Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  Sequelae beyond the sphere of individual endeavor. A guilty, secret part of him was comforted by this thought.

  From the right distance, all movement looked like fate. And if major world-shaking events were predetermined, why not minor? Why not the small births and deaths of all the people Vikram had loved, and those of the people he hadn’t? Cristaudo’s friends, the scientists, running around in the graveyard like deckhands on a floundering ship. The millions uncalled by the lottery. Jonas, whom Vikram would never know. Were all these losses as incontrovertible as the melting of the rock under their feet, the movement of celestial bodies far above their heads?

  No. He believed in the human scale, too. Decisions. Hope and consequences.

  “Look, I’ve got an idea,” Wes said. “Anything for the house that we can’t do ourselves, we need to convince strangers to pay for it. People with money—not UDPs. So what we need is bait.”

  “Bait?”

  “Something to draw their interest.” Wes punched him lightly in the chest. “Dwayne was into the Dop Peters thing, right? We’ll find more stuff like that. We could even interview people from our world about their lives. Go high profile, you know? What about that sociologist from the news who’s a UDP—maybe we should see if we can get in touch with him. Who can explain us to the world better than him? What’s his name?”

  Vikram knew it. The man was—or had been, until recently—Hel’s only friend. “Dr. Carlos Oliveira. I think I can get his number.”

  “I can’t believe you came back here. They’re supposed to be watching out for you.” Klay sounded more amused than disapproving. “What did you tell Bernardo at the front desk?”

  “Well, presumably he called you down to deal with me,” Hel said. “So he did his job. I was hoping we could speak frankly to one another.”

  They stood together in the toy section of the gift shop at the Museum of Modern Thought, just inside the entrance. The shelves were crammed with board games and puzzles, art supplies and construction sets—brightly colored blocks and interlocking metal pieces that could be snapped together or connected with magnets.

  “You realize that I can’t let you in to see Ayanna—it’s worth more than my job. You’re lucky she didn’t call the cops on you last night.”

  “Why would she have done that?”

  “Hel. Come on. She knows that was you, sneaking around.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hel found a bin filled with plastic models of spacecraft, cheap versions of the ones she’d seen Donaldson handling earlier. “I’m not here to see Donaldson. I came to talk to you. You were there with me, at the lake. Someone died there once because there was no one around to help him.”

  After her outburst, after she saw the place where the painting did not hang and lost control, Klay had led her outside and made her sit on the lawn that sloped down to meet the artificial shoreline. There, they’d glimpsed the lake through the trees, its surface as flat and dull as a dirty penny, and around them, fallen leaves from the grand, spreading beech trees dotted the grass, burnt umber and copper—those colors, too, like a sepia print. Hel had pictured how, more than a century before, the older students at the boarding school might have lolled in this spot in their school uniforms on spread plaid picnic blankets, boys crunching on apples or passing back and forth an illicit flask. She imagined races to the dock, young men fighting for a spot in the rowboats, splashing at each other with their paddles.

  A boat that capsized, little Ezra in the water. Were his friends there? Did they laugh, perhaps, as he beat futilely at the water with his hands, mistaking it for a joke? Or was he alone? Was it nighttime, early morning, lesson hours, out of bounds? By himself?

  Did he kick his feet? Did he yell and thrash, or did he hold still and drift down into the silt like a waterlogged stick, the sun or the bright moon winking good-bye to him through the obverse side of the rippled surface?

  Breathe, Klay had said, as Hel sobbed by the shore.

  “You helped me once.”

  “I remember that,” Klay said. “Let me give you some unsolicited advice. You should watch out. Ayanna said she’s going to take out a restraining order. Do you know what that means for someone in your position? If you step too far out of line, they’ll revoke your Resettlement Permission.”

  Hel crossed to the rack of postcards. “If you care so much, just tell her not to. I know you have influence on her.”

  “That’s flattering, but I really don’t.”

