An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  Before we hang up, Allison wants to be sure I know exactly what I am getting into. She reminds me that very bad things have happened to other people who tried to find out what happened to Rey. She mentions a journalist who lost her job after starting to investigate the case. I have to be very, very careful, she tells me.

  I know, I tell her. I’m not afraid.

  * * *

  It’s true. I’m not afraid, and I often wonder why not. Maybe part of me actually hopes I will get into danger, if only to give the finger to everybody who dismisses my obsession as misplaced, who writes off Rey’s death as “just a suicide.” On the other hand, despite the dark warnings and anonymous emails, I’ve now been investigating the case for almost eight years, and I have not been followed by anyone, or threatened, or even warned away (except by well-wishers).

  Of course, my lack of fear is also connected to my sense of invisibility, my “paranoia with a minus sign,” as Dr. B. astutely described it. When it comes to conspiracy theories, I oscillate between skepticism and belief, envying the conviction of the paranoid. Those who believe in conspiracies have confidence in a higher power. In my more pragmatic moments, I see this confidence as the result of repressed and projected anxiety. After all, the one thing worse than being constantly observed is having nobody care about you at all. The paranoid’s real terror is not the fear of surveillance, but that they are all alone in the world.

  What is the repressed anxiety, then, of someone who thinks she is invisible? I am not alone in believing myself to be under the radar. Inconspicuous people may not be noticed by the wider world, but we recognize one another. I see myself in the small, delicate lady in my yoga class who arrives early and always sits by herself in the back corner; in the elderly man with the curved spine I glimpse in the window of the bar down the street, drinking by himself; in the red-haired girl with the aloof expression who walks her wire-haired fox terrier through Mount Vernon; in the gentleman in the fez who sits on a park bench by the fountain; in the woman who reads the newspaper every morning in the coffee shop, dressed in medical scrubs. To me, these fellow creatures are the opposite of invisible: they may be discreet, they may be unremarkable, but I always notice them, and wonder whether their lonely habits are a choice they have made, or a trap they have fallen into (at what point does the first become the second?). To me, it is the rest of humanity that passes by in a blur—groups, friends, and couples, chatting together, well balanced, insulated and self-involved.

  My feeling of invisibility is, I suspect, a way of repressing the precipitous awareness that I am, in fact, as noticeable as the occultist Aleister Crowley in the Hotel Café Royale:

  Laboring under the conviction that he was possessed of a magical cloak that rendered him invisible, Crowley delighted in walking past smart sets in the café, a cone-shaped, star-spangled hat perched on his head. Polite groups of the British public would look straight ahead, frozen, as the grave, portly figure drifted past them, like an enormous elephant.

  At first, what baffles me about the “Stansberry Analysts” is their relentless and persistent references, in their podcasts, on their websites, and in their investment newsletters, to their tremendous wealth. If you are not used to people talking constantly about how much money they have, it can be as embarrassing as someone who incessantly drops the name of a celebrity friend.

  “My annual investment goal never changes,” brags Stansberry in his newsletter The Crux, on January 2, 2015. “There are two parts. First, I strive to save at least half of my after-tax income. I define ‘saving’ broadly. Buying cars doesn’t count. Buying gold does. Buying land does, even if it’s merely land for recreational purposes like hunting and fishing.” Michael Masterson (formerly Mark Ford), another person Stansberry calls “the smartest man I know,” admits he was once $100,000 in debt, but brags that he’s now “a successful businessman with a multimillion-dollar net worth.” In a 2016 newsletter, the Stansberry Analyst Brian Hunt crows that he “put a large chunk” of his net worth “in gold bullion” after taking the advice of his colleague Steve Sjuggerud, and it was “one of the best investment decisions of my life.” Hunt asserts that, “normally, someone like Steve would work at a billion-dollar hedge fund or a mega investment bank. He would live in a $10 million mansion near New York City or London.” Instead, Sjuggerud plays the guitar and lives by the beach; like his old school friend Porter Stansberry, he declares himself an “avid surfer.”

  I wonder why these men, with their “multimillion-dollar net worth,” continue to work so hard sending out their bromides, touting their self-published books about how they got to be so rich. The lives of these men (and 90 percent of them are men) are, it appears, devoted to sharing their investment secrets with the rest of us so that we, too, can become multimillionaires—“virtually overnight!”

  For me, possibly for most people, the main advantage of great wealth would be to take away all concerns about money. Yet the Stansberry Analysts seem to think about nothing else. Finally, I realize that while individual Stansberry Analysts may indeed be wealthy, their income does not come from investing in the companies they tout (that would be against the law). Possibly, it does not come from investing at all. Stansberry Research, despite its name, is not a research organization but a marketing company that aggressively sells subscriptions to email newsletters containing tips about how to make money. The analysts’ income has nothing to do with the advice they give or the success of the investments they recommend, but with how many newsletter subscriptions they sell. To keep on selling, they need to impress, convince, confuse, frighten, persuade, and convert gullible members of the public. And to do so, they use one of the oldest tricks in the book: they hide recurring credit-card costs in the small print. As long as the small print is there, the Compliance Editor has nothing to worry about. In such cases, deliberate fraud is notoriously difficult to prove.

