by Richard Farr
My heart is doing one eighty a minute. I feel sure, instantly, that she has never worn this before, that I must understand what it is. I tug on the vial, but the loop passes through a hole in the metal top; no way it’s coming off. Then I pull on the leather itself, harder, but clearly it’s clasped or knotted at the back. Tugging some more on one side reveals a tight knot that I’ll never undo, given the state my hands are in.
I sense the orderly standing beyond the door, impatient, just out of sight. Panicking, I look around for a knife, scissors, something. Which is stupid: I’m in a sterile room of plastic and steel surfaces, all of them empty.
“Sorry.” I’m not sure if the word actually escapes my lips, but I feel sure she hears it. I clench my left hand into as near as I can get to a fist, place it against the side of her head for leverage, and hook the exposed fingertips of my right hand around the loop. Then I pull with all my strength.
My fingers shriek at me. I pull again, harder. The pain is awful, and I’m worrying that my ruined fingertips will start to bleed on her. I manage to wiggle a bit more of my hand between the cord and her neck, glance again at the door.
One last chance.
I brace my legs, lock my left arm, and pull again. When the leather gives way, my right wrist jerks back painfully into the side of the morgue drawer, and at exactly that moment the orderly unceremoniously kicks the swing door open and comes back in.
He must have seen me.
But in fact, when I look up guiltily, trying to ignore the hornet sting in my wrist, his head is turned to one side because his white coat has caught on the door latch. Blushing, and hoping the blush looks like emotional anguish, I stuff the cord into the pocket of my hoodie. Then I stand there looking at her, count three long calming breaths, and replace the sheet over her face.
I leave the drawer open. As I leave, I brush past the orderly without saying a word. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a gesture he makes with his right hand. A chill runs through me, because I don’t know whether he’s made the sign of the cross or the sign that the Seraphim make—a triangular gesture, sweeping four clenched fingers from the throat to each nipple and back again. Is he a devout Catholic who believes in heaven? Is he the ordinary sort of person who doesn’t think too much about the Big Questions, but likes to go through the motions? Or does he believe that my mother is now—what does Quinn say?—in the dimension of the eternal?
And could someone please tell me what to believe?
Four floors back to my room, but the perverse instinct of the climbing addict makes me take the stairs, as if it’ll be good to make my bruised body work. Can’t bend the bad knee properly, so I’m forced to go up sideways. On the first floor I pass a staff break room. No one there, but just inside the open door someone has left a Spanish-language newspaper on a bench, and one word sticks out from the cover, catching at me like a thorn.
UYUNI.
It takes my conscious mind a moment to catch up—Mom had only mentioned the name of the town once. She just kept referring to those Bolivian women. As if something indescribably terrible had happened to them, when in fact nobody knew what had happened.
UYUNI, the headline says. Underneath: ENCONTRARON A LAS VEINTICUATRO MUERTAS. Below the fold there’s a color picture that I can’t make sense of at first. It looks like a giant sheet of blinding-white paper with a small hump at the far edge. The blue strip at the top edge has a single flake of cloud in it, the only clue that you’re looking at a landscape.
My eyes run over the unfamiliar words below. They seem to taunt me, like a message from Mom that’s been coded so I can’t read it. I feel as if this story, and her interest in it, is my only real link to her—as if understanding what it’s about is the only thing I can do for her. I waste some time cursing my inability to extract a meaning from the Spanish, then I drop the paper, head upstairs as fast as I can, get online.
A clip from just hours ago: a network news anchor with too much lip gloss, half a gallon of Botox, and a blonde crash helmet is mouthing earnestly into the camera:
“Uyuni lies on the edge of a giant, high-altitude salt flat,” she says. “The Salar de Uyuni. The women seem to have marched more than sixty miles across it, with all these tools, in temperatures that went below zero at night, and apparently without food or water. The victims ranged in age from twenty to seventy-five.”
