“What photos?” I stuttered.
“We have information that you are traveling with a set of important photos. Our instructions are to confiscate said photos before leaving the ship.”
“We burned them,” Cam cried out. “We burned them back in Boston.”
“They’re here,” Nordstrom piped up. “On this ship. And we’ll find them.”
Our captors, of course, despite a prolonged and thorough search, came up empty.
“Somebody I know is going to be pissed,” Wiggins said.
Nordstrom shrugged her shoulders. “Not really. He’s so pleased with what we already sent. No big deal.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Wiggins replied. “I mean, we’ve done our job. Without those photos in the bar, they wouldn’t have given a greenlight for this operation, so . . .”
Cam frowned, perplexed. “What photos? What bar?”
“Secrets, secrets,” Nordstrom smirked. “I love it when couples lie to each other, just love it. Gives a je ne sais quoi to our work, spices it up, you know. Here, take a look. Two nights ago, Sotito’s bar. Recognize your husband?”
Quick as a viper, before I could stop her, Nordstrom placed copies of the guilty snapshots in Cam’s unwilling hands. There was Wiggins in the middle, one brawny hand on Jemmy Edén Walakial’s neck and the other on my shoulder, except it was not my face there, atop my body, but Henri’s. Wiggins between the two of us, the three of us, Henri and me and Jemmy, twins, triplets, an eerie and repellant picture.
“Until I saw it, you know,” said Wiggins, “I didn’t believe any of this. Thought the boss was insane and that we were on a fool’s errand. But these two snapshots, they convinced us. And more than us. They convinced the top brass to give the go-ahead, the final phase of the operation. The last nail in the coffin. So thanks to you, Mr. Foster, for making it all so easy.”
“How about posing again, huh, with your lovely wife,” suggested Nordstrom, lifting her camera. “Say cheese.”
Cam, my Cam, was also quick. She jumped at Nordstrom, grabbed the offending device, and threw it into the sea.
I gasped, pulled her back, protecting her body with mine, seconded by Jim and Wellington who stepped forward, ready to make a last stand. And a swift and brutal retribution would have been exacted if Wiggins hadn’t intervened.
“As long as you don’t throw him overboard, I don’t care about the camera. Where you’re going, there are lots of cameras, more than you’ve ever seen. You two! Pack your bags.”
We went down to our cabin.
I ventured: “Cam, I’m so sorry, I—”
“No, Fitz, what you did—it’s fine, it’s . . . better than fine. It’s perfect. Don’t you see? It happened to Henri—maybe right here, maybe on this very bay. The kidnapping, Fitzroy Foster—these imbeciles don’t know it yet, may never realize it, but they’re helping us, they’re collaborating by—”
“But Downey,” I protested. “Downey needed a photo to pull this operation off, that’s what my stupid excursion in Punta Arenas gave him. And I didn’t tell you. About Henri’s lookalike, there was a man who—God, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you, I didn’t trust you.”
“Well, trust me now,” she said, planting a wet kiss on my lips. “And trust Henri.”
I suspected she was dreadfully wrong, but I certainly didn’t have the right—or the time, for that matter—to refute her. Still, I failed to see any lasting parallels between Henri’s kidnapping and our own detention. He had no recourse, no language to defend himself with, no knowledge of his captors and their wiles. And no habeas corpus, which my father would interpose on our behalf as soon as Vudarovic called from Puerto Edén. Nor were we bound for extinction. And yet, I was glum, less from the assault we had suffered than from the depressing encounter with Jemmy Edén, which had haunted me with more ferocity than Henri, perhaps because it showed me what any of his alter egos might have become a century later. If I had been him (and who was closer?), I’d have no longer wanted to go home to the island of my debased ancestors. Maybe he was relieved that the odyssey had been interrupted. Or maybe he was frustrated that such violence kept on repeating itself endlessly and despaired of there ever being a solution. Whatever I might speculate about him, only one certainty remained to guide me. I had to believe that Cam was right, that, quite simply, we needed to trust him.
