The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  “What is it like to be dead? Here is all I can say. There was a moment of thrashing, there in the Atlantic, and then a moment of calm. There was dismay that I was dying, then there was acceptance. I went either into black or into white, my mind keeps changing about that detail. Then? Nothing, neither heaven nor hell, not that I recall at any rate. If indeed I entered some divine provenance, the loss of its recollection was the price I paid to return to this world. No, what I remember is coughing, thorns of pain in my chest whilst I was coughing. Someone put a warm hand on my arm, and it was comfort enough to cause me to open my eyes. I found myself looking at your world, your time, this place you people have made.”

  He held his arms wide. “Now I am among you. The newspapers call me a miracle. My conclusion is the rather. I am the mere embodiment of your collective will, a sign of our species’ desire to continue, a manifestation of your determination over the span of a century. Jeremiah Rice is the accidental, unwitting, and immeasurably grateful beneficiary of all that humanity endeavors to be.”

  Gawd, it was perfect. Freaking perfect. “Our species’ desire to continue”? Old Frank smacked it out of the park. Carthage announced no further questions. The reporters chattered while gathering their things. Gerber held the side door open, saluting goofily as the staff trooped out. Dr. Kate sashayed along, delectable as ever. Jeremiah hesitated at the verge, glancing back at the crowd. In that moment one last reporter saw his shot.

  “Are there surviving family members?”

  That stopped the judge like a bullet. He turned toward a room instantly quiet. “Excuse me?”

  It was Wilson Steele, standing handsome. “Are there surviving family members?”

  Well. It was plain on the judge’s face that in the days since being reawakened, his foggy mind had not yet traveled to that particular place. His expression changed shades from curiosity to pain, to wonder, then to pain again. “I have no idea.”

  Then he sagged like a flat tire. “Forgive me,” he said, bringing a hand to his brow. “I am suddenly so tired.”

  If Dr. Kate had not caught him, I believe he would have hit the floor. Instead she rushed him from the room, which began buzzing like a band saw. The reporter next to me was already on his cell phone, shouting to the newsroom I imagined on the other end. “Genealogy,” he said. “Find out pronto if this fucker has any family.”

  The crowd so cool at one o’clock now clambered over itself in a rush for the door, worse than a grade school fire drill. The race to find a descendant was now under way, my question totally overwhelmed. Carthage stood aside, observing the mayhem with cold eyes. Then he swept out after them all.

  Time for me to get hustling, too. First, though, I counted Steele’s question back to myself. Yup. Bastard did it with just five words.

  CHAPTER 16

  The History of Aviation

  (Kate Philo)

  The first “blood call” came soon after the six o’clock news. I’d just arrived for my shift, hadn’t even removed my coat. The reception phone was ringing, so I hit the transfer code to grab it at my desk. The man was speaking before I’d said hello.

  “Hi, my name is Henry Ray and I’m Jeremiah Rice’s grandson. I live in Chatham and I can drive up tomorrow if he wants to meet and we can talk about our family and say hey. Or could I maybe talk to him right now?”

  “His grandson?” I said. “Wow. Hang on one moment, okay?”

  I put him on hold, then looked for help. Gerber sat at his terminal with music leaking from his headphones, under which coiled his crazy mane of hair. He was straight-backed, concentrating on the screen as if planning his next move in chess. To me it looked like a simple graph, three parallel lines, but clearly Gerber saw something more. Both hands, in the okay pose, floated beside his chin. He gave them a little shake, like a conductor fine-tuning the violin section. Is it possible, when a person is relentlessly odd, to be annoyed by him yet feel affection at the same time? I scanned the control room but everyone else had gone for the night.

  “David?” I said. “Gerber?”

  “Aaahhh.” He continued shaking his hands, but now the fingers were fanned wide. “No no no no.”

  “Look, I’m sorry—”

  “What?” He slumped in his chair, pulled the headphones down to his neck. His hair sprung out like a sponge after a squeeze. “What is it? What?”

