Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Too hot.”

  He crosses his arms and sighs deeply. “They won’t let me spend the night in your room—I’m not considered family. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Too hot,” I mumble into the pillow, already asleep.

  AFTER HOURS OF DOZING, I wake when Alyce stops in again. Edouardo, the evening nurse, is already there. He props me and my saline IV up in bed and fluffs pillows behind me. I marvel at the brown porcelain of Edouardo’s skin. His face looks serene and ancient, like an Aztec god’s. I resist an impulse to kiss his hand. A game show is on the TV—someone is pulling a gigantic spinning wheel of numbers. There’s a bowl of tomato soup and a little pile of saltines on a place mat on the bedside table. I can’t remember where they came from.

  “Everyone at the Lab is talking about you—how you chased the killer through the woods at night—I think you might become a folk hero or something,” Alyce says grimly.

  “But he wasn’t a suspect. It’s all a mistake,” I say, trying to talk through the buzz and pressure in my brain. “I thought he had a lead. It was such a stupid thing to do. . . .” I stop talking. I seem to have lost my train of thought. The TV screen sparkles with laughter and people jumping. I stare at it.

  “Oh yeah, well . . .” Alyce’s voice seems to fade out and in. She tells me more office gossip—something about the cashier in the break room and one of the traffic cops—then something about an online dating service she’s joined, how men are supposed to leave voice messages on her cell phone. Then she remembers another bit of news. “Did I tell you yet? Margo’s quitting.”

  I look at her. She nods. “Rob Cummings too. He’s leaving the Lab, leaving his wife. Him and Margo and her kids are moving to Atlanta. Can you believe it? Her and that old bald head? He’s going to work at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Can you beat that?”

  “Cummings is leaving—in the middle of this investigation?”

  Alyce rolls her eyes. “You know, Lena, most of us believe that the case is solved. That head case is in custody. Sometimes you’ve got to let yourself accept closure.”

  I stare at her, too drained to argue.

  Alyce shakes her head with great wondering satisfaction. “And Margo finally got her sugar daddy like she’s always dreamed of.”

  “Is she still going to do DNA?”

  Alyce is pulling out her cell phone. “What? Oh, no way. Are you kidding? She’ll never get certified. She kept failing everything. I think that was all just part of a big scam to try and impress Cummings. She knew she was going to be bounced out of the Lab soon.”

  BY THE TIME Alyce stands to go, I’m fading. Alyce smoothes my hair and then tucks in my sheets. “I hope you start feeling better soon, Lee. I think this stupid hospital is what’s making you sick.” She picks at something on the sheet, flips through the magazine on my tray, then she blows a kiss and heads out.

  I’m not very lucid when Keller comes back after work. He sits by the bed, not saying much, rubbing my fingers. I focus on that sensation—the good pressure and warmth of his hand on mine. When he stands to consult with a doctor, I doze through their conversation. I hear “critical care,” I hear “stable.”

  Later, two orderlies in scrub suits walk past my door, talking about a strange nurse who was spotted in the Pediatrics Ward.

  When I wake again, I’m alone in the room. It’s after visiting hours and there’s a note from Keller on my tray asking me to call him, but I don’t seem to have enough focus even to dial a number. The mounted TV makes a white gabbling noise. I think that if I’m ever well again, I want to go south, out of this country, over the sea back to the rain forest. The place I long for is like a hole carved out of the sky. In this forest primeval, the birds sing through the day and night, and their darting flight leaves indelible colors in the imagination. It’s a place that I could find as easily as stepping off a curb.

  The door opens and closes with a shushing sound. I assume that it must be a nurse because it’s so late, but this is someone in a soft coat, with long, kinked, russet hair. I try to focus on her, but I’m so tired, I can barely register her face.

  She stoops over the bed and I feel the cold from outdoors misting from her coat. She takes my hand and then lets go, apologizing for the iciness of her fingers. “It’s frigid out,” she says softly. “Maybe it’s not such a bad time to be tucked up in bed.”

  I can’t quite keep my eyes focused, but her voice is very clear, definitely a voice that I’ve heard before. At first I think I remember it from TV, which confuses me. And I say, almost before thinking it, “Erin.”

