by Jake Wolff
She remembers her hands. She shows them to Sadiq, who is still clutching what she now knows to be contracts. “Can’t sign.”
No need to sign, he explains. Her family can sign for her. She agrees to this. They call Francie back into the room, and she comes in dancing, singing, an angel.
* * *
Anna is dreaming English dreams. The Jungle Cat roars.
She is a child. The American priest shows her what it means to conjugate. He gropes. He groped. He will be groping. He shows her what it means to feel disgust. She conjugates her disgust until it becomes something different. She is disgusted. She had been disgusted. She is ashamed. She had been ashamed. She is angry.
The American priest rides his bicycle from the market to the mission house. Papaya and sea grapes bounce in his basket. The Jungle Cat watches him from the trees. Its black fur is caked in mud. Its mouth drips with sea foam. The Jungle Cat sprints from the gray and green of the logwood and deflates the tires of the bicycle. It climbs onto the back of the American priest and scalps him with its teeth. It opens the stomach of the American priest. The American priest screams, but soon his screams are strangled by the space-constricting volume of his own blood. The Jungle Cat gathers the intestines from the American priest as if it were re-spooling a ball of yarn. It strings the intestines on the bike like Christmas lights.
Anna cheers from her hiding place. But then the Jungle Cat turns its emerald eyes onto the road, and onto First Husband.
* * *
Anna is a young woman. She dances with First Husband. He boogies side to side like a fiddler crab. She laughs so hard she spits. He twirls her. Anna has more thickness than the other women, but in his arms? She’s lighter than a leaf.
The Jungle Cat stays low to the ground. It sneaks through the crowd on the soft pads of its feet. It is 1908. One hundred and ten years ago to the day, an army of woodcutters and black slaves defended Belize from the Spanish. Anna comes from the woodcutters, First Husband comes from the black slaves. First Husband’s great-grandfather fought side by side with his owner; he aimed his musket at the waifish bodies of the Spanish soldiers—starved to the ribs by yellow fever—and watched their stomachs explode onto the pale sand of the beach. First Husband dances and says something Anna can’t hear.
The Jungle Cat takes flight. It extends a single claw on each of its front paws, curved and sharp like a pair of parentheses. For a moment it looks like this: (First Husband). But then the parentheses close, and the Jungle Cat divides First Husband into halves. Red mist coats Anna’s hair and face. First Husband’s top half disappears into the night air, his big eyes blinking in the rain of his blood. Anna screams and runs as if she were being hunted, but the Jungle Cat has no interest in her. It lifts its pink nose and smells Second Husband. It trots all the way to San Ignacio. Second Husband’s house is big and yellow. His neighbors call it Mustard House. Second Husband is not like First Husband, who was young and strong and required careful approach. Second Husband is eighty-six years old. The Jungle Cat walks in as if it owns the place. It strolls to the couch and breathes hot air onto Second Husband’s face. Second Husband wakes and opens his mouth into a silent O of surprise. The Jungle Cat crawls into that O. It swims Second Husband’s veins to his left ventricle. It shakes the blood out of its fur and extends a single claw on each paw. For a moment it looks like this: (heart).
The Jungle Cat sleeps for a long time. When it’s done, it stands and stretches and turns its emerald eyes onto Anna. It goes to her bedroom. She wakes up the moment it passes through the door. When she sees the Jungle Cat, she’s so happy she cries.
Finally, she says. Finally.
The Jungle Cat lolls out its tongue and licks her salty cheeks.
Anna closes her eyes. You remembered me.
The Jungle Cat uncurls her hands—at last—and kills her.
19
The Rule of Three
Sadiq and I sat on the edge of his bed, my laptop on the table in front of us, watching a video called “Cocaine Preparation and Injection: How to Get High LIKE A BOSS!!!”
“Look at that little spoon.” Sadiq pointed. “It’s actually quite cute.”
