Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I’d watch him, alert in the darkness of my room, and I’d say, “I think so.”

  He’d say, “I think so too. Get some shut-eye, old buddy. Sweet dreams.” He’d kiss me on the forehead, where he’d swept away the hair. And then he’d leave the door open a crack—the way I liked it. Even though Pia would pass by an hour or so later and quietly pull it shut.

  I DON’T REMEMBER our first days together, but I’m told that I rarely spoke. Pia said that as I settled in, and as my own abilities with speech developed, I began making weird comments or providing inexplicable bits of information about myself. I might point to the apple tree in the backyard and say, “I sleep there,” or, after exploring a wild field, I might observe, “Food here.” I was attached to a fuzzy brown pillow, which I called Mama, and I’d wake in the night, calling for my mother, rejecting Pia’s arms, as if I knew that there was another, better mother waiting somewhere else. And it is true that, despite her apparent fragility, a steel core ran the length of Pia’s spine.

  Slowly, fitting together my bits of comments and information, my foster mother began to form a fearful suspicion. She ascribed my stories about forests and monkeys to a TV-dazed imagination, but she says I was adamant and detailed in my memories—even as a young child. Pia’s milk-bottle-blue eyes were my one spot of color in the Syracuse snowscape. I gazed at them as we sat together at the kitchen table. At first, my stories seemed to bemuse her; she’d egg me on, saying, “Oh, is that so? And did your forest mommy have a name? No? Are you sure? Wouldn’t you like to give her one? Why not?” As I got older and persisted, she began to joust with me, saying things like, “Now, honey, you know the apes are just make-believe, right? No?”

  Then she would stare at me in frustration and confusion. “Please, Lena, stop now,” she would say and rub her arms. “Normal people just don’t talk that way.”

  I WAS SIX YEARS OLD at the time. We sat together watching TV in the so-called family room. I still wasn’t completely at ease in the house. Outdoors or down the street in Henry’s garage I relaxed, laughed, ran through the weeds, or crawled under cars with Henry, pleased by the labyrinth of the engines. But in Pia’s dominion—within the walls of the home—I learned to sit with my arms pressed to my sides, my hands in my lap, the breath pressed down into my lungs: I was terrified of breaking (yet another) lamp or vase or leaving (yet another) trail of muddy prints across the Karastan Persian.

  On the day in question, Henry snoozed in his armchair with the doily on the headrest, and Pia and I sat, not quite touching, side by side on the couch. There was an old movie on the TV set. I remember the swaying foliage in shades of black and beige, and the man who swung through the trees in a flash of whiteness. I remember the oscillation of his terrific yell. I became mesmerized by the film, creeping down the couch onto the carpet, creeping closer and closer, until I was bare inches from the screen.

  I sensed Pia somewhere behind me, signaling, Look-look! to Henry. I wasn’t usually allowed to sit so close to the screen, due to the “radiation” that she said emanated from the set. But today something was different—I think we all sensed it. I felt electrical as the TV itself, as if my insides crackled with the same static ions. I sat, openmouthed, watching the man, the woman, the birds, the tiger, the leaves. And finally she was there, the one I’d waited for, had known would come eventually. I jumped up, crying, “Mama! Mama!”

  Pia leaned forward and said, “Do you think she looks like your mommy, Lena? But which one? There are two ladies there—do you mean the pretty one, with dark hair, like mine?”

  “No, no, there!” I cried, and put my finger right on the TV. “There. Mama!”

  Pia inhaled sharply. “Do you see? Look, do you see? What did I tell you, Hank? What did I tell you?”

  Henry slipped out of his chair and put his arms around her while a low, catlike moan rose up from her, frightening me also into tears. I leaned against the television, crying, “Mama, Mama,” forehead touching the glass images. My hand pressed to the image of the ape.

  I was sent to my room for the rest of the day. I knew I’d done an unimaginable wrong. Henry brought me my dinner that night. He sat with me on the bed and put his arm around my shoulders. He said that I’d be coming to work with him for a couple of days while Mommy rested, wouldn’t that be nice? I snuffled and nodded.

