Caligatha

by Matt Spire

  “Oh! We'll toast to their memory with the next glass.”

  There's a moment of quiet, then he says, “I wonder what you think of me. We've passed before…that must be it. Always at a strange time.”

  “I think...I think you're right.” She stares into her drink, then it's another one of those playfully severe looks. “But so what? You're very self-conscious. Don't be. I asked you here.”

  That's true. But he's yet to validate her decision.

  “Have you always lived in Caligatha?”

  “More or less. We used to live a bit outside, but we moved to downtown Caligatha a few years ago. How about you?”

  “Ah.” He finds himself lost in thought. “Oh, well, I studied.”

  “How old are you?” she asks.

  “Twenty-nine, but–”

  “That wasn't a loaded question. What did you study?”

  “I was an engineer.”

  “An engineer!” She raises her brows. “What kind?”

  “I made little machines,” he tells her, hoping not to get into it, but she only looks more perplexed and amused.

  “Little machines?”

  He's quiet, and after a moment she laughs. “Like..?” She runs her hands along the bar as though she were guiding a little toy car, makes a vroom sound.

  “Little machines the size of cells. It was all...immune system stuff. But it didn't work out.”

  “You mean–” she starts, but clearly can't grasp his evasive explanation.

  “It worked eventually,” he recants. “I made a bunch of money, saved lives. But...”

  “Well, what are you doing at Blue Coral?”

  He takes a moment to answer her, still piecing the narrative together. The death is the truest thing. Everything else has sounds like fiction.

  “I...I couldn't do it anymore.” He stares at the mirror behind the bar, at his own furrowing brow. “It took too much out of me.”

  “Oh, well,” she looks into her drink. “I wouldn't know the first thing about engineering, but I think I understand.”

  “I still have enough to live off for a long time,” he says, hoping he doesn't appear to be gloating.

  “How wonderful that you still want to be around people. You could be such a jerk,” she snickers. “Still...I wonder why I haven't heard of any of this before. It all sounds like a big deal.”

  But he can't talk about that anymore. It might be too personal, but he asks anyway. “Who are you losing?”

  She gives him a forced smile for the first time. “Did we exchange a hundred words before I told you that?”

  “You don't have to–”

  “No. It's okay.” She pauses, her voice solid. “My father has cancer. The doctors gave him three years, three years ago. It's why we moved into the shop. It's not ideal, but...”

  For some reason, Jericho feels weakened by this. Maybe it's his ability to relate, but there's something else. There's no trace of sadness on her face or in her voice. Just resolve.

  “My fiancé and I... she was sick too. But it was quick.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Years ago. Many years ago.”

  “Hmm,” she says, probably wondering if it had anything to do with his work. She almost goes to say it, Did you quit because you couldn't save her?, but minds herself.

  He's about to apologize for asking, but she sits up and says, “Can I be blunt?”

  “Of course.”

  She smiles, more genuinely this time. “I can tell it's left you damaged.”

  “I wound up with some bad habits, but I'm better now,” he rushes to assert, defensive. He can't tell her about the drugs, his forty-eight hour sort-of sobriety.

  “I'm sure. But...I think I can see all that in you. Maybe that's—that’s part of why I'm drawn to you. I can feel it, fear it. I don't want…I mean, what you’ve been through, I need to know it’s possible to come out of that. On the other side…come out okay.”

  “You're not me,” he says. “You're very different.” The idea of her coping with pills is almost laughable.

  “Maybe.” She looks into her glass again, sips. Her smile comes a little slower, more faint, but it's also warm. “This is crazy.”

  “You want someone to talk to. That's okay.”

  “Maybe,” she repeats. “But that's just part of it. I've spent the last few years being very busy. I don't just want to vent at you.”

  “You can,” he tells her. “It's...kind of bittersweet. But even this, it's–far more rewarding than any conversation I've had in a long time.”

  “No. I mean, I'm not trying to...pry into the grieving process, and I don't want to vent.” She clears space with her hands, shaking her head. “I'd like a friend.”