  She takes my hand again and now her clasp is a bit warmer. “I kept calling and I finally got through to a different person. The girl in your office—she told me you were here. I hope you don’t mind.” She opens the top button of her coat. “I just wanted—I mean—I always meant to thank you, Lena.” Now she’s holding my hand with both of hers, her voice steady. “You were the only one—you were the one—well, I knew, from the first minute I saw you—I don’t know how, but I just did.”

  I close my eyes.

  “It was the strangest thing.” Her voice keeps trailing away—but I’m not sure if it’s because of her or the way I’m hearing her.

  “Anyway, I just didn’t want to let—I just had to come and say this. And now you’re sick.” She says this last thing so gently that I wonder for a moment why I never suspected her, the deep strangeness and wildness in her. It has happened so often: the unhinged mother who murders her own baby.

  She strokes my forehead a little. “I wish I could do something. Are you comfortable? Are you too warm?”

  “Yes,” I say, my voice croaky and too deep. “Too warm.”

  She folds the covers down to my waist. “Does that help? Is there anything—anything at all?”

  “Thanks.”

  She’s gazing at her slim, dry fingers, absently rubbing them together. “The funny thing is—now that it’s ‘over’? It doesn’t feel finished at all.” She closes her eyes with a soft, feline movement. “I think almost the cruelest part of this whole experience is the way the—that man—involved us in the murder. We’d heard warnings, not to use blankets in the baby’s crib—but it was so bitter out the night we brought Matty home.” She lowers her head and presses the heels of her palms against her eyes. “I didn’t even like the blanket, it had just arrived, and I just grabbed it without thinking, I was so overwhelmed . . . and then I just—just wrapped him in that—” Her voice breaks off and for a few seconds she doesn’t speak.

  “It hasn’t given me any satisfaction, knowing that that man is in custody.” She pauses and there’s a suggestion of hesitation, as if she’s waiting for me to say something. But it’s too difficult to order my thoughts. It seems that there was something I wanted to ask her. “I went to go look at him. My lawyer told me to wait for the trial, but I couldn’t. I thought I had to go look at—this monster now. Someone willing to sacrifice human babies for his unholy cause. I told the guard at the hospital who he was and he stood up and let me peek through the mirror window at him.” She rubs her fingers together, over and over, looking away, her gaze floating around the room. “I thought it would be like looking at evil. You know?”

  I lie sunken deep into the pillows. I close my eyes for a moment.

  “But then I saw him and he—he just looked like this little old man. He didn’t look evil at all!” she cries, her voice childlike, betrayed. “He looked sick, really physically broken, his eyes all sunken in, like someone’s old grandfather.” She breaks into sharp tears, gulping, then quickly cuts herself off. “No, no—I won’t let myself—I won’t.” She straightens up and looks at me. “I’m all right now,” she says.

  “Erin, there are . . . aspects of this case—questions—you haven’t been cooperating with—police,” I say, my voice wispy. “Makes it tougher.”

  She
nods heavily, her hair swinging forward. “It’s something that . . . it’s ingrained in me. When I was a child, I was dyslexic and I had physical problems. My mom said the doctors thought I’d be learning-disabled and my teachers condescended to me. Kept me apart from the other kids. But I started catching up—around fifth grade—I fought! I was determined not to ever be left behind or ignored. Now I guess it might work against me sometimes—but I hated the way those officers looked at me—the way everyone did! Except for you . . .” she corrects herself, lowering her voice. “I felt like you got me,” she adds shyly.

  “Yes,” I say, though I have little idea what I’m agreeing with. Just this much exchange has exhausted me. I open my eyes again. “I want to thank you for that—I’ll never forget it,” she says quietly. It sounds as if she’s in mourning for me. “Never, never,” she says.

  “Erin,” I say, the question returns to me now, bobbing back into my head. “Do you—have you ever heard of a tooth on a string?”

  “Not really,” I think I hear her saying, though, increasingly the room seems whitened and dreamlike. “Isn’t that like a lucky rabbit’s foot?”

  Then I can’t hear her anymore: I drift beneath a white blur of consciousness. When I flicker back again, she’s gone. I try to remember if she was really there.

