Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  He’s shaking out the match. “Back where?”

  “To my old life—the Lab, my friends, to Frank being in charge, and I was living at the St. James, and I had dinner every Monday with Charlie. Pot roast special.”

  Keller sits cross-legged on the floor, matches at his feet. “You eat pot roast?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “But I miss ordering it. Because that was when I didn’t know about Opal or dead babies or Myrtle. I miss the rain forest.” I bite my lips. “It seems like a thousand years ago.”

  “I can cook pot roast.” Keller pushes up from the floor, knees cracking.

  “Don’t burn the folders,” I tell him. “I don’t want to move back to the St. James.”

  “Good. I wasn’t going to let you.” He takes them out of the fireplace.

  KELLER SAYS HE wants to show me something.

  There’s a porch on the west side of his house. It has wide pine floors and floor-to-ceiling screens. We walk out in our coats, hands buried in our pockets. Keller sits on an oversized rattan chair and pats the space beside him. I sit and take in the view. The house is built on a rise and the porch overlooks a neighborhood of rooftops, smoking chimneys, and drizzling, platinum sky. “Not bad,” I say. “For Syracuse. In April.” His arm is curved around my shoulders: I feel emptied out and convalescent.

  “Just pretend it’s August,” he says.

  “These trees—they’re so full and green. . . .”

  “There you go.”

  “Look at all those kids playing kick ball. And—do I smell a barbeque?” I sit sideways, slide my legs over the arm of the chair, and lean back against Keller. “Yeah, it’s good—I like this place.”

  “I built it. See, winter’s so endless around here—it was my idea of how to make the summer longer,” Keller says. “Even if it’s freezing.” He touches the doorframe beside the chair. “There were a few years there where I had a lot of time on my hands. I stayed home on disability for almost a full year—started tearing the whole place apart.”

  I let my gaze wander around the steeples and the gabled rooftops of the neighborhood. “You were in retreat.”

  “More like I was seriously freaked out,” he says, shifting so the chair creaks. “I was in college when my father died—I was studying architecture at the time, actually. But I dropped out and went into the police academy. My mother thought I was nuts—no one in my family had been a cop—not like some of these guys and their cop dynasties.”

  “I know,” I say. “Their great-great-grandpappies were cops.”

  “Yeah, exactly. For me it was the opposite—like, suddenly I had to do something no one else in the family had done. Dad was an architectural engineer, of course.” His laugh is muted. He moves his hand over the chair arm now as if he’s brushing something away. “Well. So, I did it. Academy. Detective. And I loved it. You know? I really, really loved being a cop. It was a total shock.

  “So then one day, I’ve been on the job for a couple years, we get a call out to this house on the east side? It’s pretty routine. Domestic incident. Guy has a crap day at work, stops at the watering hole, comes home plastered, and starts shooting—winged his wife. Then he takes off with the gun and says he’s gonna shoot the boss. The usual fiasco. By time I got to the scene, the wife’s already bandaged by the EMTs and she’s so pissed she’s hardly in shock. She tells us where the husband went, gives us directions how to get there, and what to do to him once we catch him.

  “So I haven’t left yet, I’m just sitting in my car outside their house, no vest, making a few notes, when I hear this crack on my windshield. I think some wise-ass kid threw a stone at the car. But all of a sudden I can’t breathe right. I look up, there’s a perfect little dime-sized hole in my windshield. And my chest is soaking wet.”

  For a moment Keller doesn’t speak and then, when he does, his voice is tight. “Turns out the guy snuck back in the house while his wife was getting bandaged. He saw all the cop cars on his property and decided to be an badass and took a potshot from the bedroom window—claims he didn’t think there was someone in the car. He—” Keller’s voice stops. He doesn’t say anything for several seconds, though I can feel a vibration moving through him. His fingers lace between my mine. I tighten my hold. It seems as if the air on the porch has begun changing—it has density and warmth. There’s a hazy little glow of sun and the landscape takes on a richness like a Renaissance painting.

