The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  Can you wait 10 minutes? I’ll be right over.

  —

  She was in her mid-fifties and had serious eyes. Dr. Helena Lee. She arrived by taxi, climbed out pulling a quilted jacket tightly around her. Catherine could see a white lab coat underneath. Hard to read the mood. The woman’s was stern, and her handshake was firm to the point of being a challenge. She let them in the high black gate and led Catherine up the walk.

  “You were expecting Michael,” Dr. Lee said, just as they reached the door. Hand on the doorknob, key in hand. She didn’t turn around. “I have his phone. Let’s get in out of this cold.”

  They climbed the stairs, footfalls dampened on thick carpet, the flights narrowing as they rose. Up and up. And then they were inside. Golden hardwood floors. A long dining room table by the front windows that she had looked up at earlier from the sidewalk below. There was a shelf of books and a trolley with wine and liquor bottles. There was an area rug across the centre of the room and various comfortably overstuffed chairs. Through a door to the left, Catherine could see the turret room where she had imagined Rostock reading, heavy oak desk with a leather top.

  “Dr. Lee…” Catherine began.

  “Helena, please,” she said. She was making tea and gestured that Catherine should sit.

  Lee returned from the kitchen with milk and sugar. She addressed her own cup with a focused expression. Then she lifted her face to look at Catherine squarely. She was sorry that Catherine had come all this way. And she thought she understood why Catherine and Michael had been in touch.

  “You’d been through something so horrible,” Lee said. “I can only imagine that you would have found support and understanding in one another.”

  A sensation was sweeping her, one that she had not felt in several days but which was now rapidly onrushing.

  Of course. Of course. And Catherine heard her voice at a whisper. Of course. Because there had never been a reason to ask. She knew.

  Michael Rostock had committed suicide the week prior. And here Dr. Lee’s tears flowed and she looked away. Catherine caught movement at the periphery of her vision. A watching other. An awakening. An awareness of the world again altering its shape such that nothing would look the same after she and Dr. Lee had finished speaking.

  They’d been romantically involved. Lee’s words, carefully chosen. Rostock’s wife had been gone many years. He was trying to move on, to be healthy in all ways. He’d gone to Paris to his conference. Lee and Rostock had planned to be married on his return. It would have been a very quiet ceremony. Just a few friends. Some colleagues from the hospital.

  “But he had a difficult time after the accident.” Lee paused, straightening and collecting herself. “His physical injuries weren’t severe. But he came home broken in other ways.”

  It wasn’t obvious at first, but then more and more. He couldn’t sleep. He was agitated and nervous. He startled easily. You couldn’t approach him from behind. He began to shut himself in. He stopped going to work.

  “This created enormous pressure at the hospital,” Lee said. “You have to understand. Everyone loved him. He was respected. But when he stopped showing up daily, things began to fall apart.”

  Rostock had trials on the go that required supervision. He’d delayed several of them, obsessed with minor data anomalies. These had grown more complicated and perplexing. Senior staff had grown resentful at his absences and frictions had arisen. Eventually there were those on the team who thought the entire data set had been corrupted.

  “The hospital asked me to talk to him,” Lee said. “They had real questions. But by that point he’d pushed me completely away. It was like I was living with a ghost. Eventually Michael took another apartment, as if he were abandoning his entire life.”

  His identity had been stolen, he told her. He thought he was being followed, that the person in question was responsible for problems at work, that this person was in fact his double, spawned somehow by the accident. He spoke of doppelgängers.

  Doppelgänger. Ankou. Fylgia. Fetch.

  He told Lee that he was tracking down other AF801 survivors, to warn them. That he’d identified some kind of symmetry that existed among the six of them.

  “I never thought that was a healthy thing for him to do. I’m sorry but I didn’t.”

  “It actually meant a great deal to me,” Catherine said.

  Well, it seemed only to make Rostock more paranoid and delusional, Lee said. “I tried to get him professional help. He would never agree. I heard from his cousin eventually, who is with the FBI. Michael had gone to them. They were concerned about some of the things he’d been saying. His cousin wanted to know if he was all right.”