  He looks down, embarrassed by his abrupt smile. “Sure.”

  “What's more, I think I found someone more awkward at this than me, and that's great.”

  “Let's have a cigarette.” He's not sure if she's flirting, but it makes him pleased and awkward all at once.

  Lydia sizes up her half-empty glass and downs it. “See? I'm not really a snob,” she says, and laughs.

  Walking to the door, Jericho remembers Reuben's words about the girl and old man living at Eden's Vineyard.

  “Hey,” he says as they walk away from the entrance. “Do you manage Eden's Vineyard?”

  “I do.” Her face lights up. “Are we solving the mystery?”

  Jericho wonders if it was wise to say anything. “I'm...I know Reuben.”

  She cocks her head. “Are you friends?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Hmm. I don't know how you could be.”

  “I see him sometimes. He has a nice family.”

  “Well, he never talks about them.”

  “What do you want to do?” he asks, lighting his cigarette. “You seem good at what you do now.”

  “That's a good question.” She's quiet for a minute. “Okay, so that...bottle in there aside–I don't really care much about wine. I could make a living, on my own I mean, if…I'd be just fine that way. But–well, I feel like I've been trapped here. For a million years.”

  “Me too.”

  “Don't get me wrong,” she rushes to add. “I don't resent anything. What about you?”

  “I'd like to start over,” he says, though it feels hollow. He doesn't know what he wants to start, exactly.

  She gives him another one of those severe looks. “What happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After. I mean...you were an engineer? Did working at the inn help you cope right away?”

  There's no point in hiding things. She's too intuitive.

  Still, he chooses his words carefully, and they're not all true. “Years ago, after...I used drugs to cope for a while.”

  “Oh.”

  “It got bad, but I... I stopped. I stopped and started up again and I had an incident. Or to be honest, an overdose. Asphyxiated.”

  “Oh.”

  He studies her face, can't tell if she's judging him or just waiting.

  “I've had some memory loss.”

  “You're not really telling me–you're an amnesiac or something?”

  “No, no. Just things around that time. I can remember things. It's just...fuzzy.”

  “I see.” She seems to reflect, then, “Well, I don't really smoke. Just when I'm stressed.” She smiles. “See, we all have vices, don't we?”

  He laughs, his body and voice listless.

  “Come on.” She leans in, pokes him on the shoulder, and he's overcome with the desire to kiss her. “The thing about being human is you can change. You've done that, so don't be too hard on yourself.”

  He wishes it were entirely true.

  ***

  Over the rest of the bottle, Jericho and Lydia discuss the funny things they see tourists do, how awkward they were until emptying their second glasses, Lydia's childhood growing up in Caligatha. Discontent the somber bartender Farron won't confirm anything about the
accident or supposed missing driver, and seeming a little looser, Lydia tries to goad him with increasingly absurd hypotheses: a rift in the space-time continuum; or the vehicle piloting itself as an agent of artificial intelligence.

  The alcohol slowly begins to soothe his anxiety and itchiness, and he finds himself laughing more and more.

  “What else?” She asks Jericho, and Farron leaves after he offers that maybe the car was thrown into the window by a rogue tornado.

  Giggling, she covers her mouth. “Sorry,” she says. “So, second confession: I don't drink very often.”

  Whether she's unguarded more from the drink or their conversation, it's beautiful. He envisions her in the green sundress, moonlit, his hand the cool air on her skin.

  “You don't drink?”

  “Oh, I do, sometimes. But this is long overdue.”

  “I thought you were good at your job?”

  “Hey! I don't have to be a wino!” she says, pouring the rest of the bottle in her glass, then realizes Jericho's is empty. She bursts into laughter. “Oops.”

  “Never too late to start,” he says, and she nudges her glass towards him.

  “Share.” She places her hand on his leg. “I'm glad you decided to be fun.”

  They finish, and Lydia insists on paying. Jericho argues with her, reminds her he doesn't know what to do with all the money he has. But she seems to take it personally, so he backs down.

