Metropolis Read Online Free Page B

to the rituals and rigors of manly purgation while his mother underwent one of her therapeutic regimens and the governess took his sister, Lottie, strolling through the cure park.
    “This will fix anything that ails you,” his father had said as they entered the front atrium of an imposing building with the air of a courthouse or museum. The doctor purchased tickets and they proceeded down a hallway and into a changing room with many cubbies and tall stacks of white towels.
    “But what do I change into?” he asked when his shoes were lined up neatly under the bench and his trousers folded. On the next bench, an old man let out a cackle that set the flesh of his hairy belly a-wobble. Then his father stripped off his shorts to reveal something awful in the midst of his firm abdomen and pale, powerful thighs: a thick, red, leathery proboscis. It was quite unimaginable to the boy that he would remove his own thin drawers before these two naked men, his father—a firm, strong God—and the mocking old satyr.
    “There are no ladies allowed here, son—you don’t need a bathing costume.” His father had slapped him on the shoulder then and made him feel a man, though in truth he was not at all sure he wanted to be one. And then they’d gone together through the alternating pools and chambers—hot and dry, cold and bracing, steamy humid, body-warm—to arrive at last in a luminous circular chamber where beds ringed the walls like spokes on a wheel and a silent attendant trussed him in a blissful cocoon of smooth sheets and soft fleece blankets.
    It was, perhaps, his fondest memory of his father, the great doctor who was beloved by generations of patients and medical students, his father who had disowned him long before he reached his majority. But even it was tainted, as every thought of his father was, by what had happened after. The following day, he had awakened in a sweat, with a fever, and everything else was a sea of confused images, half hallucination, half real. It seemed that weeks passed without his seeing his parents or sister or anyone but the nurse and the visiting physician. Or then again, like just one long day. At the end, when he’d finally been given permission to get out of bed, he found a new suit of clothes laid out for him by the governess. He imagined a party of some sort and smoothed down his hair with spit until it shone, just as his mother liked, but the nurse took him to a room where his father sat alone. His father’s arm didn’t move when he tugged it; the man was entirely rigid, a statue. Finally, he’d blinked and looked at his son and told him where they were going and why. His mother was dead.
    The nightmare ending of that dream was still playing out in his head in the Tombs when, at noon, a meal of poached eggs, white sauce, toast points and tea was brought in on a tray. There were sugar cubes. He found a jug of fresh, cool water for drinking on the table and a pitcher of hot for washing on the stand; a chamber pot as clean as a dinner plate awaited his need beneath the bed. He was further from the tack room where he’d gone to sleep the night before than he was from his lost, pampered boyhood just then, and it was only slowly that he recalled the series of events that had happened to him in between. The whole thing seemed so improbable. Perhaps there were quite a few other firstborn sons of prominent men who had been disinherited before their majority and sent to live on farms with distant relatives; surely many first wives’ children were hated by their stepmothers; and probably it was the majority of new immigrants to the great city who found themselves living unexpected lives. But how many of them were mucking
elephant stalls
? How many had been falsely accused of arson? How many of those who had ended up in jail were in
this
sort of a jail? When he looked around, it seemed more of a hotel suite or guest room. Was he lucky or unlucky, he wondered. Apparently it wasn’t the right