by Megan Abbott
“We must let it steep four minutes,” he says, resuming his perch on the sofa arm.
Diane is staring at the floor intently, a look I do not like. It reminds me of long ago, the shag carpet of my bedroom, her dark words. I wonder what they’ve been talking about.
I feel a rush of heat to my eyes. What are we doing here?
Serge reaches for his phone and raises the volume on the music, which suddenly fills the small space.
No one says anything for a moment, and Serge closes his eyes. He’s humming to the music, making little pit-pit sounds, his voice rising from a near whisper to a full-throated hum.
“What is this?” I say, a feeling in my chest as the music soars mournfully. “I know this song.”
“Saint-Saëns,” he says. “‘The Swan.’ It is, I suppose, what some call kitsch. But I find it appealing.”
“I never knew what it was called,” I say. I must’ve heard it a thousand times through the bathroom door when I was little. My mom used to play it on the shower CD player when she took her long baths, Jean Naté and Mr. Bubbles after days full of cancer-rattled collies or tending to her girlfriends Reena and Rae who had to take that second mortgage on their hair salon.
The music purrs and swells with such melancholy, and, half sick at heart already, I find myself swaying, caught up. Wanting to shut my eyes and sink into its sweet harbors.
Smiling at me, Serge holds out his hand.
I swear this happens: I rise, and for a brief moment, we are dancing. Just one, two, three twirls around before we stop, and Serge’s warm hand releases mine.
Diane is looking at us both and saying nothing.
“The tea,” Serge says, lifting a finger. “Just a moment.”
Maybe, I think, against all logic, everything will be okay. Maybe it will all work out. Serge likes me and he will understand and help us. And maybe Diane will pull herself together again.
“This is just like before,” she says, barely a whisper. “It’s the same as before.”
“Diane,” I say. “Are you okay?”
She must have fallen too, her head hitting the floor or wall. A hard knot is faintly visible beneath her smooth, wide forehead, the blood-brush framing it.
“This is what I used to listen to when I worked in a pathogen unit,” Serge says from the kitchenette. “We gassed hundreds of mice every day. I cleaned the container after each batch. The new ones can smell the pheromones. It is very distressing for them.”
I look at Diane, then back at Serge in the kitchenette, his head obscured by the open cabinets.
“It must be so hard,” I say, just to say something. “To do what you have to do.”
I remember the rumor about Serge’s sister. That she’d died of leukemia at age ten or twelve. His eyes blinking behind the kettle steam, he looks at me, and I can feel the music rise again, bittersweet, with each string pluck felt keenly and left vibrating through me.
“It is hard, in a way,” he says, returning with a tray holding an enamel teapot, mugs of smoked green glass, and a small jar of seedy red jam. “But if we do it, you do not have to.”
“My mom worked at an animal-rescue clinic,” I say. “I don’t think either of us ever got used to it.”
I don’t know why I’m talking this way. Why I’m pretending what’s going on isn’t really going on. The music, the strangeness of everything.
“Well, Kit,” he says, setting the tray on a makeshift table, a wastebasket he overturns, “you need to be more like Diane.”
We both look at Diane, who is staring at the tray, the steaming mugs, the bruised-looking jam.
“What?” I ask, thinking I misheard.
“Let’s just say,” he says, sitting, “she has a deeper view of life. I learned that years ago.”
“What do you mean?” I say. “When Diane interned with Dr. Severin?”
Serge smiles in that way of his, weary-eyed and vaguely charmed. I see him trying to meet her eyes. She will not surrender them to him or to me.
“You did not tell her?” Serge says to Diane, who lifts her head, her face now eerily calm, as if she has quickly stitched it together again from whatever antic state it was in.
“The internship, yes,” she says, talking to me but staring at Serge, lips moist, crossing her legs. “The summer between college and grad school—Serge was a junior lab tech.”
The music stops, the speaker clicking.
