

  • • •

  They pile into Daniel’s car, all five of them, everyone offering the front seat to Gertie and acquiescing when she demurs to sit beside Ruby in the back. They drive to the maritime museum and the historic district and take a brief hike through Mohonk Preserve. Daniel races Ruby across a field, mud flying up to streak their jackets. The air in his lungs is gloriously cold, and he gasps with pleasure. When it begins to snow, he expects Ruby to complain, but she claps. “It’s like Narnia!” she exclaims, and everyone laughs as they walk back to the car.

  She surprises him in other ways, too. At dinner, for instance, when Gertie recounts her ailments—a topic favored by Gertie herself and dreaded by Daniel and Mira, who share a panicked look as she begins.

  “I had a corn on my foot that didn’t heal for a year,” she says. “That’s part of the story. Then, because of the infection, I got something called lymphadenitis. The lymph nodes in my legs were inflamed, I had pockets of pus the size of golf balls. The hair on my legs stopped growing—utterly. And before long it spread to my groin.”

  “Ma,” hisses Daniel. “We’re eating.”

  “Forgive me,” Gertie says. “But I wasn’t responding to the antibiotics. So the doctor took a look and said that if I came in for surgery they’d drain all of my nodes, and that might be enough to fix the problem. There were two of them working on me, an older doctor and a younger, and the younger says, ‘Mrs. Gold, you wouldn’t believe the gunk we found.’ Afterward they hooked me up to a drainage tube and I had to stay in the hospital until all the blood and the fluids oozed out.”

  “Ma,” Daniel says. Raj has put his fork down and Daniel’s mortified; he’d like to slap duct tape across his mother’s mouth, but Ruby is leaning forward with interest.

  “So what was it?” she asks. “What was causing all that stuff?”

  “Well,” says Gertie. “Given we’re eating I’m not sure I should say. But seeing as you’re interested—”

  “We are not,” says Daniel firmly, “not now,” and the peculiar thing is that Ruby looks just as disappointed as Gertie. When Mira asks Raj about their tour schedule, Ruby leans toward her grandmother. “Tell me at home,” she whispers, and Gertie flushes with a pleasure so rare that Daniel nearly reaches for Ruby to thank her.

  • • •

  That night, while brushing his teeth, Daniel thinks of Eddie. Eddie’s question about Simon—whether the fortune teller predicted his death—is troubling him.

  Daniel doesn’t know when the fortune teller claimed Simon would die. Simon only said it was young—this in the attic of 72 Clinton Street on that drunken, befuddled night seven days after their father’s death. But young could have been thirty-five. Young could have been fifty. The detail was so vague that Daniel discarded it. It seemed more likely that Simon’s death was the consequence of his own actions. Not because he was gay—whatever mild discomfort Daniel has with Simon’s sexuality is far from moralizing homophobia—but because Simon was careless, selfish. He thought only of his own pleasure. One could not go on that way forever.

  But Daniel’s resentment of Simon masks something deeper, darker: he is just as angry with himself. For his failure to know Simon—truly know him—while Simon was alive. For his failure to understand Simon, even in death. Simon was his only brother, and Daniel had not protected him. Yes, they spoke after Simon’s arrival in San Francisco, and Daniel had tried to convince him to return to New York. But when Simon hung up, Daniel became so incensed that he threw the phone on the ground, where it cracked against the linoleum, and thought that perhaps Gertie’s life would be easier without Simon, anyway. Of course, that thought was as temporary as it was cruel, but could Daniel not have tried harder? Could he not have gotten the next Greyhound to San Francisco instead of stewing in his own resentment and waiting to be proven right?

  They look at who’s vulnerable, Eddie said of the fortune teller. They can see straight through to the point.

  It’s true, Daniel thinks, that Simon was vulnerable. He was seven years old, but that wasn’t the only reason. Just as there was something different about Klara, there was something different about him. Impossible to say whether he knew at that age he was gay, but he was elusive regardless, difficult to parse. He was not as verbal as his siblings. He had few friends in school. He loved to run, but he ran alone. Maybe the prophecy did plant inside him like a germ. Maybe it incited him to be rash—to live dangerously.

  Daniel spits in the sink and reconsiders Eddie’s theory: that what innate vulnerability Klara had may have been triggered, or compounded, by her visit to the fortune teller. There are certainly situations in which the marriage of psychology and physiology are undeniable, if not fully understood—the fact that pain originates not in the muscles or nerves but in the brain, for instance. Or that patients whose outlooks are positive are more likely to beat disease. When he was a student, Daniel served as a research assistant for a study that explored the placebo effect. The study’s authors hypothesized that the effect was caused by patient expectations—and indeed, patients who were told the tablet of starch they’d consumed was a stimulant soon showed an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and reaction time. A second patient group, told the placebo was a sleeping pill, fell asleep within an average of twenty minutes.

