by Jake Wolff
“What in the actual fuck?” RJ said, running ahead of me—only a few yards ahead, but it was enough that I almost cried out to him. Instead I watched, frozen, as he picked up the pieces of the broken padlock and showed them to me. Whoever had beaten us to Sammy’s apartment had beaten us here, too, and the path they were forging was not peaceful. My lungs were a tightening knot in my chest. Someone really was out there, doing this.
RJ crouched into a squat, inspecting the steel roll-up door of the unit. When I came to stand next to him, he looked up at me. “Let’s be fast,” he said, leaving no time for me to question the wisdom of staying.
He slid the door up easily, quickly, the metallic sound of it echoing off the walls. As the storage unit received the light of the hallway, I expected to find total destruction. Instead, we found uncertainty.
RJ frowned, his arms still extended over his head. “Is it like his apartment, or is it just messy?”
The storage unit was packed with boxes, and while some were overturned, I saw no evidence of the violence enacted on his studio. The space was a mass of equipment, clutter, and cardboard, and only my aptitude for chemistry allowed me to make any sense of the scene. Immediately through the door, several rolls of dialysis and thistle tubing were coiled like garden snakes under a hedge of filter paper. A $3,000 immersion circulator, which must have looked to RJ like a microwave with arms, lay on its side, its wires dangling pathetically over the console. Sampling bags and sponge probes surrounded the pump housing of a fluid aspiration system, its nipplelike tube connectors standing at full attention. Under another empty box, I saw a $500 incubator. Based on a quick mental calculation, Sammy’s storage unit contained over $10,000 worth of equipment. Whoever had broken the padlock wasn’t motivated by money—having left behind an elevator-ful of expensive laboratory devices.
“What next?” RJ asked.
I didn’t like that he was asking—he was the one who was supposed to know. “Should we leave in case they come back?” I asked, gesturing to the broken padlock, and what I meant was Play your role.
“Just look for a few minutes.” This was what I expected him to say, but his tone surprised me with its uncharacteristic plaintiveness, almost desperation. I didn’t recognize it.
I began to search. RJ stayed near the entrance to the unit, picking at some open boxes, keeping his eyes on the hall. He pulled a reaction flask from a plastic crate and held it absentmindedly to his nose. He gagged and dropped it back into the box, his face contorted. I could smell the thiols—the same ones in my dad’s fetid breath—from the other side of the locker. Along with the laboratory equipment, the only immediately visible items were easy-to-find materials with no obvious relation to the recipe book: twenty boxes of baby aspirin, a gallon of lye, a box of sparklers. In a pinch, Sammy could have used these materials to build a bomb.
“What’s this?” RJ had reached into an open box and removed a small plastic vial. He held it horizontal, and the metallic liquid inside settled into a shallow pool. It was the first ingredient in Sammy’s Entrée: quicksilver.
Seeing my face, RJ grew excited. “There’s lots more stuff in here.”
He was holding the flaps of the box apart and looking up at me expectantly, as though I might be able to tell him, with only a glance, if the box contained the secret to immortality. I crouched down next to him. Along with the mercury, an unlabeled herb was wrapped in computer paper, which looked like the B. rossica of Sammy’s elixir. We found a pill bottle labeled RAPAMYCIN, though it was nearly empty. At the bottom of the box was a thick vial with only a tablespoon or so of a clear green liquid. The vial was circled in masking tape, and on it, Sammy had written CATHERINE in blue Sharpie.
“Who’s Catherine?” RJ asked.
“No idea,” I said honestly. I tipped the vial on its side, letting the green sludge slide slowly down the clear walls.
“Do you hear that?”
I listened. The heavy fumes of the storage unit had filtered down the hallway, and they were just then rounding the corner, hitting the nose of the figure whose shadow we’d seen on the first floor. The stranger coughed, barely audible. Before I could stop him, RJ began to creep in the direction of the sound. I followed, trying to wave him back. We approached a bend in the hallway. RJ pressed his spine against the wall and inched forward as if he were navigating the edge of a tall building. At the corner, he took a quick peek, and then he was running, at full speed.
