Edwin's Reflection: A Novel

by Ray Deeg

  “No,” Tom said abruptly. “That’s OK. I just realized I can get copies of the photos from their grandmother’s Myspace page.” Tom began walking backward, with Gwen in tow. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that earlier. Thank you so much for your help, though.” Tom and Gwen smiled at the girl as they walked away.

  “Sure,” the girl replied and then went back to her phone.

  Feeling more confident now that they had confirmed that there were no wandering night guards, Tom and Gwen moved through the museum, quietly looking for the perfect spot. As they strolled, a small group of excited children moved past them, giggling and admiring a new diorama. Gwen turned her head to follow them as they passed. As they scanned the pack of lions depicted inside, Gwen watched their small eyes widen. She touched Tom’s arm, alerting him to watch too. Although the pride of five sat completely motionless, separated from onlookers by a thick pane of glass, the sight evoked a sense of impending danger. The grisly scene positioned the lions around a half-eaten gazelle. The blood, the flesh, and the red stains covering their muzzles were reminiscent of a horror show. The children, now quieter, weren’t scared by what they were seeing, but clearly these new minds were processing a threatening idea. Lions eat other animals. One of the children broke free and hid herself behind the trunk of a plastic redwood tree. When her friends moved closer, she pounced on them, baring her teeth with a snarl. The other children laughed.

  “Ready for some hide-and-seek?” Gwen asked.

  “One of my favorites,” he answered. “Then and now.”

  “I was just thinking of a certain type of electrifying feeling. It’s the feeling that happens when you’re hiding and you think you might be found. It’s when you’re imagining what will happen when you are. That anticipation that builds in the mind is a very common experience for a child and echoes our primal mind. It explains a lot about our core behavior too. But we all keep playing long after we stop being children. You’re pretty clever, Tom. You must have been great at hide-and-seek.”

  “I’ve always been a little sneaky, for sure,” Tom replied with a devilish smile. “What do you mean, we all keep playing?”

  “Even as children, we understand how to spot nooks and crannies in order to conceal ourselves. Concealment, camouflage—those are primal. We can spot places to take refuge from our pursuers. Sneaky is built in; sneaky comes naturally. And sitting in that dark, quiet hiding place, we learn to be completely still. In case you don’t remember, it required total concentration to be still.”

  “I remember,” Tom replied, admiring the familiar blue whale suspended overhead.

  “And donning that cloak of silence, together with the heightened sense of awareness, somehow woke up our minds in a way we didn’t anticipate. You might even remember becoming completely present in all that stillness, realizing that elevated state just by listening. And there we were, alone in our hiding places, in the silence with only our thoughts and that ringing in our ears. And we realized how excited we were, but also how silly the game was. To hide in the darkness for no reason—we didn’t have anything better to do. But it was instinctual, and we hadn’t had many chances in our lives to feel that yet. Remember what it was like, waiting to be found? All alone with ourselves, we also might have realized what feeble-minded creatures we are; how flawed in every sense. Suddenly, in that dark place, you might even become ashamed of yourself. That feeling in the back of your nose welled up, and you wondered if you might cry. Somehow that silent ringing in our ears became louder, giving rise to a self-deprecating guilt about our life, about what we are, about where we come from—an acknowledgment that there is so much we don’t understand. And as we listened to our seekers approaching, we might not have realized it, but a primal fear was setting in—the freeze response.” Gwen suddenly grabbed on to Tom’s arm, causing a toothy grin from ear to ear. “The freeze response is a real mechanism built into each of us. It can be triggered either before or after the fight-or-flight response.”

  “Are we still talking about kids playing hide-and-seek?” Tom asked.

  “Anyone playing hide-and-seek,” she replied. “All of us who sit completely still in our hiding place, scared to death and about to cry and hating ourselves for being stuck. And the freeze response causes our blood pressure to drop. Now we’re frozen in a hell of our own creation, loathing ourselves, terribly excited but unable to move. When we’re finally discovered by our seeker, we’re almost overjoyed with relief. They’ve freed us, and we can finally step out of the darkness. That cruel voice is more easily drowned out when we step back into our noisy lives. And so we learn to fear the silence and seek the noise because it’s so distractingly peaceful.”

