Towards White

by Zena Shapter

  “I also have instructions to help you, no limits, so I will clear my work for tomorrow. Do you hike?”

  “I’ve been known to stagger over the odd hill in my time.”

  “Gott.” He looks me up and down as if making his own assessment. “That will make it easier. Turn left. The coroner’s office is right there.” He passes me my suitcase and points at a door bearing a metal plaque labelled ‘Doctor Emil’. “I will find my father and meet you, when you are ready, by the front entrance. And tomorrow we will go to the river.” He goes to leave but turns back. There’s a glint of playfulness in his eyes now. “Becky, you are still worried about the man who called you on the Austurleid?”

  I nod, though Ari’s expression makes me nervous. Riley used to adopt the same expression before telling me something unpleasant. And Riley turned out to be a self-centred cheat.

  “So I wonder,” Ari says, “why would you want to hike at a glacier with a complete stranger?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Ha!”

  His laugh is loud and honest but I can’t buy into it. I’ve been here before.

  “I thought you might say that. But you are very small.” He throws his shoulders back, moves closer until he towers above me, then slaps at his abdominals. “Hit me. Go on—I will not feel a thing.”

  “What?”

  “Punch my stomach.”

  “No!”

  “You can take care of yourself, huh? You are not so tough.” His eyes linger on me as he reaches inside his coat pocket for his phone. He swipes through to his contact details then holds the phone out. “I think you will need my help more than you think.”

  He’s probably right but I don’t want to admit it. “Thanks, but I only need you to take me to the glacier.”

  “Take them, in case.” He winks and stands over me until I tap his details into my phone. Then he knocks on Doctor Emil’s door and moves back down the corridor.

  “Já!” comes a gruff voice from behind the door.

  My hand goes to the door handle, though my eyes alternate between Ari’s details in my phone and his broad outline disappearing around a corner. He gives me a final wave without looking back.

  “Já?” comes the voice again.

  I depress the handle and inch my way inside a spacious office. A smile flickers under Doctor Emil’s gruff blond beard as I enter, then he banishes it with an irritated mumble while shuffling papers around his antique pine desk. Once organised, he rises from behind his desk, his burly frame filling the room like a Viking at a tea party.

  “Miss Dales,” he says, moving towards an adjoining door, “your brother is through here. I assume you want to see him first? They usually do.”

  I take a deep breath and follow him through the door into a large room housing various computers and laptops. I pause in the doorway, but not because my world has come crashing down on me—I’m confused.

  Sensing my hesitation, Doctor Emil turns to check on me. “Did you expect to see a body?”

  Chapter 5

  Doctor Emil stares at me as if the reason we’re standing in a windowless room full of high-tech computers, and not a morgue, is obvious. But I don’t understand.

  “Where is he?” I shrug. “Where’s this cadaver I’m supposed to be seeing?”

  “We don’t have refrigeration facilities here at the Litrúm-Hús. He’s at the hospital.” Doctor Emil heads towards a computer.

  “Okay then, let’s go.”

  “Most people prefer to wait until the kistulagning, er, funeral. Please, sit.” He’s already leaning over a keyboard, searching for a computer file. “I can show you here.” Almost instantaneously, a photographic image appears onscreen. Doctor Emil straightens and waits for me to edge closer.

  From where I’m standing, I can already see the face of someone sleeping, someone with short blond hair. It’s not him. It can’t be. As I near the screen though, the portal I dreaded only minutes before closes fast behind me. I am already in that other world.

  Oh god.

  It’s him.

  I sink into a chair. Mark is lying on a metallic trolley, his blond hair swept to one side, his mouth parted as if in thought. The full eyelashes he inherited from our mother are shut. My eyes drop to the floor. My hopes lie smashed there, a pulpy mess.

  It can’t be you. Please.

  I take a long, slow breath and try clinging onto my hope. “I think I’d prefer to see him in the hospital.” I mutter. It would be impossible to argue against flesh. You can do anything with images these days.

  Doctor Emil checks his watch. “The morgue is closed now. You can see him in the morning, if you wish.”

  “I do.”

  “Can I recommend, though, that you complete the identification process here? The morgue is not a nice place to linger, and I can assure you this photograph is authentic.”

  “You’ve seen my brother?”

  “I have seen him, yes.”

  I take another long breath. Tears well behind my eyes. I find the insides of my cheek and chew. If I let myself think Mark is dead, if I hear those words in my mind, I’ll be blubbering within seconds. I know now he is. I also know ignoring that fact will enable me to stay in control. I blink back the drops and try to remember what questions to ask.

  Nothing comes.

  Instead, looking at my brother’s motionless face, I only think of all the things he’ll never do again. He’ll never breathe again. He’ll never eat again. I want to see him smile and laugh. But he never will.

  Oh god.

  I want this image to be manipulated. I want someone to be lying to me. But the likelihood of that is getting slimmer and slimmer. I am face-to-face with the town coroner. He trained at Oxford and speaks perfect English. He’s seen this body, examined this body, the same body as the one on the screen in front of me: Mark. Dead. The morgue is closed. I can see him for myself in the morning.