  TRYING TO KEEP myself awake. Punch on the TV. Hold up the remote and press the arrow key, moving through a series of faces, hands, cars, explosions, underwater scenes, children at play. Then the image of a news desk, floating above the reporter’s right shoulder the words Blanket Killer in dripping crimson. I turn on the volume. “Authorities have arrested sixty-four-year-old Marshall Memdouah in connection with the horrific Blanket Killer case that involved the deaths of eight infants.” Mr. Memdouah’s face fills the screen. It’s video footage of him in his hospital bed, looking much as Erin Cogan described him—sunken, ill, and elderly. He cowers from the camera. “Memdouah is believed to be affiliated with the so-called ‘environmental-terrorist’ group the Native Freedom Fighters. The group has firmly denied any links to the killings, however, their leader, thirty-four-year-old Dennis Dekanawida, is reported to have publicly called for the ‘overthrow and destruction of the White Toxic Nation.’ Police are still looking into evidence that may connect the group to the killings, and believe that arrests may be pending.”

  I click off the set and drop the remote on the bedside tray. I feel colder and colder—ears and lips aching, nose running. I let my eyes rove around the room, but my body is far away. The window, the bedside table, the footboard, the flowers. Everything is moving out of focus. Easily, incrementally.

  KELLER CALLS LATE that evening, waking me from a spilling, half-lit dream. He’s telling me about the case against Memdouah, the police questioning—the questions seem to twine and unravel—I hear the words Unabomber, psychological profile, conspiracy freak, anthrax. And then I hear him saying that Memdouah’s prints don’t match the prints on the cribs.

  I press my eyes closed, tell myself: Think. “Those prints are a fake,” I say, my voice reedy, full of air. “And he wasn’t the one.”

  Keller’s voice seems to be coming to me from a long way away, as if he were at the other end of a long tunnel. “Yeah? Well, his blood tests show elevated levels of cadmium and arsenic—in exactly the same formula mixture they found in the baby blankets. They even swabbed it off his palms and his jacket. Guy’s practically glowing.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I say. I think that’s what I say. But the phone receiver is so heavy and I’m so tired; it’s too hard to hold on to my thoughts. “I need time,” I tell Keller. “I have to sleep.” I can just hear his voice, tiny and contained, as my arm lowers the receiver to the phone.

  My arm floats back to my side: I feel the drifting sensation come over me; the bed becomes a raft, sailing on the thermals of the room. Beyond the windows, the snow’s inscription circles the sky. There is a smoky, musky taste in the back of my throat like burnt matches. My vision stutters for a second and I think I see the parabola of a salamander streaking down a corner.

  It seems then that a gust rattles the windows and sends a cold vapor through the air. An even louder wind blast startles me, rainy snow distorting the glass with waxy streaks. The world is flannel-lined and muffled and I have the feeling again, as I used to have as a child, that the snow will continue to fall until everything is covered, all the houses and buildings buried under hundreds of feet.

  As I lie there, I watch the ceiling turn to silk, an enclosure of limitless treetops, and the sky is far away, crystalline blues and teals, filled with birds. I watch the floorboards sprout long grasses, shrubbery, a corrugation of roots, leaves, and needles. Beyond the glass I hear the startling cries of wild parrots.

  Then the roots and branches burst through the bed. There’s a heaviness, a hot murmuring sensation in my spinal cord and my sternum. It’s like a warning; something is telling me I can’t—must not—sleep.

  I turn away from the flowing, sprouting walls and window; I stare out into the hall: I must keep my eyes open, I think. I watch the shadows of the passing nurses and orderlies. Each shadow seems to narrow and extend, reminding me of something—an image I’d seen somewhere before. The shadows look long and sharp against the wall, like cutouts, the legs straight and pointing, the bodies flattening into heads on top of scissors. I remember the images in the strange book in my apartment, the scent of the book, sweet and inviting. The familiar, metallic scent. The book was brimming with it. And now it comes to me: the reason the poison was all over Memdouah’s hands and jacket. The book was poisoned. The book I’d taken into my bed, put my nose to, and inhaled.