  “I am completely sorry to interrupt you, but there’s a caller—”

  “They were making the segue from ‘Not Fade Away’ into ‘Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.’ And I was right, right on the verge of figuring out what these freakishly similar numbers mean.” He poked the screen; I saw that his fingernails badly needed clipping. “What can it possibly be? Is the building on fire? Are we under attack?”

  “Sorry, it’s not so dramatic.” I smiled at him. “There’s a man on the phone who says he’s Jeremiah Rice’s grandson.”

  “Oh goodie, a blood call.” Gerber swiveled his chair left and right. “That didn’t take long.”

  “Blood call?”

  He grinned. “Just talk with him for a minute. You’ll see.”

  “What do I say?”

  “You’re smart, Kate.” Gerber leaned back. “Sound him out.”

  I hung my coat on a chair, lifted the phone. “Thanks for holding. My name is—”

  “Oh, you bet, no problem. Look, the thing is, I have plans to be in Boston tomorrow morning anyhow, so I could come by the lab, no problem, you know, and meet him and stuff. Jeremiah Rice, I mean.”

  “I see. Well, that’s certainly convenient, sir. It’s exciting to hear from you. However, we’re still trying to be careful with Judge Rice’s time. I’m sure he’ll be eager to meet you. But his energy is still so limited.”

  “Oh. Okay, sure. Makes sense. Except, um, yes except that I was already going to be in town. And it’s like an hour-and-a-half drive each way, you know?”

  “Well, sir, we’ll have to consider how best to arrange this. I’ll need to consult our executive director.”

  Gerber, hearing only my side of the conversation, nonetheless swirled one finger around his ear. I covered the mouthpiece. “You are not funny.”

  “Blood, I tell you.” He put his running shoes up on my desk. Filthy.

  “Pardon me, sir, I’m sorry I didn’t get your name.”

  “Henry Ray. Grandson of Jeremiah Rice. Direct descendant. Yes, direct.”

  “Mr. Ray.” I grabbed a pad, jotting his name. “We haven’t really prepared ourselves for visitors, to tell you the truth. Or prepared Judge Rice, for that matter. Is there a number where I could call you back?”

  “Oh sure, no problem. Only like I say, I’m going to be there tomorrow and everything. So why don’t I just come right on by? And meet him, you know?”

  Then I understood. I looked at Gerber, his face wearing the smug expression of a person two steps ahead of me but three ahead of the caller. “Mr. Ray, please excuse the question, but how are you related to Judge Rice?”

  “How? You’re asking me how?”

  “Yes, sir.” Gerber was nodding emphatically at me now.

  “Well, everybody around here has known it from the second his picture was in the papers. He looks just like me. I mean just, just like me. Same chin, same nose, same chin. Everyone who’s seen the picture says so. Also my grandfather was a fisherman, lost out of Gloucester in 1906, in that famous fall storm.”

  “How are you related, please? You said it was direct.”

  “Well, that’s the thing of it. Because Jeremiah’s son was my father. Timothy. Has to be. His Timmy was my old man.”

  “I see.” I gave Gerber a look. He pretended he was jerking an invisible penis, I turned in the other direction. “Mr. Ray, I think there’s been some confusion here today.”

  “What do you mean? Like I ought to come another day? Because really, an hour and a half is not so bad, no problem, if we ought to do it some other time.”

  At last I realized how naive I’d been. “Wha
t I mean to say, sir . . .”

  Why did I hesitate? Gerber obviously had no qualms. Why did I have the impulse to undo the caller’s self-delusion gently? I suppose I’ll never know. But it is worth noting, given what came later. There was an inclination, in that early time, to be kind to the people who would prey on Judge Rice. An innocence on my part. My attitude would change soon enough, but not yet.

  “I mean to say, sir, that Judge Rice’s ship did not sail from Gloucester. He set out from Nauset.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Also he did not have any sons. I’m sorry, but—”

  “Are you calling me a fake? Are you saying that I’m a fake?”

  “While I am not denying there might be a strong physical resemblance—”

  “Listen, you bitch. Listen to me. Don’t give me that crap. I’m the guy’s grandson, you hear me? I got the chin and everything.”

