Bent fumbled a twirl, dropping the pen. “How do you mean?”
Duncan hastened to explain. “Survivor guilt. Isn’t that what they call it? The questions death brings up. Why Angie had to be the one to die, in the prime of her life, her career.”
When Bent straightened up from picking up the pen, his lips were pressed together. “We all have that guilt.”
“But you know how it is with Grace. The whole thing with her father.”
Bent frowned.
“The bribe,” Duncan reminded him.
“What bribe?” Bent said, his forehead furrowing further.
Here he was, assuming that Bent remembered everything about Grace. He felt relieved. It was true, what Grace had said. Their relationship really was a thing of the past.
“That bribe he took when she was a kid. To pay for her to go to KIS.”
Bent shook his head, still frowning. “She had a scholarship.”
“A partial scholarship. You know her father had a good government service job. But it wasn’t enough to pay the fees. He took a bribe,” Duncan said. “That was when he started working in the private sector—after he lost the government job.” Looking at Bent’s confused face, he realized that Grace had not told him any of this. “She never told you?”
Bent shook his head again. “Makes sense, though. Why she was always so determined to succeed. So driven, yeah? Wanting to make every minute count.”
“Her way of paying him back. At least, that’s what I think. Because she felt like it was her fault. Even though that’s absurd.” Duncan was feeling uncomfortable now. This was an odd conversation to be having. Would Grace mind that he’d told Bent? Why would she? But even if she didn’t, should he be talking about his wife with her old high school boyfriend? How had he got himself into this awkward situation? The weekend had forced a kind of intimacy into his interactions with Bent. He had to remember Bent was a coworker. Maybe even his boss. “Anyway,” he said. “Not quite sure how I got into that.”
Bent put the pen back in the holder and leaned back, taking his cue.
“All your books came in?” he said, looking at the floor-to-ceiling ebony bookshelves. Some unseen lackey had already arranged Duncan’s books there. “Checked out our online library yet? We can get any journal you want, just name it. And anything else you need, just holler. You’ll find we keep our employees happy.”
“Holler, hmm . . . ,” Duncan said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
Bent grinned wryly. “You met Geri, yeah? She acts like that, but she’s incredibly efficient. All you have to do is ask.”
Duncan had not said much to Geri Trikefalou, the administrative assistant who guarded the reception area of the marketing division. She was a massively built woman with stiff waves of mauve-tinted hair who had regarded him with the grim expression of someone who would not give an inch. “I’ll be sure to ask her,” he said, thinking that she probably wouldn’t answer. “Although I don’t know what I could possibly need. I don’t have anything specific to do yet, other than read this, I guess.” He gestured at the folder he had found on his desk. It was tagged with a gray Post-it note that said “For Dr. Duncan McCloud” in small precise handwriting. Inside the folder’s thin blue plasticized cover was a stack of sheets titled “The Placebo Effect: A Summary.” It was a lengthy document, eighty-three pages of small print.
“It’ll get you started,” Bent said. “Things are moving along quickly on our end. We had hoped you’d start a week ago, really.”
“From my perspective, it’s all been so quick,” Duncan said. A recruiter for Cinasat had contacted him barely a week after he had received his layoff notice from St. Casilda. The interview with Hammond Gleeson had followed a few days later. The recruiter had sent Hammond the book Duncan had written, Exorcism Rituals in Sri Lanka. Duncan suspected that Hammond had only skimmed it. How could such a busy man have had the time to read three-hundred-plus pages of dense anthropological discourse? In the interview, Hammond had been eager to hear about Duncan’s research in Sri Lanka. The job offer had been extended at the end of the interview. The nondisclosure training workshops and paperwork in the subsequent days were the only parts of the process that had been time consuming. The last of the forms had been signed only the evening before, at Hammond’s house.
Bent nodded, businesslike. “We’re happy to have you. But we need you up to speed on the basics of the placebo effect.” He tapped the blue folder on the desk. “Most people think that means the good things a sugar pill does, but of course, you understand it’s something broader.”
