Silent earth.
She looked up. A silver dot was traversing the blue sky, probably an airliner out of L.A. International. But Susan didn’t want to think about airliners, which suggested travel, which suggested that this sunny interlude was not any kind of solution … that pretty soon she ought to buy a return ticket, get herself on one of those planes—
—cross that border—
Startled, she looked back at the grave.
It was her father’s voice. Her own thought, of course; but it was unmistakably his resonant, deep, and familiar voice. Drawn up, she thought, not from the grave but from the well of memory. Maybe this is why we invent people, Susan thought: because we cannot bear the loss of them.
She touched the mica-flecked granite headstone.
Daddy? Should I go back there? Is that what I should do?
But the answer was obvious.
That would be the wise thing, Susan.
Funny way to hold a conversation. But then, she thought, it’s always hard, when the silence has been so long and so awkward.
32
Amelie decided to visit Roch in the hospital: just once, because she had to.
It was safe; she was safe from him there. Anyway, she thought, the whole world is pretty much safe from Roch, now and forever.
He looked up sullenly from the bed. Roch had lost a lot of weight; his singed hair had been cropped short. He looked like a convict, Amelie thought … which she guessed he was, or at least potentially. She hadn’t pressed charges, but the holding company that owned the warehouse was pretty pissed off. (Even though their insurance must have paid them off in full—the fire must have been like hitting a Vegas jackpot, considering the condition of the property.)
But Roch didn’t care. He just looked up at her with his hollow eyes. And Amelie felt perversely guilty for coming here at all … she was still that vulnerable to his anger.
“I’m going away,” she said.
He didn’t answer. Silence was one of the few weapons he had left.
She went on, “I know this is a shitty time and all, considering what happened, but I don’t think I owe you anything anymore. I guess that’s pretty obvious. I mean, it’s too bad what happened, but it isn’t my fault.”
“I almost killed you,” he said. The words were slurred with medication, but totally sincere. She felt his anger simmering inside him. He had been insulted in a way he could barely comprehend. The last insult, Amelie thought, if only he would let it be. “I should have,” he added.
Well, maybe she had made a mistake, coming here. But it was important, not just for Roch’s sake but for Amelie’s: important to talk to his doctors … important to see him; important to prove to herself that she need never be afraid of him again. The doctors called it “a spinal cord injury sustained during his fall,” but Amelie knew it was really more than that. It was her protection. It was a guarantee that Roch would never be able to hurt her again.
Still—she felt sorry for him, lying broken in this hospital bed.
It should not have been possible, this surge of pity.
Mysterious.
She had talked to John about Roch, not long before all this happened. John had encountered Roch only that one time, in her apartment, but John had guessed a few things about him. He asked, “Was your mother an alcoholic?” and Amelie said, “Well—you could say that. She drank pretty heavy sometimes.”
“Before Roch was born? When she was pregnant?”
“Probably. I think so. Why?”
He told her, “There’s a condition called ‘fetal alcohol syndrome.’ Sometimes it causes retardation. Sometimes it has other effects, more subtle.”
“You think Roch has that?”
“It’s possible. All that unfocused anger. The alcohol interferes with fetal development, particularly the development of the brain. It has a sort of scattering effect on the neurons. The glial cells—”
Amelie waved her hand. “Maybe Roch has that. I don’t know. Does it matter? Lots of people have lots of problems. When it comes down to it, what matters is what you do—right? Not what you are.”
And John had smiled a strange, distant smile and nodded his head slowly. “Yes, Amelie. That’s what matters.”
She told Roch goodbye now, and left the room.
* * *
Amelie had stayed on at the big house north of the city. Kyriakides had said it was okay. But enough, she thought, was enough. John was back from the hospital now. And Benjamin—
Benjamin was dead.
Well, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. John wasn’t Benjamin anymore; but he wasn’t exactly John, either. Privately, Amelie figured he was something that John and Benjamin had both needed to become. Maybe something they had been all along. Something more basic, more raw, more true.
Maybe what she had loved about Benjamin was this becoming. Benjamin had been half finished and wholly innocent. Benjamin was a coming-to-life, an event And that was finished. And so her part of it was finished.
Almost finished.
She packed two Tourister suitcases. She could come back for her other stuff later, when she found a place. Her little Sanyo stereo … Kyriakides could keep it, or Susan, or John. She didn’t care.
On her way out, she stopped off at the big study where Dr. Kyriakides was scribbling away in some kind of notebook, his glasses practically toppling off the end of his nose. She stood in the doorway until he noticed her.
He spotted the suitcases. “You’re leaving?”
She nodded.
“Do you have a place to go?”
“I can rent a room until I find an apartment. Maybe I can get my old job back.”
“I want you to know—you’re free to room here as long as you like.”
“I think it would be better to get away.”
Kyriakides frowned … Something he wants to say, Amelie thought … then he cleared his throat.
She waited.
He said, “Amelie … I know about the pregnancy.”
“Christ!” She was appalled. “Who told you that? It was Collingwood, right? The clinic doctor told Collingwood and Collingwood told you. Jesus!
