Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  At that moment the light in the room changes. The walls seem to pulse inward: I feel them pressing on my shoulders and the top of my head and the whiteness through the window is unbearably bright—a column of light. It is a terrible, drowning sensation. The decorative stripe of sails bobs and bends as if the walls had in fact turned to water, a trench of blue tears—I can taste a trickle of salt on the swell of my tongue. A flat, metallic tang. It feels as if something in the room is expelling me. Something’s wrong. I back away from the window glare, then turn and head toward the hallway. Pollard turns, a cell phone pressed to one ear. “I’m going back to the Lab, Bruno,” I tell him in a thin voice. “Send me whatever prints you get and I’ll look them over.”

  He lowers his phone. “You’re going already?”

  I face him but keep walking backward. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I say. “But listen, there’s a toy box in there, against the north wall, that isn’t flagged.” He follows me as I strip off the gloves, dodging investigators. The house seems to thrum as I walk through the hallway—the only part of the house that isn’t rigged up with detectives spotlights and piles of examination equipment. That’s when the odor hits me—subtle as a feeling, familiar yet unearthly as the scent of strangers—something smells off, yet it’s so faint as to seem imaginary. “This house is contaminated,” I say. A buzzing sound fills my ears, making me move faster. Bruno starts jotting notes.

  “Run a chemical check on everything in that toy box,” I tell him. “Find out where all of those toys came from—all of them.”

  “Yeah—the toys. . . .” Bruno scratches the side of his head with his pencil stub. “Like those—what were they—jungle gyms? CCA wood, made with love and arsenic.” He starts writing again, muttering, “Thousand kids gotta get sick. . . .”

  Keller is in the entryway. “Hey!” He pauses, then turns and follows me outside, carrying a kit, the heavy steel box banging against the side of his leg as he hurries. “Lena, hey—I was bringing this in to you. What—where’re you going?”

  He catches up to me. I can see the pink veins in his eyes, some silver-brown stubble on his chin. This air is too thin and clear; it glistens like plastic wrap, but at least here there are no more humming, surging walls. “Please.” I turn to Keller. He faces me, his back to the sun, so his face is all shadow; something flickers in my right eyelid. “Can we head back now?”

  A man in a tweed coat—perhaps one of the neighbors—rushes up to us. “Miss? Excuse me? Can you tell me what’s going on in there?” The man’s shoulders are hunched up—either from the cold or anxiety. “What’s happened to those poor people now?”

  “Sir, you’ll have to move away,” Keller says, edging between the man and me. Keller looks solid and imposing and his profile is flinty. I notice for the first time the long, defined edge of his jawbone. “We’re not at liberty.”

  “Wait—please—is it something dangerous?” The man looks so stricken, I’m tempted to reassure him; then he says, “It’s those foreigners again, isn’t it? This area has gone to hell in a handbasket—we got everybody—paperboys, nuns, salespeople—God knows—running all over the place. They keep coming into this neighborhood.” He nods significantly.

  We climb in and Keller yanks his door shut. “Great, man, really, thanks for the tip.” As we pull out, he looks toward the back window, away from the neighbor, who watches our departure forlornly. Keller glances at me. “So what happened in there?”

  I lean my head against the window. “Bruno Pollard said they weren’t coming up with anything, but there’s something poisonous in there.”

  He looks at me again.

  “Toxic, I mean. I don’t know. It’s going to make Alyce so mad I even came out here—I’m supposed to stick to the Lab.” I press my head against the cold glass, concentrating.

  Keller makes a low sound. I turn to see him staring ahead at the road, his chin elevated, his hands back in their death grip on the steering wheel. I recall that spike of fear that I’d thought was there earlier. A silent anxiety I feel again like a third presence in the car.

  So I keep it to myself—the thing that I sensed almost the instant I walked into the Cogans’ nursery, but couldn’t quite believe—the existence of a baby killer.