“Well, sure. The effect of believing a treatment’s going to work,” Duncan said. “Whether the treatment is a pill, or something else. Surgery, acupuncture, whatever. Even just a meeting with a doctor. Or a healing ritual.”
“Exactly,” Bent said. “That’s where your work on exorcism ceremonies is going to come in. What was it you said in your book? An exorcism ceremony is all about illusion?”
Duncan had written about illusion right in the introduction section of Exorcism Rituals. The introduction would have been an easy enough read, even for a busy person.
“Well, that’s how exorcists see the rituals,” he said. “Demons are masters of illusion. That’s precisely what gives them their power—their ability to influence humans, by tricking them. The exorcism rituals are designed to turn that power on its head. To trick the demons, and at the same time to expose the demons’ trickery for what it is. To lift the veil from the patient’s eyes.”
“Very well put,” Bent said, although Duncan detected a note of derision in his voice. “So what you mean is that these rituals work through illusion, yeah? They make people believe they’re going to get better. In other words, the placebo effect.”
“That’s one way of thinking about the rituals,” Duncan conceded. “I’d say that’s our view. The exorcists wouldn’t say that. Or their patients.” The faint buzzing sound of a fly reached his ear. He looked to his left, but there was nothing there. How could there be a fly in here, in this perfectly climate-controlled room?
“Yeah, yeah, of course. But obviously, what we’re taking is our view, yeah?” Bent said. He took the desk pen out of its holder again and twirled it, his dexterity mesmerizing. “One thing we want you to do is write an article connecting these rituals to the placebo effect. That has to be done very soon. Cowrite an article, actually, with Derek.” He nodded, indicating the blue folder on the desk. “He’ll explain the details.”
“Derek Weinberg?” Duncan said. He had noted the author’s name and august institutional affiliation on the document. “Why would someone at one of the best medical schools in the country want to collaborate on an article with an anthropologist he’s never met?”
“He’s an open-minded type,” Bent said. “He’s doing research on a Cinasat grant, and I told him about your work. He’s interested. We’ll set you up with him.”
As if he were proposing a date, Duncan thought, rubbing a smudge off the top of his desk. A blind date. “Set me up. Hmm. Never really thought of writing a paper that way.”
“I know anthropologists tend to work on their own,” Bent said. “But you know in the medical, pharmaceutical fields, collaboration is very common.” He pursed his lips. His lips were almost pretty, Duncan thought. There was something feminine about their shape. Bent tapped the pen on the desk. “Our people collaborate quite a bit with top-notch academic researchers. We like to make sure we get into the best journals. Good science is the basis for our drugs. The best science makes the best drugs, we like to say. And lately, people from the humanities, like you—anthropologists, sociologists, even philosophers—have been collaborating with our science folks. I’m sure Hammond told you, we’re hiring people who can write well. Persuasively.” A loud buzz interrupted him, and a dense-looking black fly landed on the desk.
Bent swiped at it. The fly zipped into a corner of the room. “Looks like Geri needs to get you a swatter,” Bent said.
Dunca
n flipped through the folder. “When do I meet the others? The other anthropologists and sociologists you have on staff?” He had a lot of questions for them. The specifics of what they did at Cinasat, for instance. His nondisclosure agreement had been signed and countersigned, but he still didn’t know much more than that he would be writing papers and providing his expertise to the division.
“They have offices here, but they like the flexibility of working from home,” Bent said. “One of the perks we offer. Same goes for you, as I said, after you’ve been with us for two months. You’re the only person in this area so far, by the way. You and Geri. The others are in the research division.”
“So that’s why it’s so deserted,” Duncan said. His apprehension lifted a little. Earlier, when he’d padded down the silent hallway outside his office, he’d found only closed, unmarked doors. No evidence of life.
“We’ll be moving their offices here in the near future,” Bent said. “You’re at the forefront of a new initiative.”
“A marketing initiative?”
“Expecting unprecedented sales,” Bent said. He flicked an invisible speck off his gray-clad knee. “Marketing’s going to be the key to the whole project. That’s what you’ll be helping us with. We can go into it in detail later.”
