by Ted Kosmatka
Gavin sank into his leather swivel chair and pulled a bottle of good whiskey from his bottom desk drawer. He had the only key to this office. He wondered what would happen next. There were several different ways this could go. The envelope hadn’t been there when he’d left.
He closed his eyes and thought of Margaret and his dig team.
During his interrogation, the Indonesian officials had done their best to impress upon him his good fortune. They’d done their best to communicate their extreme leniency, their kindness for not having him charged with the many crimes for which he was so obviously guilty, for not having him imprisoned, or tortured, or confined in close quarters with sodomites. The lead interrogator had sat across the table from him and said, “We are a forgiving people, a forgiving country, we Indonesians.” He spoke in a thick Bahasa accent, his hands folded in front of himself on the table as if in prayer to a merciful and forgiving god. “We are tolerant to the point of indulgence. Tolerant beyond the point of our own best self-interest. This tolerance is taken for weakness by some. Tell me, do you think we are weak?”
Gavin said nothing.
“We are a kind people, and this kindness is often taken advantage of by foreigners. Tell me, do you think we are kind?”
Silence. A drop of blood dripped from Gavin’s lip to his shirt.
The interrogator seemed to take this as a response. “You are a lucky man, Professor, and you shall just be deported for your crimes. If it was my choice, it would be different.” He stood. “You are hereby expelled and your research visa revoked.”
“What crimes?” Gavin asked.
“Attempted theft of national heritage materials,” the interrogator said. “A very serious offense.”
“I had the permits.”
“That is strange,” he said. “We have no permits on file.”
Hours later, when Gavin was sitting in a dark cell, they told him, too, about James. An unfortunate “incident,” they called it. His body found in a hotel room. A robbery gone wrong. A young life cut short. “We will, of course, be searching for the perpetrator.”
Gavin wondered about Paul but did not ask. Wherever he was, Gavin couldn’t help him. He hoped the boy wasn’t hurt. He felt responsible for Paul, as he’d once felt responsible, in some ways, for Paul’s father.
Gavin took another long pull of whiskey.
He looked down at the envelope that should not have been there. He saw his name written in a familiar hand. A hand he hadn’t read in a long time. He tore open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper. A ticket fell out. Gavin looked at it. It was a plane ticket.
He turned the paper over; on it was written a single word: Come. Gavin took another long pull of whiskey, concentrating on the burn.
14
Hospital white. The distant beep of an alarm.
Paul hauled himself to a sitting position when the nurse entered the room.
She was young and blond and might have been pretty on other nights, in other situations.
“You received quite an injury,” she said while going over his chart.
Hospital small talk, Paul decided. That was one difference between the hospitals in the United States and those back in Indonesia.
Paul said nothing. There was nothing to say.
She glanced up from the clipboard. “It says here the enucleation procedure was performed out of country?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Maumere.”
“They did a decent job, but you have some recent infection in the orbit. We have you on two hundred and fifty milligrams of penicillin via the IV, every six hours. It’s working, so you got lucky. You’re also on four milligrams of morphine, as needed. You have to ask for that, but we also give it through the IV, so it works fast. Do you have much pain?”
“Yes.”
She injected morphine into the tubing of his IV. “This should help.”
He felt the change by the time she walked out the door. A spreading warmth in his veins.
He slept. And saw James walking on the ice—the sky above scrawled black with branches.
Snow fell. The wind blew through the trees, while a lure dangled, swaying in the wind. James smiled, teeth bright red with betel nut.
A new sound woke him, and this time it was a man looking over the chart at the end of his bed. A man in a white doctor’s coat. Over his shoulder, the windows had gone dark. Night had fallen.
The man caught his stare. He smiled. “I’m Dr. Harcoff. How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know.” It was an honest answer. What Paul felt was disconnected.
The doctor nodded like he understood. His stethoscope was silver. He wore a silver watch. “Your body has suffered a major insult,” Dr. Harcoff said. “But in addition to the physical trauma, the loss of an eye can be an enormous psychological blow. We have counselors who can help if you feel you need it.”
“No,” Paul said. “I’m fine.” He was alive, after all. James wasn’t.
The doctor’s brow furrowed. He scribbled something on the chart.
“An ocularist will fit you with a more permanent prosthetic in six to eight weeks. Right now you have something temporary.”
“Why do I have to wait so long?”
“There’s a window of best opportunity. If we tried to fit you with an artificial eye before that, there won’t be enough healing. If we wait too long after that, then the socket can atrophy and it’s hard to get a good functional result.”
“Functional?”
“Your existing eye muscles will be attached to a new motility implant and you should get near-normal eye movement. That’s important from an aesthetic perspective. Right now you have a silicone conformer in place to retain orbit volume.”
“It’s in there now?”
“Yes.”
Paul nodded. The doctor moved closer. He placed the clipboard on the bed and opened the bandages around the wound. He studied it for a moment, then closed the bandages again.
