by John Everson
I began to crumple the note up, and then stopped. Tucked it in my pocket. Maybe she had seen him at some point. Or a partner. Maybe he had something to tell me about her.
The phone rang. It was my mother, who now checked up on me every day, reminding me that she had withstood the passing of my father, and that my life had just begun.
Her pain made me feel guilty, but no less lost.
“Remember the good things,” she told me again, for the hundredth time. “And leave the pain behind. Karen would want you to move on with your life. You know she’d want you to be happy.”
“I know, Mom. I know. But I’ve got to go now, I’ve got an appointment.”
I pulled the note back out of my pocket, smoothing the wrinkles on the yellowing countertop. “Do you remember a Dr. Chavis?” I asked on a whim.
She thought a moment, then replied. “It sounds familiar, but no, I can’t place it. Why, hon?”
“No reason,” I said. “Just some junk mail I got today. Gotta go, ‘K?”
I closed up the house and started my beat-up Honda. It choked away from the curb with all the warning signs of pneumonia, but I ignored its coughing. My mind was wrapped around the memories of Karen. And mystery of Dr. Chavis. I had become instantly convinced that he must have had something to do with her. Some news of her sickness to tell me. And while she was gone now, I was still collecting and filing away every sad detail I could find of her life, and death, and tucking them into a mental file marked: heartbroken.
The sign read “Rennsalier Chavis, MD, Obstetrician/ Gynecologist.” It was a small sign, a quiet bronze placard the size of a piece of looseleaf paper, hung near the door. The building was small, an out-of-place brown brick dwarf on a street of paper warehouses and parked construction machinery.
“I don’t have current patients, so there’s no reason to keep up an office in the nicer part of town,” he would tell me later. “I’m really just tracking my old patients now. And I can do that from any address.”
I stepped through the outer door into a foyer of scuffed red tile, and then, without knocking, tried the next door. It was open. There was only one person in the office and he looked up from a file.
“Can I help you?” he said, his voice a reedy pitch that matched the bone-thin fluting of his physique. His hair had retreated to a pair of snow-white drifts around the ears, and his skin was the color of aged parchment. Liver spots freckled his deep forehead. His eyes alone betrayed the strength of the will I would get to know so well, so quickly. They flashed like the blue arcs of a welder as he talked, while crossing the room to shake my hand.
I introduced myself, and without further explanation, pulled the piece of paper from my pocket with his name and address on it. And the note.
A thin smile spread across his lips as he looked at the letter. Then a flash of uncertainty, a furrowed brow. He seemed at a loss for how to proceed.
“Is this about Karen?” I asked, breaking the pause.
“Yes,” he agreed. Then, “No.”
He took a breath. “In a sense, I suppose it is. Please, come back with me and I’ll try to explain why I called you here.”
««—»»
After the man had pounded his roses to ruin, I finally put my hands on his shoulders, and coaxed him away from the casket. He had had his turn, and others might wish to look upon the doctor themselves today.
“It’s not fair,” he whispered to me, tears still streaming from bloodshot eyes.
I nodded.
What was there to say? It wasn’t fair at all.
From the back of the shadowy room, a blur of motion. Coat and scarf falling to the floor, heels clicking on the cold stone. A flurry of long midnight hair, the raccoon hint of shadowed ebon eyes. And then the pounding that fills this room on an almost hourly basis. The pounding that finds an anvil in all of our hearts.
“Why?” is all she cries.
The answer wouldn’t make her feel any better or worse. There is only the pain of loss. The pain of identity. The pain of predestination.
There are no answers for that.
I settle the rose man into a pew as another man steps from the back to place a calming hand on the hysterical woman’s shoulder. I wonder if he knows her, or is only taking this opportunity to meet her with the offering of empathy. His face is younger than the man I have calmed. His skin is unlined, his shock of blonde hair undiminished. He has a mole by his right ear, but that is the only blemish on a strong face steered by shocking blue eyes.
His eyes remind me of the intensity of Chavis.
««—»»
“I’m 94 years old,” he told me, offering a cup of steaming coffee. We were in a small kitchen area behind the front office, a room of white tile and white walls. In his white lab coat and white hair, Dr. Chavis almost seemed to melt away into the room itself. I felt blinded.
“Do I look 94 to you?”
I shrugged. He looked old. After a certain point, it doesn’t really matter what decade the wrinkles had been brought on by. You just looked old. He could have said he was 80 or 100, I wouldn’t have been any more surprised.
“You did good in school, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Been sick much in your life?”
I shook my head. I’d always been pretty healthy.
He nodded; a secret smile flickered behind his lips.
“Ever think about having this removed?” he asked, touching the mole on my right cheek.
I shook my head no.
“Good.”