So much for fucking privacy!”
“This is an unusual situation,” Kyriakides said. “I assume it’s John’s child?”
Amelie considered walking out. She didn’t owe Kyriakides anything. He hadn’t earned this conversation.
Some impulse restrained her. “Benjamin’s child,” she said. An important distinction. “You bet it is.”
“Calm down. I didn’t engineer this invasion of your privacy for the sake of voyeurism. The point is, I want to help.”
“Help?”
“Help the child. I can arrange for money, a place for you to stay—”
“I don’t want to be a fucking research project!”
“I don’t want you to be. It’s just that I feel like a grandfather to this child. I’ve thought about it a lot. About the past, the present. I think now I might not have given John everything he deserved. I would like a chance to do better. Even in a small way. This is—” He spread his hands on the desk. “This is important to me.”
He means it, Amelie thought. The offer was absolutely sincere. She couldn’t say exactly why it bothered her so much. Still—“I appreciate it,” she said. “But we’ll be fine.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I’m not totally alone. I have friends. If I need help, I’ll get in touch.” With John, she thought privately, or whatever John was now. He had earned that connection. Kyriakides had not.
“You don’t understand what I’m offering.”
The tone was imperious. She frowned. “Maybe I don’t.”
“You wouldn’t have to work. No more tawdry little restaurant jobs. No more cold-water apartments. All that would be over. And there’s nothing I want in exchange. No deal to make. Nothing to give up. Just say yes.”
She picked up her luggage. “Thank you anyway.”
She turned to leave.
/>
His voice boomed after her: “What can you give to that child? You have nothing! My God! One more slutty welfare mother with one more worthless infant-is that what you want to be?”
“I’m not good enough for you?” She turned to face him. “You want me to be something better. You want this baby to be something better. But you don’t even know what that word means. You talk about people like they’re bugs, insects. You say you hate them because they’re cruel and stupid, but you can take a life and twist it all out of shape—how are you different?”
“I’ve seen more cruelty than you have. Cruelty and destructive stupidity. God help us, is it wrong to want to change that?”
They were talking about John now, Amelie realized, not the baby. “Susan told me what happened with Marga. You used her and you bought her off. She was a lump of clay, right? A tool. ‘One more slutty welfare mother.’ But you can’t make a better human being out of that-that hate. I just don’t think you can.”
His face was brick red. “Obviously you don’t understand anything.”
“I do,” Amelie said. “I understand that’s what you wanted John to be. A better human being. But that’s not what happened. Not better. A broken human being.”
It struck home. Kyriakides sat down heavily. For a moment he seemed to struggle for breath.
“I know,” he said at last. “You’re right. That’s what he is now—broken.”
“No,” Amelie said. “That’s what he was before.” She picked up her bags. “Now, he’s better.”
* * *
She waited for a southbound bus at the foot of the driveway. The snow had mostly gone and the crocuses were coming up. It was a cold day but bright; there was a little breeze blowing. Kind of nice, Amelie thought. Not a bad day at all.
A bus pulled up to the curb, sighing diesel fumes. She climbed inside, paid her fare, stowed her Touristers under the seat. The bus eased away and began to pick up speed.
She resisted the urge to look back. Time to look ahead, she thought. A clean horizon and this ribbon of road. Her future was up there somewhere, waiting to be invented; her baby was waiting to be born.
A new life, she thought, but not starting over as if the past had never happened. She would carry it with her:all the memories. Not just Benjamin but Roch, too. These things are what I am. It was possible to make a better life—for herself, for this baby—but not out of shame. Not out of hating what had happened. You can’t do that she had told Kyriakides so, and she believed it.
New life inside her. Anything was possible.
You’ll be my baby, she thought. Amelie’s baby. And that’s not such a terrible thing to be.
She smiled to herself, settled back into the seat, turned to the window. Outside, everywhere along the broad margin of the road, the snow was melting in the sun.
33
Susan called from California when her ticket was confirmed.
“He’s not John,” Dr. Kyriakides told her. “Be prepared for that. But he’s not Benjamin, either. He’s awake and functional and I’m certain he’ll eventually be able to hold a job, to lead a normal life. But he isn’t the person we knew.”
He isn’t the person you created, Susan thought. And she wondered if that wasn’t John’s ultimate act of revenge, a score that had finally been evened.
She said, “I’m prepared.”
“His memory is erratic, but I think he’ll know you.”
“That’s good,” Susan said.
* * *
She took a cab from Pearson Airport Dr. Kyriakides met her at the door of the house.
Such an ordinary house, Susan thought.
“I told him you were coming. He’s looking forward to it.”
“Thank you,” Susan said, and moved toward the stairs.
“One more thing,” Kyriakides said. “John was cleaning up his desk today. He found this. He asked me to give it to you.”
It was a five-inch Dysan floppy disk in a paper sleeve. It had her name written on it—“FOR SUSAN” in block capitals.
“It’s from before,” Kyriakides said.
* * *
She knocked gently on the door of his room and pushed inside.