“It looks like there will be some exterior scarring from the initial traumatic injury, but the wound has clean edges, and the stitches are good. Eye shape differs widely among individuals and you’re fortunate; to be perfectly blunt with you, ocular prosthetics often seem less noticeable in people with epicanthic folds. For patients with prominent eyes, it’s sometimes a challenge to reproduce a natural appearance.” He paused and regarded Paul closely. “You’ll have a diagonal scar across your eyelid, but the artificial eye itself shouldn’t be noticeable at all. We’ll be able to match your eye color exactly, and by the time we’re done, the only difference between your new eye and your old one is that you won’t be able to see out of it. Do you wear glasses?”
“No.”
“How is the vision in your good eye?”
“Good.”
The doctor nodded. “As for the silicone conformer currently in place, you just need to be careful when you wipe your eyes for the next few weeks. Most people opt to wear dark glasses or an eye patch until the conformer is replaced by a full prosthetic. The conformer doesn’t simulate a natural appearance.”
“When can I leave?”
“We’re going to keep you a little longer for observation and to watch for infection. I should be able to let you know tomorrow. Do you have any other questions?”
Paul shook his head.
“Good. I can recommend a plastic surgeon later to deal with soft-tissue scarring.”
“No, no plastic surgery. Scars don’t bother me.”
The doctor nodded and left. When he was gone, Paul stood and walked into the bathroom, pulling the IV pole behind him. He stood in front of the mirror. Being careful to keep his injured eye closed, he lifted the bandage to survey the damage.
He stared at himself.
His eye was fucked, he decided.
The scar neatly bisected his closed eyelid, crossing at a slight angle to the vertical and extending up to put a notch in the bottom of his eyebrow. It occurred
to him how close he’d come to dying. If the knife had just gone a little deeper …
Then he opened the ruined eye. He stared at himself.
One eye was dark and piercing—like his mother’s eyes. The other was a smoky white, the eye of a ghost.
The eye of the dead.
* * *
They kept him in the hospital for two more days. Time enough to hit bottom. Time enough to think about where things went wrong.
Mr. Lyons came to visit him on the second day. “We’re so sorry about what happened, Paul. This was a tragedy.”
And then other people from the lab.
“You gave us quite a scare.”
“We’re glad to have you back.”
“The doctors are gonna have you up in no time.”
And Hongbin, his coworker from the lab, ever the clown. “Someday they’ll come up with a bionic eye,” he said. He leaned close and whispered, “Then you’ll have the advantage.”
Later that evening, Mr. Lyons returned, a lawyer with him this time. Another suit. Hands were shaken, introductions made. “You don’t need to worry about the bills,” the man said. “The company is going to pick up everything.”
Paul sensed that they expected a response. “Thank you,” he said.
Mr. Lyons looked different.
Paul noticed it right away.
His face was different, all business this time. So this was it, then. The debriefing. Paul had been waiting for it. The two men sat. It was very formal. They asked their questions.
“Could you describe what happened, in your own words?”
So Paul told the story. Told it just how it was, just how it went down. Talked about the dig, and the bones, and the soldiers, and the river. He talked about the hotel room and the darkness. He talked about the throat like a crushed aluminum can, and only then did Mr. Lyons’s face change again. A new look in his eyes, business falling away.
And then the corporate lawyer said it. The thing he shouldn’t have. The thing that jangled, that told its own story.
“Did you get the samples?”
Paul stared at him. Bore into him with his one good eye.
The question had something pressing in from behind it, and Paul knew suddenly that their whole conversation had merely been foreplay. It had just been a prelude to this moment.
“No,” he said. “No, they took everything.”
The men nodded, as if pleased with his answer. They shook his hand again.
“I look forward to seeing you back at work,” Mr. Lyons said. “And again, we’re very sorry about what happened. Nobody should have to go through that.” The men left.
Later that night, the doctor came in to check on him one last time. He made a short examination, then signed the discharge papers. An hour later, two nurses were wheeling him to the front of the building—“standard procedure,” they insisted when he said he could walk. A cab sat idling for him at the hospital’s entrance. He gave his apartment address to the man in the front seat.
And then the hospital rolled past.
Paul rested his face against the cool glass.
A bridge. Water. Baltimore, and a brick apartment block. The car came to a stop in front of his building. He paid the cabbie and took the stairs, two flights.
As he climbed, his eye started throbbing. No, not his eye, he told himself. The place where his eye had been. Like this, the place where his life had been.
The conformer felt heavy, alien, not a part of him. His head felt light, and he stopped at the top of the stairs, willing himself not to faint. He wondered about phantom limb syndrome; soldiers who’d lost an arm or a leg would sometimes swear they could still feel it, swear they could wiggle their toes. He wondered if that applied to eyes, too. Would he swear he could see something that wasn’t really there? What would he see with his ghost eye?
Paul opened his front door and stepped inside. He put his keys on the hook near the door. Next he went to the kitchen and filled a big cup of water, and then he watered his plants, which were quite obviously dead. He hadn’t had time to water them the first night he’d been back. That first night, when he still hadn’t gone to the hospital yet.
