“Mr. Memdouah.” I stop at the stairs. “What is it you want to show me? Where’re you going?”
He pauses, his hand on the newel post. “I know their hideout.”
CHAPTER 34
IN THE TWO YEARS I’VE LIVED AT THE ST. JAMES, I’VE NEVER TRULY felt afraid of Mr. Memdouah. Certainly, I wouldn’t have thought he was capable of murder, but I wouldn’t have said I really knew what he was capable of, either. He is sly and often loud and angry, and liable to say just about anything at any time.
I’m still groggy, struggling to think straight. I pick up the phone, but Keller doesn’t answer. I try the station and am dismayed to hear Ron Hodges’s voice on the other end. He’s a friend of Charlie’s. “Keller isn’t here,” he tells me, an edge in his voice. “Something I can help you with, Lena?”
I cling to the phone, trying to think. All I know about is dust. The sweat and dust leavings of the human form. Ask me about a fingerprint—really, anything—slopes, ridges, directions—ask me about fluo-rescing powders and vapors—and I can give you an answer. But a person. A personality. I have no answer for that. I say, “Ron, please tell Keller . . . I’m here—with my neighbor. He’s a little, maybe, unstable. I’m not sure what to—he keeps saying that he wants to show me their hideout. . . .”
“Whose hideout?” It sounds like he’s already got a pen and notepad in hand.
“No, no—it’s okay. I just want Keller to know—I’m going out after him.”
“Lena. Don’t go anywhere. Just sit tight—I’ll send a man right now.”
“I got to go—he’s already on the stairs.” I put down the phone and hurry out.
Mr. Memdouah is thumping down the stairs, shouting. “I have to show you something, Lena, something essential to your case.”
“Where are you going?” I’m breathless, clomping after him.
As he rounds the second-floor landing, he says, “Did I tell you that I knew your father?”
I frown. “You mean my foster father? Henry McWilliams? Did he fix your car for you?”
He doesn’t speak again until we’re on the first floor. Then he says, “I mean the other one. The one who made you.”
Memdouah pushes through the lobby door ahead of me. There’s no way he knows anything about me: he can’t take anything in. Half the time he doesn’t even seem to know my name.
I hurry after him.
WE WALK OUT the apartment and into the city. It’s still as glass, not a bad night, relatively speaking. Memdouah’s face is surprisingly mobile and I marvel at its expressiveness—thoughts and feelings spilling through him like water. The strips of streetlights play over him. He talks as we walk, gesturing, at times almost frantically, fingers splayed in twisting, spiraling movements. “Your father, yes,” he says as I catch up to him again. I have to trot every couple of steps to keep up with him. His eyes are cast up to the green star on the MONY Building. “He was a graduate student in my Phenomenology of the City class. I wasn’t much older at the time. He was charming. He had the long, smooth jaw and shining hair. Handsome, like that actor. . . .”
“What actor did he look like?” I ask. I scan the streets, hoping to spot Keller’s little Camaro coming around the corner. The cool air soothes my throat and the stars are arrayed beautifully above us, over the city buildings.
“Oh, now you want names? Well, let me think. He was in that movie—I saw it by accident. It’s a mistaken identity. The bad guys catch up with him. They’re going to kill . . . they’re going . . .” Now his gaze seems to telescope out, the light in his eyes changes, crystallizing. “It’s what I have to—I have to tell you,” he whispers urgently.
I take his arm. “Maybe we should go back now, what do you say?” We’ve gone several blocks and a light snowfall has started. But he slips out of my grasp. He’s so wound up with the energy of talking that he skids and nearly falls several times on the icy sidewalks, as if his thoughts are too much for him to manage. I keep steadying him.
He says: “I’ve been watching it all very closely, very closely, Lena. Before the news story broke, of course. Really, listen. I’m not an idiot! No. I might be crazy, but I’m not stupid. I’ve known about it from almost the beginning. Of course, first it had to happen for me to know—for me to really, really know. But then it did and then I knew. See, I saw him in the bakery. . . .”
“In—?” My lungs constrict with the exertion.
