“Here we are,” she said, standing over the last stone. “This one’s yours.”
Mine? What could she possibly mean?
Cautious of her, keeping space between us, I looked down at the stone, saw a date that I had not memorized for its horrors, but which I had no trouble recognizing now that I was confronted with it, nearly a month after the fact.
“Do you understand now?” she said, looking at me with tired eyes.
“No,” I replied.
“The stone is symbolic of course. He cannot actually lie at rest here. He does not rest. He does not linger. He does what he must and he goes again, by the necessary means. But he’ll be back, as he has always done before.” She gestured across the graveyard suggestively.
“Do you mean . . . ?”
“Of course. They are all his markers, one for each of his exits. It is my way of honoring him, yes, but mostly it is my way of mapping him, of pretending to make sense of his comings and goings. Of course he cannot really be known. He has transcended knowledge in our crude terms. If it is to know him that you seek, then your path was finished before it began. What I give to you is the truth that he cannot be known so that you can go back and clean up whatever wreck he has left you, with the hope, if that is your wish, that you are not called upon again.” She shrugged. “Es ist außer unserer Kontrolle, as he is fond of saying. It is beyond our control.”
***
I was far from satisfied. That I was welcome there no more had been made obvious by the forcefulness with which she had seen me back to the road, refusing to answer the few questions my mind was able to patch together out of the scattered scrap material to which she had contributed her special knowledge or madness, whichever applied. As I walked back to town my disheveled thoughts kept circling to the notion of returning to the place I’d just left and eliciting, or outright stealing, more information. Indeed, breaking into at least the shop was a very real temptation, considering it stood outside the wall that protected the house. This was a convenience worthy of notice when you took into account that not only did Brazilians go so far as to build walls against potential intruders, they also placed broken glass on top of those walls—as the Mayor of Rio Tago had been good enough to pass along between ogles. I suppose the family—was it only she?—deemed a few racks of costumes out on the village outskirts not worth a burglar’s effort.
After checking in at the hotel, an understated, rather elegant place a couple blocks from the seaside, I showered, threw on a pair of shorts, and had lunch at the restaurant downstairs before walking down to the beach. As I strolled barefoot, soaking up the afternoon sun, I let my mind try to find its way through the clutter—a task easier said than done. Whenever I’d catch a glimmer among the gravestones, it would disappear under a barrage of second and third languages. Whenever I thought I saw meaning in that casual use of German, the strangest strain in the lingual medley, the shadow of a man who had died a dozen times would fall over it, muting it. The question of whether I would allow myself to even begin to entertain the woman’s incredible suggestion was a separate matter, and somewhat premature, I thought, with the puzzle still strewn across the table in individual pieces. The suggestion itself was another potential clue, to be taken along with certain keywords I had come away with from our meeting.
Among these keywords, ‘sample’ stood out the loudest. We were all samples to him, she’d said, almost as though dropping the clue intentionally—which brought up a whole other set of possibilities. The word implied something about him, that he was perhaps a doctor, or a scientist.
Or a god, I thought wryly, a god slipping between worlds of living and dead.
I dubbed this first clue my “flag word” as I started a tally, deciding I would plug the signals into a search engine later if I could find a computer.
Bless the information age. The internet had led me here, and with luck—and further assistance from the woman with whom I was by no means finished—the internet would continue to facilitate my search.
As I did my mental inventory, each word seemed to segue to the next, as though they were tag-teaming their way to some semblance of sense. Even without the aid of a search engine, possibilities emerged. Sample, scientist, and evolution certainly seemed points that could be connected, and not just in an associative way. The triangle formed of these dots appealed to a sixth sense that had made the thunderhead over my family its exclusive focus as it worked in the corridors of the subconscious. Truly, on some level I believe I already understood the essence of what was in the process. Not in a practical or even a theoretical respect, but in an organic one, from the point of view of a participant in larger things. As a result, the investigatory work could be argued to be an inherently superficial endeavor, the tale it might tell having already been told, in a finer, purer tapestry. But this line of thinking—as I stopped to pick up a seashell, admiring it, doing this mundane action—stretched the mind too far. It belonged to abstract thinkers, mathematicians. Best to back up, concentrate on the pattern emerging.
I wandered up to a large stone at the back of the recessed beach and sat down. I pulled out my pocket notepad, and wrote down the keywords, keeping those that suggested a pattern apart from the others. As I wrote the last word, ‘doctor’, in the tag-team group, a keyword that had come by less conventional means, and previous to my Portavora visit, bled through on its own, in its proper place. Twins was the word, and when combined with sample, scientist, doctor, evolution, Germany, and Brazil, more than a pattern emerged.
What had the woman said? I’m ‘mapping’ him. That’s what the pattern was becoming, a map, almost a path down the genome, and suddenly I couldn’t wait, in my wonder and dread, to get to that computer.
7
To my voiced approval, my hotel had a ‘business center’, which basically consisted of a computer and a printer perched on a desk that barely fit in the small cubicle. The internet service wasn’t the best, the load times irksomely long, but when the results for my search engine entry came up, the wait proved worth it. The very first link led to an interesting article, but when taken in context, became the unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls, a mysterious supporting document to a book built on faith or delusion.
