Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  But Keller’s already grabbed Charlie’s wrists and rolls on top of him, holding him down, gasping, “Charlie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know I started it. I shouldn’t’ve shoved you. I’m sorry, man, really, I’m sorry.”

  Charlie’s face is a deep, awful bruised color under the streetlamp. He wrenches his arms out of Keller’s grasp and I stiffen, afraid he’ll attack again. Instead, Keller slides off and Charlie scrabbles to his feet, staggering into the middle of the snowy yard.

  “Charlie?” Keller calls after him

  “Charlie, where’re you going?” I shout. “Your car’s over there.”

  He sways, loose at the waist, slightly hunched forward. He twists to look back at me, his gaze wrecked. “You weren’t even going to call me again, were you, Lenny?” he says. He sounds starkly sober. “You weren’t ever going to speak to me again.” He takes a few more quavering steps away. He stumbles, kicking up a flurry of snow.

  “Charlie, c’mon, man,” Keller says, his voice low and level, the way you’d talk to a guy on a window ledge. “Charlie, don’t be like this. Let’s go inside, it’s warm, I’ll make some coffee.”

  Keller’s trying to be reasonable, but I have no interest in reasonableness. I say, “Charlie, I don’t give a damn if I never lay eyes on you again.”

  Charlie stops, captured, knee-high in the snow. He looks disoriented, ruined. His mouth open, he makes a throat-deep ticking, choking sound. Keller mutters, “Jesus, Lena.” Charlie swings back to him. I can no longer see his face clearly: he’s walked out of the yellow ring of light. I can barely discern his outline, a deep eggplant shadow against the black air. He shouts, “I’ll fucking kill you, Duseky! You hear me? I swear I’ll fucking kill you dead.”

  We all just stand there for a second, the men panting. Finally, Charlie collects himself enough to wade out of the snow and climb back in his squad car. He slams the door shut hard enough to shake the vehicle and it squeals away from the curb so fast he overshoots the road and skids into the front yard of a house across the street. His wheels spin for a second, engine screaming, then catch and kick up clods of snow and mud as he finally peels out of there.

  “You okay?” Keller asks me. His face is wet and red and there are pieces of snow in his hair.

  “I’m fine,” I say and bat some snow off his shoulder. “I’m better than fine. I’m really, really good.”

  CHAPTER 28

  KELLER LINGERS ON THE FRONT STEPS WHILE I GO IN TO WARM up. I’m relieved to be back in this house. I flop on the coral couch and stare at a low-key fire—more embers than flame now—glowing in the fireplace. There’s a hockey game on the TV; I turn it down till the din of the audience is just audible. I have a sense of having narrowly evaded fate. I can’t remember why I’d even considered returning to my terrible apartment earlier and I spend some time wondering if I should just hire some movers to go in there and take out my very personal possessions, or just leave them there to rot in place.

  After a few minutes outside, Keller comes to the door, stomping off snow. I watch him from a swirl of blankets on the couch. The cold has brought a red bloom into his cheeks and neck and he has a hearty sniffle.

  “Were you waiting to see if Charlie comes back?” I’m trying to joke, but he looks at me grimly. “That was bad,” he says. “That whole deal back there. I wish none of that had happened.”

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Perfectly okay. You?”

  He drops into the armchair and holds his head. I stand and take a few steps toward him, uncertain if he wants me closer or not. “Keller . . . that’s just Charlie. That’s just what he’s like. He’ll forget all about this in an hour, I swear.” I wait for a moment. “What happened out there with Charlie—it wasn’t about you.” I stand there stiffly. I seem to feel faint reverberations of the scuffle out on the lawn—the crazy panic of it all—still moving through my body.

  Keller lifts his head. He says, “It’s not Charlie.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE Keller was hunting for local primatology experts, Frank set up a meeting with Joe and Tina Abernathy at the police station. He decided to ask about the tooth and to show them the footage from the baby monitor video. Keller went out along with Celeste Southard. Tina didn’t know anything about a tooth on a string, though, and they’d never had a nanny for Miranda. She felt very strongly about that, she’d said. She said she didn’t believe in nannies.