“The bakery! The bakery! Columbus Bakery.”
He wobbles as we step off a curb and I catch him again. We’re heading down Salina Street, into the South Valley neighborhood. “You’ve seen the killer at the bakery?”
He rubs at his right ear a bit fiercely—he doesn’t have a hat, and I’m sure his raincoat isn’t warm enough. But we’re moving so quickly, he may not feel the cold. In fact, he doesn’t seem to hear my question and it seems that he has only an intermittent sense that I’m actually beside him. “I saw him there first—at the bakery. Or was it a woman? It was a group—as they say on the news? A cell. We started talking—I struck up a conversation because of their appearance. They had a quality—that’s the only word—a quality, so that I could tell immediately that something was terribly wrong here. And yet it was fascinating to me, you understand, because, of course, I am a social scientist. Though I repudiate sociology and its colonialist imperative, I still find—I still find—”
We’re stopped at a corner; the light has changed, but Mr. Memdouah doesn’t move. He looks around uncertainly, as if he’s forgotten why we’re here. Several blocks ahead of us, I notice the streetlights taper away and I realize we’ve walked all the way to the road leading into Anderson Woods, a city park overgrown with stands of tall, dense evergreens. I can smell notes of pine and ozone, and a hazy snow has started to come down. I pause at the entrance to the park. “Mr. Memdouah, where are we going? I don’t think I want to go much farther tonight.”
He gazes around as if at the individual snowflakes. “Well, they’re not there now,” he says mildly. Then he glares at me. “You can’t stop!” he blurts. “We’re almost there. I’ll take you right to it. They have a hiding place up in the woods. They won’t be there. They go out, making their rounds.” He lifts his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to know who’s been killing?”
“Well then, we should call the police. They need to know about this.”
He rears back. He looks immense and wild and his raincoat flaps in the wind. “The police? Police. What’re they going to do? They won’t even—you’ll see. These people—they have a sacred agenda. The idea is—the idea is—” He lowers his face, his eyes with their gleam, his lips straining.
I step back away from him and he moves closer, his lips drawn into a rictus. I can see the tips of his teeth, white and even. He’s agitated, his face pink with energy even in this cold, and there seems to be a sheen of sweat on his forehead. His breath comes in steaming puffs. “You must understand. Violence—for example, war and terrorism—always misses its stated goal. Violence creates its own aim, which is the creation of more violence. You see? A problem in logical deduction.” He says this in an imploring voice. Then: “You don’t have to go. But I have to go now. Right right now.”
I hesitate, but cross the street dutifully. I don’t know if it’s even remotely possible that he knows about a terrorist group in Syracuse—any more than he could possibly know about my birth father. But I’m worried about letting him wander in the dark by himself.
“Lena, Lena, don’t be afraid.” His voice drops. “You can’t quit now after all your hard work—we’re so close! They’re right in there.” He points in the direction of the park. “They’ve got a sort of bunker, right in there, right up over the hill, just over, you’ll see it’s so close. It’s a wonderful place.”
“I just don’t think we should be doing this—what if someone is there?” I don’t mean to speak to him a
s if he were a child, but somehow that keeps happening.
He grabs my arm roughly. “What about the babies? There are so many babies, Lena. The woods are filled with them!”
Again, he swoops lower, his face so close his features flatten—I can see the broad simian quality, the ancient eyes. He whispers so close I can feel it on my cheek. “They told me not to wake you up.” His raincoat snaps as he turns and starts running toward the park.
I’VE LIVED IN SYRACUSE almost all my life, but I’ve never before walked into this pocket of woods, right here within the city limits. It’s dense with branches and roots and I’m quickly disoriented. But Memdouah moves between the trees as if he knows this place by heart. The streetlights dwindle, then disappear as we walk, and all I have to go by is a half lobe of a moon. At first I think I smell a river, but we turn and start banking up a slope, and then all I can smell are the rough, rich evergreens—dark glimmerings all around.
Something chirrs in my ear and I pull up abruptly with a gasp.
“Lena?” Mr. Memdouah cries—he’s a few steps ahead of me. “Are you there?