  Hel had never actually seen MoMT’s collection. The postcards highlighted its best-known works, abstract paintings in primary colors. Sculptures fabricated from glass, from metal, from felted-wool tubes. A reproduction of a black-and-white photograph of grocery store ham wrapped tightly in barbed wire. Another reproduction of an oil-pastel drawing of the Twin Towers—a realistic depiction, unexpectedly sentimental in this context. The buildings’ outline was familiar to Hel only through memorial postage stamps and the credit sequences from midnight TV reruns.

  “Can you just ask her to give me the Sleight book back? That’s what I want—the only thing I want. It doesn’t mean as much to her as it does to me. It can’t possibly.”

  “But she says she doesn’t have it. She’s a professional. She’s my boss. I believe her.”

  Hel remembered the upstairs workroom where she’d once met with the director. Metal cabinets lined the walls there. A museum typically displayed five percent of its assets or fewer. Catalogued objects in storage, accruing value, waiting for the right exhibit. Or forgotten. Locked drawers and shelves, housing art no one could access. Donaldson in her blue gloves, reverently handling the spacecraft models. She was a collector, just like the old woman who’d cluttered up Sleight’s cottage. A professional at acquisitions. Was Hel just supposed to take her word?

  Klay wrenched the postcard rack from Hel’s grip and twisted it one half turn. “I’m not trying to be rude, but have you considered the possibility that it could be you? That you’re misremembering where you left the book? That would be understandable, with all you’ve been through.”

  “You have no idea what we’ve been through. You don’t care about people getting hurt. You pretend to care, but it’s just an academic interest, isn’t it. I remember how you asked me about nearly dying. Do you remember that? After I told you I was assaulted in Park Slope one time, you asked me what it was like.”

  “So? Maybe I was curious. Isn’t that what you want—to tell people about your world? Maybe I was trying to be that person for you.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t understand why you’re so angry, when I was only trying to be kind.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Hel said. The Three of Loaves, reversed. Stagnation, obstruction, lack of progress. “I thought you could help. I was wrong. All I need is for you to stay out of my way.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There was a locksmith named Fenny in Hel’s entry group, an easy-tempered guy in his midtwenties. When they played the game, the What Did You Take Through game, he told them he’d filled his suitcase with sixers and with the blanket he’d slept with as a baby. No sixer player, he said, but he’d heard someone from Lot Fifty had one. Upon release from Debrief, Fenny immediately found work at a True Value store, cutting keys and ringing up cans of paint for the contractors and home-improvers of the South Bronx. He used to bring Hel little presents, things from work she’d never seen before. A package of no-damage adhesive picture-hanging strips, a glitter-embellished self-retracting measuring tape, upholstery spray that smelled like chemical lilacs. Once, he asked her to go out with him for coffee after Reintegration Education. She said no.

  Still, he was happy enough to explain to her about thieves’ tools, when she inquired. What she ought to find, he said, was a thing that housebreakers in their world called a jumper—a skinny key used to knock the tumblers of a lock out of the way, one by one. “It’s the neatest way,” he told her. “People might come home and not even
know someone’s been in and out till they see something missing days later.”

  “Where do I get one?”

  “Not from me. I don’t cut those. Not anymore.”

  “Do you know someone who would?”

  Fenny shrugged. “The weakest point in a house that isn’t your own is a window. Lots of ways to get one open. Glass cutters. Special tape. Or you wrap up your fist. That’s the very easiest. Just don’t get seen by no cameras. And don’t get cut.”

  Hel imagined the paperback waiting for her on a bedside table in Donaldson’s apartment with a bookmark saving a spot, and she could barely resist heading off to Hunters Point to rescue it right away. But of course, The Pyronauts could be any number of other places. Stored in Angelene’s lab for safekeeping on a shelf of gleaming glassware. Slid into the long metal sleeve of a bank’s safe-deposit box. Thrown heedlessly down a garbage chute. Resting at the bottom of Donaldson’s purse, right this minute. She cycled through the possibilities. All of them seemed equally plausible.

