Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “You loved this thing,” she says. “See, you could wrap the arms around you and hug its body.” She smiles thinly and says, “The nuns must’ve given it to you. You had this monkey doll when you first got here. You wouldn’t let anyone touch you, but you clung to the monkey for dear life. Do you remember? When Pia came to take you, she hated this thing.” Myrtle chuckles. “She said it was filthy. Probably she just figured that if we got rid of the doll, then you’d start to love her instead. I guess it didn’t exactly work out that way.”

  I close my eyes and inhale the old fabric: I hear the pulse of its body inside the fabric. The air flutters with remembered hands: ginger fur, dangling fingers, blue veins along the backs of long, white hands. I remember this. I remember. Safety, warmth, confinement. But as I gaze at the doll, a humming starts up: the box seems to be growing, it pulls me toward the black opening, trying to swallow me.

  Terrified, I drop the monkey and jump to my feet. Myrtle cries, “Lena!”

  I back away from the box, away from Myrtle, who is staring like a gargoyle. After three steps, panicked by my own breathlessness, by the weird dark surge of associations, half-remembered images, I turn, I rush down the stairs and out of the house.

  CHAPTER 42

  OUTSIDE, I’M CAUGHT AND SOOTHED BY THE WIND, BODY CHARGED with seismic energy. The cold air starts me coughing again. I walk, honking, eight blocks west to Vine Street, and since the bus isn’t there, I walk another ten blocks and wait for the 23. My mind slowly calms, my thoughts melt into black filaments of snow, crusts of snow-ice.

  On the bus, I look at the world through the window soot, but all I see is a toy monkey in a box. I’m still having a little trouble breathing, but I know that I must keep thinking about the next thing I have to do. We round a corner and face out over the plain of Onondaga Lake, which lifts, whitening into the sky. There’s a pain in the upper right quadrant of my head, jangling, radiating into my right jawbone and pressing on my molars, and a misplaced smell of disinfectant rises from the seat backs.

  I take another sip of cough syrup (one of the passengers, an elderly woman, eyes me as if I were holding a beer in a paper bag) and call Keller on the cell he’s loaned me. I expect that he’ll be unhappy that I left the house, but he’s too distracted, saying, “Sarian’s thinking of halting the NFF investigation.”

  “That’s excellent. I’ve had some interesting conversations myself—”

  “Instead, he wants us to concentrate on finding a match for the fingerprints. He wants us to start fingerprinting hospital staff.”

  The bus shudders as it turns a corner and I’m not sure I heard him right. “What? What did you just say?”

  “Yeah. He thinks the fingerprints you lifted from the babies’ cribs will match the killer’s.”

  The bus rattles over a series of potholes. “Keller . . .” My voice shakes for a moment, then we level out. “Wait, listen—those crib prints—they’re too obvious and deliberate.”

  “I don’t—” Keller’s voice vanishes for a second, then returns. “Are you there? Sarian says, work the evidence we’ve got.”

  “But it’s the wrong angle.” I hold the phone with both hands. “Keller—I just found out today that Junie Wilson was adopted—we need to find out about the other parents.”

  The bus’s air brakes wheeze as we pull in to a stop; I can just make out fragments of Keller’s voice: “Still not— I’m trying—” The bus rounds a corner and just before Keller’s voice disappears, he’s saying, “—want you to go home—rest.”

  THE BUS LETS ME out right in front of the VA hospital, just three blocks south of the Lab, on Irving Avenue. Its pneumatic door swishes open with a sigh. A few people mill around, their voices washed out in the open space. There’s a family seated in the lobby; a young woman who seems barely old enough to have children cradles a sleeping baby in one arm, her other arm draped across the top of a young man’s shoulders. The young man has a bandaged stump where his calf and foot should be. He’s smoking a cigarette—which is, of course, against hospital rules—gazing off in a benign, disconnected way. As I walk through the lobby, he seems to lift out of his reverie for a moment. I watch his eyes tick toward mine, and then, just as quickly, turn away.