  My eyes lower then, slowly, to my arms, to the way my fingers seem to float upon the sheets.

  The blue sheets look liquid and mild in the half-light and yet it’s as if I can see the poison in them, like beads shining in the fibers.

  I kick the sheets off my body and hoist myself, wobbly-legged, out of bed. I’m faint and dizzy and I crash against the bed table. A nurse, Laeticia, comes in. “Girl, what are you doing? Get straight back into bed.”

  “No, no,” I say, teeth chattering. “That nurse—they told me about—” I can’t manage to explain myself—it takes too much concentration. She leads me back into bed, shaking her head. “Lord, everybody’s acting crazy around here, talking about this strange nurse. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She pulls the sheets and blankets over me and tucks them deeply into the bed mattress. “Believe me, if there’s some stranger running around here, I’ll catch her.”

  “No, please,” I croak, pushing at the sheets. “I can’t.”

  “Honey, try and take it easy. Dr. Hoyd says she’s thinking you might’ve been hypothermic out there. We’ve got to rerun all your blood tests too, I’m sorry to say.” She smirks. “The fools in the lab swear your samples just plain ‘disappeared’! Typical.” But then she stops, stares at me, and peels the top blanket off. “Okay? Now, if you need something, ring the damn buzzer. Don’t go flying around. And you see some strange lady in here, you ring the buzzer too.”

  After she goes, I’m too weak to yank out the sheets. I wriggle, trying to loosen them; but my energy is at an ebb. I have to rest, panting, resisting tears, tugging again, until finally they’re loose enough that I can slide myself up and out of the sheets.

  A little while later Edouardo finds me asleep in a visitor’s chair. “Hey, what’s going on here, Lena? How you doing?”

  “Please,” I murmur. He moves closer. “Please. I had an accident. Will you change the sheets?”

  He goes out and a few minutes later he’s back with a linen cart. Edouardo takes two sheets from the top of the cart and I say, “Not those, please.” He stops and looks at me. “From the bottom, please,” I say.

  “Yes, madame.” He pulls them from the bottom.

  “New blankets too,” I say. “And a new IV d
rip.”

  He stares at me. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Save the old sheets—okay? I need those.” He smiles and lifts me back into bed. I feel as if gravity has fallen away from me, my body translucent and permeable.

  I LIE IN BED, struggling to organize my thoughts, to understand what is happening. The killer is here, somewhere close to me. But the night glistens, and once again I feel the heaviness of my consciousness, hanging like a beaded curtain. Once I know the bed isn’t poisoned, my body relaxes; my hands unknot, my breath extends and lengthens into sleep.

  My sleep that night is thick and dark, like sinking in a well—no lights, no dreams, just a faint rolling sound like waves.

  I sleep through Edouardo’s early morning check-in; I don’t wake until Laeticia brings my breakfast tray in around six.

  “Hey, sunshine,” she singsongs. “You still with us?” When I ask her if Edouardo saved the old sheets from my bed last night, she looks at me like I’m out of my mind. “I’m sorry, honey, but we don’t save peed-on sheets. They went to Housekeeping last night. They’re all nice and cleaned up now.”

  After she goes out, I call Keller and tell him I’m hereby discharging myself. I say, “Please come get me out of this place.”

  I shove the sheets and blankets off. I get dressed. I don’t wait for the orderly with the wheelchair. The nurses are distracted, making their morning rounds, carrying breakfast trays. I walk, slowly and carefully, past the nurses’ station, down the corridor, and out the door.

  CHAPTER 39

  AS WE PULL OUT OF THE HOSPITAL LOT, THE MORNING LOOKS STARK, shocked with cold, frozen in place. The telephone wires, car exhaust, black lace of old snow, all of it is crisp and photographic. We’re driving slowly, scanning the street for black ice. Keller’s driving like I’m an invalid, trying not to jostle or startle me. But the muscles in my neck, back, and shoulders are arched tight—I feel as if I’m waking up out of a lifetime of sleep. Keller’s lips are white, and he glares through the glass. “I could kick myself,” he says over and over. “You kept telling me you were too hot and I kept dragging those damn sheets over you.”