Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Well, I suppose there is some—” she begins, but Memdouah roars over her, “The presidential dynasty!” She cringes, looks at me in alarm.

  “Did you hear they’re relaxing the air quality standards again, Mr. Memdouah?” I pipe up. Wide-eyed, the woman nods at me from behind his back and hurries out of the store, clutching her bread. The door clatters shut behind her.

  “Yes, of course,” he says, not really looking at anyone. “Of course, of course. The air quality level is unacceptable today. The air is unbreathable.”

  “Absolutely.”

  He frowns at me as if undecided about something, then says in his almost lucid voice, “Were you aware that the corporate entities of the United States of Republican Technocrats made me this way?” He pulls a piece of peanut brittle out of his pocket and takes a bite.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. Charlie says that people like Memdouah bring their problems on themselves: too many bad things happen to some people. Even if I could bring myself to believe this, I still find Memdouah oddly engaging. He’s a compulsive walker, like myself, and when I catch a glimpse of him rounding the bend of some downtown corner, tilting and priestly in his long black raincoat, I always feel as if the two of us are in some sort of collusion. I believe that he too lives in his senses, that he is able to perceive more about the world around him than most.

  I sidle around him in the bakery, wave to the counter girl. “Better dash.”

  “Why?” he barks, his voice gruff and altered. “Did someone tell you to? Where did that other one sneak off to? I don’t appreciate that.”

  “No, I just—I—” I stop, thinking of Charlie’s instructions—don’t talk to that nut—wave again, quickly, and push through the door, into the first shock of the air. The street and sidewalks are all stenciled with frost, the trees a maze of pencil strokes. I touch the wooden-backed bus stop bench, curl my mitten around the top slat. I look up and there’s a clang—St. Sophia’s Church, three blocks away, striking its iron bell: a flock of black-veiled nuns across the street file down the block.

  I’m sure Mr. Memdouah isn’t following me, but the nerves along the nape of my neck and the backs of my hands prickle. I start walking at a brisk clip. Only after several blocks do my shoulders begin to soften.

  Even after I moved into my own place, I kept walking. It helped restore me to myself. It’s a tough habit in a city as wintry as Syracuse, and on the (many) days I work late there’s no time left over for anything beyond the prosaic stroll home. But on weekends I indulge myself. Now I hold the still-warm bread against my ribs under my coat, tearing off bites. I head toward South Salina Street, into the nearly dead city center—discount shops, the hulks of once-grand department stores.

  At noon, it looks like twilight along South Salina. It’s turning into the sort of day when the sun barely rises at all. The light is greenish gray in the eaves of the buildings; their arched windows and flat tops and columns make downtown look like the engraving of a city from a century ago, just a little past the time when it was a wagon trail between the salt springs and Onondaga Valley.

  I make the sharp left going east on Onondaga Street and let the blocks lead me into Columbus Circle. A kind of forlorn hum rises from the deserted shops and businesses. I can hear it under the traffic roar rising onto Route 81. Everyone in the Lab likes to talk about moving away: Loni and Estelle in Toxicology both want to retire to the Carolinas; Frank Viso and his wife Carole just bought a winter condo in Pensacola; Margo speaks endlessly of the day she will move herself and her children to Seattle; and now Sylvie has started to talk about going back to school. Other places are always better.

  When these conversations pop up around the break room, Alyce shakes her head; she says, “What do I want to leave Syracuse for? And go where? Why’s it going to be any different there? This is our home, right, Lena?”

  I round Columbus Circle and head down to Fayette Park, with its fountain and benches, a bust on a pedestal—memorial to a lost firefighter. A dusting of snow sits like a cap on the statue’s head and wafting shadows fall from the clouds. There’s a creaking sound and a swarm of eye-sized beetles races over the statue’s head; I stumble backward, gasping frozen air, until I realize that it’s simply a crosshatching of shadows thrown from a tree. I hold my loaf of bread tightly under my jacket and head home.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON MY WAY TO WORK MONDAY MORNING, I THINK TODAY WILL BE back to normal. I have three thick binders full of fingerprints from non-murky cases that need to be examined, classified, and compared with our database. Usually it’s one of two questions I have to answer: Where is the important print? And who matches the print? I’ll spend the morning on that; I’ll have lunch with the women. I’ll pass the afternoon tapping away on the computer, entering ten-prints and demographics; at break, slip out to Cosmo’s for a cup of tea. Maybe later, head over to the station to take suspect prints, rolling thumbs and fingers in the ink. There might be a roomful of rounded-up prostitutes in a party mood; some car-thieving teens; a company man in a dress shirt and striped tie.