  I confer with the elderly receptionist at a counter that looks like a swoop of black marble. When the elevator door opens I smell jasmine and frangipani; I think I hear a sweet, chortling birdsong descend from the elevator shaft.

  I take a breath and push away the imaginary forest. I scold myself, No, and press my hands flat against the elevator walls. On the third floor I consult with the desk nurse, who eyes my Crime Lab ID closely and asks if I’m sure I’m not a reporter. Then I walk through a swinging door and down the hall toward 328.

  Ed Welmore is stationed outside the door, sitting on a stool reading the Post-Standard, his police cap shoved back on his head. He’s been stationed there, he tells me, since early morning. He asks, “Do you want me to go in with you?”

  “Ed . . .” I shake my head. “He wasn’t trying to hurt me.”

  He stretches his neck, rubbing one shoulder. “I shouldn’t say this, but—they oughta hurry up and release the guy—he couldn’t have thought up something like mailing those poison blankets—he barely knows his own name.” He lowers his voice: “But you can’t say nothing like that around the station—half those guys are talking about taking this one out in a dark alley and messing him up. And then there’s all the parents we got calling us, wanting to come in and throw stones at him.”

  When I first enter the room, the air is so still that the place seems empty. Mr. Memdouah lies motionless and somehow shrunken in the bed, his face distended, with deep shadow wells. His eyes are closed, but they open when I come to the bed.

  As soon as he sees me, his face contorts, muscles contracting so the surface of his skin looks cracked. He opens his mouth, body trembling, and after a moment there’s high-frequency laughter. It takes him a few moments before he can say, “That’s very good, Lena, well done! Well done! I take you to show you the murderer and you end up making me the murderer instead. Well done.”

  I move to the foot of his bed. “I think they’re going to drop charges, Mr. Memdouah, it’s in the works.”

  He eyes me closely, his face realigning. He says, “Something’s different here.”

  I rest my hands on the bed’s foot railing.

  “Yes,” he says, “something’s changed, we can agree on that. But what is it?”

  “Mr. Memdouah, will you talk to me about what happened the other night?”

  “What happened?”

  “You remember. Last week, when you came to my room, you said that someone told you to let me sleep—do you remember saying that?”

  His eyes flutter—the whites of his eyes look yellowed and it occurs to me that he’s on some sort of painkiller. “Did I? Why’d I do that?”

  I cling to the foot railing. “And after that, when we went into the forest? You said you were going to show me the hideout, remember? The baby killer? And you got ahead of me—I couldn’t see you after a while. It was too dark. Remember that? We got separated and you called the paramedics. Where were you taking me that night?”

  “Something happened,” he mutters to himself, and his gaze falls away from me. “They were tracking us, you know—even out there. Every step of the way. That’s who got me and chained me up.” His eyes roll from side to side, scanning the room. “If you’re smart you’ll get out of here now.”

  “Who was tracking you?”

  “The agency,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “The captains of industry, the Yale Club, the Masonic Temple. Who else?”

  “Mr. Memdouah, oh please.” I squeeze the foot railing and lean forward, my heart plummeting. I’m afraid to look at him, to see his eyes shift out of the true, the flat, dreamy gaze descending. He looks at me and hi
s expression is injured and pleading: a powerful sense of connection to this broken person moves me. I let go of the bed rail and touch his foot through the blanket.

  “It was the agency,” he reiterates.

  “Yes,” I murmur. “Of course.”

  Then his eyes tick back to me, quick and avid. “Why are you tormenting me? Why should I tell you anything?” he says. “Who are you to me?”

  I leave my hand on his foot. I wish I’d thought to bring him peanut brittle. “Please help me,” I say. “I feel like the killer is so close, and we’ve got a chance, but in another second he’ll disappear.”

  He sighs immensely. I can see the great frame of his torso move beneath the bedsheet and he turns his head to one side. Oily blue-black spikes of hair fall across his forehead. “The poison is going to get all of us soon,” he says. “Not just the babies.” He turns on his side as if dismissing me, his eyes more sunken than closed.