“Hey!” he called, disappearing around the side.
“RJ, wait!” I yelled, giving chase. As I rounded the corner, I saw, at the end of the hall, someone’s legs as he sprinted away from us. RJ and I charged forward, but before we reached the second corner, I heard the sound of the elevator. We arrived just in time to see it depart.
“Stairs,” RJ said, and he was running again.
We traced the exit signs to the stairwell, which we descended quickly, reaching the bottom just as the slow, heavy door we’d opened at the top thudded closed. I followed RJ breathlessly, terrified—what on earth were we doing?
We ran through the unmanned lobby and into the light of the sun. To my great relief, the parking lot was empty of people. RJ threw up his hands and leaned against his car, breathing hard.
“Sorry I couldn’t catch him,” he said between breaths.
“I didn’t want you to.”
He coughed the air back into his lungs. “You need to call the phone number.”
I looked into the sky. A prop plane flew under the clouds, leaving a faint white contrail that faded as soon as it appeared.
“What else are you going to do?” RJ asked. “Let’s go back for that box and then we’ll call.”
I heard it again in his voice, the desperation. I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt, holding him in place. “Why do you care so much?”
RJ looked at me as if I’d asked him for the solution to one plus one. “Don’t you want to help your dad and Stephanie? Don’t you want them to get better?”
I let go of his sleeve. Of course. Without a miracle, Stephanie would be lucky to see her thirties. I’d been focused on the mystery Sammy had left for me, but to RJ, there was no mystery. If Sammy had given me the chance to save someone’s life, even the smallest chance, then that’s what we would do.
He was taking small steps toward the building. His face was serious, urgent, almost panicked—and for a moment, behind his confidence and his courage and his endless reserves of optimism, I glimpsed it: his widow self. It was like quicksand, pulling him under, into the world of pain and loss.
“This is all bullshit,” I told him, even though I, too, wanted to believe. “You know that, right?”
RJ waved me on. “Mr. Tampari’s work must be worth something if someone is trying to steal it.”
6
How I Got Here
For my fortieth birthday, my husband threw me a party, just a little thing in our backyard. One of our neighbors had bought me a T-shirt that said IT TOOK ME 40 YEARS TO LOOK THIS GOOD! We all laughed at how bad it was, and my husband pretended to kick him out of the party.
In fact, I first met my husband at a birthday party—a high-end, rooftop affair in New York City, celebrating the birthday of blond-haired, blue-eyed twin sisters who had once been my roommates. I knew almost no one there, and it certainly wasn’t my kind of scene. All of the other guys in attendance wore such tight button-down shirts you could see their nipples, and the women, God help them, could barely stand on their towering heels. Every time they tottered near the edge of the building, I fought the urge to pull them to safety. A three-piece band of impossibly young people were playing noncommittal electronic music on what looked to me like a row of color copiers.
I had found a relatively quiet space for myself on a bench between two tall green succulents when a man I didn’t know, and who was, honestly, a little big to share the bench with me, sat down with a thud. He turned to me and smiled, and it was a nice smile—wide, unafraid.
“Do you mind if I jus
t sit here quietly with you?”
Hearing this, and reading his gentle face, I felt something happen in my chest—not an awakening, necessarily, but a kind of move to alertness. My heart attuned itself to this man, the way a cat’s ears adjust to distant noises—just a little tilt, the rest of the body staying perfectly still. I told him yes, you can sit with me, and I hoped he heard that what I meant was Yes, please sit with me, I need exactly you.
We watched the party together. After a moment, I realized he was looking at me.
“Do you like animal fire?” he asked.
That didn’t make any sense to me.
“Animal fire,” he said louder, as though volume had been the problem. “Do you like animal fire?”
I grimaced. “Is that a drink?” I showed him my glass. “This is just Coke.”
He laughed, but it didn’t feel mean-spirited. “Animal Fire is the band you’ve been listening to all night.” He gestured with his chin to the waifs behind the copy machines. He shook his head, still laughing. “How on earth did you get here?”