  Lee no longer knew if Rostock was all right. She knew he’d rented a place in Bridgeport, but had never been told exactly where. He said he had to keep this secret because he had his double under observation. He told her that the hospital had asked him to resign.

  “Then, one day he contacted me and he sounded quite different.”

  They met for coffee, and Lee remembered thinking Rostock seemed like he had in some ways returned to normal. He had some of his old poise back. His old confidence. But what he actually told her frightened her even more, convincing her that something was still very wrong. He told her that he had a plan to meet his double.

  “‘Confront and defeat,’ he told me,” Lee said. “He kept saying that. I didn’t have any idea what he meant. He didn’t appear angry. And yet I could sense a kind of rage in him.”

  “When was this?” Catherine asked.

  A few weeks ago, Lee said, which Catherine understood to place the meeting just after Catherine herself had met with Rostock over dinner. But she said nothing about that. Perhaps better not to complicate the memories. Perhaps better for Catherine herself not to over-think the timing relative to his death, those many desperate texts that went unanswered.

  “He wasn’t doing well, I could see that.” Lee paused, wiping her eyes. “But then he was suddenly doing a great deal worse.”

  Further data anomalies at the lab. Further quiet questions asked. Rostock spiralled off into paranoia again. He disappeared into Bridgeport and was dead a couple of weeks later.

  “May I ask how?” Catherine’s hand was over her mouth, as if she had not wanted the question to come out.

  Toxicology said sleeping pills, Lee told Catherine. But then she paused and Catherine sensed her reservations. She leaned forward and put a hand on Lee’s arm, who looked up at her, the tears again brimming.

  Lee held a napkin in trembling hands and described the details of Rostock’s death that she feared she would never be able to explain. Rostock’s landlord had contacted her with the news. She’d gone over to Bridgeport and seen the circumstances to which Rostock had by then been reduced. The place had been utterly destroyed. His furniture and effects. It appeared as if there had been a fight. Neighbours had heard something. The police had attended. It was beyond comprehension.

  “A fight with whom?” Catherine asked, aware that she was flushing, her pulse starting to race.

  Lee paused to wipe her eyes. “No one,” she said. “Or himself. Or someone. I don’t know.”

  Not this, Catherine thought. Please not this.

  “He left a note,” she said. “I’ve since destroyed it. Utter madness. He wrote about black birds that surrounded him, that burst out of his chest. He spoke of a fire that consumed him, of beating this doppelgänger to death with his fists.”

  Catherine sat frozen, listening. Lee breathed deeply for a few seconds.

  “The hospital wants it kept very quiet. I want privacy myself. Too much has happened and there is no happy version of the story.”

  Catherine was sitting back by this point, horrified and riveted. The deathly familiarity of the story. Nancy Whittle. Adrian Janic, Patricia Langston, Douglas Marshall. Dr. Michael Rostock.

  Lee was weeping again now, tears streaming down her face. Catherine moved across to sit next to her on the cou
ch, and the older woman leaned into her and let herself be held. Catherine thought she could smell the hospital in her hair, a working doctor in love with another. She imagined they’d met there, at the clinic, in the lab. Eye contact. A shiver of interest. A slow first date. There had been real love here, Catherine thought, as Lee’s shoulders shook under the light pressure of her embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” Lee said, straightening.

  Catherine’s eyes were on the window. No impulse to tears, but a pressing thought instead. Was she truly the last?

  “May I ask a question?” she said, picking up her tea in a steady hand, sipping, waiting.

  —

  She had a taxi wait at the end of the block with instructions that she needed fifteen minutes tops and then they had to race to O’Hare. “Flight at 4:30 p.m., we can do this?”

  The cabby was a Somalian. He’d told her already he’d been in Mogadishu when the Black Hawks went down. “I’m not boasting,” he said. Impeccable accent-free American English. “I was five years old. Yes, we can make it.”

