Vigil

by Robert Masello

  His uncle settled himself into his white Naugahyde Barcalounger—with the heat and massage controls—and Ezra sat down on the sofa across from him. Plaster was peeling away from the walls and hanging down in what looked to Ezra like furled scrolls.

  “I’m still waiting for an answer,” his uncle said. “This isn’t the usual time for a visit. What’s wrong?”

  Ezra took a sip of his coffee. “I couldn’t sleep, and just started taking a walk.”

  “Gertrude tells me you don’t sleep at night at all anymore. She says you don’t go to bed till dawn and you get up in the afternoon. What are you doing all night, Ezra?”

  “Working.”

  “You can’t work during the day, like most people?”

  “It’s better at night. Quieter. Fewer interruptions.” Until, of course, this particular night.

  Maury didn’t look convinced. “What’s your doctor say? That Neumann woman?”

  “I haven’t discussed it with her.”

  “Maybe you should. She’s got you on some medications, for the mood swings and the rest?”

  “Yes,” Ezra said, looking down into his cup, wondering at the way the lamplight shone in iridescent circles on the surface of the hot coffee. He hadn’t told Neumann about his insomnia; he knew she’d only prescribe some sleeping pills for him, and sleep wasn’t what he wanted. Not when he was doing such exciting work, such breakthrough stuff. The only prescriptions he wanted from her were for things that would keep him focused, keep him alert, keep him calm enough to concentrate on the momentous task before him.

  Which was why he wouldn’t—why he couldn’t—tell her about the voice he’d heard that night, any more than he could tell his uncle. He knew what that could lead to—endless psychotherapy at best, and an involuntary commitment at worst. The scroll was coming together, bit by bit, but it was a mind-boggling task, the sort of thing that drove one mad; in fact, as Ezra knew better than anyone, it had done just that to many of his predecessors. The first to feel the curse had been Shapira, the man who’d originally discovered some ancient manuscripts from the Dead Sea shores in the late nineteenth century. In his lifetime, his discoveries were considered forgeries—nothing, the scholars of his day concluded, could have survived so long in such an inhospitable climate—and after enduring years of professional disdain and dismissal, Shapira checked into a Rotterdam hotel and put a bullet through his head. Since that time, and with the amazing finds at Qumran in 1947, Shapira had been vindicated—for all the good it did him—and others had picked up where he’d left off, often with equally dire results. Scroll scholars were famous for their descents into madness and despair, for their alcoholism and drug abuse and suicidal tendencies (acted upon at a fairly regular pace). Ezra knew of one such case personally, an Australian woman, the most prominent authority on the theology of the Essenes, who’d worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls housed at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem; in less than two years’ time, she had been reduced to a babbling fanatic, raving about the Apocalypse to come, and running from an omnipresent specter she called the Shadow Man. At a conference in Haifa, she’d rushed to the podium, and after shouting something about the Sons of Light, she had set fire to herself. Badly burned, but still alive, she’d been sent back home to Melbourne, where, last he’d heard, she lived under heavy medication and constant care in a private sanatorium.

  When you studied the Scrolls, Ezra knew, you had to keep a firm grip on yourself.

  “Gertrude called me yesterday,” his Uncle Maury was saying now. Ezra looked up from his coffee. “She had some news, and she was going to tell it to you today, whenever you woke up.”

  “What was she going to tell me?”

  “Your father and Kimberly are flying back from Palm Beach. They’ll be back in New York in a few days.”

  That was news. Right after the fight at the dinner table, they’d packed their bags and fled, without a word, to more hospitable climes.

  “Now your father’s not an easy guy to get along with,” Maury confessed, “and sometimes I don’t know how your mother put up with him for all those years. But if you want to stay in that apartment—and Gertrude tells me that you do—you’re going to have to work a little harder at it. You’ve got to make more of an effort, Ezra.”