  “Miss Dales,” Doctor Emil says, his tone softer, “is this your brother?”

  “Yes.” I croak, still scanning the image for some proof that it might not be. Anything, there must be something. I don’t care what it is; just let there be a reason this isn’t Mark.

  I peer closer. His face seems out of proportion somehow. “Does the computer affect the image at all? Something isn’t… Something’s different.” Something like me hoping against all odds.

  “You thought he would look paler, já? Our software adds some colour. It makes them look…like they did before.” He offers me an uncomfortable smile.

  “Before? You saw my brother before he died?”

  He died, oh god, he died. Don’t think about it. Don’t!

  “Nei. Now, wait one minute please.” He selects the computer’s VoIP program to call someone. “I will tell Gunnar to prepare your brother’s casket and paperwork for travel. You’ll be leaving tomorrow, or Friday?” He looks to me for an answer.

  “Oh, I’m not sure yet. After the weekend probably.”

  He glares at his screen, unmoving apart from a clenching in his jaw, then he switches programs and types a message instead. Written in Icelandic, I can’t understand it. After clicking the ‘send’ button, he rises and motions towards his office. “Staying to see some of our beautiful countryside?” He avoids eye contact and doesn’t sound particularly interested in my reply. “Not really the best time for it. Don’t you think you should take your brother straight home to your parents?”

  “I will,” I say, thrown by his judgmental comments. “I have some loose ends to tie up first.” Like how my brother died.

  I glance at the ceiling, trying to focus my thoughts. On the flight over, I prepared a list of questions so I wouldn’t forget anything once here. As I follow Doctor Emil into his office, I pull out my phone. Seeing those questions listed out will help me shift into lawyer mode. I’ll hav
e time to process everything else later. For now I need to gather facts. Given how unwelcome I am in Höfkállur, it’s clear now that someone somewhere has been negligent of something to do with my brother—it’s the only explanation for why it’s relevant I’m a lawyer. Time to find out who’s to blame, and for what.

  “Actually, Doctor Emil, before I go, I’d like to ask you a few questions about my brother’s, um, accident, if that’s alright?” I swallow back my tears and close the computer room door behind me.

  “Let me guess,” Doctor Emil begins, shuffling round to his side of the desk. “You want to know why your brother’s nose is swollen?”

  “Right,” I say, surprised he’s anticipated my chief concern: Mark’s face.

  “Mark was found in the Skepnasá River, a glacial river full of boulders and rocks. It is our opinion that his nose hit a boulder.”

  I scan down my list of questions. “And how did he die, exactly? Did he fall onto a boulder then hit the water, or did he drown first?”

  “There was sufficient water in his lungs to suggest he drowned.”

  “The injury to his nose then, to be clear, that occurred in the water?”

  “The bruising suggests that, yes.”

  “I understand a number of people have died in the Skepnasá River? Did their bodies look similar to my brother’s?”

  Doctor Emil scratches his beard with a huge hairy hand. “Miss Dales, I have been in this business a long time, probably since before you were born. Usually when relatives question our findings it is because they don’t believe them.” He tilts his phone towards him, checks its display.

  “It’s not that.” My instincts tell me to flash him a smile. “My parents will want to know how Mark fell in, exactly. I know a man of your position must be extremely busy, still I was hoping your expertise might throw some light on the issue. It would help them, and me.”

  “I didn’t realise ‘how he fell in’ was an issue.” Doctor Emil shifts in his seat. “He simply fell. That’s what I understand.”

  I sit silent for a moment. Some people hate conversational silences, they jump in to fill the uncomfortable void with whatever’s on their mind. On this occasion, it’s a useful trap.

  “Miss Dales,” he leans forward to interconnect his fingers on the desk, “my staff are highly competent in their work. Our annual performance reviews are always outstanding. We have never had an autopsy report questioned.”

  “There’s always a first time.” I never mentioned any autopsy report. “Can I see Mark’s autopsy report please?”

  “It’s in Icelandic.”

  “But you have Word2Word?”

  Pursing his lips, Doctor Emil turns to his desktop computer. Moments later, he angles his screen towards me. Bright green comment boxes down the report’s right-hand side contain its English translations.

  This 26-year-old white male, Mark Dales, was found dead at the Skepnasá River. The main cause of death is asphyxia due to drowning. The manner of death is accident…

  I scan past the photographs Ari must have taken of Mark’s body washed up against a riverside boulder, and skim over the report’s more complex terminology, understanding enough of the basics to get the gist. The toxicology tests show Mark’s blood and urine contained no signs of alcohol, drugs, illnesses or infections. The anatomic summary is comprehensive too; so comprehensive in fact, the awful details of my brother’s death start to become very real to me. Too real.

  I stop reading, stare at the document instead and concentrate on not crying. I have more questions to ask but first have to pull myself together. That’s never going to happen while I’m reading about Mark being cut open and weighed. I’ll have to read the rest later. I clear my throat to say so, but before I can ask Doctor Emil to print the report, a gush of water surges through my head like a tidal wave. It heats my forehead like sunstroke and is identical in every way to the watery sounds I heard earlier beside the Viking sculpture, only this time there’s little point in looking behind me. Only Doctor Emil and I are in the room.