“I need a bit more clarity about what I’ll be doing,” Duncan said. Why were details always being postponed? Was this how it was with all industry jobs? When he’d started at St. Casilda, he had known exactly what he would have to do: teach four classes a semester, advise students, do his own research whenever he had the time. There was something troublingly opaque about this job in contrast.
“As we’ve said, we need you as an expert consultant. The team will be coming to you with questions. And once you read that”—Bent tapped the folder on the desk with the pen—“we can get you started on a collaboration with Weinberg. We’ve set up a meeting for tomorrow.”
Duncan riffled the pages in the folder. He was expected to read this by tomorrow? Much more rushed than in the academic world. But it was going to be a fine job once he got used to it, he reassured himself, trying to shrug off the heaviness settling over him.
8
GRACE
Tuesday
Four of the vials in rack thirty-eight were rusty brown with adult fruit flies. Grace took one vial out and carried it to the microscope station. She pushed the air pipe down past the cotton wool plugging the top of the test tube and flipped open the carbon dioxide valve. When the flies stopped skittering around, she extracted the cotton wool and tapped a few of the dazed creatures onto a dish. Other faculty left dissections to their research assistants, but she sometimes did them herself. She set the timer for an hour. It helped her to go faster. When her students were not around, undisturbed she could average one fly every two minutes. Thirty per hour. Go.
She held a fly under the microscope with one pair of forceps and ripped its spongy abdomen cleanly with another. The ovaries were so small and pale that she had hardly been able to see them the first time she had tried the dissection. But that had been years ago. Now she was an expert. It took only a few seconds to pull the ovaries free of their ethereal moorings. They were like two small bunches of colorless grapes. Without the microscope, all she could see was a minute drop of semitransparent mucus clinging to the end of the needle-thin forceps. She smeared it inside the tiny collecting tube she had jammed into a beaker of ice to prevent the tissue from degrading.
She moved on to the next fly, after a glance at the timer’s second hand ticking on. Three minutes and ten seconds already, but the first one she did on any day always took the longest.
By noon, she had enough egg sac tissue for the new experiment. Soon she would be able to isolate the protein that gave this strain of fruit flies such thin egg sacs. She turned off her microscope and stood up, feeling the tension in her back release as she straightened her spine. She had less than an hour before she was due to meet Marla in Newark. She stored the ovaries in the freezer and locked up the lab before hurrying to the elevator.
Traffic was light, and she made it to downtown Newark just before one o’clock. Her destination was a tiny Middle Eastern café in a busy area. It was only when she smelled falafel frying that she realized how hungry she was. At the stub of a counter, a hefty woman with a striped bandanna and a sweaty face was shouting orders to two tattooed men in the kitchen. Marla was already seated, sipping a green smoothie.
“Celery-kiwi,” she said, tapping the glass. “Sorry I didn’t wait. Had to look out for this guy.” She touched her belly.
The pale cloud of Marla’s hair, when Grace bent to hug her, felt like satin. Marla was sitting well back from the table to give her belly, prominently displayed under a lemon knit dress, sufficient room. Her skin glowed. She looked closer to thirty than forty.
“I only have a couple of hours,” Grace said. “I have an appointment. Fertility specialist.”
“Duncan’s idea?”
Grace shrugged. “Yeah. But he’s not as intense after the last miss. After six misses, he’d have to be an idiot to not see something’s wrong with the machinery. Has to be a genetic thing. Every miss at the same time.”
“Sometimes it just takes trying. And the right vibes,” Marla said, taking Grace’s hand. Even the skin of her fingers felt silky. “My friend Clara had five miscarriages, and then she had three kids.”
“Vibes, I don’t know,” Grace said. “But trying . . . We buy ovulation kits wholesale. We should buy shares of Procter & Gamble. But it’s pointless. And time’s running out.”
Marla squeezed her hand. “Think positive.”