  “You just destroyed my childhood,” Tom said.

  “Those feelings are a very common childhood experience. And if you’re honest with yourself, you just understood another small truth. Our built-in responses can be embarrassing, and some people get confused—even angry—when shown something about themselves they didn’t know. They confuse seeing more with destroying the self. All our illusions become memories, and the memories become opinions, accretive to the ego and reinforcing a version of reality. When you show people how easily they’ve been fooled, anger and defensiveness are only natural. The fact is, there is only one healthy attitude a reasonable person can take; that’s to simply accept the continual emergence of new and better truths with the understanding that any firmly held beliefs should be overwritten by the discovery of new evidence. But that’s easier said than done.”

  “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool,” Tom said.

  “Shakespeare understood,” Gwen replied.

  They walked to the corner of the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians and spotted a long wooden canoe partially covered with an animal skin displayed against the main wall. They stood admiring a mural until a group of tourists wearing audiphones disappeared around the corner. Then, after another look around, Gwen and Tom leaped into the canoe and positioned themselves toward the rear in order to conceal themselves under the skin cover.

  “What if someone calls us?” Gwen asked.

  “Good point,” Tom replied. “We don’t want the canoe ringing.” He turned his phone to vibrate and then settled in for what could be a long night.

  “You know, Tesla was the first to really understand, to experiment with transmitting and receiving radio waves,” Tom whispered. “Can you imagine, back then, realizing that invisible waves could travel through the air, carrying information that could be received by someone else? At the time, it must have been mind-boggling.”

  Gwen nodded her approval. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  “Arthur C. Clark,” Tom replied. “Tesla understood that magic, the stuff in between. So did Akeley and Loomis. To understand what all this is, where it came from and what binds it together.” Tom closed his fist. “That’s what they devoted their lives to. They were explorers. They understood that to measure the stuff out there is to measure and understand ourselves. Another Clarkism just came to mind: the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them, into the impossible. He was spot-on about that, too. Whatever this machine does, it will seem like magic to us.”

  A voice crackled over the PA system. “The museum is now closed. Thank you for visiting, and we hope to see you again soon.”

  Tom checked his watch. “It’s not that I want to understand this machine because of its economic value, although I’m sure the technology is worth a lot. I’ve had this sense of déjà vu since visiting New Hope. It feels like I’m close to finding a piece that’s been missing from the puzzle of my life. It’s a piece that looks like the others—same colors and theme, same smells—but it’s been misplaced, and the puzzle won’t be right without it.”

  Tom thought fleetingly that Gwen might also be one of those missing pieces, but it was too early to say something like that, he reasoned. He’d s
care her away. And surely this wooden canoe wasn’t the right place to make such a dedication. She might feel trapped—literally—and have nowhere to run.

  “Why did we stop dating in college?” Tom asked.

  “Hmm…well, if memory serves, we were on the phone, and you said something that made me angry.”

  Tom looked around the canoe, trying to remember. “I know I was young and dumb, but please tell me what I said.”

  Gwen pushed her lips together. “You said our love was immoral.”

  Tom thought on her words but began shaking his head. “No, I said our love was immortal, Gwen. Immortal.”

  Gwen frowned, looking at him with suspicion.

  “Please tell me you didn’t stop talking to me because I didn’t pronounce the T strongly enough.”

  “Well, I’ll never know,” she replied. “But it’s never too late to love.” Her smile lit up that dark canoe, and Tom knew he was smitten.

  “I’m sorry about getting you involved in this mess, and you have my word that…”

  Gwen held up her hand. “Tom, a man’s been murdered, my apartment’s been ransacked by the FBI, my reputation is at risk, and I’m on the run from authorities. A fanatical group of East Indian goons is after us, but for some odd reason, I’ve decided to stay close to you. Now I’m a stowaway in an uncomfortable canoe that smells like a nest of wet badgers and stale Cheetos.” Tom curled his lip as Gwen continued. “Nevertheless, this is one of the best times I’ve ever had.”

