by Jake Wolff
“How are you in the States?” Sadiq asked.
“It’s not, like, superconvenient,” Bogdi said. “But Samster said he would give everything he had to Radkin if we didn’t fly over here.”
Of course. Sammy had called them. And what better bait than Radkin?
“So you’re okay?” Sadiq asked.
“Um, the pool here has a waterslide,” Bogdi said.
RJ made a frustrated sound. In all of my life, I’ve never met another teenager with less patience for adults. “Can you help us or not? We need Dor.”
Livia showed her teeth. “Relax, PJ.”
“Okay,” Bogdi said, “we’ll be there in, what, three hours? Two and a half?”
“Just like that?” I asked.
“Sure,” Livia said. “We help you, and you give us the recipe book.”
“Oh,” I said. This was my life: whenever there seemed to be nothing left to lose, someone would say, Just one more thing …
Bogdi clapped his hands, understanding that I had no choice but to agree. “Cool cool cool.” He reached for the mouse to close the call. “See you bitches soon!”
* * *
Sammy must have told Bogdi and Livia about the storage unit, because they asked to meet us there. I told them there was nothing of value left, but they insisted, so that’s where we went—RJ, Sadiq, and me—in the early evening. There was a drizzle, so we lined up with our backs to the building, taking shelter in the slight overhang of the roof. I had only a few hours, I figured, until Radkin acted on his threat.
RJ’s phone sounded. “Shit,” he said, grimacing. “My dad. He says he’ll call the police if I’m not home in ten minutes.”
“Go,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”
RJ looked at me, hearing the lie, and hesitated.
“I’ll take care of Conrad,” Sadiq promised.
After RJ departed, Sadiq and I had a final moment of quiet, just the two of us. I was still working through everything I’d learned in the past twenty-four hours. It seemed Sammy had used the AGE and the Immortalist Underground as lures for each other, to bring them to Littlefield, but why? And who had been following me, if not Radkin?
As I stood outside of the storage facility, a more immediate question came to mind. “If Radkin didn’t know about the storage unit,” I asked Sadiq, “who broke the lock?”
Sadiq thought about this for a moment, then he laughed. “Here’s a hypothesis: What if Sammy left you the package, with the key, and then realized he still needed something from the storage unit? Perhaps what he used that night to, well…”
“So he could drive back to my house and risk someone catching him, or he could break the lock?” It made a kind of sense: Sammy’s final act of forgetfulness.
Sadiq’s smile had faded, and it reminded me of Sammy and how brief his happiness always seemed. “We’ve both done a lot for him,” Sadiq said. “Probably more than we should have.”
I said nothing. Even if he was right, I couldn’t let myself think that way. To get through this, I had to believe I was making the right choices, for the right reasons.
A moment later, Bogdi and Livia pulled into the lot. I had expected the two of them to show up in one of those psychedelic 1970s vans, or, who knows, a golden tank. But it was just a blue sedan, a two-door, with New Hampshire plates. It was completely anonymous except for the rear windshield, where they’d affixed a small decal of the Romanian flag. Three vertical stripes: blue, yellow, red.
Bogdi, in the passenger seat, was the first to step out of the car. He took a moment to examine Livia’s parking job—she’d parked horizontally across two separate spaces—and greeted us with a wave. He’d pulled his long hair up into a bun, which bobbed on his head as he jogged toward us. He went straight to Sadiq and wrapped his skinny arms around Sadiq’s big body. Sadiq returned the hug with one arm.
Bogdi held Sadiq at arm’s length. “Pal,” he said gravely, “I’m so sorry I ruined your life in Tahiti.”
“Just try not to ruin anyone else’s.” Sadiq glanced at me.
I was watching Livia tug an empty-looking duffel bag out of the car. She was wearing a neon-green ski jacket and parachute pants with a bright, vaguely floral pattern. She planted a foot on the front bumper of the car and tied the laces of her Reeboks. She looked over at me from this position, and in the brief moment before Bogdi blocked my view of her, I knew: no matter how strangely she might act, she was serious, and dangerous.