Serge dips a small spoon in the jam dish. “Fruit, yes?” he says, spoon hovering over our cups. “It is the Russian way.”
“Yes,” we both murmur at once, thoughtlessly. Polite. The way we’d long ago learned to be. Everything feels so strange that nothing does.
Steam dampening his face, he sets his cup down and leans back.
“I will not forget it,” he says. “One of the mothers needed to be put down, and all her babies too. Usually we have to send students home after. The first time, at least. Not Diane. She destroyed them all handily.”
I look at Diane, who is so very still. The knot in her forehead, though, seems to pulsate, as if flooded with blood.
“And then she sliced and diced them, as you say,” Serge continues, folding his long spider arms, crossing his long spider legs. “The best necropsist Dr. Severin ever had.”
My eyes dart between them both. I know I’m not understanding something, or anything, and the speaker keeps clicking.
“Look,” I say, “let’s all just—”
“It was the job,” Diane says, softly, barely audibly. “We’ve all done it. Countless times.” She turns to me. “Haven’t you?”
“Well, yes,” I say. “Yes. I mean, not that way, but…”
Serge leans forward, hand resting on top of the teapot.
“It was Diane’s job,” Serge says to me. “But I have never seen anyone do it with such composure. One might even say gusto. The only one who came close was a young man whose family was in the slaughterhouse business. But Diane. Her preferred method was decapitation with heavy scissors.”
Diane’s voice goes tight. “That was protocol for newborn mice. I was told they were less than seven days old.”
“I would have told you they were nearly twenty days old,” Serge says. “But you did not wish to wait. As we have seen.”
Diane shoves her hands in her pockets and turns in her chair, away from us.
“Whenever she finished the necropsy,” he says, “the skin removed, the organs, the head detached, she looked so…how do you say it? Afterglow?”
We all sit for a moment, Serge’s eyes dancing with something like pleasure.
“You wanted me to cry,” Diane whispers. “Like a girl. I should have cried.”
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. That was what Serge told me the first time he watched me handling the mice. I am sure Mr. Kant meant the heart of a woman too.
Serge shakes his head. “A crocodile cries only because it has not eaten its prey.”
“What do you want?” Diane says. “Tell me what you want from me.”
The speaker clicks and “The Swan” returns.
“What do I want?” he says. “I want people like you banished from my world.” His voice is hard, relentless. “Those born with a splinter of ice in their hearts.”
Serge looks at her in that way he has, the same look he has when a postdoc hasn’t put on a gown before entering the vivarium or when he doesn’t separate the mouse litters. Under his invasive gaze, so sure of himself, so acute, Diane seems to shrink. It makes me feel sorry for her in a way I can’t explain.
“Is it money?” Diane says, softly now. “Is that what you’re looking for?”
“What makes you think there’s money enough in the world?” His eyes hot on her. “To make me unknow what I know? I saw what you did to that young man.”
What you did to that young man…
“Serge,” I call out, realizing it at last, “you’ve got it wrong. Diane didn’t do anything to Alex. It was an accident. I was
there. He was running a flash column and there was a crack—”
But Serge is not listening to me.
“Diane, why did you have to involve her?” he says, flicking one finger, resting on a knee, toward me. “She doesn’t know what you are.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Diane murmurs, recrossing her legs, foot shaking now. Swinging like a metronome.
“I have done some investigations these past few days,” Serge says. “I have uncovered some questionable things. Your father, a heart attack at forty-two?”
No, Serge. Diane, white and waxy as a cake of soap, looks at him. Inside, I can feel everything falling apart.
“No history of cardiac trouble,” Serge continues. “No one asked for an autopsy. Tell me, was he your first?”
“Stop!” Diane pitches forward, her knee hitting the makeshift table, sending spoons to the floor and blobs of jam skittering. Hot tea splotching us all.
“I’ll get towels,” Serge says, rising, rushing to the kitchenette. And there I am, bending down to scoop spoons and jam from the floor. The veneer of civilization we cling to amid chaos and carnage.
