The bell rang, not a moment too soon. The students, perhaps in deference to his foul mood, packed up their things faster than ever.
“But that geochronology idea,” Katie said over the bustle, “sounds cool. I give it a thumbs-up.”
He knew she was just trying to assure him that not everything he’d said had been entirely lost on his audience; it was a nice try, but he knew he’d failed to capture their attention today.
For lunch, he went to the one place he was sure he wouldn’t bump into any of his faculty colleagues—the student center cafeteria, where he took his tray of sloppy joe and french fries to a table in the farthest corner of the room. The din back here was a little bit less, and he could sit in peace, with his back to the rest of the lunch crowd, and think his thoughts without interruption.
The only trouble with that was, every direction his thoughts went in today was bad.
It had started out with the follow-up appointment at Dr. Weston’s office, to get the results of their various tests. Carter hadn’t been looking forward to it, but he hadn’t been dreading it, either. He figured the problems he and Beth were having were fairly routine, and that by making a small correction or two in their family-planning methods they’d get everything on track in no time. They were both young and healthy, and Beth even stuck to a healthy diet. If for some reason he had to, he’d give up his junk food.
But the look on Dr. Weston’s face told Carter, before the conference had even gotten underway, that something more than diet and nutrition was wrong. The doctor shuffled a bunch of papers and lab reports around on his desk, made some awkward small talk to Beth about his personal art collection, and only then addressed the problem head-on.
“In all your tests and lab results,” he said, looking directly at Beth, “we don’t find any problem in achieving conception. The physical exam revealed no obstructions or problems of any kind, and in terms of your blood workups and hormonal balances, again we see no problems. A slight tendency toward anemia, but we can clear that up with a simple iron supplement.”
Carter breathed a sigh of relief. At least Beth was in the clear. And maybe, just maybe, his intuition had been wrong?
Then Dr. Weston turned his gaze on him—and he knew it wasn’t.
“I see in your medical history, Carter, that you had the mumps in your early teens.”
The mumps? “Yes, I did.”
“And was it, do you recall, a bad case?”
Carter instantly flashed back to a feverish month at home, quarantined in a back bedroom with the curtains drawn and a cup of cooling tea by the bedside. “Yes, it was. I missed a few weeks of school with that one.”
Dr. Weston nodded. “Do you remember what medications you were given?”
Carter remembered pills, lots of them, and even a couple of shots in the butt, but he had no idea what they’d been. “You’d have to ask my mother, or the doctor, if he’s still practicing. He was kind of an old-timer even then.”
“We probably don’t need to. I think what happened is pretty clear, especially given that your doctor had been practicing for some time, and this incident occurred in the early eighties, before we had all the information we have now.”
To Carter, that last bit—about “the information we have now”—set off an alarm bell.
“Chances are, he prescribed some strong antibiotics,” Dr. Weston elaborated, “which we know now, if administered during the onset of male puberty, can in some cases have an adverse impact on later potency.”
Carter had to sort through all the words. Was the doctor saying that he was impotent? Because if that’s what he thought, then . . .
“I’m not suggesting you have any difficulty with arousal or even ejaculation,” Dr. Weston went on. “Neither of you has implied there are any difficulties in that area.”
One thing cleared up.
“But the unfortunate side effect of the mumps, and the measures taken to alleviate it, is that some men, later on, experience sterility.”
Carter sat still in his chair. Beth didn’t move either.
“We ran two cycles on your sperm sample—you gave us plenty to work with.” Weston proffered a small smile, which didn’t help. “And the results, unfortunately, were the same. The count was in the one-percentile range, and motility was equally impaired.”
Carter was still processing the information. He was . . . sterile?
“Are you saying that I can’t . . . father a child?”
Dr. Weston sat back in his chair, his palms flat on the desk top. “Biologically, I’d have to say, no. But I don’t need to tell someone of your intellectual caliber that being a father isn’t only about that.”
For a second, Carter didn’t follow.
“As a couple, you can still have a child, using, for instance, an alternative source of insemination. We can discuss that some other time, if you like, once you’ve had a chance to sort through things. Physiologically, Beth is still a prime candidate for motherhood.”
Carter felt her hand snake across the arm of his chair and take hold of his own. He wondered if his hand was as icy as hers.
So they could have a child—or at least Beth could—with somebody else’s sperm? A friend’s? A family member’s? An anonymous donor’s? Gee, Carter thought, there were so many good choices—how would he ever pick one?
“I know this is not good news,” Dr. Weston said, “so you should take as much time as you need to consider all your options. But if I can leave you with one thought, it would be just that—you do have options. If you want a family, you can—and you will—have one.”
Sure, Carter thought. But whose?
He knew that Dr. Weston’s parting words were meant to be encouraging, but as he looked around the cafeteria now, at all the kids, the words had a hollow ring. Looking at all the boys, he had a weird and unwelcome thought: Any one of them could be the father of his child, any one of them could do for his wife what he couldn’t, any one of them could make a baby, pass on his own genes into the next generation—how hard was it?—but it was always going to remain something that he could not do. He knew it was self-destructive and wrong to think that way, but he couldn’t help it. He also couldn’t help feeling that now—now that he knew the truth—he was less of a man than he’d been when he’d gotten out of bed, still ignorant, that very same morning. He could only hope, though he knew she’d never admit it if she did, that Beth wouldn’t come to feel the same way.