“So are you going to tell me what this is about?” Grace said, dragging her chair closer to Marla. “Why did you want me to come all the way out here?” A loud group had arrived, and she had to raise her voice to be heard.
“I want to go to the funeral, but my doc said I shouldn’t fly.” Marla pushed her glass aside and leaned close to Grace. “Grace, I can’t stop thinking about it. About how I was there with her all night. I wish, I wish. I keep wishing all these things. I wish I had gone hiking with her. Woken up sooner. I wish I hadn’t gone to sleep so soon.”
The noise inside increased as a small group of chattering women joined the food line. “Do you remember . . . there was a time when you were always going off to Harris to hang out with her?” Grace said. “In senior year. Remember how she used to yell out of her window?” The Harris dormitory had been located on a slight rise above the Woodleigh dormitory, where Grace and Marla had roomed together, and where Marla’s mother and father, both schoolteachers, had served as dorm parents. On Friday afternoons after classes had let out, Angie would bellow out of the window of her dorm room, calling Marla’s name over and over again until someone alerted Marla.
“I never understood why you didn’t like her,” Marla said.
“Not that I didn’t. We just didn’t click. Back then.” Grace straightened her back. Angie’s message kept scratching at her thoughts whenever she wasn’t focused on her work. What if it all came out somehow? Should she tell Duncan? Should she ask Marla what she thought? “But you know—”
“Sheesh,” Marla hissed, looking out the smudged glass front of the café. “The ignorance. It really gets to me.”
Turning, Grace saw a pregnant woman standing on the sidewalk outside, talking animatedly into a cell phone and wielding a cigarette with the practiced manner of a longtime smoker.
“The smoking? A few here and there don’t do that much harm,” Grace said. “Think about doctors advising pregnant women to smoke and drink in the old days. To help them relax.”
Marla snorted. “When they didn’t know any better.” She leaned toward Grace, her face screwed up with disgust. Grace could smell the innocent fruitiness of her shampoo. “The other day there was this drunk woman in the booth next to us at Chili’s, going on about how she was nearly in her second trimester. The waiter looked like he’d swallowed a stone when he was bringing her third
or fourth margarita. I was on the verge of telling her off, but Karl stopped me.”
“Pregnant women drink in France,” Grace said. “Italy. And other places.”
“Please. A glass of wine with dinner, okay. Margaritas one after another? First trimester? Hey, as soon as I found out, I even stopped eating tiramisu. No rum for this one.” Marla rubbed her belly. “Or for my first two.”
“Too extreme,” Grace said. That was always the problem with Marla. Grace sipped her water, trying to smile. It was warm inside the café, with the sunlight beating through the windows and the heat from the kitchen behind the counter.
Their food arrived. Grace said, “So anyway . . . you didn’t tell me why you wanted to meet here.”
“Didn’t want to tell you on the phone. You might have tried to talk me out of it,” Marla said, wiping off a thin mustache of green juice.
“Out of what?”
“Going to see a friend of Angie’s.”
Grace stopped in the middle of chewing a crunchy falafel. “What for?”
“Just to say that she passed, you know. And that Angie had been trying to help her.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“Her name is Minowa Costa. She lives near here. Off Broad Street.” Marla picked a slice of tomato out of her sandwich and put it in her mouth.
“You know her?”
Marla shook her head. “Someone Angie mentioned that night. She was still working when I was trying to sleep. I asked her why she couldn’t just finish in the morning, and she said she owed it to Minowa Costa. I told her I had known someone called Minnie Costa in North Jersey, and we were wondering if it was the same person. That’s when she said her friend was on Hale Street in Newark. Minowa Lee Costa.” Marla blotted her eyes with a napkin and blew her nose. “When I called Angie’s mom yesterday, I told her to let this Minowa know, but she didn’t know anyone by that name. So I looked her up online. There was no phone number. I thought I would go by and tell her. She was a good friend, Angie said.” She looked anxiously at Grace. “You’ll go with me, right? I feel like I should do it, you know. The least I can do if I can’t go to the funeral. But I feel weird about dropping by.”
The Mask Collectors Page 5