  A frosty shudder ripples down my spine. I look behind me anyway. There’s no sink in the room, no pipes or water feature, nothing even containing water. Am I going into shock?

  Finish reading, says a voice.

  I look at Doctor Emil. He’s staring at me as if awaiting an answer to a question.

  “Sorry, did you say something?” I ask.

  “Have you finished reading?”

  “Um, no. Can you print it out for me?”

  “You know,” Doctor Emil says, folding his arms across his thick chest, “this is good for me. I forget what it’s like to meet someone upset about their loss.”

  “The people you meet are usually happy?”

  He pauses to study me, eyes twinkling over cheeks ruddy and weathered. He waggles a finger at me. “I think I know the real problem here, Miss Dales. You don’t follow the Heimspeki, do you?”

  “You’re going to tell me I should, right?”

  “Can you think of a good reason to not? What do you know about our discoveries?”

  “Quite a lot actually.”

  “Humour me. How did the Heimspeki come about?”

  It’s so simple a question it’s almost insulting. “How did the Heimspeki come about?” I repress the urge to answer with a list of my credentials. Doesn’t he know what I do for a living, that I’m a professional like him? Keep a lid on things, I remind myself before answering. “It came about because your scientists wanted to know where the electrical energy in our brains went after we died. They conducted experiments and discovered that when our brains send messages into our bodies, and vice versa, excess ions diffuse out from our central nervous systems, then continue diffusing through our bodies until they reach the surface of our skin, where they are emitted into the atmosphere.”

  “Gott.” He nods in approval, then leans to rest his head against a fist and relaxes into his chair a little, as if relieved to find himself conversing with an equal. “And would you say that we emit those ions randomly, like when we secrete water and salt in our sweat, or when our skin breathes out random oxygen and nitrogen atoms?”

  “No.” I say, feeling the urge to squirm under his gaze. “Water, salt, oxygen and nitrogen don’t have electrical charges. Ions, on the other hand, have positive or negative charges that cause them to stay grouped once emitted.”

  “Which means the ions we emit retain whatever patterns they previously assumed in our brains, prior to being transmitted?”

  “From what I’ve read, yes. Why?”

  “Because,” he turns to search on his computer for something, “if these ions carry such grouped patterns of consciousness with them when they leave our bodies on a daily basis—which I personally believe accounts for memory loss,” he winks at me, “surely the entirety of our consciousness must leave our bodies when our brains’ electrical energy also leaves us after we die?”

  “I appreciate the logic of that—now and when it was first proffered by your scientific community, but—”

  “But nothing.” He clicks through some bookmarked pages on the Internet. “You remember the American neurologists who studied Buddhist monks a few years back, to determine the affects of meditation on the brain?”

  The experiment sounds familiar but I can’t recall the details. I shake my head.

  He gestures towards his computer screen and leans back in his chair so I can see the webpage he’s selected. It shows various coloured CT scans depicting cross-sections of the brain.

  “Most people’s minds are overwhelmed by thoughts and emotions they cannot control,” he says, pointing to the scans. “On brain-scanning machines this appears as yellow, red and orange activity. It glows, like the embers of a fire. The more negative those thoughts and emotions, the harsher those colours burn. But,” he points at the next set of CT scans, where the previous fiery colours
have been replaced by large blue ovals, “when these particular monks were asked to meditate, the fire in their brains cooled into soft blue pearls of energy, which settled in those regions of the brain associated with positive thoughts and emotions. Such is the power of positivity. Now,” he adds quickly, like he’s afraid I’ll interrupt, “did you know that the brains of those who have meditated regularly for years differ in shape from the rest of ours?”

  “They mutate?”

  “Nei. Their brains grow in the regions associated with positive thought and emotion, like a body-builder’s muscles grow because they train. So,” he smirks to add emphasis to his next statement, “if this is any indicator of how powerful positivity can be while we’re alive, think how powerful it could be when no longer constrained by the shell of our physical bodies? Think how powerful your brother’s energy is right now and how powerful you could make yours if you followed the Heimspeki.”

  If anyone’s brain energy were to be powerful after death, it would be Mark’s. “Still, we can never really know what happens after death, for sure, until we find a way to make that journey and come back. The Heimspeki is just another theory, unless you’ve conducted any near-death experiments?”

  Doctor Emil’s expression fades. Instead of answering he scratches at his beard.

  He isn’t denying it?

  As he struggles to respond, an unpleasant thought occurs to me and I shift in my seat. Did they experiment on Mark?

  The brain scans on Doctor Emil’s computer glow on my skin as I lean towards him. “Have you conducted any NDEs, Doctor Emil?”

  “I, wait…” He goes to the door, pulls it ajar, checks up and down the corridor, then closes it and shuffles back to his desk. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone until our alliances were announced,” he whispers as he sits. “Director Úlfar insists on keeping all negotiations confidential, for now. But,” he runs a finger across the edge of his desk then taps it decisively, “you’ve asked me directly so I cannot lie—that would be a negative thing to do. So yes,” he leans closer like I’m now his co-conspirator, “observing a death through the Sannlitró-Völva is now our highest priority.”