Garcia's Heart

by Liam Durcan

  “I know who they are.”

  “But you don’t know they’ve been a major contributor to the Democratic Voice since its inception. That’s putting it mildly; ‘founding patron’ would be more exact.” Patrick stood there, a foot against the partially open door, caught in a headlock of semi-drunken, partial recollection. “Sentient bought a sizeable chunk of your company’s IPO, and in the last six months they increased their stake to about 26.6 per cent. Roughly. I checked this morning.”

  “So this company acquires some shares in my company for millions of dollars in order to potentially affect a trial that wouldn’t occur for a couple of years. Wow, that’s a brilliant strategy. That’s just great business.”

  “I’m not saying they have some grand plan, but their influence is pervasive.”

  “Do you ever listen to yourself?”

  “Bancroft worked for a Sentient subsidiary in the mid-nineties.”

  “So? We hired Bancroft.”

  “After consulting with your financial backers.”

  “We chose him.”

  “Why are you here? Do you ask yourself that? I know you think you’re here of your own free will, personal duty and everything, but who called you? Celia. At Oliveira’s urging. You were supposed to be here, Patrick, that’s why. The Democratic Voice has their hands all over this.”

  “Is this how you do all your research? Wild conjecture?”

  “Whatever you do, Patrick, whatever you give them, they’ll spin it. They don’t need to get Hernan off, they just want to create doubt. They want Hernan to go to jail quietly, looking like he’s wrongly convicted. Then, they’re seen as impassioned defenders, good-guy underdogs. You think they want Hernan walking free and talking to people, naming names? If they wanted him acquitted, they’d have a hundred witnesses testifying that Hernan was a saint and that Lepaterique was a spa and he’d be back at home selling melons. Hernan in jail with his mouth shut is their ideal scenario, and whether or not you want to be a part of that is up to you.”

  Patrick was beginning to envy Elyse. The truth for her was zero-sum; if she had it, then others didn’t. She was certain and he was jealous of that certainty. Elyse could speak to him the way she did because she thought he was crazy or bought or scared or any of the conditions that made a person wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Elyse stood in the light of the corridor, squinting. It was dark inside the room. The doorway was open enough, closed enough that it was like they were speaking to each other from opposite sides of an animal’s mouth. It would be so easy to close the door. Then she spoke and, for a person who before had seemed so certain, it surprised him to hear what sounded like an angry plea: “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out somebody’s life?”

  “Yes,” he said, and closed the door.

  NINETEEN

  The answer to how long one can look at the View on Delft without a break is approximately twelve and a half minutes. Experiments on visual attention indicate that in any non-facial visual image, the edges and silhouettes are scanned for a quick outline of context identifiers and analysis of depth. Then the secondary details are attended to–and in View on Delft these details make up almost another entire painting; the play of light on water, the hyperrealist foreground representation and finally, the grey mantle of cloud that frames the entire sky. After surveying that, any attempt at further, intense visual concentration is rewarded with something that feels like anxiety. The painting moves in and out of focus, as if there is some process reflexively trying to avoid the cause of this anxiety. This is no fault of the artist, we are not equipped to stare at stationary objects for very long. Besides, the security guards at the Mauritshuis, ever observant, ever wary of those whose intense study cannot be attributed to pure art appreciation, were trained to intervene at precisely twelve minutes, happy to ask any patron who has lingered that long if they can be of assistance. Patrick said no to the offer, his head snapping up to meet the great tonsured head of a security guard, the hypnotic state broken but the outline of Delft still lingering, echoing through his visual association cortex, playing out like a blueprint against the guard’s facial features. He checked his watch, focusing on the novelty of the sweeping second hand at first, then checked the time. Twelve minutes thirty seconds.

  It was past noon by the time he’d got up and out of his hotel room. A protracted, beer-stoked sleep was broken by a phone call from an Oliveira assistant. Patrick had been hooked and hauled into a flat boat of midday light, caught speechless, dry-mouthed and aching, but it didn’t matter; the assistant did all the talking regarding their new liberate-García project. The call was concerning the follow-up contact–how professional, making it easy for him–telling Patrick what Cervotech’s number was so he could call early Monday morning and speak with their scientific liaison, Dr. van der whoever, to make the necessary arrangements. The assistant said, “Okay? You got all that?” at the end of the instructions, the only sign that he’d appreciated it wasn’t a machine he was talking to. The call, and its promise of more calls, was enough to chase him from the bed.

  The day was overcast and the clouds clung like gauze to a Den Haag morning that ached sympathetically with him. In the distance a church bell sent out its sonic drop kick, sorely testing the effectiveness of the anti-inflammatories he’d downed and making him curse the lack of a more comprehensive atheism in the new Europe. Even with all this, his face felt surprisingly better, the swelling subsiding and the pain a vague sense memory, its appearance giving way to a pageant of discoloured flesh, a craniofacial version of foliage season in Vermont. The staff at the Metropole were now familiar with him and the mysterious evolving disfigurement; the maids felt permitted to smile as he passed by their carts in the hallway. Even Edwin seemed more understanding, more forgiving of this injured man’s earlier shortcomings regarding his messages.

  It took fifteen minutes to walk to Korte Vijverberg where he found the Mauritshuis with its promise of diversion and solitude that he felt he needed as urgently as another lungful of oxygen. And after three hours, ending with his experiment with View of Delft, he felt better. A moment on one of the benches, among the crowd, many of whom clamoured around The Anatomy Lesson or Girl with a Pearl Earring like obnoxious groupies, and he felt a growing contrarian boosterism for the Delft painting, as ignored as the stucco-faced portrait of Rembrandt. Yes, Delft was his painting.

  He could have gone to the Gemeentemuseum but instead chose the Mauritshuis. He didn’t want to draw conclusions about the decision–the Mauritshuis was a longer walk and he wasn’t as certain of the directions–but there was an indisputable satisfaction, a verifiability, in representational art that he found lacking in more modern works. Delft looked like Delft. He was as certain of the skill of the painter as he was of any craftsman. Celia would roll her eyes and bemoan his philistinism parading as a more noble sentiment, but she wasn’t here. He hadn’t looked for her once, hadn’t turned at the sight of a stroller or the sound of a child’s voice. If he were to come upon her here, swimming upstream through the flow of other tourists mobbing Vermeer’s more crowd-pleasing canvases, he hoped he’d just pass by. Not a word. They were strangers, really. Imagining they were something else, something more, was a delusion. Pulling José-Maria Fernandez into it, buying into Elyse’s cut-rate psychoanalysis, was doing nothing more than aggrandizing himself, trying to turn an adolescent moment into an epic tale. He wasn’t a surrogate for Fernandez. He was barely a surrogate for himself. Delft brought him back. There was no interpretation to Delft. Delft was Delft. It was beautiful and if it weren’t worth ten million Euros and as heavily guarded as the main driveway of the White House, he’d wrench it from the wall and run.

  He walked through the grand foyer toward the exit, and the estuary of indoor light changed as it mixed with the outside sea of daylight. The sky was clearing and it was warm enough to consider taking off his jacket. The streets had more people. Perhaps Sunday was the walking day, the day out.

  The pictu
res in the Mauritshuis were a distraction, of course, a temporary and insufficient escape from Elyse’s grand unified theory, in which, it seemed, every second person in the western hemisphere was in on the acquittal/silencing/beatification of Hernan García. It was ridiculous, he told himself. He needed the crowds, he needed Delft to keep out freshly planted doubts about Bancroft’s motives, amazed at how easily his boss’s tolerance and amiability mutated into sinister designs. And when his suspicions of Bancroft faded, they were replaced by the depressing thoughts of how Oliveira was going to manipulate the data from the study he felt obligated to arrange. He imagined images mislabelled, key information deleted. It must have happened before, in the early days of fingerprinting or DNA evidence. Now, his technology was new, the science mysterious and compelling enough that it would be difficult to dispute the results. His only hope was that Hernan would refuse the test, that he would understand its inherent fraudulence from the way Patrick explained it (would Oliveira even let him talk? Or would he be kept in the corner, allowed to nod in agreement as a more optimistic sales pitch was used?). But he wasn’t even sure what Hernan wanted. Maybe Hernan wanted out.

  Throughout the course of the day, whenever feelings of guilt tugged at Patrick for conspiring to free a war criminal, he assuaged them by calling on the standard parole board rationalizations that Hernan García posed no threat to other people. Perhaps justice was less about judgment and more about testifying to what happened, he reasoned, remembering other countries where a tribunal would have gratefully traded truth for amnesty. And had there been any reasonable statute of limitations, Hernan would have never been arraigned in the first place. His children would have their father back. He would see his grandson. Patrick owed Hernan. He owed him this.

  Patrick turned left on the Korte Voorhout and crossed the Prinsessegracht where the density of pedestrian traffic steadily increased. For the first time in Den Haag, he had to alter his step to avoid others. Another half-block and there were now people standing on the sidewalks near where the street opened into a large green space. The novelty of a crowd, the planetary density, slowed him as much as the adjustments he had to make in his stride. People ahead stared in the direction of the southeast corner of the park where a stage had been erected and others were speaking. Ahead of him, the overflow from the park blocked the sidewalk completely. At the buckling edge of the crowd there were people balanced on the sidewalk’s curb, leaning forward for stability, attention divided between listening to the speakers and eyeing the cars that wheeled past eighteen inches behind them on the busy outer lane of the Prinsessegracht.

  Patrick stopped. For the first time in the city he was not surrounded by typical Dutch faces. The women wore hijab and there was nothing he understood in the words around him, Dutch or Arabic; not the words shouted by a man with a megaphone on the stage or the phrases chanted back by the crowd. He couldn’t judge the mood of the gathering crowd beyond feeling the tension. That alone would usually have prompted him to an increased pace and a search for a way out, but the crowd had closed in around him, making it impossible to move in any direction. He tried to turn back, pivoting into the face of another man who had been walking closely behind him, and that’s when he heard it, the sharp stab of brakes and the da-daup sound of syncopated impact against a hollow object. The crowd turned with the sound, a non-vocal sound, then a quasi-vocal sound before it was articulated into a scream, a woman’s scream, and there was a torrent of movement that settled into a fixed frenzy of ten to twelve people crouched by the curb and then someone shouted, a male voice this time, a voice calling for an ambulance, it must be for an ambulance, Patrick thought, and three people around him were on their cell phones, one already looking around, shouting. For directions? A cross street? A word was shouted out–a name, he thought–and the man with the cell phone repeated it with harried precision, his free index finger applied to the tragus of his other ear, keeping out the noise of the crowd now that he had his answer.

  The crowd convulsed in a sudden lurching movement and Patrick strained to keep his feet. There was shouting and an atonal crescendo of car horns. Patrick watched the crowd around the curb, witnessed the cries and gesticulations as if that was what would bring the ambulance more quickly. And he didn’t know why, but he said it then, at first loudly enough only to be heard by the man next to him, who turned and said it back.

  “Dokter?”

  Patrick became aware of the look of confusion he must have worn as the man repeated, “Dokter?”, this time pointing at Patrick and fixing him with a dead-serious stare. He nodded and the man shouted the word in the direction of the people gathered at the curb who turned en masse, a movement that seemed to catapult Patrick toward them. People moved aside and Patrick found himself standing over a man, unconscious on the pavement, limbs arrayed in a way that confirmed sudden, terrible force applied to a body. Thirty feet away, a car had pulled over, hazard lights pulsing a redundant warning.

  He knelt down next to the man and looked into a face that at first appeared remarkably untouched. A man in his twenties, dark-skinned and slender, lying on his side, mouth agape, one eye open. An earlobe newly webbed in blood. He groped for a pulse and the skin of the man’s wrist was cool and wet. In the crowd, on the asphalt next to the man, what came next to Patrick wasn’t the predictable panic or visceral alarm but only the oddest relief. Patrick looked again at the face and all he could attest to was a remarkable suspension of self-doubt, as though every apprehension he’d had about himself had been sequestered to another part of his body. He could help this person. I am a doctor; this is what I do, he thought and the faith wasn’t ridiculous, the faith was a fire that he’d never felt before. Looking into that blind eye with its sinkhole of a pupil, he felt such intoxicating certainty, a sense of calm beyond any pharmaceutical, a calm that seemed profane in the tumult of the crowd around him. This was how Hernan must have felt, he thought, imagining a brain bathed in dopamine, a brain revelling, already priming itself, already begging to be tweaked to feel this good again. Any other day, he’d walk away from such a scene just as he’d find a way to duck out of a hospital room during a difficult moment, but his hand was clamped to the injured man’s wrist and its impoverished pulse, and he didn’t want to go anywhere, wouldn’t go anywhere. I am here. I will help.