He put down his fork and pushed the half-eaten food away. Even the smell of it made him a little queasy now.
He left the cafeteria, and walking home decided to stop by the now-abandoned lab; he was about to finish up his report for the president’s office, and he wanted to make sure he’d covered everything he needed to. He stopped across the street, and from there he surveyed the yellow police tape, now drooping in spots, the loading doors twisted and bent by the intense heat, the outside walls blackened with smoke. He was surprised that the smell of the fire was still so strong.
And then he realized that the smell wasn’t coming from the lab; it was coming from much closer, from right behind him. He turned and saw a laminated ID card of some kind lying on the concrete. He bent to pick it up.
It was a driver’s license, for a man—African American, young—named Donald Dobkins. It was scorched around the edges, but the face in the picture looked vaguely familiar.
He glanced into the stairwell and saw an eyeglass case, open and empty.
The smell was even stronger now. And he could hear a sound—a soft rustling—in the shadows at the bottom of the stairwell.
What was going on? What was down there? Could whatever it was be connected in some way to the lab fire? But even if that were true, how would it have remained undiscovered, so close by, all these days?
The rustling came again, and Carter said, “Hey! Somebody down there?”
There was no reply.
“Anybody?”
Carter went down a step, and the burning smell—
the odor of burnt meat, in fact—got stronger still.
And now he could see something, a blackened heap, lying on the ground.
He went down another step—and the heap now had shoes. Burnt, but recognizable shoes—with a high heel.
Carter stopped in his tracks. This was a body. Dead. But then the rustling sound came again, and he saw movement.
Oh my God, he thought. Maybe not! Maybe it’s someone still alive! He vaulted the rest of the steps, and when his own feet hit the cement there was an explosion of activity—squeaking and scurrying, flashing red eyes and little white teeth. Rats—some as big and black as cats—shot off in all directions, running across his shoes, scampering up the stairs. Carter froze in place until the swarm was gone—this had actually happened to him once before, when he’d descended into an ancient sinkhole in the Yucatán—and he knew enough to just hold his breath and let it pass. The rats wanted no more to do with him than he did with them.
The corpse—his first impression had been the right one—looked as if it had collapsed in on itself, coming to rest in a pile of burnt limbs and charred bone. The face, or what little was left of it, was staring upward in a silent rictus of pain. As he bent closer, the aroma of cooked flesh was nearly too much to bear; he had to turn away, grab a breath, then turn back again with his mouth closed. What he saw was, like the picture on the driver’s license, strangely familiar. Did he know this person?
“I saw a man, only it wasn’t a real man. And he was all made of light, glowing.”
The words were coming back to him now.
“I gave him my best red coat.”
The transvestite, the one who worked this corner.
“That man was an angel.”
That’s who this was—who it had been. But how on earth had this happened to him?
Carter turned his head away and grabbed another breath of air.
But what were the odds—first Russo, and now this guy, both burnt so badly? So near to each other? And just a few days apart? What were the chances of a coincidence like that? Carter didn’t put them very high.
He looked around the dark stairwell, but all he saw were ashes and shreds of burned newspaper. There was nothing else down here, and certainly nothing he could do for the dead Donald Dobkins, except call the police.
From the phone booth on the corner he dialed 911, and a squad car showed up one minute later. A homicide, Carter surmised, still rated with the police.
He gave one of the cops the driver’s license he’d found, and he was in the midst of explaining how he’d discovered the body when another car, this one unmarked, showed up; a middle-aged man in an old gray raincoat and big black eyeglasses got out. “You the guy who called it in?” he asked Carter, who nodded. “Then I’m the one you should be talking to.” He opened his coat to reveal a gold badge clipped to his sagging belt. “I’m Detective Finley.”
He glanced down the stairwell, through glasses that looked to Carter like their lenses were half an inch thick, then said rather wearily, “Wait here.”
Carter did as he was told, though he was already beginning to regret that he’d ever stumbled into this. Why hadn’t he just called it in anonymously, left the driver’s license where he’d found it, and taken off? It wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, but at least he wouldn’t be standing around here now, waiting to give what precious little information he could.
Detective Finley came back up the stairs, putting his fingers in his ears, just as the ambulance, siren wailing, arrived on the scene. When the ambulance stopped—and the siren with it—Detective Finley removed his fingers. “They always do that,” he said to Carter. “I’m going deaf from it.”
Carter smiled sympathetically. “Professional hazard, I guess.”
“Not the worst of them.”
No, Carter thought, probably not. The detective took a notepad out of his raincoat pocket and dutifully took down Carter’s name, his phone number, a few notes on how he found the body, why he happened to be in the area. When Carter mentioned that he worked in the lab across the street, the detective’s ears seemed to prick up. “I was the one who got the call about that,” he said. “We took out one body, burned as bad as this one, and another where the guy was still breathing.”
“That was a friend of mine, the one who was still alive. He’s at St. Vincent’s now.”
