Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Simply put, the trust is asking to buy the development rights on your land—to keep it out of the reaches of commercial development forever.”

  There was a stir in the room: more whispering, a few indignant grunts. The eight figures on stage smiled through the reaction, and Bryan stepped carefully over to his next poster, an aerial shot of Orient divided by property lines.

  “Now, the trust owning your development rights has nothing to do with owning your land. That still belongs to you in every way. What we own is the promise that nothing commercial will ever be built on it. It takes only one developer to get his hands on a sizeable plot”—he purposely pointed to the diCorcia farm—“a loophole in the zoning laws, and a little cash stuffed in the right Southold pocket, to turn that land into a condominium community. You can already hear the sales pitch: ‘rustic living for city buyers with premium ocean views and a soon-to-be-opened multiplex, fitness center, and Whole Foods, all just steps from your door.’ That could happen, will happen, unless the trust steps in to preserve its sanctity—not for five years, not for ten, but forever. We don’t want to become another Hamptons. The Orient we love today should be the same Orient your grandkids will enjoy when they start their families.” For one minute, Bryan stood silent on the stage, hoping the vision was taking shape in their minds.

  In the back corner, Roe diCorcia cleared his throat and stood up, all six foot four inches of him, rising out of the audience in tan overalls like a cancerous cornstalk.

  “It’s a rotten deal,” Roe complained. “You might not be buying the land, but you’re buying control over what I can do with it. You’re deciding what I can build and how I can carve it up. And, meanwhile, you’re destroying my property values. You’ve gotta be kidding me. When we go to sell, who’s going to pay what the land is worth when there’s a lead anchor like that attached?”

  Bryan stepped over to the third poster, full of rainbow-colored pie charts and graphs; he’d designed it to advertise the financial windfall in such an agreement, but now, onstage, it all looked so convoluted. Sarakit’s smile began to tighten.

  George stepped in. “Roe, the trust is planning to ask a fair price. That’s money straight up. Plus, in the long run, if neighbors also sell their development rights, that could actually increase the value of the land, because the buyer is protected from a condominium subdivision built right next door.”

  “And it is a fair price,” Sarakit intoned.

  Cole Drake stood up from his table. He stared with an intensity of a man who had discovered that his wife had been cheating on him. Bryan couldn’t decide if Holly’s absence from the meeting proved or disproved that fear. He quickly tried to wipe his palms on his pants, but in doing so he dropped the microphone, sending a clumsy reverberation blasting from the speakers: Blump ump, blump ump, ump, ump. Bryan closed his eyes, waiting for the speakers to clear the horrible echo.

  “Where is the trust getting all the cash to buy these rights, anyway?” Cole demanded. “It sounds like a protection racket.”

  Bryan knew that the answers were on the final poster, the one that listed possible revenue streams: tax-free donations, willed legacy gifts, fund-raisers, environmental grants, the selling off of certain properties it owned in East Marion that were of no conservational import. But he walked in the wrong direction, right instead of left, and found himself back at the first poster, as if Orient’s revenue questions could be found in the romantic, soft-focus picture of Orient.

  “Other side,” Ted whispered. Bryan looked at him dazed, a look Ted only matched in return. Ted turned to the crowd.

  “This is only an introduction. The point of this meeting is to familiarize you with the initiative. Obviously there are a number of legal and ethical questions that we’ll be happy to discuss with each resident individually. The point is that we have found a way to preserve our home. No property is too small to sell its development rights. Sarakit and I have pledged to sell the rights on our three acres when OHB receives nonprofit-trust status. And Archie has agreed to sell the rights to his ninety acres. It will be owned by all of us—by the community, under the trust.”

  “So you’re basically selling your own land back to yourself and making a profit?” someone shouted.

  “What we will own isn’t freedom to, it’s freedom from,” Ted explained. “Geography isn’t something that just happens. As the teacher to many of your—”

  Bryan finally got his bearings, stepping across the stage to the final poster. Before he got there, though, he spotted a band of dark shapes moving across the Poquatuck windows—dark human shapes, which passed the three windows on their way to the front door.