  His uncle was right, of course, though Ezra had no idea how that effort should manifest itself. If his mother had been alive, there’d be no problem. She had been proud of everything he did, whether it was drawing a picture of a horse or guessing all the right answers to some TV game show. It was his father who never seemed to think anything he did was good enough. It was his father who never believed he would measure up. Who didn’t understand anything Ezra enjoyed or was interested in. All Sam Metzger knew was how to make money, how to put up buildings and parking garages and shopping centers. Everything he touched turned to gold, while everything Ezra touched turned to dust.

  But the scroll would change all that. Ezra was going to do something here that would make the world sit up and take notice. And then his father would have to acknowledge him and admit that Ezra had done something—something momentous—that even he, the great Sam Metzger, could not have done himself. When that day came, it was going to be the sweetest in Ezra’s life.

  And it wasn’t far off.

  But in the meantime, what was he supposed to do as a peace offering—bake a cake? Leave a letter of apology on their pillows? “I’ll try to make it work,” he simply said.

  “Good. You do that,” Maury said, putting his coffee mug on the floor and struggling up out of the Barcalounger. The morning sunlight was now streaming through the dirty windows of the apartment. “Me, I’m ready for some Danish. How about you?”

  “I’m buying,” Ezra said.

  “Better leave that to me,” Maury said. “You, they won’t even let inside the place.”

  THIRTEEN

  “Is it okay if I ask Professor Russo a question directly?” Katie asked, and Carter, who was sharing the lecture hall stage with him, said, “Be my guest.”

  Katie stood up and leaned on the back of the seat in front of her. Russo and Carter were on opposite sides of the slide screen, on which an artist’s rendering of a pterodactyl in flight was depicted. “Professor Cox believes that birds are the modern-day descendants of dinosaurs,” Katie said, “and that some of the dinosaurs, including a fossil of one that we saw in a previous lecture, actually had feathers. I know this is a big debate, but which side of it do you fall on?”

  Carter should have known Katie would try to nail him; she was the smartest kid in the class, but she liked to make mischief, and Russo’s being there provided her with the perfect opportunity. It was almost as if she’d guessed that this was one of the few paleontological points on which he and Russo did not agree.

  Russo stuffed his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket and looked like he was wondering how to answer that one—truthfully, or to defer to the views of his host? “Yes, you are right. There is much debate about this point,” he said, to buy some time. When he took his hands out of his pockets again, he had a matchbook in one and a crumpled pack of Nazionalis in the other. He tamped out a cigarette and actually started to light it before a couple of the students laughed, and Carter had to say, “Joe, I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here.”

  For a second, Russo looked stumped, as if he were even aware that he was lighting a cigarette at all, then flicked the match out. “Yes, of course.”

  “I’ve read that they found some fossils in Madagascar,” Katie interjected, “that showed some kind of animal that had feathered forearms, like a bird. But it also had the kind of claws that made it seem more like a dinosaur.”

  “Yes, and I believe that a mistake has been made. I believe that the excavation there has uncovered pieces of separate creatures. For me,” Russo said, glancing apologetically over at Carter, “there are still too many, how do you say . . . gaps. I do not see in birds, for instance, the beginning of a thumb”—he held up his own and wriggled it�
��“that we can see in dinosaurs. I see that there are similarities, yes, between the birds and one branch of the dinosaur tree—”

  “The theropods?” Katie said, showing off.

  “Yes. You have been paying attention to your professor,” Russo said, with a smile, “but even with these theropods, these meat eaters, I do not yet see the definite link.” He shrugged. “But that is what science is all about. Debate, discussion, discovery. I could be wrong, and my friend Carter could turn out to be right. It is possible. But since you are in his class, and not mine, I think that you should agree with his views.”

  There was scattered laughter around the lecture hall, and Carter was about to step forward to take control again when one of the other students said, “Is there a European consensus about all this, and is it different from the American one? What does the Italian scientific community, for instance, think?”