  Of course, the placebo effect was not new to Daniel, but it was another thing when witnessed firsthand. He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain. By this logic, Eddie’s theory makes perfect sense: Klara and Simon believed they had taken pills with the power to change their lives, not knowing they had taken a placebo—not knowing that the consequences originated in their own minds.

  A tall column in Daniel tips over. Sorrow floods out, as well as something else: an empathy for Simon, unbearab
ly tender, that he has kept sealed for years. Daniel rests the heels of his hands on the marble countertop and leans forward until it passes. He needs to call Eddie.

  Eddie’s business card is in the study. Ruby is inside with the door closed, but the light is on. When Daniel knocks, there’s no answer. He knocks a second time before cracking the door with concern.

  “Ruby?”

  She’s sitting under the covers with a pair of oversized headphones over her ears and a book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, in her lap. When she sees Daniel, she twitches.

  “Shit,” she says, pulling the headphones off. “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Daniel, holding a hand up. “I was just hoping to grab something. I can come back in the morning.”

  “That’s okay.” She turns the book over. “I’m not doing anything.”

  During the day, she wore makeup—eyeliner and some sort of sparkly goop on her lips—but now she’s barefaced and looks younger. Her skin is a shade lighter than Raj’s, and though her eyes are dark like his, she has Klara’s full cheeks. Klara’s smile, too, of course. Daniel crosses to the desk, finds Eddie’s card in the top drawer, and slips it in his pocket. He’s about to leave when Ruby speaks again.

  “Do you have any pictures of my mom?”

  Daniel’s heart compresses. He pauses, facing the wall. My mom. He’s never heard anyone refer to Klara this way before.

  “I do.” When he turns, Ruby has pulled her knees to her chest. She’s wearing the SpongeBob SquarePants pajama bottoms and a baggy sweatshirt, hair elastics stacked on her wrist like bracelets. “Would you like to see them?”

  “We have some, too,” she says, quickly. “At home. But they’re all the same ones I’ve seen a million times. So yeah. I would.”

  He walks to the living room to dig out the old albums. How strange it is, to have Ruby here. His niece. Daniel and Mira, of course, are not parents. When he asked Mira to marry him, she told him about her endometriosis—stage four. “I can’t have children,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” said Daniel. “There are other options. Adoption—”

  But Mira explained that she didn’t want to adopt. She was diagnosed, unusually, at seventeen, so she’d had years to consider it. She would find other satisfaction in life, she’d decided; she didn’t need to be a parent. Daniel found he couldn’t say goodbye to her. Privately, though, he mourned. He had always imagined himself as a parent. When he watched a sleeping child being carried out of the restaurant by her father, her head limp against his neck, Daniel thought of his own siblings. But fatherhood frightened him, too. He had only Saul—rigid, distant—for comparison. It was impossible to know how he’d fare. Back then, he thought he would do better than Saul, but perhaps that was a fallacy. It was equally possible that he would do worse.

  He returns to the office with two photo albums. Ruby is sitting cross-legged on the bed now, her back against the wall. She pats the empty space beside her, and Daniel climbs up. He isn’t flexible enough to cross his legs, so they dangle off the edge of the futon as he opens the first album.

  “I haven’t looked at these in years,” he says. He thought it would be painful, but what grips him, when he sees the first photo—all four of the Gold children on the steps of 72 Clinton Street, Varya a leggy adolescent, Simon a towheaded toddler—is joy. The way it floods him, warm: he could cry.

  “That’s Mom.” Ruby points at Klara. She’s four or five, in a green plaid party dress.

  “It sure is.” Daniel laughs. “She loved that dress; she’d scream when your grandmother washed it. She pretended to be Clara from the Nutcracker whenever she wore it. And we were Jewish! It drove my father nuts.”

  Ruby smiled. “She was strong willed, wasn’t she?”

  “Very.”

  “I am, too. I think it’s one of my best qualities,” Ruby says. Daniel is amused, but when he looks at her, he sees she’s serious. “Otherwise, people will push you around. Especially if you’re a woman. Especially if you’re in the entertainment business. Dad taught me that. But I think Mom would’ve agreed.”

  Daniel is sobered—has Ruby been pushed around? How?—but she turns the page to reveal photos from the same day of the siblings in pairs.

  “That’s Aunt Varya and Uncle Simon. He died before I was born, of AIDS.” She looks to Daniel for confirmation.

  “That’s right. He was very young. Much too young.”

  Ruby nods. “There’s going to be a pill for that soon—Truvada. Did you know? It doesn’t cure HIV, but it prevents you from getting it. I read an article about it in the New York Times. I wish it’d been around back then. For Uncle Simon.”

  “I did hear that. It’s incredible.”