  Gwen’s words were a gift. He thought about when he’d first seen her, in that record store. He searched her eyes in the canoe’s darkness, and those feelings came flooding back, fueling his imagination and speeding his heart rate.

  Their moment was shattered by a beeping tone and the garbled static of a walkie-talkie, accompanied by footsteps approaching fast. The two stowaways froze. “Hide-and-seek with criminal charges,” Tom whispered. Gwen’s eyes grew wider as the footsteps moved closer, but after a moment it became obvious the guard was passing by.

  Tom realized Gwen was spot-on. It does smell like a nest of wet badgers and stale Cheetos in here. When the coast was clear, the tiny boat’s only passengers shared fond memories, chatting in whispers as they waited for the museum to settle down for the night. They rambled like teens at a slumber party, exchanging secrets and sharing laughter. Even so, in the back of Tom’s mind, one question lingered: Is the world ready to peel back the curtain?

  CHAPTER 32

  AFTER SURVEYING THE area outside, Tom and Gwen emerged from the canoe. The great hall was darker, bathed in a faint blue light. They moved stealthily through the immensity of the museum toward their target. After navigating the main hallway, they spied the entrance to the African Mammal Hall. Every feeling was exaggerated by the grandness of this place, and the stillness was disorienting. As they moved forward, Akeley’s exhibit came into view. It was the first diorama in a row of seven. Simply titled Gorilla, this particular diorama summed up the man’s life work. It was his masterpiece, his magnum opus. Akeley’s diorama was the first of its kind in the world, set in the very location where he would come to be buried. Akeley, who had researched and collected specimens to create his now-famous mountain gorilla diorama, was among the first to accurately document mountain gorillas as intelligent and social animals that, even then, were under grave threat from overhunting.

  The diorama depicts four great mountain gorillas in the Mikeno-Karisimbi forest of the Congo. The four lifelike specimens are shown congregating in a lush patch of greenery partially surrounded by protective trees and vines. The background mural details the great Lake Kivu and erupting volcanoes Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo, which were in fact erupting in 1926, when the scene is set. The exhibit sits behind a thick, rectangular pane of glass.

  “It’s just amazing, but how do we get inside this thing?” Tom asked.

  “The staff has to get in there somehow,” Gwen replied. She scanned the inside of the diorama. “There,” she said, pointing to the background painting near the erupting volcano.

  When Tom squinted his eyes just right, he could make out the subtle outline. It appeared to be a small door on the inside wall. They moved toward the end of the row of dioramas until they came to a nondescript door with a sign overhead reading Staff Only. Tom tried it. Locked.

  Tom recalled his youth and his strong dislike for rules—for any limitations placed on him, for that matter. He removed a shiny credit card from his wallet, waving it around as if about to perform a magic trick for a crowd. Gwen watched him perform with raised eyebrows. He slid the card between the door and doorjamb, just above the latch. Watching Tom play cat burglar amused Gwen, and he couldn’t help but giggle when he noticed her smirking. “You don’t by chance have the key, do you?” he asked playfully.

  Gwen was smiling like the Mona Lisa. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t want to miss this performance,” she replied.

  Picturing the latch in his mind, Tom gripped the doorknob and turned it counterclockwise as far as possible. He pushed the card down into the cleft at a forty-five degree angle in hopes of catching the slanted edge of the latch. As he pushed the card down, it seemed to get stuck but suddenly slipped down farther. And without any noise at all, the door came ajar. Gwen nodded her approval. Tom presented his card like a hand model and spoke like a radio announcer. “Visa, getting you in anywhere you want to be.”

  They entered the small staff corridor and locked the door behind them. As they moved down the length of the seven dioramas, eerie blue nightlights lit their path. Small doors on the left side were marked with each diorama’s name. After passing six doors, they came to one marked Gorilla. As they entered Akeley’s exhibit, Tom retrieved Loomis’s journal and flipped through the pages.

