The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  By the time Alex arrived, Amanda had already been taken away and Katherine was sitting alone outside the apartment on the dirty hallway floor. She looked broken, completely unlike herself, her clothes askew and her face puffy from crying.

  “Tell me this isn’t my fault,” she said. “Tell me I couldn’t have known.”

  Under his horror, Alex felt a small, shamed relief that he wasn’t alone in this.

  “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We did what we could.”

  The super stood hunched beside the elevator in his pyjamas and slippers, puffing furtively on a cigarette. The apartment was open. Through the doorway, Alex saw a couple of policemen nosing around inside.

  “I should have called her,” Katherine said. “I should have called.”

  It was all too familiar, this black anguish, this circling back and back to find the right moment, the one that would change things.

  Each thing he told her, he knew, was a lie.

  “You couldn’t have known,” he said.

  The policemen took down their numbers when they’d finished. They were polite, in their broken English, but didn’t seem much interested in them after they learned they weren’t family.

  “We ’ave to call, eh? For de body. It’s only dey who can say.”

  The super was still slouching unhappily nearby as if waiting for some sort of instruction from him and Katherine, though Alex couldn’t think what it might be. He felt compelled to go inside the apartment but wasn’t sure why, if it was just morbid curiosity or the need to know this thing, to face up to it.

  The smell hit him at once, an odor of rot and of something more foul, more forbidden. He’d never been in the place: it was tiny, just a single room, though it looked as if a great wind had whipped through it, a bookshelf knocked over, broken dishes scattered on the floor, food spilled on the counter and moldering. There was a mattress in the corner, the sheets a tangle; there was a little desk in gray metal under the single window. He expected a chalk outline somewhere, as in a police show, but there was no sign of where she’d been found, curled up in her bed or sprawled frozen in some death throe across the floor.

  There were smears on the wall and on the bedsheets of what looked like blood.

  “She must have cut herself,” Katherine said. She stood at the doorway but wouldn’t come in. “You get delirious in the end. That’s what they said. It might have gone on for days.”

  It was too horrible to think about. It felt obscene, somehow, to be looking at the place, like watching a snuff film.

  It occurred to him what the super probably wanted from them.

  “We’ll clean the place up,” he said. “For when her family comes.”

  The super shifted, looked heartened.

  “It’s no hurry, eh. She still got ’er last month.”

  They brought boxes the next day to pack the place up. They both seemed to be hoping for a purging, a revelation perhaps, but all the place betrayed of Amanda’s life was the strange poverty of it. There were no photo albums; no journals. The only books were her course books, barely a novel or a grocery store flyer outside the required texts, though most of these were carefully underlined and annotated, with notes like “compare to Derrida’s notion of difference,” behind which her real self seemed hopelessly occluded.

  There was a stack of photocopied journal articles on her little Salvation Army–issue desk and next to them a yellow writing pad with a few heavily corrected paragraphs of what looked like the start of an essay. “Julia Kristeva, in her article ‘Woman’s Time,’” it began, and went on in that vein, jargon-laden and hanging always at the edges of intelligibility but not in any remarkable way for its subject matter. No sudden turn into delusion or strangeness, no final Kurtzian scrawl, just a trailing off in mid-sentence as if the kettle had boiled or someone had knocked at the door. He couldn’t picture it, how the thought might have formed from that trailing away, Now I will do it.

  “It was the last thing we talked about,” Katherine said. “That paper. It makes it all look so stupid.”

  “Maybe she was having problems with it,” Alex said, but at once the thought felt banal. You didn’t kill yourself over an essay.

  Amanda had crossed out a word and replaced it, then crossed out the replacement and gone back to the original. Nothing that he hadn’t done. In the margin she’d written, “Check references to Joyce.”

  “We should finish,” Katherine said. Already there was an edge to her, a hardness. The night before, he had held her, but that seemed forbidden now. “So we don’t have to come back.”