I held tight to that idea as we were lifted forlornly into the air, and held tight to that dimmest hope as we watched our friends waving goodbye while The Southern Cross, our home for so many weeks, became a speck below, lost in a sea tenanted by islands and dolphins and cragged twisted spires and an iceberg that crashed from its glacier mother like a child being slaughtered by the wind; even held onto Henri as an anchor as we crossed Patagonia eastward, the peaks and plains that he had never seen with his own mortal eyes from the heights we were flying; and kept that belief alive until we landed in an airfield in the Falklands.
And then felt it all melt away as soon as we observed the lank, solitary figure of Dr. Ernest Downey loping to greet us even before the asps of the helicopter ceased their murderous rotation. He was beaming, veritably hopping with joy, did not hesitate to embrace me, so hard that he seemed to be squeezing my body dry. I felt Henri’s loathing couple with mine, and it was all I could do not to vomit on the man who had chased us to the southernmost tip of the earth.
“My boy, my boy,” he murmured in my ear. “Finally, oh finally, we meet. And before the plague advances to the next stage, what a relief.” He reluctantly let me go, but kept speaking as he turned to greet Camilla, who took a step backward to avoid his hug. “And you, my dear Mrs. Foster, how kind of you to join your husband, share his glory and mine and what will soon be yours, this great occasion in the annals of medicine and science. If only my poor girl, if only my poor darling Evelyn were alive to be part of this celebration, if only she had been wise enough, given the right advice by her mother, but guilt is never the right counselor, we should never act out of guilt, never, never, but from the purest love of humanity and progress. Huxley said it, if you know the truth then you can do no wrong, didn’t he say that? T. H., I mean, because Aldous had it all upside down, didn’t he, antiscientific bastard, deriding the brave new worlds we have been forging. But we mustn’t detain ourselves further with allusions and quotations you may not be familiar with. Come, come, our transport awaits, men of significance and imperium are gathered to marvel at Operation Memory Redux, this giant step forward that Pasteur and Watson, Crick, and Miescher would die to witness, come, come.”
He gestured, still speaking, half pulling, half pushing us toward a large military plane on the tarmac, its motor humming as it was refueled by an energetic group of men in uniform.
“And agents Wiggins and Nordstrom, well done, well done. The photos, the photos in the bar, no one could have managed a better couple of shots, not alerting Mr. Foster to the game that was afoot, oh it would have been more complicated if you had been forced to barge into his room dressed as hotel personnel, well done indeed! I cannot describe my elation when I received them via fax. That was it, that was enough, the final visual proof I needed to convince our sponsors, rid them of that last pinch of skepticism, oh when they saw, when they saw with their own eyes what I had been promising, the truth that could no longer be hidden, oh, they were ready, they were ecstatic, oh, you will be commended, be assured of a raise and a commendation and a footnote in the book I am writing, such service is not forgotten. But come, come, come, destiny awaits.”
Ushering us all into the bowels of the aircraft, sitting us in some rather uncomfortable seats and placing himself directly across from ours, and still talking and talking and talking.
He kept at it all night long as we overflew the continent that Columbus had bumped into almost five hundred years earlier, the plane covering in one night what it had taken us a month and a half to navigate by sea, Ernest Downey did not cease his tirade even while he ravenously ate—we refused to partake of even one mor
sel—the tepid meal served a few hours after we departed the Falklands, he kept at it when Cam asked him to please be quiet and even carried on by himself when I stood up to relieve myself.
All the reports Cunningham had assembled indicated that Downey was a taciturn man, a melancholy man, who seldom opened his mouth except in reproach or when hurling out orders. True, he had engaged in a long rant with Cam at the library regarding his research plans, but nothing that predicted the ebullience that now possessed his vocal chords, a veritable Niagara, Amazon, Mississippi, Pacific Ocean of words cascading from thick, sensual, starved lips.
Cam soon enough learned to ignore that buzz and curled up by my side, snoring gently away, but not me. I was fascinated, in spite of my disgust. Meeting for the first time someone touched by the same tragedy that had afflicted my loved ones. As if I were perversely gaining a new family member, an older relative, insane though he might be, who could grasp what I had been through, the trials of my parents, someone who had been as shocked and puzzled and as determined—even more determined—to find a solution, a way out. And he seemed to recognize in me a similar affinity, treating me with the kindness, solicitude, and confidence of a father. Able to pour his heart out, confess to someone like me the emotions he had suppressed for years.
He talked of the grand voyage of discovery we were about to embark upon, the days and months and decades ahead—and how this would change the future of humanity, only akin, he said, to the discovery of America half a millennium ago, was this not a sign from God. And God, he talked about God and America as God’s chosen nation to lead the world out of poverty and backwardness and ignorance. Though his faith had been tested by Evelyn’s sickness. Because at the end, it wasn’t only the photos. Her face, her face had started to show signs of black bristles, tiny spikes of hair seemed to be protruding from her cheeks, and her nose beginning to flatten like a monkey’s, in those final days Krao threatened to take over Evelyn’s features, that’s why the girl had killed herself. But when his daughter had died, he had not buckled under, he had assembled a team and deepened his knowledge of the affliction that had taken her—and then, realizing the medical and scientific implications of his research, worried about the possibility of a next phase in the plague, attacks on faces rather than mere photos, which was bad enough, terrible enough, he said; worried about the future of mankind, he had contacted the people at the Pentagon he’d worked with previously on contingency plans for epidemics, how to handle evacuations and quarantines in the case of germ warfare. They had already stumbled upon a case, Jedediah Grant, a youngster who, like Evelyn, had also ended up killing himself. Here, Downey’s rant became murky and more confused, alluding to an army of names, some that vaguely resonated with me, like Jesse Tarbox Beals, and others, like Madison Grant and Topsy (Topsy?) that I had never heard of before. Convoluted genealogies, the Bronx Zoo, Coney Island, Australian aborigines—victims and lineages tracked down by national security agents. “Too late, too late,” Downey lamented, “I always arrived too late. But not you, Fitzroy Foster, not you, thank heaven and Pasteur’s spirit, not you.” And then, again more names and then praising me for not having succumbed to despair, exalting my choice of Camilla Wood as wife and companion, someone who, unlike Downey’s own spouse, had sustained and nurtured my efforts, had journeyed into the wilderness of the double helix in search of answers. And on and on he talked and always he kept returning to what really obsessed and wounded him: his own heartbreak. And the more he circled back to his daughter’s dead body and his wife’s betrayal, the clearer it became that this was the major motor of his hunt: only a victory over the sickness, only a triumphant outcome and scientific breakthrough, could justify so much pain, erase it, assuage the guilt he would not admit.
His grief was like a black hole, swallowing everything in its wake. The neck of his little girl, he kept coming back to that broken neck, her corpse dangling from a belt that he had bought for her on a shopping spree. He lingered on their good times together, he evoked the first occasion she had boarded a merrygo-round, her squeals of delight as the wooden giraffe glided up and down, held fast by her father as if there were no mournful tomorrow, and then an elephant and a camel and every other animal on that carousel, and the photos, he had snapped picture after picture with his Polaroid, he had acquired it because of her, so she could enjoy herself twice, in reality and then in celluloid memory. That merry-go-round was encrusted in his brain, he couldn’t purge it from his life, the music, the image of Evelyn rising and falling, he was the merry-go-round, he circled back to it over and over, all night long, to the one thing that really mattered, that his daughter was dead and there was nothing he could do, despite all his knowledge, to resurrect her. Unless, unless, unless, she endured in his visual DNA like Krao in hers, unless, unless, the debris of atoms she had breathed in and out in her oxygen was scattered somewhere, inhaled somewhere, reconstituting itself, water molecules that came and went, particles that could be recuperated like the dust of stars. So alone, he said, so alone—echoing Jemmy in the bar and who knows if Henri at night in the Paris zoo and me before Cam appeared to save me from the dark, so alone, so alone.