  “You want me to speak for all of Europe, or even Italy?” Russo said, wide-eyed, and Carter said, “Go for it. Nobody’s taping, as far as I know. The stage is yours.”

  Russo walked more toward the center, and Carter retreated into the shadows toward the rear—which was right where he wanted to be today; he’d had a bad night’s sleep, and even now his thoughts kept returning to the events surrounding the delivery of the fossil.

  Free at last to start his own investigation, Carter had gone to work with a vengeance. He’d removed the chains that anchored the rock to the platform and stripped away the wide bands of yellow tape that held the plastic sheathing in place. Then he’d carefully cut away the plastic itself, from the top first, so that the pieces fell away from the rock like the petals of a flower opening wide and drooping down. In the end, the plastic sheets lay in a pool around the base of the stone. The rock itself was a miracle—a massive, bumpy, granular block, striated, studded, and sparkling all over with a score of different minerals. Geology had never been Carter’s greatest strength, but even with the naked eye he could see—hell, anyone could see—that this particular specimen had led a very long and eventful life.

  “In Italy, perhaps because we do not have so much access to technology—the government is very stingy with its resources—we like to think, to work on theory,” Russo was saying. “Then later we try to make the evidence prove it.”

  The students laughed again, another one asked a question, and Carter was relieved to see that Russo was warming to the task; Carter could tell he was a good lecturer, and guessed he was popular with his own students back in Rome.

  But that first night, in the lab, he’d shown a lot less interest and enthusiasm than Carter would have expected—maybe the whole thing was just anticlimactic for him. Russo had stood back, making occasional comments and observations, while Carter had clambered all over the rock, like a kid climbing a tree. At one point, he’d lain flat on the top of it, just trying to imagine what was fossilized inside, which way it lay, what bones were preserved, what they might be able to tell him about evolution and the prehistoric world.

  “You should be careful, lying on a ticking bomb like that,” Russo had said, referring to the pockets of volatile gas that they both suspected were embedded in the stone.

  “Long as I don’t puncture the damn thing, I should be safe,” Carter had replied, though the time for that, he knew, would come. Eventually, they would have to figure out a way to chisel, sand, hack, blast, or laser away the stone encasing the rest of the fossil within. For now, all that could be seen, all that had ever been seen, were those long, twisted talons that seemed to be struggling to claw their way out of the very rock. Carter, who’d seen countless fossils from all over the globe, had never seen anything like this one; it would have been nearly impossible to put into words, or to convey to someone who hadn’t seen it first-hand, but this fossil carried a kind of ineffable vitality. There was no other way to say it. When Carter stroked the prehensile claw—and he could not resist doing so—he didn’t feel that he was touching some long-dead specimen, some calcified, ossified, petrified thing. He felt that he was touching something . . . dormant. And though he knew this had to be wrong, there was no way it could be true, he felt that the thing was perceptibly, maybe even measurably, warmer than the surrounding stone.

  “The pelvic bones, the pubic bones too, are all quite primitive in the Madagascar fossil,” Russo was explaining. “For the late Cretaceous, this is unusual.”

  “Any reason why you think this could have happened?” Katie asked.

  “Isolation, possibly. On an island, a species could survive longer than it might be able to do on the mainland. It might be able to evolve in its own way, at its own rate, and in its own . . . niche.”

  True enough, Carter thought, and it might explain some of the anomalies in the Madagascar find. But their own prize fossil, from Lago D’Avernus? Over the eons, the Italian boot, like every other present-day country and continent in the world, had migrated and changed, but for more than two hundred million years it had remained an integrated part of what was known by earth scientists as the Laurasian land mass. Nor had it ever been made, in any way, impervious to extraterritorial influence or mutation; even the Alpine folding that took place in the Cenozoic era was, geologically speaking, no big deal.

  “Can I ask a sort of personal question?” Katie asked, and Carter’s ears perked up.

  “Ask it, and then we will know,” Russo replied good-naturedly.