In the video, the faceless man sucked the cocaine solution into a needle, flicked the side to evacuate the air bubbles, and clenched and unclenched his hand until his veins were dark, angry ducts. I felt a little nauseated, and the needle wasn’t even in yet. Watching the video was, sadly, our idea of a break. I’d made an offhand remark—“Even if we get our hands on the Dor, I have no idea how to actually use it”—and Sadiq stood, with his finger in the air, and said, “To the Web!”
When the video finished, I closed my laptop, and we returned to the little table where the recipe book sat open.
“What happened with the AGE and Immortalist Underground after you left Tahiti?” Now that I’d read about Sammy’s Betrayal, I could pretend I’d known about it all along.
“I don’t totally know. Bucky Baker, Jr., dismantled Radkin’s career with the viciousness of the very rich.”
“And the Underground?”
“How should I know? Bogdi never even called to say sorry.”
Sadiq was about to say something more when his phone rang. We stiffened in our seats, hopeful and afraid. Sadiq showed me the phone. It said, Catherine.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, she knocked on the door. Sadiq and I had been waiting in nervous silence, watching the clock, running our sweaty palms over our pants. Emmett had already texted me twice that morning, asking where I was. In spite of Captain Carson’s warning, I could count on one hand the full school days I’d attended.
Sadiq opened the door, at once revealing and blocking my view of her. I saw only her small hands encircle his back in a quick, obligatory hug. Then he stepped to the side, and I was staring at the woman I’d read so much about. She was wearing a blue wool coat and black jeans that flared a little around her sneakers. She unwrapped a thin scarf from her neck and wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. She had short, heavy eyelashes, like those of a child’s doll. I studied her so hard that it took me a moment to realize that she had begun to study me, too. Over the phone, Sadiq had told her everything.
“Ah,” she said, looking at me. “Now it makes sense.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant, but instead I offered her my hand. “Hi.”
She ignored me. “I don’t have long,” she said to Sadiq.
Sadiq nodded, trying too hard. “Of course, of course.”
She shook her head, and it seemed as if she might be on the verge of laughter. I had so much to say to her, but my voice was like a fist in my throat. The room, like all hotel rooms, had a staged, theatrical quality—here’s a painting of a lighthouse, and across from it, on the opposite wall, a photograph of a lighthouse—and we stood in silence, as though one of us had forgotten our next line. Through the window, I tried to peer out across the parking lot, to the trees, where I’d seen the figure watching me.
Sadiq put his hands in his pockets and sucked in his stomach. “Was your flight okay?”
Catherine did laugh then. “I can’t make small talk with you.” Her mouth was stretched thin like a knife. “I mean, what on earth are you doing here?”
I could tell it was a great release for her to say this. The tension in her body deflated like air escaping from a balloon.
“I called him,” I said, coming to Sadiq’s defense.
Catherine wouldn’t even look at me—she’d seen me once, and that seemed to be enough for her. Sadiq was trying to avoid her eyes, but she wouldn’t let him. “Look at yourself. You’re staying in a hotel room with a sixteen-year-old. You flew from London?”
“I’m not staying here,” I said. “I just—”
Catherine held up a finger. My father used to do this, in the good years, whenever I talked back. But then he would bend his finger as though it were speaking and say, in a weird, high-pitched voice, “Redrum, redrum!” That I didn’t get the reference only m
ade it funnier, more random. But there was no humor when Catherine did it.
Sadiq sat in one of the desk chairs, defeated. I tried to imagine this big, sad man as Sammy had described him: loud, joyful, cheesy. Always the optimist. He looked sunken and embarrassed. We exchanged glances, and I felt so, so young. We were seeing each other through Catherine’s eyes.
“I’m only trying to ensure he doesn’t hurt himself,” Sadiq said. “And, yes, I flew from London, where I don’t have much waiting for me, in case that matters to you.”
Catherine closed her eyes. “I don’t know if it does, Sadie, honestly. Not long ago I told my son he’ll never see his father again, and then I had to leave him in New York to come be a part of whatever this is.”
