by Liam Durcan
After a couple of drinks in the hotel bar, Birgita had come up to the room under the mutual pretence of seeing the view. The view mustn’t have been all that captivating, for he came out of the washroom to find her thumbing through his copy of Moby-Dick that had been sitting on the undersized desk near the window. She’d read it too, in school; it was apparently widely admired in Holland, where, he supposed, the thought of nautical catastrophe coming from something other than the sea itself was a distinct novelty. She told him she’d never seen anyone read it who wasn’t doing it as part of a school assignment.
“You’ve made a lot of notes,” she said, the pages fanning from her thumb.
“They’re not mine. It belonged to a friend.”
He turned on some music, and they sat and talked some more about how long Birgita was going to stay in Den Haag. She had plans to travel that were just vague enough to depress Patrick. They drank a few shrunken bottles of an unrecognizable single malt whisky (C15.50) and ate pistachios (C6.25) and rolled around in a proto-coital haze for the longest time before he got up to search the room for a switch to turn off the lights, so as not to feel like the Phantom of the Opera with his half-mangled face. Any qualms were dissolved by the scotch and a remembered list of slights and oppressors: Celia’s hostility, Heather’s abandonment. Even Hernan made an appearance, Fernandez in tow, then di Costini and Lindbergh, along with Roberto’s fist. A Mardi Gras parade of rationalizations.
He felt he understood her–it was something he’d sensed in the bar of the Hotel Metropole, nurtured on their way up to the sixteenth floor: Birgita was lonely. Birgita–just another person putting in their time working in Den Haag, lonely enough to wander around the museums on the weekend or take in the kitsch aesthetic at Scheveningen. Lonely enough to make their way over to the bar of the Hotel Metropole on a Friday night. As lonely as he was. The loneliness wasn’t sad or poignant, but it defined her to Patrick, so that when she slipped her sweater over her head, arms held up in mid-undress, making the shape of a victory V tilting one way, and then the other, she wasn’t Birgita at all as much as a lonely woman undressing in front of a lonely man.
She pushed him back on the bed and giggled. They were refugees, come all the way to the same room at the Hotel Metropole in Den Haag, here to witness terrible things that normal people did. He kissed her on the neck and felt the weight of her on him and it seemed like the overture to nothing more than a few hours of comradely solace, something diverting and sustaining at the same time. He imagined trysts in the darkened recesses of London tube stations during the Blitz, the expressions of mutual need, the solidarity of loneliness.
But after that, as she swivelled her shoulders out of the last of her clothes and they were both naked for the first time, Birgita didn’t look lonely any more. She smiled and the whole nature of her smile was different and although it was dark and he’d had some scotch, he could see it wasn’t a look of loneliness or commiseration or even appetite. It was pity.
She was being nice. It angered him in the most invigorating way. He hadn’t realized it at first, but thinking of Birgita as some sort of kindred spirit and having images of her lonely life spool out in front of him as she came close was too sad and poignant. But then the look on her face turned into an insult, and she was different now.
Birgita, touching her; all he could think about was how anger freed him. It changed the way he thought of her, his intent, his desire, and yet she was still there, oblivious to what had just happened inside him. He kissed her and searched her face for further traces of pity. He found it, or imagined it there enough that he could feel what he needed to feel. Patrick wanted to put on the light again, to see her face more clearly. But other thoughts came to him, first in slow sequence but soon a torrent. Patrick imagined Hernan in that room at Lepaterique, trying to understand what he saw when he looked into the eyes of the detainees. Fernandez’s eyes. What was his intent? Was it a type of love that Hernan felt bringing them back from death, or the opposite? He had watched Hernan tend to a dying man, nothing that he’d witnessed had changed, and yet what Patrick had once found heroic now terrified him.
A stab of pain in his head made him wince. He squinted at Birgita as it passed and in the gloom she looked beautiful again, she was Birgita again, and nothing was complicated. Fernandez had vanished and any pity he’d seen on her face, if it had been there at all, was a memory. He apologized. He was a little messed up, he said.