  “Please, someone,” Bryan said urgently into the microphone, “lock the door.”

  But they were already through it, black shapes even under the bright overhead fixtures. Five young men in head-to-toe hunting outfits held lime green posters of the creature on the beach. Adam Pruitt was their leader, a man every audience member knew as much for his current position as the head of the volunteer fire department as for his thirty-four years of low ambition and sporadic employment. Some looked offended by his intrusion; others seemed thankful for the entertainment. Adam carried a sign reading MUTANT PLUM in leaky, bloodred marker. His disruption had all the finesse of a high school theater production.

  “We wouldn’t be interrupting if this weren’t important,” he shouted.

  “This is unacceptable, son,” Bryan said into the microphone, hoping to gain the upper hand with a show of patronizing civility. “We are having a conservancy meeting here. You can schedule your conspiracy meeting for another time.”

  Adam faced the audience. The Suffolk Times photographer crouched to snap pictures like he imagined himself in a war zone.

  “Conservancy is our issue,” Adam said. “Conserving water, animals, air, and soil from a fun house of genetic-testing horrors that has been violating nature for a half-century right off our coast.” Adam pointed out the window. “For as long as I can remember, we’ve put up with it, accepting the lab without ever asking a single question about how it might be affecting our health and homes. Ever since I was a boy.” Bryan hoped the year-rounders would remember Adam as a boy—as the school bully, the Greenport shoplifter with a face full of acne and free-floating rage. How many remembered when all the village stop signs were stolen—then found in the trunk of Adam’s Chevy Malibu? “If this is a town meeting, I think that merits a town discussion.”

  To Bryan’s disappointment, many in the crowd nodded. Roe diCorcia clapped. Two of the intruders climbed up to put their own posters on the stands, causing Helen Floyd and Kelley Flanner to vacate the stage.

  “Adam, you’re just scaring people,” Bryan said into the microphone. “That’s not a discussion.”

  Adam turned to him.

  “You saw that monster on the beach, same as we did. It was a mutant, stewing right there in our water. I thought security was important to you. I thought that was how you made a living. How can you stand here and tell us we shouldn’t be scared?”

  Bryan felt obliged to respond but his microphone had been unplugged.

  “We all saw what happened to Jeff Trader,” Adam shouted. “How much longer are we expected to drink the water, eat the local fish, find mosquito bites on our arms, watch the deer graze, and not wonder what that level-three animal-disease lab is doing every day right on our horizon? They’re not out there worrying about our safety. They’re developing disease agents. Foot-and-mouth, Ebola, polio, Lyme, cholera, swine fever, West Nile, duck plague—we know those are out there on Plum, and who knows how many others besides. It’s not natural.”

  Mitch Tabach, with his prosthetic hip, seemed to agree. Reverend Ann Whitlen nodded along: it wasn’t natural. Bryan had already ruled Ann out as a supporter, due to the fact that she believed in the Rapture and wouldn’t care what happened to the land after God sky-vacuumed his followers away.

  The Stillpasses left their table. Paul Benchley and his teenage del
inquent hurried to the door. But Cole Drake shouted, “Go on,” and the Michelsons started perusing Adam’s brochures. Bryan wondered when Adam would start handing out refrigerator magnets for Pruitt Securities and his ludicrous environmental tests.

  “My advice,” Adam said, “is not to trust others to take care of you. Just because they say ‘everything’s going to be fine,’ doesn’t mean it is fine. We haven’t heard a single word from the government on what that mutant was. Don’t we as citizens deserve the truth? We need to stand up and demand answers.”

  Bryan was tired of standing. As he hopped off the stage, his pant cuff caught on the corner of Magdalena’s photograph and tipped it forward over the red poinsettia leaves. “This doesn’t help us,” Bryan yelled. “Adam, you have no idea how important it is that we save Orient from the actual threat it’s facing. What we need is a plan for the future, how to protect our village from development, starting today.”