  But it seemed that nothing would ever be quite right again. Henry brought me to the garage each morning and back to the house for lunch, where Pia complained that I stank of auto grease. She barely addressed a word to me, instead brooding through the halls. Sometimes in the late afternoons she forgot to turn on the lights and the house fell into darkness. Outside my bedroom door at night, I heard her saying to Henry, “. . . guaranteed she was a hundred percent white. I’m not even sure . . .”

  I waited to be told that I was going to be sent away. I folded all my shirts into neat little squares just the way Pia liked them, and stacked them on my dresser just to make things easier for when it would be time to go.

  After a couple of days of Pia’s gloom, Henry woke me one morning and told me that Mommy was going to be away all day running errands, that we wouldn’t see her till the evening. I felt certain she was arranging for whatever place she was going to send me to. My emotions, everything inside me, seemed to be folded up neatly as the shirts on my dresser. I felt oddly untouchable, as if nothing could hurt me in any way. As soon I as came home from the garage with Henry, I went into my room. I didn’t bother with combing my hair or changing my clothes, as it didn’t seem necessary now that I was going. I sat on the bed, my hands folded in my lap, and waited until Pia came home.

  I don’t know how long I waited. It might have been hours. The sun had set and the windows glinted blackly at me; the world outside could have looked like anything at all at that hour. I only remember that I was shaking when I finally heard the scrape of Pia’s key in the front door. First, I heard her stop in the kitchen. Her and Henry’s voices intermingled, muffled and low, just beneath my bedroom floor. Then Henry’s voice rose. I could make out him saying, “I will not . . .” the words sinking down, indecipherable, and then Pia’s voice, crisper and higher, saying, “Really, Henry, I don’t see any . . .” I listened intently, certain they were talking about me, that my foster father was bravely trying to talk Pia out of her plan. But that was all I managed to make out.

  After a few minutes of muted exchange, there was such a long silence I wondered if they might have gone to bed. But then I heard what I knew was Pia’s step on the staircase. She came slowly up the stairs, into my room, and sat next to me on the bed. Her face was very still and serious as she placed her hand over mine. “It’s time for the truth, Lena,” she said, her eyebrows lifted, her eyes flat with their startled round irises. When she said this, a current of fear ran from the crown of my head into my hands and feet. I stared at my feet, the tip of one sneaker touching the tip of the other.

  “When you first came to me—to us—to be my baby,” she said, flattening one hand over her chest, “you knew I didn’t like the little stories about the monkeys. I thought you might grow out of them. I thought that maybe it was just a phase. And when you didn’t stop, well. Your mommy didn’t know what to do. So yesterday . . .”—she lowered her head, leveling her eyes with mine—“I went back to the nuns at the orphanage.”

  “To my orphanage?” I grew reverent at any mention of the sacral place.

  “Yes,” she said in an airy voice. “There. And I asked them, Lena. I asked about them. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “About my mama?” I whispered.

  “Yes. I did. And you know what they told me?” She didn’t move an atom, only her eyes seemed somehow to intensify, the colors to deepen, her pupils expanding. I could hear her breathing.

  I bit my lower lip. The world creaked to a halt. I shook my head.

  “They said it was all true.” She stared at me the
n, with that bottomless stare. After a stunned, eternal moment, in which I couldn’t speak or react, she said, “You see, it had to happen this way—so we could finally be together. They told me you were rescued from the forest by an American. An aid worker. Do you know what that is? They found you with her. With the mother ape. They had to give her a drug to make her go to sleep.”

  “Did they hurt her?”

  “No, honey, just to make her sleepy. So they could rescue you and bring you here to live with me and be my own little special baby girl. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I stared at her, the breath engining through my body, my pulse too loud for me to speak. I was thrilled and frightened to learn that my memories were real. This certified loneliness, the sense that I was a confirmed oddity. Up until that day, I’d been busy with becoming a suburban kid, learning fences and backyards and playgrounds. In the reading books I received in school, little girls chased dogs and balls: there weren’t any rain forests or wild apes who nurtured human babies. While outwardly nothing changed, inside of me, the world and what I was trying to know about it had vaporized.