  The vibration is there again, but this time he’s laughing, a bare, suppressed laugh. He says, “The guy was this close to shooting me in the heart. Can you believe it? This close. Still wasn’t very great where he did manage to hit me. Nicked my lung.” He smiles. “That moron went away for a long time. I had to have two blood transfusions. I was in the hospital for a month. And when I got out, I couldn’t drive anymore.”

  “You couldn’t . . .”

  “I couldn’t even get into the car. I felt fine. I wanted to get right back on the job, but all of a sudden I couldn’t stand being in a car—any car. And I didn’t want to touch guns anymore.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  He smiles and eases back in the chair, but now it seems that in the telling of this story we’ve exchanged something and he isn’t looking at me at the moment. “It might be understandable, but it sure makes it hell to be a cop. I couldn’t drive for a year. I went on disability and rebuilt my whole fucking house.” He reaches up and touches the wall behind us. “Somewhere in all that mess, my wife got fed up with me hanging around and she walked out. Which was fine. Which was fine,” he says softly. Then he laughs and says, “But that was when I had to start driving to get groceries. And I realized if I could drive the fifteen blocks to the store, I could probably drive twenty and make it to work. That’s what I did. I couldn’t do much more than that—just quick trips around town. And my hands shook every time I did, and I could barely make it through intersections. But it was enough. They gave me a desk job—filling out reports—typing up other people’s lousy handwriting. And that’s how I became a glorified secretary.”

  “People say you’re the brains of the department.”

  Now he glances at me. “I ain’t.”

  “That’s what the lab examiners say. That you’re, like, the one who knows what’s going on.”

  His gaze is flat, pragmatic. “They consult with me on cases. I go to the meetings, I help analyze situations. I do research and phone interviews. But basically, without the car and the gun, my big-time career stopped dead in its tracks six years ago.”

  “But you went out with me,” I say. “You drove me to the Cogan house—that was way out there.”

  He leans forward in the chair, leans his elbows on his knees so I can see the slope of his shoulders through his sweater, the dip at the nape of his neck. “Yeah, I guess something’s started to ease up.” He links his hands together and lets them dangle between his knees, a little hopelessly. I watch his shoulders rise and he says, smiling at the floor, “I wanted to be with you.”

  I turn and touch the side of his face. I draw his attention forward, toward me. He lowers his face. My eyes sink shut as his breath touches my face and there is the warm dissolve of his lips on mine.

  WE KISS. We slide sideways into kisses, and the big rattan chair creaks and moves under our weight. But it’s so cold out on the porch, getting colder as the night comes, we have to stop and flee back indoors.

  In Keller’s bedroom, I watch myself peeling the sweater up over my head, unzipping, then skinning off my jeans. The bedside light with its white paper shade is on. Keller waits for me on the bed, watching without speaking or taking off his own clothes; he holds out his arms and I move into them. “This okay?”

  “I—yeah, I think it is.” I’m breathless and can’t tell if it’s because I’m scared or excited.

  “You don’t have to do this,”
he says as he slides the bra straps off my shoulders. He kisses the base of my throat.

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “Definitely not,” he says and kisses me in a straight line along my clavicle, murmuring, “No, no, no, no.”

  I pull off his sweater, then begin undoing the buttons on his worn blue shirt and he stops moving. Though we had sex once before, it took place in the dark and I couldn’t see his body. Now he watches my eyes as I unbutton, as if he’s waiting to see what will happen. When I get to the last button, I take the sides of his shirt between my fingers, as if unfolding a piece of paper. He turns his eyes away. In the bedroom light, the wound scar on the left side of his chest has a starburst of pink scar tissue at its center. I move my fingers over it—it feels soft as a lip. He flinches.

  “I’m sorry, does it hurt?”

  “No—no—it just . . .” He takes my fingertips and kisses them. “I’m used to guarding it. An old habit.”