  “Sir, I really don’t think there’s any call for that sort of language.”

  “Oh, fuck you. You fucking people are all alike. You just want to cash in on him, and keep away the man’s own family. You people are sick, I swear to Christ. His own grandson. You are just fucking sick.”

  He hung up on me. I set the phone in its cradle gently. “Wow.”

  Gerber’s grin could not have been wider. “Is everyone all right?”

  “That was an experience. Whew. I understand you now, anyway. You mean it’s a blood call because he was claiming to be Jeremiah’s blood relation.”

  “Nope.” Gerber took his shoes off my desk, leaned forward like he was delivering bad news. “I mean it’s a blood call because the world is full of vampires.”

  Across the lab, at the reception desk, the phone rang again.

  By 2 A.M., 114 people had claimed to be Jeremiah’s kin. I set the phones to go directly to voice mail so I could get some work done. Eventually, though, the switchboard starting pinging—which meant the general voice-mail box was full, and which came over the intercom too loudly to ignore.

  Just returned from one of his contemplative midnight walks, Gerber scampered past me to his desk. “I’d say there’s a phone call for you.”

  He flounced into his chair, clapping the headphones into place and squinting at the screen. The imp.

  I surrendered, plunking myself down at the reception desk, playing back messages, writing names and phone numbers on a legal pad while more calls came in. The voices were young and old, male and female, alike only in their needy tone. Some did not even leave contact information. Those who did, I diligently wrote down, leaving it for others to assess the callers’ merit or sanity. Let Carthage sort them out. They all believed Judge Rice was their father, grandfather, long-lost uncle. Could there really be so many missing ancestors? Or that many people desperate for a connection to this reawakened man?

  I began to worry that we might fall into the cesspool of celebrity, which I consider the opposite of science: haste instead of caution, surface over substance, the bright flash of a camera instead of the droning overheads of the lab. Something triggered the anger of that first caller, some desire or expectation, something he thought he deserved. It was the first piece of a puzzle I would need months to solve.

  When the mailbox was finally empty, I took a break, strolling over to see Gerber’s latest Perv du Jour. So far some had been hilarious, some too weird to believe. That night’s installment was obscene.

  The site Gerber had found was sexyfrozenman.com. People had taken still shots of Jeremiah from our site and doctored them entirely in a sexual fashion. One showed his head pressed between two enormous breasts. In another, someone had tattooed a red mermaid on his cheek, again with ballooning breasts. A third attached his face to a bodybuilder’s torso, gave him the penis of a giant, and pasted a twig-thin man kneeling before him. Still another showed a woman’s naked bottom, with Judge Rice’s head tilted beneath as if he were performing oral sex on her. What a world. The one Gerber placed highest was a digital alteration of the judge’s face, his sideburns lengthened to give him more of an animal look, his lips drawn back in an expression of ecstasy.

  That was the moment I felt my first flutter. I’d been so busy protecting Judge Rice, I had forgotten the experience of lifting him into the wheelchair that night. I checked on Gerber, who wagged his crown along with whatever music was playing in his headset, then looked again at that top photo.

  I confess it: I found myself wondering things I would never have contemplated a few weeks earlier. What had sexuality been like one hundred years ago? Was desire shown so openly? We are different now, surely. We know more, are exposed to more. I remember Dana, my track-star boyfriend for two years of college; what a sexual laboratory we were for each another. I became so adept with a diaphragm he called it my Frisbee. Did Judge Rice have a similar familiarity with his wife? Of course he did, though it must have been different, must have. Then there was the anesthesiologist I dated during grad school, who found nothing more erotic than the two of us showering together till the hot water ran out. Did the judge’s house even have running water? Now there is the Internet, too, where every predilection has an address, easy access, total anonymity. How would a man from modest times fare in this modern world?

  Gerber appeared at my elbow. “They’re getting weirder, aren’t they?”

  “This is all so completely wrong.”

  He laughed. “And normal.”