John was asleep.
He had pulled a chair up to the window—watching the spring clouds, Susan guessed—and he had fallen asleep there. She moved to touch him on the shoulder, then remembered the disk in her hand.
Maybe she shouldn’t wake him.
She sat down at his computer and slid the disk into its slot.
It began to run when she turned on the machine. The disk drive whined; a hard disk answered in deeper tones. It was not an ordinary PC; John had done something to the microprocessors. Susan wondered if she would be able to work it. But the monitor blinked to life all by itself.
It displayed, first of all, a date: the material was several years old. This would be, Susan calculated, when John was living on his island, before she met him, before the return of Benjamin: something from John’s deep immersion in cellular biology.
The date disappeared and there was more whining from the drives as a plodding animation appeared on the screen. Susan blinked at it, surprised. It was a metastatic tumor cell—it looked like diagrams she had seen of the 3LL mouse carcinoma, a common experimental lab tumor. The perspective closed in suddenly on the cell surface, where John had ideographed certain molecules: she recognized collagenase and the MHC glycoproteins. These dissolved in turn into ball-and-stick perspective drawings of their molecular structure. A new molecule appeared at the right side of the screen, one that Susan did not recognize, although John had labeled it meticulously—a novel protein, synthetic or even hypothetical. Suddenly it closed on the MHC glycoprotein and bound with it in a violent flurry of activity. The product was a fragmented chain.
Susan realized she was holding her breath.
The screen blanked, then refreshed with the original metastatic cell … exploded and dead.
It was a magic bullet. A designer molecule: the screen filled with a protocol for its synthesis.
Not a cure for cancer, Susan thought, but at least a cure for its metastasis, a way to interrupt the fearsome colonization of a human body by tumor cells. As a postoperative therapy it could prolong lives indefinitely. She thought of her father, rendered mute, and then dying, murdered by his metastasis before he could recover the courage for words.
She remembered, too, what John had told her on that cold January day before he walked into the warehouse and out of the world:There are lives I could have saved … thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands.
This was what he meant. He had devised this program for his own satisfaction, an “experiment.” If he had made it public or even submitted it anonymously to some journal or some laboratory—it might be in production already, Susan thought, or at least well down the FDA pipeline.
She withdrew the floppy disk—carefully!—and looked at the label again.
For Susan.
She faced the bed. He opened his eyes.
* * *
There was so much he didn’t remember.
Waking up, seeing the woman, he was acutely aware of his handicap. He had lost a great deal over the duration of his fever: memory, vocabulary, time. The loss was endurable mainly because it was so far-reaching—impossible to mourn the absence of a thing he could only vaguely recall. But there were times, like this, when the immensity of his loss was painful and obvious.
Her face was familiar.
I know that face. Memories surfaced and then winked away, elusive as fish in a still, deep pool. He remembered her face next to his, her eyes on his eyes, snow on a window, words spoken softly in a silence that had seemed as large as the night; her name—
“Susan,” he said.
She smiled tentatively. Once he had been able to read the nuances of her face as simply as he might read a book. He remembered the odd sense that she was transparent, skin and skull invisible, the trace of her thoughts etched there as clearly as animal tra
cks in fresh snow. But now there was only her face, opaque but pretty; her eyes only eyes, very blue.
Another fragment of memory flashed past He said, “You saved my life.”
“No,” she said hurriedly. “No, not really.”
“You did,” he affirmed.
He sat up cross-legged across the bed and regarded her seriously. “Did you talk to Dr. Kyriakides?”
She nodded.
“Then you know what I am. I’m not Benjamin. But I’m not John, either. They’re gone. Both gone.”
“You’ve changed,” she said. “Well, I’ve changed too. That’s not so strange.”
“You loved John,” he said.
Susan blushed, opened her mouth and then closed it.
“Yes,” she said finally. “I loved him, and it’s hard saying it that way—as if he’s dead. But I don’t think that’s really true. I think there was something in him he never talked about or acknowledged—maybe it was in Benjamin, too—something that doesn’t go away because it’s too basic, it’s built into every cell. I know that’s not scientific but I believe it.”
He regarded her with open, surprised interest.
“I’m talking too much. But I want you to know why I came. I didn’t come expecting John—not the old John. I came to see you.” She hesitated. “I guess I wanted to say, well, here I am if you need me and I have a car parked outside if you ever need to get away.” Her fists were clenched and she was avoiding his eyes. “I couldn’t not come.” But she looked at him, finally. “I came because if you need to talk to someone you shouldn’t keep silent—because it’ll kill you, doing that.”
She looked at him across the room, her eyes full of doubt—surprised at what she’d said, he guessed; worried at what he might think.
He smiled.
“Those are good reasons,” he said.
* * *
They talked, and he discovered that certain memories were not so elusive after all; that the sound of her voice or the choice of a word evoked echoes from his life before the fire. Maybe this was how “normal” memory worked—the past made subtle and mysterious, forgotten moments welling up miraculously whole at the touch of a hand or the turning of a head.
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