“Diane,” I say, sitting up again, setting the spoons down, “please, just…”
Immediately, I know something is wrong. Her eyes are glistening strangely, like animals right when they go under or like my mom those last days at the hospital. My heart catches a moment.
Serge returns with tea towels. “What has happened?” he asks.
Because my eyes are on Diane, who now has one hand balled into a fist against her knee.
“Did the water burn your hand?” I ask, squinting.
“We’ll be here forever,” she whispers. “We have no place else to go.”
“Diane,” I say, eyes on her clamped fingers, red and insistent. “Diane, let me see your hand.”
But she’s looking at Serge and he’s looking at her. “Was he some kind of threat to you?” Serge says. “Do you just go around killing any man who gets in your way?”
“Diane,” I say. “What’s in your hand?” Because now I know something is.
She isn’t listening to me. No one is.
“I knew what you were, all those years ago. The way you handled those mice,” Serge is saying, fingers touching his neck, leaving pink spots. “I cannot abide it any longer. This is where it ends.”
“You think you know things about me?” Diane says finally. An odd dreamy tone, her balled hand opening and closing now. And I know I see something in it. “You think you know because of the way I euthanized those mice?”
Serge looks at both of us, touching his cheek with the palm of his hand. His face is newly pink, pink as a Pink Pearl eraser.
It comes to me in that instant, the thought, the panic.
This is just like before, Diane said, just a few moments ago. It’s the same as before.
“Don’t!” I say, reaching for Serge, knocking his teacup from his hand.
“What?” he says. “What?”
“Diane, what was it?” I say, grabbing her hand, her palm sticky and white.
Head wobbling, Serge reaches down and lifts the teacup to his face, under his nose.
“How did I miss it?” he asks, nearly smiling. “How did I not realize?”
“You shouldn’t have done this,” Diane says to Serge, her voice so delicate, vaguely mournful. “I’m so, so sorry you did this.”
He lifts one hand to his cheek, rests it there, as if puzzled by everything, by life. By the darkness unspooling at his feet.
“You killed me,” he says, a rattling gasp.
Those words, the very same words Alex spoke to me.
“You killed me.”
There’s a thin band of white at his hairline, but the rest of Serge’s face, his long graceful neck, has bloomed cherry red, redder than the jam, as red as poor Alex’s hot blood.
“Oh, Diane,” I wail.
But just as I reach out for him, Serge tumbles to the floor, his chin smacking the carpet, his arms and legs zigzagging. Froth hangs like lace from bluing lips.
Sinking to the floor, a blur of things: my hands on his curled-in chest, the sickly sound of his receding breaths, leaning over, my mouth open over his.
“Don’t,” Diane calls out. “Kit, don’t put your mouth on him!”
And I can smell it then, what’s inside him. Cyanide. The same scent drifting from his smoky teacup. Like an apple core gone to rot.
“Oh no,” I say. I say it over and over, reaching into my lab coat pocket for my phone, hoping it’s still there. But just as I shake it loose into my palm she slaps it from my hand, sending it careering across the room.
My arm flies up at her; the heel of my hand shoves her, knocking her back into her chair.
The sound from Serge’s mouth is terrible. The death rattle like in an old horror movie, but more plaintive, more lost.
I place my hand on his chest, which is utterly still, as I knew it would be. The heart so big, it burst. It’s almost as if a wave of cold passes from Serge over me and I know he’s gone. I know it.
“It’s just like before, and no more real,” Diane is saying. She looks like a frame of film paused, her body halfway between sitting and rising, her hands gripping the seat.
Then, looking at me: “Is this really happening, Kit?”
That’s when I see the shadow on the floor. Turning, peering up, I see her in the doorway, her face somber and full of woe.
“Oh, Diane,” Dr. Severin says, looking down at her, a look of infinite sadness, “what have you done?”