  “Can you imagine how appalled Judge Rice would be if he saw this?”

  “People were probably just as dirty-minded in the old days.”

  “Now I know why you call it Perv du Jour.”

  “This is just one form of perversity. But there will be lots of others, you’ll see. The multitudes have made our judge the meat of the moment. Some buy the magazines, some watch the news. But right now lots of them are going online and perving on our handsome hero. Tonight it’s plain horniness. But I promise, whatever sites I find weeks from now, whatever way people find to indulge their fantasies about this man and place their projections onto him, I guarantee the content will be perverse.”

  The reception phone rang but I let it go. “Personally, I’m hoping people move on with their lives so we can prioritize research again and begin to help Judge Rice integrate into modern society.”

  Gerber chuckled. “Personally, I wish that woman there had a nicer butt.”

  “Excuse me, what do those lines mean?”

  It was Judge Rice. He’d woken somehow, stood pointing at Gerber’s terminal, where those parallel lines were displayed again. He was still wearing scrubs.

  In a flash I tore down the Perv posting. “Judge Rice, what a surprise.” I crushed the papers into a ball. The digital counter read sixteen hours into day seventeen, but the regular clock said 3:19. “To see you up at this hour. Good morning. Everything all right?”

  “I had too much energy to sleep,” he said. “Good morning, Dr. Philo.”

  “They’re you,” Gerber answered, strolling over to the judge. “Over the past six days. This one is your heart rate, that one’s your respiration rate, and the top line is your blood pressure.”

  He nodded. “They are parallel, sir.”

  “And rising a little bit each day.”

  “What does this tell you, sir?”

  “Your body systems are still waking up, I guess.” Gerber rubbed his nose. “The weird thing is, they’re all doing it at the same rate. It’s a metabolic mystery. But I am not ‘sir.’ ” He held out his hand. “I’m Gerber.”

  They regarded each other. I hurried the balled-up papers into the farthest trash can, my relief at shielding Judge Rice from the Perv du Jour becoming a zip of amusement at the characters now shaking hands. Talk about spanning the century: a deliberative lawyer from the past, an oddball savant of the present, considering each other like two forest apes who have unexpectedly encountered a being of a similar species.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Gerber. My name is—”

  “Oh-ho, I know who you
are, Judge Rice. I’ve been here the whole time. I was even on the ship when they found you. And not to be sticky about it, but it’s actually Doctor Gerber.”

  “I see. Thank you, Doctor.” He pointed at Gerber’s headphones. “May I inquire what those ear covers are? I’ve noticed you wearing them often.”

  “Well, they’re for listening. These days we can capture music played in one time and place, and replay it anywhere else, over and over. And for me personally . . .” Gerber held them up and laughed. “I guess what they do is help my wacky mind focus. Keep my thinking from going to places too wild for me to handle.”

  “Might I try them?”

  Suddenly I felt like an anthropologist. I observed from across the control room while Gerber wheeled another chair to his desk, placed the headphones over Judge Rice’s ears with unexpected care, adjusted the fit, tapped a few keys to begin a piece of music. Here was the judge’s first true taste of contemporary life.

  I was close enough to hear vaguely that a song had begun. Judge Rice’s eyes went wide. “Ha ha. My goodness.” He spoke loudly, as if we were wearing headphones, too.

  “That’s ‘Lady with a Fan,’ ” Gerber said. “One of my favorites. From the album Terrapin Station. That’s what 1977 sounds like. Pretty sweet, huh?”

  “So much is happening at once,” he bellowed. Then, for the first time I had ever witnessed, Judge Rice smiled.

  Gerber of all people. I had always imagined it would be me to introduce Judge Rice to the modern world. I thought I would be his teacher. I know I began the process, that night on the roof. Yet as that song played, I did not feel possessive. In an odd way, who better than Gerber? Brilliant for all his eccentricity, a man without guile.

  “What is this light-throwing device, anyway?” Judge Rice said, lowering the headphones, tapping the computer screen. “You people sit here for hours, though it looks incomparably dull. What can possibly be so compelling about it?”