There’s an interview with a sun-wrinkled local man in a straw hat, who squints into the camera and speaks in halting English: “This volcano”—he points to the cone behind him—“name is Tunupa. Legend say Tunupa is woman. Salar de Uyuni made from her tears when her children taken away.”
To one side of him there’s a police Jeep parked on the salt pan, and a line of tape. Behind that, a crude pyramid of whitish blocks. The man raises his hands in a Words fail me gesture, and his voice goes strangely squeaky. “They walk here with shovels, saws. Build pyramid, climb on top. Then? Some kind of—”
He stops midsentence and turns away from the camera, squinting into the sun.
Another clip shows a news conference on the steps of some official building. A stocky man with a white lab coat and a comb-over, who turns out to be the Bolivian government’s chief pathologist, is standing in front of a bouquet of microphones. What he says is so simple, straightforward, and honest that it’s a bit shocking, coming from a medical professional. He speaks for barely thirty seconds in Spanish, and then repeats himself, first in Quechua and then more slowly in English:
“We do not know why these women came to Tunupa, or how they died. They built a structure, a kind of stepped pyramid, and stood around it in a circle. The ground immediately around has been blasted clean, as if in an explosion, but the structure itself is untouched and the bodies lack any signs of trauma. How this is possible, we have no idea. Another puzzling fact is that the three youngest women appear to have died several days after the others—as if they were not killed, initially, but simply stayed with the others until lack of water overcame them. Yet another puzzling fact is that one of the women is still missing.”
I have the strange feeling that Mom was right—that she and the Uyuni women are linked in some way. Looking down, I see that I have been rolling the blue vial between my thumb and my blackened middle fingertip.
Can’t open it with my bandaged bear paws—it’s barely an inch long, with a tiny screw cap, the kind of thing people with a medical problem use to carry a couple of emergency pills. I have to get out the pliers on my multi-tool, clamp them around the vial, and use my teeth. About the tenth attempt, the top comes loose, falls on the floor. I upend the vial and nothing happens. Then I shake it a couple of times, and a square of white paper the size of a Post-it flutters onto the bed.
Neat handwriting I don’t recognize. Three words. Stairway to heaven.
It looks like a reference to the song. Fragments of it come back to me—all soft acoustic guitar at first, mournful folk music. Then the long slow build, and a short drumroll right in the middle that announces the gear-shift into headbanger rock. Can’t remember the singer’s name, but I can picture him with his big blond hair, and the guy in back with big dark hair and a double-neck guitar. Bits of the lyrics hang in my mind like rags in a tree. Something about a piper, calling us to join him?
I’m tapping one hand against my thigh, hearing the exact way the instruments fade at the very end and leave the singer all alone with his last words—stai-AIR-whey to HEH-vun—when it strikes me that maybe the piece of paper has nothing to do with the song. A stairway to the heavens: surely that’s what the ziggurats were? Surely that’s what made God send in the celestial demolition crew at Babel? I pick up the paper, intending to roll it carefully and replace it in the vial; it’s only then that I see the writing, in the same hand, on the back:
“In life lies the question. The answer is eternity.”
(Anabasis 11:3)
El-u-min
Kel-a-mun
Vo-ma-ga
Yir-keb-it
(Anaba
sis 24:8)
Those twelve syllables give me an odd feeling. They mean nothing to me; I know I’ve never seen them before; but they have a kind of familiarity, a resonance. A bit like the song: I can hear a voice in my head saying them. I try to speak along with it: “El-u-min, Kel-a-mun, Vo-ma-ga, Yir-keb-it.”
For a second, just a single second, she is actually there, standing on the other side of the room in her climbing gear. Not shadowy or ghostlike, but so present and real that I scramble toward her with my arms out.
Daniel, don’t let them
“Mom!”
Daniel
“What, Mom? What?”
She has gone before I make two paces. I slump to my knees in front of the spot where she was standing, lean forward on splayed fingers, hunt minutely on the floor for the tiny marks her boots must have made.
Nothing.
I see then, as if from outside, my own desperation that she be something more than an apparition. I see then, as if from outside, my fear that I’m losing my mind.