I don’t remember how I answered that question—my answer was good enough, whatever it was, to keep him sitting with me all night—but it’s one of those questions you can’t think too much about, or it gets too big for you. How did I get here? How far back do you want me to go? To earlier that week, to earlier that decade, to the creation of man?
For the sake of this story, let’s go back to Ned and Nasya, a couple of overachieving undergraduates who had been groomed their whole lives to find each other: two New England Jews, exact same age, exact same GPA. How I got here starts with them.
* * *
Ned Aybinder was an only child, a small and sensitive boy from Milford, Connecticut. He wept at his bar mitzvah not because he was nervous but because he felt something. A connection to his faith. A love for his family. I remember two folders he used to keep on our desktop computer: one where he saved articles about anti-Semitism and one where he saved his poetry.
Meanwhile, Nasya Beckmann was a high school tennis star in Newport, Rhode Island. If we can call a five-foot-two-inch Jewish girl a jock, that’s what she was. I’ve seen the pictures from her team portraits. She stands to the far left, her long wooden racket gripped in both hands and her white Teddy Tinling skirt just a tad dirtier than everyone else’s. She liked to aim her ground strokes directly at her opponent’s body; if she came to the net, you were better off protecting yourself than trying to win the point. She didn’t just want to beat you, she wanted to kill your love of the game. She continued to play tennis in college, but her opponents were fiercer and her lack of size caught up to her. Those gentiles from Amherst averaged five feet seven inches. They hit serves that seemed to come from the heavens. In a different body, my mother could have become a tennis pro, but in the body of Nasya Beckmann, she became a psychology major with a mean streak.
The two of them met as juniors at Connecticut College and were married soon after graduation in America’s oldest synagogue. They tried immediately for a family, but my mother couldn’t conceive—polycystic ovary syndrome—and they had to wait for the fertility research to catch up. I was born June 1, 1994, a miracle of modern science, the product of five hundred milligrams of metformin, fifty milligrams of clomiphene, and a decade’s worth of patience.
* * *
Winterville, Maine, was a quiet town, population two thousand. They say it’s the kind of place you can hear the snow falling. I loved our house there—a lean, rustic one-story on three acres of moss and mud. The peaked roof was the color of bruised strawberries. In winter, the ice would catch the roof’s reflection and give the snow trapped in tree branches a sanguineous hue. We lived in a big, beating heart, the three of us, protected by the bones of the house and the cold of the air, which kept us inside and everyone else out.
We’d moved there after my father found a job teaching math at the high school. My mother worked a couple of days each week at the reform camp for troubled boys. Winterville and its neighboring towns were full of camps—for healing, for fishing, for sobering up. For learning how to hunt with a bow.
I only lasted a month in kindergarten before I was promoted to first grade. It was news to me that I was smart for my age, but I do remember a unit on the solar system, and how I was the only kid in my class to know that the sun was a star. When I reported this to my mother, she said the children up there didn’t get any sun and couldn’t be blamed for not knowing much about it. But later that night, I heard her talking to my father behind a closed door, and I knew then that I was different and that this difference was meaningful. Two years later, I skipped third grade.
I existed this way—friendless, too young for my grade—until I was ten years old. That was the year my mother died. A fire caused by a cigarette. She’d spent the night at the youth camp, filling in for someone, and it was her first time doing this—she’d never slept there before. When she woke to the smell of fire, she was disoriented. The fire inspector said she did everything wrong: she went up when you’re supposed to go down, she traveled toward the heat and not away from it. The fire spread slowly, and there were plenty of safe exits. No one else died.