“I know. I held onto his hand until they got him to the E.R.” He shook his head, sadly. “Poor guy—glad he’s still hanging on.” He gestured at the stairwell, where Carter could hear the paramedics putting the body on a stretcher. “Now it looks like we’ve got another fire victim, only this one’s dead no more than a day or two.”
“I know who it is,” Carter volunteered, “in fact, I gave a—”
“We know who it is, too. It’s one of the transvestites who worked this corner. He got beat up once in a while—they all do—but nothing this bad ever happened before.”
“So you think some . . . customer did this to him?”
Detective Finley stepped to one side to let the stretcher go by. Even with the body wrapped in a plastic sheath, the smell was bad. The paramedics wore paper masks.
“Right now, I couldn’t say. But what kind of concerns me is, this happened right across the street from the last place I saw a couple of burn victims.”
Though it was tough to see Finley’s eyes through the thick glasses he wore, Carter felt he was being studied.
“Just what were you doing in that lab building, anyway?” Finley asked.
“Working on a fossil,” Carter said, “a rare find, from Italy.”
“Were you using flammable stuff, like chemical agents? Blowtorches?”
He was grasping at straws, that much Carter could tell, but for the first time it dawned on Carter that perhaps he should start watching what he said. “Some extra lighting had been rigged up,” he admitted. “The fire marshal thinks that’s what started the fire.”
Detective Finley pursed his lips, skeptically. “Awful big blast, for a bad fuse.”
Of course Carter could explain, if he’d wanted to, what really happened; he could tell him what Russo had said about Mitchell training the laser on the slab of stone, a slab of stone riddled with pockets of gas. But for some reason he didn’t. Nor did he say anything about what Russo had said, in his delusional state, about the fossil coming to life.
“You ever talk to this guy, Donald Dobkins, the hooker?”
“No,” Carter said, before catching himself, and saying, “Yes, once.” Damn, he thought. Finley would note his confusion. “I was upstate when the accident occurred, but right after I got to the lab, the day after the accident, I saw him on the street. He was babbling about seeing somebody, somebody coming out of the burning building.” Why did he feel, more and more, like he was offering an alibi?
“So who did he think he saw coming out?”
Carter hesitated. He could see where this might be going. Maybe Finley thought that the arsonist who had set the fire had been spotted by Donald Dobkins, and come back to dispose of the witness. But Carter knew that that wasn’t it. “If you really want to know, he said that he saw a naked man made out of light,” Carter replied, thinking that this would put an end at least to this line of questioning.
But Finley appeared strangely unsurprised. “Fits the general description.”
It what?
“Even though Mr. Russo was slipping in and out of consciousness when he was taken out of here,” the detective added, “he was mumbling the same sort of thing.”
“He was?”
The detective nodded as he dug around in his pocket and then produced a business card so worn it looked like he’d already handed it out a dozen times. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.” He turned toward his car. “In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for anybody walking around made out of light.”
The ambulance pulled away from the curb, and a moment or two later the detective’s sedan pulled out after it. One of the cops w
as still standing at the top of the stairwell, speaking into a walkie-talkie, and Carter finally realized, even though nobody had given him formal permission, that he was now free to go.
It all seemed so . . . anticlimactic somehow. He’d discovered a body—a dead, burnt body—and now it was all over. He was walking away. Nobody had any more questions for him, there was nothing more that he could do. And maybe that was why, like a delayed reaction, it suddenly hit him—the full horror of what he’d seen. With nothing to do, and no one to talk to, he could suddenly focus on the reality of it, on the grim, appalling discovery he’d made. It wasn’t the first corpse he’d ever seen—on his work expeditions he’d occasionally encountered natural and accidental deaths—but this wasn’t anything like those. This was the kind of sight that came back to haunt you in your dreams—and that was all he needed. He was already having enough trouble getting to sleep these days.
He shivered and put up the collar of his leather jacket; it might be time to break out the parka, he thought. Even though it was only late afternoon, the light was getting pretty thin. The days were growing shorter. At the corner of West Fourth Street, while he waited for the light, he suddenly felt like there was someone right behind him. Watching. He turned around, but the nearest pedestrian was an elderly woman with a walker, her eyes riveted to the cement.
He crossed the street and walked the rest of the way home at a brisk pace—not only to keep warm, but to shake that odd sensation of being tracked. Once or twice he turned around abruptly, but he never saw anyone suspicious. When he got to the foyer of his building, he stopped to pry the mail out of their little metal box—these boxes, he thought, had obviously been designed long before mail-order catalogs had been invented—and instead of waiting for the unreliable elevator, took the stairs, two at a time.
Beth wasn’t home, and the apartment was dark. He went from room to room, turning on the lights, and put a CD of the Hives on the stereo. He wanted upbeat, fast, attention-grabbing music, and he also wanted it loud. He popped open the fridge, took out a beer, and went into the living room. He flopped down on the sofa and stretched out his legs; above his head, he could see the Audubon bird prints. One of which Russo had temporarily replaced with that crucifix. What, he wondered, had all of that really been about? He’d never had a chance to ask, and now it would definitely not be a good idea.
Vigil Page 20