  Something keeps me at the foot of his bed. It might just be the lassitude of the room itself, with its tiny window and cool, thin light. He turns again on the bed, shifts his head, his slanted cheekbones like blades, and says, “We’re all just molecules anyway.”

  “I suppose so.”

  He frowns, then his brow lifts. “I met the killer. You remember?”

  I hold still. “And she spoke to you . . . is that right?”

  “Told me everything.”

  “Why do you suppose she would do that?”

  He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “Everyone needs to confess.” He grins. “I told her I was a priest.”

  “You told her that?”

  He nods gravely. “She thinks I’m as mad as she is. Mad chatting with the mad.”

  I nod. His eyes are sharp.

  “Oh, she did it, all right.” He lifts his finger, stabbing at the air. “She’s the one. You go catch her. Go, go.”

  “Who, Mr. Memdouah?” I ask. “Give me a name—what does she look like?”

  “You go—go look—but you mustn’t tell them—swear to it!” His voice falls away and there’s a noise behind me. A nurse stands in the doorway. Her eyes move from Memdouah to me. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” she says sternly.

  I look at Mr. Memdouah. His face is calm and composed now. “Of course,” he says. “They don’t want you to know. They don’t want me whispering anything in your ear. Too late, my friend,” he says to the nurse. “She knows your secrets.”

  CHAPTER 43

  I TAKE THE BUS BACK TO KELLER’S HOUSE.

  It’s the longer route: number 14 bus, windows rattling, speckled with grime and dried snow. It drops me off several blocks from Keller’s house and by the time I get to his door, the cuffs of my pants are soaked with slush and I’m coughing rolling, mucusy gasps, each spasm racking my ribs and throat. I see the blue film of the television through the curtains. A twist of smoke twines from the chimney—scent of old balsam and cherrywood. I hesitate and hover outside for a moment, still coughing, eyes watering from the exertion. Finally, I let myself in.

  The living room is empty. I find Keller in the kitchen. He’s sitting, leaning against the table, studying the sports section, a pair of drugstore reading glasses propped halfway down his nose.

  I sit across the table from him. “Fuck, Lena,” Keller says, not looking up from the paper. “You don’t sound so fucking great.” He finally lifts his eyes: he looks wrung out.

  “I know,” I say. I touch his hand. “It’s cold out. And I had some errands to run.”

  “‘Errands’?” He lets go a bleak laugh. “Me too. Talking to all of them. Yet again. Nobody knows nothing. They just want to go after the guy—Memdouah.”

  “I know. I saw him. Got nothing.”

  “And none of the other parents are adopted—checked that out. . . . I think it’s just a coincidence, with you and Junie.”

  He eyes me. Neither of us says the obvious aloud—that the killer will probably want to complete her little unfinished project with me: that I can either go look for her or wait for her to find me first. In the movies, the killer always imposes a deadline or a demand—deliver the ransom in an hour or the victim will die. Here, there is nothing but stealth and silence—the open-ended gaps between deaths or evidence that wears down investigators and closes the case before anything’s solved.

  Something shows on my face, and he frowns, taking off the glasses and laying them aside on the counter.

  I’m trying to smile, but my face feels constricted and two-dimensional. He moves toward me carefully, both hands out, palms up. “Talk, please,” he says. And I open my mouth, but I just start coughing again, eyes watering. “Oh, easy, there,” Keller says. He slips his arms around me and this time I’m tired and the pressure on my joints makes me wince. The kitchen lights turn dull and waxy and the room tips slightly.

  “Shit! I’m sorry—wasn’t thinking.” He holds up his hands.

  I gulp air, pressing down the cough. And while Keller sits still, consciously not touching me, I lean forward into him, inhale fragments of lemon aftershave and wood smoke and cedar. We drift into the bedroom while the TV flashes and mutters to itself, abandoned in the living room. Neither of us speaks. We lie on the bed in our clothes and drop into sleep.