  That night, she trailed Donaldson on foot from MoMT to a Duane Reade on Bedford Avenue. She could no longer afford to risk being recognized, so she’d taken steps, arranging a paisley-printed shawl over her hair, tying it the way she’d learned in yet another internet tutorial. She’d also bought a pair of dollar-store reading glasses. The magnification gave her a headache, but they improved the cheap disguise. She hid herself in the condom-and-diaper aisle and watched Donaldson up at the checkout, buying an all-natural brand of deodorant, a bottle of iced tea, and—at the last minute—a copy of Us Weekly with Joslan Micallef on the cover.

  Outside, Donaldson pulled up the hood of her raincoat and checked her phone. Hel feared she was using an app to call a car, but after a minute, she began to walk down North Third, high heels ringing out hollowly against the sidewalk. Hel waited until the other woman had passed the wine bar on the corner and then began to follow her, staying a full block behind. It was simple, like the subway game she’d played with Vikram. The only rule was not to get caught.

  She did not worry about the movement of her blood or the cadence of her noisy breaths the way she had the first time she followed Donaldson. Her footsteps fell silently. The coordinated movements of her arms and legs felt hyper-natural, smooth and powerful, and the rhythm of pursuit filled Hel with clearheaded joy. The goal of a surgeon is to remove all the cancer, taking as little healthy tissue as possible while leaving a clean margin of resection. Even with years of theoretical and practical experience, intuition had guided Hel’s scalpel, once. That feeling of mastery she’d lost. It had returned to her at last.

  A greedy wind pulled at Donaldson’s coat and rattled her plastic drugstore bag, and she ducked into a storefront—a bookstore. Did Donaldson have The Pyronauts with her at this very moment? Was she having it appraised?

  The shop looked pretty small, so Hel waited under an overhang across the street, barely able to contain herself. She felt invisible, intangible, as if she’d finally come to the end of a tiresome process. No one would give her anything and no one could see her. At long last she’d vanished from this world completely.

  A group of young women passed by, clad in the long dark robes and veils that some Muslims wore in this world. They glanced at Hel’s makeshift hijab, taking her in without interest, and then returned to their own animated conversation, of which she could understand no English words but “body wax” and “spatula.”

  Dusk fell and it began to mist faintly. Hel wrapped her sweater-coat tighter around her, pulling up the knitted collar. What was keeping Donaldson’s attention for so long? Should Hel risk going inside? At last, able to wait no longer, she crossed the street. The windows glowed, showing one deep room lined with shelves. About thirty folding chairs had been set up in rows, as though an event were about to start. A few people had staked out spots, but Donaldson wasn’t one of them. But in the back, Hel saw the curly hair of someone else she recognized. Teresa Klay.

  Have you considered the possibility that it could be you?

  She shrunk back reflexively before remembering how well-lit the bookstore was. All Klay would see from the inside was reflection. It was safe to look around for Donaldson. No sign of her through the glass, though—just books and books and more books, all the way up the walls. Shelves of print, forests of paper. Pre-1910 titles from Before that she would recognize if she went inside, and scores of After volumes she’d never heard of and didn’t want to read. Pop history, psychology, medicine—the kinds of books she’d pick up to pass the time during airship travel or flip through when clinic hours were slow. How could she just dismiss a century of collected knowledge, how could she be so incurious, so internal and contained? She hadn’t always been like this. What happened to the person she used to be?

  Mist continued to fall, gathering in beads on Hel’s sweater and dampening her shawl, but at least it wasn’t really raining. She blinked droplets out of her eyes. Staring so intently through the unneeded glasses made her head ache. She took them off to clean the lenses. When she glanced up again, Donaldson was seated in a chair in the last row, her dark head bent toward Klay’s. Their backs were to the door. In front of the assembled crowd, a white man in a denim shirt buttoned all the way up shuffled through a stack of papers, getting ready to read or speak.

  Just then, the door swung open with a jingle of bells as a customer exited. Before the door could close again, before she could think twice, Hel was darting into the store.