  And Matthew Cogan’s file will begin its fade back into obscurity. Inactive.

  But when I do my morning check of the Evidence Room, I find something new in there. Five feet high and painted with a hot red lacquer, red as cinnamon drops. It looks like a jewel box. I check the ID tag dangling from one of the bars: Infant, Cogan.

  It gives off a radiance inside the room, casts its glow onto the walls, the shelves piled up with brown bags full of evidence from dozens of cases. I approach the crib and imagine Erin Cogan laying the baby on these red cushions. I can tell that it’s handmade, finished in ways that virtually nothing is anymore. Nonporous surfaces, preserving pristine marks. It belonged to wealthy people, with nannies, drivers, servants: generations of fingerprints. You can only move such a piece of evidence by pressing on the corners; gloved hands wipe away marks.

  The corners are decorated with bright silver joints—recently polished—the Cogans have real money, the kind that hires women who attend to the most minute detail. The silver casters roll easily—they’ve been oiled and spun.

  In the Lab, Margo is carrying a rack of slides, but she puts it down when she sees me. “Did that reporter find you yet?”

  “A reporter?” I stop short. “Why’s there a reporter?”

  Margo’s face glows with the office lights. “You’re surprised? That woman called her—I bet you anything. Probably said there was a big scandal, the police are letting a crazy baby killer go free. Something like that.”

  Sylvie sits back on her stool, all bones. She’s got peaked shoulders that hunch up when she works. “Peggy says she’s from the Times. But if she’s such a big deal, why’s she’s up in Syracuse?”

  “They go wherever the story is,” Margo says. “That makes it even better—if something awful happens in a boring place.”

  I shrug on my lab coat. “So there’s a new crib in the evidence room.”

  Margo glances up. “Yeah. They couldn’t take it apart. It’s carved from a single piece of wood or something.”

  “High gloss. Should hold good prints,” Sylvie says.

  “It must’ve cost a fortune,” Margo adds. “All that”—she waves her fingers—“for someone’s little baby.”

  “Why’d they even bring it in? I thought everyone’s saying it was SIDS, case closed.”

  Margo arches one faint eyebrow, taps her pencil on a stack of papers. She’s only about five-two, but she’s got wide hips and shoulders and a flaring collarbone that make her look robust and imposing. “That lady—Erin Cogan? She’s raising absolute hell. Her husband is friends with Cummings. They got him to requisition the crib.”

  “Cummings himself?” I ask.

  “Mm-hm,” says Margo. “And now guess who’s supposed to dust it.” She tips her head forward. “According to Cummings. Himse
lf.”

  Alyce walks in, head lowered, scanning a clipboard. She stops when she sees me and grimaces. “Yeah. You checked Evidence? They requisitioned the crib. Complete waste of time,” she says. “I’m sorry. We’ll have to put in a new report—and end up telling them there’s nothing. Which is, of course, what there will be—nothing.”

  Margo turns her face away, eyes downturned.

  “I kept thinking about it,” Sylvie says hazily. “It was just so awful—the way she came in here like that. I can still see her face.”

  “Me too.” Margo’s voice is lowered. “All weekend. Thinking it around in circles. Did we miss something? What did we miss?”

  “I don’t think it’s helpful to start saying things like that,” Alyce snaps.

  I roll a pencil between my palms. Sometimes it happens, evidence is overlooked, leads go astray. But I also know Alyce doesn’t like it that Margo is training on DNA typing; she’s muttered to me Margo’s getting “ambitious.” She sometimes jokes in the lunchroom about Margo’s “wildness” (i.e., the fact that Margo is divorced from her children’s father and is now dating a younger man). While it’s true that there’s something about Margo that’s always tempted certain others to tease her, lately it seems some of the play has gone out of the teasing.