Perhaps sensing my discomfort, Catherine lowered her finger, finally. “I’m not going to talk to you,” she said to me, her voice softer. “It’s not to be rude, or because you’ve done anything wrong. You’re just a kid. What is wrong is that you’ve gotten mixed up in this awful thing, stupid fucking Sam, and rather than helping you, Sadiq is encouraging you to pursue it. And I’m not much better. I’m not going to help you, either.”
“You’re helping if you’ve brought the tribal medicine,” Sadiq said.
Catherine rolled her eyes at him. “I did, but you know that’s not what I mean. And seriously, shame on you.”
“His father is dying,” Sadiq said to the carpet.
“Sam killed himself, Sadie. Nothing he did is going to save anyone’s life.”
“He didn’t kill himself,” I said. “Not like that. He was trying to help me.”
Before I knew what was happening, Catherine had taken my hands. Her fingers were cold. “Okay. Sit down.”
So I sat, and she sat next to me. It was so familiar, being treated this way, being braced for bad news. The hotel bed, with its awful puce bedspread, felt like a time machine we’d entered together. I traveled back—the year was 2004, and my father was saying, “Sit down,” exactly as Catherine had said it, and then trying to tell me something, but failing, half-talking and half-sobbing, and all I could make out was the word cigarette.
Catherine smoothed the bedspread. “I’m sorry. But no. His death had nothing to do with the elixir. It was suicide.”
I looked to Sadiq, but his face showed the same surprise as my own. “What?” I said. “But—”
“He told me he was going to do it. On the phone.”
I was about to deny this, to call her a liar to her face, but then the memory surfaced. The night before he died, our last night together, when I told him I loved him. He’d gone outside to make a call. I had watched him from the window, pacing along the tree line. When he climbed those steps and came back to me, his eyes full of need, I believed he’d truly come back.
“What did he say?” I asked.
She hesitated. I wasn’t sure if she was protecting her privacy or protecting me from the truth. Sadiq was watching us from the chair, where he sat with one arm resting on the clear glass desk. It was like a joke. Three widows walk into a hotel room …
“He told me to say goodbye to Theo.”
“But why did he do it?” It was time to ask the question—for the first time, out loud—that I would wonder for the rest of my life. “Was it because of me, what we did?”
Catherine gave my hand a squeeze. “Honestly, Conrad, I have no idea. I hope there’s nothing worse than what he did to you, but I’ll never understand him, and you won’t, either. I tried—well, it doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
I stared past her. Finally, I could complete the scene in my mind. Finally, I could watch him die and torture myself with that image. He was in the car, and it was a hot, early morning—the windows were rolled down. He was sweating, but when the breeze came, he shivered. He undid the seat belt, trying to get comfortable. Was that an oxymoron: to die comfortably? The sun was only just rising. Bogdi’s words were in his head, from all those years ago: “Even in Dor, cocaine is still cocaine. Too much will kill you.” Other words were in his head, too, the words spoken to him by a sixteen-year-old boy. Three simple words. He had done to that boy what he did to anyone who loved him. Through the windshield, the Methodist church was a wide, white triangle. Its slogan: A CHURCH WITH A HEART. To the sixteen-year-old boy, he made a vow in his mind. If there’s an afterlife, and someday I see you there, I promise: I’ll stay far, far away.
In a strange way, I’d never seen Sammy more clearly. It was the moment I should have felt furthest from him, when the elixir should have seemed the most like a delusion. Instead, I could see the final recipe in my mind, and it was as if something began to shift, to open, to unlock. What’s missing? An answer was forming on my tongue.
“It’s not your fault,” Catherine said, interrupting my thoughts. I looked into her eyes, which had before been hard and closed, the pupils constricted into periods. They were open. “Whatever happened, it was Sam’s doing.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d been told that someone’s death wasn’t my fault, but it had never felt more hollow.
“I called the police after he hung up,” Catherine said, as much to herself as to me, “but I didn’t even know where he was.”
“He had a studio apartment,” I said stupidly, weakly.