The website was a news oriented publication out of the UK. The article, dated January 24, 2009, focused on the abnormal ratio of twins to single births in a small Brazilian town. That fearsome villain of the modern era, Josef Mengele, was named in the title of the article. Strange that a name which ordinarily existed in the pages of history books, a separate place whose events never impacted one personally, at least not detectably, should suddenly assume the shape and heft of the immediate concerns of life.
Still, I read as from a great distance, as we do when we’re confronted with ‘pulp nonfiction’, as I call it. The article stated that an Argentine historian, in a recently published book, claimed to have found the answer to the alarmingly high rate of twins, mostly blond-haired and blue-eyed, born in the town of Candido Godoi. Scientists had been baffled by the fact that one in five pregnancies in this village, as compared to the normal one in eighty, had resulted in twins. According to residents of the town, notorious SS physician Josef Mengele, who had fled from the advancing Red Army to South America in 1945, had made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, offering medical treatment to the women and providing medicines and requesting blood samples. It was soon after that, according to the Argentine historian, that the birth rate of twins began to rise.
I read over the article a couple times before sitting back and considering its content. While in the context of my personal search, the general subject matter clicked, the Mengele aspect didn’t. His claim to infamy lay in the deadly genetic experiments he performed at the Auschwitz concentration camp in an effort to find the key to producing twins in order to facilitate Hitler’s master race. The idea of the propagation of the Aryan race did not, to my mind, fit the elephant man. To put it differently, I could buy into the prospect of a genetic angle, but no
t on the article’s terms. The ends were unrelated, the parallels limited. If the elephant man had his roots in Nazi Germany, was indeed a doctor, and had in fact impregnated my daughter for some purpose, he was acting independently of—
I quit the train of thought midstream. Had I been using the present tense? Had I been doing what my daughter had done, what the woman had done, and spoken of him as if he was alive and still capable of influencing events? I had, God help me, and as I thought of him now, of driving the knife under his ribs, I found myself remembering—for the first time—the hint of a smile surfacing out of his twisted, dying features. A gesture apparent enough in the fragmented darkness of the hotel room to have imprinted itself on me.
Aryan propagation was an ideal to Hitler and his madmen. The elephant man wasn’t about ideals. His vision involved a future steeped in chaos. Randomness. Entropy. All of these, as it happened, were natural cousins of inevitability, which the woman had hinted at when she said, “It is beyond our control.” This was actually an idea that had been turning over in the back of my head for some time now. Inevitability could be broken down, as I saw it, into three categories: orchestration, which I’ve already touched on; natural order, which needs no commentary; and predestiny, the strictly metaphysical member of the group, whose symptoms for the purposes at hand included dreams, déjà vu, the gravitational pull, outside of external influence, of distant places. As terrible a prospect as it was, some combination of these seemed to have been in play all along, manifested in such innocent ways as a set of twin sisters happening to split up on the day one of them would disappear; a seasoned outdoorsman allowing himself to be seduced by an advertisement for the sort of excursion he normally wouldn’t give a second thought to; a father, with a whole arsenal of self-convincing justification, granting spur-of-the-moment permission for his daughter to accompany him, on school time, to Brazil; a house making itself available to a stranger and the medical operation to be performed on her. Manipulation played a large part, certainly, but the elephant man, to get back around to the point, was not acting alone. This belief was imbedding itself now. It was grounded, I fully confess, in instinct, feeling, but the article, as a comparison to my situation, had brought into focus things my mind had only been flirting with to this point. The bottom line was, while the tactics were cold, brutal, and god-terrible on both the SS and the elephant man fronts, the latter’s actions were not based solely in the vision of a madman—not unless he was a god, laying dreams over the unsuspecting while between worlds. His evolução—and here’s where natural order came into the picture—seemed to create its own momentum, requiring only a pilot with a ready supply of hallucinogens to suck on for inspiration as he steered his craft, made his maneuvers, dropped bundles here and there, a trail to follow into utter apocalypse.
Orchestration. Predestiny. Natural order.
How had the woman put it? If there is one thing in which we can take comfort, it is the knowledge that it is not him we serve. For its informational value, this capsule digested well. And if I believed its information, believed in some larger self-propelled design that perhaps only one person, or being, understood, then I should in turn shed any reservations or inhibitions concerning the possibility that he indeed was other than mortal, and treat statements like They are all his markers, one for each of his exits and You’ve been here before, a time or two, when the masks were involved as factual. I should pursue my answers with this same open-mindedness, employing my tolerance for the notion of black miracles by actually incorporating those miracles into my reasoning. In a way the design itself demanded it. How could I find my own gears within its internal logic otherwise?
Of course, by doing this I was allowing for a situation that put Kristin at further risk. Shouldn’t I, following my own logic, be at home guarding her rather than in Brazil seeking answers? A tough call, considering knowledge potentially armed me, but then, if I was willing to accept inevitability, what difference did it make anyway? The currents would flow as the currents would flow. No, that’s where I drew the line. Accepting the idea of a larger design was not the same as accepting the idea of inevitability. Nor was the idea of inevitability the same thing as inevitability itself. Natural law had the moon in a fixed orbit around the earth, but that didn’t mean a comet couldn’t come along and upset the picture. Yes, natural law continued to apply, whatever the fate of the satellite, but it was the fate that mattered, not the law. And when Kristin’s was concerned, there were no inalterable forces. To entertain the absoluteness of anything lying at odds with hope and love was to forfeit human meaning, and therefore humanity itself.