  I DIDN’T THINK OF my first rescuers as apes. They were curling leathery hands, mild eyes, and always, the nighttime of their fur.

  They were distant cries in trees. Warbles that traveled through the bones in my head, through spine and rib cage, and delivered sweetness like a nutrient directly into my bloodstream.

  “Now, remember, Lena,” Pia would say, “this has to be a secret. You can’t tell strangers about the apes. No one will believe you.”

  Pia never volunteered the name of my orphanage, and, in fact, a sort of force field surrounded her whenever I tried to pry for information. It seemed that even the most indirect questions about my past caused her pain. Her lower lip would curl in, her chin would tremble. She said that she and Henry were my parents now—they were going to officially adopt me very soon—just as soon as the last pieces of paperwork came in.

  There are only a few possible artifacts remaining of the rain forest—first are the faint white scars on my arms and legs—possibly the aftermath of the plane crash. I’ve done Internet and library searches, but aside from a de Havilland Comet crash into the side of a mountain in Spain, I’ve come across no other crashes for that time. Pia didn’t, or wasn’t able to, ascertain what country I was found in. I believe it was a rain forest because of my memories of the dense carpeting of leaves and the canopy of trees—a coin’s width of winking sky at the top. Judging by the date I came into foster care, I might have survived in this forest for up to two years. No one knows my exact birth date.

  In high school, I sank into a period of subterranean research: I wanted to quantify, to describe to myself, what my earliest days might have been like. I read about the endangered species of the rain forests, about silver-backed apes, about feral children raised by animals. I kept journals in which I’d jot any fragment of imagery or sensation: leaf, berry, bark. But then Pia’s stories always seemed to converge with my own thoughts: “They said that she sang to you, that she held you wrapped in her long arms. . . .” And I was overcome by a wave of disorientation, shame, and weakness.

  My other artifact is in an old cigar box carved with ibises and palmettos which I keep on a nightstand by my bed, something Pia told me that I was wearing around my neck when I came to them:

  An ape’s tooth on a string.

  I PULL THE BELL CORD and walk unsteadily to the front of the slowing bus. As I climb down the stairs, the driver calls after me, “Now, you take care of yourself, my dear.”

  The wind catches me as soon as I step off the bus, singing through my woolen coat. I pause inside the glass bus stop shelter for a moment as the bus trundles away, an etching of diesel exhaust in the air. My apartment is just across the street from the shelter, but I have to steel myself for the wind that whips down James Street. I wait for a break in the traffic and then I don’t stop running till I reach the front door.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEXT DAY, I WAKE MYSELF MOVING MY ARMS, TRYING TO FEND off a nightmare. I feel shivery with the aftermath of dreams—an ominous sensation, like the first symptoms of illness.

  Everything feels a bit unhinged. What if a larger case than the death of Baby Matthew Cogan could have been gathering around me, and I’ve failed to notice? Several things trouble me: cribs in the evidence room, the surge of SIDS cases, and—in view of the Cogans’ case —the fact that it’s rare for comfy white families to be hit by SIDS.

  A baby killer seems like such a coolly malevolent fantasy, so urban legendish, that it is impossible to believe.

  And Matthew Cogan’s reports were unremarkable. The police photograph showed the baby curled on his stomach, unblemished skin, eyes closed, serene. There was a complete autopsy report indicating minute hemorrhages on the surface of the heart, in the lungs, esophagus, and thymus, consistent with the syndrome. There was a thorough examination of the scene—no signs of forced entry or an intruder’s presence. And there was a review of the clinical history with no notable findings, no metabolic disorders or myocarditis, no signs of infant abuse or discord in the household. The Cogans were wealthy late-thirty-somethings, six years married, thrilled to admit this crown prince into their lives. I was sure that I’d already wasted time going over his report by the time I slid the file back in the drawer and gave it a good push closed. I’d jotted a note on a Post-it to give Ms. Cogan—the number of a SIDS bereavement group. Then I came home, had dinner, went to bed, and woke feeling trashed.