  Stansberry and Associates claims to have an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and this is true, but only because someone from the company has responded to every complaint—and there are a lot of complaints. The BBB lists 105 total customer complaints against Stansberry & Associates Investment Research LLC since March 2014. Those who have grievances refer to “rude service,” and “low quality research,” but by far the most common complaints refer to misleading information about unauthorized recurring credit-card charges, the company’s refusal to accept cancellation requests by email, and phone lines that are always busy or that drop their calls.

  For most Agora publications, the “customer service staff” are the only personal point of contact between subscriber and publisher, and it is these stressed-out telephone operators who have to handle cancellation requests, demands for refunds, and the task of repeating long URLs, often at the top of their lungs, to elderly, hard-of-hearing customers who rarely go online. Most members of the customer service staff have never met the editors or publishers, who can hide away behind SEC regulations, leaving it up to the telephone operators to handle the furious calls. “Good old bait and switch at its best,” one customer concludes.

  Rey and Allison on their wedding day

  * * *

  Driving through the city, I swerve to avoid hitting a stray dog wandering in the road, a foxy little creature with big ears. I park my car and follow her on foot, hoping I can slip my fingers around her collar long enough to see whether there’s a phone number on her tag. An elderly gentleman helps me for a while, but his presence makes the dog nervous, and we lose her. Then, walking back to my car alone, I catch another glimpse of the animal running perilously in and out of the traffic. I follow her on foot again, sticking close this time, until she gets tired and sits down on someone’s front stoop, at which point I sit down quietly beside her, let her sniff my hand, then gradually begin stroking the fur on her ears and the top of her head. I continue to do so until she becomes calm. When she seems completely relaxed, I gently take hold of her collar and twist it toward me so I can read her tag. But the moment she fe
els the pressure around her neck, she grows afraid and starts to struggle, baring her teeth and snarling. I keep a tight hold of her collar. She twists her neck around, looks at me with wild eyes, and sinks her teeth into my wrist. I cry out, relax my grip, and the dog runs right back into the traffic.

  I am only a few blocks from T.’s place, so I stop by to clean up my wrist. My friend T. lives in a dark basement with his two cats, one of whom was born without a tail.

  I turn on the tap in the kitchen and hold my wrist under the running water. T. goes into his bathroom to look for a bandage. His bathroom is about five by five, including the shower stall. For six years, his toilet has been sinking down through the floor into the sub-basement, descending another millimeter or two every time he sits on it. Recently, it has also begun to move back and forth, like a porcelain rocking chair. T. is increasingly afraid it is about to sink through the floor entirely. He rarely has guests.

  Once the bleeding has stopped and the dried blood has been washed away, we examine my wrist. The wound is not serious. My skin bears the red marks of a row of small teeth, but only the canines have punctured the skin.

  T. has heard that dogs do not bite unless the moon is full. I have heard this is true only of rabid dogs. We wonder if the dog might have been rabid. Unable to find any bandages, T. gives me a dark brown sock to wrap around my wrist, one of a pair his mother bought him that he has never liked. He does not want it back, even clean. He does not want to catch rabies, he says.

  I tell him that in this country there is a greater chance of being hit by lightning than of getting rabies from a dog, let alone from a clean sock. On average, in the United States, there are only three deaths a year from rabies, and those all are from bat bites.

  For all these glib statistics, as I write this sentence it strikes me that if the dog was in fact rabid, and if I had picked up a small amount of the virus, it could even now be incubating in my body, and I would not know it. A small amount of rabies virus can linger in the body from two weeks to six years before the first symptoms appear. By then, of course, it is too late. What appears to be a mild case of the flu quickly develops into fever accompanied by agitation, paranoia, confusion, hydrophobia, delirium, and finally paralysis of the facial and throat muscles. At this point, death by respiratory arrest is unpreventable and occurs within a few days—if the victim is lucky.

  Dr. Henry Wilde, who regularly treats rabies patients at the Chulalongkorn University Hospital in Bangkok, has made the case that in his final days, Edgar Allan Poe, who was known to have kept a number of semiferal cats, showed all the signs of rabies. When he was found on a Baltimore street, dressed in a stranger’s ill-fitting clothes, he was in a state of delirium. According to medical records kept by Dr. John J. Moran, who cared for him while he was in the hospital, Poe’s symptoms included wide fluctuations in pulse rate, respiration, and temperature. He refused alcohol and had difficulty drinking water. All these are typical symptoms of rabies. Also, the median length of survival after the onset of such symptoms of rabies is four days, which is exactly how long it took Poe to die.

  Not long after being bitten by the dog, I see a poisoned rat on the edge of a busy sidewalk. The rat is lying on his back and taking short, gasping breaths. Thick black fluid seeps from his mouth. I think of Poe’s young wife, Virginia, singing to her husband while playing the piano. Her throat catches as she strains for a note. The catch becomes a cough. She reaches for her handkerchief, bleached and starched by her mother, and sprays it with tiny flecks of blood, almost black. Her husband recognizes the sign; he has seen it before, too many times. His wife is in the late stage of tuberculosis.