  CHAPTER 10

  FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, I CAN’T BREAK OUT OF THE FUNK THAT started at the Cogan house. Even though Alyce is nice about my field trip and doesn’t make remarks about me driving around with Keller, she also doesn’t ask about my impressions, as if I couldn’t possibly have found much of interest. And I’m increasingly hesitant to say anything, when most of my reaction to that house was based on gut feelings. At lunch, when Margo and Sylvie bait me with questions about where I’d run off to all morning, I stare at my tomato sandwich. Finally, Alyce takes it out of my hand, flops it down on the bag, and says, “Lena, for chrissakes. You’re being a weirdo.” To the other two, she says, “Lay off, children. Let her eat.”

  The afternoon is bleached out, lagging before the end of day, and the Lab is quiet, though late-shift police are starting to appear in the hallway. They walk heads down, shoulders slumped in their uniforms. After lunch, as I enter the corridor to the office, I watch a sliver of my reflection repeated in the glass walls. I feel swoony and disoriented. One problem with doing investigative work without clear evidence is that it tempts you to invent leads, to imagine all kinds of possibilities. I’m chilled by a memory of the Cogan house and the gray, half-real sense that something had been in that room with me.

  Then I hear someone coming around the corner, the familiar rap of heels: Celeste Southard. Her office is in the County Medical Services place next door, but she’s frequently in our building consulting on cases—upright, spine erect, head level, buttoned into light wool suits, a warm, dark-eyed Italian face, with black paintbrush hair. A little buxom, a touch overweight, so her suits occasionally look snug, Dr. Southard is a psychotherapist, a social scientist surrounded by the practitioners of skeptical, so-called hard sciences. She was also my marriage counselor.

  I have to admit, before I persuaded her to become our counselor, I’d edged away from her in meetings and rarely spoke with her. It’s not that I didn’t like her, but the notion of psychological assessments and criminal profiling had always struck me as impossibly intangible. I became a scientist, in part, to comfort myself with a few certainties in the face of chaos: psychology seemed to allow too much of the chaos in. But at least I knew that Celeste was from Elmira; she went to local, public schools—SUNY-Cortland, Binghamton for her PhD—so even though she was smart, she wasn’t terrifying. Not like the FBI Georgetown and Princeton grads who sometimes popped in for consultations. And for the brief time Celeste was my counselor, I saw that she could also be warm.

  Celeste seems hesitant to stop when she sees me. She holds her wooden clipboard to her chest, shifts her weight, and tilts one long-heeled burgundy pump. Her hair is blown to glassy straightness—she wears it flat against her head and neck, which somehow makes her eyes look longer and narrower. I find her unearthly, her manner of cool scrutiny: I watch her gaze as it flicks from my eyes to my mouth back to eyes. “I was—I was wondering—Celeste—” I fumble, trying to keep my voice low.

  She sighs. “Lena, I’m sorry, but I’m in such a hurry. . . .”

  I feel flustered and try to smile and wave her on her way. But then she lowers her head and says, “What’s up?”

  “Can we just go in here for a second? To talk?” I touch Frank’s open office door. Both Frank and Peggy are out on lunch break and it’s the only private place on the floor.

  Celeste sighs again, so slightly it could have almost been a regular exhalation.

  She enters the office, seats herself in the center of the deep, sand-colored couch, and crosses her legs. I sit next to her, fold my arms along my waist, and ask, “So, how’ve you been anyway?”

  She touches th
e back of her ankle. “Lena, I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes—”

  “Of course, sure, sure.” I glance at the black and white photograph of billowing sails above Frank’s desk, and try to collect my thoughts. “The thing is—okay. We haven’t worked much together—I mean, professionally. I guess I’ve always been a little nervous about . . .” Celeste’s expression is stern and wary and I cut off the sentence. “Well. I’d like to know your opinion on . . . see, I’ve been working on this case—a series of cases, actually—and I wondered what you think about the idea of a—of a baby killer. I mean, a person who literally—sort of—specializes in—babies. Not child abusers, in the usual sense, not in the home. I mean people who go out after babies—deliberately.”