  Miraculous, even, and unthinkable at the height of the epidemic, when tens of thousands were dying each year in the U.S. alone. In the nineties, when AIDS medications were introduced, patients had to take up to thirty-six pills per day, and in the early eighties, there were no options at all. Daniel pictures Simon, just twenty, dying of a disease unknown and unnamed. Had the hospital been able to do anything to make him more comfortable? He has the same feeling he did moments ago, in the bathroom—that unbearable empathy, so much more intrusive than resentment.

  “Look at Grandma,” says Ruby, pointing. “She’s so happy.”

  Grandma. Another word Daniel’s never heard, and he’s profoundly touched by it, by the fact that Ruby thinks of the Golds as her family. “She was happy. That’s her with your grandfather, Saul. They must have been in their twenties.”

  “He died before Uncle Simon, right? How old was he?”

  “Forty-five.”

  Ruby crosses her legs. “What’s one thing about him?”

  “One thing?”

  “Yeah. One cool thing. Something interesting that I wouldn’t know.”

  Daniel pauses. He could tell her about Gold’s, but instead he thinks of a jar with green lettering and a white lid.

  “You know those miniature pickles? Saul was obsessed with them. Very particular, too: he worked his way through Cains and Heinz and Vlasic before he discovered a brand called Milwaukee’s, which my mother had to order from Wisconsin because they weren’t in many New York stores. He could eat a whole jar in one sitting.”

  “That’s so weird.” Ruby giggles. “You know what’s funny? I like to eat pickles on peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “You do not.” Daniel makes a fake-retching sound.

  “I do! I cut them up and put them on top. They’re good, I swear—there’s this sort of, like, sweet-sour crunch, and then the peanut butter’s sweet and crunchy, too—”

  “I don’t buy it,” says Daniel, and now they’re both laughing. The sound is remarkable. “I don’t buy it at all.”

  • • •

  At midnight, he leaves Ruby with the stack of photo albums and climbs to the house’s main level. In the kitchen, he pauses. He was so contented, sitting with Ruby, and the feeling trails him: it seems foolish, or unnecessary, to do anything but get into bed with Mira. But when he retrieves Eddie’s business card from the pocket of his sweatpants, his contentment morphs, and he feels a wistfulness that borders on mourning. He could have had more of that connection—over the years, with Ruby, or with a child of his own. Maybe, he thinks, there’s another reason he did not urge Mira to reconsider adoption. Maybe he felt that he did not deserve it. After all, with Saul so often at work, Daniel had tried to be a leader for his siblings. He’d tried to face down danger, unpredictability, chaos. And look how that had turned out.

  You doing that, Eddie said, it’s blaming the victim. But it’s too late: Daniel did do it, he did think that way. He spent decades punishing himself for something that had never been his fault. As Daniel’s compassion for himself swells, his anger toward the fortune teller hardens. He wants her to be caught—not just for Simon and Klara, but for himself, no
w, too.

  He walks to the front door and opens it gently. There’s a suctioning noise and an affront of frigid November air, but he steps outside and closes the door behind him. Then he opens his cell phone and enters Eddie’s number.

  “Daniel? Something wrong?”

  Daniel pictures the agent in a Hudson Valley hotel room. Perhaps Eddie is working through the night, a cup of cheap coffee at his elbow. Perhaps he’s thinking of the fortune teller as fixedly as Daniel, this shared thought connecting them like cord.

  “I’ve remembered something,” Daniel says. It must be thirty-five degrees outside, but his body is warm. “You asked about Simon—whether the fortune teller predicted his death—and I said I didn’t know. But he did tell us she said he’d die young. So let’s say he knew he was gay. He’s sixteen, our father’s gone, and he’s rattled by the prophecy; he feels like this is his only chance to live the life he wants. So he disregards sense, disregards safety.”

  “All right,” Eddie says, slowly. “Simon wasn’t any more specific?”

  “No, he wasn’t any more specific. I told you: we were kids, it was one conversation, but it gives credence, doesn’t it, to what you said before? That she pushed him, too?”

  “It might,” Eddie says, but he sounds detached. Now Daniel imagines him differently: rolling to one side, holding the phone in place with his shoulder. A hand skittering across the bedside table to turn the light back off, Daniel’s revelation having disappointed him. “Anything else?”

  The heat is leaving Daniel, depression setting in. Then something occurs to him. If Eddie is unmoved by this information—perhaps even disillusioned with the case—then maybe Daniel should do his own digging.

  “Yes. One question.” As he breathes, puffs of white air hover like parachutes. “What’s her name?”

  “What’s knowing her name going to do for you?”

  “It’ll give me something to call her,” Daniel says, thinking fast. He keeps his tone jocular, to put Eddie at ease. “Something that isn’t ‘the fortune teller,’ or worse, ‘the woman.’”