  Joe and Tina held hands as they watched the videotape; Tina started crying as soon as she saw Miranda sleep. And then, the moment at the end of the tape, when a set of hands leans over the crib and the tooth on a string swings forward, she stood up and began to scream, Those aren’t my hands! Whose hands are those? Those aren’t my hands! Joe had to take her out of the room, but they could still hear her screaming in the corridor. Dr. Southard gave her sedatives.

  Now Keller sits hunched over, his head low and heavy. “I’ve been a cop for a long time, but sometimes . . .”

  I sink down on the broad flat arm of the chair beside him and touch his wrist. He takes my hand with both of his own, and we sit like that while he holds on to me, neither of us speaking. After a minute he says, “So that wasn’t the mother in that video.”

  “So who was it?”

  “Right. Who was it?”

  I listen to the whorl of the snow in the eaves, a round, hollow sound.

  Eventually, we recollect ourselves. Keller tells me that during the course of his research today, he learned that none of the zoologists at Cornell keep their posted office hours. I stroke his hair—once—and tell him we should’ve both become academics.

  He eyes me a moment, then jams his hands in his pockets. “Come on, let me show you what I got.”

  I hold a blanket latched around me and shuffle down the hall after him in my socks. I’m expecting to see files and evidence reports. We enter his bedroom. There’s an assortment of new items laid out on his bed: toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, comb, soap. Beside the items on the bed, there are several mystery books—Agatha Christies—and wrapped in tissue paper, a pair of feathery cotton pajamas.

  Keller stands in the doorway, and blushes deeply when he sees me fingering the pajamas. “I—I hope you—I didn’t know if you wear them or—” His color intensifies and he laughs, a small hopeless snuffle. “Lena. God.”

  I smile at him. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Oh yeah,” he says dryly, more upbeat now. “I just couldn’t believe how that—this business with Charlie really got to me.” He shakes his head. “I went caveman. After a day like today. When I thought he was going to try and take you away from—” He stops and glances up, as if to check my expression. “Shit, I was ready to kill him.”

  “You have my permission,” I say. I don’t look at him. “I love these things. Thank you. And I’ll wear my pajamas tonight. In the guest room.”

  THAT NIGHT I WAKE swathed in a landscape of blankets. The light from the moon has shifted and the wooden blinds catch the light, scatter it like a spray of palm fronds. For several seconds, I lie still, waiting for my mind to catch up to my waking.

  I get up silently and stand in the center of the room listening. From far away, I hear a warbling sound, the baby cry of a cat. I remember the empty crib at the Abernathy house, think of Tina Abernathy screaming in the bare public space outside the police office, and for a moment I feel grateful that I’ve never had a baby to risk losing. I walk barefooted down the cool floor; the pajamas shimmer and flow around me. I hear an even current of breath from Keller’s room, but the sound stops as soon as I reach his door. I admire the rich, perfect silence of this hallway—the way it opens before me. I wait, hovering, caught outside his door, as if I’ve stepped outside my own skin.

  Outside, there’s the thwock of a neighbor’s car door closing, the engine rumbling as it idles, warmi
ng up. I peek in the room and can make out Keller’s legs stretching under the blanket. There’s a flicker above the bed, and Keller comes to the doorway. “Lena,” he whispers. “You need something?”

  I touch his face, my fingertips grazing stubble, and I move past him, into the room, onto his bed, the rumpled pewtered sheets, his scent of warm skin, a trace of old cologne. “I was just remembering something,” I say. “I was thinking about that tooth on the string, trying to sort of find another way to get at it, you know?”

  He sits close beside me, both of us sideways on the edge of the bed. “Yeah?”

  I loll backward, propped on my elbows, my legs dangling off the side. “I was just thinking about a time back when I was a little girl—living with my foster parents—somehow I got the idea that if you pressed your ear to the side of someone’s head and everything was very quiet, and you listened very, very closely, that you’d be able to make out the sound of their thoughts.”