  Adam had seen this one coming, and he grinned as he responded. “Bryan, has it ever occurred to you that no one is going to want to buy the land out here if it’s polluted? You’re so scared of developers. Hell, if it’s a biohazard, we’ll be praying for them. You’re the one who’s missing the point.”

  “I see your point,” Bryan muttered. Adam called for volunteers to join him in protesting at the next council meeting in Southold. Behind him was the gluey, tilted picture of Magdalena, a woman who had spent the last years of her life fighting to preserve the ecosystem of Orient. She had been so beloved in the community for her dedication that it seemed incidental, maybe even disrespectful, to mention that she’d been killed by wild animals, stung at least partially to death by indigenous bees.

  CHAPTER 12

  One of the stranger things Beth learned about her husband after they moved to Orient was his fear of the dark. After sunset, darkness settled so thick in the house that walking to the bathroom or climbing the stairs felt like donning a blindfold. Despite all of Gail’s hysterical remodeling, she had never bothered to update the electrical wiring. Sensible light switches near doorways were rare. Most of the rooms were lit by ceiling lamps with long beaded chains, forcing the light-seeker to swat the air in hopes of catching the phantom string.

  In New York, Beth had detected no hint of Gavril’s nyctophobia. Their East Village apartment glimmered yellow at all hours, thanks to the constant light from the street. In Orient, however, Gavril complained that he felt drowned by the blackness, like a child adrift in the ocean. During their first weeks there, Beth often woke to find him calling out to her from the hallway, needing her voice to lead him back to bed. “I’m embarrassed,” he admitted one morning, eyes swollen from lack of sleep. “In the night, I had to go to the bathroom, but I was so scared I waited until dawn to pee. I almost went out the window.”

  “You almost jumped out the window, or you almost peed out the window?”

  “Both.”

  Beth had always been comfortable with darkness; she had never thought that an otherwise highly functioning adult could envision strange, serial-murdering horrors awaiting him on a simple ten-yard trip to the toilet. She bought Gavril a flashlight to keep on his side of the bed, but for weeks thereafter, Beth would be startled awake by an intense spotlight on her face.

  “Just making sure it’s still you,” he said before climbing under the blankets.

  “Who else would it be? Oh, just get under the covers. I’ll hold you.”

  Before she knew she was pregnant, Gavril had been her child. “The darkness is as heavy as soup. I can’t even see my hand,” Gavril said in bed, presumably holding up a hand neither of them could see.

  Now, finally, Gavril had learned to sleep soundly, moving his arms in dreams. After Magdalena’s death, it was Beth who stayed awake, marginally terrified. Was that the sound of a key turning in the kitchen door? Was that creak someone’s foot on the creaky third stair? Had the person who killed Jeff and Magdalena heard her tell Mike Gilburn it was murder, and decided she too must be silenced?

  Beth had to go to the bathroom. Lately she had to go all the time, but she couldn’t bring herself to go out into the hall, where a killer could stab her or snap her neck with ease. If she was attacked, would she scream for help? And would that wake up Gavril, making him the second victim? Would she love him enough to stay silent while she was being murdered, just so he could live?

  She shifted in the sheets, wishing women could urinate out windows. She distracted herself by imagining a dildolike contraption that women could strap on to urinate with masculine precision. But the fear soon returned, settling back into her like stirred sand returning to the sea floor. It was fear that made a person feel most alone—even a married woman in the safety of her childhood home next to her two-hundred-pound husband.

  In the two days since Magdalena’s death, Beth had tried to convince herself that she’d behaved irrationally, a slave to her raging hormones, as if her own body had sacrificed her sanity to support the new life within her. That new life was in her right now, growing, dividing, mimicking her heartbeat. It could be gotten rid of. A trip into the city for an appointment at the clinic was all it would take. And they could try again later, when she was ready. She willed herself not to think of the fetus as a baby. It was a mass, and she would think of it that way until she decided if she would keep it.