  * * *

  The rat is in the late stages of brodifacoum poisoning. He may have hours of agony ahead of him, but I do not have the courage or strength of mind to end his pain. If I had known how much this failure would haunt me—how many times I would revisit this scene in my head, how many times I would imagine myself returning to the dying rat with a large brick, crushing his head, and leaving his carcass to the flies—I believe I would have found the strength to help him.

  Brodifacoum is an anticoagulant marketed under many names, most of which conjure up the image of scientific yet violent and permanent warfare against “vermin”: Ditrac, Ratshot Red, Vertox, Finale, Havoc, Klerat, Pestoff, Ratak+, Rodend, Rataquill. It is used in rat poison because it stays in the body for a long time. A rat will return to eat the poisoned bait for up to ten days before he begins to feel the effects, which means that neither he nor his fellow rats will necessarily associate the poison with the agony it produces. They will, perhaps, continue to eat while feeling confused, wondering what is happening, who has turned against them.

  The manufacturers of these poisons often claim there is no pain involved when rats die. Yet here is a list of symptoms provided by veterinarians for owners who fear their dog or cat may have swallowed brodifacoum by accident: wounds that will not stop bleeding; large bruises appearing on the body or gums; acute swelling of one or more joints; swelling of regions of skin; the sudden swelling of the abdomen (due to hemorrhaging into the belly cavity); difficulty breathing (due to hemorrhaging into the chest cavity or lungs); diarrhea, abdominal pain, and the coughing up, vomiting, and defecation of blood.

  At this stage, if an antidote is not administered, your beloved pet’s lung cells will become damaged and lose their integrity, allowing fluid from the blood vessels within the lungs to leak into the airways, causing heart arrhythmia and respiratory distress. This will be followed by tremors, convulsions, collapse, loss of consciousness, coma, and finally, at long last, death.

  * * *

  I have courted a flock of birds with whirring wings by placing a feeder full of thistle seed on the outside ledge of one of our fifth-floor windows. At first, I assumed the birds were pigeons. Now I know they are mourning doves, and they have shown me the beauty of the color gray, which, on their small bodies, transforms itself delicately here into lavender, there into blue. I think I can hear them now, cooing at the feeder. When it is empty, they will grow impatient, tapping on the window with their beaks like hungry children, demanding their breakfast. One of them once laid an egg in my planter, and immediately abandoned it, as if embarrassed by what she had done. The small white oval lay there for months, cold as a pebble.

  Sometimes in the early summer, fledgling doves, sparrows, pigeons, or starlings will fall from their nests high in the Belvedere’s quoins and embellishments. Occasionally, one of these baby birds will land in my window planters (“to the mouse and any smaller animal, [gravity] presents practically no dangers”). Whenever this happens, I keep the fledgling in a box and feed it with milk from a dropper until it is old enough to fly. One summer I take in an injured homing pigeon that I find in the street outside. A tag on its leg provides a phone number and a registration number.

  I call the phone number. It is answered by a gentleman who asks me for the registration. When I read it to him, he asks me to slow down.

  “And speak up,” he adds. “I’m ninety-one.”

  When he looks up the pigeon’s registration, he discovers the bird is on its way to Coney Island.

  “What should I do with it?” I ask him.

  “I’ll get the man with the books to give you a call,” he says.

  I make the pigeon a home in my closet and give it a dish of bread and milk. “The man with the books” never calls, but the next morning, the pigeon is much stronger. I put it on the window ledge and it seems eager to be on its way. It totters out, tests its wings, flutters and flaps for a while, then launches itself into the air. Its first attempt at flight is a brief one; it lands on the annex roof, takes a short rest, then flies off again, heading in the wrong direction. I hope it made it home. I still think of that pigeon now and then.

  Another time, the bird that landed on my window ledge turned out to be a furious baby hawk. It lived for two days in my closet until two gentlemen from the Maryland Raptor Rescue, wearing big black gloves with wris
t protectors, arrived to retrieve it. On two March days six years apart, I have found a woodcock in the gutter outside the hotel. Both times, I learned, the birds’ spring migration had been disastrously interrupted by a heavy winter storm, leaving them starved, unable to find or forage for food in the snow-covered city. Or perhaps they had crashed into the building, mistaking the reflection in its windows for the sky ahead. One was freshly dead; the other, although beautifully plump and healthy-looking, was seriously injured, and died later that night in my blue scarf.

  XII

  WHEN I FLY out to LA to meet Allison Jones Rivera, I take a red purse, nothing more. The plane is almost empty. I fall asleep in a snowy Baltimore winter and wake up in the spring sunshine of California. We have planned to meet in the coffee shop of a hotel close to the airport.

  I recognize Allison at once. She looks the same as she does in the two photographs I have seen of her, both taken almost ten years ago, at her wedding. She is tall, slim, and graceful with shoulder-length red-brown hair, angular, expressive features, and an easy laugh. She has brought a friend, a striking strawberry blonde with blue eyes and freckles whom Allison introduces as Megan. I am dressed for the cold, in a denim jacket and green knit cap, and feel distinctly grungy beside Allison and Megan’s bright glamour.