  She made her way down the block. The streets were empty except for parked cars.

  “Did you see his body?” she had asked Dr. Lee at the very end of their conversation. Tea in hand and a sense of impending closure.

  It was an odd question, to which Lee had reacted with a startled glance. Yes, she had. Of course she had. Why did Catherine want to know?

  “This will sound strange and I apologize in advance. But I believe it’s important.”

  Lee was listening, though her glance flickered briefly over Catherine’s shoulder and towards the door.

  “Were you certain it was him?”

  Catherine moved into the street now, a quick glance up and down. No traffic. An odd stillness over that part of the city. Very little noise but for the scrape of a plane passing overhead, a white seam opening in the dusty blue as if the sky itself were being minutely torn.

  Lee had gone stiff with the question. And Catherine sensed that their time together had drawn to a close. “You may not know this,” Catherine said, “but I’m also a physician. And I ask for a specific reason.”

  Well, in that case. Lee drew herself straight in the chair, addressing Catherine squarely. In that case, Dr. Bach. And here she’d given Catherine the straight goods. Choroid fissure. Coloboma, from the Greek word for defect.

  “An aperture in the iris,” Lee had told Catherine. “If there were such a thing as a double, then his was a perfect one. Flaws and all.”

  Of course it would be, Catherine thought. Faithfulness to the smallest flaw would be the doppelgänger’s signal perfection.

  And with that, Lee had begged her leave, citing workload, patients. The ordinary madness. And Catherine found herself on South Drexel Boulevard again with a single task left in Chicago.

  FINGER OF GOD

  CATHERINE DIDN’T EXACTLY HAVE A GAME PLAN. She wasn’t sure she even had clear objectives. But she knew the next few necessary steps.

  It would be so good to speak. I have something for you.

  She knocked on the door at the address on South Halsted that Lee had reluctantly given her. A stocky African-American man in jeans and a Chicago Bulls jersey opened the door. Rostock’s landlord. The spark of recognition between them was not commented on. But from the man’s expression and the sudden stillness within her, Catherine thought they both seemed to be meeting exactly the person expected.

  “My name is Catherine Bach. I think you might have something for me.”

  She provided identification—a Canadian passport, scrutinized closely—and only then did he pull open the door wide enough for her to enter, beckoning with his free hand that she should come inside.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” he said.

  Gabriel was his name. He’d had a hard week, Catherine guessed. And as he led her back through the house, he warily answered her first tentative questions. No, he’d never met Dr. Rostock before he rented the ramshackle house two months prior. And no, he hadn’t seen him around much since then, as Rostock seemed to come and go at unusual hours. Then Gabriel wondered aloud at how long Rostock’s body might have lain in his bedroom, had it not been for the earlier noise complaints.

  Catherine asked about that as they made their way past a small kitchen and into a long, dark hall that led to the rear of the main floor.

  “Some kind of crazy fight, smashing, yelling, bad language. He did a lot of damage as you’ll see. I’m only now starting the cleanup.”

  “You mean he wasn’t alone?”

  “Cops came,” the landlord said. “Said he was alone, being noisy, but no crime yet. So they left and then this happened. I don’t know what to think.”

  They’d reached the bedroom. And those last words unspooled just as the door swung open and the room came into view. Catherine, both hands to her mouth, in shock. “Oh my God.”

  The wreckage lay in mounds and dunes and drifts, as if the contents of the entire apartment had been dragged into that back room and put through a wood-chipper. A shelf, its books disgorged, then minutely chopped to ribbons. A couch that existed only as a vague structural reference to its original form and function: confettied upholstery, splintered timbers. A midden of smashed dishes and crockery. Clothes torn and strewn. Evidence of an office turned upside down and shaken: torn sticky notes, mangled bull clips, mulched financial papers, the remnants of many plastic cards. Catherine took a single step into the room, overwhelmed at the completeness of the destruction. She’d seen pictures of tornados that had traced similar patterns on the ground. Finger of God, people said, referring to how the created world could be entirely erased. And here too the physical had been stripped out of itself, objects defuncted and depurposed in a single savage swirling. Catherine thought she saw it quite clearly, the tornado of converging convictions that had emerged from Rostock and caused him to lay waste to the very surfaces and substances of his life.