  Gavril shifted next to her, slamming his elbow against her ribs, and she rolled onto her side to keep their skin from touching. She listened to the clock tick. She had thought of driving over to Paul Benchley’s to collect Jeff Trader’s book from Mills that evening, but she’d decided against it, reluctant to give more free rein to her insanity. Mike Gilburn’s incredulous reaction to her had left her feeling ashamed. Her outburst to the detective—he was murdered, she was murdered—now sounded to her like the ranting of a delusional mind.

  Yet no matter how often in the past two days Beth admonished herself for acting irrationally, her mind kept leading her back to the evidence. Magdalena had told her that someone had murdered Jeff Trader. The caretaker himself had pointed the blame at the OHB when he spoke to Magdalena just before he died. Only days later, Magdalena herself was dead. How was murder an irrational conclusion to draw? The problem was, Beth had been the only person to hear Magdalena’s suspicions. She couldn’t shake the sense that it was her duty to pursue that possibility. It was, at least, a distraction from sitting around in indecision about the mass. Tomorrow she would call Mike Gilburn to ask for a deeper investigation. Tomorrow she would retrieve the book from Mills. Tomorrow, after Magdalena’s funeral, she would try to work out what possible gain there was in two loosely connected deaths.

  A shuffling sound came from the walkway outside the kitchen door. Hinges yawned. Wood slapped. Beth quickly sat up and shook Gavril’s shoulder. She was never certain he was awake until she saw his eyes.

  “Çe este?” he groaned. “What?”

  “Gavril,” she whispered. She couldn’t make out the contours of his face. Only the liquid cowry-shell eyes, already shrinking closed again. “I think there’s someone downstairs.”

  “Go back to sleep,” he mumbled, roping his arm around her.

  “No.” She gouged a finger in his armpit, causing him to flinch. “I really think I heard something.”

  “I don’t hear anything.” He was alert now, listening, or at least pretending to listen. He pushed his chest against her and began to rub his groin against her hip. She shoved him back by the shoulder.

  “Don’t.”

  “Come on.” He tried again, slipping his fingers under the elastic of her underwear. She squeezed his hand to stop it from foraging deeper. “What’s wrong with you?” Gavril withdrew his hand. “We have not had sex in almost a month. Why can’t I?”

  “I don’t want to.” She had to match his wounded tone to affect a stalemate. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Never in the mood lately,” he said gruffly. “How can we have a baby when we don’t—”

  “Maybe I don’t want
a baby right now.” She said it more calmly than she had intended. He grabbed for her breast, and she knocked his hand away. Gavril crouched on his knees, wide awake with rejection.

  “Why are you acting this way to me?” His eyes and lips were wet; the tips of his shoulders gathered a trace of moonlight. “We used to do it every night. Now you don’t let me touch you. What have I done?”

  “Nothing,” she whined. She hated that whine, that last bit of girl in her.

  “You don’t want a child anymore?”

  “Someone is downstairs!” She no longer thought anyone was downstairs, but she hadn’t worked out a map for this convoluted midnight conversation. Beth wasn’t exactly lying when she said: “And I told you, and you didn’t listen, that our next-door neighbor might have been murdered.”

  “Murdered.” He laughed. “American obsession. You’re too smart for that. Why are you acting crazy lately?”

  “And you’re still not listening to me. I heard something. But, sure let’s fuck while there’s a burglar in our kitchen.” Beth pulled her underwear down to her knees to drive the insanity home. She lay there, exposed to the cold, arms crossed against her stomach.

  “Now maybe I’m not in the mood.” Gavril grabbed his pillow and hugged it against his stomach. “You’ve been—”

  Glass shattered. A chair toppled over in the kitchen. The sounds Beth had only invented became real sounds, the last sounds of vulnerable sleepers before they were killed. For a minute they lay frozen, two people living every second except this one, a second that felt like it couldn’t possibly be theirs to live. People were murdered so easily because they didn’t believe they could be.

  Gavril jumped from the bed and located his flashlight. “Someone is downstairs,” he whispered. “We push the bed against the door. We take the bed apart and use the metal for bats. We go out the window.”

  A broom whisking across linoleum. Glass shards dumped into a soft, yielding substance.