“Where are you?”
“Where are you?”—much louder this time.
“What did they do to you?”
The answering silence is deafening.
CHAPTER 7
KNOW IT IS TRUE
I’m pacing up and down just inside the glass front door of the hospital. Every time a car pulls up, I stop, look down across the entrance steps, go on pacing. Even when their taxi arrives at last, I don’t quite believe it; I wait until I see her jet-black hair before hobbling out into the wind.
Morag dumps her bag on the sidewalk, sprints up the steps, and flings her arms around my neck, hanging onto me like a kid in a tree.
“Daniel. Daniel. Daniel.”
“Morag.”
Over her shoulder I can see Dad getting out of the back seat, paying the driver, trying to pick up four bags. A gust of wind nearly blows us off our feet, and we leave him to it, retreating inside.
She puts her head against my chest, wraps her arms around me, and goes still, as if checking that my heartbeat’s there. Then, just as I expect, she pushes back to look up at me. Morag always has a kind of hunger for eye contact; it unnerves people sometimes, but I’m so used to it that I love it, experience it as a sign that she’s OK. Glancing down for a split second, she finds my bandaged hands and holds them up between us, pressing the ends of our fingers together while giving me the full force of that deep, unblinking stare.
“Does that hurt? Pushing on your fingertips?”
It does, a bit, but I shake my head. She adjusts her fingers anyway, holds them so that they’re barely touching mine, and looks into my eyes. It’s the standard Morag greeting that I’ve been used to since childhood—quirky, delicate, powerful. And after this greeting it’s always childhood we start with, always the shared memories. Not How was the flight? or Tell me about what happened to your hands, nothing about Mom, yet. Just childhood. Dad’s still struggling through the door when she says:
“Remember hiking with Jimmy and Lorna in Northern Ireland?”
“The Mourne Mountains.”
“Four-hour downpour, and then the sun breaking out right on top of Slieve Binnian. You brought the wrong map and we got lost.”
“Scenic detour.”
“Aye. Through a bog.” She glances down at my hands again, tries to make a joke of it: “You’re an accident-prone bastard.” But a little tremor goes through her jaw around the word prone, and she bursts into tears. We lunge for each other again, hug fiercely. I’m crouching down, she’s on the tips of her toes. We stand like that, soaking each other’s shoulders, for what seems like a long time.
“I’m so sorry D. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry so sorry.”
It’s like this is the first moment since the accident that I’ve been given permission to feel terrible—and it takes her crying to remind me that Mom’s death is a devastating blow for her as well. We’re so focused on absorbing each other’s pain that it takes awhile before I become aware of the figure loitering uncomfortably behind us.
“Dad.”
“Daniel.”
Gray stubble. Rumpled clothes. Bags under the bloodshot eyes. He looks exactly like the man I’ve just seen in the Boston video, only ten years older. He steps forward now, puts his arms round us both, gets at least one other thing right. He doesn’t spew platitudes. Maybe it’s rehearsed, but I’m grateful anyway: instead of asking how I feel, he just says, “This is going to be hard, guys. Terribly hard. What we need to hang onto is that she would want us to get through to the other side of this. We will. I promise we will. And we’ll be happy again.”
What’s wonderful about this: he’s treating the three of us together as one unit, one family. That helps. What’s terrible, and lonely and frightening about it: they both think—as Rosko thinks, as everyone thinks—that she died in an accident. So I can’t say what I want to say. What it would sound crazy to say, because it sounds crazy even to me.
That we can’t afford to be happy again until we find out why she was killed.
The three of us do descend into platitudes after that. Got all your bags? Need something to eat? Then Stefan comes down, and everyone’s making appropriate noises—without actually saying big bad words like accident or death or Iona.
I want to get away from this scene. For months, ever since the Eislers showed up in Seattle, I’ve been itching to introduce Morag to Rosko, wondering if they’ll get along. But, when I finally suggest it, Stefan explains that they just gave Rosko more painkillers. “He won’t recognize his own eyelids for a couple of hours.”