Bogdi encircled me in a hug, and I felt the brittle hairs of his mustache on my cheek. “Little Conrad,” he said into my ear.
By the time he released me, Livia was upon us. Her hoop earrings rotated slightly as she moved. “You have the book?”
“Yeah.” I gestured with my head to the backpack looped around my shoulders. Then, because she was scary, I added, “It’s nice to meet you.”
Livia made a snorting sound with her nose. “Storage unit. Storage unit. Storage unit.” She ushered us toward the double doors of the building.
“There’s nothing useful here,” I said, but I led them anyway to the unit, where Bogdi crouched into a squat, his bony knees touching his chest, and lifted the door by the handle. It was only halfway up when he emitted a squeal of delight.
“Bingo, bongo!” He motioned theatrically for Livia to enter.
She strode inside and made a beeline for one of the boxes in the far corner. When I saw what it was, it was the stupidest I’ve ever felt in my life, and there has not been a single moment since that’s come close.
The sparklers.
Sadiq looked at me, and I could see him trying to keep the frustration off his face. “You didn’t tell me that was here,” he said evenly.
We’d had all the Dor we needed—a whole box of it—sitting unguarded in the storage unit. “I didn’t know about the Dor when I first came here,” I said, but that was no excuse. What’s worse was the measurement in Sammy’s final recipe: Dor (1 sp). One sparkler.
Livia pulled a switchblade out of her ski jacket and jabbed it unceremoniously into the box. She carved open the packing tape and flipped the lid. Watching her, I remembered that first night I opened the box of Sammy’s journals. Back then, I believed my only problem was heartache. Bogdi was watching her, too, and I saw it, like a dark eddy behind his laughing eyes: his widow self. I knew then that despite his resources, Bogdi had needed Sammy much more than Sammy needed him. When it came to the elixir of life, Bogdi had the curse of happiness. He had too much to lose.
Livia dumped the sparklers into the duffel bag. When she was done, she pushed the knife closed on the meat of her thigh and tossed the bag out of the unit to Bogdi, who slung it over his head. Livia returned to the hallway, and she was holding a single sparkler, waving it back and forth as if it were lit, as if this were a celebration.
She held it out to me, but when I reached for it, she pulled it away. “Book.”
“I need two.” One for my father, one for Stephanie.
Livia’s face assumed a puzzled expression, but this was another act. “Oh? Two sparklers? Do you have two books?”
“You know there’s only one.”
Livia mimed wiping sweat from her brow. “Phew! Because there is only one sparkler, so everything is fair.”
“Livia, please,” Sadiq said. “He’s just a kid.”
Livia motioned to the debris of our surroundings, as if to say, Look where we are. “This is not a place for children,” she hissed, “so if that’s what he is, you shouldn’t have brought him.”
“Please,” I said. “They’re dying.”
“No offense,” Bogdi said from behind me, “but, like, everyone is dying.”
Livia’s argument was less philosophical. “One of these is worth more than your life. Than Papa’s life. Than PJ’s crippled sister’s life.”
I looked back and forth between them. They had traveled so far to get here: Romania to Boston, Boston to Maine. They’d put on that ridiculous show on the computer. They said they wanted the recipe
book, and maybe that was true, but it was the Dor that had activated Livia’s greed.
“I saw Gavril,” I said.
They paused. Livia’s lip curled, and Bogdi held the strap of the duffel bag with two hands.
“You didn’t know he was working for Radkin when you sabotaged the AGE in Tahiti.”
“How could we have?” Bogdi asked, and I felt that he was talking to Livia more than to me. They’d had this conversation many, many times. “He was our oldest pal.”
I pointed with my chin at the duffel bag. “How much Dor do you have left?”
“You don’t know anything,” Livia said, which was answer enough. They’d taken down Radkin not knowing how much he had against them. In destroying the AGE, they’d destroyed themselves.
Sadiq had followed along. “The warehouse? The equipment?”
Bogdi spit on the ground. “Seized. An ‘asset of the government.’”
It was nice for at least one thing to make sense. “You didn’t know Sammy had any left until he called you. You’re just as desperate as I am.”