««—»»
Most of the pilgrims are between the ages of 10 and 40. Chavis had more or less given up active practice a decade ago and begun work on other projects. One of which, a body petrification serum, has ensured that he will be with us for as long as I protect his remains from abuse. Everyone should have at least one chance to see him, I think. After his death, according to his wishes, I injected the serum that keeps his face as stern and frozen and composed in death as it was in life. So I remain here, a sentinel, his caretaker at the grave.
A punk wanders into the room and I can feel the handful of pilgrims freeze. You have to try pretty hard to get here; down the stairs of a locked and abandoned subway station, past the old boarding platform and into the dark tunnel of the constricted underground tube that serves as the bullet sheath of the trains. Just beyond the first curve is this room, a pockmark in the otherwise smooth subway wall. Perhaps it was intended as a mechanical storage area, or an engineer’s room. Whatever it once served as, it was now a tomb. And our meeting hall. Very few would ever stumble upon it aside from pilgrims with determination and clear instructions. But delinquents and roughnecks and punks…they might seek this out-of-the-way hideout for their own.
Twelve eyes followed the boy as he strode cockily down the aisle beside the four pews. Chains jangled against the zippers of his black leather jacket and a knifesheath swayed from his belt. His hair was spiked and greased to attention, his mouth chewed animately on something—gum, tobacco, human flesh? Who could say?
His jaunty steps slowed, however, when he reached the front of the room. He didn’t kneel, as so many did, but instead planted his hands with a solid thud on the frame of the casket and stared deep down into the crypt.
Long.
I could feel the breath of the room still held, but I released mine, because from my vantage point, I could see that he wasn’t just any young punk here without a calling. His demeanor still said he might try to tip the display and scatter the remains of the perfectly preserved dead man within. But like the rest of us here, he has the right. He didn’t look back at anyone in the room, but I could see the glint of tears starting down his face. One of them shining atop a darkened spot on the right side of his face.
Near his ear.
««—»»
“I devoted my life to helping women,” Chavis explained to me. His hands shook as he poured me a second and shortly thereafter,
a third cup of coffee. But his eyes never lost their shine.
“I started out as a research scientist in embryonics and genetics. Trying to cure the common cold. We never will, you know. The common cold isn’t common, it’s rare. It exists for a few months maybe, and then mutates into something different. All this time we’ve sought for one answer, but there is no one answer. There is only change. Evolution. The strong survive.”
He sipped his cup and looked at me over the rim.
“We can’t cure mankind from sickness, but we can make him stronger. With all of our medicines and hospitals and expensive isolation units, we’ve been reactive though, rather than proactive. We’ve been preventing the very thing necessary to our survival—mutation. Change. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Well, if we don’t allow anything to kill us and cull the weak…we’ll never evolve. We’ll never get stronger.”
“What does this have to do with Karen?” I asked finally, three cups into a conversation growing increasingly theoretical, and without any grounding in why we were discussing it at all. Overlaid on his deathly pale mouth, I kept seeing her pert, pink butterfly lips in my mind. Discussions of Darwinistic theory were increasingly difficult for me to focus on. I wanted to drift away with the comfort of her image, not concentrate on his esoteric theories.
“It has to do with you,” he announced. With that, he stood up and left the room.
He returned a few seconds later with a fat blue binder.
“What’s your birthday?” he asked.
“April 22, 1998,” I said and he smiled as he flipped through the early pages of the book, passing picture after picture and finally coming to rest on the reddened, blanched face of an infant. He stopped on an ugly baby, a shock of black hair pointing every which way atop a fat blotchy forehead.
“Here you are,” he announced.
I looked closer at the picture and saw the scrawl of vital statistics across from it. “Delivered 4/22/98, 3:45 a.m., 21 inches long, 6 lbs, 4 ounces. Black hair, blue eyes.”
“Mother ever mention that you were a test tube baby?” he asked.
My stomach seemed to ice over. Why should I care? I wondered, but something in the way he said it….
“No,” I answered.
“No, they never seem to. Don’t want to admit their infertility, I suppose. Doesn’t support the whole myth of feminine fertility goddesshood.”
He winked at me.
“But that’s what I was here for. To help these good little women become good little mothers for their good little husbands. Just call me the babymaker. I made sure they became fertile. And I made sure their kids would be strong.
««—»»
The punk didn’t push over the casket. He stared up at the ceiling for a few seconds, no doubt batting back the unmanly tears, and then went to sit in the first pew.
Right at the front.
Where no one could watch his face.
He sat near a young woman in a conservative brown business suit, very little makeup. I wondered if they’d leave together.
Stranger pairings had come from this room.
It was almost time for me to make my daily announcements. Another woman entered from the back, hesitated before starting forward in that inexorable procession to stand near death himself.
I took her faltering as my cue and stood, turning to the growing assemblage to announce:
“If you haven’t been here before, please sign the book at the back. We’d like to keep a count going so we can track who has made it back here, and who has not.”
««—»»
My mother had never mentioned that I was a test tube baby. But I was an only child. No wonder Dr. Chavis’ name had seemed familiar to her. He had never been my doctor, or Karen’s. He had been my mother’s, 30-odd years before.
“I wanted to make sure my patients had strong, healthy children,” he said presently. “I wanted to have children myself. And I wanted to make sure we escaped the tyranny of false preservation that the waning age of antibiotics had given us. How much sickness do you hear about today?”
I rolled my eyes. Disease seemed almost rampant anymore. New ones were named every week.
“More than when you were a kid?”
I nodded affirmatively.
“I could see this was our future—and this was no secret. They talked about it on the radio and TV all the time. Every year a new strain of killer flu. Vaccine shortages. But I could also see that there were genes in the population that were naturally resistant to bacterial infection. I had these genes myself; I never took flu shots and never caught the flu. Unfortunately, I was also unable to produce offspring myself.”
“You weren’t married?” I asked.
“Unable,” he reaffirmed.
Later, in making his body ready for “burial,” I discovered the reason for his “inability.” Sometimes, size does matter, no matter what they tell you. Thankfully his deficiency was not a gene he had apparently passed on.
“I began to experiment with utilizing my own genome, and that of some other unfailingly healthy, intelligent patients. Mixed with the mother’s genetic design to ensure a variant gene pool, I began to birth children who I knew would make their parents proud.”
My mouth dropped wide. My father wasn’t my father?
He could see my discomfort and rested a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s a lot to take, I know,” he said. “But regardless of who raised you, or who contributed your genetic material, you are who you are.”
“How do I know what you’re saying is true?” I asked, fishing for a way out.
He pointed to the mole on the right side of his face. And then touched my own.
“You are my son. And as my son, I need your help. I don’t have much longer. I’m dying.”
“Why should I help you?” was all I could think to say. I was angry. Betrayed.
“Not for me,” he said softly, leafing through page after page after page of pictures in the blue binder. Each side with a dozen baby pictures on it, each picture showing the tearful, scrunched up faces of infants. White infants, Chinese infants, black infants. Babies with hair as fiery as a carrot, and babies with no hair whatsoever. But every tiny face betrayed one signature trait. A mole.
His mark.
“I need you to help me notify them,” he said. “All my children. There are things they need to know.”
««—»»
“You’re here because you received my letter,” I said, looking out at the small audience. There were 11 today. Not a bad turnout for a rainy night. A few I had seen before. There were always a few that I knew. We rarely spoke, but nodded in passage. They were waiting for someone. And when they found that someone, they would leave for good and not return.
“It answered some questions you’ve had, but certainly raised many more. I will answer what I can for you, what I know. I, too, received a letter of calling. Only mine was from Chavis himself. Our father. He told me of his researches, of the genetic experiments that led to us.”
“You all have a mole on the right side of your faces,” I said, and several newcomers reached up to touch their right ears. “This is his mark. A way for us to recognize each other, and he, us. It’s certainly no guarantee of brotherhood, but it is a clue.
“You were drawn here by death; someone you loved has passed away. In the future, the only safe love you can think to have will begin here, in this room. With your own family. If you love an outsider, they will die.”
««—»»
“The only way I could make sure that these genes stayed pure,” he explained, “was to put in a failsafe mating recursive.”
We had moved to the couch in his outer office, and he had locked the entry door.
“What?” I didn’t understand him at first.
“A mating guarantee,” he said. “If you have sex with anyone who doesn’t bear the mark of my children, you will pass them a virus. They will become ill and slowly dwindle away. A wasting sickness. Yo
u saw it with Karen.”
If the knowledge of my parenthood hadn’t been enough of a slap, this was a thunderbolt.
“You killed Karen!” I screamed and launched myself at him, grabbing him by his white lapels and shaking that wizened head so hard it should have snapped off.
“No,” he wheezed, between shakes. “You did.”
««—»»
This night, as I do every night, I explained to the newcomers just what Chavis had done. And how that evil act must remain hidden, lest we be hunted by our marks for the death we bring.
I told them of how he found a way to preserve himself, so that he would remain an icon for us in death, a saint of his own cause. And I told them of how I brought him to this place, so that they could all have a chance to see their father. And meet their family.
“In his last days he charged me to go through the books that he kept. There were records on all of us; he tracked us quite well. I sent you all letters bringing you here.”
After the explanation, the room was always heavy with an injured, shocked silence, even though much of my talk had been detailed in the letter that brought them here. It was like that now. And so, as I did every night, I told them, “You may stay as long or as little as you like. Good luck to you.”
With that, my brothers and sisters slowly rose and walked to the front of the room, even the punk in the leather jacket. As if by instinct, we joined hands, and cried again together.
As we did every night.
We cried for the loved ones we’d killed, unknowing. And for each other. And for the loss of our childhood dreams of romance. And for the hope that we’d find another that we could love. One who wouldn’t die from our kisses. One who bore the mark.
All of us come to the crypt alone.
But not everyone leaves that way.
The strong will survive.
— | — | —