“Mr. Memdouah? Wait for me!” I have trouble making him out. His form melts between the trees. The snow gets thicker, as if springing up from the trees themselves. It’s crystalline and sharp-edged and I have to keep blinking to see anything. “Mr. Memdouah,” I call, my voice carried away on the bluster of snow. “I want to go back”
“What ‘go back,’ Lena? What does that mean? There is no other place or time available to us on earth.”
I turn sideways, pushing between the hard, springy branches, furious that I’ve gotten myself into this.
“It’s a beautiful night, my dear,” he says, so excited he’s practically singing. “I’m here, Lena,” he shouts. “I’m here and here and here and . . .” His voice fades out for a second. Then he shouts, “It’s a beautiful night, not a drop of snow in sight.”
As we walk, the wind shifts and takes on a deep measureless dimension, filled with ice and needles. The wild trees—firs, oaks, maples, hickories, hemlocks—all turn black and anonymous, and lose their boundaries. I navigate by my hands and sense of smell, going on little more than faith and panic. Mr. Memdouah is barely a flicker, a ghost rustling in my peripheral vision. I’d turn around, but I’m already lost.
Gradually, though, the trees open up and it becomes easier to walk. I begin to notice that there’s a primordial loveliness to this place—an equipoise. The sounds and lights of the city are remote as if they’d never existed at all. I look up and the night seems to break off into pieces like chamois, fluttering in a flock of butterflies just above my head. Invisible hands sweep over my body. My body expands, my lungs relax, my throat and stomach soften. I feel weightless; I feel like I could choose to walk into the air itself, that it’s merely a matter of choosing. The breath floats out of my lungs and for a liquid moment my heart rests. I feel the night air, the grain of the snow, feel the ice crystals forming on my lashes and nostrils. I can’t clear my eyes. I see in flashes. It seems that something is shadowing me, magnifying the sound of my own breathing, as if the woods were rattling with spirits. The sensation is both eerie yet oddly enticing, calling me out of myself.
After walking for perhaps a half hour—though it’s hard to know, as my sense of time has vanished along with the city—I rest against a wide, dipping branch and try to catch my breath. The ground has been slowly rising and now it banks steeply upward. There’s another roar and gust of snow. I push off the branch and start up the incline, stepping on bulging roots, around frozen white trunks. I try to stick to the direction that Mr. Memdouah seemed to be going. This is, after all, a city park, and it seems inevitable that I’ll find my way out if I can stay on a straight course. But then I’ve started having to fight waves of grogginess that have returned, blurring my eyesight. My breath is increasingly shallow. The trees sway a little and their fragrance intensifies, reminding me of another place. I blink, trying to clear my eyes, and the trees grow long black aprons, necklaces of teeth. The pine is the incense on the hands of nuns and I’m surrounded by nuns in their plain dark habits. I breathe out, marveling at their towering bodies and white hands. All around me is the sound of babies, and behind this a canopy of birdsong, palm fronds weaving and unweaving in trade winds.
They’re here, I understand, to help me to sleep. I lower myself and curl up on the long, shining grasses. I feel warm, I feel comforted.
CHAPTER 35
I WAKE UNDERWATER, IN SHALLOW GOLDEN LAYERS. CONSCIOUSNESS comes in layers, deepening and expanding. The water evaporates to greenery, then birdsong, then a smell of jungly earth, then a gentle hand framed in silvery fur touches my face.
Then my inner world dissolves: a white, hairless arm is reaching toward my mouth. I shout and grab the wrist, little bones bending under my grasp, and there’s a high-pitched shriek, people shaking me. “Jesus. Lena, stop!”
Hands on me, faces lowering too close, the voices smearing, a high din of beeping equipment. I beat at them: they’re here to take me away. Taking me from the green world. I beat furiously.
THE NEXT TIME I wake it’s a different time of day. I feel clobbered, like someone banged me on the head with a frying pan, and the back of my throat and sinuses are burning. It hurts to move my eyes, and my neck is stiff all the way to my spinal cord. Someone is standing over me, watching closely—really, monitoring is the word—a woman who introduces herself only as my nurse. She says, “Hang on, I’m going to get Dr. Hoyd.”