  They had left the door open to air the place out. There was a knock, and three people were standing in the entrance, an older couple and a young woman, dark-haired and stocky. It took Alex a moment to recognize Amanda in them.

  The man was broad-shouldered and tall, towering over the women like the mast of a ship.

  “The super said you’d be up here.” He motioned out awkwardly. “We’ve just come to see about her things.”

  The father took a seat at the kitchen table, but the mother stood at the counter, half-turned to it as if to some chore there. She was the smallest of them, a wisp. They were like Russian dolls in not quite the right order, mother, daughter, father.

  He and Katherine had got the mess cleaned up, at least—they hadn’t had to see that.

  “You’re the ones found her, I guess,” the father said. “We thank you for it.”

  There seemed no clue here. Alex had hoped for some ogre, not this gentle giant. The mother stood, still half-turned, avoiding their gaze, clutching her hands together as if she held something fragile in them. It was too much, the weight of these people, it seemed to press down on him like a continent. And yet there was a strange decorum to them, not so much of something suppressed as of something contained.

  The sister was watching him and Katherine with a feral awareness. She had Amanda’s look but none of her aspect, clear-eyed in a way Amanda had never been.

  “She tried it once before, back home,” the father said, and it came to Alex, with sudden sureness, that the story she’d told of her dead friend the night they’d slept together had been of herself. “We never quite knew what was best for her. You can’t bear it sometimes, letting go, but you have to.”

  The blame was spreading. It was like a pool rising up around them, taking them all in, up to their ankles, up to their knees.

  The father stared at his hands.

  “I used to come in once a month or so. Not her mother, it was too hard on her, but I’d come. Last time, I said, ‘I’m worried. You look happy.’ And we laughed about it.”

  There was a freighted silence.

  “I should make tea or something,” Katherine said.

  “You won’t find any tea. Didn’t drink it. Only coffee. But I’ll take a cup of that.”

  Afterward, the visit felt like a secret shame between him and Katherine.

  “All I could think of was how I’d found her,” Katherine said. “That was what kept going through my head.”

  Alex didn’t dare to ask, but he wanted to, he wanted that image, he wasn’t sure why, even if he would only have ended up playing it over and over in his head the way Katherine was. He had a picture of her slumped by her bed, slack-faced from the pills and some last thought or horror written on her, but it was like an image from a movie, it wasn’t the thing itself. Maybe it was simply a matter of needing to gaze on the body, the way people said, of wanting the image of it seared into his brain like something he could believe in, that he couldn’t forget. But it was Katherine who went out for the funeral, not Alex. Because of the money, he told himself, even though Amanda’s father had offered to pay; because of the time; because of the guilt. Because the dead should bury the dead, whatever that meant, when he had the living to look to, and should be seeing his son. He had all his reasons lined up, but it came down more to the feral look her sister had given him, to her mother twisting her hands at the kitchen counter.

 
At Katherine’s insistence they had paid a visit to the therapist Amanda had been seeing. It was futile, Alex thought, just another way of spreading the blame, but he didn’t say this to Katherine. The therapist was an older woman in a business suit, her hair tied back so tightly it stretched her face back as if it were a mask.

  “You understand I can’t tell you anything about what we discussed in our sessions,” she said.

  “She’s dead.” The words dropped from Alex like a rock that had been dislodged from him. “What difference could it make?”

  The therapist looked down at her desk.

  “It doesn’t change things.”

  It turned out Amanda had quit seeing her weeks before. To Alex, the one time he’d asked, Amanda had said only, “She’s great, she’s really great.”

  “Shouldn’t that have been some sort of a flag, her dropping out?” Katherine said. She was better at this than Alex was, she went straight for the systemic. “I mean, otherwise, what’s the point?”

  The woman seemed to soften.

  “Look. You feel angry, you’re hurt, you feel a hundred different things. Mostly, you feel guilty. That’s what happens. But don’t be so sure there’s an answer out there. I shouldn’t say this, but the truth is the subject never came up between us. Not once. People do that, they come in here and lie all the time. Especially here. But we can’t force people to come in and we can’t force them to tell us the truth. They make their choices.”