  CHAPTER 44

  THERE’S A NICE PRE-DAWN VIEW FROM THE TOP OF IRVING AVENUE, on the way from Keller’s house to the Lab, where you can look down the hill to the city—a solid old Victorian center, red-bricked and squared-shouldered, and all of it cloaked in snow, falling snow, melting snow. If you look past that, there are beautiful old valleys, places where you may still pass herds of dairy cows and elderly apple orchards. To the south, there is Onondaga Lake, clear and stately. For over a hundred years, the yards around the lake produced millions of tons of salt, shipped via the Erie Canal. The industry that put Syracuse on the map. Solvay Process Company emerged from the salt industry, producing soda ash from salt brine and limestone. Solvay Process merged with Lucius Process and Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation. But now Onondaga Lake is simply sunstruck—it seems to rise in the air like a blue pane of glass. It reminds me of photographs of the Puget Sound, busy with ferries and ringed with snowy mountains. So ineffably lovely, alive with the mystery of departure, the sense of being a place of purpose.

  The lake and its doppelgänger—beautiful and polluted—a lake of black smoke. I see both things at once—its shadow self and the original lake, pristine, sparkling. According to the NFF manifesto that Keller brought home from work, it’s a sacred body of water. I shield my eyes, unaccustomed to the light. Then I start back down the hill, back to work. The cool air starts to tighten my chest again, but this time I’m a little better at resisting it, relaxing my lungs with small sips of air. I stroll past students and nurses buttoned into cloth coats, businessmen, heads lowered and hands deep in pockets.

  At seven a.m., the forensics building is dead. Just the security guard alone in the lobby, nodding over his newspaper.

  The floors look waxy and buffed to translucence on the fourth floor. I pick up the old chemical scents—adhesives and fluorescent powders, acetone and ethyl alcohol—that are confined to the Lab yet still manage to leave their signature in the corridors. Just the tiny bits of daily toxins that stick in you forever.

  I notice a glimmer in the corner of the Trace office; Alyce is bent under an orb of light at her desk, browsing through a book—her pharmacology guide. She licks her fingertip and turns a page, then looks up as I approach “Well, well,” she says with a wide, wry smile. “Welcome home, conquering hero. How you feeling?” She stands, ready to give me a big, two-armed hug. But I wave her off.

  “A little crotchety,” I tell her.

  “Aw, Lena. Keller told us you were still recovering. You should be home!”

  “Working is resting.” I take the squeaky roller chair beside her desk
, where I can prop my elbow on her desktop. “For me.”

  She widens her eyes at me. “Well, you know . . .”

  “What? The baby killer’s gonna get me? I feel like more of a target hanging around in bed.” I look at my desk. “I want my life back.”

  “Me too.” She closes the book over her finger and sits back, her face moody and dull. “I wish everything would just go back to the way it was. They’ll never solve this case—there’s no evidence! Every day now we’re hearing something different about the killer: first they have a suspect—but then it’s not him, it’s his group. But he doesn’t even belong to the group, but turns out there’s no evidence that it’s the group either. . . . Every day there’s a different reporter or news van downstairs. Frank’s cranky, Cummings’s running off with Margo—I can’t stand it.”

  I consider all this for a moment. “Margo.” There’s a yellow fountain pen on Alyce’s desk. I pick it up, turning it in my fingers. “Isn’t this hers?”

  Alyce shrugs. “Probably. She cleared out her desk a couple days ago. Good riddance. Left all kinds of junk. She acted like she was escaping from prison.”

  I walk to Margo’s desk. “Really? She took off already?” I feel a kind of thump of disappointment. I’d worked beside Margo for four years, yet it occurs to me that we’d barely managed to have any sense of each other beyond work. I gaze at the few remaining items on Margo’s desk—pencils, loose-leaf paper, a Lab mug. It strikes me then that if I’d been a better friend, perhaps Margo wouldn’t have tried to get me fired.