And yet, for all his suffering and loneliness and guilt, for all his theories and experiments and hypotheses, his mad, groundless suspicions about a next stage, he had learned nothing from his journey, nothing about himself and nothing about the ultimate victims of violence and photography and greed and blind science. And now he was making me his victim, he was joining the chain of oblivious oppressors, taking my life from me, interrupting the one chance I had been given, I had given myself, to atone and lay to rest the crimes of the men whose genes were spliced inside me. How dare he act like a god who decided my fate from his certainties and civilization, how dare he use me to allay his own trauma.“You’re making a big mistake,” I said impulsively, not thinking he would listen but because I needed to tell myself that I had tried, had afforded him the opportunity to step outside the bubble of his megalomania and self-confidence. Suddenly finding inside myself, whispered from who knew what twilight of wisdom, terms that he might, as a scientist, consider worth at least bearing in mind. What if the appearance of his daughter’s visitor, and mine, was not a virus that signaled a degeneration in our bodies, a regression to savagery, but a slight evolutionary step forward, one timid way in which the species was searching to free itself from the limbic system governed by fear and loneliness, heralding the need to develop the zones of the brain where compassion and empathy and trust reside? What if we treated my visitor as a prophet and not a plague, a challenge instead of a tragedy? What if the genes lodged in me and Evelyn had come to warn us of humanity’s fate if we kept destroying one another? What if Downey had greeted his daughter’s ghost as an angel rather than a demon? I would have done my best to elaborate, would have tried to articulate a theory about this possible mutation towards kindness, but just then Wiggins came by to let us know we were about to land.
Outside it was dawning, the sun was rising on October 12, 1992. I caught a glimpse below us of a bright blue sea as the plane banked and began to descend.
Wiggins woke Cam—quite gently, to my surprise—and asked her, as she yawned and stretched the slim branches of her arms, if she’d like some coffee, a roll, some orange juice, which Nordstrom, all rouged up for the day, mascara applied thickly, had begun serving to Downey and me.
Cam nodded, thanked Wiggins, and turned to me. “What have I missed?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “He’s making a big mistake.” I addressed Downey. “You know, it’s not too late. There are other ways.”
“Other ways?” Downey asked. “No. It’s perfect. Isn’t it perfect?” He gestured toward the plane, the scenery outside, the mug of steaming coffee in his other hand, perhaps the plans and projects he had for this day and every day till the end of time. “Isn’t it fucking perfect?”
I wish I had been given the time to explain to him what I meant. A message I would have liked to deliver to
Pierre Petit if I could go back in time, mutter to Carl Hagenbeck and all the rest of them—all the men who had made me and the world we inhabited, I would have liked to speak to them through Downey. Because they were dead and he was alive, they had made their mistakes and convinced themselves that it was fucking perfect, and he still had the chance to acknowledge how deeply flawed his life was, how fucking imperfect despite all the terrific reasons he kept feeding himself, I would have liked to persuade him that it is never too late for any of us to understand.
For an instant I thought it might be possible. Incredibly, he turned to look at me, and seemed genuinely perplexed by my intensity and, more crucially, was silent, stopped talking, as if he were seeing me, not as a piece of flesh to be probed in his lab and paraded anonymously in scientific journals, but as a fellow human deserving care and attention, respect and kindness, simply because I had been born, as he had, from a mother and a father and a long line of men and women who had hoped for something better. As if he sensed his daughter speaking through me. Was that a glimmer of serenity bathing his eyes? Or was I deluding myself, projecting onto him what I would have wanted him to feel? Or maybe he was just exhausted, gathering strength for the day ahead?
I never found out.
We were on the verge of landing. Below our plane, a frothing ocean landscape and then swaying tropical palm trees and then, with a thud, a tarmac with barracks on both sides. And no sooner did Cam feel American soil, what she supposed was Florida, beneath the plane’s wheels than she intervened, hijacking the conversation and turning it in an altogether different direction.
“My husband’s right, Dr. Downey. A big mistake. Have you heard of habeas corpus? Filed by Jerry Foster on our behalf, I have no doubt. So get ready to release us. Court order. And start thinking about finding somebody else’s life to screw up.”
Darwin's Ghosts Page 25