NOW
You alone understand the heart, that’s what Serge told me once. The others are made of darker material.
The smell of vomit is everywhere.
“We need to get out of here,” Dr. Severin says. “The fumes are dangerous.”
But Diane won’t move, still seated on the metal folding chair, its red foot caps clamping the floor. Dr. Severin clasps her shoulder, her arm, but Diane doesn’t move or lift her head.
Everyone moving around her, she couldn’t move at all. Maybe she was made of wood too. A wooden girl. Watching Serge on the floor, was Diane thinking of the last time, her father twisting and twitching on the carpet, his face swollen, his throat inflating like a football?
Freud wrote about it a century ago. How we rummage through the armory of the past to retrieve the weapons needed to repeat, repeat, repeat past traumas. He said it was primitive, instinctual, destructive. Like a demon inside us all.
And now we know it’s true. The brain itself is built with the battered beams of our early years. What the conscious mind forgets, the neurons remember.
I know what Diane would say. What she did to her dad came from a fleeting impulse in an unsound state. What she did to Serge, however, was about self-protection, survival.
But science knows better.
I’m running through the vivarium, foraging for amyl nitrate, for anything.
There may be a Cyanokit somewhere. That’s what Dr. Severin said, reaching for her phone.
We both know it’s too late, but still, I’m looking, my breath ragged, and hard sounds, something animal, coming from my lungs.
When I return with the kit, I can see just how late it is.
“This is what we’re going to do,” Dr. Severin says. There are damp whorls under her arms, staining her silk blouse. “You two found Alex. And then you came down here looking for help, and you found Serge.”
“Dr. Severin,” I say, “what is it you plan to do—”
“They had a quarrel over protocol,” she says, her face moving forward, into the light from the gooseneck lamp. “Things got out of hand. Serge killed Alex. Attempted to hide the body. Consumed by guilt, Serge took his own life. Workplace violence.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
I pause. “I’m not going to do that,” I say. “I’m not going to say those things.”
Dr. Severin l
ooks at me with surprise and maybe a whiff of relief.
“Okay,” she says, taking a breath. Looking down at Serge, scarlet-skinned. Her fingers touching her mouth, she won’t meet my eyes. “Okay, then.”
I hear the elevator doors open down the hall. The beep-beep and noise of arriving paramedics.
“He wasn’t real to me,” Diane says suddenly, jerking to life beside us. We both look at her.
“Nothing that happened seemed real.” She turns and looks at us, her hands shaking before her, her eyes widening. “My God, my brain.”
That’s when we hear the walkie-talkies, the hurried feet, the gurney wheels.
“What is wrong with my brain?”
“It’s cyanide,” Dr. Severin tells them. “Don’t put your mouth on him.”
“Jesus, we all gotta get outta here,” one paramedic shouts. He and a partner hoist Serge onto the gurney, then push the gurney through the office, into the vivarium, and out to the hallway beyond.
Diane, her face unchanged, remote, in some kind of marble-struck shock, nods.
My hands are on her now, lifting her to her feet.
“I had to do it, Kit,” she says softly. “I couldn’t bear for anyone to ever know what I was.”
“Diane.”
“But I knew,” she says.
“Miss,” one of the paramedics says, pushing past me.
When I turn around again, Diane is drifting through the office door and into the vivarium.
When I was little, I saw a scary old movie about a woman who remained in a permanent stupor from a long-ago tropical flu. At night, she walked the corridors of her grand house, face blank, body moving as if on strings. Does she suffer? a nurse asked her doctor. I do not know, he replied. A sleepwalker who never wakes, he called her.
That’s how Diane walks. That’s how Diane is. Something missing from the center of her, a piece never put in place that now roams loose inside her, never finding anchor.
Pushing past the paramedics, I follow her. All the animals seem to be moving, unsettled, disordered, the feed tubes clacking against the cages, the squirm and squall of thousands of rodents straining.