“If you’re so smart,” Livia said, “you’ll stop talking and take the sparkler.”
I shook my head because I knew what it would mean if I took only one. I knew the decision it would leave me. And I knew, although I hated to admit it, what choice I would make. “No, I need two.”
Livia was on me so fast I can’t even describe the motion of her body. We had not been far apart—an arm’s length—but then her face was right in front of me, and she held in one hand both the sparkler and the collar of my shirt. In the other hand, she had the knife.
“Give me the fucking book”—her words were hot on my face—“and take the sparkler, or I’ll cut you open and leave the sparkler inside you.”
Bogdi dropped the duffel bag and sprang forward, tried to fit his skinny body into the narrow space between us. I could see it in his face: if she had to, she would do it. “Let’s relax,” he said. “But you should also, like, take the sparkler.”
I looked to Sadiq, and he nodded. So I took the backpack off my shoulder, unzipped it, and offered her the recipe book. She let go of my collar, even straightened it for me. We made the exchange. I held the sparkler between my forefinger and thumb, and it was so skinny and so light. It was like holding nothing.
As Bogdi and Livia began the walk down the hall, Livia paused midstep. Bogdi took another pace before he realized she wasn’t with him and turned with a questioning look. Before he did, I realized why she’d stopped: he’d left the duffel bag on the floor.
“Darling?” She curdled the word with sarcasm. “What’s missing?”
Bogdi blushed and ran back for the bag. Once he had it secure around his shoulder, Livia made a clicking noise with her mouth—Let’s go—and the two of them started again down the hallway.
As they went, Sadiq stood next to me and examined the sparkler in my hand. He asked me something, but I don’t remember what. I wasn’t really there. Livia’s question was hovering in front of me: What’s missing? I let the words—and the sound of them, like a frustrated tutor—hang there, solidifying. Then I pulled up Sammy’s final recipe in my mind, placed it alongside Livia’s question.
still not strong enough. what’s missing?
Darling? What’s missing?
It wasn’t a question. It was a quiz.
All this time, I had thought Sammy died on the precipice, so close to something he couldn’t quite reach. I thought he needed my help. Maybe I wanted to believe that. But I had to be honest with myself: He knew he was going to die. He put in motion a series of events—phone calls, packages, cryptic notes—that brought everyone to Littlefield together. All of the data he had left me were forming a constellation, a shape that held meaning.
What’s missing? Sammy had known the answer; he had died knowing it. I’d been thinking of the missing component as something he had overlooked, when really it was something he had been trying to show me. We had the Appetizer, we had the Entrée, and it wasn’t some rogue ingredient we lacked, some random plant from a faraway country. It was a third course. It was Dessert.
Without saying anything to Sadiq, I ran down the hallway to stop Livia and Bogdi before they left. I found them at the end of the corridor, waiting for the elevator.
“Wait!”
Livia threw her head back in agony. “We will never leave this place!”
Bogdi took her hand in his, squeezed. “What do you need, little Conrad?”
I caught my breath. “Do you know how I can get an ECT machine?”
Livia and Bogdi exchanged looks, and then she asked, “Where are we, again? Kentucky?”
“Maine.”
Livia wrinkled her nose and said, “I have cousin near here,” as though this was an answer to my question. She pulled out her phone and began to search through it, but then the elevator doors dinged open and revealed, staring out at us, Joseph Radkin and Gavril.
Gavril had a gun.
Instinctively, I stepped back. Gavril shook his head, and I took this to mean I shouldn’t move any farther.
“Honey, look!” Livia said to Bogdi, in a sunshiny voice. “It’s two dumb assholes.”
Radkin moved out of the elevator, flanked by his spy. He began to say something, but spotted, over Bogdi’s shoulder, an old friend he hadn’t known was here. “Sadiq?”
Sadiq stepped two paces forward, and I did not fail to notice that he’d placed himself between me and the rest of them. “Dr. Radkin. What are you doing?”
“We’re all here for the same thing.” Radkin gestured at the duffel bag around Bogdi’s shoulders.
“But why?” Sadiq asked. “You always said their work was bullshit.”