  “An old habit,” I echo as he pulls me into the bed beside him. “Old habits are wonderful.”

  His kisses move from my mouth to just beneath my ear and circle the base of my throat. He removes the rest of his clothes and I’m pleased by the warmth of his skin, its constellation of freckles, its baked color that makes my fingers look pale and olive as I move them across the globe of his shoulder.

  “Old habits are wonderful,” he echoes back, his hands rinsing along the curve of my hips.

  For me, I suppose, kisses are an act of trust, a dive into the waves. At first, my mind moves ahead, imagining each touch the moment before it happens. But then Keller sinks into the bed beneath me, waiting for me to come to him. We go slowly and the ghost of pain is still there between us, like ectoplasm just beneath the skin. But something in me is more insistent: if this is going to hurt me, I think, I’ll deal with it later. Because I want this now.

  LATER THAT EVENING, Keller is snoozing on his back, one forearm resting over his eyes, his chest rising and falling—I slip out, trying not to wake him. The folders are still on the coffee table, exactly where we abandoned them.

  I sit on the couch, pick up the pile, plop it on my lap. I open the first folder, stare at it blankly.

  Keller follows me in, yawning hugely and buttoning his shirt. He shuffles to the couch and sits next to me. He kisses my neck and says, “Good?”

  “Just fine,” I say shyly, smiling at the papers in my lap, taking in his scent.

  “Okay,” he says. “Now this.” He takes half the pile again.

  I try taking more notes, running columns of details—vital statistics, names, blood types. I read and reread the pages, hunting for anything familiar. The house is so still: no parrots laugh in the window; no lizards chitter along the walls. The names and numbers and columns run together and after an hour of reading, and then skimming, another batch of folders I feel hopeless again. “This isn’t working,” I tell Keller. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “That’s how it is sometimes. Don’t give up,” he says, flipping through the pages. “Don’t give up. Look for anything unusual, anything that strikes you. Use your instincts. You might just be in here: Wait for it. Let it come to you. This might be the only information you ever get.” He riffles through the pages, checks their reverse sides. “All these babies,” he murmurs. He picks up a new folder and, using the tip of an index finger, he partially lifts the cover page of vital statistics away from where it’s stapled to the inside of the folder, then starts tearing it from the staples.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Look at this,” he says, tearing the paper away.

  Stapled by all four corners to the inside of the folder—as if they never imagined anyone would want to look at them, on the reverse side of the page of vital statistics—is a pair of baby footprints.

  A chill runs from the crown of my head down through my body. I hold the page in my hand. It’s frail and dry, the tiny footprints detailed as an engraving. I touch the outline of one foot. We grow into the prints we’re born with—our body’s exquisite signature.

  Keller is already going back through all the previous folders, tearing the papers away from the staples. “They all have prints,” he says.

  THE INK PAD from my kit is too small to stamp adult feet, so to get a sample print, we must improvise. Keller rummages through his pantry and comes up with a bottle of red food dye. We pour this over a kitchen sponge and run the sponge over the sole of my foot. I step carefully and lightly onto a clean sheet of printer paper. I do this several times until we have some decent samples—blurred in places, but workable.

  I go back to the first folder. Keller tries to help me, comparing my long imprint to the babies’. The ones with differences in the major lines are easy to set aside. Things get more difficult when we run into prints with basic whorls and ripples similar to my adult sole print. Which is where the artistry of discernment occurs. I have a sloping ovoid print on the balls of my feet and bending whorls on the heels. Working slowly with the tip of a sharpened pencil to hold my place and a hand lens, I trace the hundreds of friction ridges, each print its own labyrinth.

  After examining seven, eight, then nine folders, I start to relax. Keller continues to study the folders, reading the babies’ statistics; occasionally he drops his chin, marking an item. But we both know that this is my work now—moving alone through the curving trail of the prints.