  A man in his fifties dropped to his knees beside Patrick, hoarsely shouting some directive at him, indicating in the broadest possible manner that they should turn the injured man over and Patrick shook his head and pointed to his own neck. Across from the man in his fifties was a young woman, squatting on her haunches, wearing a hijab of the most amazing blue, a colour matching her wide eyes, made to seem wider for the fact that they were the only part of her face he could see with her hands brought up to her gasping mouth. Sister or wife. He put his head back down to the pavement to see how the injured man was doing, and he would swear it was another man now, in similar clothes and circumstances, yes, but now a different category of man, a dying man. His euphoria was an airborne memory, leaving him to face the incontrovertible facts of injury and the knowledge that he could do nothing for this man. He was going to die. A crowd of the injured man’s friends and family circled in, and Patrick felt the weight of their gaze on his chest like a tightening python. He looked up for any sign of an ambulance, not with hope but for relief from having to kneel there and carry the weight of the crowd’s expectation. Patrick lay down again, this time flat on his stomach, ostensibly to be better able to see the man’s face. One eye open, its pupil even more dilated, a depth from which no return was possible. The sound of traffic on the other side of Prinsessegracht was a constant dull roar behind him and the voices of the people around him seemed to ride on it, feed off it. The injured man gasped, a shuddering, deep visceral sound, an agonal sound that would have dropped Patrick had he not already been face-flat against the pavement, seeing the man’s lips move with each increasingly tenuous breath. He let go of the man’s wrist.

  The sirens came.
Ambulance. Police too, and half the crowd in the park gathered for the demonstration cleared out with their arrival. The injured man was put on a backboard and loaded into the ambulance, which departed with full lights, full siren, perhaps as a concession to the man’s family, the woman in the blue hijab and the man in his fifties somewhere among the people wailing behind him. The police waded through the tension in the crowd to take statements from the car’s driver and a few witnesses. When they got to Patrick, he explained that he had seen nothing, that he was just passing by. They told him he was free to go. A few steps away, an ambulance attendant stopped him and sat him down, going through the drill of first aid until Patrick explained the bruises on his face were nothing new and the blood on his shirt was not his own.

  Patrick opened the taps wide enough that the mirror fogged above the sink. He checked the ridges of his nails and found no visible blood but his fingertips had that smell to them, and so he lathered and scrubbed and drowned them in the blast of water. By the time he was finished washing, his hands were newborn piglets in the sink. He had never told anyone, but an added benefit of research was escape from that never-ending intimacy with death that defined his specialty. The catastrophes were bad enough: mushroom clouds of blood, acres of brain scorched and salted, insurgencies of bacteria and viruses–but he couldn’t bear to contemplate a life spent cowering from patients who were aware that death approached. They could see his fear. He knew it. They’d faced it themselves and conquered it or been pulled under, but either way they knew. They’d watch as he came into their room in the morning and inquired about how the night had passed; they’d see traces of it in him as he examined their withering muscles or checked their eyes for evidence of pressure that was building from the little garden of metastases ripening inside their brains. They’d look at him and it would seem that they all knew his secrets and he sensed how it diminished him as their doctor. He had mastered the details of illness, acquired a superior working knowledge of the nervous system, and yet, in the most basic sense, he could not be what these people needed. There was no way to learn this skill. It should have been achievable, like everything else. It should have been fair. It galled him to see classmates almost inadvertently stumble into that sort of confidence, that calm authority that ministering to the ill demanded. It was like watching them be admitted into a secret society from which he’d been excluded. Nothing had been beyond him except this. Not having that ability–and what was it, he thought, the delusion of confidence, a benign hubris, the denial of death–had been the biggest disappointment of his life, one that he couldn’t admit to someone like Hernan, someone who had been so endowed.