  Gwen’s eyes moved over each of the four gorillas and then back to Tom. “There isn’t much to figure out,” she surmised. “The coil is inside the leg of one of these Gorillas. What a great hiding place; no one would think twice. I suppose there’s a touch of sarcasm in that, too.”

  “Which one?” Tom said, wincing at the thought of slicing into any of these irreplaceable relics. This is Akeley’s memorial, his legacy.

  “We can’t know which one,” Gwen said softly. “We’ll be as gentle as possible.” She knelt down beside Tom, who was examining the first gorilla. It was positioned sitting down, nearly kneeling. Its back legs were mounted on a small wooden platform mostly hidden under the lush plastic foliage. Gwen pushed the faux greenery aside and reached into her pocket. She retrieved a small pocketknife.

  “You had a pocketknife?” Tom said. “Why didn’t you tell me that before I unlocked the door with my credit card?”

  “I didn’t want you to cut yourself,” she replied sweetly.

  He held his phone over the gorilla’s leg to illuminate the space thinking Gwen’s sarcasm was truly superb. Gwen was about to push the blade into the Gorilla’s leg when he interrupted. “Wait a minute.”

  “Now what?”

  “This one is new.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look at the mount. This is twenty, thirty years old at best.” Tom moved to the gorilla on the other side of the exhibit, which was also positioned sitting down. “Same thing over here.”

  Gwen looked toward the back of the exhibit and the largest gorilla. It was standing upright and beating its chest. And although the creature had departed this place nearly a century before, it appeared completely alive. The light from Tom’s phone reflected in the beast’s marble eyes. The glare seemed like a warning. Keep your distance. Tom and Gwen inched toward the creature. As they moved closer, they were forcibly struck by the gorilla’s presence and natural grandeur; they could feel its manitou still emanating after all these years. This was Carl Akeley’s work, and it was spectacular.

  As they inched closer to the gorilla, an uncomfortable feeling crept down Tom’s spine. He felt as though he were being watched. Instinctively, he turned his head toward the front of the exhibit, but saw only bla
ck glass. He turned his phone toward the glass and to his horror saw the faces of three Indian men staring back at him from the other side. “Gwen!” Tom shouted.

  Gwen turned and immediately screamed. Esha smiled and elbowed Ashok, and the three men glared through the glass like hungry animals. The men scowled wantonly and examined the glass for a way inside. Ashok, the largest of them, kicked at the glass, but after a third attempt, it became obvious that it was far too thick to be broken. Esha gestured down the hallway, and all three men disappeared.

  “Quick—open the leg!” Tom said.

  “Which one?”

  “Try the right.”

  Gwen made an incision in the gorilla’s leg and opened the flap. She searched below the knee and found nothing, but moved her hand above the knee and felt a heavy object inside a cloth. She jiggled it back and forth several times, maneuvering it down the leg and out through the incision. She was holding something wrapped in a dark-red cloth bag. She opened the bag and removed an intricate metal gizmo that shone like a Christmas ornament. It was a strange, alien-looking thing. “Beautiful,” she said out loud.

  “We can admire it later. Let’s get out of here,” Tom said as he pulled Gwen up and out of the diorama.

  “They’ll be coming that way,” Gwen said, pointing up the hallway.

  “I know,” Tom whispered, pulling her gently.

  The three men could already be heard at the far end of the hall, wiggling the door handle. As Tom and Gwen approached the door where they’d entered, they heard a powerful kick from the other side. Gwen stared into Tom’s eyes with a desperation that made his stomach sink. Another hard blow rang out, along with the crunch of wood beginning to buckle. Tom quietly opened the door to the first diorama in the row. He pulled Gwen inside and closed the door behind them. The next blow to the staff door was followed by the crunch of breaking wood as the door smashed violently into the corridor wall. Gwen and Tom were frozen, hardly breathing.