  Klay and Donaldson had their backs to her, their attention focused on a bookstore employee introducing the denim-shirt man, a journalist, apparently. He had reported from war zones all over the world. Polite applause. Under Donaldson’s chair, her black leather clutch—just large enough to contain a paperback—lay next to the Duane Reade bag, unattended. Could she snatch it and make it out to the street in time? Or was she simply courting disaster? Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

  Hel moved closer, keeping a wall of books between her and the other women. “You definitely made the right call,” Klay was saying. “You’ve got to keep yourself safe.”

  “She hasn’t actually done anything, you know. I feel kind of guilty.”

  “Don’t. She’s acting crazy.”

  Was this conversation about her? Hel had assumed Klay’s honesty and believed that she really didn’t know Donaldson had stolen The Pyronauts. But something about their easy intimacy now made her wonder if the two of them were in this together, laughing at her.

  At the front of the room, the journalist cleared his throat. “I’m going to start out with a piece I wrote while I was investigating conditions in the infamous Jungle refugee camp,” he said. “If you remember, this tent city near Calais was home to thousands of asylum seekers who’d paid all their savings to traffickers to escape their countries of origin . . .”

  Hel sidled around the corner, along the other side of the Philosophy and World Religion shelf. She was fully exposed now; she kept her face averted, stealing peeks over her shoulder. The women seemed to be listening intently. Hel ducked low and looked under Donaldson’s chair as the reporter droned on about the Iraqi and Yemeni teens he’d met at the camp who were teaching themselves the English language. The zipper of the clutch gaped open. She could see a cell phone inside, a pair of sunglasses, a small bottle—maybe lotion? No book. No room for a book. Hel hurried back into safety, out of sight.

  Donaldson dropped her voice. “This whole thing is making me reconsider her. Look at them, floundering around. Why aren’t UDPs like other refugees, trying to make a place here? They’ve lost too much. That would completely fracture your assumptions about how life is meant to be. It’s certainly an interesting perspective.”

  “It doesn’t excuse stalking you,” said Klay. The traitor.

  Hel pushed through the door, not caring whether heads turned when the bells on the door rang out. Last she’d heard, Fenny was dating a non-UDP woman. He’d adopted the woman’s child and they were expecting a second together. He still worked a
t True Value, that chain with the hopeful name. Not all UDPs were alike; he was different from Hel. They saw each other at the required weekly meetings, but Fenny never followed her out into the street with hardware anymore. After soliciting his advice about housebreaking, she’d tried to start a conversation. She asked if he ever tracked down the sixer player from Lot Fifty. He told her he’d thrown away the discs. She’d have to use her fist, just like he said.

  Vikram didn’t want to ask Hel about Oliveira, not if he could help it. Instead, he called the man at his office number, listed on the website of the Department of Sociology at CUNY. Oliveira had recorded his own oddly formal voicemail message: “You’ve reached the office of Carlos Oliveira. If you care to leave a recording, you will have an opportunity after the tone. Or, if you’d prefer to speak to a human, press zero and a secretary will gladly take a message.” Vikram left a voicemail first, giving his name, mentioning Hel’s, explaining the project briefly and requesting a phone interview. No response.

  “Keep trying,” Wes said.

  Dwayne agreed with this advice; he liked the idea of celebrity attention. “Blow the man up,” he said, then noticed the two UDPs’ expressions. “It’s just a saying. It means calling somebody over and over. He’s busy, but he can’t be that busy. You leave enough messages, fancy-pants won’t be able to forget about you.”

  So Vikram tried the secretary next; she was polite but discouraging, informing him that since Dr. Oliveira was a professor emeritus, he was rarely in his office at predictable times; she couldn’t hazard a guess as to when he might hear back.

  After two more days, Vikram finally brought it up with Hel. “What happened between you and Oliveira?” he asked over their evening meal—dinner for her, breakfast for him. “Do you know how cool that is, to make friends with someone like him? You liked each other, right? Then, when I asked you about him the other night, suddenly he’s Attila the Hun or a KomSo commandant or something.”