  She pulls up, turns to face me directly. “You mean, are you asking me, does such a thing exist? People who prey exclusively on infants? Of course. Sure. It’s rare, but it happens. There’ve been reports of cults in this country that take their members’ babies for ritual sacrifice—”

  “No—no. This would be an unknown assailant—and very . . .” I struggle with how to describe the nature of the crime. “Sort of elusive. Someone who could kill a baby—I suppose for no other reason than to kill it—and also be able to make it look like SIDS.”

  “Make it look like SIDS?” She shakes her head. “What makes you think it isn’t SIDS?”

  “There was an influx of cases—more than usual. Where they were actually bringing in the cribs.”

  “How many?”

  “Three over the past two months. Reported by different officers.”

  The corners of her eyes narrow; she turns her head. “Anything else?”

  I nod heavily, elbows pressing on my knees. I lace my fingers together. “The main reason for all of it is because there was a woman—the mother of one of the deceased babies—she came to the Lab and was crying that we reopen their file. She was sure that her baby’d been murdered. She said she heard footsteps in the house and when she went to check, her baby was dead. She was adamant.”

  “Was there any sign of an intruder?”

  “Not that the police could find.”

  Celeste stares ahead for a moment. Then she says, “Sometimes, when something is too painful to deal with, then people have to invent reasons for why that thing happened. Sometimes it’s easier to imagine that something was done on purpose than because the universe is random and unpredictable.”

  “So you don’t think there’s such a thing, then? You don’t believe there’s a baby killer?”

  She lifts her chin. “I didn’t say that. It’s not so straightforward as that. Because in your line of work, you can’t afford to work only with physical evidence. Sometimes you have to use instinct. And sometimes you even have to choose between the two things, between the ways things feel and the way they look under a microscope.”

  I lean back against the couch. “I know. But I don’t really trust it.”

  “Lena.” She lets her clipboard sink down from her chest to her knees. She tugs at the top of her blouse, adjusting a bra strap. Now she looks more fatigued than remote. “Where people are concerned, believe you me, anything is possible. You need to let yourself be open to the human element in this.”

  “But—I’m not like you—” I feel an upwelling of panic. “I can do fingerprints—that’s all! That’s all I’m trained to do. What if I make a mistake? What if I say there’s a killer and there’s not?”

  “Gotta make mistakes to make progress. Especially you, Lena.” She leans toward me, holding up her interlaced fingers. “You keep yourself so caged up. It’s wonderful that you’re so brilliant at prints, but what about the rest of you?”

  “I don’t know about psychology. I don’t know any of this stuff.”

  Celeste slides back against the couch and her eyes turn toward the photograph of the sails. “Psychology isn’t magic. If anything, profilers mostly use empirical data—the kind you like—like the age and occupation and marital status of the suspect, that sort of thing. But you also have to bring in human motivation. That’s huge.”

  I cross my wrists, grip the narrow wrist bones. “Can you just—look at this case and at least tell me if it seems like there’s a killer involved?”

  But she’s already shaking her head, her hair swaying in a curtain. “If this is all you’ve got for me? There’s not enough to go on. I might be able to help tell you about the type of person you’re dealing with, if you can ascertain that there is indeed a murderer. Otherwise, you’re asking me to psychoanalyze a—a cloud. There’s nothing there.”

  “All right, okay— but just suppose—imagine that it’s a—a given. If we assume there’s a murderer—then what sort of person would this be? What would a baby killer think like or act like?”

  She hesitates, then says, “Lena, this could be anyone. There isn’t one profile for all serial killers. There are some patterns. We know—well, we know that something seems to happen to these people with puberty, something in their brain chemistry. Sometimes killing is connected to sexual compulsion. Or a sense of revenge. Occasionally they’ll try to self-govern—join a religious group or gang or take drugs. And they’re often mystified by themselves. They often seem relieved to be caught. Things like that. Doesn’t really help you narrow it down, though, does it? I need some vectors.”

