Celeste considers me for an unnerving moment, during which I’m certain she can read my every thought. “Okay. Well. Maybe you’ll think about it.” Then she nods at her clipboard and says, “Good talking with you, Lena. I hope you’ll come see me again pretty soon.” We shake hands a little awkwardly and she slips out the door and down the hall, a long echo of heels.
SYRACUSE IS A modest-sized burg. About 150,000 residents in the metro center, a big price-tag university with a famous stadium, problems with brain drain, and a generally crummy economy. Crime rates tend to be higher than the national averages, especially the sorts of crime (domestic abuse and robberies) that spring from unemployment, lousy jobs, and lengthy, miserable winters. In 2001 there were 885 nabbed vehicles, 1,802 burglaries, 5,166 larcenies. There were also 15 reported murders—mostly domestic in nature—plus don’t forget the two gang shootings. We average about one reported SIDS case every other month in this town: rarely investigated beyond standard autopsy and police questioning.
I sit at my desk, supposedly jotting notes and stats for the case, but instead I start doodling twirling vines, feeling stuck and aggravated: if the killer turns out to be myth, I’ll feel naive for not having the instincts to have known all along. After a page of jagged leaves and buds, I shove off from the rolling chair and head back down to the Evidence Room. Across the top of the page, I have written Celeste’s exercise: Imagine yourself into the killer’s mind.
I enter the Evidence Room and stare at the red crib. Circle it. After a few moments’ hesitation, I crouch beside the crib; I watch how light falls between the bars.
I close my eyes. I imagine myself in the red crib nursery—talc-scented, shadows of turning mobiles. You would know, standing there, that this baby had a warm bed, a family. Perhaps you’re envious of all the things you never had in your own life. But no, it’s nothing that simple. There is just something a bit terrible about a baby—too much at stake—something fearsome in a baby’s cry. The moment your shadow falls over the baby’s sleeping form, you’d despair of being able to do anything other than what you’re about to do. Pregnant women and new mothers dream about killing their babies—dropping them or even throwing them out windows.
That must be how it is for anyone driven to kill in this way; it must feel stronger than fate: a biological imperative, like the need to sleep. A sleeping fever drops over you. And after you’ve killed once, you know it’s impossible not to kill again.
You approach the crib so soundlessly, not because you’re a monster but because you’re gentle. It’s one of your paradoxes. You can’t bear to hurt anything or to cause suffering—you leave no bruises, never a mark. Your hand extends to the baby’s face, and—no—the murder isn’t done for the violence of it. The murder is unnamable: it occurs the way your life occurs, as an inevitability—the way an accident of cells created the singularity of your consciousness. Motive doesn’t even enter into it.
The baby turns its perfect round head, its hands curled as if they held something secret just for you; its eyes are dark glimmerings. You’d picked this baby after peeping into homes and into nursery windows: this baby called to you; it’s special. The baby looks at you with its wise old face; it breathes out as you breathe in; you lurch once, only once, a bit clumsily, into the crib, and the baby is so easily extinguished, you had almost nothing to do with it. You were there. You wish you knew why.
CHAPTER 11
CHARLIE’S VOICE RINGS IN THE CORRIDOR OVER THE CHATTER OF ALL the other officers, clerks, and Lab techs. I can always make out his voice—jagged and cheerful.
He comes to my office with that half-smile. Charlie is tall with black eyes that seem a liquid part of their lashes, a shadowy jaw, nice, square shoulders and a chest that helps camouflage the softening of his stomach, and good, hard arms—strong enough to lift me when I’m not looking, right off my feet.
Charlie knows my secrets. Which isn’t to say that he necessarily cares about them. He knows that I won’t own pets and that I don’t want children. He had a son from his former marriage, but when we married he told me it was important that we have “our own.” And we tried, but no children came, and I knew that was because I wasn’t meant to have them. The fact of my own survival was a freakish thing—against nature, it seemed—so how could I expect to reproduce?
Charlie takes the satchel full of folders out of my hand, loops the leather strap over his shoulder, takes another armload of files, lets them ride on the shelf of his holstered gun. Then he says, “Whyn’t you take the whole damn filing cabinet?”