Proceeding with what allowances I was willing to make, the question I sought an answer to could be honed down to this: Why had the elephant man killed one of my twin daughters and impregnated the other? Why mine? Had he killed and impregnated others as well? It could easily be extrapolated from the woman’s comment about others like myself coming to the costume shop that not only had they done what I had done—killed the elephant man?—they had also come for the same reason I had. Which meant their families, their children had been targeted, too. Were their children also twins? Was there something intrinsic to multiple births that also applied to the design? Was the elephant man looking for something? A key, like the Nazi geneticists? Had it already been found?
A knock at the room’s open door interrupted my thoughts. I turned to find a Brazilian gentleman standing there. He said something in Portuguese, gesturing at the computer.
“Yes, of course, sir,” I said reluctantly. “Just give me a moment.” I held up that many fingers while impulsively dragging the cursor down to the digital time function in the right-hand corner of the screen, an action akin to checking one’s watch. When the date popped up at the touch of the cursor, I stared at it a moment, wondering what the world would be like today had the future been left in Nazi hands. Would I be sitting here right now? Sitting here, it hit me with some annoyance, with this gentleman hovering behind me. I wasn’t sure whether he could see Dr. Mengele staring dead-eyed out of the computer from his angle, but the looming was outright rude.
“Please,” I said after clicking the printer icon, closing the window, and pushing the chair back—all in one motion. “You obviously need it more than I do.”
I waited a moment on the two pages to print. As I pulled them out and left the room, closing the door gently by way of making a point about privacy, I was sure I heard him say in English, “One wonders.”
Through the square window in the door, I saw that I’d inadvertently minimized rather than X’d out of the page and he’d called it up again. It and the face haunting it.
Don’t get lost in there, I wished him silently and went to my room for a hot shower massage before looking into dinner.
***
After a pleasant meal on the seafront, I managed to get in almost an hour of computer time before a couple appeared, making their presence known the more civilized way, by lingering in the hallway. When I realized they were there I quickly gave up my spot, having far exceeded the posted time limit. I’d accomplished nothing really as I’d continued my keyword search, coming up with basically more of the same. Some of the stories were less far-fetched than others, but all led in directions that didn’t feel right to me. I’d been about to pursue results for Evolução Handmade Costumes on the off chance that might take me somewhere when the couple showed up. Just as well, I told myself. My mind and body needed rest.
Even with the help of the two beers I picked up from the lobby bar on the way to the room, my thoughts proved not so easy to clear. Something nagged at me, something to do with my first visit to the computer room, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whatever it was—and it seemed of crucial importance when the glimmer shone brightest in its peripheral orbit—it wouldn’t be gleaned by forceful exertion, so I eased off, letting it to its own schedule. Meanwhile my body, not to be deprived, went into a sort of torpor state, allowing the electrochemical activity upstairs to proceed f
ree-radically. I was sitting on the bed staring at the wall, a non-act I had been engaged in for an unknown span of time as I debated over how I would approach the woman tomorrow, when my cell phone shocked me out of my coma.
An unease fell over me as I saw my home number displayed. If it was Felicia, she would not be calling for news at my end. She was not brave enough to suffer it alone.
“Hello.”
“Barry, it’s me. I think Kristin’s grip is starting to slip again. She’s said some things . . . some rather alarming things about her, quote, babies. They want to use them, use one of them anyway, for some awful purpose. I guess she had another nightmare, though I didn’t hear anything from her room. How long are you going to be, Barry? I don’t want to interrupt the trip, but I think you should consider coming home as soon as possible.”
“Give me tomorrow to finish up my business here,” I said. “I’ll leave no later than Thursday morning. The return flight is scheduled for Friday, but the airline gave me the leeway to reschedule it, depending on space. Just keep her close to you, Felicia. I’m sure everything will be all right until I get back.”
Funny how we rarely remember our exact words to someone until we realize they were the last ones spoken.
***
As if in answer to the day’s thoughts and possibilities, when I finally fell asleep that night I had the most vivid dream I could remember ever having experienced. It was snowing, coming down softly and in enormously exaggerated flakes, their crystalline patterns visible to the naked eye on the windless air. I stood near the edge of a cliff, and beside me, lying in the snow, was a man. Maybe a dead man, with his closed eyes and the wounds that distorted his features. But the wounds weren’t normal wounds; they radiated as with innate meaning, burned a fiery blue in his face. It seemed the incisions had been closed once, but had reopened for the sole purpose of conveying something, something that eluded me and yet seemed vitally important for those couple of minutes I spent looking for familiar symbols in the design the wounds drew. It was all the time I could spare this image because a stronger attraction took hold, its source below the precipice, in that unknown territory hidden from view by the drop-off’s lip.
The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Page 8