  Around ten o'clock they walk together towards Eden's Vineyard. His apartment is only a few blocks away, and she agrees to come up for a little while.

  As soon as he opens the door, he regrets the decision.

  “Cozy,” she says. The bare walls, the dead moth in scotch, even the morphine–is it still at the top of the trash?–it all fills him with dreadful shame. The tiny efficiency and its lack of ornaments bares everything, his nothingness.

  She sits on the edge of the bed, looks at Alana's drawing. “Why didn't you tell me you were an artist?”

  The alcohol's sedation is dissipating, and the comment feels personal. He knows it isn't, forces himself to smile.

  “Reuben's daughter made that for me.”

  “Cute.” She lies back and stretches out, baring the light olive skin of her flat stomach.

  He looks to the window. “She is.”

  She rolls onto her side, plays with a strand of hair. “You look out that window a lot?” she asks, noticing the chair, the ashtray on the sill.

  He wishes he hadn't suggested she come inside, maybe tried to kiss her by her door instead, and invite her another time after he’d found a way to make his apartment less pathetic.

  She pulls him against her body, leans in. “I should go soon,” she whispers in his ear. “But I've had fun.”

  With the pressure of her waist and the weight of her breast on him, he says “me too,” and her lips graze his.

  He squeezes her side, wonders what she would do without the alcohol. Would she be touching him? Would her fingers still be digging into his pockets, eager to be intimate, probably for the first time?

  “We should meet again,” he says, avoiding her parting lips.

  She buries her face into his neck, mutters something warm, then pulls off. “Okay.”

  They exchange numbers at the door, and she kisses his cheek, says she should go home and check on her father anyway.

  “You're a good person,” he says. “He's lucky.”

  “I don't know about that.”

  “He is, to spend this time with you.”

  Her smile this time is crooked, undecipherable. “Whatever he can enjoy, I guess.” She straightens her shirt. “Whatever he isn't sleeping away with all the morphine.”

  Morphine.

  It's a stab, a paralysis. Reuben couldn't have been selling the same morphine.

  The same morphine from the same dying man, with the same daughter reduced to air in Reuben's cupped hands at the bar.

  Lydia walks away, flashes of all those tablets staring up at him, Reuben's lecherous voice lingering in his mind, a disgusting orgy of tits, ass, death.

  He doesn't know how much time passes between her walking away, him closing the door, and laying on the bed.

  He wishes she'd never touched him, his filthy face.

  If he'd taken her virginity, he just might disintegrate now into a braindead puddle.

  His body begins to boil, molten waves of nausea rolling inside. The ghosts return, too, the walls wavering in sync with his stomach.

  For once, he doesn't care, just stares vacantly.

  10

  Exhumation

  Eric kneels at the hearth on the first floor, clearing the ashes and possum bones with the straight edge of his folding knife.

  There's only a slab of dirty cement underneath. Crane and Mae are silent beside him, but the disappointment is palpable as Crane leans into Mae's light, trying to grip the cement edges. He wonders if Crane half-expected an inscribed tablet to appear, some holy relic from the old world.

  “God damn it,” Crane says, still feeling the concrete. “This is it. We know this is it.”

  Eric begins to protest the secrecy, but Crane stands and kicks the surrounding floorboard with his heel.

  “Come on,” he says, “The cement is loose.”

  Sure enough, the slab jostles with Crane's kicks.

  Mae unsheathes her knife, and they begin working at the rotted, black wood around the hearth. It crumbles easily after years of decay and the drifter's failed attempt to cook the possum.

  As Crane sifts through the loft's rubble behind them, Mae stops and shines her light close to the concrete. They've made the sliver of an opening under the slab.

  “Hollow,” she says.

  Crane returns from the kitchen with a gardening trowel, fixing it into the opening. Mae and Eric work their knives under the slab, and it lifts with their leverage.

  Eric expects a foul, tomblike smell to emerge as Crane pulls the concrete from the hearth, but the air remains unchanged.

  Mae shines her light into the hollow tunnel. The concrete runs easily ten feet to flat ground, with slats carved into the far surface for climbing.