  “It’s like you’re saying there’s no help,” Alex said.

  “Maybe I’m saying that, yes. Sometimes there’s no help.”

  It seemed too easy, this sort of blanket forgiveness.

  “If you want,” the woman said, “you can come and see me. Just to talk.”

  Alex felt tempted despite himself. For all the hardness of the woman she seemed to have shown more insight in five minutes than Dr. Klein had in five months.

  “Let me know. I’m here.”

  Katherine left town to stay with a friend in Toronto. It was already clear that Amanda’s death would only divide them—she would come by and they would lapse into silence, unable to talk about it anymore and unable to talk of anything else.

  “I’ll stay if you want,” she had said to him. “It’s just, I need to get out.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

  For a week, then another, he barely left the apartment. He canceled his classes; he called in sick to Dr. Klein. Whenever he thought he saw a way through, the old Galápagos hole would open up in front of him: back then, he had managed to turn himself around by vowing to change, to keep the matter close, like his cross to bear, and yet it hadn’t been long before the guilt itself had become a kind of prophylactic, what allowed him to think well enough of himself to fall back to the old complacence. He had buried the experience, that was all; there had been no conversion, no makeover. It would be the same with Amanda, he’d slide back and back, telling lies to himself until there was nothing left of what was true.

  He found himself wishing that he had fallen that time on Fernandina, that he had let go.

  So, how does it come to that, really? I mean, not that it hasn’t crossed my mind once or twice.

  Well, Peter, I suppose it’s sort of like someone taking a pickax to your brain. They keep picking away like that, and you’d like them to stop.

  It was only after Stephen had called and they had met to talk that the fog started to lift. It shouldn’t have mattered so much that Stephen had slept with her, but it did: it wasn’t just the sharing of the guilt but that things had gone, from what Alex could gather, more or less as they had with him. Too much booze; then regret.

  It came out that Stephen had seen her just a matter of days before Katherine found her.

  “We didn’t sleep together then, if that’s what you’re thinking.” But he’d grown hesitant. “There was something, though. She seemed different. Calmer, I guess.”

  He fell silent.

  “Her therapist said that sometimes you can’t stop these things,” Alex said.

  “Well, that lets her off the hook pretty nicely.”

  The blame seemed spread out so widely by then that it was growing thin.

  “I have my son on the weekends,” Stephen had said. It was the first time he had mentioned him to Alex. “Maybe we could catch a game or something.”

  There hadn’t been much in the way of games—a couple of outings to the Forum, where Ariel had a habit of wandering off through the stands, and then one ill-fated excursion to a monster truck competition at Olympic Stadium, where he had recoiled in terror as soon as the first engine had revved and they’d had to make a quick exit, after forking out twelve bucks a head to get in. Thereafter they stuck to playgrounds and parks, mainly, and to libraries on the bitter days. It comforted Alex to be with Stephen: because he was not the sort to keep wringing his hands over things; because of Ariel. Corn-child that he was, Ariel was still a link for Alex, a kind of expiation. Alex didn’t say anything about his own progeny—he considered it, then it seemed too much time had passed, then he was glad he had not. It was his secret. Instead he watched Ariel and thought, Perhaps I could do this.

  Now, at a distance of months, Amanda’s death already felt Peyton Place–ish and remote. So much had happened since then. There was only the chill at the back of his neck that never quite left him.

  Another girl went by, in a school uniform, and Alex’s eye followed her until he registered, with a start, that she was probably all of fifteen.

  “It was pure revenge.” They had got onto Stephen’s ex-wife. “Fathers are nowhere these days as far as the courts are concerned. So he ends up spending half his time in daycare because she works all day.”

  Alex had formed a mental profile of his ex from the various snippets of information he’d gleaned about her over the months, as a no-nonsense séparatiste who dressed like someone from the Red Brigades and went around the city scrawling slogans on buildings and defacing English signs. Stephen himself was vague about her, referring to her almost exclusively as “Ariel’s mother” and alluding darkly to her infiltrations into the corridors of power, from which Alex supposed she was part of some secret cell of intellectuals ready to seize the reins of state at the opportune moment. About their breakup Stephen was silent, except to bemoan his custody rights and his legal bills, though to judge from his recent philandering Alex suspected there had been Cause in there somewhere.

  Stephen’s spirits had fallen. He was staring at Ariel now not with a parent’s vigilant eye but as if at something not quite in his reach.

  “He’ll probably get back at us by turning into a neo-Nazi or something, like Jiri’s son. The joys of parenting.”

  Another boy had come up near where Ariel was still crouched, Haitian, from the look of him, peering into the water with feigned disregard for Ariel and yet clearly edging himself into his territory. A moment later the boy’s father, raven black and as thin as a rake, came trailing up behind him on the sidewalk.

  They were both dressed in parkas despite the warmth, bundled up like Michelin men.

  “Gee-mee! Pas près de l’eau!”

  It took Alex an instant to make out the name: Jimmy.

  “Gee-mee, viens!”

  The boy paid him no attention. He was smaller than Ariel but had the sureness of someone older, standing fearless at the edge of the curb. He picked up a rock and heaved it out into the lake in a long, high arc, then picked up another.

  “Tu veux jouer?”

  Do you want to play? He had made his approach. Alex felt Stephen tense beside him. Ariel, poking at something at the bottom of the lake with a stick, didn’t look up.

  “Hé, toi! Tu veux jouer?”

  The boy squatted onto his haunches next to Ariel. Stephen was on high alert.

  “Ariel,” he called out, with forced calm.

  It was too late. Ariel, looking transformed, suddenly turned on the boy as he settled and shoved at him with all the force of his little limbs.
Alex was horrified. He pictured the boy cracking his skull on the curb or falling into the lake and ending up waterlogged to death by that monstrous coat of his. Instead the boy, with lightning quick reflexes, shot a foot back to steady himself and swung his fist against the side of Ariel’s head. He still had the rock in it.

  Ariel was screaming.

  “Shit!” Stephen said, already in motion. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  He was next to Ariel in an instant. The blood was pouring out of Ariel’s head.

  “I’m bleeding!” he screamed. “There’s blood in my eye!”

  Stephen’s hands were already covered with it.

  “It’s okay, you’ll be okay.” He managed to pull a Kleenex out of his pocket, but it was drenched in an instant. “Shit! I need some help here, somebody!”

  But there was only Alex and then the boy and his father. The boy, at the sight of the blood, had pulled back in a kind of wonderment at what he had wrought.

  It took the father an instant to realize what had happened.

  “Qu’est-ce que t’as fait?” With each instant he seemed to grow more amazed with the magnitude of his son’s crime. “Qu’est-ce que t’as fait? T’es fou? Qu’est-ce que t’as fait?”

  “Il m’a poussér,” the boy said defiantly.

  “T’es fou?” The father picked a rock up and hurled it at the boy, who dodged it, retreating further. “Je vais te tuer! Je vais te tuer, sauvage! Je vais t’abattre!”

  Ariel was still howling. The blood wouldn’t stop.

  “We have to get him to a hospital,” Stephen said. He had the cuff of his blazer to Ariel’s head. “Rip my shirt or something, we need some kind of a bandage.”

  Before Alex could comply, the boy’s father had flung his coat down and stripped off his own shirt.

  “Take it, mister! Please take it! Quickly!” Seeing Stephen hesitate, he ripped a strip from it and held it out. “Here, take it!”

  Stephen took the proffered strip. He mopped the blood away so they could see the wound, a nice gash near the temple, but still the blood kept flowing.

  Ariel looked truly panicked.

  “You’re hurting me, Daddy! You’re hurting me!”