  And with each rejected set of prints, I realize that I’m feeling something like relief: after all these years of not-knowing my history, it seems that I’ve gotten comfortable with living in a state of suspense. With suspense, everything is still possible. Mystery contains its own possibilities—of parents and history. And knowing too much is a sort of loss. Each folder is easier for me to look at as it begins to seem less likely that I’m here.

  But prints are my homeland—the place, one might say, where I was born. So I continue reading because I know this path, I know how to do this. I read as if I were simply back at my desk in the Lab, looking at the prints of suspects and perpetrators and victims. I forget that I’m looking for myself.

  It takes hours. At some point, so late in the evening that I’ve forgotten about dinner, forgotten even about sleep, I come to the twenty-second folder, the second to last. I turn the torn-out page, and I know that I am looking at my own feet. The sight of them—the shell curls, the startling minute toes—moves me in a way I hadn’t expected, as if I’m looking at my own infant. Pressure rises in my chest. I check the prints and with each matching point, I feel it increasing: the heat of recognition. I look for discrepancies in the ridge paths between the questioned and the known—something to indicate the prints don’t match. But each comparison leads to one conclusion: it’s me.

  Keller is sitting across the room, surrounded by discarded folders, gazing out the window at the streetlights, when I finally look up. He studies my face for a moment, then puts his hand on the chair arm. “You found it.”

  “Number twenty-two, second to the last.”

  “You’re number twenty-two?” His voice seems to slide. He’s read through all the folders, though I can’t imagine he remembers each one. Still, he says, “Are you sure?”

  I look at the matching points, I check the number we penciled on the upper corner of each folder. “Twenty-two.”

  He moves back next to me on the couch. “Have you read the folder yet?” His face looks ashen, though I tell myself it’s the effect of the late hour. Keller shifts forward and I have the sudden inkling that he is about to take the folder from me.

  I stand, the folder open in my hands. “What’re you doing?”

  “Lena. Maybe you better just wait.” Keller stands also, his voice has a warning edge, but I turn my back to him to read and he doesn’t try to stop me.

  I start with the first page, a police report. This is different from the other f
olders. There is the officer’s name, the precinct. I skip over the initial information, incident data, and go directly to the report:

  2/12/70. Newborn infant, abandoned. Bruises on arms and legs. Contusion and frostbite of extremities. Mild hypothermia. Breathing partially obstructed by debris. Estimated 8–48 hours post-partum. Infant discovered covered with trash in dumpster on 1800 block James St. Officer responded to citizens’ reports of baby crying.

  I look up at Keller; there seems to be an odd, disembodied smile floating on my face. I don’t know why I can’t seem to stop smiling. “This is so weird!” I say, and then I hear the way my voice is shaking. I inhale through my nose, trying to calm myself, but even my breath is shaking. “This is so . . .” I look back at the folder. “It’s like it’s saying that . . .”

  Officer spoke with George Hudson manager of Giurgius’ Drugs, who owns the dumpster. Hudson reports hearing “strange whining sounds” coming from the dumpster and calling the police. Infant found wrapped in yellow blanket, lying beside stuffed animal toy. Officer conveyed infant and

  “This is completely bizarre.” I don’t look at Keller.

  conveyed infant and toy in squad car to Lyons Hospital. Infant reported in critical condition. No witnesses, no information on infant’s parents or their whereabouts.

  And there’s a police photograph—a black and white image of a tiny infant, arms flung out, eyes shut, nestled alone in a white nursery bed.

  ALMOST DEAD.

  A CHIRPING LAUGHTER is in the air. I know it’s my laughter, but still I look for the birds. I remember the sound of birds laughing over the dumpster. How’s that possible? No one would remember the day of their birth. Especially not me, when everything I try to remember, or think I remember, turns into laughing birds, monkeys in the trees, geckos with flickering tongues. I try to stop myself, but the more I try to hold back my laughter, the more there is. I laugh till my vision is sliding with tears and I can’t see Keller, I can’t see where I am. The laughter tastes sharp and metallic in my throat, like one of Opal’s poisons, and this strikes me as even funnier.