When he’d come home first, after the airport.
His neighbor had seen the eye patch that night, and she’d been horrified. “What happened?” she’d asked.
Paul said, “You should see the other guy.”
Now he went to his medicine cabinet. He steadied himself against the sink for a moment, waiting for the world to stop swaying. He opened the pill bottle, and there, at the bottom, just where he’d hidden it four days earlier, he found the lozenge.
15
Baltimore is a place half in and half out of the water.
It sits at the western edge of the Chesapeake, at the confluence of the Patapsco River and the Middle Branch of the great bay. Although it is more than fifty miles from the open ocean, the region’s highways cross saltwater channels on two sides. There are tides and mudflats and seagulls. Shipwrecks jut from the shallows like the bones of leviathans. Here, the ocean has made an effort to move inland. It has made a point of it.
Baltimore is a place of bridges. The enormous Francis Scott Key Bridge stretches four lanes wide, shore to shore, a hundred feet above the waves. To the east of Baltimore, at Sparrows Point, the land divides itself into a series of lobed peninsulas that thrust for miles out into the open water of the bay. On a map, here, the line drawn between water and land forms a jagged male signature—jutting spines of rock and soil and marsh, the ins and outs of countless tiny waterways. It is a place of ancient, rusting mills, and dusty slag piles, and wildlife. It is a place at the very edge.
In the distance, along one of the farthest spines of land, at the edge of the edge, is Westing.
* * *
It is an old industrial park. A property that used to produce iron and steel and good pensions. A place backed against the water.
The gates are rusted chain link. Barbed wire spirals itself along the top of a sagging fence that disappears into secondary growth along the side of the road. Small shrubs sprawl from choked ditches.
The guard shanty sits just beyond the open fence gates. To the uninitiated, the property looks for all the world like what it used to be: some industrial relic, a dying entity, a place from the past. There is no street sign to tell you where you are. Weeds grasp for toeholds in every gathering of accumulated soil. To the local flora, this is postapocalypse. Life fighting its way back from concrete oblivion.
But beyond the single unsmiling guard, up the road and around the curve, the deepest nature of the place reveals itself, and it becomes part of another age.
The first time Paul saw the facility, he knew.
It was a place of glass and black magic.
Westing, hiding in broad daylight.
Paul pulled to a stop in his assigned parking space and turned off the ignition. He took a deep breath, listening to the silence in his car. His head hurt. Everything hurt. He blinked. He stepped out of the car and walked up the cement stairs to the building’s entrance. From the gates, it looked like nothing at all, an abandoned property, but here, on the other side of the bend, it was state-of-the-art. Glass and sprawling, six stories of it, a building from a future that might never happen.
He flashed his badge to the desk guard and hit the elevator button. The guard seemed taken aback by Paul’s black leather eye patch but said nothing.
The elevator dinged.
Paul got off on the third floor and made his way down the hall.
One of the secretaries—Julie, he thought her name was—smiled at him as he walked by. “Welcome back,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said. “Good to be back.”
He was almost past her when she called after him, “We put your mail on your desk.”
He arrived at his office. He paused at the threshold before pushing the door open and stepping inside. It seemed like months since he’d been here, years maybe. Could it really have been o
nly weeks? That didn’t seem possible. So much had changed since the last time. He was a different person now.
The lights in his office came on automatically, triggered by motion detectors Paul had never been able to locate. The only way to turn the lights off was to sit perfectly still for a long period of time. On some days, Paul was certain this period was ten minutes; on other days, an hour. The other researchers complained of it often; it was a common topic of conversation in the lab. “To keep the lights on, you have to wave your arms in the air,” one might say, then add, “Like a rooster.”
But Paul liked the dark. He sometimes found himself engaged in his work, typing on his computer, and there would come a loud click, and the lights would go out, and he’d find himself sitting in the shadows, facing a glowing computer screen. He’d look around the room in wonder. Darkness was a gift.
He put his briefcase down and considered the formidable stack of papers on his desk. He picked up the pile and leafed through his mail—magazines, mostly. Principia Biologica, Theist-informatics, Materials and Method, Design Interpretation, Precept Monthly. Trade magazines he’d never ordered but which had begun to show up, by some mysterious process, when he’d first gotten an office with his name on the door.
He tossed the whole pile in the trash and sat.
It was warm in his office. He loosened his tie and opened his white shirt, glancing around. His office was the caricature of an office, he decided.
The furniture was office furniture, too small for him, bought from a catalog. The walls were painted office color. He imagined the can of paint had said “office” right on its side, as a signal to those in corporate purchasing. Have an office that needs painting? Here, use this.
There were no windows, and for that he was grateful. It made it different from the hospital room.
The books, too, made it different—shelves and shelves of books. Books stacked neatly in the corners; books on anatomy and archaeology and genetics; books about Peking man and Jane Goodall and the subatomic structure of the atom. Books on Mus musculus.
Other than the books, the room’s principal ornamentation was a single dog skull, coated in paraffin wax, that sat on the corner of his desk.