  “But with all this data you have—” I hold my hands out. “There must be some sort of statistical way—something—to isolate this kind of person?”

  Celeste smiles at me, but her eyes seem glassy; she looks internally exhausted. I miss our sessions, fifty minutes each—the few moments out of my week when I felt like I wasn’t necessarily going to go crazy after all. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to hear me say this,” she says. “But I think if the science is starting to fail you, then you should also try to get at this intuitively. Think of it as an exercise, right? Do you still do the exercises I gave you? What you have to do is look at whatever evidence you’ve got and let yourself imagine your way into who that suspect might be. Let yourself try to imagine what it’s like inside the space of their head: What do they want? What are they afraid of? What does the world look like through their eyes? It’s not that complicated.”

  I close my eyes for a moment and sigh. When I open them, Celeste is looking directly at me. “Can I say something here, Lena? Is there—something—about this case—something that’s working on you?”

  “On me?”

  She tilts her head a fraction.

  I remember this, the way she will wait for answers to impossible questions, the long, uncomfortable stretches of nothing. I strain to come up with something. “Well, these cases—these cribs—I don’t know—” My eyes rove over the carpeting, the furniture. “I really don’t know. Unless it’s just—it’s like these SIDS parents have lost their babies for uncertain reasons and I—” I stare at a spot on the armrest of the couch. My thoughts have gone blotchy, disconnected, and my vision gets wonky, as if I’m telescoping out.

  “You lost your parents—and your own infancy—also for uncertain reasons.”

  My throat constricts, then I’m irritated with myself, horrified at my self-pity. I take a few moments, memorizing a spot on the armrest. “You’re talking almost like you think we’re on opposite sides—the babies and me—of the same sort of question.” Another old memory vapors back to me, a muscle memory: a beaten patch of playground dirt, the momentum of a seesaw.

  “Well, maybe you feel like if you can help solve this case . . .” Celeste pauses, then says very softly, “Maybe part of you feels it will help you resolve . . . other questions?”

  There is the thought, not rational: find out what killed the babies—find out what happened to me. And again, I feel that snaking shame for having thought it, something so self-serving and nonsensical. And pathetic. Instead I construct a smile, try to make myself laugh, fail, and
then say, “Please, give me a little credit here.”

  She turns her head, looks at me from the corners of her eyes. “I never said that you did feel that way, Lena. I just want you to be careful—not to make yourself too vulnerable. This kind of investigation can be sensitive terrain for anyone, but especially . . . well. You might even want to take a little break from it, perhaps.”

  “No, no, no,” I cut her off. “I’m not even really working on this case. I’ve got a thousand other things to do. It’s crazy at the Lab. No, truly, I’m really fine.”

  “People change, Lena—do you know that? What might be easy and comfortable at one time in our lives can get harder—even inappropriate—”

  I let go a ragged breath, roll my eyes. “Honest, I’m fine.”

  “Yes, you keep saying so.”

  I laugh more naturally then. I thank Celeste for stopping, and she says, “Anytime,” in a subdued voice. She stands, then pauses at the door. “Lena, are you getting out at all? Seeing people?”

  At the moment, I don’t particularly want to answer. I force myself—out of courtesy to Celeste—to say, “Alyce and I go out sometimes. And you know, Charlie takes me for dinner once a week.”

  She doesn’t say anything to this. Her gaze is long and unfocused down the corridor, as if she can’t quite remember why she was walking there in the first place. Then she says, “You know, Lena, sometimes cases . . . really touch us . . . where we live? Just like how it happens in, just, everyday life. You’ll meet someone, or hear a voice, that reminds you of someone else or makes you feel the way you used to feel when you were a child. And those people can have a great deal of influence over us because we’re drawn to them or feel we can trust them—even when it’s not really appropriate—just because of an old association . . .”

  I think about the dazzling sense I had when I met Erin Cogan outside the Lab, of having known her somehow, in another life.