  When she returned sufficiently to the moment, to herself standing where she was standing, having swept on through memories of their dinner together, the spiralling agony of the story he told, such anguish at the end in the black depths of his angular coloboma, Catherine found her cheeks wet with tears. Finally, finally. Here they came in earnest. And she wrapped her arms around herself and let the sobs wrack her silently for several moments. 70F, she thought, I resisted you but I do believe. I believe you now all too terribly well.

  —

  It was a lumpy envelope with her name written across it. But she didn’t open it, standing in the wreckage of what Dr. Michael Rostock’s life had become. Standing precisely where that life, the penultimate one of those marked, original six, had completed its final disintegration. She didn’t think Rostock would have expected her to open it there. Perhaps he’d even forgotten he’d left her anything at all in that maelstrom moment when he wrote his own ending.

  She didn’t open it in the taxi to O’Hare, or on the plane, either. She just held it in her lap, feeling the shape of several objects inside, until she fell asleep and stayed asleep almost the entire way.

  At home, instead. In her living room, on her return. Toby back from the cat sitter’s and coiling around her bare ankles. A cup of tea at hand. Her clothes were unpacked and in the washing machine. She had checked email and voicemail but made no replies. One-word email from Kalmar: Sparrow.

  Next steps. Small but critical next steps.

  She sat herself down at the dining room table, slit the envelope open. There were three items, which she extracted one by one. Coordinates of a kind. Plot points for locating oneself in a three-dimensional space.

  A man’s wristwatch stopped at the fated moment of 10:30 in the evening, the thick crystal smashed in the pattern of a snowflake. Blue diver’s bezel. Rostock’s watch, frozen forever in the lingering moment of impact, radical and entire.

  A folded Air Safety Card from an Air France Airbus A380-800. Catherine noted the picture of the aircraft in the waves with slides extended. The water b
irth where it all began.

  Last item, a small envelope tucked into the larger one. It wasn’t sealed and she opened the flap with her finger to see there were photographs inside. Six of them, small headshots swiped off the Internet and printed on ordinary paper. Catherine laid them out on the table. That was Rostock there. And here, a picture of Catherine herself from some moment in history when she had apparently been laughing.

  She didn’t need a key to crack the code of the other four. This young woman here, dark hair, wide-set eyes. That would be Patricia Langston in 20F, heading home after European travel. Lower spinal cord injuries. Never left the wheelchair to which AF801 had confined her and gone from this world entirely in just a few months.

  Another young person. Catherine pulled the photo over to position it just to the right of Langston’s. Adrian Janic, who sat so unknowingly in 18E. A carpenter from Serbia en route to an uncertain future, delivered to the most unexpected destination. Gone just after Langston, less than six months.

  Nancy Whittle, 12B. Catherine looked at the round and heavy face, the bobbed hair. Mother of four from Kent, England. She’d cut herself off from family before taking her own life just after the first anniversary of the crash.

  Douglas Marshall, 63B, Paris-based insurance executive, took a box cutter to his own throat.

  Leaving Rostock. Dr. Rostock, who had survived the longest before laying waste to his world.

  Catherine sat back at the table to breathe a little. Slowly in. Slowly out. Important to remember that she was in fact still breathing. These five had not been so lucky, but they suggested a pattern to her now. Left to right in the order of their deaths: Langston, Janic, Whittle, Marshall, Rostock. Each one’s injuries a degree less, each one also struggling all that much more with what lay beyond their bodies. Each had pushed a little closer to some elusive truth that Catherine had herself seen fluttering so often at the far reach of peripheral vision. She felt it in shivers, in the brush of black feathers, in the grainy video footage taken by a Warehouse camera far overhead.