A nurse pokes his head around the corner, looks at me, points to his watch. “Señor Calder?”
Oh right. I’m supposed to be in a physiotherapy session. Not knowing what else to do, I tell everyone to come with me, and they sit around for half an hour, admire my X-rays, pretend to be fascinated by nine different techniques for manipulating my knee to make it even more painful than it already is.
By the end, it’s not my knee that’s making me want to scream. I’m just desperate to be alone with Morag, and desperate to spend an hour anywhere other than the hospital. Also ought to talk to Dad, but—
Surprisingly, he’s the one who breaks the ice. “Daniel, why don’t you and Morag go talk for a bit while I catch up with Gabi and Stefan?”
He probably means, go sit in the lounge, but that’s not what I have in mind. “Need to be outside,” I whisper to Morag. “And I need real food.” I grab a jacket and my stylish rubber-tipped walking stick. While nobody’s looking, we step out of a side door into the chilly blast.
When we reach street level, I take a deep lungful of the cold, damp air and make a decision. Morag is Morag: I’ll just describe the whole thing, tell her exactly what happened. But something makes me hesitate. After Rosko’s reaction, am I prepared to tell her? That I had to cut the rope? That I watched her fall? That, just before she fell, something happened, something I can’t quite—
Maybe she’s reading my mind. Maybe she’s trying to give me something easier to talk about. “Look,” she says, gesturing toward a flyer on a light pole. “Bill’s favorite student is everywhere these days.”
A familiar duotone image of Julius Quinn stares back at us, handsome and resolute, eyes piercing the future. Above his face, the favorite slogan of the Seraphim in the original English, all in caps: KNOW IT IS TRUE. Beneath, in the same typeface, is the local translation: SABED QUE ES CIERTO. And the whole thing is framed in a broken triangle with a wavy dash at the top. World’s single most popular tattoo, I read somewhere: the mark of the Seraphim.
We walk north from the hospital and see that the flyer is one of dozens, papering the whole area on almost every wall, store window, light pole. I pull one of them down so that I can take a closer look, or perhaps because the Spanish gives it the feel of a souvenir. “Great slogan, yeah? Meaningless, so you get to let it mean whatever you want it to mean.”
“I think he’s been clear,” she says. “ ‘The
gods are returning. I have spoken with them. They are ready to accept us, and humanity is about to make the great leap from the Real to the Eternal.’ ”
“I’m glad you think that’s clear. Like, what, we’re all going to be vacuumed up into the sky or something?”
“Or something. It’s kind of like Internet scams—at least some people will believe anything, if it sounds good enough. In Christianity you get a cloud to sit on. In Islam you get a busload of virgins, at least if you’re a guy. Quinn’s deal beats the lot—with him, you actually become a god.”
“What’s his story? It took centuries before Hinduism and Buddhism and Christianity and Islam had any global significance. Mormonism, what, a century?”
“Aye, and fifty years for Scientology.”
“But Quinn’s done it in, what, two or three years? How is that possible?”
“He’s good-looking?”
“I’m sure that explains everything.”
“And he has that voice—how did Lorna describe it? ‘Och, girl, I canna get enough of it. So smooth, aye, but with that little fiery edge. Chocolate flavored with chili peppers.’ ”
She’s making me smile, a little: this is good.
“So big Julius gives your mother the hots. And you?”
She shudders. “He gives me the creeps. People can be too attractive.”
At a hole-in-the-wall café near the cemetery, we sit at a rickety round table, order sodas and fish sandwiches. She has returned to her usual calm self; guess I have not, because when she glances down at the table, and I think she’s just looking at the bandages again, I see that I’ve turned my paper napkin into a little pile of white shreds. I’ve also gone from hungry to ravenous, as if I can fill that gaping hole in myself with food, but the bandages make me too clumsy. She has to feed me. I’ve managed only three or four bites when a fragment of conversation comes through the noise of the kitchen behind us, catches my ear. One of the waitresses: