Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I climb slowly, feeling weak and permeable. It’s occurred to me that I need to have a night of not-thinking about a baby killer—try to clear my mind. The steps takes me through new smells: paint thinner, formaldehyde, old cabbage. When I finally scrape the key in my lock, the moon in the windows looks clean and blue-tinted.

  This is what I like best—returning to these empty chambers, the apartment extinguished. I stand in place, my heart suspended in me like a bell clapper. It turned out, once I got over my terror, that I loved the state of aloneness. I was able to retreat to my mind—just as I did as a little girl, when it was possible to spend hours, sometimes whole days, within the sanctuary of memory.

  The apartment is cold—and though I hate the feeling, it’s another thing I’ve come to crave. Cold, blank walls. Consciousness is a kind of fire. I need this cool entombment, a place where I can feel my true nature stirring. This is, of course, the state that Pia warned me about for all those years: solitude and comfort and madness. She scared me with the idea of going crazy—of being encased in a living death—the blankness that I sometimes see freezing Mr. Memdouah’s eyeballs—his glimpses of self-awareness like glints on the face of a drowning man. But my foster mother never explained to me that there can be a deep loneliness in modern sanity too. That madness can be its own form of solace.

  I’ve come to think recently that this solitude that Pia warned me against was just the thing she wanted for herself. To live in silence—a crazy old lady—without the constraints of home, husband, or child.

  “Why did you take me in?” I asked her once when I was still young, stopping just short of the more frightening question—why didn’t you adopt me?

  She turned her pillowy, disembodied smile to me. “I took you because we couldn’t have babies. There was a problem with Henry.” She nodded, waiting for me to accept that answer, but then she saw that wasn’t what I was after and she said, “I took you because you can’t really be a whole woman without having children. Because that’s what women were put on this earth to do.”

  Now I walk through my apartment, slip out of my shoes, pull my sweater over my head, and pad into the bedroom. The tiny bones push at the tops of my feet, my toes spread, become pliable. I look in the mirror on the bedroom wall. I see what’s possible. If I were to, for example, transform into an ape. I touch my smooth cheeks and chin. Apes live in the beautiful in-between world—neither human nor animal. I believe I could open my closet door and find the rain forest there in full profusion. I think: I am ready.

  MY APE MOTHER visits my sleep. We wade in slick grasses. She rides the raft of my bed with me. She gazes at me with my mother’s eyes—I almost recognize her within the ape, the woman who would’ve been my mother. She touches me with hands, not paws, tapering fingers, flat, pink nails and fingerprints, just as distinct as any human’s.

  The dream-sun spools away from the shoulders of the earth, and the sky is a pale blue powder. My mother points to the towering, ancient trees. The leaves are green only in their undulant midsections; I look higher and I see how the tops of the trees, the very farthest tops, the cloud forest, are burnt, the leaves curling up in furrows of smoke, the air above glittering with hydrocarbons, fluorocarbons, poisons, mutations.

  I dream of the moment of my discovery: My ape mother finds me after digging through smooth aluminum plates, moving aside wafers of metal, wreckage, a stench of rot transforming in the rain, the light dropping from very far away over my new limbs. I am uncovered. She scoops—so carefully!—those long fingers under my shoulders.

  I feel the sweetness of being lifted from that wreckage and stink—the air rinsing me—and then, being cupped to a broad chest. I will never live anywhere but this place, the jungle floor, blanketed with ferns, tweedy mosses, and weeds. There are corridors of brightness, light flat and hard as stone.

  I came back to life at an age when I didn’t know what life was. Rebirth scoured impressions into me—the world, the jungle, this disarray of leaves and stems, a bed of matted grasses and fur.

  CHAPTER 13

  THIS MORNING I WALK TO WORK UNDER A PEARLY SKY; IT’S SO EARLY it’s hard to distinguish day from night, and lizards streak across the sidewalks as I approach. I remind myself: just illusions. At a traffic light, there’s a cacophany of car horns and sirens. I cover my ears and look up and I think I spot a flock of numinous green parrots; their glittering laughter rises, drafts of birds swoop over the city buildings.

  The traffic light changes and the crowd nudges me back to reality. Wind chill of six below, weatherman Bob Franks said on WPLJ-FM, air mass moving out of upper Michigan, watch for lake effect snow. It’s so cold, tiny blue fissures seem to open in midair. My shoulders are squared against the wind.

  This morning, as I dressed for work, I decided I’d trust my instincts, as Celeste said. I pulled out my black wool coat, which isn’t as warm as my big parka, but it has a respectable, less postapocalyptic look about it. I’m planning to go straight to Frank’s office and talk about baby killers.

  Now, crossing the street, I realize I’m surrounded by children.

  They spill and converge around me, their voices loud against the pavement as we leave the curb: ten, twenty, thirty small children, and two young women with long wavy hair, silver whistles, plaid scarves, and navy pea coats flying open, running after the kids, one of the women shouting, “Gary and Caitlin, hold hands! Sadie, don’t hit! Matthew, slow down!” The other shouts, “Watch out for each other.”

  One tiny boy attracts my attention: high wide forehead, milky skin, big, forward ears. He’s the victim of a game of keep-away some bigger boys are playing with his knitted cap, tossing it over his head. And I realize as I look on that for some reason that little boy is about to dart left, into the oncoming traffic stream on Jefferson. He wheels without looking and I seize his collar. It happens so quickly that no one notices, not even the boy, it seems, who darts back into the safety of the crowd and runs ahead, as if he’d intended to all along. One of the young women yells after him, “Matthew, slow down!”

  By the time we reach the opposite curb, they have already surged past me. I feel drained and stop beside an office building, one hand on the pink gravel of its façade.

  “You okay there?”

  It takes me a moment to realize that someone is speaking to me. I look up, squinting, and she says, “Lena? Lena Dawson? My name is Joan Pelman. I don’t know if you received any of my messages—”

  Red-lacquered lips come into focus, deep-set eyes a low, winter-lake color. She is wearing a gray wool beret—chosen, I see, to match her eyes. The ends of her hair scatter in chopped red pieces around her face. There are blue wells the size of thumbprints beneath her eyes.

  “I’m sorry . . . I don’t think so . . .” I falter. The thought comes to me that she is a friend of Erin Cogan. Or her lawyer. A blast of cold wind tightens my shoulders, makes it hard to focus.

  She hunches and the wind blows strands of hair across her smile; her teeth that translucent hydrogen-peroxided white that shows the roots, one crooked incisor edged over the next tooth. A frozen, porcelain quality about her forehead. “Well, I’m so pleased to finally meet you—” her face looms close. I can see the pores on her chin and a fine white down of hair covering her cheeks. She places two fingers on my coat sleeve and the silver plume of her breath rolls around me in the cold. “I’ve really been wanting to talk with you—but they guard you like a state secret.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t quite place . . .” I start backing away.

  She follows. “Must be so busy, I can just imagine. All those cribs coming in.”

  I stop, staring at her.

  “Have you examined that Cogan crib yet? I’ve never seen such a flawless finish on anything. Have you? It’s like a car.”

  The realization comes like something from far away: the reporter.

  In a lull in the
wind, I pick up a twist of anxiety in the composition of her scent, amid traces of a lemony soap. But she just smiles as if her face is disconnected from the rest of her and says, “I drove out to their home to interview them.”

  I realize then that she’s handed me her business card, slipped it right between my fingers. I lift it and eye the gothic New York Times logo. In smaller print, Joan Pelman, Correspondent. “You interviewed them?”

  “Sure, I was trying to figure out if there is something that—about that baby or that house or whatever—that might attract a killer.”

  “What did you decide?”

  She smiles at me slyly as if I’d just asked a personal question. “You’re pretty funny.” Another gust of wind comes up, dashing snow over us. She gasps and says, “How the hell does anybody live up here?”

  I clap my hands over my ears.

  “Can we just get indoors for a minute?” she shouts over the wind.

  I shake my head. “I can’t, really, I’m not supposed to talk about cases,” I shout behind the lip of my scarf, and I begin to walk back in the direction of the Lab as the wind dies down. “And I’ve got to get to work.”

  “They don’t really control your every move, do they?” she goads.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I say, waving without looking back.

  I walk around the block to make sure she isn’t behind me, then detour to the Machine Shop Coffeehouse, near the Columbus Bakery. It used to be the Machine Shop Disco; at some point in its long life, it actually used to be a machine shop garage like my foster father owned. One of the dozens of past machine shops and foundries and candle factories. Now the coffeehouse is all window-lined walls; some sort of futuristic graphite blackboard up front displays a hundred or so coffee drinks. A few solitary customers sit at the bar that runs along the wall, nursing what looks like cups of steam.

  Not two minutes after I enter the café, I hear the door open behind me. I close my eyes, then turn, and Joan is behind me, blocking the door, hands held out in front of her as if in prayer. “Please, Lena, please. Just one minute. That’s it. One minute. It’s always much better to confront the press than to hide from it.”

  I tilt my head skeptically, rub the back of my neck.

  “Well.” She smiles. “I think it is.” She drapes her cashmere coat—gold and fine-grained—across the top of a spindly round table and sits at the table next to it. She’s wearing a gray pencil skirt and a luminous white silk blouse. Then she pulls out a chair for me. “Really. This way you control more of the story.”

  “Uh-hunh.” Annoyed, I take the chair next to the one she pulled out.

  “I do appreciate this,” she says in her confiding way. “People sometimes find me a bit—well, you know—well, a lot—” She laughs and flashes one hand at me. Then she opens her purse, looks at her cell phone, replaces it. “I was thinking, it must be almost sort of exciting, working on a case like this. . . .”

  I look at her without responding and she rolls her eyes. “Well, of course I know it’s tragic and everything. I’m not some sort of monster. I just mean that you finally get a chance to do your thing, get out of the Lab and really work it. They had to reopen the case, and now you’ve got to figure it all out from scratch. Whatever the big boys missed.” Her eyes shift and she says slyly, “I read about you solving the Haverstraw case.”

  I feel a blaze of embarrassment. “There was a whole group of us. I just helped piece together a few—”

  She’s shaking her head. “Right, right, right—I know—City Hall wants to keep you back behind your Bunsen burner.”

  “No, you’re wrong. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no one did any hiding. I’m a lab tech, not a detective.”

  She curls her fingers under her chin. “Be that as it may, we both know the truth.”

  “Oh? Tell me.”

  Her laugh comes in crystal drops. “Lena,” she says. “Honestly.”

  The waiter comes over with his hand low on one hip. He looks at Joan Pelman’s coat taking up a table, then he looks at us, not speaking. “Well! I guess we order now,” Joan says to me with an arch smile.

  I order a coffee and Joan orders cappuccino. The waiter turns on his heel. Joan fans her hands on the table. “So you really do live and breathe the Lab.” Her posture adjusts like someone leaning toward a microscope. “For someone who sees so much in her line of work, Lena, I think there’s a lot of stuff you’re not getting—God, I’d give anything to know what they’re paying you. What, thirty, forty grand? Analyst One? That crappy desk job. After how many years?” She stops and there’s that rearranging of her internal pieces again; she asks, head tilted, “Where’re you from originally?”

  “From here.”

  “No, but I mean originally. You’re not from Syracuse? I can tell you’re not.” She says Syracuse in that grim way that people do, meaning: the soot and salt, the closed industries lined up along Onondaga Lake, Solvay chemical plant, winter.