  “Ha. Yeah.” Keller slides back beside me, lays his head back on his crossed forearms. “Like listening to a seashell.”

  “I imagined—I imagined that it would sound like a lot of little whispers, saying all sorts of things—things that we know, and things we were about to say, but also things we’d forgotten, things that we didn’t even know were in our minds.”

  “Hunh. How old were you?

  “Young. But I was by myself a lot. I had a lot of time to dream things up.”

  He turns to look at me; his face is close to mine. I can see the glisten of his eyes. “Did you ever try it out, see if it would work?”

  I smile up toward the ceiling. “Pia wouldn’t let me. She didn’t like the sound of it at all. It was just further proof to her that I was going crazy.”

  “So you never got to test your theory?”

  I shift backward, lower myself off my elbows, lay my head level with Keller’s. I fold my fingertips together in the dark. “Well, one night Henry came in, after Pia had gone to bed. And he said, ‘Your mother told me about the idea you had—about listening to people’s heads.’ I remember looking at him all big-eyed, like, afraid he was going to punish me for having crazy thoughts. And he put his head down just like this, right on the pillow next to mine—and he said, ‘You want to try it?’”

  Keller is looking at me, so still I’m not even sure if he’s heard me. Finally he says, “So did you?”

  “Yeah.” I smile again.

  “And what did you hear?”

  I look over at Keller. “I could hear him whispering, ‘You are getting sleeeepy.’”

  He laughs. In the background, there’s the sound of the cat’s voice, a curdled, querulous noise, as if he’s asking a question, a word like baby over and over. After a moment, Keller asks, “Do you want to try again?” So I slide over just a few inches and press my ear against the top of his head. Then I close my eyes and neither of us speaks.

  I listen and it seems almost possible to hear the sounds of the invisible world, a microscopic world of corpuscles and lymph, of tendons and synapses, of subatomic filaments of thought. Keller’s breath rises and falls like a current, as if we’re awash together, on the surface of a nocturnal sea, I rise and fall with him. And just at that moment, my eyes still closed, I try not to think about how to do this, or if I’m scared to try. I just say, “Keller, I want to tell you, I mean—I want to tell you where I came from.”

  I BEGIN WITH my theory of the past: the weird partial memories; the plane crash, the smell of jet engine fuel and burnt metal. I tell him everything I know or seem to know. Bits and pieces about foraging in the rain forest. About walking and sleeping in the branches, moving among the spirals of blossoms and berries, touching the spiny-ridged backs of chameleons, the flick of a snake’s tongue or gecko’s foot. About learning to smell and taste and see the world as an ape does. About the long arms of an ape mother. I stare at the ceiling, so I can’t see Keller’s face. But he doesn’t speak or move away, so then I tell him about the last two years, of living alone in the St. James Apartments and confronting this past, reencountering pieces of memory like a germination inside my body, this other self awakening, a way of seeing the world and remembering a past that’s as strange and dislocated as madness.

  There’s a long silence. Finally, when Keller speaks, his voice sounds lower, carefully neutral. “So you don’t know any of this for certain, then? Well, you remember, but these are barely memories?”

  I nod.

  “And Pia can’t—or won’t—give you more information? Any leads, even? Or other kinds of verification?”

  “Are you kidding?” I close my eyes, smiling. “Everything offends that woman. To her everything is a ‘personal question.’ Even if it has nothing to do with her.”

  Finally, he says quietly, “But the other day, with Pia—that’s what you were saying—that the babies are making you think about your own past.”

  A sensation of fingers pressing on my ribs seems to be lifting from me, one finger at a time. I say carefully, “I’ve started wondering if maybe the killer—whoever that is—wants to kill me, as well.” I risk looking at Keller. His face is alert and grave. I wait—I suppose I’d hoped that he might contradict me—the way Charlie would have—tell me I worry over nothing at all. But Keller doesn’t do that. He nods.

  I stare up at the plaster impressions on the ceiling. They seem to deepen and turn bluish, as if pooling with water. “I know this all sounds nuts. I know it does, and I wouldn’t blame you for not believing me. It might be better if you didn’t.”

  Keller lifts himself up on one elbow and looks down at me. I feel him studying my face with intense tenderness. The moonlight is strong in this room and his face is washed with mercury light. He says in a gentle, impatient voice, “Jeez, Lena, of course I believe you.”

  I lean back against the railings of the bed’s headboard, taking this in. I’d been waiting for, at the very least, the kindly nudge in the ribs, Charlie-style Tarzan jokes, or a Pia-style injunction that we are going to pretend that I didn’t say any of the mortifying things that I’ve just said. I stare at him. “But, so . . .” I touch one of the curving headboard railings. “So it’s okay, then? It’s okay with you?”

  He moves closer to the bed, rests one forearm along its edge. “Is what okay?’

  “All of it—what I told you about my past, all that stuff?” My voice is very low and my fingers glide along the fluid edges of the railing. “That I might be nuts.”

  “Lena, you told me about yourself.” Keller’s smile is gone, his face straight and solemn, and there is a translucence to the air, as if for that moment we’re seeing through the layers of ectoplasm that keep people from having the most private sorts of connections. “That’s what you got. The past is nonnegotiable. The rest of us just have to deal with that.”

  I feel so glad to hear this I’d almost like to shake hands on it. “Okay,” I say, though I feel like I’m testing words. “Nonnegotiable.”

  “But now I think we need to approach things a little differently,” he says. “I don’t know if any of these memories will link directly to the investigation or not. But the fact that you have so many unanswered questions about your own past—about the time when you were a baby— I think could mean that there may be more links between you and these cases than we’d suspected. If the killer is some sort of—I don’t know—possibly even a part of your past . . .”

  I hadn’t considered this.

  He stretches forward, his hands sliding along his legs, the deltoid and trapezius muscles in his back shifting. Sitting back, he says, “Instead of trying to find the killer through the babies, we need, like, the link to you. You know? The tooth, the apes . . .”

  “And the cross on my window.”

  He looks at me, alarmed. “What?”

  “One night I came home and it was there—someone drew a cross on my win
dow—like, in the dirt on the glass? And last week, someone chased me—it was dark and she chased me.”

  “Jesus, Lena.” He’s sitting straight upright. “Did you report any of this?”

  I wrap my arms around my ribs. “It scared me, but I thought it was some crazy reporter person.”

  “Literally chased you? She didn’t say what paper she was from or anything? What sorts of things did she ask?”

  “Well, I can only remember one question, but it was sort of weird, something like, why don’t you save the babies? Why aren’t you saving them?”

  “‘Why aren’t you saving them’?” His face is alert in the darkness of the room, his eyes deeply still. “That doesn’t sound like a reporter’s question to me.”

  “It doesn’t?” I think about the throng of reporters in front of the Lab, waiting there in the early morning cold, all the questions they threw out at me—about anthrax, and conspiracies, and terrorists—I recall the way Joan, the reporter in the café, offered up her own career anxieties and personal disappointments—and it seems to me that reporters are capable of asking pretty much anything in the service of getting a story.

  But when I think of the tone of that question in the alleyway, the weird, haunting voice comes back to me, and now it seems that it was more of a private taunt. Did she call my name? It no longer seems clear, the whole event like something I’d dreamed. I don’t trust my recollection. Still, the skin tightens all along the backs of my arms and my shoulders and my neck, and my breath tightens and quickens, so I look at Keller, my eyes widened now, I can feel it, with my own fear, and I ask, “Keller, who was that? Who was chasing me?”

  “Could’ve just been some ‘deeply disturbed individual,’” he says in a pompous anchorman’s voice, trying to joke, but the joke falls flat. He adds, more neutrally, “Some street person.” But I can hear all the hesitation in his voice.