  I say quickly, “I’ll look at the crib—I will. It’s no problem.”

  Alyce pinches her lips together. “Thanks, Lena.” She hangs her jacket in the cupboard and pulls out a lab coat. “If the Cogans didn’t have all that family money, we wouldn’t be wasting a minute on this.”

  IT’S LATE IN THE DAY and we’re working in the Lab when Frank comes in. He’s carrying a box of powdered cookies, the cardboard flaps loose, striped bakery string broken. No contaminants are allowed in the Examination Room, but Frank says it’s okay as long as he keeps the cookies near the door. He sits beside me at the examination table, angles his long legs in the rail under the chair, leans back; the windows over his head reflect rectangles of fluorescent bulbs. “So what’s shaking?”

  I frown into my microscope. I’ve been putting off examining the red crib all day. At the moment, I’m trying to isolate a fragment of skin from a nail scraping: party victim. Drugged with Rohypnol and raped. Woke up the next morning alone in a cab with an anvil-sized headache. She didn’t know where she’d been. The Lab studies tongue scrapings, splatter patterns, skin shreds, the secretions of the invisible universe. Every brushed shoulder, handshake, kiss leaves millions of skin cells. People assume we’re all discrete and contained individuals, but lab techs know that life is an effluvia.

  “I heard Duseky’s been asking about you in the officer’s lounge,” Frank says. I ease my scope in, listening but not looking at him. I don’t want to risk showing him the lilt of pleasure I feel at hearing this. It’s always nice to think you’re of interest to someone else. I hear a click and know that Frank is playing with the laser pointer one of our equipment salesmen gave him last fall: switching it on and off. “Actually not asking about you so much, I guess, as Charlie.”

  I lower my tweezers and peel off a glove to rub my eyes. “Really? What’s he wanna know about Charlie?” I ask. Trying not to show much curiosity.

  Click. Off-on. The pearl of orange light floats over the back wall. Push the button on the other end and it’s a pen. “I don’t know. Charlie thinks he follows you around.” He scribbles an orange light in the air, then draws circles around Margo, who glares. Frank clicks the pointer off. Margo has already squirreled away his first two pointers. “I guess he just likes to ask questions.”

  Frank lazes sideways in his chair, his face easy in its natural expression, an almost-smile. He’s a retired cop—the officers tell him their troubles before they tell their own captain. Suspects, wrists ratcheted back in cuffs, see him on their way through the lobby and want to make their confessions to him.

  “What sorts of questions?”

  “Oh, how Charles feels about you. How long you two were married.”

  I touch the metal stand of the microscope. “Not how long we’ve been apart?”

  He slides the pointer into his shirt pocket, slips it back out again. “Keller knows you’re separated—he’s past that. Now he wants to know what sort of competition he’s got. Cops like to have the one gun drawn.” He points gun-fingers at me.

  “What competition?”

  Margo laughs. Alyce makes a small, rueful sound.

  Frank’s orange dot is glowing on the counter where Margo can see it. “Yeah, so while we’re on the subject—Keller’s not the only one asking about you: I understand someone’s been calling the Lab.”

  “That’s that reporter,” Sylvie interjects, her voice anxious and excited. “Peg told me. She wants Lena.”

  “I didn’t know she was looking for me. What does she want?”

  “Easy, Lee,” Frank says, but his smile diminishes. The orange dot goes out. “Not a wonderful development, I’d say, but nothing to panic about. Someone like this—she’s going to keep trying. The front desk kept routing her to Peggy, but if she does talk to you, Lena, just try to remember she’s a reporter. You don’t have to answer her questions.”

  I stare at my tray of fingerprints. “It’s about the cribs.”

  “Listen, no, don’t be afraid of her. It’s just the business she’s in—like being a used car dealer,” he says slyly. “She’s probably read about the Haverstraw case, right? Which is why she’s after you now and not one of the detectives. She’ll try to turn the story into something about local police ignoring a baby murderer.” Frank shrugs, turns slightly so I can’t quite catch his expression; I hear the soft click of the pointer.

  Frank hired me eleven years ago, semilegally—I didn’t even have an associate’s degree—because I could analyze and describe all the major components I smelled being used in the Lab. The interview over, we were standing in the hallway while Frank tried to think of a polite way to turn me away. I said, Pine Sol. Super Glue. Burnt matches. I didn’t mean to, the words floated out of me. They were heating and fuming in the Lab, the smells so strong and oddly appealing that I had to name them: ammonia, old pennies, salt. . . . Frank said, you got all that just from smelling? I sniffed the air and said, there’s more, but they’re in different layers, some are just barely there. Cut wood. Old silver. . . . He laughed and said, yes, yes.

  “I’m not telling any reporter anything,” I say. But the fine hairs on the back of my neck feel stippled.

  “Doesn’t matter at this point, does it? What matters is that the media’s starting to snoop around—the trick is to shut it down. There’s no sign of any such baby killer,” he says, his voice emphatic; he lifts his chin, addressing all of us. “But let’s make sure we don’t help cook one up. Last thing we need out there is a panic party.” He raps his knuckles once on the stainless countertop, a gong that rings through the room. “I don’t want a bunch of gossiping, I don’t want to hear about leaks—not to the media, not to bereaved parents, not to health officials. I don’t care how trustworthy or noble or well-intentioned any of these people seem. Unless they’re actively involved in the case, we can’t go outside with information. Believe me, no one wants to resolve this issue more than I do,” he says directly to Margo—who looks skeptical. “But if we want to resolve the case, we must act as a team.” He looks at Alyce. “We’ve got to get along.

  “Don’t forget the circus with the Haverstraw case,” he says. “None of us wants to go through that again, right?” Frank climbs off his stool, brushes at his jacket, and before he’s out the door, he says, “That’s it, ladies. Hasta la vista, enjoy your evenings.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THEY CALLED ME TO THE CRIME SCENE. HANK SARIAN, THE CHIEF OF police, drove me out himself. The house, a tall, gray batwing of a building, sat upright against a hillside of snow. It was seven years ago, rural Hesiod, seven miles west of Syracuse, down a loose
gravel road, flanked by shipwrecked plows and tractors and spreaders, all left over from a past age of farming and orchard cultivation. The elderly apple trees around the property were webbed with snow and spears of icicles.

  When I first came to work for the Crime Lab, Frank said an investigation is like a play. There’s a cast of characters, some with starring roles—victims and suspects and investigators. Some are hidden behind the scenes—the chemists, ballistics specialists, psychiatrists, DNA techs—all sorts of experts who might only get called to the scene if it’s a homicide. Five years after I started at the Lab, the Haverstraw family was my summons.

  The case had received a lot of attention because of Troy Haverstraw. He was supposed to be a sort of fortune-teller. He told his mother that he could see “parts” of what would happen, as if time consisted of ripples. He was only seven years old when he died, and his parents had been making a second income from the locals who came around, asking Troy what he could tell them about their lives.

  The mother, Anita Haverstraw, showed police a bald spot on the red velveteen couch on the back porch where she tried to get Troy to sit still to receive his clients. From there, he could also see into the next room where his brothers and sisters sprawled, watching a washed-out TV screen in a corner of the room. He would sit on his couch, peering into the next room at the TV, and his mother and a visitor would sit across from him on the porch. The visitors would recount their troubles to Anita. Usually the visitor wanted to know were they going to get that raise at work, was their wife cheating, was their husband about to get fired, or simply, would things get better anytime soon. There was no ritual beyond asking the question and Troy’s answer would take a while if he was engrossed in cartoons. But once the commercial came on, the answer generally had little to do with the question. It was often something like: Your kitty is going to have seven brown kittens. Or: Davey’s baseball is in the hayloft. Or: Next week you’re going to hang your laundry and forget it in the rain. And somehow, this satisfied people. The visitors paid Troy’s mother three dollars and left feeling like they’d experienced something. And, Anita insisted, whatever Troy said always turned out to be accurate. Sometimes he also had very useful information, like: Your cousin is going to give you her old car! Or: The man at your work is going to yell at you tomorrow. Maybe stay home.