  The waiter places a tall glass mug before Joan; she stirs the contents of one of the pink packets from the sugar dish into her drink. I begin to pick up a teaspoon when Joan reaches over and takes my wrist, her fingertips pressing points of cold through my skin. I try to pull my arm back but don’t seem to be able to. Finally, she lets go and says, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll get back to it.”

  Joan picks up her drink and I reclaim my wrist and cradle it under the table. She dabs her lips with the corner of her napkin. “Lena, the thing is, I need you for this story, I’ve got to get your perspective. And I don’t know if you realize this, but virtually no one at the Lab mentions your name. It’s like a wall they’ve built around you. I get the feeling that they’d like it just fine if you never spoke to anyone outside the Lab, ever.”

  Electric shivers run through my legs and the coffee tastes acidic. Perched at the café table, under Joan’s gaze, I feel the cold edges of exposure. Then she says, “Obviously they want to keep you from getting credit. You’re too good for the Lab and so you’re a huge threat. You don’t see that?”

  Her expression seems almost hurt. “They’re afraid of you. You’re too good and too unique. When a man is that good at what he does, he’s a big hero. But let it be a woman? Yeah. Then things get all interesting—”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t think it’s the men against the women.”

  “Oh, right, yeah, nothing’s ever simple.” She wicks her fingers around the edge of her ear, tucking back some hair. I catch the glint of an old yellow diamond on her finger. “But this isn’t anything you don’t already know. A woman is never supposed to be professionally powerful. Oh well, okay, up to a point. But after that it’s unseemly.” She leans over the table, presses her ribs against the edge. “I know all too well. You wouldn’t believe the BS and backstabbing that goes on in a newsroom.”

  “You mean at your paper?”

  Her eyes roll up. “You wouldn’t believe it! The good old boys’ network. The stupid locker-room comments about girl reporters. I’m forty-seven years old.” She raps a knuckle on the café table. I eye her skeptically—transverse ridgelines on the neck, distended veins on backs of the hands: fifty-three. “I’ve earned every bit of my success. I don’t have time for the office politics. God, the second you stop bringing in the sexy story, the big, fat scoop, they’re all talking about how you just don’t have it anymore. Suddenly three hundred college intern Barbie dolls are gunning for your job. . . .” She trails off for a moment, frowning at the tiled floor, then says, “I’m sure the same thing must happen to you. I read about that Haverstraw case. Two things came through loud and clear: you solved it and they didn’t want anyone to know,” she says. “Women like you and me—no one knows what that’s like for us, to have an ability that sets us apart. And how much we have to sacrifice for it—children, husbands, everything.”

  This woman’s voice is
so confiding, while her eyes are so avid, her fingers twisting the yellow diamond back and forth. “Haven’t you ever noticed they’re all a little . . . uneasy around you?” she says.

  I think, for a moment, of the Haverstraw crime scene. There’d been a young, dark-haired agent with an FBI cap among the group of detectives I’d led out to the telltale tracks. As I’d spoken, explaining the sublimation process, her eyes had narrowed with what looked like an admixture of suspicion and fear. She didn’t say anything, but I remember feeling, as I used my pencil to point out the boot tread in the snow, as if I were revealing something shameful about myself.

  One of the customers stands up from the coffee bar, buttoning her coat. I realize I’ve seen her before, though it takes me a moment to place her: it’s the older woman, the one that Mr. Memdouah was ranting at in the bakery. She notices me looking and I wave, a bit more cheerfully than I ordinarily would. She moseys over. “So we meet again,” she says. “I think you said you lived nearby.”

  “I do—the St. James,” I say, then instantly regret saying this in front of Joan.

  “Ah, I’m just down the street, myself,” she says, pointing out the window.

  There’s something almost consoling about her face: her eyes are mild and contemplative and a deep dimple creases her left cheek when she smiles. There’s a fan of wrinkles over her face and pleating her neck; she’s not wearing a speck of makeup. I remember her name then—Opal. Joan is waiting for the woman to go—I hear the tick of her nails on the side of her cup—but I ease back in my chair. “Do you like this place?”