This information seemed to interest her. “Really.”
I wiped my nose. “He didn’t like it.”
She took a deep, slow breath. “Okay. Show me.”
* * *
We stood outside the widow’s house, the three of us lined up in a row. The sky was clear and colorless; the sun was warm, but the air carried autumn. The widow’s wind spinners blew counterclockwise.
“The garage?” Catherine said.
I pointed. “Above it.”
“This is where you…?” said Sadiq.
I didn’t answer. The curtains in a window of the widow’s house shifted, and I wondered if she saw us and if she recognized me. It seemed like a long time ago that I was scared of her.
As if sensing my lack of concern, Catherine said, “Let’s go.”
So we walked right down the driveway, in broad daylight. At the top of the steps, the police tape was gone, and the busted door had been removed. The entry was sealed with a blue tarp affixed by duct tape. Without hesitation, Catherine sunk her painted fingernails into the tape and peeled one strip away, allowing us to squeeze past, one after the other. I went last, and before I even followed Sadiq through, I could feel the emptiness of the room. Inside, all of Sammy’s furniture was gone, and the place had been cleaned of debris. The room looked smaller than ever. Catherine turned on the overhead light, revealing every ding and scratch. I moved to where the bed used to be and felt as if I were floating in space.
“My son’s bedroom is bigger than this whole apartment.” Catherine was touching the walls, her fingers circling the hole above the missing headboard.
“Can I see a picture of him?” I asked, expecting her to say no. But she was distracted, and a mother, so she reached absentmindedly into her purse.
The picture showed a boy, maybe seven years old, smiling for a school portrait. He wore a checkered button-down and a thin mauve tie with a pattern of the periodic table. As he’d grown, he’d acquired a little more of Catherine in his looks, though these changes were more about mannerisms than genetics. He smiled her even, thin-lipped smile, and his posture—a little slouched, completely unself-conscious—certainly wasn’t his father’s.
As I handed the photo back to her, she gestured to the hole in the wall, which she’d been inspecting. “Did Sam do this?”
“Yeah,” I said, my face warm.
Catherine put her hand through it. “Please tell me he never hurt you.”
I shook my head. “Never. It wasn’t like with you.”
Catherine flinched. It was a cruel and petty thing for me to have said, but ever since she’d arrived, I felt powerless.
Sadiq was studying a particularly worn section of the floor. I could see Sammy ther
e, hunched over his desk, sighing to himself as he assigned another F to a student.
“That’s where he wrote,” I said to Sadiq. “Your postcard was there.”
“You were in touch with him?” Catherine’s voice was neutral.
“I tried to be. But no.”
Catherine opened and closed a cabinet. Like the rest of the apartment, it was empty. Did Sammy ever imagine this, all of us in one room?
“I know you don’t want to be involved,” Sadiq said to her. “If you could give us the stuff, I know Conrad will agree that we’ll never contact you again.”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I had every intention of contacting her again.
“I brought it. But it’s a trade. The medicine for the journals.”
I felt my legs weaken. What was it about me that I was so easy to take things from?
“He gave them to Conrad,” Sadiq argued.
Catherine gave him a savage glare. “Trust me, I don’t want them.”
“Then why?” I asked.
“Why are any of us here? Sam told me to bring you the medicine and take the journals. He wants Theo to have them, when he’s grown. It was his last request.”
I could no longer stay on my feet. I slumped to the ground with my back against the wall, just a few feet below the hole. I wanted to crawl inside that hole, disappear forever. It was painful enough that Catherine was one more person Sammy had warned without warning me, but this was so much worse than that: the journals were never really mine. I was just a placeholder, and in so many ways. I was temporary.
Catherine ran her hands through her hair. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But I loved him, too, and this is what he wanted.” She hadn’t yet convinced herself—I could hear this. “Someday Theo will be older than his father,” she added, but in a different, less confident tone, as though she’d only realized this fact right then, and it surprised her.
Sadiq came to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s up to you.”