The doctor has intelligent, kindly eyes. She introduces herself and tells me I’m in Upstate Medical Center, that they moved me out of the ICU this morning, in stable condition. I look around at the plastic desk-style table near the bed, the upholstered visitor’s chairs. It looks like a hotel room. Dr. Hoyd shines a penlight into my eyes and mouth, checks my feet, undrapes her stethoscope and taps my chest. She asks how I’m feeling and checks my reflexes. I watch her opening and flexing my hands, examining the curve of my arms, her fingers slide up the nodes behind my ears. She places a digital thermometer under my tongue, another inside my armpit, and nods and says, “Good,” when the reading appears.
She has me lean forward and she presses the cool ring of the stethoscope to my back. Twice she asks me to relax, inhale deeply, and hold, so I close my eyes and wait as she listens. The matching lilt of our breathing is even and concentric.
“Good,” she says again, coming around to the front of the bed, sliding the stethoscope from her ears. “Very good. You’re lucky. You were passed out in the cold—you’ve got a nice impressive bruise there on the side of your forehead—but no lingering frostbite.”
I try to sit up but feel dizzy and slump back in the bed.
“Easy, there,” she says. “So what can you tell me about last night?”
I consider this. “I’m not sure what happened,” I tell her. “Or . . . I was walking . . . I was in the woods, I think. Then I—then I . . .”
“You were with an older man?” She checks her notes. “Marshall Memdouah? He called the paramedics and said he’d ‘lost’ you. He was in quite a state, apparently.”
“Mr. Memdouah—oh Lord . . . is he okay?” It comes back to me—following him through the trees, the blowing snow. “Where is he?”
“They took him to the VA hospital. They’re treating him for frostbite—otherwise he’s okay—well, aside from the fact that he’s in custody.”
“Mr. Memdouah? They arrested him? For what?” And then I remember bits of our conversation last night, Memdouah’s words, eat the babies! “Oh no, no, no.” I try to sit up again and the doctor gently pushes me back down.
“Time to rest, Lena. You nearly froze, your air passages are badly inflamed, and your heartbeat’s irregular. You’ve got to take it easy.”
“Mr. Memdouah? He’s my neighbor—he’s schizophrenic. He doesn’t know what he’s saying half th
e time. He spouts off all kinds of stuff. I need to talk to the police.”
“First I want you to settle down and sleep. I’ll check in later and then we’ll talk about it. Okay?” She closes the folder and slips her pen into her jacket pocket. “I’m scheduling some bloodwork to make sure there aren’t any lingering effects. When’s the last time you had a physical?”
I duck my head, tucking a strand behind one ear. I don’t like doctors looking at me. “A while.”
She reopens the folder, jots something on my chart. “We’ll do a full workup. All things considered, you’re in decent shape.” She takes my wrist and presses her fingertips against my pulse. “Luckily, you’re young, you’re in good overall physical condition.”
“I like to walk.”
“Lucky for you.” She tells me to stay bundled up good for the next few days. She asks if I have any questions for her, and I hesitate. “There is something.”
She nods, still writing in the folder.
I lie back against the pillows and run my fingertips along my brow bone, trying to find the ghostly headache that hasn’t completely subsided. “Have you ever heard of a place called Lyons Hospital?”
She clicks her pen and slides it into her jacket pocket. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“It was torn down, I think, back in the seventies.”
“Ah well, I just moved here four years ago. Hang on a sec,” she says. She props the door open and leans into the corridor. “Any of you ever heard of Lyons Hospital?”
I hear someone say, “That nasty old place?”
Someone else says, “Oh, I haven’t thought of Lyons in years.” She pokes her head in the doorway. It’s the woman I met at the Columbus Bakery. “Hello, Lena.” She smiles at me and enters, smoothing at the front of her blue smock, a matching surgical mask around her neck. “I’m Opal—do you remember? I switched my rotation when I heard you’d been admitted, so I could say hi.” She stands by the bed. “How you feeling, there?”
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