Birgita was gone now. She must have left sometime in the night. He could see her in her apartment, making toast for herself and maybe thinking she should have stayed home last night. Maybe she would speak to her mother or one of her brothers but she wouldn’t say a word about how she’d spent her evening.
He opened his computer to find remarkably few messages in his inbox. Nothing from Sanjay. One message from Marc-André. This was good, he thought, looking at the empty space, maybe Sanjay had figured it out, after all.
11.14
from: Dumont, MA [email protected]
re: Urgent/death of Neuronaut
Asshole.
Bancroft and Sanjay are gone, not even on the premises. The nephew went back to Minnesota and now The Olafson Brothers are coming, personally, tomorrow at noon. It’s me with the CEOs. And their lawyers. I have nothing.
If you don’t do something, I will tell Globomart whatever I think is necessary to make them happy. I will tell them we re-modelled the data. I will tell them you are dead. Whatever it takes. I will not let you take us down MAD
11.14
to: [email protected]
re: re: Urgent/death of Neuronaut
Don’t tell them anything until I get a chance to see the data.
Where is the data? Where is Sanjay?
You are overreacting. And before you send another email like this, you should remember who you’re talking to. mpl
It was like speaking to children, and the only comfort, until now, was that his colleagues lacked the sophistication to be devious. Over and over, he had explained to them it was a matter of analyzing the data. The answer was there, they just needed a little time and expertise to find it. He wondered if Bancroft was trying to coax Sanjay through it, a new-age sensei letting his young ward find his confidence in the crisis. Patrick had been through moments like this, the crunch of time and numbers, and he was nostalgic for those times, when he had the information at his disposal and it was a matter of making sense of it. He could imagine an all-nighter, just him and the data, knowing something interesting would come of it, knowing he could make it work. Other than designing a study, it was the moment he enjoyed most. Surprisingly, he felt a few sparks of excitement thinking about the problems at Neuronaut, and fanned by the righteous indignation he felt at Marc-André’s threats, it all amounted to something he hadn’t felt in months. Neuronaut was his and his alone. They needed him. They were falling apart without him. He lay down on the bed, savouring the feeling, its warm narcotic ache. It was a melancholy he imagined only people who’ve fled could attest to, the reverie of exiled princes and runaways. He would help them, he told himself, as he closed his eyes and the Den Haag morning pressed him deeper into the bed. Yes, he would do the right thing. Once he had the data.
FIFTEEN
Patrick awoke to a room the colour of eggshells. He looked at the clock and saw it was later than he’d thought. From the vantage point of his pillow, his gaze wandered the empty room until it settled on the books on his bedside table–Moby-Dick on top, where Birgita had left it, as if placed there in an attempt to contain the psychic biohazard of The Angel of Lepaterique beneath it. He pulled out the bottom book and opened it randomly, always surprised by the density of grief inside, how every page contained its own psalm of minor catastrophes.
At approximately 9:30 on the evening of June 28, 1983, Lieutenant Hector Gonzalez called García into room 14 to attend to a detainee. It was García’s first day at Lepaterique in more than three weeks, and log entries from various buildings at t
he INDUMIL complex suggest that it had been an exceptionally busy day. Interrogation of detainees arrested the previous night was being carried out simultaneously and García was called from one holding cell to another, often travelling between the buildings on the compound.
Hector Gonzalez–interviewed at his home in Columbia, South Carolina, five months prior to his death in 2003–had been stationed as a guard at Lepaterique since September of 1982 and recognized García from his frequent visits.
“The doctor came in and asked the guards (JLB, AH) to move back from the prisoner and he went down to his knees to look at the man–he was a boy, really–who was lying on the floor, chained by one arm to the wall. He’d been very badly beaten. His face was swollen and bloody, and his back and arms were covered in bruises. I asked the doctor if he needed anything and he said no, but could we release the man’s arm from the shackle. I looked at the interrogators and they said they didn’t care but none of us had the key, so it took a few minutes to get the prisoner out.
“The doctor had his bag open and he was listening to the boy’s chest. The doctor turned to me and asked me to get ‘the cart’ right away, so I went to building 2 where it was kept. When I got back he was pushing on the prisoner’s chest and then he used the electrical paddles to shock him and I guess his heart began beating again. It took another twenty minutes for the boy to wake up and the doctor looked relieved and began packing up his equipment in that black bag of his. The interrogators were still there, I remember that. The boy, he had his hands free now, made a motion for the doctor to come closer to tell him something. He could barely speak and so the doctor put his face next to the boy’s face as he whispered.
“The doctor just looked at the boy. He was shocked, you could tell. I heard the shouting. I thought it was the boy but it was the doctor. He was shouting ‘Who is this man?’ and ‘I demand to know who he is.’ And the interrogators took the doctor outside, it was a scene, really a scene. There was a scuffle because the doctor did not want to leave until he knew the boy’s name. I had to leave soon after. I never saw either one again.”
With this interview, a line was drawn from the boy on the floor, José-Maria Fernandez, to Patrick Lazerenko. Even though one man was already dead and the other unaware, at least at first, they had been connected for twenty years, according to Elyse Brenman. Elyse went so far as to index her hypothesis in The Angel of Lepaterique:
Fernandez, José-Maria: Lazerenko, M. Patrick and, 230, 231, 252–54
Patrick imagined Elyse’s interest being piqued when she found out that Hernan had influenced another young man after he left Honduras, just as he could see her falling to her knees in thanks when she discovered that the young man had gone on to become a doctor. Ah, the protegé other than the diary or sheaves of indiscriminately written correspondence, was there a more generous, unexpected gift to the biographer? The protegé as defender, as betrayer, as surrogate. Universal foil. Elyse, even he would admit, did fantastically well with this biographical device, strapping it on for a headlong rush into a psychological inquiry of the entire García clan. In her analysis, Patrick, simply put, was a project of Hernan’s repentance, his way of making amends for what he realized he had done to Fernandez, little more than a child, a colleague in the making, his most personal violation of an oath. The mere facts of Patrick’s life–that he worked for and befriended the Garcías, that he had fallen in love with Celia, that he had decided to become a doctor–were all preordained, according to Elyse, all Hernan’s doing.
It was ingenious and psychologically nuanced and it made for compelling reading, but in this equation Patrick was nothing more than a pawn. With her formulation, Elyse Brenman had cast doubt on many of the happier moments and relationships of his life, essentially challenging his role in it. He knew he shouldn’t care. Happy is happy, and if a person had a few days, never mind a few years of happiness, it was more than several billion other people got.
Growing up disengaged from his parents, Patrick had been prone to the common childhood fantasy of imagining he’d secretly been adopted; he understood the attraction of creating an alternative life story. How it could frighten and invigorate at the same time. But it was different to have a biography imposed on you. Elyse had done that. What started out as second-rate psychologizing began to make sense to Patrick; the dead man’s story had credence and soon it was part of him, inside him and declaring itself like a sore leg that still needed to be used for walking. It was enough to keep Patrick awake at night, running through an inventory of memories for examples of kindness that were now something else entirely.
I was Fernandez: it was the thought that complicated everything for Patrick. It cast doubt on Hernan’s motives at the same time it explained his actions. A monster seeking forgiveness. Every act of generosity became a repayment of a debt, and Patrick was nothing in this equation except a vehicle of possible redemption, a walk-on playing the ghost of Fernandez.
Was it there, in the alley behind Le Dépanneur Mondial, that Hernan first saw the possibility in him? On that May night, was it the darkness and the threat of violence, the startled face of a boy that made Fernandez come to mind, the recognition of the debt owed? Or was it when he saw the boy was eager and impressionable, and would be deeply affected by his stories of the nobility of a life in medicine? Patrick wondered if he’d disappointed Hernan, been less of a student than Fernandez, failed in those ways expected when one is measured against a ghost. He put the book back on the bedside table.
The weekend. Two full days with no tribunal. Respite was elusive. He had wanted a break and now that it had come, the thought of not having the comfort of other people around him made him count the hours to the start of the next session. The room was silent. The entire hotel would be quiet. The Metropole was a business hotel, and once the work week was over it would be abandoned except for a skeleton staff and castaways like him. On occasions like this, without a companion or family to defuse the aura of the stranded traveller, he had been treated by the staff with particular kindness, almost solicitude, which he attributed to either their need to keep busy or his inability to disguise his loneliness. Patrick had the feeling the Metropole was different, and that except for Edwin and his deputies searching him out, he could have stayed in his room, in bed, all weekend without inquiries. He rolled onto his side and sat up.
It would be hours before North America woke up, before Sanjay would think to send him data, so he didn’t bother with his computer. He didn’t want to listen to music, and the television, well, the television never helped. So he dressed, poking his still tender head out of his sweater with all the élan of a drugged tortoise. Then the rest of his clothes, scattered on the ground in random hillocks after last night, none of them any less daunting than the sweater, each an affront to his desire to just lie back down and sleep. But there was a possibility that some of the Garcías were waiting for him, and so he got ready, and by the time he was out in the hallway he felt almost normal again. He should be happy. He was going to the beach.
Those first months after reading Elyse’s book, he wondered why Hernan needed him, why he couldn’t have used Roberto to fulfill his debt to Fernandez. But it was impossible to reinvent your own son for such a purpose, a burden worse than calling him junior, a feat that needed twelve disciples and some spare lumber and nails. No, it needed someone new. Patrick realized this, that he may have been nothing more than in the right place at the right time, the opportunity for Hernan to redeem himself.
But being a surrogate for José-Maria Fernandez didn’t explain everything. It couldn’t. Celia had loved him. Yes, Elyse had made the case that Hernan’s actions could be explained by Fernandez, but not Celia’s. She was his daughter, and she deferred to him, but it was crazy to think that Hernan could exert that type of influence over her, to convince her that she felt that way about Patrick. Patrick refused the thought, but it crept up on him in the darkness sometimes, abetted by a lingering sense of inferiority that shadowed every memory from adole
scence. What was Celia doing there in his bedroom that night? Why did she come to him? Patrick remembered the shocking ease with which he allowed himself to forget what was going on downstairs at his father’s wake, how quickly he said that he loved her. The next thought was amazement that grief could be so capsized, and that any emotion could be so beyond his control. She could kill me like this, he thought, even at the time. She could walk away and he would return to being unhappy. They lay in his bed and held each other and nothing else existed. But since Elyse’s book, every memory of the Garcías had been revised, and what troubled Patrick, as much as thoughts of Hernan’s motives, as much as Fernandez stalking every memory, was the memory of Celia appearing that night, appearing in his room like a second-rate adolescent fantasy. What had made her come up to his room? He wanted to believe it had been her desire that made her climb the stairs, but he was no longer sure. There had been two of them alone in a room, and everything that came from that–contact, a confession, and the explicit understanding of power–now had the possibility of meaning something else.
He and Celia had spent a few weeks that autumn meeting secretly at places downtown; he told himself they were enjoying the novelty of each other, that it was fair to keep it to themselves. But he knew they both sensed the delicacy of the situation. They talked for hours in the protective shell of public spaces. In a coffee shop on Park Avenue Celia told him how she had liked him since he had come to their house that first time for dinner, but that he’d always seemed so unhappy, an observation that stung him at first–who in their right mind would want to be with anyone they perceived as unhappy?–but which he took with the good humour of a man of newly reformed moods. In the library of the medical school he admitted to her that school bored him and that he didn’t know if he’d made the right choice. From cafés and restaurants, they graduated to sneaking into his bedroom when his mother was out at Catholic Women’s League meetings. After a month, Celia finally suggested that he come to dinner. Her parents needed to know.