I became aware, as Sadiq spoke, of Livia easing the switchblade out of the back pocket of her pants.
To Sadiq’s question, Radkin made a dismissive gesture with his hands. “If it’s worth money, then it’s real.”
Gavril held the gun steady, though it wasn’t clear to me that he was pointing it at anyone in particular. His mouse ears rose over my sight line of the gun, and they made me remember a question I’d forgotten to ask them—an absurd question, but one that mattered to me.
“Did you find a rat?” I asked Radkin and Gavril. “In Sammy’s apartment? A Wistar rat?” It was one thing I still didn’t know: What happened to Number 50 after Sammy revived him?
“Why are you talking?” Radkin asked, but Gavril caught my eyes, and something passed between us.
“I let your rat outside,” Gavril said, and maybe it was only the dramatic nature of the scene, but I felt I could hear in his voice everything he’d been through: the experiments he’d endured, the friends he’d betrayed. “He’s free.”
I remember Livia, in the seconds that followed, pulling the knife and charging Gavril with a battle cry that could stop a beating heart. I remember Bogdi dropping the duffel bag on the floor, freeing himself to fight. I saw the bag, and I went for it, thinking if I could only take one more sparkler, it would spare me from making that terrible choice. But Sadiq was in front of me, with a head start. He was reaching for the bag when the gun went off—and my God, a gunshot is so much louder than movies had told me—and he whirled away, the force of the bullet pushing him toward me, and the blood puffed from his arm like a firework. He’s dead, my mind was screaming, Sadiq is dead, but I was taking his hand as I thought this, guiding him in the direction of the stairwell. We descended the stairs, half-running, half-falling, to the bottom floor. By the time we reached the doors, he was breathing so hard I wondered if that would be what killed him.
We burst into the parking lot. I ran to Sadiq’s rental car, but I had to wait for him to catch up. When he finally made it, he unlocked the car, and we threw ourselves inside.
“Are you okay?” I tried to inspect him.
“I think so. It only grazed me.” He took his hand away from his arm. The bullet had ripped his shirt, and the wound was an angry line on his skin—more than a graze, but so much
less than it could have been. He put his hand back over it. “But you’ll have to drive.”
“Right.”
We exited the car, switched sides, and reentered. But we didn’t leave, not right away.
“Wait,” he said. “Should we call the police?”
“We need to get you to a doctor.”
“I’m fine.” I heard for the first time how annoying it is for someone to say that when it obviously isn’t true. “Can we just sit for a minute?”
“Okay.” I still had the sparkler. I placed it on my lap.
The right thing to do was to give it to Stephanie. RJ was my friend, and his sister was so young. She was a good person, not like my father, who was old and cruel. Stephanie deserved my help, and RJ deserved my loyalty. But I was only torturing myself with these thoughts because my mind was made up.
“So.” I assumed Sadiq was going to tell me to get moving already. Instead, he asked, “Electroshock therapy?”
“He’d been leading me toward it all summer. The P. cupana has one purpose: to restore memory after a brain burn.”
Sadiq was working it out in his mind. “He thought ECT could finish the job of the cocaine and mercury? To eliminate the blood-brain barrier?”
I nodded. “It takes all three.”
“But if he already knew, why put you through this whole charade?”
I would never know, completely, the answer to this question. That day in the lab, Sammy had said, “Never just take my word for it. You have to see for yourself.” Maybe that was part of it—Sammy playing teacher, one last time. I pictured, too, the journals in Catherine’s hands, the recipe book in Livia and Bogdi’s. Maybe he used me to get these things where he wanted them. And then there was Radkin, the AGE squaring off against the Immortalist Underground, whatever violence was happening behind the bright white walls of the storage facility. There must have been a part of Sammy that was saying, to all of them, You deserve each other.
I was starting the car when I saw Livia come running out of the building. Her face was completely calm. She wasn’t covered in blood, hers or anyone else’s. It looked as if she was holding the knife, but as she came closer, I saw that it was only a pen, and in her other hand, a Post-it. It was as though I’d dreamed everything I’d seen inside.