Tuesdays we go to the Lamplighter Inn.
Snow quivers in the air; too cold to fall, it hangs there in icy bands, shining. Charlie lugs open the wooden door with its brass handle. We pass the bar, its slim glass circles, the click of ice cubes, the air humid with a sweetish tang of beer.
Charlie shoves my folders, coat, and bags into one of the vinyl booths beside a window. I slide in just halfway to avoid the cold glass pane. The floor’s uneven here so Charlie tests the rickety slant of the table, then stuffs a folded napkin under one corner, sits up, looks around, gulps down half his glass of water, and mutters something about the service. “They must’ve passed some new ordinance against handing out menus.”
The daily specials don’t change. Tuesday is prime rib, gravy, baked potato, peas, steamed carrots and cabbage. The waiter is new—a hippie girl with a sheath of crimson hair—and I can see Charlie smile hopefully, trying to decide whether to try some banter on her. After she takes our order, Charlie winks at me, then says, “Lena, you know what, you’re really looking good tonight.”
The knife and fork beside my water glass gives off sparks of reflections. I pick up a soup spoon and see the reflection of my left eye floating upside down in it.
“No, no, no, don’t look, for crying out loud,” he says, one hand lowering my hand and spoon to the tabletop. “It doesn’t need corroborating evidence. Just let me say it, okay?” He’s turned so the snow light drifts over his features. “I just want to say this thing to you, Lenny, and I’d like for you to smile and say thank you, and don’t worry if the evidence is there or not. Can I just do this—just say you look beautiful and that’s okay with you?”
It’s cold facing the window. I gaze out at the white plate of the ground. “Thank you, Charlie,” I say. “I’m beautiful.”
“Very good, very good.” Charlie is used to my gaps and pauses. “I don’t know why you’re looking so good. Just seems like you are. Maybe it’s because I hear that kid is sniffing around you. So what’s going on there, Lenny? What can you tell me about that?”
For a moment, when I hear him say, that kid, I think of the red crib. Then I notice the way his face has remained still and his eyes have turned toward me. I surprise myself by saying coolly, “You mean Detective Duseky?”
“Detective Duseky!” He drops his head against the padded back of his cushion so I can examine the ridge of his throat, the skin dark with end-of-shift stubble. He levels his face at me. “Fucking hell, Lena. I don’t need that.”
“What’d I say? He is a detective, I believe.” I know this isn’t what he wants to hear.
“Lenny! Jesus—” His voice thuds. The waitress slides our plates across the table. Potatoes like brown and white flowers burst open inside their silver jackets, a dish of buttered peas, tiny condiment dishes of chives, a gravy boat filled with sour cream. “Lenny, he’s like, what, fifteen years old. I’m going to be forty-eight next month and Detective Asshole is out there, he thinks he’s got the right to go sniffing around my wife. How’m I supposed to feel about that?”
“Your wife?” I say, my voice bending and sarcastic. I shake the napkin from its folds and onto my lap.
Charlie told me from the start of our relationship that he wasn’t sure how long he could be faithful. He said it wasn’t in his nature, but that he’d try. After I’d found the note from El
izabeth, though, he admitted that he needed to see other women. He wanted to be faithful to me, he said, and in his heart, he said, he was. He was, “metaphysically speaking,” the most faithful guy in the universe. His body was the complication. Once or twice a month he went out, slapped with lemon cologne. I would lie down, my face pressed to the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, and sob.
“And what kind of detective is he anyway?” Charlie is now ranting. “Duseky spends so much time at his desk, he’s practically a civilian. He’s just always back at that computer, tapping away like some fucking secretary. What’s he doing back there anyway—spying on all of us? Larry Tucci says it’s for sure he reports to Viso and Sarian. He’s their little spook, angling to get himself another promotion. Son of a bitch!” Charlie slaps the table so our plates rattle, a pea spills out of its dish.
“Jesus, Charlie. What’s with you?”
He looks off, moody and glum. After a moment, he says, “It’s just, sometimes I think I really miss you, Lena, you know?”
“You miss me?” I scrunch the napkin on my lap. For months after he left, I was so wrung out by grief I could barely swallow solid food. I snuck calls to him from a pay phone behind my office, praying that no one from work would see me. I’d be choking on sobs, my tears freezing to my skin, as I begged him to come home. We’d been married for eleven years, and I’d come to believe that I couldn’t live without him—I believed my very survival depended on being with Charlie. Without him, I saw myself in a chair in an empty room, dissolving. Pia used to hint that marriage would help me stave off madness: it seemed, in those terrible moments of begging, that she must be right.
I remember glancing up once while pleading with Charlie (—just please stay on the line, please don’t hang up—) eyes streaming, my mouth open. And there, not fifteen feet away, was Frank’s secretary, Peggy, walking up the street, staring over at me, her face open, pitilessly curious. I tried to turn away, but the wind threw my hair back and blew open my coat. I remember Charlie’s reasonable voice on the other end of the line saying, “Hey, Lenny, hey, hey, come on, easy, there, kid. I know it’s hard, I know. It’s hard on me too, don’t forget. But listen, you got to get yourself under control. Listen to yourself. We’re going to stay friends—we’ll always stay friends. We’ve just gotta do things differently. That’s all. Hey, that’s the radio, now really, I’m sorry, I gotta run. . . .”
Now, in the restaurant, Charlie looks at me with flat exasperation. “Yeah, I miss my wife. Imagine that. Don’t you miss me?”
There’s a flutter in me, an old kick of hopefulness. Something I had to get under control. But I owe that determination to Peggy, not Charlie. I didn’t ever want anyone like Peg watching me like that again. I smile at Charlie, pick up a spoon, and scoop all the sour cream in the silver boat onto my potato. He can have my prime rib.
AFTER DINNER, CHARLIE helps me on with my down jacket. He lifts my hair from behind and slides it two-handed outside my coat collar. Then he drives me home in his police cruiser with its heavy-duty wiper blades clacking; illuminated city buildings float by, whited out by wind-blown snow, but the predicted storm out of high Manitoba hasn’t materialized yet. The cruiser is plush and ample, its wheels rumble on the snow, a metal cage separates us from the backseat and the rest of the world.
We don’t speak again until Charlie pulls over in front of the St. James entrance. “Lenny—do you—are you okay—you know, alone up there in that nuthouse?” he says, his voice lowered with beer and the darkness of the car. “I could come up—just walk you up—if you wanted. It’s been a while. . . .” After his girlfriend left him, Charlie occasionally materialized at my door; he’d bring up my mail, offer to tighten the faucets, fix the rod in my closet. He never stayed long, just strolled around, surveying the place, saying, “Yeah, Lenny, you got to get out of this shithole.”
A year ago, I would have jumped at his offer. Now I just suppress a sigh. I don’t look at him. “No, thanks, Charlie, I’m fine.” I gather the satchel and loose folders.
“I know,” he says lamely. “Hey, is that Memdouah freak still living up there? That loony tunes giving you any trouble?”
I just gaze at him, an arm around my folders. One hand on the door handle.
He releases the door lock. “But, hey, Lenny? Lenny!” He calls me as I’m climbing out of the car. Charlie leans forward, one hand clinging to the lower arc of his steering wheel. “Wait—listen . . .” He settles back into himself for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “That business about Duseky today—”
It’s so cold, air seems to wisp out of my lungs. “What about him?”
He shakes his head. “I just don’t like it, okay? That’s all. Take it or leave it. I don’t like it—we’re still married, you know. It doesn’t look right, and I wouldn’t have you talking to him if I could help it.”
“Okay, Charlie,” I say. “Thanks for dinner.” But I’m already walking, the cruiser idling at the curb. I turn away and the shadow of the St. James swallows me whole.
CHAPTER 12
THE LOBBY IS HUGE, ECHOING WITH MARBLE FLOORS, A BANK OF guttering lightbulbs lining the walls. It smells of scorched insects and old laundry. Molting carpets and mildew, disinfectant, and yesterday’s cooking. The elevator jerks up and down the center of the St. James. Instead of taking the stairs, most of the residents would rather risk getting stuck between floors, waiting for the platform to lurch to a stop, at which point they must crank back the latch and throw open the collapsible cage enclosing the chamber. I take the winding marble staircase instead. I pause on the third floor, which has the last operable TV lounge—there used to be a working TV on every floor. That was before my time. Stanley, Norman, Clint, Ellie, Hermione, and Mr. Memdouah are sunk into the sour wool armchairs. Memdouah calls this gathering his “salon.” They’ve all lived here for years. Some of them even remember when the St. James was an upscale address, where a doorman in a uniform with epaulets held open the lobby door. But all the dentists and defense attorneys and architects gradually abandoned downtown, fleeing to the suburbs and exurbs, toward the Great Northern Mall, Fayetteville Mall, Shoppingtown. Now most of the St. James residents drag along on food stamps, Social Security, or unemployment, barely able to cover the rent even in this building.
The bare TV light flutters over their faces. They sit frozen in place, light-scalded as X-rays. Clint rotates one forearm up on his elbow, a silent, half salute in my direction.
Mr. Memdouah is talking animatedly. He seems to have eccentric, vast—if not entirely trustworthy—pockets of information on nearly every subject. In the past, he’s broken into spontaneous lectures on overpopulation, global warming, gun control, and the destruction of the rain forest through commercial logging. He nods at me in a sly, knowing way as he speaks. Tonight he seems to be conducting his ongoing disquisition on TV programming:
“You hear that soundtrack? Hear all those pianos? That soundtrack is telling you to feel excited. Okay? You don’t even have to think about it. See, they’re telling you—go get a really, really big car—they don’t show us the gas consumption levels or the neurotoxin emissions.”
“My granddaughter is taking piano now,” Ellie says. “And she’s only six.”
“You people shut it,” Norman says. He works the graveyard shift for the phone company, repairing lines. “I’m watching the program.”
“Yes, the program. They don’t show the CIA, do they?” Mr. Memdouah asks. “They don’t show how the CIA is behind our reliance on fossil fuels, do they? No. Our enforced consumption of nicotine and herbicides, pesticides, PCBs, carbon monoxide, trans fatty acids. Killing all of us slowly. Or fastly. You know what they’re telling us? They’re saying, look away—don’t worry about living things—look away, hooray for freedom, look away. If you get too hungry, eat your babies! You know what I would do to those people?”
“Kill them?” Stanley says.
“Shut up, shut up,” Norman says.
“What would that be like?” Mr. Memdouah says.
“My golly,” Ellie says.
I back out of the room, return to the staircase: one more flight. After I go up twelve steps, I hear Mr. Memdouah’s voice in the stairwell, calling my name. I sigh and descend again until I can see him, about seven steps below me. “How can I help you, Mr. Memdouah?”
“Did you know I used to have a wonderful career?”
This again. “I do know. A university professor.”
“Before that, I was a political strategist for the Carter administration. It’s true. I used to have a beautiful brain. It really was. That was before they started tampering with it. With the chemicals.”
“Who was that?”
He squints and glares down into the dark recesses of the stairwell. “That’s the problem—I can’t get outside my brain to find out. I feel like the answer is just there, just next to me, but I can’t quite get at it.” He looks up and says casually, “Don’t worry, I know I’m crazy.”
“Oh, well . . .”
“Remember—this isn’t the True World—we know where the True World is.” He nods suggestively. Then: “Are you still working on . . . you know what?”
I stiffen, then realize he’s just fishing. “I’m not really supposed to talk about my work, Mr. Memdouah.”
He nods, his head and body one long continuous shadow at the railing. He takes a piece of peanut brittle out of his pocket, looks at it, and replaces it. “I know—it’s top-secret. Tip-top-secret. I understand. I know they might be listening. But I know you’ll stay on it. Cases like those, they’re disturbing, aren’t they? Disturbs the human organism.” His mouth distends, then, into an insinuating line, not quite a smile, and he says, “You’ll figure it out. You and your boyfriend.” He waves and wafts back into the TV lounge. I stand there for a long moment, then feel a brain-flattening wave of sheer exhaustion and turn away.
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