  “Why are you here, in New York? Are you just visiting with your old friend Professor Cox, or are you here doing work of some kind?”

  Odd, how on target that kid could be. Even Russo looked nonplussed, and glanced over at Carter just as the class bell went off.

  “A little of both,” Carter said, over the din. “The good news is, Professor Russo will be at your disposal, on an informal basis. And the bad news is, the work we’re doing is—to put it professionally—none of your beeswax. See you all next week; don’t forget to leave your term papers in my box at the departmental office.” He turned to Russo, as the students made for the exits. “So how do you like teaching in the States?”

  Russo wagged his head back and forth. “Not so bad. But it would be better if I could smoke.”

  “You’d have to apply to the department head for a special dispensation.”

  “I could do this?”

  “Not really.”

  After lunch in the faculty dining room, where Russo had the dubious pleasure of meeting the departmental chair, Stanley Mackie, Carter spent the rest of the day working in the lab; the argon laser had been delivered, and a techie from the medical sciences department spent several hours walking Carter and Russo through its operating procedures. On the whole Carter figured he knew how to use it, but he wasn’t about to try it out until the following week, and even then he’d only test it on the Smilodon specimens recently donated to the university. Not only were they unremarkable—they were also free of any dangerous gas pockets.

  At six o’clock sharp, while he was still immersed in the laser manual, there was a honking outside, just beyond the metal doors to the lab.

  “Carter?” Russo said.

  “Huh?” Carter replied, without looking up.

  “Your friends, I think, are here?”

  Carter couldn’t believe it; he glanced at his watch. He’d agreed with Beth that he’d be ready to leave for the country at six, and to make it easier on him, she told him she’d get Ben and Abbie to bring their car around to the very door of the lab.

  Carter threw the manual into the duffel bag with his other things, then pulled on his leather jacket. “You going to be okay?” he said to Russo.

  “I am a big boy,” Russo said. “And tonight, I have a New York party to go to,” he said, brandishing the invitation to Bill Mitchell’s pre-Halloween bash. “Have a good time.”

  The car honked again, and Carter slipped out the side door.

  Beth was in the backseat, and Carter slid in beside her. “Sorry, hope I didn’t keep you all waiting,” he said, propping his feet on the du
ffel bag.

  “No problem,” Ben said, turning to look out the rear window as he backed up.

  “We were planning to stop on the road and have dinner,” Abbie said, from the front seat. “There’s a great little place, with a moose head over the bar and all that, about an hour and a half away.”

  “Sounds great,” Beth said, squeezing Carter’s hand in the backseat. These days, she reflected, the only time they were in the backseat of a car together, it was a taxi, and then they were holding on for dear life. This was a lot more romantic.

  “So Beth tells us you’re working on something very exciting,” Ben said, as the car crawled westward, through heavy traffic, on Houston Street.

  “Can you say what it is,” Abbie asked, “or is that information classified?”

  Beth wondered what Carter would say; he was normally so secretive about his research—this project especially—and she felt guilty that she’d said anything about it at all.

  “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said, the wonder in his voice surprising even Beth. “A massive sample of primarily igneous rock, but with what appears to be a perfectly preserved fossil embedded inside it.”

  “And that’s rare?” Ben asked over his shoulder, as he navigated through a crush of cars, all of them no doubt trying to make their way, as he was, to the West Side Highway.

  “It’s not only rare, it’s basically impossible. Especially since from all the empirical evidence so far, the rock is almost as old as the molten core of the planet, as old as the earth itself.”

  “So how could something that old hold a fossil?” Ben asked. “Even an investment banker knows that life came along a whole lot later.”

  “That’s what makes it so puzzling,” Carter said.

  When he talked like this, leaning forward in his enthusiasm, he looked to Beth like a little boy.

  “We’ve taken a specimen from the fossil itself—”

  “I thought you hadn’t used the laser yet?” Beth interjected.