  The ghost of the neighbor’s snoring comes through the wall on Saturday mornings. It is a wavy, delicate snoring that comes from the south wall, not the complicated repertoire of wheezes and crenellated growling that erupts from my west wall. I roll back on my iron-springs bed, the musty mattress that smells like an aggregate of all the sleepers who’ve lain there before me, the bed filled with the nomadic socks that I wear to bed cold-footed, then peel off in my sleep. Nothing like the Posturepedic king-sized I swam in when I was with Charlie. The northern sun comes in the window from far away; it must look like the sun they see in Norway, snow-blued and feeble. And the windows in the St. James Apartments are historically dirty. This morning, at least, the windows lie at rest in their frames, not chattering and puffing out the curtains.

  I decide to work on the meditation exercises my counselor once taught me, to practice being my human self. Think of the person you’d most like to be. Think of the sort of person who most frightens you. I’d told her cautious bits about Pia, volunteered a few snippets about how my foster mother liked to tell me “stories” about “monkeys,” and somehow the therapist and I seemed to evolve an unspoken rule that we were treating those memories as a metaphor for something. What person or people in your life most remind you of “the monkeys”?

  Charlie and I went to Celeste Southard a few years ago, to try and keep ourselves together. She’s actually a criminal profiler who consulted with the Lab. I don’t think she’d ever worked as a marriage counselor before; at first she tried to talk me into seeing a different psychologist, but I insisted. And after the first few sessions with Charlie, I was seeing her all alone. I went back eight more times before the insurance ran out. She encouraged me to do “memory exercises” that would help me “resituate” the past. Sometimes I had the feeling that she dealt with me in the same way that she dealt with her assault victim clients, helping them to reconstruct a criminal sketch. She had me keep dream journals, take notes on fleeting sensory impressions, especially the visual and aural hallucinations that sometimes plague me when I’m stressed. She urged me to pay attention to smell, pointing out that our olfactory processes are just a synapse or two away from the amygdala—the center of emotional memory. And she’d point out that my sense of smell was so advanced, I should be able to “follow it” into my past.

  I’m still in bed, mid-exercise—try to recover your earliest memory—when the phone rings. Sev
en a.m., a favorite time for my almost-ex, Charlie, to call. “Lenny? Okay? Now, listen—it’s the weekend, right? Just deal with it. Don’t stay in bed, it’s time to get up and answer the damn phone . . .”

  I open my eyes, peer at the grimy light.

  “You got a plan for talking to someone this weekend? It can’t just be the girl at the bakery—that doesn’t count. She’s paid to be there, Len. It doesn’t count when they’re paid to be there.”

  I lean back against the pillows and look toward the answering machine alone on the credenza; it’s bulky with big, piano key buttons, and buzzes with the sound of Charlie’s voice. It was his separation present to me. It’ll record up to one-half hour of the same call before the miniature tape runs out with a squeak. If the phone gets left off the hook, it will faithfully record half an hour of empty-telephone whine.

  “Len-ny, how I love ya, how I love ya, my dear ol’ Lenny . . .” he sings tunelessly.

  “So Lenny, guess what’s coming. Yep! Our second anniversary”—of our separation—“is coming up. What do you say you let old broken-down Charlie take you out for a fancy something or other? Yeah? Okay?”

  Charlie likes to keep an eye on me. But, for me, living through our breakup was like walking slowly through a wall of fire. I feel scorched and lucky to be alive. Everything since then seems turned down a notch—lights are dimmer and sounds have softer edges.

  “I miss you, Big Foot,” he says to the machine. “Okay, listen up, time to get a move on.”

  FOR OUR FIRST DATE, Charlie waited for me in his black-and-white, engine humming, the great big Crown Vic blocking the Lab entryway, so all the homeward-bound technicians and consultants and administrators had to veer around him. He’d come straight from patrol and was still in uniform. He held the door open for me in front of about twenty-seven of my co-workers, helped me in, and autolocked the door from his panel.