I remember standing with my father outside the funeral home after the service, shaking hands with people as they walked to their cars. My mother was in an urn. From the front lawn of the funeral home, I could see, just down the road, the entrance to the conversion camp for homosexual boys. While I waited for my father to take me home, I watched as a green SUV stopped at the gates of the camp. The driver’s door swung open, and a man stepped out. He was tall but a little mousy, dressed in a button-down shirt that didn’t quite fit. From the front passenger’s door, another man emerged and stomped the ground, shook the feeling back into his legs. The first man walked around the car and popped the trunk, pulled some luggage from the back. The other man opened one of the back doors, reached inside the car, and dragged a boy outside by his wrist. The boy wasn’t crying, but you could tell he’d been crying by the way he watched the ground. He followed the men to the gate, and they waited there for admittance. After a minute or two, a camp counselor appeared and opened all the locks.
The counselor waved hello to the boy, and I could see the men apologize for the boy’s shyness. And that was that—custody of the child was exchanged. The kid didn’t look back as the men drove away and the counselor guided him inside. He knew full well that neither direction was better than the other. That’s the crazy thing about those camps. It’s all just shame, and trust me, your gay child can get that anywhere. You don’t need to pay for a wilderness retreat.
* * *
Winter in Winterville. It’s as bad as it sounds. Snow piled up to the windows. Snowmobiling and ice fishing and the inevitable, graphic injuries of snowmobilers and ice fishermen. Sometimes there’d be a twofer, such as when Bobby Segal, Jr., drove his snowmobile into the ice-fishing shed of Bobby Segal, Sr. Both lived, neither were ever the same again.
Nor was my father. The first night our house was empty, Ned and I played Jenga until three in the morning and then fell asleep in the living room, me on the couch and him on the floor. We shared, at that point, a wounded camaraderie, and we indulged each other in our grief. We ate ice cream for dinner. We belched and farted and never said excuse me. We watched all the scary movies my mother would have made us turn off.
My father’s mysterious transformation began during one of these movie nights. We had microwavable burritos laid out on tray tables in front of the TV and a movie in which Kate Beckinsale, a skinny Brit with vampire-pale skin, played an actual vampire. The camera loved her. She wore a skintight black leather suit that hugged the contours of her body. She opened fire on a group of bearded thugs we would later learn were werewolves. She jumped out of a window, landed on her feet, and bared her fangs at a stranger. She didn’t do much for me, though looking back, I wouldn’t have kicked some of those werewolves out of bed.
My father turned up the volume by several notches and immedi
ately back down by the exact same amount. He was drinking a glass of wine; me, a tall cup of Vanilla Coke. “I don’t think I’d wear black leather if I were a vampire,” he said. “I’d just wear regular clothes.”
“It’s camouflage,” I explained. “They only go out at night.”
My dad finished his burrito and folded his paper plate in half. All of our real dishes were piled high in the sink. “What? They don’t make cotton in black?”
Kate Beckinsale infiltrated a werewolf lair. For a people at war, the werewolves seemed overly preoccupied with chemistry experiments involving their own blood.
“Anyway,” my father said, “I’d fuck her for sure.”
I was ten years old.
My father punched me on the shoulder, too hard. “I’d even let her keep those teeth in.”
I turned my attention to my meal. I drank, before the movie was over, six full cups of Coke—the whole bottle. By the time the night ended, I was so hyped up on sugar that I just lay in bed, covers up to my chin, debating the difference between having sex with someone and fucking them. The best I could do was that you have sex with your wife and fuck a stranger. She didn’t even have to be human.
Sometime after midnight, I heard my dad in the kitchen and crept to my door to spy on him. He was standing in front of the sink. He removed a plate from the pile and held it up to the light. It was truly filthy—these dishes had been gathering for weeks. My father held that pose and then smashed the plate on the floor. The pieces scattered across the linoleum and surrounded his bare feet. He picked up a soup bowl and this time with less ceremony whipped that, too, against the floor. I closed the door and returned to my bed, more awake than ever, but I could hear him continue this work for the next half hour.
* * *
Here’s what that scene suggests: a depressed, widowed father. Later, this depression feeds the alcoholism, and the alcoholism destroys the liver. But there is more to the story, so much more happening in his body than any of us, including his doctors, understood. For now, I’ll take a cue from the New York Society of Numismatics and offer, in place of an explanation, a bit of homework, a formula that doubles as a clue: