The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  The media stayed with the story for weeks, probably because there was a considerable cast involved. Each player needed a turn in the spotlight of hate or revelation.

  Thomas, for example. File him in the you-never-know department. It turned out that he was actually T. Beauregard Fillion, heir to the estate of his steel industrialist grandfather. He had basically bankrolled Carthage from start to finish, nearly thirty million dollars over the years. When the project collapsed, so did the investors in reanimation technology that he and Carthage had hoped would turn his donations into an even larger fortune.

  “I am proud of what we accomplished,” Thomas said in a long Sunday profile in the Washington Post. “It was worth every penny to work with one of the great minds of all time, and to be present when he made scientific history.”

  Almost overnight Thomas landed a job with the copycat lab in China. Sanjit Prakore, whom Carthage had fired for spilling his tea, now runs that lab. He, too, was quoted in the Post story: “We believe Mr. Fillion will be a tremendous asset to our ongoing work. We expect him to be most helpful.”

  Probably so, since he owns the rights to all of the project’s intellectual property.

  Gerber recovered after two weeks; there was a story about him in the Globe. On his way out of Massachusetts General Hospital he paused to make a statement exactly one sentence long: “For nearly all of human history, religious zealots have committed unjustified violence in the name of God.” In the news photo he was giving a goofy thumbs-up, leaning on the arm of his wife. Gerber had a wife; who knew?

  A few months later he landed a job with NASA, managing the satellite program that measures climate change at the poles. I felt glad for him, the odd duck. I read about it in the New York Times.

  Speaking of which, that was also where I learned about Amos Cartwright. A famous chess cheat, yes, discredited and stripped of international standing. But Amos also turned out to be the father of one son, a grandiose compensating narcissist by the name—changed in court when he was eighteen—of Erastus Carthage. And what resourceful investigator spilled those Freudian-flavored beans? Wilson Steele, of course.

  Steele wrote a few more stories related to the project, on how Borden couldn’t land another job, on the many unpaid debts. He was the one to reveal that Dixon erred in using “Tessie” to prove the judge was a fake. The song, originally about a woman singing to her parakeet, came from a Broadway hit in 1902. Steele went hunting to see if “the authentic Judge Rice” had any living descendants, which caught my interest. But before he found anyone, his new book came out, Shudder, about earthquakes, with press junkets, a book tour, the next hot topic.

  By then, Carthage could not be hurt by any revelations because he had already hanged himself. He left a letter that said, We are the opposite of Amos Cartwright. As Jeremiah would say: Hm. I can’t decide which was worse, that he proved himself wrong by dying exactly as his father had, or that his suicide note contained an unintended self-parody by using the royal we.

  I had not seen Carthage again, after the last time in his office, but people said he never recovered from that debacle of a news conference, reporters shouting accusations while the scientist at the podium froze so pathetically, Borden had to lead him stammering from the room. You might have expected Carthage’s tragic suicide to be front-page news, and it truly was tragic, because for all his flaws the man was a genuine genius. Instead I found the story buried deep in the B section, a few inches of text under a blurry photo of his face. Apparently it didn’t merit reporting on TV. All that brilliance, all that waste, but it was already old news.

  The opposite was true of Gerald T. Walker, as the whole world knows. On the next Halloween, the most popular mask was his face with its trademark toothy grin. The following Tuesday, he swept thirty-one states to become the next president of the United States. While it was a minor matter in Walker’s wide-ranging political platform, he championed greater accountability in scientific studies, including an audit of every single federal research grant. Polls showed that a vast majority of the public approved of this policy. Hail to the chief.

  Political ambition must be contagious, too. Because T. J. Wade, the star quarterback of self-righteous protests, has announced that he is running for Congress. A few pundits criticized him for launching a campaign so early, with the last election barely over, but Wade has received generous contributions already. His pretty face shows up on TV with amazing frequency, too. The cameras just love him.

  If it’s love for some, then for others it’s money. Daniel Dixon, my own personal space invader, went on to make a fortune. A seven-figure book deal, packed lectures for which he is paid handsomely, a movie coming out next year in which the star playing him is ten years younger and magazine-cover handsome. Oddly enough, Dixon also gave two hundred thousand dollars to a Pennsylvania burn hospital, refusing to explain his reasons, which brought another round of headlines feting him as a hero, truth teller, philanthropist.

  As for Hilary in the white beret, who loitered outside the project’s offices, I have entertained some suspicions. There’s no finding her, of course. I searched on the Internet, the Boston-area phone books. But if tombstones tell a truth that surpasses time, then I’d be willing to bet her last name is Halsey. That would make her the daughter of the daughter of Jeremiah Rice. In which case I send a silent blessing to Hilary Halsey, wherever she may be.

  And that leaves me. Old Kate. Carthage said he would ruin me, and I suppose at some level that is what happened: career, home, prospects, all gone. But it was not his doing, no, I did it to myself. Or the world did it, anyway. The first few times I returned to my apartment, the tabloids had staked it out. But they weren’t patient, because there’s always a new scandal to point a camera at. Soon enough they were only around daytimes. I rented a truck one night, planning to haul out all I could carry. Things went well enough, a long, sweaty effort, until I entered the kitchen to find a single egg sitting on the counter. Nearly three weeks it had sat there. I didn’t cry, because I couldn’t breathe. Eventually I washed it down the sink, running the water till it spiraled. Then I went back to work because there was nothing else to do: taking down bedding, packing kitchen appliances or winter clothes, sticking it all in a storage shed in Danvers, calling my landlord to say he could keep the rest. When he asked where to send the security deposit, I said he could hold on to that, too. No sense revealing my location.

  Which, of all places, is still Marblehead, still the Harborview Inn. I rented that room the whole first summer, for a small fortune, then paid a pittance for the winter because the place was practically closed. In March, Carolyn said she needed help for the coming season. Hiring me for the wage of room and board, she said, would be cheaper than training a college girl with a teenager’s appetite. Also I wasn’t likely to fall in love with some college-boy waiter in town, stay out all night, and sleep through the hearty breakfast I was supposed to serve the inn’s guests.

  A safe bet. It was a monastic dwelling she gave me at the back of the house, what a century ago had been the sewing room: a dresser, table, lamp, bed. But the window let in ocean breezes. No one in the inn had any reason to come through the kitchen to disturb me. The back stairway Jeremiah and I had used to escape gave me a private entrance, too. Carolyn asked me nearly every day to join her for yoga class, saying it would do my heart good. Instead I spent those months in the healing habit of silence.

  Mourning is a mysterious maze. Often I asked myself what should happen next, but there were no obvious avenues. I was infamous in Boston, reviled from the North End to South Station. I knew of no research openings anywhere. I was too ashamed to contact Tolliver at the academy. I’d probably damaged his reputation enough already. In an academic publication I read that Billings might open a lab outside London, to study the Lazarus samples he’d kept. So I e-mailed him a timid greeting, just fishing. He wrote back to say that if the lab opened, if it won funding, if there was a need for someone with my skills, then he might offer me a
job, but I would have to understand in advance that at no time could my name be listed among any report’s authors, for obvious reasons. He signed his e-mail your devoted friend, GB.

  Such is devotion in the world of scientific research. Yet I can’t say I was disappointed. Who would want to go back that way? Not when I’m already discredited. Then I learned that the lab in China had hired Billings. Not a month later they reanimated a sardine that remained alive for months. The article lacked detail, but apparently the breakthrough had something to do with oxygen saturation. To me it seemed as if everything that occurred, in China or elsewhere, was happening too late.

  Chloe had two cents to add every day. Her e-mails were condescending, scathing. Yet I could not resist reading every word, letting their poison in. The blame they assigned, the condescension, felt like penance. She urged me to learn something from this whole pathetic mess, Katie-bug. Learn something.

  Well, what have I learned? I mean besides the world’s fickleness, how people turn vicious when they feel tricked, the difference between the wholesome appetite of scientific curiosity and the empty avarice of personal ambition? Something instructive happened, I am certain of it. Something educational took place in the months between that night in the Arctic and that morning on the pier. Yet the lessons remain unclear.

  Maybe this, maybe at least this: when love comes into your life, it calls upon your whole being to be worthy. If you rise to that challenge, it will plant roots and you will blossom. I know. I lived such a love greatly, if briefly, with a fine, rare man. That man taught me the power of noticing, of appreciating, which cannot be unlearned.

  So, rather than follow Jeremiah’s request that I forget him, instead I honor the moment he hugged me in my apartment, when he must have known he was dying, yet he made me promise never to forget his gratitude. What a gift. I have indeed fixed him fast: the most inconsequential gesture, the least word. I savor those memories. I regret nothing.

  Into the crucible of my interior life, Carolyn found an opening. Summer flew past, I prepared to bundle against another fall. Already the morning wind off the harbor had a bite to it. Then one of her yoga friends, principal of the local high school, lamented after class one day that she was losing a biology teacher to maternity leave.

  Without asking, Carolyn volunteered me as a long-term substitute. Then she returned to the inn, stood in my doorway. She did a tree pose, while declaring that she was firing me from the inn.

  After all those years in a lab, so many men but so few women, I knew better than to reject this sisterly generosity.

  On my first day the kids had a quiz, on the components of a plant cell. Their teacher had drawn one as a parting gift, arrows pointing to various features, with blanks for the students to fill.

  A few bent diligently to the page, pencils moving, but many sat still, gazing out the window or staring into space. When I told them to pass the papers forward, one girl immediately began chatting with her neighbor. She had strong features, straight blond hair, very pretty.

  I stood by her desk. “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Victoria.” She tossed her head so her hair swept back.

  “May I please see your lab notebook, Victoria?”

  Most pages were blank. A few had scribbled numbers that I assumed were from in-class projects. The sheets with the most writing primarily contained drawings of field hockey sticks, quite colorful, plus equally artful writing of a boy’s name: Chris.

  “Class dismissed,” I told them, though twenty minutes remained. “That’s it for today.”

  “Awesome,” one of the boys said. As they all hurried off, I shuffled to my desk. There sat my first stack of papers to be graded. Victoria was the last one out the door. I overheard her saying to another girl a single word: “Deadly.”

  The quizzes went into a recycling bin. That afternoon I stayed after school, digging out every microscope in the place. I cleaned them all: wiping the dusty bodies, replacing dead illuminator bulbs, polishing lenses. Early the next morning I borrowed a bucket from the inn, scooping it full from a brackish shallows in the harbor. It felt like someone was watching over my shoulder, my co-conspirator from across the centuries. The bucket grew heavy as I lugged it to school.

  When the students filed in, they noticed the microscopes instantly, made skeptical expressions. Doubt is a fine place to begin. I dipped a slide into the bucket, held it high. “Do you see anything on this piece of glass?”

  Of course they did not, mumbling as much in reply. But I knew how rich that seawater was, how vital with paramecia, flagella, algae. I smiled. “Your assignment is to dip a slide for yourself, put it on your microscope, then draw the most interesting thing you see.”

  At first the students moved like I was forcing them to drink poison, grumbling, not bothering to conceal their scorn. Gradually they formed a line.

  “You too, Victoria.”

  “Oh, right.”

  She came last, chatting with friends the whole time. She held her head away from the bucket as she dipped, as if the water would sting. But I waited. She slid the little glass plate under the microscope’s stage clips, shared one last laugh with the girl at the next lab station, tossed her hair to one side. After she’d exhausted her repertoire of delaying gestures, Victoria lowered her face to the eyepiece.

  At first she squinted. Then she adjusted the focus. Then she stopped fidgeting. A boy across the room needed help with his scope, but when I checked back on her a moment later, Victoria was concentrating on what she saw. After a long stillness, she reached without taking her eye from the lens, and picked up a pencil.

  I heard her whisper one word to her friend: “Cool.”

  When an e-mail from Chloe arrived that night, I deleted it without reading. I wasn’t cutting her off forever, but right then I didn’t need the criticism. Nor would it hurt her for a while to listen to the sound of her own voice.

  A few months later Billings did send me a note about job openings. China desired scientific supremacy so zealously, he explained, officials there would not be particular about my history. Already they were modifying fishing boats to search for hard ice at the poles. Someone would have to command those vessels.

  Of course you’ll need to come clean about everything, he wrote, and explain that it was not a hoax but actually exemplary science. They’re very forgiving, if you have what they need. Besides, you were besotted with love.

  Besotted? I closed his e-mail without replying. Then I went to stand on my back stairs, examining what I felt. Not like I’d thrown away a career, no. More like I had finally relaxed my grip on the reins of a horse I’d proven myself capable of riding, but had never loved. I felt no pangs as it galloped away out of sight.

  So I go now from the inn, each day, across town to the school, walking to work as I did in another lifetime. I stand at the front of the room, black lab tables with sunken sinks, gas nozzles for Bunsen burners, all the bright faces angled up at me, even the sullen ones attending with the corners of their eyes just in case something interesting happens.

  Quickly I became known as an easy A, because I don’t care if my students memorize the facts. All I want is to cultivate their curiosity. Yes, my old friend remains undiminished even now: the simple yearning to know. If these students cannot tell a xylem from a phloem, it will not unduly handicap their college hopes or impede their careers. But their lives will depend entirely on whether they possess wonder, an eye for beauty. For many people, the unknown is something to fear. Instead I want to give my students the humility to believe that anything they do not understand therefore possesses an elegant magic.

  I anticipate the day when someone brings up my past. Another teacher, a student who searched me online, most likely a parent with some grievance. It’s all but certain to happen; we live in a cynical time. Educated by a wise judge, I will not argue or defend. Thanks to repeatedly watching a video of him that remains online, I have a better reply prepared: We must let our deeds be our ambassadors. Our chall
enge is to live with all the sincerity that is in our hearts, and hope that those who doubt will come to see the truth.

  At the end of the school year, when I collected everyone’s lab notebooks, I flipped through Victoria’s first. The pages were thick with use. I was amused to see that boy Chris still figured prominently in the margins, the back cover. But the rest was filled with notes, measurements, drawings of accuracy and care.

  “Hm,” I said, though if I am honest, it came out more like a laugh. I had reached her. Curiosity had reached her. Victoria’s progress was plenty significant enough for me.

  The teacher on leave had her baby, yet remains undecided about whether to return next fall. So I begin to have a glimpse of a future, a place I might belong.

  Meanwhile I find solace in knowing that I remained worthy. No, more than that. I feel pride. After all, I loved Jeremiah Rice enough to stand between him and the evil in this world. I loved him enough to let him go.

  But not completely. I smile to think of what I held on to. Most nights I meander this town’s narrow streets, seeing lights on inside the antique houses, envying the occupants their domesticity. Eventually I find myself down on the docks where I held him, where I released him. Some nights it is cloudy there. On others, the moon shines a bright path across the black water. Regardless of weather, I am glad to be there, glad to have kept one thing of Jeremiah’s: small, brown, round.

  It is no mighty totem, no sacred talisman. It is a nothing, really, meaningful only to the one person who knows what it signifies: that he existed, that he loved me in return. Truths as strong as these can be sustained by the humblest of objects. This one hangs on a simple chain, resting above my heart.

  There on the dock I reach up and touch it, three fingers around the rim. What I have left of him. One button.

  Acknowledgments

  In 1992 I first heard James Taylor’s song “Frozen Man,” and it planted the seeds of this novel. In 2010 I shared the idea with my friends Chris Bohjalian and Dana Yeaton. They persuaded me to give it a try. Eighteen years is a slow thawing, and I’m forever grateful for their encouragement.