  Eric grabs Crane’s shoulder before he can peer further down the hole.

  “What are we going to find?”

  Crane's eyes meet his, wide and wondrous, and Eric realizes Crane has no idea.

  But Mae's already started down the tunnel, the light on her rifle bobbing down ahead of her.

  Crane follows without a word, contorting himself into the hole, then stops to look at Eric with only his neck above ground. “Stay here,” he says gravely, less like a command and more like a warning. He writhes his arm free, and tosses Eric his light.

  Eric looks around the desolate loft. Crane's taken the only radio, the only contact with their spotters, with him below.

  If Eric were calling the shots, they would all have radios, all be wearing thermogenic sights, and there would be a fourth unit still in the truck.

  But he can’t do anything about that. Now’s his opportunity to search for anything of value to steal. Anything to keep paying the jackals.

  “What are we doing?” he asks himself, surveying the rotten trash in the panorama of his light. He could steal the whole room, all of its shattered glass and brittle paper and animal bones, and not fetch a single penny.

  He presses his back to the wall, turning his light to the footlocker at his feet.

  Carefully surveying the entrance, he steals glances at the book.

  ***

  What does a man do after he's eradicated disease? Cancer, HIV, Ebola, Malaria. Every strain of the flu.

  There's no suppressing information. Once his blueprints for the artificial immune system were online, hundreds of millions worldwide, anyone daring enough with access to a printer, swallowed his pill within 24 hours.

  Half of America had Jericho's invention in their blood by the time he returned to California that June, and GenAssist had cleared house in an attempt to uncover the en
gineer or board member that had leaked their prize of the century. Desperate, the new board turned to Jericho for an edge, any edge, over the now publicly-available immune system. He told them in two months' time, he could have an upgrade that scrubbed the arteries of plaque, regulated blood sugar, enhanced the filtration efficiency of the kidneys, lungs, and liver, and eliminated hangovers. But he would need an additional fifty million, and a small percent of sales. Of course, he'd already developed all that in the first go-round. He knew how to play the idiot savant, though he told me he had no intention of using GenAssist again. It was merely poetic humor to him that they'd even asked. This time around, with industry lawyers and legislators and even the FDA in paralysis, he demanded everything be on the books. “Squeaky clean,” he insisted.

  In another eight months, Jericho released the upgrade along with an open-source online hub under the pseudonym Verminus. The writing was now metaphorically on the wall for the entire industry. GenAssist's chief executive promptly covered the sunlit windows of his forty-third floor office with residue from an antique flintlock blunderbuss and brain matter. Rumor is, he'd been so savage at the end that after the blast shattered a hole in the wall-length panes, no one dared disturb him. For three days vultures freely consumed what was left of his face.

  Maybe Jericho wanted everyone to have access to his life-saving technology. Or maybe he'd been so vilified, he wanted everyone to know who the real monsters were.

  He then hired a lawyer and, despite a most negligible case, successfully sued for lost sales. He was right–everyone had a father or daughter or niece whose life had been saved. It didn't matter whether tabloids linked him to Verminus. Impartiality was impossible. Despite being the plaintiff and the perpetrator, he was awarded another hundred million, beating a paradox as difficult as he'd left GenAssist's lawyers on the first go-round. GenAssist, as a pharmaceutical giant, collapsed in an embarrassing buy-out that saw it re-envisioned as a producer of novelty genetics tests and other retail goods.

  So, when Jericho pulled into my back alley in a decrepit 2015 Volt with rusted sides he'd bought at the last minute for a hundred dollars, I could not fathom what the future held.

  There he sat, alternating between staring into the tea I'd served, erratically flipping through an increasing pile of books retrieved from my shelves, and muttering conversational false starts. “You know what's funny about curing multiple sclerosis,” and then silence. “It's amazing, what retraining afferent nerves for pulmonary,” and then he'd read the dust-jacket of Wuthering Heights, toss it on the pile, and slyly stick another pill in his mouth and force a dry swallow.