Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Now I turn in my seat to face Frank directly. “Why would Margo even do that? We’ve had disagreements—but bad enough to want to get me fired?”

  Frank pulls up in front of my building, puts the car in park, and leaves the engine running. He pats the pockets of his coat and withdraws a folded square of paper and a pair of half-glasses. “Alyce doesn’t know about this letter yet,” he mutters. “She’ll go ballistic.” Then he opens his glasses, sighs, smoothing the page out, and begins reading: “. . . reason to believe that Lena is increasingly distracted, reckless, possibly incompetent . . . incapable of safeguarding classified or restricted information, seems to be carrying on a relationship with certain news media . . .”

  I feel my throat cinching.

  Frank says, “Incredible bullshit.” His face is taut.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  He folds the letter up carefully and replaces it inside his coat. “Margo’s worried about her job. I just got handed this year’s budgets—the city is facing personnel cuts and there’s talk of downsizing units like Fingerprinting and Arson. Margo’s started a campaign to sign the lion’s share of the budget over to DNA. She’s been going around putting it out there that in a few years DNA will make everything else obsolete.”

  “That’s crazy,” I say. My forehead feels glazed and there’s a dampness in the small of my back.

  “Maybe,” Frank says. “Labs are going nuts for DNA work. Everyone wants the latest gear and Margo wants to be on top of that.”

  “But that letter. The whole thing. It’s so mean,” I say lamely.

  Frank nods. “Yeah, it is. But Margo has the least seniority in all of Criminalistics, which means that unless she and Cummings produce another likely candidate to cut, she’s most at risk.” He slides a hand over his thinning hair. Finally he says, “For now, just keep your head down, Lena. That’s what I can tell you. Absolutely do not speak to the reporters. Get to work on time. Be polite to Margo, but tell her nothing. Under no circumstances—you hear me? If she finds out that you’re working on a case that’s supposed to be resolved, it’ll just give her more ammunition. I’ll do everything I can to protect you, but you have to help me.”

  “Frank.” I can barely ask, “Will they really fire me?”

  He smiles at me in an odd, broken way and this frightens me even more. “Not if I can help it,” he says. “I know it’s scary, but I don’t want you to worry about this—you’re too valuable to the Lab and they know it. I just wanted you to have all the information.”

  “I can’t lose this job, Frank,” I tell him.

  He nods heavily. “I know you can’t.”

  I pull on the door handle and at first it doesn’t move—as if the locks have iced over while we’ve been sitting there. But then something gives in the mechanism and the door bursts open. I sit back for a second, stung by the frigid air, and turn to Frank. “How did you get ahold of that letter?”

  He smiles—naturally this time. “Peg swiped it—Bobby Cumming dictated it to her to send to the health commissioner. But, of course, she gave it to me.”

  “Peg?” I think of her long, sour glances.

  He nods. “She’s so loyal to me, she’ll even help you.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE PEOPLE IN OUR MEDICAL FORENSICS DIVISION WORK WITH A genome map; the code to the eighty thousand human genes, it’s the blueprint to identity, health, wholeness. If all the genes are perfect, they call it a consensus genome: the genetic ideal. But no one has this physical ideal; instead the analysts say that there are fate maps—tracings of which genes are flawed—and how this will hurt us sooner or later.

  If I could see my fate map, would a string of genes show my metaphysical flaw? A primate in me, reclaiming my soul for its own.

  I worry that what Margo says in her letter might just be true: I can’t be trusted.

  THAT NIGHT, I wake abruptly, but it’s only 2:02 a.m. according to the clock radio. My gut seethes and bubbles, my right ear sings a piercing frequency. My fingers creep to the edge of the bed. I try not to think about the rain forest or baby killers or losing my job.

  For the next few hours, my sleep is lousy—it has a strobelike quality, intercut with flashes of light—the green star pall from the nearby MONY Insurance Building filling and fossilizing the room. I swim through the sheets on my bed, despite the ambient chill of the room; I’m so overheated that my mattress radiates warmth. I kick the covers off, then feel chilled and drag them back on. I lie awake and try to imagine the easy slope of a workday, hours of print comparisons, the pleasurable ache in my shoulders as I move prints through my magnifier, the thin line running through the reticule that cuts through all the prints—a coordinate for doing fingerprint ridge counts, the constant, comforting, prime meridian of my world. How could I survive without it?

  A little after six a.m., I give up on sleep and get dressed. I rattle around the apartment, gazing out the windows, waiting for the city to wake. I peek out of my apartment door. The hallway is dark and cold, yet somehow intimate, as if it were just part of a large, single home we all live in. I pull on parka and hat and drift downstairs, pausing for a moment on the third floor: the eternal TV flashing to an empty room. There are commercials for dripping hamburgers, for a black car that seems to be driving itself (with a backdrop of intense classical music), for a kind of diaper that a young woman holds above a baby’s head with a glorifying smile.

  Then an interview show. A scientist in a paneled room facing the camera with a dazed look on his face, his name—Jensen Wakefield, PhD, from the Agency for Environmental Stewardship—flashes beneath his image. He’s smiling, trying to banter with the interviewer. In another frame, a woman with angry cords in her neck and shoulders leans forward. Her name is Sharon Wertinen, and she is head of something called Life, Yes! She makes the point that “all life is sacred, all the time.”

  Dr. Wakefield takes off his glasses, nodding and rubbing them on his shirtsleeve in a tired way, then quickly replaces them, as if he’d forgotten he was on television. “Yes, yes,” he says. “But let us not forget that the world population is increasing at a rate of over one hundred million people each year. Each year. Imagine a whole new city the size of New York City appearing somewhere on the planet every couple of months. Global birth control and family planning education is not only critical—”

  Here both the interviewer and the woman furiously crash back in, their voices an electric garble. I abandon the room and head downstairs.

  Outside, I walk behind a snowplow for a few blocks, gray snow churning at the edges of the plow until it makes a left on Burnet and disappears. There are few signs of life, just a solitary car, muttering past on the white street. I feel desolate and weirdly disembodied, as if I don’t belong to my own body. Gradually, I make out a figure standing on a street curb several blocks ahead. The cone of streetlight illumination doesn’t quite reach, but I think I recognize the profile of the nurse—whose name I’ve forgotten. I’m pleased to see a familiar face in this gloomy place, glad not to feel quite so eccentric in my habits.

  But before I have the chance to call to her, I realize there’s another person there, standing a little farther back in the shadows, speaking with her. I slow down, studying the scene, and realize that this tall, nodding figure could only be Mr. Memdouah. Their voices come to me in a distant, filtered way, so I can’t make out what they’re saying, only that they seem to be having something of a conversation, and I hang back, hesitant to interrupt anyone who could have a calming effect on Memdouah.

  The moment doesn’t last, however: the woman seems to make up her mind about something, and steps quite decisively into the street to cross, moving with such a firm, youthful gait that I think this couldn’t have been the older nurse after all. I feel relieved that I hadn’t made a fool of myself, calling after her in the empty street. Mr. Memdouah steps backward in his unear
thly way, and disappears into the night.

  Columbus Bakery opens for business at six a.m. Its front windows cast solid blocks of light into the black morning. There’s noise in the back, but no one seems to be behind the counter when I come in. Then I notice the store clerk sitting at the single tiny blue-tiled table against the wall, cradling a demitasse of coffee. It’s the girl I usually see on weekday afternoons. Her head bobs up when she sees me come in. “Hi,” she says as I come in. “I didn’t think we’d get anyone with this snow.”

  “You must not get people this early, even on nice days,” I say, self-conscious about being such a ghoul. “Though I think I just spotted one of my neighbors out there.”

  “Oh-ho.” She hides her cup behind the counter. “We get people waiting outside at five forty-five sometimes, before we’ve even unlocked the doors—factory workers, cops, nuns, the all-night grocery kids.” She smiles at me. “Just not on this kind of a morning.”

  I order a round-flat loaf and watch one of the bakers march by in his long apron, carrying a tray with both hands.

  The door jingles and an icy waft of air fills the room: a customer, bundled in a thick, snow-flecked coat, turned-up collar, a knitted scarf wrapped up to the eyes, and a knitted cap pulled low over the ears and eyebrows.

  “Excuse me.” The girl attends to the customer. Outside the window, the newspaper truck pulls in the alley behind the bakery and parks. The driver, in a parka so dense and stiff it looks bulletproof, tugs on the rear doors of his truck. I loiter by the window a few moments, reluctant to go back into the cold.

  The deliveryman comes through a side door into the front of the shop toting a bundle of papers in each hand. He wings them up onto the ledge against the inner wall where customers will see them as they walk in. Then he slices through the binding on each stack so they snap stiffly open like clamshells. I lean over, take one off the top, and study the headlines.

  After the customers clear out, the girl starts sorting bread into the bins. “So anyway,” she says, her arms full of bread. “Why you out with us vampires today?”

  “Oh—” I peel the paper open but don’t read it. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  The girl laughs and looks at the ceiling. “Sleep? What’s that?”

  I nod and add, “Actually, I’m a vampire too.” And then I see it, a small item on the front page, below the fold: Baby Terror in Onondaga County? My breath halts in my chest.

  The girl is asking me something else, but my hearing has gone muffled, as if plunged underwater. I lift the paper off the table.

  SYRACUSE, NY. Eerie echoes of the recent anthrax mailings resonate through Central New York as grieving parents accuse police of staging a cover-up. Erin Cogan of Lucius, whose infant son Matthew died in December, was initially told by the city’s medical examiner, Nan Ronson, that her child had been claimed by Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. This week, however, investigators revealed that Matthew’s death, along with that of at least five other babies, was due to contact with blankets tainted with toxic dyes.

  “First they tell us it was SIDS. Now they’re telling us that we wrapped our baby in poison,” said Ms. Cogan, immediately following the press conference at the city crime lab.

  Cogan, a defense attorney with Bankens, Thiller, and Tubbs, says that their blanket was mailed to them anonymously. “We’d assumed it came from someone at my office,” she said. “We were wrong.”

  My fingers feel numb on the paper.

  Lena Dawson, of the Wardell Center for Forensic Sciences, revealed earlier this week that she and other city investigators had started looking into the possibility of a serial killer. “Children’s lives are at stake. This is deadly serious,” she stated.

  For a moment, my name drifts there, disembodied; my eyes float over it. Then I’m remembering the day the Haverstraw case broke—my face suddenly appeared on the evening news. I knew that the woman in the tan herringbone suit was pointing a microphone at me and yet I still didn’t quite get it; certainly I didn’t expect to see myself materialize on the screen as Charlie and I were eating dinner. My phone began to ring—more reporters began calling. And then the commissioner, furious, demanding to know why I’d talked with them.

  The paper settles from my fingers to the table.

  I CLUTCH AT MY COAT and stumble in the half-light of streetlamps, still an hour or so to go before the morning sun. The days are supposed to start getting longer, but in January they just seem shorter and shorter. I walk with my head bowed against the wind but also against the old fear of recognition. Even though there was no photograph, the mere mention of my name in print is enough to rattle me. If I can just get home, I can think. That’s as far as I can reason: if I can just get home. . . .

  But when I turn on to James Street, someone is standing on the step in front of my building, back to me. A woman, I think. The wind catches the stranger’s hair, making it pulse and whip, and opens the long coat into a wide billow, revealing a flash of white underneath. My eyes are tearing from the snow and wind, so it’s hard to see anything. But even before she turns, I know: she’s looking for me.

  I slip into the shadow of the glassed-in bus stop across the street. Snow hisses in waves against the walls of the shelter, stippling it white, then turning transparent. I feel light-headed. When I close my eyes, I recall Joan’s bright white blouse at the coffee shop. I step backward, into a blast of stinging snow.

  Up on the steps, the woman turns sharply. I hurry across James Street and a moment later, I hear footsteps behind me.

  That’s when some instinct spikes in me: I start running. My feet arch in my boots, as if to grip the ice, my knees bent, head bent against the wind, the thunder of my breath in my head. There’s nothing rational to it—though I flash on Charlie’s human being lesson—people should think with their brains, not their bodies—I’m driven by a flash of terror, a sudden unreasoning, bodily panic. I slip on the slick sidewalk, caught between a run and a walk; I hurry down several blocks, in and out of the halos of streetlights, through intersections, then ducking into an alley.

  Inside the narrow passageway, I stumble to a stop and try to catch my breath, panting as much from fear as from exertion. I can’t draw enough air—the cold tightens my lungs, my eyes stream tears which freeze along my cheeks. The alley is dark as a tunnel. Narrow enough that I could stretch my arms and touch the buildings on either side. It runs the length of the block. Snow has drifted in on both ends, but the alley tapers off to dry pavement in the middle. It’s littered with cigarette butts, gum wrappers, crushed paper cups, and bags. I hold one hand against the side of the wall and creep toward the black center. There’s a rumpled blanket—someone has slept here.

  Just when I start to think that I’ve lost her, I look up and see a silhouette at the end of the alleyway. About twenty feet away. I’ve crept into the dark, but she seems to be peering straight in at me. I freeze, pressed against the building. As I stare out at the distant figure, I see long hair lift in the wind and I realize I don’t know who this is.

  She approaches the dark interior. “Who is that in there?” Her voice seesaws, menacing and ethereal.

  I don’t speak or move, frightened by the teetering voice. I tell myself it’s just some crazy homeless person. Charlie’s right—got to get out of this neighborhood. I try to calm myself by counting my shaky breaths; after five, the woman turns and moves on.

  I take another tentative breath and after a long gawk down the alley, I step away from the wall. At that instant, the woman reappears in the alleyway opening. She takes a couple of steps in, as far as the gray light at the entrance holds, and she cranes toward the interior darkness. I hear something like breath muddled with a low gurgle—an intimation of laughter. “Leeeena.” Her voice sings and echoes through the narrow space.

  Fear-dazed, I totter backward and kick what might be a garbage can lid, shocking myself.


  “Lena.” The strange voice pulses. “Are you still with us?” She takes another step in. I press my hand hard against the building, take another step back. I’d swear she can see me. I take another step back, trembling. “Why aren’t you saving the babies, Lena?” Her voice hisses through the air. A hot blast on my skin, fingers in my hair. I blunder backward, kicking the metal lid again with a loud rasp—I shriek, stumbling into a run.

  I run blindly, gasping, out the back of the alley, through grids of streetlights and building lights. The world is switched on in patches and I run in and out of long silhouettes, a solitary black form crossing.

  I run flat out for several blocks, until I can’t breathe and stagger to a walk. I glance over my shoulder, panting, and decide to take a roundabout route to the Lab. I try to stay hidden, on quiet streets, but I get turned around and find that I’m passing the gold doors and ornate, vaulted façade of the Bank of America. I turn down South Salina, half abandoned and forlorn, flanked by boarded-up buildings and shells of department stores. At times I hear footsteps behind me, then nothing.

  I turn left on Harrison, hurry several more blocks, walk under the highway overpass, and start up the pitched incline toward the university and hospital district. Finally, I can see the Lab building several blocks up ahead.

  It’s probably almost eight; on Saturday there’s usually one or two techs inside the Lab. I rush across the street. My scarf has come unraveled from my neck and my knitted cap is shoved back on my head so I can feel a film of sweat there starting to freeze.